BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A NEW EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY

Compiled by Roger Waite

BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A NEW EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1 – THE PROBLEMS OF EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY 3

CHAPTER 2 – WHEN IN EGYPT’S HISTORY DID THE EXODUS OCCUR? 22

CHAPTER 3 – WHO WAS JOSEPH’S PHARAOH? 54

CHAPTER 4 – THE PROBLEM OF JERICHO 75

CHAPTER 5 - WHO WAS THE REAL PHARAOH SHISHAK? 83

CHAPTER 1 – THE PROBLEMS OF EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY

To properly understand the history of Egypt and evaluate the competing chronologies, both the accepted conventional chronology and various revised chronologies, assigned to Egyptian history we need to understand where their dynasties relatively fit in time and the context of what events were happening in other ancient nations.

Egyptologists generally divide Egypt's historic past into the following major periods:

1. The Old Kingdom (Dynasties 1 to 6), when the pyramids of Giza (according to scholars), Saqqara and Dashur were built. Djoser built the Step Pyramid and Sneferu the Bent and Red Pyramids followed by the reigns of those kings to whom are credited with building the Giza Pyramids (Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure).

2. The First Intermediate Period (Dynasties 7 to 11), when the land fell into chaos because of foreign invaders and central authority was abolished. Of the seventh to tenth dynasties, almost nothing is known. The last dynasty of this period (Dynasty 11) was not the primary ruling dynasty at the time. It was a native Egyptian dynasty based in Thebes. The others were foreign rulers over Egypt.

3. The Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 12 to 13). Native rule over Egypt returned with the twelfth dynasty. This was the time when the mud-brick pyramids near the Faiyum were constructed.

4. The Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties 14 to 17). Another period of chaos followed, during which Asiatic invaders, known as Amu or Hyksos seized control over a prostrate Egypt and ruled without mercy for a long period. Dynasty 17 was a native Egyptian dynasty based in Thebes that rebelled against the Hyksos and succeeded in driving the Hyksos out of Egypt.

5. The New Kingdom (Dynasties 18 to 20). The Hyksos were expelled from Egypt. At this time Egypt’s most powerful dynasty, the 18th dynasty, founded by Ahmose (Amasis) arose to power, with the renowned kings of Thutmose I, Queen Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, the greatest of all Egyptian conquerors. This was a period of the building of the magnificent temples at Luxor and Karnak in the Valley of the Nile.

   One of the last few kings of this dynasty was the heretical king, Akhnaton, who rejected the gods of Egypt such as Amon replacing his worship to worshipping the Aten. His son, who was influenced to restore the worship of Amon by the priests of the land, was the famous boy-king Tutankhamun who’s untouched tomb with its fabulous treasures was discovered in the 1920’s by Howard Carter.

   Following the 18th dynasty was the 19th dynasty. The legendary Ramses the Great (Ramses II) was of this dynasty. The 20th dynasty included Ramses III who fought an invasion by the Sea Peoples.

6. The Third Intermediate Period (Dynasties 21 to 25). This is the time when nearby Libyan and Ethiopian rulers had primary control over the land of Egypt.

7. The Late Period (Dynasties 26 to 31). This includes the native ruling dynasties of the 26th and 30th Dynasties and the two periods of Persian domination (Dynasties 27, 28, 29 and 31) that ended in Alexander the Great conquering Egypt. Upon Alexander’s death one of his generals, Ptolemy ruled Egypt along with his descendants (the Ptolemies) until the Romans conquered Egypt. Cleopatra was the last of these Greek Ptolemy rulers of Egypt.

   

   It is from these different periods of Egyptian dynasties where artifacts and strata levels get the different archaeological ages which are assigned to them.

   The Bronze Age is divided into three periods – Early Bronze (EBA), Middle Bronze (MBA) and Late Bronze (LBA) ages which refer to the Old (EBA), Middle (MBA) and New Kingdom (LBA) periods respectively.

