264 MARK LEUCHTER this claim, as settlements in the highlands from that time show no d i s t u r b a n c e or disruption until well beyond the period of Merneptah’s reign 21. Indeed, the rhetoric of the inscription is itself indicative of this fact: Merneptah’s scribe boasts of other geographic locales that fell to the king, but (as is well known) refers to Israel as a “ people ”, not as a land 22. There is no mention made of an area that is dominated by his armies, which suggests that the author of the inscription is deploying a sly rhetorical device to soften or blur the memory of a less-than-successful campaign against the highlands. If Merneptah utilized chariots in a manner consistent with other 19th dynasty Pharaohs — a likelihood, given the fact that the depiction of his predecessors as master charioteers stems from his own time 23 — then his scribe’s choice to avoid mentioning Israelite land holdings may relate to the inefficacy of Merneptah’s chariot brigades in that area of Canaan. As a matter of propaganda, the scribe could make the amorphous claim that Merneptah had dominated a people called Israel, but the ambiguity regarding where this Israel was to be f o u n d follows the device of deliberate ambiguity in royal propaganda when full victory could not be declared 24. The annals For an overview of settlements and dates of destruction in the late 21 13 through the mid 11th centuries in the central highlands, see R.D. MILLER, th Chieftains of the Highland Clans. A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C. (Grand Rapids, MI 2005) 97-103. For a summary discussion, see MILLER, Chieftains, 93-95. The people- 22 d e t e r m i n a t i ve occurs in other contexts within the stele, though as G.A. RENDSBURG notes, the determinative in relation to Israel is unique — “The Date of the Exodus and the Conquest/Settlement: A Case for the 1100s”, VT 42 (1992) 518. It is notable however that the stele’s presentation of the Sea People also present them as landless, for it is clear that whatever measure Merneptah took against the Sea People, they maintained a geographic foothold especially on the southeastern Mediterranean coast. In both cases, then, the depiction of people independent of a geographic location is offered in relation to groups that clearly persisted unabated and beyond Egyptian control. On the dating of the relevant details to Merneptah’s reign rather than 23 that of Rameses II, see F. YURCO, “Merneptah’s Palestinian Campaign”, JSSEA 8 (1978) 70. Here I differ in opinion from the reading offered by RENDSBURG (“ The 24 Date of the Exodus”, 517-518) that the Merneptah stele refers to the domination of an Israel during a period of enslavement, which in his view explains the people-determinative as opposed to a regional depiction.