Petrie’s report on his work in the mortuary temples at Thebes includes the discovery and first publication of the large granite stele of Merneptah, with plates.
Why the stele matters
Near the end of a triumphal poem about a campaign in Libya, the text lists places and peoples defeated in Canaan, and one of the entries is Israel. It is the earliest occurrence of the name in any surviving source, and it is Egyptian rather than biblical.
The determinative attached to the name — the sign category the Egyptian writing system used to classify a word — marks Israel as a people rather than a settled place, which is different from how the other Canaanite entries in the same list are written. That distinction carries a great deal of weight in reconstructions of early Israel, and it is also disputed.
The limits, which are large
The stele establishes that a group called Israel existed in Canaan and was known to Egypt at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. It establishes nothing about who they were, where they came from, what they believed or whether any biblical narrative describes them. A page that uses it for more than the name and the date is using it for more than it says.
How it is cited here
By Internet Archive identifier, which resolves to the item record and returns the title. The volume is in the public domain and can be read in full, plates included.