   The last dynasty of the New Kingdom (Dynasty 20) is labelled as the first part of the Iron Age (Iron Age 1A).

   

   If we had an artifact that was dated to the same time as the Old Kingdom (Dynasties 1-6) then it would be classified as Early Bronze Age (EBA).

   If we had an artifact that was dated to the same time as the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 12-13) then it would be classified as Middle Bronze Age (MBA).

   Also included in the Middle Bronze Age are the 1st Intermediate Period (Dynasties 7-11) and the 2nd Intermediate Period during which the Hyksos ruled (Dynasties 14-17).

   If we had an artifact that was dated to the same time as either the 18th and 19th dynasties of the New Kingdom then it would be classified as Late Bronze Age (LBA).

   If we had an artifact that was dated to the same time as the 20th dynasty of the New Kingdom then it would be classified as Iron Age (LBA), specifically Iron Age 1A.

   If we had an artifact that was dated to the same time as a later dynasty then it would be classified as Iron Age (LBA).

   If the wrong dates have been assigned to any of Egypt’s dynasties then the archaeological age connected with those dynasties would have to correspondingly be re-dated.

   To properly understand how the conventional scheme of Egypt’s chronology was developed I would like to quote from David Rohl’s well-illustrated and fascinating book called “A Test of Time”. David Rohl offers the following introduction to the chronology of Egypt:

   The singular event of Christ's birth (conveniently dated to 'year zero') is the firm anchor point for our AD ('Anno Domini') dating system. So, the year in which I write this book - AD 1994 - is one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four years since the established date for the birth of Christ. But what happens when we need to fix an event which occurred before Christ's birth in absolute time? Of course we give that event a date BC or BCE.

   That is all very well, but how do we actually establish that BC date? For instance, what methods do scholars employ to determine exactly how many years have elapsed since Pharaoh Ramesses II fought his heroic battle at Kadesh or when Tutankhamun was buried in the Valley of the Kings? Clearly, the scribes and officials of those times were unable to look into the future in order to determine how many years were still to run before BC became AD. How then did the ancients date events? Well, they used what scholars call the 'regnal dating system'; that is, they dated events to the REGNAL years of the ruling monarchs.

   So we know from Egyptian inscriptions that the Battle of Kadesh took place in Year 5 of Ramesses II and Tutankhamun died in the boy-king's ninth regnal year or thereabouts (i.e. his last known year as pharaoh). In the same way we read in the Bible that the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was plundered of its treasures by an Egyptian king named Shishak in the fifth year of King Rehoboam of Judah [I Kings 14:25-26 & II Chronicles 12:2-9] - a subject to which we are going to return.

   So far so good, but how then do scholars make the giant leap required to assign an absolute date of 1275 BC to the Battle of Kadesh, 1327 BC to the death of King Tut and 925 BC for the sacking of Solomon's Temple? The answer, in its crudest form, is that historians simply add up the sequence of regnal years (i.e. the number of years each king reigned) backwards from the birth of Christ to the event they wish to date.

   History is, however, never so simple, for there are many other factors which have to be taken into account—factors such as CO-REGENCIES, PARALLEL DYNASTIES and INTERREGNA.

   In essence, however, the methodology is to add up the intervening reign lengths between two events and apply certain other well established historical cross-links (what we call “synchronisms”) between different ancient civilisations in order to construct a chronological framework upon which we can embroider the events of history. If mistakes have been made in the reconstruction of that framework then the great edifice of pre-Christian history would be something similar to a Hollywood film set - an artificial construct with only a superficial integrity.

   How, then, do we know if historians have built a reliable structure for us to place Ramesses II and Tutankhamun in time? The honest answer is we take it for granted that they know what they are doing. In the same way, today's academics themselves have relied on the framework supplied by their predecessors. But more recent research has led to the belief that fundamental mistakes in the currently accepted chronology were made in the formative years of ancient world studies.

