by
Damien F. Mackey
What follows is an old article
(originally entitled “Thutmose III as ‘Shishak’”)
here significantly modified.
Champollion’s
Shoshenk
as “Shishak”
Jean
François Champollion was obviously a prodigious talent to whom we owe the first
translations of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But he was also a pioneer,
hence susceptible to some early miscalculations. His identification, with
Megiddo, of Thutmose III’s Mkty, was, as far
as Sir Henry Breasted was concerned, as if set in stone.
I wrote this before I had
(most recently) come to accept that the Mkty in the pharaoh’s annals
was meant to intend the strong fort of Megiddo in northern Israel. See my
article on this:
The most
interesting candidates (I think) who have been put forward for the biblical
“Shishak king of Egypt” (I Kings 14:25), are: Shoshenk I; Thutmose III; and
Ramses II.
Shoshenk I, because
he was the choice of Champollion, and because this identification is still, to
this day, purportedly a biblically-based pillar of Egyptian chronology –
namely, the 5th year of Rehoboam, son of Solomon, tied to the 21st
year campaign of Shoshenk I.
Thutmose III, because
he alone is, according to my revision - with his co-ruler Hatshepsut as a
contemporary of Solomon’s (following Velikovsky) - historically appropriate for
“Shishak”.
Ramses
II, who
is David Rohl’s candidate for “Shishak” (A Test of Time:
The Bible - From Myth to History, 1995) - because Rohl presents a very good argument
in support of his case.
Who “Shishak” is not
Dr Elizabeth Mitchell,
who has written for Answers in Genesis an article in which she pleads,
“Will the Real Shishak Please Stand Up?”, has followed this up further on in
the article with the amusing heading (https://answersingenesis.org/archaeology/ancient-egypt/will-the-real-shishak-please-stand-up/):
“Will the
Wrong Shishak Please Sit Down?
So how did this the
chronological confusion come about?
Jean Champollion, the
brilliant translator of the Rosetta Stone, unwittingly gave support to
inconsistent chronology when he erroneously identified Pharaoh Shoshenq as the
Shishak of the Bible. Champollion found an inscription about Shoshenq, founder
of the 22nd Dynasty, at the temple of Karnak. Because the names sound similar,
Champollion assumed that Shoshenq was Shishak. Then, with the biblical date for
Rehoboam as a starting point, chronologists used Manetho’s list to outline the
next three centuries of Egyptian history.
Many Bible scholars have
trusted traditional chronology even when it disputes the Old Testament.
Manetho’s list is problematic
enough, being full of discrepancies, duplications, and overlaps, but the
starting point Champollion thought he’d found was incorrect. The two problems
with identifying Shoshenq as Shishak involve military strategy and phonics.
According to the Karnak inscriptions, Shoshenq attacked the northern part of
Israel, not Rehoboam’s Jerusalem or Judah. As we said earlier, Jeroboam was
Shishak’s friend and probably his ally. If Shoshenq were Shishak, then Shoshenq
attacked his friend and ignored his enemy. Furthermore, the phonetics of these
two pharaohs’ names only sound similar in transliterated form, not in the
original languages.
Because of this faulty
identification of Shoshenq with Shishak, Egyptologists ignored the rest of the
biblical facts relating to the geography and characters involved. Then, because
dates determined by combining the Shoshenq-Shishak error with a misplaced
acceptance of Manetho’s work almost magically match traditional information
about the confusing Third Intermediate Period, many Bible scholars have trusted
traditional chronology even when it disputes the Old Testament.
We should take a lesson from
this bit of history.
Champollion, with the best of
intentions, a brilliant mind, a track record for great discoveries, and a
belief in biblical history, stumbled. He began with the Bible and developed
what seemed to be a perfect match. But when further analysis produced
discrepancies with the Bible, the biblical Egyptologists of the time dropped
the ball. They held on to their original interpretations of the evidence even
when it forced clear discrepancies with the Bible.
In creation ministry, we also
sometimes discover that models or arguments once popular among Christians, when
examined more closely, actually conflict with new discoveries or, even more
importantly, with Scripture. This website even maintains a section of
arguments
creationists should avoid. All evidence needs to be viewed through biblical
glasses. We need to always be like the Bereans, who were commended because they
“searched the Scriptures daily” (
Acts
17:11), measuring all we “know” according to God’s Word and not
being too stubborn to change any unscriptural ideas we may have.
[End of quote]
Professor James
Henry Breasted considered the warlike Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Thutmose III
(c. 1480-1425 BC, conventional dating), to have been “the Napoleon of Egypt” (Ancient
Times, I, Ginn and Co., 1914, p. 85). Now, Thutmose III has been
confidently dated according to the ‘Sothic’ scheme of things to the C15th BC.
Dr. Eva Danelius gives a brief summary of this astronomical scheme in her
article, “Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?” (SIS Review, Vol.
II, No. 3, 1977/78, pp. 64-79). She wrote:
The scheme commonly applied is
that of a calendar tied to the fixed star called Spdt in Egyptian,
Sothis in Greek, and Sirius by the Romans - the English "Dog Star".
The star becomes visible in Egypt about the time when the Nile begins to rise -
the most important event for a country the productivity of whose fields
depended on the annual Nile Flood. After having tied the calendar to a fixed
star, it became possible, through most complicated mathematical and
astronomical observations and operations in combination with Egyptian texts, to
secure so-called "astronomically fixed dates" for some pharaohs. In
this way the reign of Thutmose III, including that of Thutmose II and Queen
Hatshepsut, was "astronomically fixed" as from May 3, 1501 to March
17, 1447 BC ….
[End of quote]
For a more detailed analysis of the
Sothic dating method, see e.g. my article:
The Fall of the Sothic Theory:
Egyptian Chronology Revisited
This artificial ‘Sothic’
system has yielded (as we have already learned) wildly inaccurate dates for
Eighteenth Dynasty figures such as Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, who were, in
actual fact, approximately C10th BC figures.
Ramses II and
his fellow Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian rulers have also been well mis-dated.
(And yet biblical historians try to tie Ramses II to the Pharaoh of the
Exodus).
For a suggested
revised era for Ramses II, see my article:
New Revision
for Ramses II
The 22nd
dynasty’s Shoshenk I, accorded a C10th BC location, conventionally speaking, is
to be dated significantly later than this.
By far the
majority of scholars are prepared - with so much seemingly weighty scientific
argument behind the Sothic theory - simply to fall into line with its
chronological conclusions. And so these would not quibble with the blatant
conclusion of Professor Breasted that Thutmose III’s First Campaign, in
his 22nd-23rd Year, occurred during April/May of 1479 BC.
A record of the
pharaoh’s many campaigns, including this first one, have been inscribed upon
the wall of the Temple of Amun.
… around 1437 BC, Thutmosis
[Thutmose] had the story of his campaigns in Syria and Palestine inscribed on
the walls of one of the sanctuaries of the great temple of Amun at Karnak.
At the beginning of the first horizontal line that
stands at the top of the wall, one can read the pharaoh’s dedication of this
inscription to Amun: “His Majesty commanded that there be recorded on a stone
wall in the temple he had renovated ... the triumphs accorded him by his
father, Amun, and the booty he took. And so it was done.
Moreover:
The narrative is organized by
year (hence the name "annals"), and each entry gives the course of
the campaign, together with accounts of booty brought back and of the
supposedly voluntary tribute paid by Nubia and by various countries of the Near
East in recognition of the pharaoh's might.
According
to Breasted, the ‘Napoleonic’ pharaoh, in the 22nd year of
his long reign (54 years), embarked upon a military expedition into Syria, in
order to fight against a coalition of Syrian princes under the leadership of
the “King of Kd-šw”, who had revolted against Egypt.
Kd-šw
has been identified as the city of Qadesh, or Kadesh.
Pharaoh Thutmose
III emerged from this campaign with a great victory and immense spoils from the
conquered territories. Dr. Eva Danelius takes up the story, and how Megiddo got
into the picture (“Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?”, SIS
Review, Vol. II, No. 3, 1977/78, pp. 64-79):
… the greater part of
Thutmose's report is dedicated to the fight for a city My-k-ty (now
read Mkty), its siege and final surrender. In their search for a city
written this way in hieroglyphs, Egyptologists decided that My-k-ty
must be the transcription of the name Megiddo, a city in the Plain of Esdraelon
well known from the Old Testament.
…. According to common
consent, Thutmose III was the first pharaoh to conquer Megiddo.
Regarding
Champollion’s identification of “Shishak” with Shoshenk I, Dr. J. Bimson, in
1986, would turn this right on its head in his article, “Shoshenq and Shishak:
A Case of Mistaken Identity” (Chronology and Catastrophism Review,
vol. VIII, pp. 36-46). Despite the superficial similarity of the names, the
fact is that Shoshenq I (as is generally agreed), never attacked Jerusalem
(which “Shishak” most certainly did).
Shoshenq does not relate that
he invaded Israel or that he conquered Jerusalem. He simply writes a list of
cities that he is presenting to the god Amun, and Jerusalem is not among them.
…. If Shoshenq had conquered Jerusalem and taken all the fabulous treasures out
of the temple there, he would certainly have made a big deal of it. Some have
pointed out that some of the inscription has been damaged and perhaps Jerusalem
was mentioned among the damaged section, but Jerusalem would have been the
prize and would have been mentioned at the beginning of the inscription, which
is still intact. ….
I summarised
some of Dr. John Bimson’s argument as follows in my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King
Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
‘King Shishak of
Egypt’
My Egypto-biblical
re-alignment will be fully in accordance with Velikovsky insofar at least as he
had removed one of the most fundamental pillars of the conventional Egyptian
chronology: namely, that Shoshenq I was ‘Shishak’. Whether Velikovsky was also
correct in his identifying of the biblical ‘King So of Egypt’ with one or other
Libyan Shoshenq … will still need to be determined.
Just How Important is
Shoshenq I in the Conventional Scheme?
Bimson has claimed that the
present identification of Shoshenq I with ‘Shishak’ is so firmly fixed in the
minds of the conventional historians that it constitutes a “major obstacle”
standing in the way of their acceptance of the revised scheme of ancient
history. …. Ever since Champollion proposed this identification, he says, it
has been well nigh universally accepted by the scholarly community, becoming
“axiomatic among Egyptologists and biblical scholars alike.
Superficially, the link
appears impressive enough. Apart from the fact that (i) Shoshenq I is
conventionally dated to the approximate time of ‘Shishak’, it seems (ii) his
name is similar to ‘Shishak’, and (iii) Shoshenq is known to have campaigned in
Palestine.
The reality, however, is very
much different from the appearance!
….
And I can add to this the
pertinent observation that historians - as a result of their dating Shoshenq I,
as ‘Shishak’, to the time of Rehoboam of Judah (c. 925 BC) - find themselves
having to look, for [biblical king of Egypt] ‘So’, at the time, say, of pharaoh
Tefnakht (c. 727-716 BC, conventional dates), a [Third Intermediate Period] ruler
of the 24th dynasty. But since it is immediately apparent that the name
‘Tefnakht’ is entirely inappropriate for ‘So’, proponents of this view must
then resort to such far-fetched explanations as this one mentioned by Grimal:
…. “Some scholars have treated [So] as a mistaken Hebrew spelling for the city
of Sais, in which case - by a process of metonymy - Hosea would have been
appealing to King Tefnakht [who reigned from there]”.
2 Kings 17:4, however, clearly
identifies ‘So’ as “King … of Egypt”; hence the name does not pertain to a
city, such as Saïs.
Kitchen moreover has listed a
number of reasons why he thinks that Tefnakht is unsuitable for ‘So’. ….
Gardiner has looked more
realistically to identify “So with the Sib’e, turtan of Egypt, whom
the annals of Sargon state to have set out from Rapihu (Raphia on the
Palestinian border) together with Hanno, the King of Gaza, in order to deliver
a decisive battle”. ….
Though such a view would need
to address why one whom the Second Book of Kings had entitled ‘King’, prior to
the fall of Samaria, had become, some half a dozen or so years later, a mere
Egyptian official (turtan); albeit an important one.
Name (Linguistic)
Arguments
The vocalisation of the
Egyptian hieroglyphs as Shoshenq is based upon the spelling of the
name Shushinqu (or Susinku) in Assyrian records from the C7th
BC. We find experts ranged on both sides in regard to whether the two names Shoshenq
and Shishak are sufficiently close to confirm their identity.
Gardiner, for instance, plainly felt that the Hebrew name was incompatible with
the hieroglyphic original. …. Kitchen … has on the other hand defended the
plausibility of the Hebrew rendering. More recently, Bimson … has accepted
Gardiner’s estimation that the name fit is not entirely compelling; whilst
Bimson’s critic, Shea … has fully supported Champollion’s identification.
….
The most problematical
linguistic aspect for the likes of Kitchen and Shea is the second vowel in the
name Shishak, about which Bimson has this to say: ….
... there is the omission of
the ‘n’ from the Hebrew name. Kitchen points to several instances of the ‘n’
being dropped from cartouches of the name Shoshenq during the 22nd Dynasty ....
Two of these involve the
prenomen Hedjkheperre, i.e. the prenomen borne by the Shoshenq normally
identified as the biblical Shishak; and two other instances are associated with
his known relatives. It is therefore possible that the Hebrew name Shishak
represents this abbreviated form of the Egyptian.
However, Kitchen’s case would
be stronger if there were instances of the ‘n’ being dropped in non-Egyptian
sources. The Assyrian Shushinqu preserves it, and it is retained in the Greek
form employed by Manetho and his excerptors…. Should we therefore expect the
Hebrew scribes to omit the ‘n’? Probably not.
