by Ahmed Osman
At Amarna the monotheistic ideas of Moses underwent further development and, when he became sole ruler on the death of his father, Amenhotep III, after the end of his Year 38 – Year 12 of Moses – he shut down the temples of the ancient gods of Egypt, cut off all financial support for them and sent the priests home. These actions caused so much bitter resentment that, in his Year 15, Moses was forced to install his brother, Semenkhkare, as his coregent at Thebes. This action served only to delay the eventual showdown. In his Year 17 Moses was warned by his uncle, Aye, the second son of the Patriarch Joseph (Yuya), of a plot against his life, and he abdicated and fled to Sinai, taking with him his pharaonic symbol of authority, the staff topped by a bronze serpent. Semenkhkare did not long survive the departure of Moses – perhaps only a few days – and was replaced on the throne by Moses’ son, the boy king Tutankhamun, who restored the old gods, but attempted a compromise by allowing the Aten to be worshipped alongside them. Tutankhamun ruled for at least nine, and perhaps ten, years and was succeeded by Aye, his great-uncle, who ruled for four years before the army leader, Horemheb, brought the era of Amarna rule to an end.
The bitterness which divided the country at the time is indicated by the actions of Horemheb and the Ramesside kings who followed him. The names of the Amarna kings were excised from king lists and monuments in a studied campaign to try to remove all trace of them from Egypt’s memory, and it was forbidden even to mention in conversation the name of Akhenaten. In addition, the Israelites were put to the harsh work of building the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.
On the death of Horemheb, there was no legitimate Eighteenth Dynasty heir. Ramses, Horemheb’s elderly vizier, took power as Ramses I, the first ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty. On hearing of Horemheb’s death, Moses returned from Sinai to challenge Ramses’ right to the throne. With him he brought his sceptre of authority, the bronze serpent. The wise men of Egypt were assembled to decide between the rival claimants to the throne, but, while they chose Moses as the rightful heir, Ramses controlled the army, which was to prove the decisive factor in the power struggle. For a short time, however, Moses did succeed in establishing his followers as a community in Zarw, which for the Israelites may be likened to the Paris Commune briefly established in the French capital in 1871. Then, having failed in his attempt to restore his former position as ruler, Moses eventually persuaded Ramses I to allow him and the Israelites to leave the country.
How long was the Oppression? If the chronology in the Book of Exodus was correct, it would have begun before Moses was born, lasted during the eighteen or twenty years he was growing up, and continued during the years of his exile before his eventual return to lead the Exodus – a period of several decades, which seems an unduly long time to build the two store cities. The Oppression story in the Book of Exodus, in fact, links three separate events that happened at different periods – the first the plan to murder the Israelite male children; the second related to the religious upheaval caused by Akhenaten that was already in full flow at the time he was forced to build his new capital at Amarna to avoid further confrontation with the Theban priests; the third the rigorous Oppression of the Israelites by Horemheb after the final overthrow of Amarna rule.
It seems therefore that it was the scribes, working from what Cassuto has called ‘an epic poem describing the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt and their liberation’ – whether it was oral or written, or partly oral and partly written, in Egyptian – who rearranged the chronology, especially in the opening chapter of the Book of Exodus, which was regarded as an introduction to that book as well as a link with the preceding Book of Genesis.
It is worth drawing attention at this stage to a few points in which this suggested outline of the historical events that lie behind the story in the Book of Exodus agree with what we know of the life of Akhenaten. As in the case of Moses, the childhood of Akhenaten is largely uncharted territory. Yet as soon as he appears on the scene at Thebes he is already bubbling with different ideas about art and rebellious ones about religion, suggesting that he must have been brought up in a manner that differed from the traditional upbringing of a future king. He had evidently not had the normal sport and warfare training common to his ancestors, nor does he seem to have known the sons of the Egyptian nobility, who were customarily educated at Memphis with the royal princes. It is more likely, as his new religion and rituals had many similarities with the solar worship which had developed in the lower end of the Eastern Delta, that it was there that he lived and was educated. The threats to the life of Moses in his early years also find an echo in Akhenaten’s later life. The strange epithet ‘Great in his Duration’ (‘He who Lived Long’) that he applied to himself constantly has been interpreted by Gardiner as an indication that, as a child, he was not expected to live long. In addition, it is curious on two grounds that he allowed himself to be represented as an Osiris (god of the dead) in a large number of colossal statues placed in the massive Aten temple he built at Karnak early in his reign. Firstly, it was normally a dead king who was shown in this Osiride form, and, secondly, Akhenaten did not believe in Osiris or his underworld. The only possible explanation is that he saw himself as having escaped from death, supporting the idea that during his childhood his life, too, had been threatened.