   This book will demonstrate that all is not well with the “conventional” chronology and that the only real solution to the archaeological problems which have been created is to pull down the whole structure and start again, reconstructing from the foundations upwards (p.9).

   David Rohl spoke of how the dates of the Egyptian rulers were primarily developed by adding up the length of regnal years for its kings. What sources do we have for the record of the number of years that each pharoah reigned?

   The present division of the periods of Egyptian history up to Alexander into 30 or 31 dynasties and the primary record of reign lengths comes to us via an Egyptian priest of the 3rd century BC, 100 years after Alexander’s conquest. His name was Manetho. We also have records from monuments and king lists in temples like Abydos. Commenting on these sources John Keyser has this to say about their veracity:

   Uncertainties in Egyptian chronology are legend! For every historian and archaeologist there seems to be a different reckoning -- some based on the work of the Egyptian scribe Manetho, others on the movements of heavenly bodies or the evidence of the monuments.

   In establishing a framework of Egyptian history, most scholars have relied -- to a large degree -- on existing fragments of a record written in Greek by MANETHO, an Egyptian priest of the 3rd century B.C. These fragments were preserved in the works of later historians such as Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius and Syncellus -- who lived many centuries later than Manetho. Although Manetho's division of Egyptian history into thirty periods, each dominated by a ruling dynasty, is generally accepted in Egyptology, other fragments of his chronology that have been preserved are considered questionable.

   W.G. Waddell states that:

   "it is extremely difficult to reach certainty in regards to what is authentic Manetho and what is spurious or corrupt." He continues: "There are many errors in Manetho's work from the very beginning: all are not due to the perversions of scribes and revisors. Many of the lengths of reigns have been found impossible: in some cases the names and the sequence of kings as given by Manetho have proved untenable in the light of monumental evidence" -- Manetho, introduction, p.7-25.

   The book Studies in Egyptian Chronology, by T. Nicklin, further explains:

   "The Manethonian Dynasties...are not lists of rulers over all Egypt, but lists partly of more or less independent princes, partly...of princely lines from which later sprang rulers over all Egypt." (Blackburn, Eng. 1928. p.39).

   Author Waddell observes that:

   "perhaps several Egyptian kings ruled at one and the same time;...thus it was not a succession of kings occupying the throne one after the other, but several kings reigning at the SAME TIME in different regions. Hence arose the great total number of years. " (Manetho, p.1-9).

   For those placing their confidence in the monuments of Egypt there are just as many pitfalls

   -- notice what J.A. Wilson says:

   "A warning should be issued about the precise historical value of Egyptian inscriptions. That was a world of...divine myths and miracles."

   After suggesting that the Egyptian scribes were not beyond tampering with the chronology of historical events to add praise and inflate the ego of the pharaoh in power, he cautions:

   "The historian will accept his data at face value, unless there is a clear reason for distrust; but he must be ready to modify his acceptance as soon as new materials put the previous interpretation in a new light." (The World History of the Jewish People, 1964. Vol.1, p. 280- 281).

   So where does that leave us? Who or what can we believe when it comes to constructing an accurate picture of Egyptian chronology?

   While the Bible itself is not a comprehensive study into the world of historical chronology, it does provide invaluable insights that enable us to accurately correlate Egyptian history with that of ancient Israel.

   John Keyser says that the Bible is one of our best sources to help clear up the problems associated with the misalignment of the chronology of the ancient world. While the Bible is not meant to be a comprehensive history book it provides a foundation of knowledge upon which we can build upon with confidence and surety.

   Having said that, like any body of evidence, the Bible can be misinterpreted. The strange irony of Egyptian chronology is that it was actually misinterpretations of Bible history that, according to revisionist chronologists such as David Rohl and Immanuel Velikovsky, got Egyptian chronology into the mess that it ended up in where it became misaligned by centuries for which examples will be shown shortly.