With Velikovsky’s Shoshenq
(Sosenk) = ‘So’, any linguistic difficulty is greatly reduced, at least, since
the whole of ‘So’ is contained in the first syllable of the pharaonic name. And
we should not be surprised about the abbreviation of the name ‘Shoshenq’ to
‘So’, since, according to Kitchen: … “Abbreviations of private names are common
from the New Kingdom onwards”. More specifically, Kitchen tells here of
Shoshenq’s name having been actually shortened to ‘Shosh’ on scarabs.
Moreover, Hebrew shin (ש)
and samek (ס) are reasonably close in pronunciation. The difference
between the sh (ש) and s (ס) sounds could simply be one of
dialect as is apparent from the celebrated case in Judges 12:6 where the
Ephraïmites were distinguishable from the Gileadites in their inability to
pronounce the password, Shibboleth … which the Ephraïmites rendered as
Sibboleth ….
Shoshenq’s Activity in
Palestine
Whilst the linguistic argument
in favour of Champollion’s choice of Shoshenq as ‘Shishak’ has at least
something to recommend it, the same cannot be said I think for Shoshenq’s most
misunderstood actions in Palestine, as recorded on the Bubasite Portal at
Karnak. Shoshenq I’s activities in Palestine just cannot be made to fit the
bold campaign by ‘Shishak’ against Jerusalem!
By today’s standards
Champollion’s understanding of Shoshenq’s Bubasite list was, as Bimson has
noted, quite unsophisticated. Instead of his recognising all of the name-rings
on Shoshenq’s inscription as
being the names of towns and cities in Palestine, he believed that the list
included “the leaders of more than thirty vanquished nations”. ….
Among the names Champollion
read No. 29 as ‘Ioudahamelek’, which he took to be the name ‘Judah’ (Heb. יְהוּדָה)
followed by ‘the kingdom’474 – though, more preferably, it would be ‘the king’
preceded by definite article (Heb. : הַמֶּלֶךְ). Consequently,
Champollion translated this name-ring as “the kingdom of the Jews, or of Judah”
(cf. Hebrew ha(m)malcûth).
He thus concluded that Judah
was among the many “nations” that the pharaoh claimed to
have conquered.
Champollion’s reading of name
No. 29 was subsequently challenged by Brugsch, who made a new and detailed
study of the list. Brugsch identified names both before and after
No. 29 as belonging to Israel
as well as to Judah, and therefore felt that its position in the
list contradicted
Champollion’s reading.475 The now generally accepted view, according to Bimson,
is that proposed by Müller:476 namely, that No. 29 stands for a place, Yadha(m)melek.
Whilst this location has not yet been identified, its position in the list
would definitely seem to suggest that it refers to a location in the NW coastal
plain of Israel, far from Jerusalem. This fact, however, does not appear to
have weakened acceptance of the identification of Shoshenq with ‘Shishak’.
….
A considerable number of names
in the Bubasite list had come to be identified with towns in Israel and Judah,
establishing that Shoshenq’s forces had campaigned in Palestine. Unlike in the
campaign of ‘Shishak’, however, the kingdom of Israel too was attacked according
to Donner. ….
In regard to certain
‘explanations’ that “Rehoboam might have captured various towns in Israel, or
that the pharaoh was simply prepared to override friendship with Jeroboam for
the sake of political gain, these”, says Bimson, “are either flatly contrary to
Scripture (1 Kings 12:21-4), or completely unattested therein”. …“Such
conjectures are necessary”, he adds, “only because of the identification of
Shoshenq I with Shishak. It is entirely consistent with the Bible’s portrayal
of Shishak as Jeroboam’s ally that it contain no reference whatsoever to an
Egyptian invasion of Israel”.
Jerusalem Not Listed by
Shoshenq
Scholars for and against
Champollion’s reconstruction, alike, have generally concluded that Jerusalem is
not even mentioned in Shoshenq’s Bubasite list. Velikovsky, for instance,
claimed that: … “Neither Jerusalem, Hebron, Beer-Sheba, Bethlehem, nor any
other known place was among the names on the list; nor was Jaffa, Gath, or Askelon”.
And Bimson has regarded
“Shoshenq’s failure to include Jerusalem in his list of cities ...” as being
far more serious than any other problem raised by the opponents of the
conventional view; “a major stumbling block”. ….
But even the proponents of the
Shoshenq = ‘Shishak’ view are puzzled by this apparent omission. Judah’s
wealthy capital features in the Scriptures as being the prime target of the
biblical pharaoh’s expedition; but when we turn to Shoshenq’s inscription, as
Hermann says: …. “It is remarkable that Jerusalem does not seem to be mentioned
on it, and does not therefore belong among the places seized ...”.
Kitchen also thinks it
extremely unlikely that Jerusalem ever featured in any of the sections of the
bas-relief now damaged. ….
Shea, on the other hand,
claims to have found Jerusalem and its environs described in various of
Shoshenq’s name rings. ….
David Rohl,
admittedly, does make a very good fist of trying to match Ramses II with
Shishak. But, as we shall read in the following critique, this ‘new’ version of
Shishak runs into some insurmountable problems, thus placing “the New
Chronology … under considerable threat”. Rohl, like James (Centuries of
Darkness, 1990), still manages to score telling points against convention,
but his mid-way revision leaves him wandering in something of a no
man’s land. Dale Murphie (recently deceased) has provided the following rather
devastating “Critique of David Rohl’s A Test of Time” (C and C Review, 1997:1,
p. 31):
According to David Rohl, ‘The
evidence from the Egyptian monumental reliefs, artefacts and documents points
to the identification of Ramesses II as the historical counterpart of the
biblical Shishak, conqueror of Jerusalem’ [Test of Time, I, p. 170:
‘Conclusion 8’]. The evidence certainly points to Ramesses II having been in
the Judaean capital but is this conclusion the only option? ….
Having sketched Ramesses II
into the Shishak position, Rohl takes on the conventional view that Shoshenq of
Dynasty XX [sic] was the biblical Shishak. His argument is cogent, convincing
and compelling. Even Kenneth Kitchen, reigning champion of the Third
Intermediate Period (TIP) dogma, must surely come under pressure to yield
ground, opening the way to a dramatic TIP revision. The great advance here is that
David demonstrates Shoshenq is not Shishak - and the book is worth its price
for this gem alone - but he does not actually prove Ramesses II is
Shishak. He merely establishes that this would be the case if his
input data are comprehensive and accurate. I suggest they are neither.
In Rohl’s historical scheme,
this is a paramount issue. He gives three full chapters (4-6), plus his Preface
as reinforcement, to the proposition that Ramesses II is Shishak. If he is
mistaken here, the New Chronology comes under considerable threat. It is worth
examining the general milieu into which Rohl thrusts Ramesses II, to see how
snugly he fits. There seem to be a number of problems, stemming from biblical
evidence that the regional power of Egypt became diminished and the Judaean
state re-established full independence in this very period.
Firstly, given Ramesses’ 67
year reign, he would only have reached Year 22 when Asa of Judah, grandson of
Rehoboam, ascended his throne. The significance of this date is that only one year
previously Ramesses concluded his famous treaty with the Hittite King,
Hattusilis. At this stage, with Egypt and the Hatti entering a long period of
unprecedented harmony, consider the remarkably provocative actions of miniscule
Judah. This tiny nation, under her new king, flouted the Egyptian/Hatti pact
(which provided for mutual aid in just such an event), by starting the greatest
fortress building phase of its entire history and developing a standing army of
540,000 men [II Chronicles 14:6-8] – and where did this military build up take
place? Not in some distant corner of Egyptian/Hatti territory, away from prying
eyes, but right in the demilitarised zone between the two powers, where all
might see and not be under the slightest doubt that Judah meant business.
And that is not
the end of the problem for Rohl.
Murphie
continues:
To compound this difficulty,
the Hebrew annals declare that in Asa’s 10th Year [II Chronicles
14:9-15] (Ramesses’ 31st year in the New Chronology) Judah was
invaded from the south. However the biblical record says the foe was neither
Ramesses nor Hattusilis (as would be expected in Rohl’s scenario) but another
character entirely: Zerah the Ethiopian. Would Hatti and Egypt stand back to
allow this fourth party with a massive army (suggested as from Arabia rather
than Nubia) to invade their territory? Moreover, Zerah’s expedition
suffered a major thumping at the hands of the Judaean upstart, enhancing Asa’s
reputation throughout the region. Still the New Chronology has us believe that
Ramesses and Hattusilis did nothing! Even if Zerah was acting in some way as agent
provocateur of one of the major players (logically Egypt) in an attempt to
take out the Judaean Maginot Line of fortresses, how could Ramesses
have tolerated Asa’s humiliation of his agent?
If Ramesses II was Shishak,
there never was a time when, nor a place where, such a result for Asa could
have been more inappropriate or unlikely. ….
Briefly here,
also, Murphie touches on the inadequacies of Rohl’s chronology in relation to
the Queen of Sheba:
At the beginning of this time
frame Shishak is tied chronologically to another celebrity who, like Zerah,
simply cannot be ignored. On p. 178 Rohl mentions the Egyptian princess, bride
of Solomon, but pays little attention to the contemporary visit of the Queen of
Sheba, to whom he assigns 2 lines on p. 32 and a patronising comment about
Velikovsky on p. 402. By aligning Dynasty XIX with the middle to near end of
the United Monarchy of Israel, the New Chronology lacks a suitable candidate
for Solomon’s celebrated visitor. It is not good enough to stay with the
received opinion that she was a denizen of the south-west regions of Arabia
Felix, when Josephus [Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, vi, 5] informed
us that she was the Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia …. Further, the Ethiopian Kebra
Nagast (The Book of the Glory of the Kings), discussing their Queen’s
visit to Solomon, delivers her name as Makeda, almost identical to the
royal name of Dynasty XVIII Queen Hatshepsut Makera, used repeatedly
in the Dier [sic] el-Bahri mortuary complex inscriptions of her trading mission
to Punt, placing the events in Dynasty XVIII.
Kings Rehoboam and Jeroboam I
“Also,
Jeroboam son of Nebat rebelled against the king. He was one of Solomon’s officials,
an Ephraimite from Zeredah, and his mother was a widow named Zeruah”.
I
Kings 11:26
Jeroboam
and “Shishak”
Jeroboam [I] is
not - unlike King Solomon’s other adversaries, Hadad the Edomite and Rezon son
of Eliada - actually referred to as a satan … but as ‘lifting up his
hand against the king’ ….
Thus we read
(vv. 27-39):
Here is the account of how
[Jeroboam] rebelled against the king: Solomon had built the terraces and had
filled in the gap in the wall of the city of David his father. Now Jeroboam was
a man of standing, and when Solomon saw how well the young man did his work, he
put him in charge of the whole labor force of the tribes of Joseph.
About that time Jeroboam was
going out of Jerusalem, and Ahijah the prophet of Shiloh met him on the way,
wearing a new cloak. The two of them were alone out in the country, and Ahijah
took hold of the new cloak he was wearing and tore it into twelve pieces. Then
he said to Jeroboam, ‘Take ten pieces for yourself, for this is what the Lord,
the God of Israel, says: ‘See, I am going to tear the kingdom out of Solomon’s
hand and give you ten tribes. But for the sake of my servant David and the city
of Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, he will have
one tribe. I will do this because they have forsaken me and worshiped Ashtoreth
the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Molek the
god of the Ammonites, and have not walked in obedience to me, nor done what is
right in my eyes, nor kept my decrees and laws as David, Solomon’s father, did.
But I will not take the whole
kingdom out of Solomon’s hand; I have made him ruler all the days of his life
for the sake of David my servant, whom I chose and who obeyed my commands and
decrees. I will take the kingdom from his son’s hands and give you ten tribes.
I will give one tribe to his son so that David my servant may always have a
lamp before me in Jerusalem, the city where I chose to put my Name. However, as
for you, I will take you, and you will rule over all that your heart desires;
you will be king over Israel. If you do whatever I command you and walk in
obedience to me and do what is right in my eyes by obeying my decrees and
commands, as David my servant did, I will be with you. I will build you a
dynasty as enduring as the one I built for David and will give Israel to you. I
will humble David’s descendants because of this, but not forever’.’
Jeroboam was
obviously a man of great talent, making an impression, first on King Solomon,
and, then, on Pharaoh Shishak.
Solomon,
realising that the great man had become a danger (v. 40), “tried to kill
Jeroboam, but Jeroboam fled to Egypt, to Shishak the king, and stayed there
until Solomon’s death”.
Pharaoh Shishak
can only be, according to my estimations, the very long-reigning (54 years) Thutmose III
of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
I (and others) have
calculated that Thutmose I was the biblical “Pharaoh” during King
Solomon’s early reign, who had given his “daughter” to King Solomon in an
“alliance”. He reigned into approximately the first decade of King Solomon’s
reign.
For more on
this, see e.g. my article:
Thutmose I was
succeeded by Thutmose
II of uncertain length of reign – but perhaps similar to his
predecessor, about 13 years.
The “Queen of
Sheba”, who had visited and married Solomon, then left to marry Thutmose II.
She was Queen Hatshepsut.
These were
political marriages, for the purpose of linking powerful kingdoms such as
Israel and Egypt.
When Thutmose II
died, Thutmose
III came to the throne, for approximately the last two decades
of Solomon’s reign.
“According to
custom”, Queen Hatshepsut “began acting as Thutmose III’s regent, handling
affairs of state until her stepson came of age. …. After less than seven years,
however, Hatshepsut took the unprecedented step of assuming the title and full
powers of a pharaoh herself, becoming co-ruler of Egypt with Thutmose III”.