Yet if, in outlining the story of Moses we are also outlining the story of Akhenaten, why is it that the world has remembered him as Moses rather than by the name under which he ruled Egypt, as coregent and alone, for seventeen turbulent years?
The Name Moses
It seems that neither the Bible nor the Koran gives us the proper name of the leader of the Jewish Exodus, but what on the evidence appears rather to be a codename.
In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud argued that Moses was an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaten, who later led the Jews out of Egypt. Freud was first persuaded to take this view by the fact that Moses was itself an Egyptian name: ‘What first attracts our interest in the person of Moses is his name, which is written Moshe in Hebrew. One may well ask: “Where does it come from? What does it mean?”’
The answer to Freud’s question is found in Exodus, 2:10 when we are told how the mother-nurse returns the child to his royal mother who adopted him and called him Moses because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’ For a Hebrew name, Moshe is a rare, even unique, formation. In fact, the Hebrew word m sh a does not mean what the biblical editor would like us to believe. As a verb it can mean either ‘to draw’ or ‘one who draws out’. In order to agree with the explanation given by the biblical editor, the name should have been Moshui, ‘one who has been drawn out’.
There are other questions to be raised about this explanation of why the name was chosen. How, for instance, can we expect the Egyptian royal mother to have sufficient knowledge of the Hebrew language to be able to choose a special Hebrew name for the child? Then again, as we can see from the case of the Patriarch Joseph, when Pharaoh appointed him as his vizier he bestowed on him an Egyptian name to go with his new Egyptian identity. How could we expect that the royal mother of Moses could still give her royal Egyptian son a Hebrew name at a time when the Israelites, in the lingering aftermath of the invasion by the Hyksos shepherds, were still regarded as ‘an abomination’ by the majority of Egyptians?
In Ancient Egyptian, the word meaning a child or son consists of two consonants, m and s. If we take away the two vowels o and e from Moshe we are left with only two consonants, m and sh. As the Hebrew letter sh is the equivalent of the Egyptian s, it is easy to see that the Hebrew word came from the Egyptian word. Short vowels, although always pronounced, were never written either in Hebrew or Egyptian, and using long consonants for long vowels, as we saw earlier in examining the identity of the royal mother of Moses, was a later development in both languages. A final point is that the s at the end of the name Moses is drawn from the Greek translation of the biblical name.
As a large number of scholars have noted, mos was part of
many compound Egyptian names such as Ptah-mos and Tuth-mos, yet we also find some examples of the word mos used on its own as a personal pronoun belonging to the New Kingdom, which started with the Eighteenth Dynasty.2
After Akhenaten fell from power, the Egyptian authorities forbade any mention of his name. Consequently, it seems to me that an alternative had to be found in order that his followers could refer to him. Apart from that, Akhenaten’s name was part of his royal power while he was king, but once he was no longer on the throne use of his royal names was forbidden to him, and he was referred to officially in latter days as ‘The Fallen One of Akhetaten (Amarna)’ and ‘The Rebel of Akhetaten’. Faced with the accusation that Akhenaten was not the real heir to the throne, I believe the Israelites called him mos, the son, to indicate that he was the legitimate son of Amenhotep III and the rightful heir to his father’s throne. We shall see how mos was used in a legal sense in a subsequent chapter where a protracted land dispute has added to the confusion and debate about the length of the reign of Horemheb, the Pharaoh of the Oppression.
Later, the biblical editor, who may not have had any knowledge of the original name of the greatest Jewish leader, attempted to put forward a Hebrew explanation of the Egyptian word Moses in order to sever any possible link between Moses and Egypt.
