• The Bible provides no dates and fails to name the pharaohs in question. However, archaeological evidence has shown that the Israelites did exist and had settled in Canaan – an area which included modern Israel, Palestine and the Lebanon – by around 1250 BC.
• According to the Book of Genesis the Israelites first arrive in Egypt from Canaan when the Patriarch Joseph is made chief minister by the pharaoh and he settles his family in the kingdom. Over the following centuries their descendants remain in Egypt, their numbers continuing to grow until they are thousands. If the Joseph story in any way reflects historical events, it would need to be set around 1750 BC.
• The peoples who occupied much of Canaan at this time were called the Hyksos. Around 1750 BC they began to settle in northern Egypt and within fifty years they had set up their own rival kingdom in the area with their capital at Avaris. It is certainly feasible, indeed almost certain, that the Hyksos rulers of northern Egypt appointed as their chief ministers those of Canaanite extraction. The story would further sit with the Genesis account, as the Hyksos rulers did see themselves as pharaohs.
• Not only are the Hyksos the only pharaohs of the time who would actually have raised an Israelite faction to high status, but Avaris is precisely where the Bible places the Israelites.
• It is very possible that the biblical enslavement of the Israelites reflects the historical period when the Egyptian pharaohs of the south – the seventeenth-dynasty Theban kings – eventually overcame the Hyksos pharaohs of the north. Many of the Hyksos were enslaved.
• There is evidence of a people who may actually have been the Israelites being prominent among the Hyksos slaves. They are specifically referred to as Apiru – also rendered as Hapiru or Habiru by some translators – a name which many scholars believe to have been the origin of the word Hebrew.
CHAPTER NINE
Cataclysm
Around 1350 BC Egypt is at the height of her power and Amonhotep III is on the throne. His great-grandfather Tuthmosis III has laid the foundations of the largest empire the world has yet seen and the land of Egypt is now filled with abundance. Amonhotep has erected great buildings and monuments in cities throughout the kingdom, all of them notable for their affluence and exceptional quality of design. In Thebes, he has built his enormous Malkata palace, as splendid as any before, and he has glorified Amun-Re in gratitude for his country's fortunes. He has embellished the already massive temple at Karnak, and at Luxor he even builds a new temple to the mighty god. As much as any pharaoh, Amonhotep is worshipped by his people. Images of him stand proud in temples at Memphis, Hierakonpolis and Thebes, and in the temple of Sulb Amonhotep is even depicted adoring his own image.
Here is an Egypt stronger and more prosperous then ever before: a land with Amun-Re firmly entrenched as supreme deity, and with a pharaoh who is immensely rich, powerful and confident. Then, all of a sudden, when he still has years of life left in him, the mighty Amonhotep relinquishes his power, retreats from public life and Akhenaten is appointed as senior co-regent. Moreover, the impeccable state religion is totally abandoned and an altogether new type of god is installed as principle deity. What on earth has happened?
One would expect such fundamental changes, particularly religious ones, to follow some terrible calamity or period of upheaval. The phenomenal spread of Christianity in the second half of the first century, for example, followed the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the virtual annihilation of Judea, and the rise of Islam throughout the Middle East in the seventh century followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet even these events did not happen overnight. The peculiar events surrounding the inception of Atenism appear to suggest some very unusual – perhaps unprecedented – set of events. It is not only that Akhenaten himself had been possessed by such radical notions, but that Egypt's population at large seems to have accepted them.
We can gather from the fact that Horemheb did not later expunge Amonhotep's name from the list of kings, and even claimed him as his predecessor, that Amonhotep had never personally sanctioned Atenism. We have also seen how Amonhotep seems to have lived on for some considerable time as co-regent. If Akhenaten had not enjoyed wide support, any dissenters could easily have rallied around Amonhotep resulting in civil strife; yet all the evidence points to the contrary. The country is actually stable enough for Akhenaten to remove himself and his court to a remote location, seemingly without any fear of revolt. All this suggests that virtually everyone was prepared to go along with Akhenaten's peculiar ideas – including the old king himself, who actually moved aside to make way for his son. Egypt shows all the signs of a country shocked into silence. Surely there must be some evidence that something quite extraordinary had recently occurred.
