Merneptah is well known to BAR readers as the pharaoh who set up a stela (or stele) that contains the earliest undisputed reference to Israel. But he has been in the news again lately thanks to the enormous size of his sarcophagus. Merneptah generally doesn’t seem as popular or flashy as his father, Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great), often identified as the pharaoh of the Exodus, or even his grandfather Seti I, another great builder, but the late-13th-century B.C. Merneptah Stele piqued the interest of Biblical historians when part of the hieroglyphic inscription was deciphered to read, “I laid […]
