[Chapter Twelve: Tangled Bloodlines]

Chapter Thirteen: The Hyksos and the Hebrews

Dynasties in Chaos

Continuing the process of elucidating the intricacies of the Egyptian timeline, begun in Chapter Eleven with the recognition of the Akkadian role in Egypt during the First Intermediate Period, we will take a quick look at another problem that has existed since Josephus first claimed that the Hebrews could be identified with a group of Asiatic invaders that ruled lower Egypt before the rise of the New Kingdom. The Hyksos appear in Egyptian history during the Second Intermediate Period. There are two versions of this period in the surviving lists of Manetho, each using its own sequence of dynasties, one from Africanus and three from Eusebius transmitted to us by later authors.

The primary stumbling block has always been the lengths of Manetho's reigns, too long according to the accepted chronology. Once the lengths of his earlier dynasties have been halved, however, we are left with a period roughly twice as long as the one into which modern scholars have tried to cram the kings of Manetho's 13th through 17th Dynasties. As we saw in Chapter Eleven, this halving and aligning with the invasion of Sargon brings us to the year 2002 BC at the end of the 12th Dynasty, leaving us with an astounding 468 years for the supposed five-dynasty period that ended in 1534 BC. The following table will give the reader an idea of where we are headed.

Dynasties 13 through 17 from Manetho—Who They Were

Even the academics have managed to figure out that the kings that follow the 12th Dynasty in the Turin Papyrus belong to Manetho's 13th Dynasty. Both Africanus and Eusebius agree that these ruled from Diospolis, or Thebes, and that they held the reigns of Upper Egypt for 453 years from 2002 until the installation of Ahmose in 1549 BC according to the current reconstruction. Both ancient authors also agree that there were 60 kings in this dynasty and the surviving fragments of Turin have room for something in the neighborhood of 58 rulers. These are clearly the same kings of the same dynasty and they represented legitimate authority in Egypt even as the Delta was being overrun and then ruled by Asiatics. Despite the attempts of the residents of the academy to shorten this period and to attach their so-called 17th Dynasty to its later end, it is to this 13th that we must look for those kings who finally succeeded in defeating in battle and then driving the Hyksos out of Egypt, and we will not be disappointed. Unfortunately, the last king of the 13th Dynasty is missing from Turin, but the next to last ruler is there in fragmentary form. This Se[...]enre is none other than Seqenenre Tao, the father of Kamose and Ahmose.

The 13th is followed by the 14th in Turin, and again the academy has managed to get the position of its first king correct. Unfortunately, at least in the case of K. S. B. Ryholt, in The Political Situation in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, they end the 14th Dynasty at position 10/20 of Turin, whereas the kings that follow in positions 10/23 thru 11/14 are ascribed to the 15th and 16th Dynasties of Manetho, among the latter of which may be found a fragment containing the name Dedumose, apparently Manetho's Tutimaios whom the Egyptian priest placed at the fall of Lower Egypt to the Hyksos, as described in the Papyrus Ipuwer. All versions of Manetho agree that the 14th was ruled from Xoïs in the Delta and that it was made up of 76 kings. The 14th (plus the "15th" and "16th") of Turin contains approximately 77 rulers. Its length varies between 184, 284, and 484 years, whereas the Hyksos dynasty lasted for 284 years according to the version preserved by Africanus and 189 in the Armenian version of Eusebius. It appears that the correct values should be 284 for the 14th and 184 for the 15th (the 17th of Eusebius), with reigns of the six named members of the 15th perhaps artificially extended to make up for missing kings from that period. This gives a total of 468 years and brings us down to the year the Hyksos were finally driven out of Egypt by Ahmose in 1534 BC. Thus, despite the belief of the majority of modern academics, the Turin papyrus contains neither Manetho's 15th, 16th, nor 17th Dynasties, except perhaps for a misplaced fragment of the 15th from the very end of the surviving text. As a result, though we know little about the Hyksos, we know absolutely nothing from Manetho about the purported 16th and 17th except a few scraps about the number of kings and how long they collectively ruled.

Though it has long been assumed that the 16th and 17th of Africanus and the 15th and 16th of Eusebius were the same dynasties, this appears to be incorrect. Consider the following. The 16th and 17th of Africanus contain 75 kings altogether, ruled for 667 years, and are called "Shepherds." The 15th and 16th of Eusebius ran for 440 years and made their home at Thebes. It has also long been assumed that the Hyksos were the last dynasty in this group of supposedly five dynasties to rule, and that Eusebius was correct in placing the Hyksos at the end of the group. However, Africanus places the Hyksos directly after the 14th, where one would expect to find their fellow rulers of the Delta, and places two non-Theban dynasties after them. This makes a grand total of seven dynasties in the period between the 12th and the 18th. Clearly something is seriously wrong with this interpretation. As we will see below, four of these seven dynasties extend beyond the end of the Hyksos 15th.

Who Were the Hyksos?

No less an authority than Kamose, the brother of Ahmose, tells us who the Hyksos were in an inscription found at Karnak spread across multiple stelae. As translated in "Textual Sources for the Hyksos Period," in The Hyksos: New Historical and Archaeological Perspectives, Kamose describes the progress of an attack on the Hyksos that presaged the eventual victory of his brother Ahmose over the despised Asiatics:

I sailed north in my might to repel the Asiatics through the command of Amun, exact-of-council, with my brave army before me like a flame of fire and the Medjay archers a-top our fighting-tops on the lookout for the Asiatics in order to destroy their places....

