by Ahmed Osman
What strikes us first is that Tiy seems to have been named after Queen Tiye. We know from the Amarna tomb that she was ‘nurse and tutress of the queen’, Nefertiti. She was also, as Baikie noted: ‘The great nurse, nourisher of the god (king), adorner of the king (Akhenaten).’2
Scholars have long debated the identity of Queen Nefertiti’s parents. As we saw earlier, some have suggested that she was Tadukhipa, the daughter the Mitannian king Tushratta sent to Amenhotep III as a bride towards the end of his days, and that she could then have married his son, Akhenaten, instead: others that she was, in fact, Aye’s daughter by an earlier wife who had died. Neither of these hypotheses has any grounds for support. Akhenaten, himself rejected on account of the non-royal origins of his mother, would not have married someone other than the heiress, the eldest daughter of Amenhotep III, and he had, in any case, married Nefertiti in his Year 28, eight years before the arrival of Tadukhipa in Egypt. Nor can Nefertiti have been Queen Tiye’s daughter, otherwise she would not have been the heiress.
Seele has argued that, as Nefertiti became ‘Great Royal Wife of the King’, it is probable that she was a princess of royal blood.3 In addition, Ray Winfield Smith, reporting on the reconstruction work of the temple project of Akhenaten at Karnak, makes the point: ‘An astonishing emphasis on Nefertiti is demonstrated by the frequency of her name in the cartouches on offering tables, as contrasted with the relatively few cartouches of Amenhotep IV. The queen’s name alone occurs sixty-seven times, whereas only thirteen tables carry both names, and a mere three show only the king’s name.’4 He goes on to discuss the appearance of statues of the king and queen on offering tables that appear on the talalat, the small stones used in building Akhenaten’s Karnak temple and later re-used by Horemheb after the temple’s destruction: ‘There are sixty-three Nefertiti statues and thirty-eight Amenhotep IV statues, with eleven unidentified. Significant is not only the preponderance of Nefertiti, but even more important the extraordinary domination of the larger offering tables by Nefertiti statues. It will be noticed that all of the five identified statues of the large size (72cm) are of Nefertiti.’5
The greater importance attached to Nefertiti than even the king himself in the first years of their marriage makes it more possible to agree with Seele’s theory that she must have been a daughter of Amenhotep III, not by Tiye but by one of his other wives. As Horemheb later married Nefertiti’s sister Mutnezmet, to strengthen his claim to the throne, this reinforces the view that Nefertiti’s mother was Sitamun, Amenhotep III’s sister and wife, who, from the traditional point of view, would have been regarded as the real Queen of Egypt, being the heiress daughter of Tuthmosis IV.
Tiy, then, was Nefertiti’s nurse and also nursed her half-brother, Akhenaten, and Seele goes on to explain: ‘It would be especially understandable if, as I have indicated, Nefertiti was the daughter of Amenhotep III. In that case, Nefertiti and her half-brother, Akhenaten, perhaps from childhood destined to be her husband, would have grown from infancy to maturity in close association with both Tiy and Aye. Egyptian history presents repeated precedents for the reward of royal nurses and their families at the hands of Pharaoh.’6 Seele also indicates that the nurse of Nefertiti and Akhenaten must have had another child of her own: ‘The Egyptian word for “nurse” employed in her title almost certainly means that Tiy was the actual nurse – the wet-nurse – of Nefertiti during her babyhood. If this interpretation be correct, it is evident that Tiy had been the mother of a child – presumably the child also of Aye – and thus became available as the nurse of the princess, Nefertiti.’7
Even today, bedouin children thus nursed by a woman call her ‘mother’, the same name that they use for their real mother. The naming of Akhenaten’s nurse after his real mother, Tiye, confirms the relationship, and at the Amarna tomb of Aye and Tiy the king is seen bestowing honour on his nurse as well as on her husband.
