A New Stela of Ramesses II in Jordan in the Context of Egyptian Royal Stelae in the Levant

Abstract

It was in a mosque in the southern Syrian region of Hauran, where in the late 19 century an Egyptian royal stela was identified for the first time in Western Asia. GOTTLIEB SCHUMACHER, a prominent member of the German “Templer” community from Haifa, recognized by 1891 in the village of Sheikh Sa‛ad, that an almost 2 m tall standing basalt monolith in the centre of a local shrine, related by tradition to the Qur’anic and Biblical Nabi Ayyūb/Job, was in fact a badly eroded pharaonic monument (Fig. 5; Schumacher 1891; KRI II: 223). The faint traces of relief and hieroglyphs permitted to attribute it safely to Ramesses II, who is depicted vis-a-vis a Canaanite deity. Less than 20 km to the south of Sheikh Sa‛ad, the upper half of a second stela, showing Sethos I with Amun-Ra and Mut, was noticed in 1901, built in the wall of a house in the village of Tell esh-Shihab (Fig. 3; Smith 1901: 344-349; Muller 1904; KRI I: 17; Brand 2000: 123-124).