by Judith Tarr
Even more outrageous from the standpoint of biblical scholarship is the theory set forth by Ahmed Osman in Moses: Pharaoh of Egypt (London, 1990). By tweaking and fiddling with the chronology of the Exodus, selecting carefully from the archaeological record, and citing not only the Pentateuch but the Koran, Osman manages to construct the thesis that Moses was not simply the pupil of Akhenaten but was in fact the exiled and discredited pharaoh. His thesis requires a great deal of stretching and adjustment of the historical and scriptural evidence—but from the novelist’s perspective it is pure gold. To go even further, to propose that Moses’ sister Miriam could have been Akhenaten’s daughter and wife (since in Egyptian the same word can be used for both sister and wife) Ankhesenamon, seems a natural progression.
In Osman’s chronology, Akhenaten feigned death around about the age of thirty-two, went into exile in Sinai, and returned some thirty years later, after the death of his enemy Horemheb, perhaps to reclaim his kingship, perhaps simply to free the Israelites from bondage. The Israelites themselves, Osman proposes, were the kinsmen of Joseph, whom he identifies as Yuya, Commander of Chariotry to Akhenaten’s father Amenophis III. We have Yuya’s mummy (thereby, if Osman is correct, negating the statement in the Book of Exodus that Joseph’s body was carried back with the Israelites in the Exodus); he was indeed a Semite and not an Egyptian, a strikingly handsome, eagle-nosed man whose mummified face preserves the dignity it must have worn in life.
Yuya, according to standard Egyptological thinking, was the father of Queen Tiye, who was the mother of Akhenaten. He may also have been the father of Ay, and Ay in his turn may have been the father of Nefertiti—the evidence is confused on this point; Ay could also have been Nefertiti’s brother. I have chosen the former as the more dramatically useful.
In any case, if Yuya was the biblical Joseph, then Akhenaten was related by blood to the Israelites. Osman finds various ways to accommodate the story of Moses to the biography of Akhenaten as it is known to Egyptologists—it can most conveniently be read in two recent versions, that of Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten: the Heretic King (Princeton, 1984) and that of Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt (London, 1988)—and through this accommodation to construct his equation of the Hebrew prophet and the Egyptian king.
I have made liberal and sometimes quite broad use of Osman’s chronologies and theories in the latter portion of this novel. In earlier portions however I have adhered more faithfully to the Egyptological and historical view. For chronology and identification of principals, including the ages of Akhenaten’s daughters, I have chosen to follow Aldred; for the sake of dramatic effect I have simplified the chronology in some cases, notably in the deaths of Nefertiti and her three daughters, and the death of Tiye. In fact these deaths may not have occurred in the same plague, but over a period of years. Likewise I have conflated Meketaten’s childbirth and death with the childbirth of Meritaten, and disposed of Ankhesenpaaten-ta-Sherit a year or two earlier than may actually have been the case.
In other controversial issues I have chosen among often widely divergent theories, again for the sake of the most effective story. I follow Redford’s suggestion that Akhenaten’s secondary queen and favorite, Lady Kiya, may have been a princess of Mitanni—perhaps that Tadukhipa or Gilu-khepa whom we have on record in the king’s harem. Likewise I have chosen to present Smenkhkare and Tutankhamon as Akhenaten’s brothers rather than his sons as some scholars believe, and proposed that they were all sons of Tiye. Further, I grant Smenkhkare no independent reign; I dispose of him shortly after Akhenaten’s putative death, and bring Tutankhamon immediately to the throne.
I have done nothing with some of the wilder theories about Smenkhkare: that he was a woman, a eunuch, Akhenaten’s boy-lover, perhaps even Nefertiti in male disguise. There is another book in all of that, but not, unfortunately, this one.
Nor have I made Nefertiti the conniving figure that she has sometimes been portrayed. Theorists who believe that Akhenaten’s peculiar physical appearance was the result of a medical condition, believe that that condition would have precluded his producing any children—in which case none of his six putative daughters was in fact his offspring. It has also been proposed that Nefertiti vanished from the archaeological record not because she died but because she turned against her husband, or else refused to participate further in his experiment at Amama—including Akhenaten’s marrying his daughters in order to produce the son and heir whom she had failed to give him. These options, while intriguing, again belong in another novel.
I have taken liberties, some of them extensive, with the geography of Amarna/Akhetaten, notably the palace and the workmen’s village. Akhenaten’s tomb is as described, although there is no evidence that its builders were Hebrews.
For the reign of Tutankhamon, again I have followed the orthodox historical view. The circumstances of his death are my own invention. That he died by violence is a fact; the wound in his skull appears to be that of an arrow. He might have died in battle, or he might have been assassinated. If the latter, it is possible that Horemheb was involved—he does appear to have intrigued for the throne.