If Nefertiti were the eldest daughter, she could have been a few years older than Akhenaten, which would explain why she is more prominent in the scenes of the king’s Karnak temple. Although we do not know for certain whether the child Tiy nursed at the same time as Nefertiti was a boy or a girl, if the other elements of the biblical story can be identified from Egyptian evidence, then it must have been Aaron, about three years before the birth of Akhenaten. Thus Nefertiti would stand for the biblical character of Miriam, while the nurse’s real son, Aaron, was simply what the bedouin call ‘a feeding brother’ to Moses.
Such a relationship would explain the strange way he is introduced in the Book of Exodus, for, after the birth of Moses is reported in the second chapter, a long time elapses before we hear of Aaron. He makes his appearance in the story only after Moses had grown to manhood, fled to Sinai and is resisting the Lord’s orders to return to Egypt to rescue the Israelites, pleading that he is ‘slow of speech, and of a slow tongue’. It is only then that we learn of Aaron, and in a very strange way, when the Lord asks: ‘Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.’ (Exodus, 4:10, 14)8
The Koran also confirms that Moses and Aaron were related only through the feeding-mother relationship. When Moses comes back from the Mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, he becomes very angry, so he:
Seized his brother by (the hair
Of) his head and dragged him
to him. Aaron said
“Son of my mother!” … (Sura VII:150)
In Manetho’s account, it was Amenhotep III who fled to Ethiopia (Nubia): in the Talmud it was Moses. The strange name given to Moses’ queen, Aten-it, relates her to Akhenaten’s God. No doubt what is meant by the Talmud reference to Ethiopia, which is described as being a city, is the Amarna location, and the queen’s desire to place her son on the throne instead of Moses could represent Tutankhamun replacing his father, Akhenaten, whose policies had placed the whole dynasty in the possible danger of being overthrown.
One can even see the character of Aye as the man who, according to the Koran, advised the king to leave the city as the chiefs (nobles) were plotting to kill him.
And there came a man,
Running, from the furthest end
Of the City. He said:
‘O Moses! the Chiefs
Are taking counsel together
About thee to slay thee:
So get thee away, for I
Do give thee sincere advice.’ (Sura XXVIII, 20)
The only clue to the historical source of the account of how Moses slew an Egyptian would appear to lie in the Amarna Tablets, the foreign archives of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which were found by a peasant woman in the ruins of Akhenaten’s capital in 1887 and, unfortunately, suffered considerable damage before they reached a dealer in antiquities and their importance was realized.
Among them is a letter, sent to Akhenaten by Abd-Khiba, King of Jerusalem, in which the king accuses him of allowing the Hebrews in Egypt to kill two Egyptian officials without being punished for their crime: ‘… the Khabiru (Hebrews) are seizing the towns of the king … Turbazu has been slain in the very gate of Zilu (Zarw), yet the king holds back … Yaptih-Hadad has been slain in the very gate of Zilu, yet the king holds back.’9
Much argument has surrounded the question of whether the word Khabiru, used in the Amarna letter, is to be equated with the biblical word for ‘Hebrew’. The various points of view can be found summarized in a useful research by the biblical scholar H. H. Rowley.10 (For my own conclusions – that the term indicated a social class rather than a people – see Appendix G.)
Part of Josephus’ account of events in Egypt makes two points: ‘This king, he [Manetho] states, wishing to be granted … a vision of the gods, communicated his desire to his namesake, Amenophis, son of Paapis [son of Habu], whose wisdom and knowledge of the future were regarded as marks of divinity. This namesake replied that he would be able to see the gods if he purged the entire country of lepers and other polluted persons, and sent them to work on the stone quarries to the east of the N
ile, segregated from the rest of the Egyptians. They included, he adds, some of the learned priests, who were afflicted with leprosy.’
The points in question may have their historical inspiration in the fact that:
1 Moses/Akhenaten preached about a God who, unlike the ancient gods of Egypt, had no visible image;
2 When Akhenaten was persuaded to leave Thebes for his new capital at Amarna, those of his followers who stayed behind were sent to work in the stone quarries.
