57 Fig. 1. Name-ring no. 29 from the Shoshenq I topographical list at Karnak. When Champollion visited Egypt in the late 1820s he believed he came across the earliest known mention of the name yhwdh (i.e. Judah) outside the Bible. Inscribed on the wall of Pharaoh Hedjkheperre Shoshenq I’s (the biblical pharaoh qfyf = Shayshak) Bubastite portal at Karnak 1 is this king’s account of his military expedition into Syria. It includes a list of over 100 toponyms he subdued in Syria during the course of his campaign. The name of each toponym is inscribed within a name-ring. The name y-w-d-h- m-’-r-k appears within name-ring no. 29 (Fig. 1) and Champollion deciphered the glyphs to read: “the kingdom of Judah.” However, Müller quickly challenged this reading within the same century and argued instead for Yad Hamelek, i.e. “hand (monument) of the king.” 2 According to Müller the reference is to an obscure royal stela and this is now the view accepted by most scholars. We’ve come quite a long way since the 19th century and it won’t hurt to review the question anew in the light of new information. The name yhwdh is mentioned over 800 times in the Bible, and always in its plene spelling. Müller’s main objection centered upon the absence of the medial “h” sound in the Egyptian spelling y-w-d. This cannot be how the ancient Egyptians would render the word “Yehudah” in hieroglyphic writing. The reed shelter glyph is expected: i.e. y-[h]-w-d. Hence contrary to Champollion, y-w-d must represent the Semitic word for “hand.” What is now believed to be the earliest extra- biblical mention of the ethnonym yhwdh has come down to us by way of Akkadian cuneiform script — m ia-ú-ḥa-zi kur ia-ú-da-a-a. This is normalized 1 R. K. Ritner, The Libyan Anarchy: Inscriptions from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period (Society of Biblical Literature 21: Atlanta, 2009): 206-207. 2 W. M. Müller in T. K. Cheyne & J. Sutherland Black (eds.): Encyclopaedia Biblica, Vol. 4, (London, 1888), col. 4486, n. 5. in English as “Jehoahaz of Judah.” 3 The Assyrian inscription from the annals of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) composed at Nimrud shortly after 729 BCE informs us that the full name of the infamous biblical king Ahaz was “Jehoahaz.” The king evidently removed the theophoric element yhw from his name and Ahaz is what we find in the contemporary epigraphic material and in the Bible. Given that the Assyrian orthographic representations of ancient Hebrew words provide 3 Nimrud Tablet K 3751, rev. line 11′. See H. Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III King of Assyria. The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Jerusalem, 1994): 170-171. Another look at the earliest mention of Judah Yaohdah Ban Dor