   The accepted conventional chronology later created doubts in the Biblical records of the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan and David and Solomon who’s evidence was looked for in the wrong time as well as creating artificial centuries of darkness in Greek history, according to revisionists like Rohl, Velikovsky and Peter James.

   If Egypt’s chronology is out by hundreds of years then this not only means much of Egypt’s history is out by that many years but also the absolute dates assigned to archaeological finds in places like Greece, Turkey, Syria and Israel and even early Mesopotamian history as well because their dates are cross-linked to the conventional dates assigned to Egyptian rulers.

   British archaeologists of the Victorian era were keen to find evidence supporting the stories in the Bible.

   Based on the mention of the store city of Pi-Raamses in the Nile Delta where Ramses the Great (dated conventionally around 1250 BC) did a lot of building works these early archaeologists concluded that the Exodus occurred in the reign of Ramses the Great (Ramses II) of the 19th dynasty.

   This older scholarly point of view is immortalised in the movie “The Ten Commandments” where Yul Brunner plays Ramses the Great who is portrayed as the Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus.

   

   There are a few problems with this view that the Exodus occurred in the time of Ramses the Great. The first problem is that the reign of Ramses II (conventionally dated from 1279- 1213 BC) is too late to allow sufficient time for the period of the Judges.

   The next problem is the complete absence of any catastrophe to have befallen Egypt in the records of the 19th dynasty. A third problem is that we have the mummy of Ramses the Great. Unlike what we see in the movie “The Ten Commandments”, the Bible indicates that the pharaoh was included in the death of Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

   Exodus 14:28 And the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, all the army of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them. There did not remain so much as one of them.

   Psalm 106:9-11 And He rebuked the Red Sea, and it was dried up; so He led them through the depths, as through the wilderness. And He saved them from the hand of the hater, and redeemed them from the hand of the enemy. And the waters covered their enemies; there was not one of them left.

   While the dates assigned to the Egyptian pharaohs have not changed, the view that the Exodus occurred in the 19th dynasty during the time of Ramses the Great has largely been abandoned.

   The Bible’s chronology places the Exodus around 1445 BC due to the statement that the Temple was completed 480 years after the Exodus in 1 Kings 6:1, ignored earlier by the bible archaeologists who promoted Ramses the Great as the Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus.

   This has pushed the Exodus back to the time of Thutmose III (1457-1425 BC) or his successor, Amenhotep II, or one of the earlier two Thutmoses of the 18th dynasty depending on the date used for the building of Solomon’s Temple that 480 years is calculated back from.

   The view that the Exodus took place in the mid 18th dynasty under the reigns of either Amenhotep II or Thutmose III (dated conventionally around the biblical date of 1445 BC for the Exodus) is also flawed as this dynasty was one of the most prosperous and documented dynasties of Egypt and there isn’t so much as a hint of the enormous catastrophe that befell Egypt at the time of the Exodus.

   The 18th dynasty also ruled from southern Egypt in Thebes, not anywhere close to the Goshen area in the Delta. Also, we have the mummies of all the 18th dynasty pharaohs though the Bible indicates (Exodus 14:28, Psalms 106.9-11) that the pharaoh was included in the death of Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

   While there are serious issues with placing the Exodus during either the 18th or 19th dynasties there is a great deal of evidence which we’ll look at in the next chapter supporting the view that the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 12 & 13) was the time of the Israelites in Egypt and there is a great catastrophe documented at the end of the Middle Kingdom that matches the enormous catastrophe that befell Egypt at the time of the Exodus.

   If this can be proven to be the correct dynastic period in Egypt to fit the Exodus then there would need to be a corresponding shift in the dates for many of the dynasties of Egypt which has profound implications. This means that other Bible events may have been looked for in the wrong place relative to the sequence of dynasties of Egypt and corresponding archaeological age.