Manetho’s account also describes how Amenophis (Amenhotep III) subsequently advanced from Ethiopia with a large army and his son, Rampses, at the head of another, and that the two attacked and defeated the shepherds and their polluted allies, killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria.
This is an allusion to Ramses I, during whose brief reign the Exodus took place.
Analysis of the origins of the tribe of Israel and of the Levites would need a book in itself. Here it is worth making a few points briefly.
Contrary to the general view, the name Amarna does not derive from a Muslim Arab tribe which settled in the area later. No evidence of such an event exists. The name derives from the name in the second cartouche of Akhenaten’s god – Im-r-n. Amram, or Imran, was the name given in the Bible to Moses’ father and it is the name Akhenaten gave to his ‘father’, the Aten.
Across the river from Amarna there is the modern city of Mal-lawi (Mallevi), which means literally ‘The City of the Levites’. This could be explained by the fact that the Levites, who held priestly positions with Moses, held the same positions with Akhenaten at Amarna. For example, Meryre II was the High Priest of the Aten at his Amarna temple:11 the Hebrew equivalent of this name is Merari, who is described (Genesis, 46:11) as one of the sons of Levi. Similarly, Panehesy was the Chief Servitor of the Aten at Akhenaten’s temple:12 the Hebrew equivalent of this name is Phinehas, the son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron (Exodus, 6:25) in whose family the priesthood was to remain:
Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him (Phinehas) my covenant of peace.
And he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel. (Numbers, 25:12–13)
It is therefore a possibility that we are dealing here with the same people who served Akhenaten at Amarna and then followed him to Sinai after his fall from power.
Discovery late in 1989 of the tomb, almost intact, of Aper-el, the hitherto unknown vizier to Akhenaten, also provides a semantic link between the Israelites and the Amarna regime.
Similar names are known to have existed in Egypt at this time, but never in the case of high officials. The name ‘Aper’ corresponds to the Egyptian word for ‘Hebrew’, which meant to ancient Egyptians a nomad, and the final ‘el’ is the short form of ‘Elohim’, one of the words used in the Bible as the name of ‘the Lord’.
The fact that Akhenaten’s vizier was a Hebrew worshipper of El confirms the link between the king and the Israelites living in Egypt at the time. Furthermore, the fact that Queen Tiye was associated with her husband, Amenhotep III, in donating a box to the funerary furniture of Aper-el (see Chapter 8) indicates the possibility that the vizier was a relation of the queen’s, most probably through her Israelite father, Yuya (Joseph).
The Death of Moses
The account in the Old Testament of the failure of Moses to reach the Promised Land, his death and his burial in an unmarked grave is another curious episode.
We are told initially, as we saw earlier, that, when his followers complained of thirst, Moses used his rod to smite a rock and bring forth water. It was called ‘the water of Meribah’ – a location in the north-centre of Sinai, south of Canaan – and it was for this action, although there is no indication that Moses had done anything forbidden to him, that he was denied his reward. When the Israelites were camped on the banks of the Jordan, near Jericho and opposite Canaan, he learned, according to the Book of Deuteronomy, that he was to be denied the opportunity to cross the river, no matter how hard he pleaded:
I pray thee, let me go over, and see the good land that is beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain, and Lebanon.
… the Lord said … speak no more unto me of this matter …
… thou shalt not go over this Jordan. (Deuteronomy, 3:25–7)
Later in the Book of Deuteronomy we have an account of the actual death of Moses. The Lord said to him: ‘Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab’ – the borders between Sinai and eastern Jordan – ‘that is over against Jericho; and behold the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel for a possession: And die in the mount … Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin … thou shalt not go thither unto the land which I give the children of Israel.’ (32:49–52)
After admonishing and blessing his people, Moses left them with Joshua and climbed the mountain. There, after viewing the Promised Land, he met his death – and was buried by the Lord in an unmarked grave in the plains of Moab below.