Although King
Solomon had been, as Senenmut (Senmut) a mighty force in Egypt, in close
association with Hatshepsut, his influence there, at the time when Jeroboam
fled to Shishak, must have been well on the wane, with a maturing Thutmose III
now in the ascendancy.
In my article:
Solomon
and Sheba
I had written on this:
Thutmose III in the
Ascendant
Thutmose, far from having
engaged in damnatio memoriae, actually placed a statue of Senenmut in
his Karnak temple and was ‘willing to see honor done to him, at least
posthumously’ …. Thutmose III's apparent respect for his mentor might explain
why such a military-minded Pharaoh left it 5 years after Solomon's death before
invading Jerusalem and sacking the Temple … (as the biblical ‘Shishak’).
However cracks in their
relationship surfaced near the end of Solomon's life when Jeroboam, chosen by
God ‘to tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon’, feared for his life and
fled to ‘Shishak’ in Egypt, where he remained until Solomon's death (I Kings
11:26, 31, 40). Perhaps during the last few years of Hatshepsut's reign, with
Solomon in decline, Thutmose Ill began to assert his independence. He may have
realised that it would fall to him to rectify Egypt's economic problems. He
accomplished this after Hatshepsut's death, by embarking upon a series of mighty
military conquests.
Senenmut's Decline and
Death
‘Senenmut's continuing
goodwill at court seems to have continued unabated during most … of
Hatshepsut's floruit’ …. Hatshepsut died in about Regnal Year 21. …. There have
been all sorts of intriguing guesses about Senenmut's demise. Schulman … who
estimated Senenmut's age at over 50 in Regnal Year 16, thinks ‘it would not at
all have been surprising for [Senenmut] to have died from natural causes at a
relatively old age, without our having to suppose a fall from the royal favour
which resulted in his death’.
Evidence for
Solomon’s weakening would be that, whereas, before, he had been able to slay
his adversaries (e.g., Adonijah, Joab, Shimei), he was not able to do away with
Jeroboam, who would, after Solomon’s death, go on to rule strongly “for
twenty-two years” (I Kings 14:20).
That Jeroboam
was prized by Shishak - as Hadad the Edomite earlier had been, by “Pharaoh” -
is apparent from the fact that Shishak gave him an Egyptian princess for a
wife, Ano, according to the LXX (I Kings 12:24):
And Jeroboam heard in Mizraim {gr.Egypt}
that Solomon was dead; and he spoke in the ears of Shishak {gr.Susakim}
king of Mizraim {gr.Egypt}, saying, Let me go, and I will depart into
my land; and Shishak {gr.Susakim} said to him, Ask any request, and I
will grant it thee. And Shishak {gr.Susakim} gave to Jeroboam Ano the
eldest sister of Thekemina his wife, to be his wife: she was great among the
daughters of the king, and she bore to Jeroboam Abia his son: and Jeroboam said
to Shishak {gr.Susakim}, Let me indeed go, and I will depart. And
Jeroboam departed out of Mizraim {gr.Egypt}, and came into the land of
Sarira that was in mount Ephraim, and thither the whole tribe of Ephraim
assembles, and Jeroboam built a fortress there.
The Hebrew text
lacks any mention of an Egyptian wife given to Jeroboam (I Kings 12:1-2):
“Rehoboam [son of Solomon] went to Shechem, for all Israel had gone there to
make him king. When Jeroboam son of Nebat heard this (he was still in Egypt,
where he had fled from King Solomon), he returned from Egypt”.
As I have said
before, the revision, when properly aligned, can be fruitful, whereas the
conventional system is sterile. Regarding Jeroboam’s Egyptian wife, Dr. I.
Velikovsky thought to have found historical evidence for her (Ages in
Chaos, ch. iv: “Princess Ano”, pp. 180-181):
In the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York there is preserved a canopic jar bearing the name of Princess
Ano [his ref. No. 10.130.1003]. The time when the jar originated has been
established on stylistic grounds as that of Thutmose III. No other references
to a princess of such name is found in any Egyptian source or document.
Of course this
data suited perfectly Dr. Velikovsky’s revision, according to which Shishak
(Susakim) was Thutmose III (p. 181): “The existence of a princess by the name
of Ano in the days of Thutmose III lends credence to the information contained
in the Septuagint and gives additional support to the identification of Shishak
or Susakim of the Septuagint with the pharaoh we know by the name Thutmose
III”.
Jeroboam
and the cow-goddess Hathor
Jeroboam I will
ultimately be disgraced and will fall from grace. I Kings 14:9-11 tells of it:
‘You have done more evil than
all who lived before you. You have made for yourself other gods, idols made of
metal; you have aroused my anger and turned your back on me.
Because of this, I am going to
bring disaster on the house of Jeroboam. I will cut off from Jeroboam every
last male in Israel—slave or free. I will burn up the house of Jeroboam as one
burns dung, until it is all gone. Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who
die in the city, and the birds will feed on those who die in the country. The
Lord has spoken!’
That fearful
prophecy, uttered by Ahijah, would be fulfilled in the next reign.
In a marvellous
article, “Aaron, Jeroboam, and the Golden Calves” (JBL, Vol. 86, No.
2, Jun., 1967, pp. 129-140), authors Moses Aberbach and Leivy Smolar will list
“thirteen points of identity” between the accounts of Aaron and the Golden Calf
(Exodus 32) and Jeroboam and his Golden Calves (I Kings 12:38 f.).
Might we take it
even further, that Jeroboam’s “golden calves” were, like Aaron’s creature,
vestiges from former contact with Egypt?
Dr. Eva Danelius
has, indeed, established a firm Egyptian religious connection for Jeroboam I in
“The Sins of Jeroboam Ben-Nabat” (The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol.
LVIII, no. 3, 1968):
“…. Faced with the fact, that
Jeroboam's "calves" were representations of a cow-goddess-the next
question is that for the prototype to them, or her.
Naturally, attention is first
focussed on Egypt-the country which had extended such ample hospitality to the
exiled Jeroboam, where he had married, and where his son had been born. The
search is not in vain : a cow like the heifers described by Josephus : a
reddish young animal, made, not molten, covered with gold, in a small shrine of
her own, a cow inscribed with the name of a Pharao-who was considered a -has
indeed been found: it is the famous Hathor cow from the Hathor shrine in the
temple at Deir el-deity43Bahari.
The magnificent temple at Deir
EI-Bahari was erected in a bay of the cliffs on the west side of the Nile at
Thebes, by the great queen Hatshepsut of the famous XVIIIth dynasty. In the
winter, 1906, Mr. Naville, during his excavations of the XIth dynasty temple
which preceded that of Hatshepsut, discovered the shrine of Hathor. The shrine
was built by Thutmoses III, Hatshepsut's husband, and successor to the throne.
Within it stood a great life-size image of the cow-goddess. "Never before
had a cult-image of this … size and beauty been found intact within its
shrine".
“. . . Hathor is a goddess who
comes out of a mountain-therefore a cave was cut in the rock. . . The shrine is
a cave about 10 ft long and 8 ft high" (it is 5 ft across) it is hewn in a
rock. . . it has been lined allround with slabs of sandstone . . . the roof is
a vault consisting of two stones abutting against each other and cut 45in the
form of an arch. There never was any pavement; the cow stood on the rough
rock".
"The cow is of sandstone.
She is of natural size and in her shape a perfect likeness of the cows of the
present day. Her colour is a reddish brown, with spots which look like a
four-leaved clover. . . in some texts, these spots are replaced by stars . . .
It seems that there are animals with this particular colour and spots. Probably
this was the sign that they were the incarnation of the goddess, just as some
particular … marks distinguished the Apis Bull . . .
"Hathor is the goddess of
the mountain. She comes out of her cave and goes towards the river to the
marshes . . . In the Book of the Dead, immediately at the foot of the mountain
out of which she comes, we … see quite a forest of high papyrus plants . .
."
"The head, neck, and
horns of this cow were certainly originally covered with gold: faint traces of
it may be seen in the nostrils and on the horns; but the gold must have been
very thin, like the very delicate coating which covers some statuettes, and
which is metal beaten so thin that the sculpture is made with the same care as
if the coating did not exist. It is the case with the cow. . ."
"According to the
judgement of experts, this cow is perhaps one of the finest representations of
an animal … that antiquity has left us.
On the neck of the cow is the
cartouche of Amenhotep II, son and successor of Thutmoses III.
The XVIIIth dynasty were
fervent worshippers of Hathor, and so were many of its successors. The
sculpture of Deir EI-Bahari was certainly not the only one of its kind, some of
which must have been seen by Jeroboam. We know, too, that from the days of the
Old Kingdom Egyptian princesses from the harim of the Pharao had been
priestesses to Hathor and especially devoted to this goddess-and Jeroboam's
wife Ano might have been one of them. The possibility must be considered, therefore,
that Jeroboam during his stay in Egypt accepted the worship of Hathor, the
heavenly cow, the Great Lady, Mistress of Heaven and Earth. He seems to have
decided already then and there, to introduce her service in his native land,
should the prophecy of Ahija the Shilonite ever come true”.
The
Greeks
The contemporary
tomb of Rekhmire, like that of Senenmut, features Aegean emissaries, whose
specific ethnicity and lands of origin are debated.
… Introduction of
a new term--The terms Keftlu and "Islands
“In the midst of
the Great Green" are found In conjunction in
the tomb of the Vizier Rekhmire during the reign
of Thutmose Ill. Historically, one may infer that the new
term, "Islands in the midst of the Great Green" was
designed to describe the Mycenaeans, who first came in touch with
Egypt during the time of Thutmose III”.
A massive
problem, of course, is the conventional archaeology with its Dark Ages for
Greece. Previously I had noted:
Thanks to historical revisions
… we now know that the ‘Dark Age’ between the Mycenaean (or Heroic) period of
Greek history (concurrent with the time of Hatshepsut) and the Archaic period
(that commences with Solon), is an artificial construct. This makes it even
more plausible that Hatshepsut and Solomon were contemporaries of ‘Solon’. The
tales of Solon's travels to Egypt, Sidon and Lydia (land of the Hittites) may
well reflect to some degree Solomon's desire to appease his foreign women -
Egyptian, Sidonian and Hittite - by building shrines for them (I Kings 11: 1,
7-8).
John R. Salverda, in a
letter to me, suggested that the Greeks may have derived “Europa” from the
name, Jeroboam:
…. Exiles from Jeroboam’s
kingdom founded colonies in Mycenaean lands, including Greece (where the
“virgin Israel” was likely even known by a feminine corruption of Jeroboam’s
name “Europa”); Where a famous set of twins fought in the womb, and one of the
twins (Acrisius) set up a twelve tribe “Amphictyon” to maintain a special
temple. This Greek temple was located at a place known as “Pytho” (a likely
transliteration of the term “Bethel,” also called Delphi) thought to be named
for “Python” (a possible corruption of “Beth-Aven” or without the slur
“Beth-On”), where Apollo (Identified by the Greeks with the Egyptian Horus)
slew the great serpent (as Horus did Seth/Apophis). As the Bethel shrine was
turned into a copy of the Jerusalem Temple, so the Pyhtian temple of Apollo
shares many detailed coincidences with the Judean Temple. The “omphalos” as the
“Eben Shetiyah” (the respective “center stones” of the Earth), the Adyton as
the Holy of Holies (the sanctuary of forbidden entry), the goat sacrifice
(complete with special treatment for the entrails), the fumigation (sweet
smelling incense), and ritual bathing (in specifically “living water”) … there
are many other corresponding ritualistic and anecdotal features shared by these
two temple schemes too numerous to outline in this forum! Well, before going on
too long, notice all of the “Egyptian” motifs in this narrative. ….
What is certain
is that Solomonic archaeology emerges in abundance when all of the seemingly
disparate elements of ancient history are brought together, as indeed now they
must be.
These, we have
found, are:
The supposed C18th BC world of Iarim-Lim
(now King Hiram), and the archaeology of Alalakh (tying in with the
Philistines);
The contemporaneous Shamsi-Adad
I (now Hadadezer) - son of Uru-kabkabu (Rekhob) - and his ‘sons’, with
Iasmakh-Adad as a potential Hadad the Edomite;
The Era of Hammurabi and
Zimri-Lim (Rezon), son of Iahdulim (Eliada). The Solomonic-like architecture at
Mari.
The supposed C15th BC (actually
only about a generation later than the above) world of Idrimi
(Hadoram) at Alalakh, rightly situated as a contemporary of Hatshepsut and
Thutmose III of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt.
Senenmut (Solomon) in
Hatshepsut’s Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. Late Bronze I-II Age approximately.
Not Iron II where the current
archaeologists mistakenly look for King Solomon.
This is the age of those Minoan
and Aegean Greeks depicted in the reliefs of Senenmut and Rekhmire.
The so-called (c. 600 BC) age
of Solon of Athens (Solomon), whose laws are actually Jewish - some being even
as late as those of Nehemiah. See e.g. E. M. Yamauchi’s, “Two Reformers
Compared: Solon of Athens and Nehemiah of Jerusalem" (Bible
world, New York: KTAV, 1980. pp. 269-292).
Rehoboam
not so “young”
I Kings 14:25-26:
In the fifth year of King
Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the
treasures of the Temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He
took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.
and
correspondingly we read from:
2 Chronicles 12:2-4, 9:
Shishak king of Egypt attacked
Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam. With twelve hundred chariots and
sixty thousand horsemen and the innumerable troops of Libyans, Sukkites and
Cushites that came with him from Egypt, he captured the fortified cities of
Judah and came as far as Jerusalem. …. When Shishak king of Egypt attacked
Jerusalem, he carried off the treasures of the Temple of the Lord and the treasures
of the royal palace. He took everything, including the gold shields Solomon had
made.