Theories again are numerous, and books thereon proliferate. Among them is Nicholas Reeves’ glossy and lavishly illustrated The Complete Tutankhamun (London, 1990). If nothing else, it is a testimony to the splendor of the young king’s relatively shabby and hastily cobbled-together tomb and grave-goods.
That Tutankhamon’s wife was Akhenaten’s daughter is not contested. What happened to her after the pharaoh’s death, however, is a mystery. She appears to have married Ay, who became pharaoh for a brief time—four years at most: he was an old man, and apparently died a natural death. Long before Ay died, however, Ankhesenamon vanishes from history. The last evidence we have of her is not Egyptian at all, but an account in the memoir of a Hittite king.
The Deeds of Suppililiuma as Told by His Son Mursili II (edited and translated by Hans Gustav Guterbock in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, volume 10 [1956]) is a remarkable document, an eyewitness account of the events of the period. Among these is an unusual incident, the arrival of a letter and an embassy from the queen of Egypt, requesting a thing that had never been requested before: a husband to be her consort, to sit the throne of Egypt. I have quoted this letter and its sequel verbatim, as it is recorded in Guterbock’s translation.
We know that the Hittite prince Zennanza was sent to Egypt. We also know that he was killed—probably by Horemheb. What we do not know is what became of the queen thereafter. She simply vanishes. Most probably she was disposed of for what was, after all, an act of treason. My proposal in the novel is an extension of Osman’s theory regarding Akhenaten—and in fact it was remarkably simple to transform Akhesenamon the queen into Miriam the prophetess of the Israelites.
oOo
Along with Osman I find it fairly simple, and quite dramatically useful, to equate the Pharaoh of the Exodus with Ramses I. His reign was short, and seems to have been cut off rather abruptly. Why not, then, by the waters of the Red Sea? That he was also a great builder, and had been master of works under Horemheb, is even more convenient in the context of the Book of Exodus.
As for Johanan and Leah, Aharon and Jehoshua, I have made quite free with the biblical characters. Johanan is my invention, as is Leah. Aharon and Jehoshua of course are not, but there is no evidence that they were related in the degree that I have depicted. I have made similarly free with the geography of Sinai and the location and composition of the Hebrew tribes therein.
What is remarkable is that I have had to invent or to alter so little—that it all fits together so well. Errors, omissions, heresies and heterodoxies are my own; but the story, the history, is very much itself, and happened very much as I have written it.
COPYRIGHT & CREDITS
Pillar of Fire
Judith Tarr
Book View Café edition February 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61138-591-5
Copyright © 1995 Judith Tarr
/> First published: 1995
Production Team:
Cover Design: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
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Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital edition: 20150122vnm
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judith Tarr's first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her most recent novel, Forgotten Suns, was published by Book View Cafe in 2015; she is currently completing a sequel. In between, she has written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies, many of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed spirit dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.
Other Titles by Judith Tarr
The Epona Sequence
White Mare’s Daughter
Lady of Horses
Daughter of Lir
The Shepherd Kings
Avaryan Rising Series
The Hall of the Mountain King
The Lady of Han-Gilen
A Fall of Princes
Avaryan Resplendent Series
Arrows of the Sun
Spear of Heaven
The Hound and the Falcon Series
The Isle of Glass
The Golden Horn
The Hounds of God
Novels
Ars Magica
Alamut
The Dagger and the Cross
Forgotten Suns
King and Goddess
Living in Threes
Lord of the Two Lands
Pillar of Fire
A Wind in Cairo
His Majesty’s Elephant
Collection
Nine White Horses
Nonfiction
Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting it Right
BVC Anthologies
Beyond Grimm
Breaking Waves
Brewing Fine Fiction
Ways to Trash Your Writing Career
Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy II
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Sample Chapter: KING AND GODDESS
Judith Tarr
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Edition
July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-530-4
Copyright © 1996 Judith Tarr
To the people who helped to make this book possible:
Joanne and Steve, for help with research and development,
and John, for the means to do it.
PART ONE: GREAT ROYAL WIFE
Thutmose II, Years 3-15
1
The boat of the sun sailed slowly over the horizon. All night long it had drifted through the land of the dead, pouring its light upon the dry land. Now it drove the stars away. It ruled all alone in the blue vault of heaven, with no attendance but a lone circling falcon whose eye bent piercing keen upon the land of the living.
Senenmut stirred and groaned and started awake. He was stifling. He could not breathe. He was trapped in the tomb, bound to the body, with no spells or magic to guide him out of the dark and into the Field of Reeds where the blessed dead go.
