Report of Wenamun

Overview

The Report of Wenamun is an Egyptian text preserved on a single papyrus, Papyrus Pushkin 120, now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. It tells how Wenamun, an official of the temple of Amun, was sent to Byblos on the Lebanese coast to buy cedar for the god's sacred barque, and of the humiliations he met on the way. It is set in "year 5" of an unnamed reign, usually understood as the era of Ramesses XI, in the last decades of the Egyptian New Kingdom, around 1080 to 1075 BC.

The Story

Sent out by the high priest Herihor, Wenamun called on Smendes at Tanis and sailed for the Levant. At Dor, a town of the Tjeker, one of the Sea Peoples, ruled by a prince named Beder, he was robbed of his silver; Beder declined responsibility, replying that the thief belonged to Wenamun's own ship. At Byblos the ruler Zakar-Baal made him wait for weeks and then insisted on payment for the timber, treating Egypt's claims to the cedar as a matter of trade rather than tribute. Pursued by Tjeker ships, Wenamun was driven by the wind to Alashiya, Cyprus, where the papyrus breaks off.

Date and Character

The papyrus was found at el-Hibeh in Middle Egypt, probably in 1890, and reached Moscow through the collection of Vladimir Golenishchev. It was first read as a genuine official report. Since the 1980s most Egyptologists have treated it as a literary work built on a real historical setting, and the surviving copy may have been written some time after the events it describes. Either way, it reflects how Egyptians of the period saw the Levant.

Biblical Significance

The Report of Wenamun is not quoted in Scripture, but it is one of the few written sources for the Levant at the start of the Iron Age. It places a Sea Peoples community at Dor, the coastal town that appears in the biblical accounts of Joshua, Judges and Solomon, and whose excavated remains are at Tel Dor. It also shows an Egypt no longer able to command obedience in Canaan and Phoenicia, which is the political setting in which Israel's early monarchy took shape, and it documents the Byblos cedar trade that lies behind the timber accounts of Solomon's building works.