For someone so completely devoted to Amun-Re, Amonhotep does something very strange towards the end of his independent reign: he erects literally hundreds of statues to another deity – the goddess Sekhmet. At Asher, half a kilometre to the south of the Temple of Amun, Amonhotep was in the process of rebuilding a temple to the chief goddess Mut, when he suddenly reconsecrated it as a temple to Sekhmet. Furthermore, he decreed that Sekhmet should be assimilated with Mut, effectively making her the principal goddess. So many statues did he erect of Sekhmet, here and elsewhere, that nearly every Egyptological collection in the world can boast at least one example. The British Museum has the largest number: over thirty specimens in various states of preservation. Hundreds still remain in situ in Egypt, the majority being at the temple of Luxor. It has been estimated that there were around 700 at the temple of Mut alone. In fact, no other deity of ancient Egypt is represented by so many large-scale statues – and nearly all of them were erected by order of Amonhotep III. These statues of Sekhmet are a clear indication that, despite the apparent stability and wealth of the country, something was wrong. Sekhmet was the goddess of devastation!
Sekhmet was represented as a lioness or a woman with a lion's head. She was the daughter of Re who, in Egyptian mythology, had once almost annihilated mankind. They were only saved through Re's personal intervention. Called the 'mighty one', Sekhmet was a fierce goddess of war and strife who brought destruction to the enemy. In tomb scenes, she is depicted spitting flames and a fiery glow emanates from her body; the hot desert winds were even regarded as her breath. She was seen as the udjat – 'The Eye of Re' – representing the scorching, destructive power of the sun.
Why these monumental statues of the goddess exist in such unrivalled numbers has never been satisfactorily explained. The fact that Amonhotep erected more statues to her, by far, than he did to Amun-Re suggests that something had occurred to make him question the power of the chief god. Akhenaten acted in the same way by establishing the Aten as supreme, and ultimately the only, deity. On one of the Sekhmet statues in the British Museum Amonhotep even describes himself with the epithet 'Beloved of Sekhmet', as Akhenaten would later describe himself as 'Beloved of the Aten'. Surely something had afflicted the country: Amonhotep considering it to have been caused by Sekhmet, Akhenaten seeing it as the influence of an altogether new type of god, the Aten.
Sekhmet and the Aten have something which may be very indicative in common: they were both solar deities. Had there occurred some pernicious episode in some way associated with the sun? As both kings had chosen fairly obscure – and particularly unusual – deities to appease, it would seem to suggest a somewhat unique set of circumstances: drought, an intense heat wave, or other such solar-related conditions would be relatively commonplace in the desert belt, and there is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians had previously, or since, behaved in such an unusual manner.
There are only a limited number of things that can have happened to the sun. Most, such as solar flares and sunspot activity, would not be visible to the naked eye. Even if such phenomena did cause adverse effects on earth, there is no way the ancient Egyptians could have linked them together. If something strange had – from the earthbound perspective – happened to the sun, there is only one
realistic possibility: something had obscured it. There had been a partial eclipse visible from Egypt in the 1370s BC, but it is doubtful that this would explain such drastic and long-term reactions by the Egyptians. After all, if Amonhotep had originally considered the phenomenon the work of Sekhmet, and had enough time to build the statues, then, as the eclipse had not heralded the end of the sun, he and others would have seen his actions as having been successful. The goddess would have been appeased, and there would have been no support for Akhenaten's introduction of Atenism – a cult that endured as the state religion for well over a decade. Besides, Egypt had witnessed many eclipses which, although being regarded as indicative celestial events, were not seen as omens of catastrophe. If some strange phenomenon had occurred, it would have to have been either longerterm, unprecedented, or far more spectacular.