Fatefully, and
wrongly - as we have found - the conventional history has (following
Champollion) synchronised this most significant biblical event with the main Palestinian
campaign of pharaoh Shoshenk (Shoshenq) I of Egypt’s 22nd (so-called
Libyan) dynasty.
We have, though
(in this case following Velikovsky), constructed a totally different scenario.
In our revision,
Senenmut’s (who was King Solomon) floruit in Egypt would correspond
approximately to the mid-to-late phase of Solomon's reign = Years 1-16/19 of
Thutmose III.
Hatshepsut's
reign is dated by the regnal years of Thutmose III.
Prior to this
period, King Solomon had completed his great building projects in Jerusalem,
and, towards its end, he fell away from pure Yahwism into a decadent phase,
building shrines to pagan gods for his foreign wives (I Kings 1:18). In perfect
accord this, N. Grimal says that Senenmut “was a ubiquitous figure throughout
the first three-quarters of Hatshepsut's reign. He oversaw some of the most
famous temples and shrines built during the co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose
III, and [princess] Neferure’s name also figures in some of these. …”.
King Rehoboam’s
immaturity early during his reign would make one think that he was only young.
Indeed, his son Abijah will refer to Rehoboam as if he had been (2 Chronicles
13:7): ‘Some worthless scoundrels gathered around him and opposed Rehoboam son
of Solomon when he was young and indecisive and not strong enough to
resist them’.
The Hebrew word na‘ar
(נַ֙עַר֙), translated here as “young” needs to take into
account the fact that (I Kings 14:21): “Rehoboam son of Solomon … was forty-one
years old when he became king …”. The common word, na‘ar,
also used by a reluctant prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:6): ‘“Alas, Sovereign
Lord’, I said, ‘I do not know how to speak; I am too young”, must also
include the sense of disposition, of temperament.
However, King
Rehoboam, who had formerly told the people: 10-11): ‘… My little finger shall
be thicker than my father’s loins. … whereas my father burdened you with a
heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips,
but I will chastise you with scorpions’, was wise enough to humble himself
during the invasion of Shishak king of Egypt (2 Chronicles 1:6): “The leaders
of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, ‘The Lord is just’.”
Dr. Eva Danelius
looked to recreate the scene at the time in a revised context (“Did Thutmose
III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?”):
The Empire of the Hebrews,
which David had taken such great pains to build, fell to pieces immediately
after the death of his son King Solomon. Hadad seems to have returned and
conquered Edom even before King Solomon's death - or, at all events,
immediately thereafter (I Kings 11:22). Jeroboam was sent for and called back
to his native Ephraim by the elders of the ten Northern tribes to be made
"King over all Israel". Rehoboam, Solomon's son and successor, was
left with his native tribe of Judah alone (I Kings 1:13; 12:20).
Rehoboam had lost an empire.
Now he did everything possible to ensure the safety of the tiny kingdom with
which he was left. Anticipating an invasion, Rehoboam put his country into a
state of defence (II Chron. 11:5-12): he closed off all the roads and defiles
leading up into "the high rocky fortress of Judaea" (23) with a semi-circle
of fifteen fortresses, he "put captains in them, and store of victual, and
of oil and wine . . . shields and spears, and made them exceeding strong",
to withstand a prolonged siege.
Rehoboam was well advised to
do so, being surrounded by enemies of the House of David: in the south Edom, in
the west the lands of the five Philistine kings, and in the north the
Israelites, who had just successfully rebelled against him. The only road which
he kept open was that which led via Jericho and the fords of the Jordan to the
Ammonites, to whom he was related through his mother (I Kings 14:21), and from
whom he could hope for help against a foreign invader.
Curiously enough, the Bible
does not mention any fortress which would protect Judah's northern border against
Israel. This gap is filled by Josephus, who reports that Rehoboam, after
completing the strongholds in the territory of Judah, constructed walled cities
in the territory of Benjamin, which bordered Judah to the north ….
While the king of Judah prepared
for defence, the Pharaoh prepared for an attack.
The Egyptian pharaoh who
conquered Jerusalem during Rehoboam's reign has been identified with Sheshonk
I, who had a list of Palestinian cities inscribed on the Temple walls at
Karnak. The list is most fragmentary, and it is doubtful whether it refers to a
campaign at all. Most of the discernible names refer to localities in northern
Palestine, which, in Shishak's time, belonged to the Kingdom of Israel. The
name "Jerusalem" does not appear at all. Some scholars maintain,
therefore, that the main attack was not launched against Judah, but against
Israel, which suffered serious destruction …. This contention, however, can
only be upheld by scholars who are willing to sacrifice the reliability of the
Bible (and of Josephus) - which this writer refuses to do ….
The Masoretic Text which has
come down to us was written by Judaeans hundreds of years after the Kingdom of
Israel had ceased to exist. The Judaeans hated this kingdom and its first king,
Jeroboam the heretic. The redactors of the text would have been only too glad
to report that Jeroboam was punished for his heresy, that it was his
land that was conquered, his capital which was plundered, and the
temple at Beth-El that was despoiled. - There is not a word of this, but
definite proof to the contrary.
While Rehoboam was feverishly
preparing his country for war, Jeroboam indulged in entirely peaceful
activities. He built a royal palace at Shechem in the hope of making it his
capital. He built a second one at Pnuel …. And he embarked on a religious
revolution which weakened the military capacity of his country considerably ….
During all those years, Jeroboam was certainly as well aware of the military
preparations going on in Egypt as was his southern neighbour the king of Judah.
It seems that Jeroboam judged the situation correctly, as far as his kingdom
was concerned: no unfriendly act of the Pharaoh against Israel is as much as
hinted at by the Chronicler, who reports:-
And it came to pass, when
Rehoboam had established the kingdom, and had strengthened himself, he forsook
the law of the Lord, and all Israel with him. And it came to pass, that in the
fifth year of king Rehoboam Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem,
because they had transgressed against the Lord ... And he took the fenced
cities which pertained to Judah, and came to Jerusalem ... So Shishak king of
Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the house of
the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he took all ... (II Chron.
12:1-2, 4, 9)
An even more detailed account
has been preserved by Josephus, who closes with the words: "This done, he
[i.e. the Pharaoh] returned to his own country." Neither source mentioned
any hostility against Israel.
Velikovsky had
put out this challenge to conventional scholars regarding the forts of Judah:
The walled cities fortified by
Rehoboam (II Chronicles 11:5ff.) may be found in the Egyptian list. It appears
that Etam is Itmm; Beth-zur – Bt Sir; Socoh – Sk. Here is a new field for
scholarly inquiry: the examination of the list of the Palestinian cities of
Thutmose III, comparing their names with the names of the cities in the kingdom
of Judah. The work will be fruitful.
This was coupled
with his pointed remark that, among the 119 cities listed by Thutmose III,
there were many cities “which the scholars did not dare to recognize: they were
built when Israel was already settled in Canaan”.
Unfortunately for this part of Velikovsky’s thesis, P.
Clarke (in “Was Jerusalem the Kadesh of
Thutmose III’s 1st Asiatic campaign?—topographic and petrographic evidence”, p.
49) has well shown that Velikovsky had completely mis-identified these
supposed forts of Judah.
What
sort of a name is “Shishak”?
Dr.
Velikovsky himself did not actually attempt to connect “Shishak” to any of the
Egyptian names of pharaoh Thutmose III, but merely alluded to Josephus‘s
information that the Egyptian conqueror’s name was “Isakos”, or “Susakos”, and
also to the Jewish tradition that the name “Shishak” was from Shuk,
“desire”, because the pharaoh had wanted to attack Solomon, but had feared him.
A right
chronology
Criticisms of Dr. I.
Velikovsky’s choice (in Ages in Chaos, I, 1952) of pharaoh
Thutmose III for the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt” tend to focus on four
crucial areas: (i) chronology (naturally, since
Velikovsky has Thutmose III about 500 years later than does the conventional
estimate); (ii) the name; (iii) the relevant campaign against Jerusalem;
and
(iv) the booty.
Conventionally, Shoshenk I
of the 22nd (so-called “Libyan”) dynasty is considered to be the right
candidate, given that he has been dated to the time of kings Solomon and
Rehoboam; his name is phonetically like “Shishak”; and he is known to have
campaigned in Judah.
Though it is now widely
thought that pharaoh Shoshenk I did not at any stage attack Jerusalem (as
“Shishak” most certainly did).
Inevitably,
Velikovsky’s vital (for posterity) Eighteenth Dynasty reconstruction, snugly
aligned against the United (and later Divided) Monarchy of Israel, must lead
him to the conclusion that the long-reigning (54 years) pharaoh Thutmose III
was the same ruler as the biblical Shishak. Demonstrating this to be the case
in all its major details, though, has turned out to be more elusive, not only
for Velikovsky, but for those who have followed him here.
I, for my part,
am convinced that Velikovsky was entirely correct in this identification of his
(though not in his reconstruction of the whole biblico-historical scenario) and
I have added a possible extra dimension to the revision by introducing Senenmut
(Senmut) as King Solomon.
As previously
noted, Senenmut’s floruit in Egypt would correspond to the mid-to-late
phase of Solomon’s reign. In perfect accord with this, N. Grimal says that
Senenmut “was a ubiquitous figure throughout the first three-quarters of
Hatshepsut's reign”.
Name
“Shishak” for revisionists
Reconciling the
name, “Shishak”, with the mighty Eighteenth dynasty pharaoh, Thutmose III, was
one of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s pressing tasks towards establishing this
proposed biblico-historical synchronism as a sturdy pillar of his historical
revision. Other major challenges relating to this were to connect the geography
of Thutmose III’s First Campaign to the brief biblical accounts about
“Shishak king of Egypt”; and to demonstrate that the inscribed Karnak
treasures from this campaign could be matched to those of the Solomonic
reign (his palace and the Temple of Yahweh).
Admittedly the
name Shoshenk (var. Shosenq, Soshenq) is, phonetically speaking - and
despite Dr. Bimson’s useful criticisms of it in his “Shoshenq and Shishak” - a
far more obvious fit for “Shishak” (Heb. Šiwšaq: שִׁישַׁק)
than is the name “Thutmose” (and perhaps than any other pharaonic nomen).
The various
names known for pharaoh Thutmose III are provided here by Phouka:
Horus Name
|
Kanakkht Khaemwaset
|
Nebty Name
|
Wahnesyt
|
Golden Horus Name
|
Djeserkhau Sekhenpehti
|
Praenomen
|
Menkheperre "Lasting are the Manifestations
of Re"
|
Nomen
|
Thutmose" Born of the god Thoth"
|
|
|
Manetho
|
Misphragmuthosis, Mepharamuthosis
|
King Lists
|
|
Alternate Names
|
Totmes, Thutmos, Thumoses, Tuthmoses
|
It needs to be
kept well in mind, however, that “Shishak” was the name by which this
person was known to the Jews; so it may not necessarily even have been an
Egyptian name.
A
similar name, “Shisha” (Heb. Šiyša‘:שִׁישָׁא) - practically identical to
“Shishak” but lacking the final k sound (Heb. qôph) - does
occur in the First Book of Kings as the father of two of King Solomon‘s
highest court officials, scribes (4:3).
It is generally
thought that “Shisha” is an Egyptian name, as with one of this man’s sons,
Eli-horeph.
Curiously,
Shisha’s name is variously rendered in the Old Testament as “Seraiah” (2 Samuel
8:17); as “Sheva” (20:25); and as “Shavsha” (I Chronicles 18:16), which
variability might perhaps indicate its foreignness.
Another very
close fit for the name “Shishak” is the biblical name “Shashak” (Heb. Šašaq) of
I Chronicles 8:14, 25.
{ŠŠK is actually
an atbash cryptogram in Jeremiah 25:26; 51:41}.
If, on the other
hand, the name “Shishak” is to be sought amongst those pharaonic
titles of Thutmose III, then one might consider K. Birch‘s suggestion that it
could derive from Thutmose III’s Golden Horus name, Djeser-khau (dsr h‘w)
[“Chase a Cow”, as some have rendered it]. Birch has written: “... the (Golden)
Horus names of Thutmose III comprise variations on: Tcheser-khau, Djeser-khau …
(Sheser-khau?) …”. (“Shishak Mystery?”, C and C Workshop, SIS, No. 2,
1987, p. 35).
This Golden
Horus name means “holy-of-diadems”.
Whilst Birch’s
ingenious explanation, and the others, may all have merit, my own particular
preference, at this point of time at least, is that the name, “Shishak”, was,
not an Egyptian name at all - or certainly not a pharaonic one - but was one of
those Israelite-applied names in vogue in King Solomon’s court along the lines
of “Shisha” and “Shashak”.
David Rohl,
admittedly, does make a very good fist of trying to match Ramses II with
Shishak. But, as we have read, this ‘new’ version of Shishak runs into some
insurmountable problems, thus placing “the New Chronology … under considerable
threat”.
Rohl, like Peter
James (Centuries of Darkness), still manages to score telling points
against convention, but his mid-way revision leaves him wandering in
something of a no man’s land.
Overall
Velikovsky’s revision (his Ages in Chaos series) has, despite its
flaws, paved the way for relieving ancient history of its troublesome “Dark
Ages” (c. 1200-700 BC).