"Bad news is in your town: you are driven back in the presence of your army, and your authority is restricted ...."

I put in at Per-djedken, my heart happy, so that I might let Apopy experience a bad time, that Syrian prince with weak arms, who conceives brave things which never come about for him! ....

"Syrian prince"? The Egyptian word is actually Retenu, and it refers to the entire region from the Orontes River to the Negev.

Remember, in 1511 BC Chedorlaomer, purportedly of Elamite extraction, began his rule over the Canaanite kingdoms of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar. In 1534 Ahmose had defeated the Hyksos at Avaris in the eastern delta. Sometime around 1531, after a siege that consumed the better part of three years, he defeated the remaining Hyksos forces holed up at Sharuhen and thus left a power-vacuum in southern Canaan, a vacuum that would soon be filled by Chedorlaomer in alliance with Amraphel, Arioch, and Tidal. Josephus saw these kings acting under the authority of the Assyrians. Now the Hyksos were early on afraid of Assyrian attack, and were more concerned with them than with any kind of threat the legitimate Egyptian dynasty at Thebes might pose. As Josephus tells us, Saites (or Salitis),

made both the upper and lower regions pay tribute, and left garrisons in places that were the most proper for them. He chiefly aimed to secure the eastern parts as foreseeing that the Assyrians, who had then the greatest power, would be desirous of that kingdom, and invade them ....

We have already noted that the Egyptian term "Syrian" included the Hebrews and other inhabitants of Canaan, so that we would be justified in suspecting that these "Rulers of Foreign Lands," the Hyksos, were none other than the rulers of Canaan and Transjordan among whose inhabitants were the very enemies of Chedorlaomer mentioned in Genesis—Bela, Bera, Birsha, Shinab, and Shemeber—as well as the unnamed kings of the Rephaim, Zuzim, Emim, Horites, Amalekites, and Amorites. Yet none of these peoples approached the power of the Hyksos, even assuming their military defeat by the Egyptians of the New Kingdom. This is the whole problem with the identification of the Hyksos as Canaanites and the root of the mystery surrounding their demise. In short, where did they go after their defeat by Ahmose?

Two More Clues

We have two other clues to the identity of the Hyksos. One is fairly obvious. The other requires a bit of thought and a generally suspicious mind.

The first is that Manetho, in the version preserved by Eusebius, refers to the Hyksos not only as Shepherds, but as "Phoenicians." This squares with the identification by Kamose of the Hyksos as inhabitants of Retenu. But remember from Chapter Nine that the Hebrew alphabet was derived from that of the Phoenicians and that it was ultimately derived from a 24-sign zodiac that went back at a bare minimum to 1860 BC and most likely to 2400 or earlier. Herodotus has the foundation of Tyre at 2300 years before the 5th Century BC. What we appear to be looking at here is something on the order of a Third Power operating in the eastern Mediterranean sphere during the closing years of the 18th Century BC. Beside the Egyptians and the Assyrians, we have a hitherto unsuspected armed force, identified by the Egyptians with Retenu and the Phoenicians, that ruled southern Canaan and expanded into the very heart of the Egyptian state. Unfortunately, the origins of the Phoenicians are almost as murky as those of the Hyksos.

The problem is that scarabs of the Hyksos period, the most obvious means of tracking Hyksos domination of the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, appear most commonly in southern and central Palestine and are rarely found in northern Palestine and Syria, suggesting that the "Syrians" of Kamose and the "Phoenicians" of Manetho ruled neither northern Israel, Lebanon, nor Syria, as Breasted suggests in A History of Egypt, where he attempts to identify them with Kadesh on the Orontes. Which is not to say that they didn't have political affiliations or even common origins with the northerners. By the very maritime nature of their civilization, the Phoenicians were capable of sailing off to new lands where they could found new colonies independent of their home cities on the Levantine coast. An obvious case in point was their later foundation of the city of Carthage. The great port city of the Hyksos in Palestine was Tell el-Ajjul. Aharon Kempinski of Tel Aviv University, in "The Hyksos, A View from Northern Canaan and Syria" (in The Hyksos: New Historical and Archaeological Perspectives), identifies it with Sharuhen. In any case, the city had ties with Cyprus. Another city farther north, Tel Kabri, had links to Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean. Minoan frescos have been found at Kabri. They have also lately been found at Tell el-Dab'a, thought to be the Hyksos capital of Avaris. The city of Kabri died precipitously, according to Kempinski, "just before 1600 B.C." This destruction was not limited to Kabri. It occurred across a wide front "in the latter part of the 17th century B.C." Even mighty Aleppo was affected, leaving it open to Hittite and Hurrian attack. Amazingly enough, Kempinski can find no reason for the destruction. The tree ring minimum at 1628 apparently never happened in his universe. I am being sarcastic here, but one begins to wonder whether any of these people really wants to solve the problems of ancient history and whether they are not all suffering from a particularly debilitating form of historical amnesia.

The second clue relates to the common assumption that the mistranslation of Hyksos as "Shepherds" was limited to Josephus and his successors and their attempt to identify the Hyksos with the Hebrews. But we have already seen that the Hebrew patriarchs themselves were not sheep herders any more than the Hyksos were, so we have to wonder whether all of the cute little stories in the Old Testament based on their lives as shepherds weren't tall tales constructed to explain an already existent confusion between the two terms.