   Ramses the Great was placed in the 1200’s BC by simply adding up dates for the reigns given by Manetho from the independently verified absolute dates for the 25th dynasty which has been dated to have ended in 664 BC. This adding up of dates from 664 BC has been done without little or no thought of dynasties ruling parallel to each other

   The next great pillar of Egyptian chronology, which is still maintained to this day and is theoretically confirmed by simply adding the reigns recorded by Manetho back from the end of the 25th dynasty, is that Shoshenk I of the 22nd dynasty was the biblical Shishak who plundered the Temple in Jerusalem during the days of Solomon’s son Rehoboam.

   Commenting on how this pillar was put in place I quote again from David Rohl’s “A Test of Time”:

   Following the identification of Pi-Ramesse with the biblical Raamses, the Victorian biblical scholars and their colleagues, the new breed of Egyptologists, bonded as they were by their commitment to the biblical texts, soon had another important chronological link between Egypt and the Bible - a link which appeared to confirm the chronology they had devised, based on their identification of Ramesses the Great as the Pharaoh of the Oppression.

   In 1828, Champollion finally paid his first (and only) visit to Egypt along with his travelling companion Professor Ippolito Roselini of Pisa University. At last he was able to stand beneath the monumental inscriptions of the temples and tombs and record the utterances of Pharaoh and the gods directly from the very walls themselves.

   So it was that Champollion found himself before the triumph scene of King Hedjkheperre Shoshenk I, cut into the south facade of the Bubastite Portal at Karnak. To his right he could recognise the faint outline of the pharaoh - wearing the tall white crown of Upper Egypt, with raised right arm and, in his fist, the royal mace poised to crash down upon the heads of bound captives at the centre of the smiting scene. To the left side of the wall stood the regal figure of Amun, the god of Karnak, and, below him, the goddess “Victorious Thebes', both of whom were dragging towards the king tethered rows of oval name-rings surmounted with the heads of captive chieftains. Each name was enclosed within a crenellated border in the form of a fortress balustrade representing a city wall. The hieroglyphs inside the rings spelt out the names of cities and towns captured by King Shoshenk during his Year 20 military campaign into Palestine.

   Champollion began to read the city names: Aijalon, ... Gibeon, Mahanaim, ... Bethshan, Shunem, Tanaach, Megiddo - all familiar from the Old Testament stories. Then he came to name-ring 29 and read the signs: y-w-d-h-m-l-k Could it be? He began to vocalise the consonantal letters (the ancient Egyptians did not write vowels): louda-ha-malek – “Judah” (Heb. Yehud), followed by “the Kingdom” (Heb. ha-malcuth). Had Pharaoh Shoshenk conquered the Kingdom of Judah? Indeed he had!

   As 1 Kings 14:25-26 and 2 Chronicles 12:2-9 confirm, Shishak, king of Egypt, invaded Judah in the fifth year of King Rehoboam, son of Solomon, and took away the treasures of the Temple of Yahweh as his price for not ransacking Jerusalem. Champollion was delighted to have found another crucial chronological link between the events of the Bible and the history of the pharaohs. From that moment on, Shoshenk I, founder of the 22nd Dynasty, became identified with the biblical king Shishak who pillaged the Temple of Solomon in Year 5 of Rehoboam. This event - according to the biblical chronology - was datable to the first half of the tenth century BC.

   The books of Kings and Chronicles detail chronological links between the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah during the DIVIDED MONARCHY period and these (in combination with Assyrian annals mentioning Hebrew rulers) have enabled scholars to determine, with a fair degree of accuracy, the post-Solomonic biblical chronology.

   

   Again, as a direct result of some penetrating research undertaken by American biblical chronologist Edwin Thiele, modern scholarship has reduced the Old Testament dates by fifty years, fixing Year 5 of Rehoboam at 925 BC. Shoshenk I's twentieth year was thus attached to the same anchor date and his first regnal year (the founding of the 22nd Dynasty) set at 945 BC. So came into being the second great pillar of Egyptian chronology.