Moreover, it has
spelled the end of the “Sothic” astronomical theory upon which artificial bed
the lengthy dynastic history of Egypt has been so uncomfortably spread out. Its
worth has become apparent from the plethora of biblico-historical synchronisms
- so lacking in the Sothic scheme - that have sprung up in association
particularly with the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Unfortunately,
some of the best minds associated with the necessary modification of
Velikovsky’s revision, most notably those connected with what has come to be
known as the “Glasgow School” of the late 1970’s to 1980’s - the likes of Peter
James, John Bimson and Geoffrey Gammon - eventually abandoned those
well-established Eighteenth Dynasty synchronisms and went off in search of
their ‘new’ chronologies.
There is an
interesting exchange between one who had persisted with the “Glasgow” findings,
Michael Reade, and Bimson, formerly of that school, who had not (C and C
Review 1999:2, pp. 38-40):
FORUM
A further synchronism
between Palestine and
Egypt by Michael G.
Reade
Ten potential synchronisms
between Palestine and Egypt during the period 1000-600 BC (approx.) were listed
in the article ‘Shishak, the kings of Judah and some synchronisms’ [I]. A
further such synchronism can be derived from John Bimson's article 'Dating the
wars of Seti I' [2]. This one has the special advantage of being independent of
Dr. Velikovsky's proposals in Ages in Chaos [3], which dominate the
first four of the ten synchronisms and which seem to be particularly distrusted
by some people. Dr. Bimson's article rather plainly shows that Seti I's
campaigns in Palestine were synchronous with the time of Jehoahaz (of Israel).
Jehoahaz ruled Israel during years 23-37 of Joash of Judah … though he is
elsewhere credited with 17 years of rule (II Kings 13: I). ….
Notes and references
Reade, MG, 'Shishak, the Kings of Judah and some
synchronisms', C&CR 1997:2, pp. 27-36.
Simson, Dr J, SISR V:l, pp.
11-27,1980/81.
Velikovsky, Dr I, Ages
in Chaos, Abacus (pub. Sphere Books), 1973, first pub. 1952 in USA.
…”.
A response to Michael
Reade
by John J. Bimson
Michael Reade is leaning
heavily on my 'Dating the Wars of Seti I' (SISR V:I, 1980/81, pp.
11-27), written almost twenty years ago. He goes so far as to state that my
article 'rather plainly shows that Seti I's campaigns in Palestine were
synchronous with the time of Jehoahaz (of Israel)'. Unfortunately I no longer
stand by the conclusions of that article and want to state clearly why I do not
believe any further arguments should be based on it. A little history may help
to clarify the picture.
By the late 1970s it became
obvious to a number of us who were testing Velikovsky's chronology that his
separation of the 18th and 19th Dynasties was not viable. However, at that
stage we were still persuaded that his redating of the 18th Dynasty
had a lot to be said for it. The next logical step was therefore to test the
possibility of adopting Velikovsky's dating of the 18th Dynasty and letting the
19th and 20th Dynasties follow it consecutively (as in the
conventional scheme). This experiment was reflected in some of the papers
presented at the SIS international conference held in Glasgow in 1978 [I] and
consequently the alternative revision became known as the 'Glasgow Chronology'.
The paper to which Michael Reade refers was an attempt to test and develop that
revised chronology.
However, doubts about the
Glasgow Chronology soon emerged. On the Egyptian side, we could not find room
to accommodate the Third Intermediate Period; in my own field, the archaeology
of Palestine, it became clear that sufficient compression of the Iron Age would
be difficult to achieve; Peter James's work on the Hittites raised parallel
problems; and so on ... After
further research and soulsearching, those of us most closely engaged with this
problem (myself, Peter James and Geoffrey Gammon) reluctantly admitted that our
alternative to Velikosvky's scheme could not be brought to completion. In short,
the evidence was now forcing us to question Velikovsky's dating of the 18th
Dynasty. Hence the postscript (dated Oct. 1982) which Peter James added to his
Glasgow paper shortly before its publication: 'The writer would like to add
that he now feels somewhat higher dates than those experimented with in this
paper are required by the evidence'. ….
Notes and References
See
papers by Geoffrey Gammon, John Bimson and Peter James in Ages in Chaos? Proceedings of the Residential
Weekend Conference, Glasgow, 7-9 April 1978 (SISR VI: 1-3), 1982. …”.
I have, like M. Reade,
found myself still continuing favourably to embrace “Glasgow” modifications
despite the fact that its authors would no longer associate themselves with
their early findings. And I have also, similarly to Reade, written of the
“Glasgow” school as having ‘thrown out the baby with the bathwater’ - for Reade
will, in his response to Bimson, use the like phrase, ‘thrown in the sponge’:
Michael Reade replies
I am happy to assure Dr Bimson
that I still stand by what I wrote in C&CR 1997:2 (top of p. 33):
'I shall not attempt to adjudicate the extent to which either Velikovsky's
proposals or the 'New Chronology' are 'right' or 'wrong'. I doubt whether it is
even possible in the present state of the evidence'. My immediate object is to
test the proposition that the founders of the Glasgow chronology may have
thrown in the sponge before it is really necessary.
…. At the risk of being
condemned to be burnt at the stake as an incorrigible heretic, however, I am
willing to test the possibility of major revisions of this pattern, which could
indeed permit this compression. Dr Bimson and his friends betray their own
timidity in this respect when they speak of bringing down the chronology of
Egypt by 250 or 350 years. This implies a shift of the existing order (en
bloc) - a logical impossibility - whereas what I am envisaging is gross
interference with the traditional order, which looks to be a house of cards
erected on insecure foundations. It is high time these foundations were
re-examined but this will obviously be a long and a slow business, involving
testing a great many scenarios which must at least start out as very
speculative. …”.
I fully agree
with Reade’s sentiments, if not his own personal efforts at historical
revisionism. Whereas Velikovsky had proposed - in what is now appearing more
and more to have been a rather flawed reconstruction - that Hatshepsut’s
contemporary, Thutmose III, was the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt”, who
sacked the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in the 5th year of king
Rehoboam (I Kings 14:25), according to the ‘New Chronology’, ably led by David
Rohl, Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty was this Shishak. With Velikovsky’s
anchors of Hatshepsut/Queen Sheba and Thutmose III/Shishak now thrown away, the
‘New Chronology’ immediately suffers from its not being able adequately to
replace these Eighteenth Dynasty candidates with suitable Nineteenth Dynasty
ones. This is especially true in the case of the Queen of Sheba - there is
simply no appropriate royal woman to take her place!
Pharaoh’s
Campaign against Jerusalem
“The
topographical facts have been verified on the spot by a highly competent
scholar …
H.
H. Nelson, … whose only adverse criticism was that the narrowness of the road
had
been somewhat exaggerated”.
Sir
Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Professor
Breasted’s preconceptions
Gardiner, here
on p. 192, is referring to Thutmose III’s First Campaign, undertaken
in his Years 22-23, after Hatshepsut had passed away.
No wonder, then,
if this was Gardiner’s reading of H. Nelson’s view - not to mention that of the
pharaoh’s officers - that Egyptology is such a mess.
Gardiner was
rather more accurate when he famously lamented (on p. 222): “What is proudly
advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and
tatters”.
I wrote this when I was
fully in favour of Dr. Danelius’s view that the Aruna road taken by pharaoh and
his army in the First Campaign was actually a road leading directly to Jerusalem.
I have discussed this and its topographical aspect in “
Biblical “Shishak king of
Egypt”, in which article I finally - and
rather reluctantly - departed from my acceptance of Dr. Danelius’s
reconstruction.
Professor James
Henry Breasted considered the warlike Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Thutmose III,
to have been “the Napoleon of Egypt” (Ancient Times, I, Ginn and Co.,
1914, p. 85). And it is to that pharaoh’s records that we now turn, because
they concern Breasted and his reconstruction of the so-called “Battle of
Megiddo”.
Thutmose III has
been confidently dated according to the ‘Sothic’ scheme of things to the C15th
BC. So, the majority of historians would not quibble with Breasted’s bold
conclusion that Thutmose III’s First Campaign occurred during
April/May of 1479 BC. According to Breasted, Thutmose III, in his Year 22,
embarked upon a military expedition into Syria, in order to fight against a
coalition of Syrian princes under the leadership of the “King of Kd-šw”, who
had revolted against Egypt.
Kd-šw
has been identified as the city of Qadesh, or Kadesh.
Pharaoh Thutmose
III emerged from this campaign with a great victory and immense spoils from the
conquered territories. Dr. Eva Danelius (“Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple
in Jerusalem?”, SIS Review, Vol. II, No. 3, 1977/78, pp. 64-79), tells
of this and of the very poor condition of part of the Egyptian Annals:
A hieroglyphic text, carved
into the wall of a famous and much frequented Temple about 3,000 years ago,
does not survive undamaged. And this is how Breasted described it when he
started working on it around the turn of the century:
"They [the Annals]
are in a very bad state of preservation, the upper courses having mostly
disappeared, and with them the upper parts of the vertical lines of the
inscription." ….
Detailed information about the
length of the various gaps is provided by Sethe, who worked on a critical
edition of the Egyptian original during the same years that Breasted worked on
its translation into English. Gaps noted by Sethe vary from a few centimetres
to more than 1.75 metres! …. In addition, even the signs which remained were
sometimes damaged and their reading open to question. Add to this the enormous
difficulty of translating an Oriental text into a European language which
differs from it fundamentally in its vocabulary, syntax etc. and its evaluation
of events, and it will be understood how questionable all these translations
actually are. No wonder, therefore, that the more important of these inscriptions
induced every new generation of Egyptologists to try and produce a more
complete rendering of the original.
Another pitfall for the
translator is the licence to fill gaps not overly long with words which might
have stood there, according to his - very subjective - ideas. Such words might
have been taken from similar inscriptions where they have been preserved; or
the translator/interpreter simply counts the number of missing
"groups" and tries to fill the gap as best he can with fitting words
of a similar length. Though these insertions by the translator have to be put
in brackets as a warning to students, it happens only too often, especially
when provided by a famous teacher, that in the end they are treated with the
same respect as the original.
….
For Breasted, the
identification of the fortress [My-k-ty or Mkty]
conquered by Thutmose with Biblical Megiddo was a fact not to be doubted. And
his interpretation of the - very fragmentary - text was determined by this
fact. …”.
Dr. Danelius has
done some marvellous critical work whilst following the First Campaign of
Thutmose III through the eyes of professor Breasted. She will point out some
glaring discrepancies along the way, leading to her introduction of Harold
Nelson and his doctoral thesis with its own criticisms of the conventional
scenario. I take up Danelius’s account, adding my own comments here and there.
Let us commence at the beginning:
The story, as told by
Breasted, starts in the 22nd year of Pharaoh's reign, "fourth month of the
second season", when he crossed the boundary of Egypt (Records, §
415). There had been a rebellion against the Pharaoh in the city of Sharuhen,
known from the Bible: the city had been allocated to the tribe of Simeon,
inside the territory of Judah (Josh. 19:6). Nine days later was "the day
of the feast of the king’s coronation", which meant the beginning of a new
year, year 23. He spent it at the city "which the ruler seized", G3-d3-tw,
understood to be Gaza (§ 417) (33). He left Gaza the very next day 16
in power, in triumph, to overthrow that wretched foe, to extend 17"the
boundaries of Egypt, according †[… L.P.H.: conventional representation
of brief Egyptian form for “(may he have) life, prosperity, health”, an
honorific customarily applied to the Pharaoh. – Ed.] to the command of
his father the valiant†18 that he seize. Year 23, first month of the
third season, on the sixteenth day, at the city of Yehem (Y-hm), he
ordered [GAP - one word] 19 consultation with his valiant troops ...
(§§ 418-420)
….
The attentive reader will have
observed that there is no gap in the middle of line 18. Nevertheless, Breasted
inserted before the words "at the city of Y-hm" in brackets:
"(he arrived)" (§ 419). In his History of Egypt he goes much
more into detail: "Marching along the Shephela and through the sea-plain,
he crossed the plain of Sharon, turning inland as he did so, and camped on the
evening of May 10th (34) at Yehem, a town of uncertain location, some eighty or
ninety miles from Gaza, on the southern slopes of the Carmel range." (pp.
286/7)
Not a word of all this appears
in the Egyptian text. All that the text says is that the Pharaoh spent one
night at a city which has been identified with Gaza, and that nine days later
he held a consultation with his officers at another place of which we know
absolutely nothing. All else is guesswork. Its only justification, in the eyes
of the translator, lies in the fact that it brings the army to the place where
it should be if the location of the city to be conquered, My-k-ty,
was in the Valley of Esdraelon. Quod erat demonstrandum.
It is highly
worrying when an authority takes it upon himself to ‘improve’ upon an ancient
text. I also found similarly in my thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
that
Assyriologists had done the same in the case of adding the name “Sargon” where they
had presumed it ought to have been (Volume One, Ch. 6, p. 137):
Another seemingly compelling
evidence in favour of the conventional chronology, but one that has required
heavy restoration work by the Assyriologists, is in regard to Sennacherib’s supposed
accession. According to the usual interpretation of the eponym for
Nashur(a)-bel, (705 BC, conventional dating), known as Eponym Cb6, Sargon was
killed and Sennacherib then sat on the throne: ….
The king [against Tabal....]
against Ešpai the Kulummaean. [......] The king was killed. The camp of the
king of Assyria [was taken......]. On the 12th of Abu, Sennacherib, son [of
Sargon, took his seat on the throne].
Tadmor informs us about this
passage that: “Winckler and Delitzsch restored: [MU 16 Šarru-ki]n; ana Ta-ba-lu
[illik]”. That is, these scholars took the liberty of adding Sargon’s name.
Once we know
that there has been some tampering with a text, in favour of one’s own
preferred conclusion, then we can only wonder what further additions or deletions
have occurred?