The Holy Grail of Biblical Chronology

Once we manage to break free from the assumption that the two unknown dynasties of Africanus and Eusebius were the same two dynasties, we are left with two Theban dynasties that look much like the 18th and 19th dynasties of the New Kingdom and two post-Hyksos dynasties of "other Shepherds," other being a supposed correction of the word Hellenic that actually appears in the manuscripts. It took me a while to understand who the first of these two latter dynasties were, and even longer to figure out who the second were. As to the first, the length of their rule was quite extraordinary. At 518 years, I was sorely tempted to write this off as a mere clerical or transmission error on the part of Manetho and Africanus. Yet the identification of them as "Kings of Foreign Lands" intrigued me. Where in the region was there a group of rulers who could claim anything resembling such a long period of continuous existence during the height of Egyptian power and could also claim the role of alternate dynasty of Egyptian princes? Surely such an important though peripheral royal line would have survived in the annals of ancient civilization.

Josephus was quite insistent in claiming that the Hyksos were actually the Hebrews and that the Exodus was the expulsion of the last of the 15th Dynasty* kings from Egypt. This was obviously in error; yet, I wondered, what if the Jewish historian had only gotten part of the story wrong? What if the Hebrews were these other Hyksos from the 16th Dynasty? What would be the implications of such a hitherto unsuspected relationship between the Egyptians and the Hebrews? Looking at the timeline in Chapter Five, we see that Abraham entered Egypt sometime during the reign of Thutmosis I. We already know from Chapter Seven that Saul took the newly minted position of King of Israel in 986 BC. Thus a total period of 518 years would place the arrival of Abraham in Egypt at 1504 BC. If this is indeed the same 518-year period suggested by the 16th Dynasty, we would be left with some very unusual, though far from impossible, implications. The first is that Abraham's visit to Egypt entailed a series of events a bit different from the rather peculiar account given in the bible.

But first, the reader may have already noticed that dynasties 16, 17, and 18 in the list of Africanus appear to be in reverse order. Let me take a moment to try to explain this discrepancy.

Dynasties 12 through 18 from Africanus—
The Source of the Misalignment

We have already seen that the problem with the earlier dynasties of Manetho had to do with the artificial extension of their reigns by a factor of two. During this period and later most of the dynasties of Egypt followed each other sequentially and the possibility of error was thus limited. However, during the "Second Intermediate Period" and, as is becoming apparent, during the years of the New Kingdom as well, there were more than one contemporaneous kingdoms claiming dynastic privileges, all of whom appeared in the original text of Manetho. At some point his history was condensed into an Epitome that appears to have contained these concurrent dynasties in tabular form, if they did not appear in such form in his original work. The above table shows these dynasties as they would have appeared in a table consistent with modern methods of representing such data, where horizontal position indicates the geographical origins of the dynasties and vertical position indicates their chronological relationships. As indicated by the black arrows, the flow is from top to bottom, and from left to right within each row, returning to the left after the end of each such row, so that there is an added chronological element to the flow from left to right. What we have in Africanus appears to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the parameters of the table. In the latter case, as indicated by the red arrows, Africanus simply followed the flow of adjacent names from left to right at first, then downwards through the Hyksos dynasties at the right, and then back to the left when he ran out of vertical elements of the table. The specific parameter that he has missed is the added chronological aspect of the sequence 18–17–16, an aspect that is not expressly indicated by the table but only suggested by the general tendency in the European world to read from left to right. That the numbering follows the reading of Africanus would indicate that this numbering system was added after the publication of the original work by Manetho and also tends to explain the lack of a clear break between dynasties 18 and 19 in Josephus, the divisions also having been added later on. The importance of the error is that it placed dynasties 16 and 17 within the Second Intermediate Period, where they have been open to constant misinterpretation, rather than during the New Kingdom where they belong. By this new interpretation, Dynasty 17 must have followed the expulsion of the Hyksos in 1534 and Dynasty 16 must have followed that event sometime later on during the 18th Dynasty.

By the time he visited Melchizedek, Abraham was already a prince. Never before had he been addressed as such. His new position had something to do with what happened in Egypt. According to the biblical account, Sarah, the "sister" of Abraham as well as his wife, married the king of Egypt, Thutmosis I according to the current reconstruction. But this would certainly not lead to the institution of a line of Hebrew princes, even if there were offspring from their union, at least if we are talking about the biblically enumerated descendants of Abraham. There is really only one way that any of this makes any sense, if we would identify the 16th Dynasty with the Hebrews. By the inherent logic of the situation, Sarah would have had to have been the sister of Thutmosis, and it would have been her marriage to Abraham that would have created a new Egyptian royal line. In this case the barrenness of Sarah would have been a simple excuse for her lack of offspring until after Abraham arrived in Egypt, while Abraham was impregnating every woman in sight, and his earlier offspring would have had nothing to do with this supposed inability to bear children. Even the woman's supposed name reinforces this implied relationship, for both Sarai and Sarah refer to the idea of a princess, quite a coincidence if they were not simply indications of her position rather than her actual name.