7
THE COREGENCY DEBATE (I)
IF Moses was born in 1394 BC, and if he was Akhenaten, according to the king-list of Gardiner (see p. 11) he would have been in his mid-forties when he fell from power in 1350 BC, not an unreasonable age. However, he would have been in his mid-eighties when he led the Exodus during the brief reign of Ramses I at the start of the last decade of the century. This is clearly unlikely – but the whole chronology changes into a more realistic one if it can be shown that the seventeen years Akhenaten spent on the throne included twelve years as coregent with his father, and that Horemheb ruled for less than half the twenty-seven or twenty-eight years assigned to him conventionally.
There is little dispute about the length of the reigns of the three Amarna kings who suceeded Akhenaten. To take them in reverse order, the king before Horemheb, who brought the Amarna era to an end, was Aye. The highest known regnal year for Aye, from the stele in the Louvre and the Berlin Museum, is Year 4. Tutankhamun preceded Aye. In the tomb of Tutankhamun wine dockets dating from Year 10 of his reign have been found, although it seems that he could have died early in this year, signifying that he reigned for only nine complete years. Before Tutankhamun there was Semenkhkare, who is known to have had a coregency period with his predecessor, Akhenaten.
At Amarna, Semenkhkare’s name appears on many small objects enclosed within a cartouche, confirming his kingship, as well as on the wall of the tomb of Meryre II, High Priest of the Aten, Superintendent of the King’s Harem, Royal Scribe and Steward, while in the North Palace Akhenaten’s name is found in many examples, accompanied by the names of Semenkhkare and his queen, who was Akhenaten’s eldest daughter Merytaten, the heiress. His praenomen (coronation name) is Ankh-kheprw-re, meaning ‘Kheprw-re lives’, Kheprw-re being the praenomen of Akhenaten. Some reliefs found at Amarna showed Akhenaten and Semenkhkare together as kings, indicating that they ruled together. But did Semenkhkare rule alone for any period of time? From a graffito in the tomb of Pere, a Theban nobleman, at Western Thebes, the last date – Year 3 – was found and indicated that, at this point, Semenkhkare was sole ruler. The text does not mention Akhenaten at all and here Semenkhkare seems to have begun to number his own years. We also have a hieratic docket inscribed in Year 17 of Akhenaten, the last year of his reign, and later changed to Year 1 of Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun). The only possible conclusion is that Semenkhkare became coregent in Year 15 of Akhenaten and, after Akhenaten’s fall from power, Semenkhkare, who was probably at Thebes at the time, became sole ruler for a few months, or maybe only days, before he met his death and Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun) followed him on the throne.
The question of whether Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) shared a coregency with his father, Amenhotep III – important in trying to establish a precise chronology – is a vexed one. Many objects bearing the name of Amenhotep III were found at Tell el-Amarna (Akhetaten), the new capital city built by Akhenaten. This has led a large number of Egyptologists to believe that Amenhotep III was alive at the time the new city was built and may even have visited it in person. Others, who did not agree with this argument, have rejected entirely the notion of a coregency.
Both points of view have their distinguished supporters. Scholars who favour the coregency theory include Petrie, Pendlebury, Fairman, Engelbach, Seele, Steindorff, Aldred and Giles: those who dismiss it include Helck, Gardiner, Hayes, Campbell and Redford. The evidence that has been adduced in the argument on both sides includes wine-jar dockets, reliefs, cult objects, cartouches, temples, pylons, stelae, sarcophagi, statues, paintings, letters, praenomen, nomen (birth names) and the length of kings’ reigns. Scholars who take the view that there was actually a coregency disagree among themselves about how long it lasted, with the duration put at anything from two to twelve years. In my view, the evidence pointing to a coregency of twelve years is overwhelming. However, so many counterarguments have been put forward that it is, unfortunately, necessary to examine them in some detail to demonstrate their flaws. In order not to weary the reader, I propose to deal here only with some of the main points: a more detailed analysis can be found in Appendix B.