Dr. Danelius now
proceeds on to the “war counsel” of the great pharaoh and his generals:
Details of this highly
dramatic warcounsel have been preserved in the following 30 lines of the text,
which are given here in Breasted’s translation (beginning at the end of line
19), but without his restorations and additions:-
… saying as follows: That [GAP]
enemy 20 of Kd-šw has come (35) to My-k-ty;*he
[GAP] 21at this moment. He has gathered to himself the chiefs of
[GAP] countries 22on the water of Egypt (36), as far as N-h-ry-n
[GAP of 23cm.] 23the H3-rw, the Kdw, their
horses, their troops [GAP of ca. 23cm.] 24thus he speaks, "I
have arisen to [LONG GAP] (37) 25"in My-k-ty Tell ye
me [LONG GAP]" 26"They spoke in the presence of his majesty
"How is it to go [GAP] 27on this road which threatens to be
narrow? (38) While they [GAP] 28 say that the enemy is there waiting
[LONG GAP] 29way against a multitude. Will not horse come behind horse
[GAP] 30man likewise? Shall our vanguard be fighting
while our [GAP: rearguard?] is yet standing yonder 31in ‘3-rw-n3
not having fought? (39) There are [GAP] two roads: 33one road,
behold, it [GAP] come forth at 34 T3-‘3-n3-k3, the
other behold, it is to 35the way north of Df-ty,
so that we shall come out to the north (40) of My-k-ty. 36"Let
our victorious lord proceed upon [GAP] he desires [GAP] 37cause us
not to go by a difficult (41) road [GAP]. 38[ONLY TWO WORDS
PRESERVED:] … messengers ... design 39they had uttered, in view of
what had been said by (42) the majesty of the Court, L.P.H.:† 40As
Re loves me, as my father Amon favours me, as 1 am rejuvenated 41with
satisfying life, my majesty will proceed upon the road of ‘3-42rw-n3.
Let him who will 44among you, go upon those 43roads
ye have mentioned, and let him who will 44among you, come in the
following of my majesty. Shall they think among those 45enemies whom
Re detests: ‘Does his majesty proceed upon 46another road? He begins
to be fearful of us,’ so they will think,” 47They spoke before his
majesty: “May thy father Amon [GAP], 48 Behold, we will follow thy
majesty everywhere [GAP] go, 49as a servant is behind his master.
(§§ 420-423)
This was indeed an amazing
story – Thutmose’s generals rising almost in mutiny against their commander,
the Pharaoh, “the Mighty Bull, Living Horus", as he calls himself in his
inscriptions. And, even more astonishing, the Pharaoh seemed to understand
their reluctance to enter this road of ill omen: he neither blamed them, nor
did he punish them, but left the decision to them. Upon which the officers
decided to follow their master.
Breasted identified this
defile, the road called "Aruna" in Egyptian records, with the Wadi ‘Ara
which connects the Palestine maritime plain with the Valley of Esdraelon (43).
It was this identification which aroused my curiosity, and my doubt”.
Though I now
find myself accepting this conventional identification of the “Aruna” road, I
can well sympathise with why Dr. Danelius might have doubted it.
“As it turns out”,
I had previously written, “the Wadi ‘Ara is neither
etymologically nor topographically (pace Gardiner) appropriate for the
dreaded “Aruna” pass of the Egyptian Annals”, following Danelius
according to whom:
If it is true that "the
geography of a country determines the course of its wars" (44), the
frightful defile, and attempts at its crossing by conquering armies, should
have been reported in books of Biblical and/or post-Biblical history. There is
no mention of either. Nor has the Wadi ‘Ara pass ever been considered
to be secret, or dangerous.
"From the Plain of Sharon
to Jordan. This line ... ascends by the broad and open valley Wâdy ‘Ârah.
crossing the watershed at Ain Ibrahim, which is about 1200 feet above the sea.
Thence the road descends, falling some 700 feet in 3 miles to Lejjûn, where it
bifurcates . . . This line, which appears to be ancient, is of great
importance, being one of the easiest across the country, owing to the open
character of Wâdy ‘Ârah.”
This was written years ago, by
C. R. Conder (45), long before a modern highway was laid through.
Conder’s view is shared by
later writers: "Most armies coming north over Sharon … would cut across
the . . . hills by the easy passes which issue on Esdraelon at Megiddo
and elsewhere." – thus, a famous historian and geographer (46).
The last army which actually
crossed by this pass on its way from the south was the Egyptian Expeditionary
Force under General Allenby, in September 1918. General Wavell evaluates the
difficulties of the crossing when discussing the operational plan for the
final onslaught: “There was no obstacle to rapid movement along either the
Plain of Sharon or Plain of Esdraelon. The crux of the ride would be the
passage of the mountain belt which divides these two plains ... the width of
this obstacle is about seven miles. Two routes lead across it from Sharon, of
which ... the eastern debouches into Esdraelon at Lejjûn or Megiddo ... Neither
road presents any physical difficulties for a mounted force. On the other hand,
either is easy of defence and would be hard to force against opposition”. On
September 19th, 1918, a brigade with armoured cars was sent ahead to seize the
defile leading to El Lejjûn. It was undefended, and on the following night
"the 4th Cavalry Division passed the Musmus Defile (Wadi ‘Ara
pass) during the night, after some delay due to a loss of direction by the
leading brigade, and reached the plain at El Lejjûn by dawn. (47)
Testimony
of Harold H. Nelson
It was at this
point that Dr. Danelius introduced into her discussion the somewhat ill-fated
young scholar, Harold H. Nelson - to whom Sir Alan Gardiner had referred -
whose task it was, as Danelius puts it, “to verify a foregone conclusion of
Breasted”:
During the same years in which
Breasted wrote his reconstruction of the campaign, a German team under
Schuhmacher started to excavate at Tell el-Mutesellim. The excavation was led
carried out during the years 1903 to 1905. Unfortunately, “At the spot
excavated by Schuhmacher, absolutely nothing has been found which could provide
any further information” (concerning identification of the mound with that
besieged, and conquered by Thutmose III), states the report (48).
Schuhmacher’s excavation was
much too limited to permit final judgement. Breasted, quite rightly, refused to
give up so easily. He wanted specific proof for his identification, and
suggested to one of his students, Harold H. Nelson, that he dedicate his
doctoral thesis to the problem. Nelson was not given freedom to look for the
frightening defile among the mountains of Palestine: Breasted confined him to a
specific region: “This study is confined almost entirely to an effort to
interpret the Annals of Thutmose III in the light of the geography of the
environs of Megiddo", explains Nelson in his preface (49). In other words,
the “scientific investigation” had to verify a foregone conclusion of Breasted
– it was “prove or perish” for the unhappy young man.
For the sensitive reader, the
resulting dissertation is a moving testimony of an intelligent and honest young
student who tried desperately to harmonise the theory of his venerated teacher
with the observations made on the spot, which simply did not fit.
Danelius had seemed
to me not to be exaggerating here.
The conventional
reconstruction of this campaign, I had believed, now begins to get very messy,
with the situation on the ground being quite incompatible - ‘simply not
fitting’ - with the data recorded in the Annals. The hard road that
pharaoh Thutmose III had chosen, that made his officers extremely nervous, cannot
be equated with the relatively peaceful and easy one that is the Wadi ‘Ara. Nor
are the names etymologically compatible.
Dr. Danelius
continued:
Nelson travelled the Wadi ‘Ara
pass in 1909, and again in 1912. He described it in detail: "… the road enters
the Wadi ‘Ara which is there … flat and open . . . All the way to a quarter of
a mile above ‘Ar‘arah the valley is wide and level and cultivated up the slopes
on either side ... the ascent is so gradual as to be scarcely perceptible and
it is possible to drive a carriage as far as the top of the pass." The
road follows an ancient Roman road which descends along a smaller way. “This
latter gradually contracts as it proceeds till about half a mile above the
mouth of the valley, it reaches its narrowest point, being not more than 10
yards wide. A little further on the road … opening out rapidly to a couple of
100 yards, emerges upon the plain of Lejjûn”. Nelson comes to the conclusion
that: “Of course such a road could be easily defended by a comparatively small
number of men, but, on the other hand, an invading army could readily keep possession
of the hills on either hand which are neither steep nor high above the valley …
a watcher posted on the hill above Lejjûn could descry an approaching army at
least a mile above the mouth of the pass”. (50)
As an afterthought, Nelson
warns not to be deceived by the Arabic name (wadi) ‘Ara: “Etymologically, it
seems hardly possible to equate (Egyptian) ‘Aruna with (Arab) ‘Ar‘Arah
(51).
Neither the physical appearance
of the road as described by Nelson, nor its use as an international highway
justify its identification with a road described as “inaccessible”, “secret” or
“mysterious” in the Egyptian records.
Neither did it appear
to make sense tactically speaking.
Dr. Danelius
went on to explain:
Nelson’s difficulties did not
end here. According to the timetable drawn up by Breasted, the Egyptian army
emerged from the pass in the afternoon, set up camp, and spent a quiet night,
to go forth to battle the next morning (52) – all this in full view of the army
of the Asiatics!
Nelson is unable to understand
the behaviour of the Allies, or why they should have "thrown away the
advantage afforded by the narrowness of the pass ... to strike Thutmose under
circumstances so favourable to the success of the Allies. Our meagre sources
must leave us forever ignorant of the reasons of the Allies for thus throwing
away their greatest chance of victory . . . It is astonishing how little
military wisdom the Asiatics seem to have displayed …. The great opportunity
[of successful resistance] they seem deliberately to have neglected."
(53).
The theme given to Nelson was
"The Battle of Megiddo", and this became the title of the
dissertation. It seemed, however, that there was no battle. "On the
actual conflict which took place there is not a vestige of information. To
judge from the Annalist's narrative it would seem that the Asiatics fled
without striking a blow ... why the Asiatics fled is not plain. They probably
mustered a considerable force." (54) And finally, why was the city not
taken by storm? "Just why Thutmose did not make such an attempt at once is
hard to surmise …" (55).
Habent sua fata libelli -
books have their own fate, and Nelson's was no exception.
That Sir Alan
Gardiner appeared to have been quite wrong in writing that H. Nelson’s “only
adverse criticism was that the narrowness of the road had been somewhat
exaggerated” had seemed to be apparent from what Danelius described next –
Nelson’s ultimate complete disillusionment with the project.
Whilst Breasted appeared
satisfied with the outcome, Nelson claimed that he “would gladly have
re-written the whole manuscript” in retrospect.
Somehow, he managed to satisfy
Breasted; he passed his examination, and his study was printed before the
outbreak of World War I. He immediately returned to Beirut for the cuts of' the
illustrations and maps, when war caught up with him. During the whole of the
war he was confined behind the Turkish lines in Syria; only in the Year 1920 did
he manage to secure the material needed.
This unexpected turn of events
provided him with the opportunity of discussing his thesis with some British
officers who had participated in the conquest of Palestine, 1917/1918. Nelson
refers to the outcome of these meetings in the Preface to the 1920 edition of'
his thesis: "Had the University of Chicago regulations governing the
publication of theses permitted, I would gladly have re-written the whole
manuscript in the light of the recent campaign of the Egyptian Expeditionary
Force under Lord Allenby in the same region in which Thutmose III, nearly
3,500 years earlier, also defeated an enemy advancing from the north towards
Egypt", but "I cannot make use of certain valuable suggestions made
by those who campaigned in Palestine in 1917-18 …".
Nelson never rewrote his
dissertation. Armed with the precious study, Breasted approached John D.
Rockefeller Jr and persuaded him to finance a renewed excavation of Tell el-Mutesellim
for a five-year period. Clarence S. Fisher was to be the director, and he came
to Palestine in 1925 to start the preparations for the dig. A comfortable house
was built for the members of the expedition, and in 1926 excavation was
started, lasting until 1939.
Results, as far as the Thutmose
campaign was concerned, were as negative as those of Schuhmacher’s excavation.
Concerning identification of the mound with the city besieged and conquered by
the Pharaoh, the excavators relied only and solely on Nelson's dissertation:
"There can now be no doubt concerning the identification of Tell
el-Mutesellim as Megiddo (Armageddon). What little doubt might have remained
... was entirely dispersed by Nelson's translation of and commentary on the
account of the Battle of Megiddo given in the annals of Thutmose III, which are
recorded on the walls of the temple of Amon at Karnak." (56)
And so, during the last 50
years, the doctoral dissertation of the young student became the unanswerable
proof of the how, when and where of Thutmose III’s First Palestinian Campaign
(57) ….
Nelson for his
part, however - according to Danelius - “no longer identified himself with his
findings” as published in his thesis:
However, there were at least
two scholars who had their doubts about the localisation of the event. One was
Nelson himself, the other the late P. L. O, Guy, who directed the excavations
at Tell el-Mutesellim during-the years 1927 to 1935.
Harold Nelson, when asked by
the Librarian of the Cairo Museum, the late Joseph Leibovitch, for a print for
his private library, parted with his last copy of his doctoral thesis. He
stressed this fact, adding that he no longer identified himself with his
findings as expressed in the study (58). ….
L.
O. Guy was serving as Chief Inspector with the Department of Antiquities of the
Mandatory Government of Palestine, when Breasted asked him to accept the
leadership of the Megiddo excavation which Fisher had had to give up for health
reasons. Guy was a Scotsman who had fought with the British Army in World War I
in Europe and in the Middle East. Guy did not share Breasted’s enthusiasm. Time
and again Breasted appeared at the Guy’s home in Jerusalem till Guy finally
agreed to accept the offer to head the biggest and most richly endowed
excavation in Mandatory Palestine (59).