The indication in Manetho that there were 32 kings in this succession may not be a precise representation of the situation, though it is not really problematical. There were 29 generations from Abraham until Samuel, using the sequence given in I Chronicles, but there were actually 35 rulers if we include foreign conquerors, some of whom came from nearby kingdoms. One could certainly come up with a line of 32 rulers by the judicious inclusion and exclusion of these foreign rulers. For example, I would suggest leaving out Cushan-rishathaim because he was Assyrian and clearly aligned against the Egyptians, but I would include the other foreign kings with the exception of the Philistines who were allied with Ammon. The following table is one possibility.

16th Dynasty—Hebrew Governors of Canaan

The important thing is the light this identification throws on the political and religious situation in western Asia during the long years before the establishment of an independent Israelite kingdom. In one fell swoop, the identification of the Hebrews with the 16th Dynasty explains the close relationship between the kings of Egypt and the Hebrews, for these relations of the former were not with a foreign power but with their in-laws from a secondary line of kings. It also casts doubt on the biblical contention that the kings after Thutmosis IV did not "know" Joseph, the further implication being that (at least the rulers of) the Hebrews were never slaves, though there is no good reason to rule out other elements of the story.

We have seen already that there was a conscious effort on the part of the editors of the bible to reduce the interactions between the Egyptians and the Hebrews to a bare minimum, but until now this appeared to apply only to individual incidents and relatively short historical periods. If, however, the entire era from Abraham through Samuel fell within the confines of Manetho's 16th Dynasty, then the elimination of recorded Egyptian influences on the Hebrew nation during the period before the appearance of the Israelite monarchy rises to the level of an absolute denial of political reality over more than 500 years and leaves the reader of the bible with a completely distorted understanding of the political situation at the time. One of the results of this distortion is that any time Egyptian officials and even the king himself appear within the narrative of the bible, they are magically transformed into unrecognizable characters of a decidedly metaphysical nature. This begins to look like the solution to the question of why there is so little overt reference in the bible to the rulers of the nearby Egyptian kingdom. In a manner analogous to the way the Egyptian commanders at Troy were transformed into gods by Homer, the Egyptians appear to have been transformed into angels of the Lord and, in the case of the pharaoh, into a physical manifestation of El-Yahweh himself when they appear in the everyday lives of their Hebrew subjects, even those with close family ties to their dynastic rulers. One need only read the book of Joshua, for example, substituting "the king of Egypt" for "God" and "our lord the king of Egypt" for "Lord God" in order to comprehend the simple reality that lies beneath the incessant biblical attribution of all actions and events to the ever more mystical "God." What we have here, in essence, is the elevation of the Egyptian king to a holy office higher even than that to which the Egyptians themselves had raised him and a concurrent diminishing of the Hebrews' own earlier God to the position of temporal ruler of the land of Egypt.

What we are left with when we pursue the possibility of a Hebrew dynasty is a royal family directly related to the pharaohs, during its later centuries ruling over a large multitude of Canaanite followers from the nation of "Israel," most likely the same Israel defeated by Merneptah somewhere near the year 1215 and commemorated by the Israel Stele. At this point it will be useful to sketch in a possible history of this family of leaders as it would appear if the identity of the 16th Dynasty with the Hebrew ruling elite were assumed to be representative of actual political conditions in the region at the time, so that we will at least have a baseline with which to compare the biblical account.

After arising from the mutually beneficial marriage of Abraham with the sister of Thutmosis I, later members of the 16th Dynasty would hold the position of solar priest at Heliopolis and even rise to the level of chief assistant to the pharaoh himself. These priests and administrators all had Egyptian names and some of them served under their Canaanite names as rulers of the Syrian territories of Egypt. The pharaoh, however, did not remain in his capital and leave matters exclusively to his subordinates in Canaan. As I have already suggested, the visit that Lot received from "angels" was not carried out by some metaphysical beings in human form. They were officers of his uncle's brother-in-law who knocked on his door and to whom he bowed down in abject submission. And it was the very real pharaonic god on earth who took offense at the generally unrestrained behavior of the citizens of the Cities of the Plain and their inhospitality to strangers that led not to natural disaster but to the intentional torching of their cities and fields. This is the sort of thing one would expect living in an area where a nearby kingdom was ruled by a person whose subjects firmly believed he was the incarnation of Osiris.

The relationship between the descendants of Joseph through Nun and their Egyptian superiors is largely unknown except so far as Joseph was leader of the Egyptian chariot corps and Nun was a general associated with the tribe of Ephraim, so that what we are left with is a family of hereditary military leaders whose function was to rule the northeastern provinces under their more powerful relations on the Nile. These military rulers may have seized the throne of Egypt at the end of the Amarna Period in the persons of Ephraim, Beriah, and Rephah (Ay, Horemhab, and Ramses I), the period marked in gray in the above table, and sometime during the Trojan War these military rulers of Syria and Canaan made another, nearly successful, attempt on the kingship of Egypt and were only thwarted by the return of Seti II from the Black Sea campaign. At this point there is a temporary break in relations between the two branches of the Royal family. I say temporary because the dynasty appears as a single 518-year entity in Manetho's records. This is where the biblical account becomes especially murky, with Joshua, the son of one of the line of military rulers on his father's side and one of the conspirators on his mother's side, prosecuting a campaign of personal conquest in Canaan. One has to wonder if support for the later assassination of Ramses III in 1150 did not arrive from supporters of the Canaan campaign. It might even be argued that the ultimate success of this assassination of the much hated Ramses prevented a permanent break in relations between the two families....

