Shasu

They were tent dwellers, organized in clans ruled by a tribal chieftain and were described as brigands active from the Jezreel Valley to Ashkelon, in the Transjordan and in the Sinai.

Among the details uncovered at the temple was a reference to a place called "sʿrr, in the land of Shasu" (tꜣ-shꜣsw sʿr), a name thought to be related to or near to Petra, Jordan.

[8][9] In the 13th century BCE, copies of the column inscriptions ordered by Seti I or by Ramesses II at Amara, Nubia, six groups of Shasu are mentioned: those of sʿrr, of rbn, of smʾt, of wrbr, of yhw, and of pysps.

During the pharaoh Seti I's campaign, primarily attested as a historic event by the presence of victory steles found at Tel Megiddo and Beth Shean, the Shasu live in a fertile, mountainous area between Sileh and Pa-Canaan (perhaps the city of Gaza).

[13] Regarding the name yhwꜣ, Michael Astour observed that the "hieroglyphic rendering corresponds very precisely to the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH, or Yahweh, and antedates the hitherto oldest occurrence of that divine name – on the Mesha Stele – by over five hundred years.

"[15] Donald B. Redford has argued that the earliest Israelites, semi-nomadic highlanders in central Canaan mentioned on the Merneptah Stele at the end of the 13th century BCE, are to be identified as a Shasu enclave.

[18] If this identification is correct, these Israelites/Shasu would have settled in the uplands in small villages with buildings similar to contemporary Canaanite structures towards the end of the 13th century BCE.

[23] Thus, they are differentiated from Israel, which is determined as a people, though not necessarily as a socio-ethnic group; and from (the other) Canaanites, who are defending the fortified cities of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam.

[25] Moreover, the hill-country determinative is not always used for Shasu, with the Egyptologist Thomas Schneider connecting references to "Yah", believed to be a short form of the Tetragrammaton, with the writings in the Shasu-sequence at Soleb and Amarah-West.

The highlands were largely uninhabited in the Late Bronze Age, and the settlers would have included former pastoralists, farmers moving to less settled areas, migrants from outside Canaan and people in general seeking a new land and life.