Pithom and Ra'amses

A scene from Nina Paley's animated feature Seder-Masochism. Image credit: Nina Paley

So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh (Ex. 1:11, NIV translation).

What is a “store city,” anyway? The ancient Egyptian equivalent of a gigantic Amazon fulfillment center? Archaeologists have never found anything matching that description, in Egypt or anywhere else. Every village and town in the world has depots and repositories of various types, but - at least until very recently - there’s never been so much stuff around that you needed a metropolis to store it where people had no room to live.

So, assuming that at least part of the Exodus story contains elements of truth, the products of Israelite labor mentioned in the Hebrew Bible were more likely to be city-sized storage facilities within much larger municipalities than actual “store cities.” But that still begs the question of where Pithom and Rameses were located.

After more than a century of searching, now we know.

In the past few decades, using ground-penetrating radar along with more traditional tools like picks and trowels, Egyptologists have identified the biblical-era city of Ra’amses beneath the modern Egyptian city of Qantir. In fact, they are so certain they’ve found Ra’amses, Google Earth has labeled a section of Qantir Pi-Ramesses.

Screen shot from Pi-Ramesse reconstruction. Image credit: artefacts-berlin.de 

 If anything can be said to have been “stored” in Pi-Ramesses, it was horses. The site is home to the largest ancient stable complex ever found, housing up to 460 mounts in luxurious quarters. The immense equestrian complex, which included a chariot repair shop, befitted pharaoh Ra’amses II who was known for his military adventures as much as his massive construction works. An eye-popping computer-generated flyover of Pi-Ramesses was created for a museum exhibit  in Germany and is available on Vimeo, showing details of the stables, the neighborhoods, an entire avenue lined with six-foot sphinxes, and the small proportion of excavated land compared with the underground radar map.

In my novel Goshen, the big sister and the mother of my two main characters work in the stables. Every horse hotel needs low-status people to muck out the stalls, and I figured that might be the job of a few select Israelite slaves. Biblical archaeologists also know that the Kingdom of Israel, which flourished centuries after Ra’amses II, was highly dependent on skilled horse handlers - skills that might have been learned much earlier in Egypt and passed down from generation to generation. 

Image credit: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons

 While Pi-Ramesses is now pretty definitively located, there is disagreement about which city the biblical author is referring to when it comes to Pithom. Majority opinion centers on a dig in the present-day town of Tall AZ Zahirah, which Egyptologists know as Tell el-Maskhuta, because they’ve found centuries’ worth of layers of monumental buildings there. There’s also a reference in a scroll to a place in the area called Per-Atum (“City of Atum,”  an Egyptian sun-god - see above), which early Hebrew-speaking people might have shortened to pi-tohm. There are other candidates for Per-Atum, though, so I avoided the whole controversy in my novel Goshen and decided to make the male members of my protagonists’ family work in a place very close to Pi-Ramesses that they called the “Old Capital”: Avaris. 

Avaris, which is generally accepted as “one of the most important [ancient cities] in the Nile Delta,” was the capital of the Hyksos, a Semitic people who ruled Egypt shortly before the time of Rameses II. In fact, Rameses II probably built Pi-Ramesses close to Avaris in order to be very clear to everyone who entered Egypt that his city was so much better. Since it seems to me that a colossal self-promoter like Rameses II would literally take Avaris apart and use it as a storage depot for the city he named after himself, that’s what I have my characters working on: turning the magnificently frescoed palace grounds of Avaris into . . . the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an Amazon fulfillment center.

Rameses II would have been proud. In fact, he undoubtedly was.

Colossal statue of Rameses II in the Memphis Open-Air Museum, Egypt. 
Image credit: Wknight94 talk, CC BY-SA 3.0  via Wikimedia Commons