He gasped. The weight on his face began to purr. The warm solidity that trapped him against the cold wall muttered sleepily till he kicked it; then it yelped. “Ai! You’re killing me! Mama! Help, Mama!”
He clapped a hand over his brother’s mouth. Ahotep’s bright black eyes laughed at him. If he lifted it, the brat would shriek till their mother came running, and in no kind mood toward Senenmut. Then Ahotep would laugh and skip off to his breakfast, while Hat-Nufer, who cherished her title of Lady of the House, drowned her eldest in the wine of correction.
Senenmut heaved his brother up, hand still clapped to his mouth, and carried him out into the bustle and clatter of morning in his father’s house.
He dropped Ahotep squawking into the tub that they all bathed in, and bathed himself around him. Ahotep splashed in the water while Senenmut dried himself and put on a clean white kilt. Senenmut tossed another at his brother. Ahotep grimaced at it. He was a scant season removed from naked and insouciant childhood; he was not greatly reconciled to the servitude of clothes.
Senenmut left him to find his own way into the kilt. The house had quieted as it did every morning just before sunrise. Everyone—his mother, the aunts, baby Amonhotep with his nurse, the two servants—had gathered in front of the shrine. His father bowed before the image that had resided in the niche for time out of mind, and poured out a drop or two of beer, and offered a bit from the new loaf of barley bread.
Senenmut bowed to the god from force of habit. It was a graceless thing, a grinning, leering dwarf with luck in his stumpy hands and blessing on his head. Bes, dwarf-god, luck-god, presided over the house of Ramose as he did many another middling prosperous house in Thebes.
But in his mind’s eyes Senenmut saw another god. A great god, a noble and straight-backed god, a god who was a king: Amon-Re of Thebes, who ruled above such lesser gods as Bes.
At this very moment, in his tall palace set apart in walls from the rest of Thebes, the king offered wine in a golden cup and fruits of the earth on golden platters, as many as all his servants could carry, to the image of Amon in his ancestral shrine. By his offering the sun was persuaded to rise. By the strength of his devotion the Two Lands of Egypt measured their prosperity.
It was a noble thing, to bring the sun back to the sky. Senenmut had never seen the rite, only heard of it. He had seen the king, of course, going by in procession for this reason or that: riding to war, returning in victory, celebrating the festival of a god.
Senenmut was a commoner, a tradesman’s son. The king stood as high above him as the moon. But he could dream. Someday he would stand beside the king. Someday he would be a power in the world, a voice in the king’s ear, a sharer in his counsels.
“Senenmut!” His mother’s voice was sharp, pitched to pierce the veil of fog about her eldest son. “Are you going to break your fast today? We have dates, fresh from the tree.”
There was nothing tender about Hat-Nufer. Still she looked after her children well enough, and she knew how Senenmut loved dates. She thrust the bowl at him and said not a word as he gorged himself—at least until Ahotep appeared in a damp and drooping kilt, to lay vociferous claim to the few that were left.
There were more wrapped in a cloth with the bread and cheese and the jar of beer that would sustain him till evening. He grinned and kissed his mother, who slapped him for his presumption, and saluted the aunts, and offered due respect to his father. Ramose, inte
nt on coaxing the baby with a sop of bread in goat’s milk, acknowledged him absently.
The memory followed him: the small inelegant room, the noisy inelegant people, even the servants joining in some altercation or other with Hat-Nufer and Ahotep.
“They are so unbearably common,” Senenmut said as he shut the door and paused in the street, blinking against the dazzle of sunlight. “Father—gods, father is in trade. How much more common can you be?”
He thrust himself away from the door. He was going to rise in the world.
He knew precisely where he was going to begin, if not exactly how. His mother, clear-eyed ungentle creature that she was, had seen to that when he was no older than Ahotep. She had taken the whole profit of a season from Ramose’s trading of pots and jars for the brewing and storing and drinking of beer, and delivered it to the temple of Amon, and not the little temple that stood at the head of the street, either, but the great one, the temple in which the king himself had been known to set foot. In return she had demanded schooling for her son, and only the best of that.
The priests had reckoned the payment sufficient, after some discussion with Hat-Nufer. Senenmut even then could have told them what use it was to haggle with his mother. She had never lost a battle.
He had grown from child to man in the temple of Amon. Every morning after sunrise he went there, to the lofty halls and gilded pillars and the murmur of cultivated voices in every tongue that was spoken in the courts of Egypt. Every evening he returned home to his mother’s fierce interrogation and his father’s vague beneficence, Ahotep’s boisterousness and the baby’s wailing.
Someday he would be rich. He would live in a high house and dine on a gilded table and never—no, never—share a bed with anyone not of his choosing.