   Shoshenk I, founder of the 22nd Dynasty…[was] identified with the biblical 'Shishak, king of Egypt' who, according to 1 Kings 14:25-26 and 2 Chronicles 12:2-9, came to Jerusalem and despoiled the Temple of Solomon in Year 5 of Rehoboam. This event is datable to 925 BC using the widely accepted biblical chronology of Edwin Thiele.

   Once more, the Egyptian monuments seemed to have confirmed the biblical narratives - but when we take a closer look at the Shoshenk campaign inscription, the whole edifice begins to collapse.

   First, Champollion was entirely wrong in reading name-ring 21 as loudaha-malek (“Judah the Kingdom”). As Wilhelm Max-Muller pointed out as early as 1885 ring 29 should be read Yad- ha-melek which when translated literally means “Hand of the King” and should be understood as “Monument” or “Stela of the King”. In other words it is a location in Palestine where some un-named ruler had erected a commemorative stela.

   More damaging still to Champollion's hasty reading is the geographical location of this Yadhamelek; its position in the list locates it in northern Israel, well outside the boundaries of Judah, and so name-ring 29 cannot possibly be translated as “Judah the Kingdom”.

   Let us just remind ourselves of what we actually know about Shishak's campaign from the relevant biblical passages:

   Solomon tried to kill Jerohoam but the latter made off and fled to Egypt, into the protection of Shishak, king of Egypt. He remained in Egypt until Solomon's death. [1 Kings 11:40]

   In the last years of Solomon's reign Jeroboam, son of Nebat, became a threat to the throne. Following Solomon's attempt on his life, Jeroboam fled to Egypt where he received the protection of Pharaoh Shishak. He even married the sister of the Egyptian queen. When Solomon died, Jeroboam returned to Israel and was proclaimed king of the ten northern tribes, whilst Rehoboam, Solomon's eldest son and legitimate heir, was left with the rump kingdom of Judah - comprising the tribes of Judah and 931-913 BC Benjamin. Jeroboam established his capital at Shechem and Rehoboam retained Jerusalem. This division of the Israelite kingdom (which lasted down to the fall of Samaria in 722 BC) is known in academic circles as “the Schism” or “Divided Monarchy”.

   Rehoboam, residing in Jerusalem, fortified a number of towns for the defence of Judah. He built Bethlehem, Etam, Tekoa, Bethzur, Socoh, Adullam, Gath, Mareshah, Ziph, Adoraim, Lachish, Azekah, Zorah, Aijalon, Hebron, these being the fortified towns in Judah and Benjamin. He equipped these fortresses, stationing commanders in them, with supplies of food, oil and wine, and shields and spears in each of these towns, making them extremely strong and thus retaining control of Judah and Benjamin. [2 Chronicles 11:5-12]

   Why was Rehoboam so preoccupied with the fortification of these fifteen cities? What was the perceived danger to his small mountain kingdom? Certainly he may have felt threatened

   by his new northern neighbour, but the fortresses are located in an arc which sweeps around Judah's western and southern flanks. Was the perceived threat therefore from the south? The next crucial passage in II Chronicles gives us the answer.

   ”When Rehoboam had consolidated the kingdom and become strong, he and all Israel with him, abandoned the Law of Yahweh; and thus it happened that in the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt marched on Jerusalem, because they had been unfaithful to Yahweh - with twelve hundred chariots and sixty thousand cavalry and countless hordes of Libyans, Sukkiim and Kushites who came from Egypt with him. They captured the fortified towns of Judah and reached Jerusalem” [II Chronicles 12:1-4].

   Shishak's army was enormous, consisting of foreign mercenaries as well as Egyptian troops. These “countless hordes” of foreigners included Kushites - soldiers from the warlike kingdom of Kush located along the upper reaches of the great Dongola Bend of the River Nile between the Third and Fourth Cataracts (now in modern Sudan). This mighty force easily overwhelmed Rehoboam's fortified strongholds and soon stood outside the city gates of the Judahite king's capital.

