Tomb Hints at Egyptian Colony in Israel

A young Egyptian woman laid to rest in southern Israel 5,000 years ago may have been one of the world’s first colonists, say the archeologists who are excavating her tomb.

Though the woman lies 200 miles east of the Nile, her grave bears numerous marks of an ancient Egyptian burial, said Thomas Levy of UC San Diego.

The woman lies on a low platform in an hourglass-shaped room that has been carved from a natural cave. She rests on her left side and faces east, toward the rising sun. The burial chamber lies at the end of a series of stepped passageways that are aligned east to west. Wall inscriptions and standing stones commemorate the deceased.

“This is the first time that a monument like this has been found,” Levy said. “It points to a very serious Egyptian occupation at the site.”

Levy and a colleague, David Alon of the Joe Alon Regional Research Center in Israel, have been excavating the site since 1994. Known as Halif Terrace, it lies in the northern Negev Desert near the city of Beersheba.

Even as they began digging, brushing and sifting two years ago, the archeologists said they knew that they were dealing with some type of Egyptian settlement.

“We’ve known that the Egyptians had been running around there,” Levy said.

In the past, the Egyptians were thought to have visited southern Israel as traders. But the recent excavations at Halif Terrace, conducted by UC San Diego and the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, suggest that from the beginning the pharaohs sent colonists to a desert 200 miles from home and wielded political power there.

“This seems to be part of an overall expansion policy on the part of Egypt,” said Lawrence Stager of Harvard University.

Several signs of an official government presence, such as official seal impressions and a serekh, a pharaoh’s official symbol, have been found at Halif Terrace. The serekh belonged to Narmer, an early pharaoh sometimes credited with uniting Egypt and beginning a dynastic progression that lasted thousands of years.

It’s not surprising that the Egyptians colonized their neighbors so early, Levy said. Wherever civilizations have sprung up without the encouragement of other groups--in central Mexico, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt--the newly organized people have exerted political control over their less sophisticated neighbors.