Guy died in 1952. His wife,
who had lived with him at Megiddo and shared work on the site, continued
working with the Department of Antiquities of the State of Israel. Mrs Guy most
willingly answered all my questions. Again and again she stressed the fact that
nothing, absolutely nothing, had been found during their nine years of digging
which would throw any light on the story of Thutmose’s campaign.
One brief work concerning
post-World War II digs at the mound. All of these were small affairs undertaken
to clarify special problems. The riddle of the stratification of the layers
from the 10th and 9th centuries BC was investigated anew (60), and so "was
that of the area around the temples. Among the various soundings carried out in
the area, the only ones investigating ruins which could be ascribed to Late
Bronze Age I - the time of Thutmose III, according to conventional chronology -
were those carried out by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
under the direction of the (late) architect I. Dunayevski (61). They led to the
conclusion that: "At the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the temple with the
wide walls appeared, developing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age
to the temple with two towers at the entrance, a type of temple whose
sources, like those of its predecessors, must be sought in the
north." (Emphasis added.) Similarities were observed with the temple
at Byblos in LB I, that at Shechem and stratum Ib at Hazor, in LB II.
The report does not mention
any Egyptian finds.
“...
the road enters the Wadi ‘Ara which is there ... flat and open ...
All
the way to a quarter mile above ‘Ar'arah the valley is wide and level ...
the
ascent is so gradual as to be scarcely perceptible ...”.
H. Nelson.
A
Leap from Gaza to Carmel ridge
Breasted’s
reconstruction of the campaign almost seemed to spirit the Egyptian army from
Gaza all the way north to the Carmel ridge.
To discuss this,
Danelius would return to the beginning:
Let us stop here and survey
the situation. To recapitulate: the one undisputed place reached by the
Egyptian army was Gaza. From there on, every "identification" has
been pure guesswork. This is especially true for the "identification"
of Y-hm, which was supposed to have been near the entrance to Wadi ‘Ara
(and identified, eventually, with Jemma, a nearby Arab village). In order to
reach this place, the army which had just crossed the Sinai desert would have
continued marching for 10 days, covering about 90 English miles (89). So far
Breasted, and his followers to this day.
Experience has shown that an
army which includes cavalry and chariots drawn by horses cannot progress that
quickly in a country where drinking water is in short supply during the dry
season, May to November. It seems that neither Breasted nor any of his followers
has given any thought to this vital question, not to mention other problems of
logistics. In this respect, the dispatches sent by General Allenby to the
Secretary of State for War during the advance of the Forces in the Philistine
Plain are a veritable eye-opener. Gaza had fallen on November 7th 1917. Two
days later: "By the 9th, the problem became one of supply ... the question
of water and forage was a very difficult one. Even where water was found in
sufficient quantities, it was usually in wells and not on the surface, and
consequently ... the process of watering a large quantity of animals was slow
and difficult," writes Allenby (90). The very next day, November l0th:
"The hot wind is an additional trial, particularly to the cavalry already
suffering from water shortage". (This was near Ashdod, in the Philistine
Plain) "Owing to the exhaustion of their horses on account of the lack of
water", two mounted brigades "had to be withdrawn into
reserve", on November 11th.
There is no reason to suppose
that nature was kinder to Thutmose’s troops in May, the month with the greatest
number of days with the destructive hot wind blowing from the desert, than to
the Allied troops in November. Allenby's advance, too, was considerably slower
than that demanded in Breasted's calendar for the advance of the Pharaoh's
army: the Allied left wing covered only 40 miles in 15 days along the plain
(91), while Breasted suggested 80-90 miles in 10-11 days.
These observations may justify
a totally different interpretation of the events during the 10 or 11 days from
the day Thutmose left Gaza to the council of war at Y-hm. According to
the unanimous understanding of Egyptologists, the text of the Annals leaves
no doubt that the entrance into Gaza was a peaceful one. There is no hint of
any resistance by the inhabitants. ….
The place named immediately
after Gaza is Y-hm. Petrie suggested an identification with the modern
Arab village Yemma, south-west of the Carmel ridge, an identification that is
"little more than guesswork" according to Nelson (94). [Danelius
opted instead for Y-hm as the Egyptian equivalent of Yamnia (Yabne in
Hebrew), a port about 40 km north of Gaza: “Today, Yamnia/Yabne lies about 7 km
inland from the Mediterranean, from which it is separated by a broad belt of
sand dunes. The plain around it is strewn with the remnants of Bronze Age and
Iron Age settlements, among them a harbour town at the mouth of a little river
which bypasses the city. Needless to say, possession of a harbour would
facilitate the problem of supply and help considerably in its solution.
Problematical
coupling of Taanach and Megiddo
The seemingly most
inconvenient (for Dr. Danelius) combination now encountered in the Egyptian Annals
of
the place names T3-‘3-n3-k3 and My-k-ty, rendered
Taanach and Megiddo, really had given me pause to wonder whether one could
possibly reject the conventional interpretation of the geography of Thutmose
III’s First Campaign. For Taanach and Megiddo lie well to the north of where
Dr. Danelius had focussed her campaign geography.
“Taanach
is almost always named in company with Megiddo, and they were evidently the
chief towns of that fine rich district which forms the western portion of the
great plain of Esdraelon”.
Joshua 12:21:
“The king of Taanach The king of Megiddo”; Judges 5:19: “At Taanach, by
the waters of Megiddo; 1 Kings 4:12: “Baana the son of Ahilud;
[to him pertained] Taanach and Megiddo”; and so on.
This combination, Taanach
and Megiddo, was by far, to my mind, the
strongest point in favour of the conventional reconstruction of Thutmose III’s First Campaign.
Indeed, Dr. Velikovsky himself
had accepted this combination as indicating the well-known northern Taanach and
Megiddo, and he would later, in a letter to Dr. Danelius, point to it as an
apparent weak point in her reconstruction. Thus Velikovsky wrote (http://saturniancosmology.org/files/egypt/thutmos.htm):
“A Response to Eva
Danelius
….
Dr Velikovsky sent
comments to Dr Danelius after reading her paper, and has requested that some of
these be printed here:-
My view of the paper of Dr
Danelius is given here extracted from a personal letter to her, dated March 14,
1977. Dr Danelius is a very gifted researcher and innovator, and she herself
carries the responsibility for challenging Breasted and all others: I do not
wish that any authority I may carry should overshadow the discussion of my
work.
Your paper on Hatshepsut* is
an important contribution. With your paper on Thutmose III and Megiddo I am not
in accord. I would still follow Breasted as to the position of Megiddo, and
these are my considerations in short:
It seems to me that things
went this way: When Jeroboam, upon the death of Solomon, returned from Egypt,
he did not succeed immediately in taking over the entire area of the northern
tribes. Megiddo was one of the fortresses (the main) built by Solomon, and it
withstood the secession. Four or five years thereafter, Thutmose III moved into
Palestine, and as his first step he "took the fenced cities which
pertained to Judah" (II Chronicles 12:4). Rehoboam hurried to defend
Megiddo. Thutmose did not put siege to Jerusalem: he wished first to eliminate
the strategically-dominating stronghold that was a thorn in his plan. After a
pitched battle outside of the gate, in which the King of Kadesh participated,
he was hoisted to the fortress - after a while the King of Kadesh (Rehoboam)
went out of the fortress and "humbled himself"; Jerusalem was not
besieged: already at the walls of Megiddo the surrender and the loot of the
Temple and the palace of Jerusalem were agreed upon.
This was about -940. Megiddo
was not handed over by Thutmose to Jeroboam, but was kept as a fortress enclave
in the land that was a divided vassalage (North-South), with an
Egyptian-appointed commander.
In the letters of el-Amarna,
Biridia (Biridi) is the commandant referred to as Biridri in the Annals of
Shalmaneser III. The commandant of Megiddo (which he calls in the letters
Mikida and Magiida, called Mykty by Thutmose in his Annals one hundred
years earlier), Biridri has under him at the battle of Karkar charioteers of
Ahab, and Syrians, and a thousand Musri soldiers (Egyptians).
Also the name of the brook
(Taanak) referred to by Thutmose III next to Megiddo:
"One of the roads -
behold it is to the east of us, so that it comes out at Taanach. The other -
behold, it is to the north side of Djefti, and we will come out to the north of
Megiddo ..."
Taanach is also next to
Megiddo in the Bible (I Kings 4:12). Your equation of Taanach with the Tahhunah
ridge does not strengthen your thesis.
Now as to the approach to
Megiddo being a narrow pass - by what it is now, it cannot be judged what it
was almost three thousand years ago. There could have been artificial
mound-fortifications the length of the pass. Think, for instance, of Tyre of
the time of Shalmaneser III or Nebuchadnezzar (who besieged it for 13 years),
or even of the days of Alexander, when it withstood a protracted siege. Today
its topography is completely changed.
The story as I see it explains
what you see as insurmountable difficulties. I was asked what I think of your
essay, and before I let it be known, I tell you this in the spirit of
constructive co-operation.
[* E. Danelius: "The
Identification of the Biblical 'Queen of Sheba' with Hatshepsut, 'Queen of
Egypt and Ethiopia' as proclaimed by Immanuel Velikovsky - in the Light of New
Archaeological Discoveries", Kronos I:3, pp. 3-18. and I:4, pp.
8-24.]”.
I would now accept Velikovsky’s
explanation of this.
We read in the Annals
of the apparent close proximity of T3-‘3-n3-k3 to My-k-ty:
“… behold, it [GAP] come forth at 34 T3-‘3-n3-k3, the
other behold, it is to 35the way north of Df-ty,
so that we shall come out to the north (40) of My-k-ty”.
Etymologically
speaking, only, Dr. Danelius’s choice for Y-ḥm (Yehem) of the port of
“Yamnia (Yabne in Hebrew)” was hardly more promising than was Petrie’s choice
for it of Yemma, south-west of the Carmel ridge, an identification that was
“little more than guesswork” according to Nelson.
But the
information more recently supplied by Hans Goedicke, in The Battle of
Megiddo (Halgo, Inc., 2000, pp. 96-97), that some of the conquered enemies
of Thutmose III had apparently travelled to Egypt by boat, with their tribute,
would be - I had previously thought - an argument in favour of Danelius’s
approximate location for Y-ḥm, at least, if not necessarily of her
actual choice for the site. Thus Goedicke wrote (pp. 96-97):
… a group of people from among
the chiefs that has been caught in Megiddo had to travel to Egypt. This journey
was certainly not due to a desire to see Egypt or to participate in a triumphal
display à la Aïda. The necessity to travel to Egypt is final evidence that
Thutmosis III was not present at Megiddo at the time of the surrender but had
already returned to Egypt …. The determinative [a boat] after ḫntyt, “to
go south”, could be taken as an indication that the journey was under-taken by
boat. While this might be the easiest way to get to Egypt, it opens the
question where such a maritime link would have started. There are hardly any
indications that Thutmosis III at this point in his reign controlled the
Levantine Coast … and the big harbor towns located there, with the possible
exception of Byblos. However, to transport through Byblos would have been a
difficult task to accomplish.
Goedicke will
add to this, on p. 118: “According to the geographical list the itinerary of
the king did not touch upon any of the harbors on the Levantine littoral, so
that Sethe’s rendering of mnit as “harbor” has no absolute support”.
The
Aftermath
According to Goedicke
(Battle of Megiddo, p. 101), the enemy chiefs were reinstated.
- 103:
“… they continued to be independent on the local level, but at the same
time acknowledging the king as their sovereign”.
- 102.
“Not only are there no more statements about military encounters after the
surrender of Megiddo [sic], but the text itself does not report capture or
plundering of other cities, as has generally been assumed”.
- 110.
Heavy impost on chief of Qadesh.
- 103.
“Although there is no specification as to his personal fate after the
surrender of Megiddo [sic], his realm is territorially curtailed”.
Re-visiting the Karnak Treasures
Patrick
Clarke writes, “… the subject is described as ‘white bread’ (ta
hdj): the full description being: ta hdj hnk f
kat; ‘dedication offering of white bread’.
From
where does Velikovsky derive his idea that 169 is of colored stone
(malachite)”?
Patrick
Clarke, “Was Thutmose III the biblical Shishak?”
According to
Dr. I. Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos, I, p. 155):
The treasures brought by
Thutmose III from Palestine [Israel] are reproduced on a wall of the Karnak
temple. The bas-relief displays in ten rows the legendary wealth of
Solomon. There are pictures of various precious objects, furnishings, vessels,
and utensils of the Temple, of the palace, probably also of the shrines to
foreign deities. Under each object a numerical symbol indicates how many of
that kind were brought by the Egyptian king from Palestine: each stroke means
one piece, each arch means ten pieces, each spiral one hundred pieces of the
same thing. If Thutmose III had wanted to boast and to display all his spoils
from the Temple and the Palace of Jerusalem by showing each object separately
instead of using this number system, a wall a mile long would have required and
even that would not have sufficed. ….
But was
Velikovsky entirely right about this? Not in the opinion of Creationist,
Patrick Clarke (“Was Thutmose III the biblical Shishak?—Claims for the
‘Jerusalem’ bas-relief at Karnak investigated”:
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j25_1/j
Clarke argues
here that Velikovsky got all of this badly wrong. That Velikovsky - and those
who have followed him in this (Clarke’s “VIC”) - lacking the necessary Egyptological
knowledge, have wrongly identified the items that appear on the Karnak
bas-relief. Consequently Clarke writes (p. 51): “It appears that one of the
major weaknesses of a number of the VIC revisionists is that they are not
competent in the ancient Egyptian language, or the rules governing Egyptian
art”.
That is
understandable, of course.
Not everyone can
be a specialist in such arcane knowledge.