The Papyrus Ipuwer

Josephus transmits the description of Manetho of the coming of the Hyksos:

There was a king of ours, whose name was Timaus. Under him it came to pass, I know not how, that God was averse to us; and there came, after a surprising manner, men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, and had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country, and with ease subdued it by force, yet without our hazarding a battle with them. So when they had gotten those that governed us under their power, they afterwards burnt down our cities, and demolished the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants after a most barbarous manner; nay, some of them slew, and led their children and their wives into slavery. At length they made one of themselves king, whose name was Salitis; he also lived at Memphis, and made both the upper and lower regions pay tribute ....

This description is amplified and extended by the Papyrus Ipuwer.

The Papyrus Ipuwer describes a calamity in Egypt that left the Egyptians starving and the Nile flowing with blood and corpses. Velikovsky thought this document was a description of the events surrounding the Exodus. But John Van Seters, in The Hyksos: A New Investigation, an analysis of the linguistic elements of the papyrus, has determined that the original dated from the Second Intermediate Period. Thus, the events described in Ipuwer appear to be those of 1718 and the following years, when Egypt was overrun by the Hyksos.

Indeed, the desert is throughout the land, the nomes are laid waste, and barbarians from abroad have come to Egypt.

Trade had ceased with the countries north of Egypt:

None shall indeed sail northward to Byblos today; what shall we do for cedar trees for our mummies, and with the produce of which priests are buried and with the oil of which [chiefs] are embalmed as far as Keftiu [Crete]? They come no more; gold is lacking [. . .] and materials for every kind of craft have come to an end.

Then we are told that Upper Egypt no longer pays taxes to the north, again indicating the period when Thebes did not rule the entire land.

Indeed, Elephantine and Thinis [...] of Upper Egypt, (but) without paying taxes owing to civil strife.

Finally, the king has ceased to govern:

Behold, things have been done which have not happened for a long time past; the king has been deposed by the rabble.

Clearly, this was the end of a reign; if we are correct, that of Dedumose, and the new king was Salitis. There is a major theme here of tables being turned, of the lower classes becoming the upper classes, and vice versa, in short, of class warfare and revolution. The implication is that kinsmen of the invaders already lived in Egypt. This was clearly not the situation at the time of the Exodus, despite Velikovsky's skillful editing of the text.

The 400-Year Stela

Sometime during his reign a monument was erected by Ramses II that commemorated the 400th anniversary of the worship of Seth at Avaris, an occasion that was celebrated, according to The Cambridge Ancient History, during the reign of Horemhab, who ruled between 1325 and 1301 according to the current reconstruction. This would make King Seth Apehty ("the Ombite") of the stela the same person as the Saites of Manetho, who came to power, again according to the current reconstruction, in 1718 BC. The Cambridge Ancient History places the event "around 1720 B.C." This is as clear an indication as we have found so far that our placement of the rise of the Hyksos in Egypt 284 years after the cometary event of 2002 BC is essentially correct.

The Trials of Job

Dating Job has always been difficult, there being a number of clues that point in no single direction. We do know that Josephus identifies Uz, his home, with Damascus, though the current reconstruction would modify this slightly to place it at Ugarit in line with the identification of Abraham, the purported king of Damascus according to Nicholas of Damascus, with Ibiranu III of Ugarit. Job himself may have been a king. The bible calls him "the greatest of all the children of the east." It does seem probable that he would have lived at Ugarit during the period after the birth of Eber in 1655 and before Jacob left the throne and headed for Egypt in 1400. This fits nicely with the age of Job when he died, which was 140 years plus a number of years before the catastrophe, a period during which he had seven sons and three daughters, presumably by the same wife, all of whom, again presumably, were grown, making him approximately 220. As we can see from the above table, there is a relatively short period when the patriarchs were purported to have lived to around 200 years, from the birth of Peleg in 1640 until the death of Terah in 1512. Assuming for the moment that the catastrophic events described in Job fit the pattern elucidated below in Chapter Eight, this event can be identified with the tree ring minimum of 1628, 58 years after the death of Ham. The details of these events, as experienced by Job, are instructive. The book of Job describes them graphically, including the acts of men as well as those from the natural world:

And it fell on a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house, that there came a messenger unto Job, and said: 'The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them; and the Sabeans made a raid, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.' While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said: 'A fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.'  While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said: 'The Chaldeans set themselves in three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have taken them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.' While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said: 'Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house; and, behold, there came a great wind from across the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead; and I only escaped alone to tell thee.'

Seth is not finished:

So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot even unto his crown.

"Satan in Arabic means a serpent," according to Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly elucidates the events that followed in his Ragnarok:

When Job's afflictions fall upon him he curses his day—the day, as commonly understood, wherein he was born. But how can one curse a past period of time and ask the darkness to cover it?

The original text is probably a reference to the events that were then transpiring:

"Let that day be turned into darkness; let not God regard it from above; and let not the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death cover it; let a mist overspread it, and let it be wrapped up in bitterness. Let a darksome whirlwind seize upon that night.... Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to raise up the leviathan."

De Dieu says it should read, "And thou, leviathan, rouse up." "Let a mist overspread it"; literally, "let a gathered mass of dark clouds cover it."

"The Fathers generally understand the devil to be meant by the leviathan."