The Wine-jar Dockets of Amarna
If the notion that Horemheb had a long reign, which will be examined in Chapter Nine, is dismissed, the only king of the immediate period who ruled for more than twenty-eight years is Amenhotep III. The implication is that the wine-jars found at Amarna, dated Year 28 and Year 30 (Years 1 and 3 of Akhenaten), originated in Amenhotep III’s Malkata palace at Western Thebes and were brought to Amarna by Akhenaten around the time that he began construction of his new capital and Amarna had no vineyards of its own. As Amenhotep III reigned for a total of thirty-eight years and died at the beginning of Year 39, this would argue a long coregency.
Amenhotep III’s Soleb Temple in Nubia
The temple, begun and almost completed in the last decade of Amenhotep III’s reign, possesses a few scenes on the pylon that were executed by Akhenaten in the year following his father’s death. Professor Donald Redford of Toronto University, the most recent scholar to argue against the coregency theory, has dismissed all the scenes where Akhenaten or his name appears with his living father as of late date, after the death of Amenhotep III, when Akhenaten completed the work on the temple.1 He cites Joseph M. Janssen, the ‘scholar who has examined the [pylon] scenes most recently’ and whose ‘readings differ markedly from those of other scholars’ before him. Two of his eight readings are of particular significance:
The cornice, according to Redford, is ‘the only portion of the pylon that can be attributed beyond doubt to Akhenaten’. He agrees that Akhenaten’s work on the pylon did not take place before Amenhotep III’s death and was carried out within the following twelve months. He does not explain, however, the fact that, if there was no coregency, how is it that Scene 8 – the only original scene, according to Redford – gives the new king’s name as Akhenaten, a name we know from a variety of sources that he did not adopt until Year 5–6 of his reign? It must therefore follow that the first year after Amenhotep III’s death occurred after Year 5 of his son.
It is also surprising that Redford did not choose to comment on Scene 2. Here we have an original cartouche of Amenhotep (the original birth name of Akhenaten) in a scene that Redford agrees must have been completed by Amenhotep III before his death. Later the new king destroyed this birth name and imposed on it his new name, Akhenaten. The only possible explanation for this is that, while Amenhotep III was alive and busy decorating the temple, his son’s name was still Amenhotep. By the time the old king died, the young king’s name had already been changed, as we saw from Scene 8, and while completing the unfinished scenes he also replaced his
Amenhotep name with that of Akhenaten. As Redford confirmed that the original Scene 2 was the work of Amenhotep III, this is again strong evidence for a coregency.
A Rock Relief At Aswan
The relief shows two chief sculptors, Men and Bek, father and son, each adoring an image of the king for whom he worked. Men bears the title ‘Chief Sculptor’ and ‘Overseer of Works in the Red Mountain’ to Amenhotep III: Bek has identical titles appertaining to the reign of Akhenaten. The relief was made during Akhenaten’s reign and use of the late form of the Aten’s name indicates that it cannot be dated before at least the second half of Year 8. At this time the name of the Aten received a new form to rid it of any therio-anthropomorphic or pantheistic ideas that may have clung to it. There is no indication that either Amenhotep III or Men was dead, nor that Bek, the younger official, was giving an account of his relations that justified mentioning his father’s job. The fact that each of them is shown as holding an official position under a different king, with no indication whatever of any lapse of time, is a strong indication that the kings were contemporary.
The Panehesy Stela
A stela found in the house of Panehesy, the Chief Servitor of the Aten, at Amarna shows Amenhotep III with Queen Tiye, seated before a pile of offerings. As the Aten is shining over them in his later form, it cannot date from earlier than the second half of Year 8 of Akhenaten. The king is shown here in the realistic Amarna style with thick neck and bent head, indicating his age at the time. Neither in the scene nor in the text is there any indication that the king was already dead. On the contrary, as the queen is shown next to him – and she was still alive, with separate evidence that she visited Amarna before Year 12 of her son’s reign – it would not have been possible for the artist to show her next to her husband if he were already dead. Furthermore, the artistic nature of the Amarna style used here gives a realistic portrayal of the couple in Amarna, under the Aten’s rays, and not an abstract or idealized scene, drawn from memory, of a king who had died at Thebes a decade or so earlier.