The remaining possibility is that the sun's light had been dimmed, or its appearance altered, due to atmospheric contaminants. This could be caused by such phenomena as an intense meteorite shower, an asteroid or comet impact, or a massive volcanic eruption. Airborne debris from such events – particles of dust thrown high into the stratosphere – can in some circumstances contaminate the atmosphere of the entire globe. The asteroid collision believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is thought to have thrown up enough material to have darkened the skies the world over. Something less life-threatening, but equally dramatic, can result from volcanic activity. In 1980, for example, when the volcano of Mount St Helens erupted in America, there were green sunsets reported months afterwards as far away as Russia. Had such a rare solar phenomenon happened during Amonhotep's reign?
There is compelling evidence that a gigantic volcanic eruption did occur in the Mediterranean around the time of Amonhotep's reign. Every winter a fresh layer of ice forms on the Greenland ice cap, creating clearly defined strata, one for each year. Every layer contains trapped air, holding a sample of the earth's atmosphere as it was when the ice formed. In the 1970s Danish geophysicists began taking core samples many metres down into the ice, so as to recover a year-by-year record of the earth's atmospheric conditions going back some 100,000 years. The team, led by Drs C.U. Clausen, H.B. Hammer and W. Dansgard, soon observed that from years when there had been major volcanic eruptions, such as the one that destroyed Roman Pompeii in AD 79, the samples evidenced high levels of acidity. In an article in Nature magazine in November 1980, the team reported that there had been a massive eruption somewhere in the world around 1390 BC, with a margin of error of some fifty years either way. This might indeed have coincided with the reign of Amonhotep III (circa 1389–1352 BC).
The only eruption large enough to have resulted in the atmospheric conditions recorded by the Danes, and known by geologists to have occurred within 200 years either side of this date, was a gigantic eruption on the Aegean island of Thera. Although, at the time, this seemed to place the eruption around a hundred years after it was previously thought to have occurred, more recent radiocarbon tests from Thera have tended to support the findings (see Appendix). However, even if Thera had erupted during Amonhotep's reign, would it have had any significant, or observable effects in Egypt?
Thera (also called Santorini) was the southernmost of the Greek Cyclades islands, and in the fifteenth century BC it had supported an important trading port of the Minoan civilization. Today Thera is a crescent-shaped island forming a bay almost ten kilometres across, and the cliffs surrounding it are ribboned with layers of volcanic debris and once-molten rock, testifying to the island's violent past. The bay itself is actually a crater formed by the ancient eruption, and it is so deep that no ship's anchor reaches the bottom. In the 1930s, the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos was the first to propose that at some point towards the end of the Minoan period a gigantic volcanic eruption had all but destroyed the island, and in 1956 two geologists, Dragoslav Ninkovich and Bruce Heezen of Columbia University USA, conducted a survey of the sea bed to try to determine precisely how large the eruption had been. From their survey ship, the Vema, they were able to determine the exact size of the volcanic crater – 51 square kilometres – and from this, they estimate the incredible magnitude of the event.
There are various types of volcanic eruption: some spew forth rivers of molten lava, others produce searing mud slides, but by far the most devastating is when the pressure of the magma causes the volcano literally to blow its top. Going by the resultant crater size, that is what happened at Thera almost three and a half thousand years ago. A similar eruption occurred at the volcano of Mount St Helens in Washington State in 1980, when the explosion blasted away the mountain side with the power of a fifty-megaton bomb.
The first sign of trouble came in the middle of March, when a series of earth tremors gradually grew more violent and frequent. Scientists were certain that an eruption was imminent after a series of rumbling explosions were heard to come from deep within the mountain, and searing-hot steam began to vent through cracks in the rocks. By April, a geological survey team was established in the area to keep a round-the-clock watch on an enormous 90-metre bulge that had appeared on the volcano's north slope. Even though they were prepared for an eruption, no one had anticipated the sheer magnitude of the event. The mountainside slid away exposing the molten core. When superheated magma under sufficient pressure is exposed to air the result is an explosion of unimaginable proportions. At 8.32 on the morning of 18 May the whole mountain began to shake and one of the observers called excitedly over his radio: 'This is it!'
