The tomb autobiography of Weni, an official who served Teti, Pepi I and Merenre in the later 24th or early 23rd century BCE, describes how Pepi I made war on the 'Asiatic Sand-dwellers' and gave Weni command of an army levied from across Egypt and from Nubian groups. A repeated victory refrain says the army returned safely after it had hacked up and destroyed the land of the Sand-dwellers, overturned its strongholds, cut down its figs and vines, set fire within it, slain many tens of thousands and carried off a great multitude as living captives; Weni adds that he was sent five times to put down their 'rebellions', and that on one occasion he landed troops by ship in the 'land of Gazelle-nose', usually placed on the coast of southern Canaan or as far north as the Carmel ridge. The text is the earliest record of Egyptian military campaigns in Sinai and the Levant and the only account of an army being raised in the Old Kingdom. It is a first-person commemorative composition whose refrain is a literary set piece, and no archaeological destruction in the southern Levant has been securely tied to it; scholars such as Karin Sowada have argued that Weni's campaigns, and Egypt's wider role in the decline of Early Bronze Age towns there, need reassessment. The episode is included because the text describes a state army destroying settlements and deporting captives, but its scale cannot be measured.
The Sixth Dynasty Egyptian king Pepi I raised a levied army, including Nubian auxiliaries, under the official Weni, which campaigned at least five times against the semi-nomadic 'Sand-dwellers' (Heriu-sha, among the Aamu) of Sinai and southern Canaan, destroying settlements and carrying off captives
There is no figure for the 'Sand-dwellers' themselves, a semi-nomadic population known only from Egyptian texts. Archaeological survey estimates for the Early Bronze Age southern Levant as a whole run to the low hundreds of thousands, but the campaigns fell around the time its fortified towns were declining, and neither the area raided nor the population affected can be defined, so no baseline is given.
No death toll can be given. Weni's inscription claims the army slew troops 'in many ten thousands' and that every revolter in the Gazelle-nose expedition was slain, but these are formulaic boasts in a self-commemorating funerary text with no independent textual or archaeological corroboration, so they cannot be read as counts.
The overturning of strongholds, cutting down of fig trees and vines, and burning described in Weni's autobiography are documented in Breasted's translation and summarised in the Wikipedia article on Pepi I; the claimed killings are not listed as a form because they rest only on the inscription's boast.
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