It was two in the morning when they arrived in Cairo, the road into the city was flooded after a violent storm and they arrived in their Hotel overlooking the Nile at almost four in the morning. In spite of the brief night they took their breakfast at nine, joined by Professor Faoued Nasseri, a good friend of Shlomo Klein, one the country’s most eminent Egyptologists, was their guide them during their stay in the city.
The object of their visit to Cairo was to learn more of Egypt’s role in the ancient history of the Jews and their first stop that morning was the Egyptian Museum of History.
‘According to my book Professor, Egypt was the site of the first monotheistic religion.’
‘That’s right my dear,’ replied the professor softly. He was a man of about sixty five; he spoke perfect English with a very slight accent and was dressed like an English gentleman with a gentleman’s manners. ‘According to some scholars Akhenaton was the first person in history to establish a form of monotheism. He is also known as Amenhotep IV and was Pharaoh from about 1350 to 1334BC. Akhenaton was the son of Amenhotep III and husband of Nefertiti.’
‘Nefertiti, that’s interesting,’ said Laura, always pleased at the mention of a great woman in history. The professor gave her an indulgent smile.
‘Akhenaton set up the cult of Aton, the sun god. He believed Aton the sole creator of the universe. So you see some of us think that the Hebrew’s concept of a universal God, preached seven or eight centuries later in a land that Akhenaton once ruled, was perhaps derived from his cult.’
‘Very interesting, so it was some kind of a new religion?’
‘Above all a religious concept. But, it did not last long, because when he died his son-in-law, Tutankhamen, restored the old polytheistic religion.’
‘Where did the Egyptians come from, I mean they were before all other civilisations.’
‘That’s another thing, a long story, but briefly about six or seven thousand years ago a prehistoric peoples called the Badarians and Naqada already farmed the banks of the Nile. They were basically Stone Age tribes who lived in the northern Sahara region which had a wetter climate at that time, a Savannah type ecosystem like in Kenya today. They technology was Stone Age but they had elementary metal technology, and could make jewellery and pottery, though they didn’t mummify their dead, they buried them with ritual objects for an afterlife. The Naqada and the later Egyptians were basically the same group of people. There are many ancient wall paintings that exist across all of North Africa, which in the case of what is now Egypt show that their leader had a similar relationship with his people as did the Pharaohs who came much later. Everything points to them being the same people as the early Egyptians of the Pharaonic dynasties, that is to say the same peoples who have occupied Egypt from prehistoric times to the present.’
‘I thought that the Middle East was the cradle of civilisation?’ said Laura.
‘So it was.’
‘Mesopotamia,’ she hesitated.
‘Right,’ he smiled at her effort. ‘As a mater of fact just recently near the Syrian border with Iraq at a place called Hamoukar, archaeologists say they have uncovered the earliest evidence for large-scale warfare.’
‘Nothing changes!’
‘How right you are. The work is at one of the Mesopotamia’s earliest cities that date to around 3500BC, which was apparently destroyed in a siege. Archaeologists found extensive destruction with collapsed walls, which appears to been attacked with a heavy barrage of missiles launched by slings, they found more than one thousand small oval-shaped missiles and about one hundred larger clay balls.’
‘So the city was completely destroyed.’
‘So it seems, lying waiting to be discovered six thousand years later.’
‘A bit like today.’
‘I’m surprised that work like that can continue in Syria in the present political situation.’
‘We archaeologists and anthropologists are a very peaceful bunch, we keep our friendships and work going even during these conflicts, we are witness to so many conflicts of the past we feel it as some kind of a mission to humanity to unravel and understand these sources of conflict.’
‘What was happening in Israel in those early times?’
‘It depends where you start, but if we look at recently uncovered evidence of man’s advance towards civilization then we can say with some certainty that agriculture started in the Jordan Valley ago about 11,000 years ago, at that time there was of course no Israel no nothing just nomadic hunter-gatherers who had started to cultivate plants. Evidence was found in the form of the carbonised remains of a domesticated type of edible figs together with barley, wild oats and acorns at a dig in an early Neolithic village.’
During the centuries after Alexander, non-Jews knew what Jews thought of their cult images. The fact that Jews did not maintain cult images of their god was discussed by both Greek and Roman authors. Some writers, early and late, showed disdain for the Jewish approach. Others, however, suggest a more positive evaluation. The Roman author Varro used the example of the Jews in support of his desire that fellow Romans might return to their ancient imageless religion. If the earlier Roman practice had continued, Varro wrote our worship of the gods would be more devout. Strabo of Amaseia’s description of the Jewish cult betrays considerable respect for the Jewish position, at least in its origins, for example he wrote that Moses was an Egyptian priest who held a part of Lower Egypt.’
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The Koran
The Legacy of Solomon Page 53