They were his last words. In that instant, he and forty-six others were vaporized. A mass of searing volcanic material blasted outwards, killing a further twenty-five people over twenty-two kilometres away. They too had thought themselves safe, and many of them had been photographing the event when they were killed. Every living thing in a 251-square-kilometre swath of land north-west of the volcano was utterly destroyed. Thousands of hectares of forest were flattened and molten debris covered everything like the surface of the moon. What had once been a bustling tourist resort over sixteen kilometres from the volcano was now covered entirely by volcanic material. Luckily it had been evacuated, but a nearby farmer had declined to leave his home. He had refused to believe that such a distant eruption – as far away from him as the outskirts of a major city are from its centre – could possibly affect him. His farm is still buried beneath solidified molten rock.
Within a few hours, a cloud of ash some eight kilometres high, containing billions of tons of volcanic material, had rolled 800 kilometres east. In three states – Washington, Idaho and Montana – the massive volcanic cloud covered the sky and day was turned to night. Throughout the whole area ash fell like rain, clogging motor engines, halting trains and blocking roads. Seven million hectares of lush farmland now looked like a grey desert, and millions of dollars'-worth of crops were flattened and destroyed. Hundreds of people, as far away as Billings in Montana (950 kilometres from the volcano), were taken to hospital with eye sores and skin rashes caused by exposure to the acidic fallout ash. For weeks afterwards, fishes in thousands of kilometres of rivers were found floating on the surface, killed by chemical pollutants in the water.
Mount St Helens was one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in recent years, yet compared with the explosion of Thera it was tiny. When Ninkovich and Heezen published their findings regarding the Thera explosion, they used the Krakatau eruption of 1883 as a comparison. In August 1883, Krakatau, a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, exploded with a force twenty times that of Mount St Helens. The eruption was heard over 4,800 kilometres away in Australia, a volcanic cloud rose eighty kilometres into the air, fallout ash covered thousands of square kilometres, and the resultant tidal wave reached a height of thirty metres. Over 36,000 people perished!
The first signs of trouble began in May: firstly a series of earthquakes, followed by a succession of minor eruptions. On 26 August the volcano exploded. Forty kilometres away, at Katimbang on the
Sumatran coast, 3,000 people who had been evacuated from Krakatau thought they were safe. Over a thousand of them died, and as many more were seriously injured, as suffocating ash and flaming cinders descended around them, setting fire to buildings and trees. People fled in all directions as thunder and lightning raged above, the result of the tremendous turbulence inside the deadly fallout cloud. A series of further explosions continued on Krakatau for two days, creating gigantic tsunami – tidal waves – over thirty metres high which swept away 165 villages on the Sumatran coast. The cloud of ash covered thousands of square kilometres, and over 3,000 kilometres away in the Indian Ocean ships' decks were covered with ash and pumice. Krakatau continued to belch forth ash for days and for almost a week there was no daylight up to 800 kilometres down wind.
It has been estimated by the size of the resultant crater that 19 cubic kilometres of volcanic material blasted skywards from Krakatau – yet Thera's crater is six times bigger. Accordingly, the explosion would have been heard halfway round the world, volcanic debris would have been hurled over 100 kilometres high, and the ash fallout would have covered well over a million square kilometres. However, the most devastating phenomenon would have been massive tidal waves which thrashed the eastern Mediterranean.
The last nuclear weapon mankind used in warfare was the atom bomb that totally destroyed half the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945. It was a 20-kiloton explosion (the equivalent of 20,000 tons of conventional explosives). Mount St Helens exploded with a far greater force of 50,000 kilotons; Krakatau reached an incredible 1,000,000 kilotons; yet Thera dwarfs them all with a staggering 6,000,000 kilotons. It would take 6,000 of the most destructive modern nuclear warheads – each with the power to wipe out an entire city – to equal the explosive magnitude of Thera. Much of the estimated 114 cubic kilometres of debris ejected skywards would have fallen to earth, although smaller particles would remain in the atmosphere for years. The green sunsets caused by Mount St Helens would be nothing compared to the bizarre observations made by the ancients for months, even years, after the Thera eruption. (A year after Krakatau, the sun was seen to be blue all day long in some parts of the world.) Is this what had prompted the strange behaviour of Amonhotep III, Akhenaten and the Egyptian people in the mid-fourteenth century BC?
Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings Page 19