Endnote 5 – 3,200-Year-Old Picture of Israelites Found in Egypt

Another important element in the earlier attribution of all the reliefs on this wall to Ramesses II is the presence of a Prince Kha-em-Wast in one of the later battle reliefs to the left of the Peace Treaty text (scene 2)—for Ramesses II had a very famous son of that name. However, the Prince Kha-em-Wast shown in this scene is not the well-known son of Ramesses II, but a like-named son of Merenptah. Formerly Kenneth A. Kitchen took the Kha-em-Wast of these reliefs to be a son of Ramesses II (“Some New Light on the Asiatic Wars of Ramesses II,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 50 [1964], p. 68, n. 9, and Ramesside Inscriptions: Historical and Biographical [Oxford: Blackwell, 1973-present] [hereafter KRI], vol. 2, p. 165, notes 4a-b); but since hearing my paper in Toronto in November 1977, he has accepted my position that Kha-em-Wast is indeed a son of Merenptah (see Kitchen: KRI, vol. 4, p. 82, no. 49 n. B, and Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses I [Mississauga, Ont., Can.: Benben Publ, 1982], pp. 215–216 and fig. 17 on p. 220). Additional evidence supports this identification: in scene 2, Prince Kha-em-Wast is a military personage, while Ramesses IIs’ like-named son was high priest of Ptah for much of his career. Further as shown by Eugene Cruz-Uribe (“On the Wife of Merenptah,” Göttinger Miszellen 24 [1977], pp. 24–25), Merenptah’s chief queen, Isis-nofret II, was a daughter of the high priest of Ptah, Kha-em-Wast I, and a granddaughter of Ramesses II. In the Ramesside royal family, it was very common practice to name grandchildren after their grandparents, and this is precisely what Merenptah seems to have done in the case of Kha-em-Wast II.