We shall see that it means the fiery dragon, the comet:

"Let the stars be darkened with the mist thereof; let it expect light and not see it, nor the rising of the dawning of the day...."

We dealt with this comet in Chapters Eight and Nine.

Donnelly goes on.... and on.... and on. Of particular interest, we have those,

"Whose harvest the hungry eateth up, and taketh it even out of the thorns, and the robber swalloweth up their substance."

That is to say, in the general confusion and terror the harvests are devoured, and there is no respect for the rights of property.

In the end, Job survived and prospered. De Moor calls him Ayyabu, a common enough name in the area for millennia, though he tries to identify him with a character mentioned in the Amarna Letters a couple of centuries later.

...

2002 BC—The Priest Kings of the 13th Dynasty

Long before the Hyksos arrived in Lower Egypt, the 2nd Intermediate Period began with the breakup of a united Egypt into two autonomous states, one in the north and one in the south.

To be continued...

[The following will eventually be part of Chapter 14]

The Problem of Minos

...Hankey and Cline have made a powerful circumstantial case
for supposing that there was Egyptian political activity
in the Aegean during the reign of Amenōphis III.
Given the economic, military and cultural inequality between the two regions,
there would seem to be good grounds for accepting the Egyptian claims
for some sort of hegemony over the Aegean at this time.
—Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume II

As with many Greek myths, the story of King Minos makes little sense chronologically. In the most complex form of the story, due to Diodorus of Sicily, there were two Kings Minos, one the son of Zeus, as Menes was the son of Sosos in Egypt, and one who lived two generations later, two generations before the Trojan War. Since we have already seen that Menes ruled Egypt beginning in 2950 BC and that the Trojan War was fought between 1195 and 1186 BC, there must be something radically wrong with this tale that has come down to us from Crete by way of Greece.

What we have in King Minos is a tale that manages to compress most of the ancient history of Crete into a simple narrative that could have been performed by actors on a stage in a few evenings. Fragments survive from both Euripides and Sophocles of lost plays about Daedalus, Minos, and Theseus that would have presented the legendary tale in just such a format. Our quest then is to extract the various elements of these plays and to restore them to their proper positions in the history of the Mediterranean island. The story told in these plays and their sources would have begun with Minos the son of Zeus, again, a clear reference to Menes the son of Sosos, implying that a single sovereign ruled Egypt and Crete at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium BC. This is all the story tells us about the early years of Crete. It immediately jumps to a point where the inhabitants of Crete—I am studiously avoiding Sir Arthur Evans's use of the term "Minoans"—have hired one Daedalus, transformed into an Athenian by the later Greek playwrights, to build them a Labyrinth. The purpose of this Labyrinth is to house a monster—half man and half bull—who is the product of an unholy union between Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, and a white bull. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, for the Labyrinth was not originally associated with the Minotaur, but served a much more useful, though no less gruesome, purpose.

According to Hans Georg Wunderlich in The Secret of Crete, the constructions at Knossos and elsewhere on the island, identified by the British archeologist Evans as palaces, were in actuality built not for the living but for the dead. They were complex tombs, necropolises, reminiscent of Egyptian custom and meant to provide all of the useful objects and sources of entertainment enjoyed by the living. Evans, in fact, found huge piles of bones near the exits of his "palace" at Knossos, apparently left there by grave robbers, suggesting the origin of the legend of the Minotaur and his hunger for human flesh, a legend perhaps concocted by the tomb robbers themselves to cover their nefarious activities. These mortuary complexes first appear on Crete at the beginning of the Old Palace, or Middle Minoan II, Period. By the current reconstruction this would have been shortly after 2002 BC, not much more than 10 years after the end of the reign of Amenemhet III in Egypt, again according to the current reconstruction. The interesting thing about Amenemhet is that his second pyramid was built next to a Labyrinth displaying many of the same features as the one on Crete, and the one in Egypt was clearly not a palace, so that we have to wonder whether the latter was built by the same "Daedalus," or "craftsman," as the former. As Diodorus tells us, the Labyrinth at Knossos was modeled after the one in the Fayum, though modern scholars discount this assertion on—surprise!—chronological grounds. One of the names given to Amenemhet, along with the Lamares of some versions of Manetho, was Labaris, either the origin of the word Labyrinth or a derived form of it used to indicate the king's association with it.

A Brief Timeline of Crete

All in all, the heyday of civilization on Crete paralleled the rule of foreigners at Xois in Egypt, the following Hyksos Period, and the pre-Amarna part of the 18th Dynasty. Upon the defeat of the Hyksos at Sharuhen they immediately disappear from the stage of history. Yet the locations of the two cities of Avaris and Sharuhen at places with direct access to the Mediterranean Sea are instructive. According to Martin Bernal in Black Athena; Manfred Bietak, the excavator of Tell el Dab'a, sees the Hyksos as seafaring, not land-based, invaders from Byblos, the oldest Phoenician city. Bietak's theory is based on the presence of huge numbers of clay jars at the Hyksos capital, which he sees as an indication of a massive trading network in the eastern Mediterranean, though recent research places the origin of the clay used in those jars at Ashkelon, according to Patrick McGovern in his Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. As we have already noted, Eusebius, referring to Manetho, also identifies the Hyksos with the Phoenicians. This identification is echoed in the Scholiast on Plato's Timaeus as reproduced in Berossos and Manetho: "The Seventeenth Dynasty were shepherds, Phoenician brothers, foreign kings, who also took Memphis ...." The latter is the 17th Dynasty of Eusebius, the equivalent of the 15th (Hyksos) Dynasty of Africanus.

