Does Egyptian history mention Joseph?

 

No, Egyptian history does not mention Joseph. Why would it? Quite frankly, if Joseph had been a real person and an official living in Egypt would there have been a reason for the Egyptians to record that fact? While he was certainly an important individual in the Biblical narrative, maybe not so much in the Egyptian one….

So, while there is no direct evidence of Joseph in Egyptian records, it is useful to keep in the mind the old archaeological truism: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And remember, there is no evidence that he was not there, either (of course, you can never prove a negative through archeology….).

However, there are circumstantial evidences of a person like Joseph. I will not cover all of those here, but an interesting one is a discovery made by a Professor Bietak in archaeological digs near Avaris, the Hyksos capital in the Delta, between 1984 and 1987. He uncovered a palace from the period of the 12th Dynasty. It was not a royal palace and it was NOT the palace of Joseph, but it was the palace of a governmental official of apparently some importance.

In the garden in front of this palace, a cemetery was discovered with a number of tombs in it. One tomb in particular was of special interest: it consisted of a single brick burial chamber with a small chapel in front of it. The tomb had robbed long ago, of course, but in a robbers’ tunnel between the tomb and the chapel, a statue was found that had been apparently dragged there by the robbers for some reason. Given its size, which was one-and-a-half times life size, it was almost certainly a statue of the palace official. It had been deliberately smashed into pieces and only a few recognizable pieces remained, one of which was the badly-damaged head, the features of which were deliberately destroyed (so somebody didn’t like him….). The statue exhibits no royal characteristics, but the most interesting thing is that this official was clearly an Asiatic. This is shown by the yellow coloration of the skin, which was, as Bietak observed, typical for the depiction of male Asiatics, and by another Asiatic feature, the so-called Mushroom hairstyle which the statue had.

Also, enough of the body survived (as seen in the reconstructed image above) that on the back can still be seen evidence that this individual was wearing a striped garment, made up of at least three colors: black, red, and white—typical colors for an Asiatic—and of a pattern (striped) by which Egyptians typically depicted Asiatics.

The significance of this find for a 12th Dynasty setting of the Joseph Story is obvious. While there is clearly not enough evidence to claim that this was the tomb of Joseph or that a statue of the famed Biblical character has been found, it is clear that this man was from the area of Canaan and that he had become an important official in the Egyptian government. This demonstrates that an Asiatic could indeed rise to a position of prominence, and allows for the possibility—however remote—that a Joseph could have served a king of Egypt.