Eric Cline

He makes some discoveries, but misses others.

So one of the things he finds is a little tiny Jasper seal about, uh,

one and a half inches across, a couple of centimeters.

And on it, it says, servant of Shema, I think is what it says, or Shema, servant of Jeroboam.

And that was probably Jeroboam II.

Well, that seal is now missing because Schumacher sent it up to Istanbul to the sultan.

We know it made it to Istanbul, and then it disappears.

So he did find that, but it's gone.

He also found a large boulder, piece of stone, which has a cartouche of Sheshonk, biblical Shishak that came from an inscription or some sort of building that Sheshonk put up at Megiddo.

This would be about 925 BC after Solomon dies.

And indeed, in his inscription down in Egypt, it's very much like Thutmose III, but 400, 500 years later.

Shashank says he captured Megiddo, and lo and behold, here is this fragment with his cartouche at Megiddo, but Schumacher and his men missed it, and they threw it out on their backdirt pile.

They never knew they had found it.

So we're not sure what level it comes from.

The only reason we know even that it exists, when Chicago showed up in 1925, the first thing that they did was run around the site collecting rocks and stones from Schumacher's back dirt pile to build their dig house.

Ha ha.

And one of the Egyptian workmen carrying this stone down the hill said, hey, you know, there are cartouches on here.

And they're like, oh, my word.

And so when James Henry Breasted came over from what was then the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, he said, wait, that's Shashank.

That's biblical Shishak, right?