In contrast to this straightforward story, Talmudic sources have a rich collection of contradictory accounts of the manner of Moses’ death. A reference to a confrontation between him and the ‘Angel of Death’ on the Mount before he died, with an indication of a struggle between the two, has persuaded some biblical scholars that Moses was killed. Sigmund Freud interpreted this suspicion in his book Moses and Monotheism to mean that Moses had been killed by his own followers for being too rigid in his views. I do not think this is an accurate interpretation of what happened.
The key, it seems to me, lies in the reason given why Moses was not allowed to enter Canaan, the Promised Land. According to the Book of Exodus, the reason is that Moses struck a rock with his rod to obtain water for his thirsty followers. This is not really convincing. Why should this practical action be the cause of punishment? It is not as if there is any suggestion that he had been forbidden to indulge in such conduct.
However, when we look back at the wars of Seti I, the second king of the Nineteenth Dynasty, against the Shasu we find that the first confrontation took place in the vicinity of one of the Egyptian fortresses on the route between Zarw and Gaza. Such fortresses were built in areas that had wells. It would therefore seem to be a more likely explanation – even if it can be only supposition – that Moses, under pressure from his thirsty followers, entered one or more of these fortresses and obtained water by using his royal sceptre. Intrusions of this type would have been reported by the Egyptian guards to their superiors at Zarw, resulting in Seti I sallying forth to put a stop to the unrest that the Shasu were causing among the Sinai settlements. After the initial battle, Seti I, as we saw earlier, chased the Shasu, identified as the Israelites, into northern Sinai – and, if these Talmudic references to the death of Moses are correct, it must have been there that Moses died, out of sight of his followers, most probably at the hand of Seti I.
This would explain how a new version of the Osiris-Horus myth came into existence from the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Osiris, the King of Egypt, was said to have had to leave the country for a long time. On his eventual return he was assassinated by Set, who had usurped the throne, but Horus, the son of Osiris, confronted Set at Zarw and slew him. According to my interpretation of events, it was in fact ‘Set’ who slew ‘Horus’; but their roles were later reversed by those who wished to believe in an eternal life for Horus. This new myth developed to the point where Osiris/Horus became the principal god worshipped in Egypt in later times while Set was looked upon as the evil one.
This myth could have been a popular reflection of a real historical event – a confrontation between Moses and Seti I on top of the mountain in Moab.
EPILOGUE
LACK of historical evidence to support the stories we find in the Old Testament has resulted broadly in three schools of thought.
My own view has long been that the Old Testament is a historical work whose stories, recounted in language that frequently strikes our sophisticated ears as extravagant, became distorted and exaggerated during the many centuries when they were transmitted by word of mouth, and suffered further at the hands of various editors. It is difficult to imagine how all these biblical tales became etched so deeply in human memory if they did not have a basis in reality.
This is not to say that there are not genuine miracles in the Old Testament. There is no need to question the fact that, if he had a message for Moses, the Lord attracted his attention by means of a bush that appeared to be burning (radiant light is a recurrent feature in accounts of Marian apparitions in our own age, such as those at Lourdes). Yet to many modern minds the popular image of Moses as some kind of super-magician with a rod that could turn into a snake and part the waters of the Red Sea is an impediment to belief.
I hope that my work, in providing a link between biblical and known historical events and putting forward rational explanations for many of the seemingly mystifying events we find described in the Old Testament, will serve to overcome such doubts and objections. In the case of this particular book, it will enable Moses, the great law-giver who delivered the Ten Commandments, to be studied from two sources – the Bible and Egyptian history. In addition, it points the way to the identification of other biblical figures and, by fixing the date of the Exodus, makes it possible to establish when and how the Israelite entry into Canaan took place, as well as other events that have long been the subject of debate and argument.