Is there an example of Egypt recording defeat?

Question

Some defenders of the Torah's historical accuracy respond to a lack of evidence for the exodus from Egypt with the claim that Egypt simply didn't make records of its negative events. For example, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb from Ohr Somayach (a yeshiva) says: (emphasis is theirs)

Why is it that no ancient Egyptian records mention the Exodus? The answer is that the Egyptians never recorded their defeats.

Is this claim true? Can anyone cite an example of the Ancient (let's say from the era of 2000-500 BCE)? recording defeat suffered in battle? Are the only records of Egyptian losss from non-Egyptian records ?

Answer 1

First and foremost, you've got to understand what it is that ancient historians mean by "records" of ancient Egypt. We do not, by and large, have accounting ledgers or encyclopedias from that time. They may have existed (well, probably not in the case of the latter) but they are gone to us. What we have instead are the objects that were left behind: sarcophagi, obelisks, the insides of the Pyramids themselves, and so on. For the same reason your local town probably doesn't have a statue on Main Street commemorating the time your country lost a war, these artifacts tend to be heavy on the wins and light on the losses.

There are also archaeological type artifacts such as the tools that were used during this time, the bodies of workers and the pharoahs, and so on, but those, too, tend not to come with instructions. As incredible as people are nowadays at extrapolating out nuggets of information from this evidence, stuff like "oh, in 3496 they lost a battle to the Assyrians" is just not going to appear in these records.

What we do have in the case of Egypt are long periods of time where there isn't a great deal of recorded history. For example, the First Intermediate Period was a time when the lights went out, so to speak. There's still a decent amount of information to be had from the period but nowhere near like what we have before and after. We can surmise from the way the art differed that there was a bit of a split in the empire during this 100 year period, but beyond that, it seems that a lot of what we know about this period of time is what folks said about it afterwards.

Add to that the fact that we've only been able to read hieroglyphics for about 180 years now and you start to get an inkling as to what we have to use.

As to the specific claims made by the Bible and the Exodus, there is just plain no way that several hundred thousand Jews lived in the Nile delta. There's simply no evidence for a group of that size. Some Egyptologists (notably Robert Breyer) think that the legends may be based on a group that was actually there, but if so they were orders of magnitude smaller than what is portrayed in the Bible and might be better referred to as proto-Jewish rather than actual members of the established tribe.

Answer 2

There are a number of Egyptian defeats known to history - some of them come to us from contemporaneous accounts from neighboring civilizations, others from archaeological evidence, but many of them come from the Egyptian historical record.

In direct answer to your question, here is the Victory Stela of Piye, which documents the conquests of the Nubian kingdom of Kush in Egypt and Libya. It details battles in which Egyptians lose, and badly, to Piye's Nubian army. Piye's image has been somewhat inexpertly redacted by subsequent Pharaohs, but the text remains untouched.

Answer 3

The suggestion that Egypt did not record its military defeats and disasters is flatly wrong. The Egyptians were united not just ethnically and religiously, but their scholars were also able to record their defeats, break them down, counter the tactics which defeated them and the weaponry which was superior to their own. The Double-arched bow wasn't invented in Egypt, it was a Hyskos invention, similarly the chariot was integrated into the army as an invention of the Hurs.

You can read all about the times when they were beaten and how they got around to beating them back. The Kushite Nubians and the Canaanite Hyskos in particular gave the Egyptians a fair thumping in the Middle Kingdom, so much so that they were forced to sign peace treaties.

The Ipuwer Papyrus is the favourite document used by creationists and bible bashers because it describes in graphic detail a list of disasters which befell Egypt, including a period of darkness which may or may not have been literal, and the waters of the Nile turning blood red, stinking and being generally unfit for drinking. They do this at the same time that they ironically deny that Egypt recorded such disasters. What they wont tell, is that this was from a time well before the Jews were allegedly in Egypt.

So the claim that the Egyptians did not record their woes militarily or domestically, being an excuse for the thorough lack of any sort of corroborating documentation for the bible is flatly wrong.

Answer 4

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/ramseskadeshcampaign.htm

The whole battle was a draw at best. It can even be argued the Egyptians lost. Still the Egyptians recorded the Hittite king crawling at Pharaoh’s feet. Asking the great and mighty son of god for mercy. The Hittite king offered Pharaoh his service and land in exchange for being spared.

With that in mind how do you think Egyptians would record being defeated by a bunch of (almost) unarmed slave men, women and children on foot? I think the most plausible answers are: ● Nothing was written down out of shame. ● It was written down as another huge victory but the records are lost.

I'm not claiming the Egyptians never recorded any defeat, but I think the above clearly shows they sometimes were quite 'flexible' with the truth :-)

Answer 5

Well, in America there are plenty of monuments to the Vietnam War, which was a huge humiliating defeat for the country. Now ancient Egypt might be different. It is plausible that the Egyptians would not have wanted to record their defeats, but bare in mind that this is not the only reason why some skeptics of the biblical narrative disbelieve the Jewish enslavement and exodus. Their disbelief isn't founded entirely on the fact that there are no Egyptian recordings of it - there is simply no historical or archaeological evidence for it anywhere outside the bible, not in Egypt or in Sinai, nowhere. And the story doesn't fit into the larger historical context of the kingdoms that existed at that time. In fact, in ~1400 BC, which is roughly when the exodus is supposed to have happened, Canaan was controlled by the Egyptian Kingdom.

Answer 6

To answer the question that the op asked because everyone was too biased to simply say it. No the Egyptians have not shown evidence of admitting defeat in their history that is currently looked at and known.