According to Martin Bernal, again, in Volume II of Black Athena, there is evidence of Hyksos in Crete in the 2nd Millennium BC. "...Stubbings maintains that there was a conquest of parts of Mainland Greece, though not Crete, by Hyksos princes. I believe that the same probably took place in Crete." Furthermore, there is the "Hieroglyphic Deposit," which contains seals using Cretan hieroglyphs but in a style unknown in Crete, Egypt, or farther east, illustrated with, as described by Friedrich Matz, "a directness of their reproduction of nature."

The Linear A script appeared in Crete sometime around the time of the arrival of the Hyksos in Egypt in 1718 BC, according to my reconstruction of the Egyptian timeline. "Cyrus H. Gordon was the first to identify, in 1957, some words, written out syllabically above vessel ideograms on a Linear A tablet from Hagia Triada (HT 31), as Semitic vessel names," according to Jan G. P. Best and Fred Woudhuizen in their Lost Languages from the Mediterranean, and the 1982 revision of Gordon's Forgotten Scripts was, in fact, the first place I actually encountered the notion that Linear A was Phoenician. Gordon was later supported in his identification by M. C. Astour and Robert R. Stieglitz. In short, the linguistic evidence, as far as it currently goes, points toward a Phoenician occupation of the island of Crete at about the same time as the "Hyksos" were conquering Egypt, in 1718 BC, or perhaps even earlier, in 1752, that lasted until the Greeks arrived around 1525 BC.

The Phoenician practice of sacrificing their children is well known, and the sacrifice of other people's children would have gone over a bit better with the native inhabitants of Crete. If there is any truth to the notion that the Greeks, upon their conquest by the rulers of Crete, agreed to send them seven young men and seven young women for sacrifice, either every year, or every seven years, or every nine, depending on the source consulted, their dispatch had nothing to do with the presence of a bull-headed man in a maze, but rather with the well-known techniques by which the Phoenicians sacrificed their own children. Thus, we can divide the myth of the Minotaur into two separate elements, one from the period of Phoenician rule and one from the period after, perhaps long after, the Phoenicians had been driven off of the island by the Greeks in consort with the Egyptians. Whatever the relationship between the Greeks and the Egyptians during this period, it was not as simple as either the Eurocentrists or the Afrocentrists make it out to be. From the available evidence, which is limited, it would appear that the two parties had a long history of working together.

If we place the beginning of the 17th Dynasty of Africanus in the year 1509, 151 years before the death of Amenhotep III (Minos II), we are left with a dynasty that would have run from 1509 until 1358, the latter year near the end of the so-called Mono Palace Period on Crete. The latest object found below the destruction level has been identified with the wife of Amenhotep, and the earliest object found above the destruction layer is from the reign of Akhnaton. This is close to Claude Schaeffer's 5th catastrophe, which he places between 1370 and 1360, and slightly after our own cometary event of 1403. Apparently there were political ramifications of the latter that only began to manifest themselves three decades later. An example of this was the radical change in Egyptian art during the reign of Akhnaton, when it began to resemble the naturalistic style of Crete.

Manetho, as transmitted to the modern world by Africanus, tells us that the 17th Dynasty consisted of "Hellenic Hyksos," meaning Hellenic "rulers of foreign lands," commonly "corrected" to other Hyksos by those who have not recognized the error in the numbering of the dynasties of Manetho in Africanus. The implication is that Phoenician fortunes took a turn for the worse across a broad front beginning in 1534 and that as a result their domination of Crete was ended by the Greeks and the Egyptians around the year 1509. Even with the decipherment of the Linear B script from Crete, little is known about the history of the island. The Linear B tablets, written in Greek, were little more than receipts for goods, and votive tablets, and the Linear A, though far from completely read, shows every sign of being the same sort of common document, though written in a Semitic language. There is also evidence of Luvian speakers in some of the votive tablets. The important evidence of the Linear B is the fact that it was an early form of the Greek language, confirming that the island of Crete was already populated by a Greek speaking people before the final collapse of Thera in 1403. There is no indication in the Hebrew bible of these rulers, despite the identical description by Africanus of Abraham and his descendants of the 16th Dynasty and the rulers of the island of Crete of the 17th Dynasty as "Hellenic shepherds." Or is there?

Cornelius Tacitus, Roman senator and historian of the 1st and early 2nd Centuries, enumerating six possible origins of the Jewish people, mentions one possibility he may have gotten from Antonius Julianus, that they were expelled from the region of Mount Ida on Crete and that the term Idæi had later become Judæi. There is no other extant reference to this theory, but if there is any other evidence for it, we must search for it in the years surrounding the defeat of the Hyksos by the Egyptians. Tacitus himself places the expulsion from Crete during the period when Zeus defeated Cronus. We have already explored the implications of the identification of the name Joseph with that of Cronus, both in Chapters Two and Twelve.