The Karnak treasure had
been considered by many revisionists as being a strong point of Velikovsky’s
argument – as had Hatshepsut’s Punt expedition, in the case of his Queen of
Sheba reconstruction. But Dr. Bimson blew the Punt expedition right out of the
water as far as its qualifying for the biblical incident of the visit to
Jerusalem by the biblical queen. And, likewise, Patrick Clarke
appears to have seriously damaged Velikovsky’s proposed identifications of
Thutmose III’s Karnak treasures with items from King Solomon’s Jerusalem.
Now, whilst I
shall be agreeing with Clarke’s conclusions about the few items that he does in
fact discuss - using his knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics against the
Velikovskian thesis - that will in no way affect my previous findings
indicating that Thutmose III was most definitely the biblical Shishak.
Similarly, Dr.
J. Bimson’s important argument (in “Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba: A Critique of
Velikovsky’s Identification and an Alternative View”, SIS
Review 8, 1986), in which Bimson completely shipwrecked Velikovsky’s
romantic idea that Hatshepsut’s maritime expedition to Punt was the same as the
visit by the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’s Jerusalem, does not affect the now
well-founded identification of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba.
With the wise
King Solomon as a mentor, it would not be surprising, too, if Thutmose III
himself had exhibited skills as a Lawmaker. After all his campaigns came to an
end and steady streams of imposts, gifts and tribute were received, the scribes
of the king turned their attention to the ‘Wise Administration’ of the king (Records,
Sec. 568):
Behold, my majesty made every
monument, every law, (and) every regulation which I made, for my father,
Amon-Re, lord of Thebes, presider over Karnak, because I so well knew his fame.
I was wise in his excellence, resting in the midst of the body; while I knew
that which he commanded to do, of the things which he desired should be, of all
things which his ka desired that I do them for him, according as he commanded.
My heart led me, my hand performed (it) for my father, who fashioned me, performing
every excellent thing for my father [Amon].
It sounds rather
Solomonic, doesn’t it?
Cf. e.g. I Kings
3:10-13:
The Lord was pleased that
Solomon had asked for this. So God said to him, ‘Since you have asked for this
and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of
your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you
have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will
never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Moreover, I will give
you what you have not asked for—both wealth and honor—so that in your lifetime
you will have no equal among kings’.
Other of
Thutmose III’s statements would suggest that the pharaoh was quite at home when
it came to giving moral guidance and a philosophical foundation of government.
The Egyptian
records, according to H. Breasted (Records, II, Sec. 435),
specify:
.... 340 living prisoners; 83
hands; 2,401 mares; 191 foals; 6 stallions; ... young ...; a chariot, wrought
with gold, (its) pole of gold, belonging to the chief of `M-k-ty'.... 892
chariots of his wretched army; total, 924 (chariots); a beautiful suit of
bronze armor, belonging to the chief of Jerusalem; .... 200 suits of armor,
belonging to his wretched army; 502 bows; 7 poles of (mry) wood, wrought with
silver, belonging to the tent of that foe. Behold, the army of his majesty took
...., 297 ...., 1,929 large cattle, 2,000 small cattle, 20500 white small
cattle.
Given the
significant cultural interchange on practically every level between Israel and
Egypt at this time, it is hardly surprising that the likes of Dr. Danelius, and
more recently P. Clarke, have referred to the Egyptian element in the
Karnak bas-reliefs. Thus Danelius (“Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in
Jerusalem?”):
The problem of the provenance
of the spoil is further aggravated by the observation that some of the objects
pictured in murals were unquestionably of Egyptian workmanship … pieces of
furniture decorated with the royal uraeus, the serpent of the pharaohs; vessels
are formed like the lotus flower, symbol of Upper Egypt; others are decorated
with the ram’s head of the Egyptian god Amun, and those of other Egyptian
animal-gods.
Not surprising
at all, I would say, from a King Solomon who had apostatised under pressure
from foreign influences (I Kings 11:1-4).
P. Clarke, in
turn, refers to: “The frieze of ureai (a bas-relief of rearing cobras) [that]
represents potent occult magic, for the cobra-goddess Wadjet was considered a
deadly protectress of the king in both life and death”, and this description
(e.g. ‘cobra’, ‘uraeus’, and ‘magic’) resonates well with the following
description of the statue of a kneeling Senenmut (
http://arthistory.about.com/library/weekly/sp/bl_hatshepsut_rev.htm):
The intact and relatively
unscathed portrait statue of Senenmut Kneeling with Uraeus Cryptogram
was carved from a grayish green stone called metagraywacke. As he gently kneels,
Senemut holds a large cryptogram or emblem with hidden meaning. A
cobra's head supports a solar disk and cowhorns. The serpent rests on two
upraised arms, the hieroglyphic symbol for the ka or soul. In its
entirety, this mysterious composite image was meant to support life and protect
one from evil magically. Also, the cobra, arms and sun disk together
hieroglyphically spell Hatshepsut's coronation or throne name, Maatkare.
Possibly after her demise or by priests hostile to the cult of Amun, Senemut's name
was carefully and intentionally erased from the sculpture's inscriptions. ….
Clarke continues
(p. 55):
“… the offerings
on the Thutmose bas-relief were not at all unusual, being quite normal in this
period … [the high priest] Hapuseneb listed:
“ … a shrine of
ebony and gold …offering tables of gold and silver, and lapis lazuli … vessels
… necklaces … two doors of copper …’’. . .
Hapuseneb also
mentioned that there was a ‘great name’ upon the doors “Okhepernere [Thutmose
II]-is-Divine-of-Monuments”. Everything listed was Egyptian, right down to
dedications on doors; this consistency in offerings which covers three
Pharaohs’ reigns overturns Velikovsky’s argument”.
But this just
what we should expect now, I believe, in a revised context.
Hatshepsut’s
husband, pharaoh Thutmose II was the above-mentioned “Okhepernere”, the son of
Thutmose I.
Firstly, may I
make a general comment regarding the plunder taken by Thutmose III.
Clarke, on pp.
48 and 49, considering the Hebrew word qol (קוֹל), will make these
(typically Creationist) ‘global’ like statements:
Since this Egyptian ‘took
everything’ (Heb. כֹּל qol), … included in his looted inventory would have been
the Ark of the Covenant, along with many other valuable items of precious
metals and gems mentioned in the biblical narrative. God allowed Shishak to
plunder his people for their disobedience. ….
…. Velikovsky believed that
the Ark [of the Covenant] was left unwanted in Jerusalem and did not depart
until the Babylonian exile. …. But the Hebrew word qol indicates that
the Temple and palace were stripped bare; “all” meaning “everything that one
has; entire possession.
Previously,
though, I have had cause to disagree with this view as espoused by
‘Creationists’.
They, making
much of the fact that the Genesis Flood narratives use language that they say
unequivocally indicates totality and universality - and indeed they surely do
when read at face value, from a modern (western) point of view - are forced to
situate Noah and his family in the same sort of vast global environment,
virtually, as now inhabited by 3rd millennium man.
K. Ham et
al., for instance take such Hebrew phrases from the Flood narrative
translated as e.g. “all flesh”, “all the earth”, “every living thing”,
“under the whole heaven”, etc., as clearly implying a global Flood. Though
they do note (ibid., p. 143), at least in regard to the word ‘all’
(Hebrew kol), here, that:
Some have
argued that since ‘all’ does not always mean ‘each and every’ (e.g. Mark 1:5)
the use of ‘all’ in the Flood account does not necessarily mean the Flood was
universal. That is, they claim that this use of ‘all’ allows for a local flood.
Again, the
co-authors are adhering to a true literary principle - applicable to both
ancient and modern writings - when they insist that the meaning of any word
(such as ‘all’) needs to be determined according to its [geographical] context;
that: “From the context of ‘all’ in Luke 2:1, for example, we can see that
‘all the world’ meant all the Roman Empire”. D. Hochner … though, having
also considered these same sorts of ‘total’ Hebrew phrases in the Flood
narrative, concludes that the Flood was not global. Here is what
Hochner has to say, for instance, about the key word “earth”/“land” (Heb: eretz/erets):
Erets (#776
in Strong's), the Hebrew word that [is] translated "earth" throughout
the flood account and it does not require a world-wide meaning. This word
translated "country" (140 times) and "land" (1,476 times!)
in the Bible. Many of them are often of limited land areas.
Hochner then
proceeds to produce a list of Old and New Testament usages of this word, eretz,
to show that its meaning is often localized, and certainly never
globalized in our modern sense. To give just one of his examples (his point e):
… Acts 11:28
speaks of a similar famine throughout all the world,
yet it is not likely it really meant over the whole globe including the New
World.
One encounters
again, later in the Old Testament, a phrase very reminiscent of the Flood
narrative, namely, ‘spread over the face of the earth’ (Numbers
22:5,11): ‘A people has come out of Egypt; they have spread over the face
of the earth’, complains the Moabite king, Balak, of the Israelites on
their way to cross the River Jordan. But how far ‘spread over the face of
the earth’ were the Israelites at this particular point in time? A few
verses earlier (22:1) we are told just how far: “The Israelites …camped in
the plains of Moab across the Jordan from Jericho”.
Not very far at
all according to a global context!
Thus, certain Semitic
geographical phrases that would seem to us to imply ‘total’, or ‘global’, do
not necessarily mean that!
I have my own
personal copy of Sir A. Gardiner’s Egyptian
Grammar (Oxford, 1973), and, whilst not professing to be a fluent
reader of the hieroglyphs, I have been able at least to verify that the
following matchings by Clarke are all correct.
On p. 49, Clarke tells that
what has been presented by VIC as the Ark of the Covenant (fig. 76), is
actually in Egyptian nbw hbny pds n mnkht, which translates “a gold
and ebony clothes chest”.
Most important are the gold
shields, since 1 Kings 14:26 specifically mentions that ‘Shishak’ “took away
all the gold shields which Solomon had made”. Velikovsky claimed to have
identified these, as Clarke say (p. 53), “… shields made of “beaten gold” in
row seven of the bas-relief”. But Clarke goes on to tell that, except for
Figures 127 and 128 there, “all the objects in the row are clearly marked as
being silver”, with Fig. 127 being “described as nbw w hen n mnw (my
gift of a gold chest)”; and the rest being basins, not shields, “which are
rendered differently in Egyptian art”.
On p. 50, Clarke tells that
Velikovsky claimed that collars in row 4 of the bas-relief (54-57) are evidence
of priestly apparel, some having “breastplates”. But Clarke says that they are
not “breastplates”, but just a functional ornament. In a vertical column
between items 80 and 81-88, the hieroglyphs describe their use, he says:
“Jewellery for the Appearance Festival of the god”. “Such collars, called usekh
… were worn by royalty and the privileged elite”.
Pp. 50-51. Here we meet the
uraeus, referred to by Danelius, but that we also found adorning statues of
Senenmut (our Solomon). Dr. David Down of whom Clarke is also critical, had
claimed in his DVD “Unwrapping the Pharaohs”, that “it looks like a fire
altar”. But Clarke replies that: “The frieze of ureai (a bas-relief of rearing
cobras) represents potent occult magic, for the cobra-goddess Wadjet was
considered a deadly protectress of the king in both life and death. There is no
example from Scripture for such an artefact being found in either the Temple or
residence of Solomon and the claim that it is a ‘fire altar’ is not tenable”.
But it is exactly what we
would expect from Solomon in his late career as Senenmut. Recall what we
included above: The serpent rests on two upraised arms, the hieroglyphic symbol
for the ka or soul. In its entirety, this mysterious composite image was meant
to support life and protect one from evil magically.
P. 51.
Here Clarke quotes Velikovsky as identifying figure 35 (and by association
36-38) as being “candlesticks with lamps”. “One of them (35)”, writes
Velikovsky, “has three lily lamps on the left and three on the right”. But
Clarke claims that, here, “Velikovsky missed an important detail …’. [He
includes Dr. David Down here, too]. A text accompanies figure 35 on the
bas-relief, he says which reads … nbw-ddt (gold bowl). Clarke also
compares it with Wreszinski’s Fig. 35 for clarification. “Six Nile lotus
blossoms and a human figurine cannot be equated to branches and almond blossoms
no matter how hard one tries”, Clarke says, before concluding: “… the bowl
(Egy. ddt) is not the same as altar (Egy. khawt)”.
P. 52.
“Row seven on the bas-relief may contain predominantly silver objects but the
choice of Egyptian text for 138 leaves no doubt about its nature: ‘white …
bread’. Velikovsky’s ‘silver bread’ is deduced only by its position in the
register. Had it really been silver its label would have included the Egyptian
… hdj nb, where the two hieroglyphs combined translated as hdj
white, and nb gold”.
Pp. 52-53. “As for 138”,
Clarke writes, “the subject is described as ‘white bread’ (ta hdj):
the full description being: ta hdj hnk f kat; ‘dedication offering of
white bread’. From where does Velikovsky derive his idea that 169 is of colored
stone (malachite)”?’, Clarke asks.
The likes of J. Bimson
and P. Clarke have, I believe, done a real service to the revision by applying
their specialist knowledge to the Velikovskian theses, and showing where these
are inadequate or just plain wrong. Others have sometimes followed Velikovsky
into these traps, either due to too much idealism or just plain laziness.
Clarke has given
a good lesson in why revisionists really need to scrutinise everything that is
presented to them, and not just take matters for granted. The Karnak booty of
Thutmose III will need to be more thoroughly and scientifically investigated.
Unfortunately,
neither Bimson nor Clarke has been able to find any compelling substitutes for
those ‘twin pillars’ of the Velikovskian revision, Hatshepsut and Thutmose III,
whom they have completely discarded – having ‘thrown out the baby with the
bathwater’ in my opinion.