As we have seen, more than one Near Eastern king-list began with 12 eponymous ancestors. Both the Assyrian and Lukan lists do so. Yet the eponymous ancestors of the Jews appear in the bible not in the beginning along with Adam (or Adamu), who can actually be found in the early part of the Assyrian list, but later on, as the purported sons of Jacob. This is significant, as it indicates another one of those cut-and-paste jobs on the part of the editors of the Hebrew Scriptures, this time grafting Joseph and his descendants onto the line of Abraham and his purportedly Babylonian ancestors. But who was this Joseph in actuality and where did he come from if he was not really a descendant of Abraham and Sarah but the progenitor of another line of kings?

 If the theory transmitted by Tacitus is at all close to the mark, Joseph arrived in Egypt before the final destruction of the necropolis at Knossos, before the ascension of Amenhotep III to the throne, and even before the catastrophe of 1403. We may even begin to suspect that the final Minos was really the Sun King himself, Amenhotep III, and that perhaps Amenhotep was the son of Joseph, the Manasseh of the bible, a name that approximates even closer to the name Minos. There is even evidence of his conquest of Crete and parts of mainland Greece.

At the site of the so-called Colossi of Memnon at Kom el-Hetan across the Nile from Thebes, there is a temple erected to the memory and for the continued worship, not of the legendary Memnon, but of Amenhotep III. Around the back of the temple one finds the remains of five of an original ten statues of Amenhotep that we may assume originally recorded a total of ten victorious campaigns carried out by the successor to Thutmose IV and the second employer of Joseph. Only the feet and bases remain. Fortunately, it was on these bases that the workmen inscribed the overall focus of the king's campaigns, as well as the specific sites captured. In one case the former include the land of Keftiu (Crete) and that of the Tanaja (the Danaans). The latter read like a veritable travelogue of the Aegean, including such sites on Crete as Knossos, Phaistos, and Amnisos. These names are found inside of ovals that resemble cartouches on the outside of which are seen images of captives, leaving little doubt as to the nature of Amenhotep's visit, though the extent of these conquests has led some to suggest that the captives simply represent the Egyptian method of portraying foreigners. Even if this were true, it accentuates the Egyptian notion of just what exactly foreigners were good for.

 Little is known of the period of Greek rule on Crete from the end of the New Palace Period until the end of the 151-year period marked by the death of Amenhotep III, but the parallel between the occupation of Canaan known to Africanus as the 16th Dynasty and the occupation of Crete by the Greeks known as the 17th Dynasty would suggest that there existed some sort of client state on Crete ruled nominally by the Greeks at Knossos but ultimately under the control of Egypt. We do not have the names of these Greek rulers of Crete, with perhaps the exception of Theseus who may have been the last, nor do we know how long they ruled. We might construct a kind of skeleton chronology, assuming that each king ruled for an average of 3½ years, or 7 equinoxes, which would tell us nothing except that none of the Greek rulers could have lasted very long, reminding us of both the period of the 14th Dynasty at Xois and the 13th Dynasty at Thebes. It is still not clear what these short reigns actually meant. Neither do they go very far in explaining whether there ever actually existed a king on Crete named Minos any time after the reign of Menes in Egypt, nor whether there ever existed a "Minoan Empire" as envisioned by Evans. We can, however, suggest the following.

It has been noticed more than once that the story of Moses and Mount Sinai, as opposed to other parts of the Exodus saga, appears to describe an active volcano, none of which exist on the Sinai Peninsula. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive,

Regarding the "hearsay" recitation of Tacitus is that he states quite clearly that the nation of Israel was an amalgamation of tribes, including people who had once lived on Crete, who brought a volcano story with them.

Now Moses was the lawgiver of the Jewish people, as Minos and Menes and all their other permutations were primal lawgivers in other parts of the ancient world. Until now, the inclusion of Moses in this group of original legislators has been obscured by the existence of what looks for all the world like a second Moses, who led the Jewish people out of Egypt during the disruption that occurred during the New Kingdom at the end of the Trojan War. But, if we are correct in identifying him with Minos and Menes, there was an earlier Moses who, like Menes, led his people not out of Egypt, but out of the dying Sahara into the "Land of Milk and Honey" on Crete. The descendants of this first Moses went on to rule Egypt, first from Crete and then from Egypt itself for a total of six dynasties until finally replaced by Sargon and his wife Nitokris.

Perhaps the key to this entire quandary is that Minos became judge of the dead after his death. If Wunderlich is correct and the entire commercial base of Crete was founded on the care and entombment of the dead, Minos must have been ruler of those dead for a long time, from the day that he died and perhaps even earlier as a result of his former position as a high official of that North African kingdom that turned to dust when it stopped raining round about 2950 BC. And now we begin to catch a glimpse of what exactly those idyllic scenes pictured on the walls of the mortuary complex at Knossos are really showing us. Those female-dominated representations of high civilization came not from Crete at all. Neither were they originally images of the afterlife as conceived by the Cretan priesthood, though they may have evolved into that over the centuries and even insinuated themselves into Egyptian religion. Rather, they are pictures of a lost world, the urban equivalent of the Tassili frescos, showing life as it was lived under the Amazons and later under the Egyptian Hercules and his descendants before the antediluvian world came to an abrupt end when Typhon changed the weather patterns of a continent and sent its refugees fleeing to the river valleys east of Eden.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

* From this point on I will use the dynastic numbering of Africanus without any further qualifications.

[Chapter Fourteen: AD 429—The Rise of the Pendragons]

Home | Table of Contents | Main Web Site