   “So Shishak king of Egypt advanced on Jerusalem and carried off the treasures of the Temple and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything away, including the golden shields which Solomon had made” [II Chronicles 12:9].

   With no hope of redemption, Rehoboam had opened the gates of Jerusalem and allowed the Egyptians to remove all the treasures of the kingdom established by his predecessors, David and Solomon. In return for this gesture of submission, Shishak went on his way and left Jerusalem very much chastened but not destroyed.

   These are the basic facts as derived from the biblical narrative. Now let us see what we can learn from the Year 20 campaign city-list of Pharaoh Shoshenk I found on the Bubastite Portal at Karnak.

   The list itself would appear to be a genuine itinerary of the campaign. Altogether there are ten rows of name-rings. Rows VI to X involve a secondary campaign into the NEGEV to the south of Judah which does not directly concern us here. Rows I to V, some sixty-five names in all, are what we are really interested in.

   We read the rows of name-rings in what is called 'Boustrophedon' order which means from right to left, then down a row and left to right, then down to the next row and right to left, etc. Row I begins on the right with the names of the 'Nine Bows' - the 'traditional enemies' of Egypt (occupying positions 1 to 9); then comes a single introductory phrase (no. 10) before we begin the campaign sequence proper with G[aza], Makkedah and Rubuti (nos. 11, 12 & 13). These last two towns are situated in the Shephelah - the foothills separating the coastal plain from the massif of the central hill country of Palestine. Clearly Shoshenk's forces had set out from Gaza on the coast and were heading inland and northwards.

   Dropping down to the second row we find Aijalon at the left end of the line (no. 14). The Egyptians intended to strike into the uplands along the route which begins near Aijalon and leads up onto the central ridge. At position 17 is Gibeon. If Shoshenk is to be identified with the biblical Shishak, our next location should be Jerusalem itself, but instead we find Mahanaim (no. 18) - a city in Transjordan. Jerusalem simply is not there!

   Row II then lists a number of towns in the Jordan valley (nos. 19 to 23) before reaching Bethshan, Shunem and Taanach in the Jezreel valley (no’s. 24, 25 & 26). Row III begins on the right with Megiddo (no. 27) and then goes on to list various other locations in the vicinity (including Yadhamelek). The row ends with Socoh and Bethtappuah in the Sharon plain, back on the coastal strip to the south of the Carmel mountain range. Row IV is almost totally destroyed as a result of heavy erosion, but the names in Row V, most of which are located in the Jordan valley and the central ridge of the hills of Israel, suggest that both IV and V represent the itinerary of a second strike force which separated from the main army somewhere in the Jordan valley and then rejoined their colleagues at Megiddo.

   

   Clearly, the main route of march of the Egyptian army was across the central hill country, down into the Jordan valley, up to the eastern entrance of the Jezreel valley and westwards along its floor before crossing the Mount Carmel ridge and heading south along the coastal plain for home. A secondary strike force also occupied themselves with the territory of the Northern Kingdom, whilst a third force campaigned in the Negev. The main campaign route did not enter the kingdom of Judah but rather skirted its northern border. Only one of the towns mentioned as being fortified by Rehoboam is listed as captured - the other fourteen are not mentioned at all. The real target of Shoshenk's campaign was the Jordan valley, the Jezreel valley and the Negev.

   

   If Shoshenk I is to be equated with the biblical Shishak, why did he attack his ally Jeroboam in Israel whilst meticulously avoiding an incursion into the territory of his enemy, Rehoboam king of Judah? The whole situation is topsy-turvy: whilst Shishak attacks Judah and enters Jerusalem to plunder the Temple of Yahweh, Shoshenk attacks Israel and does not mention Jerusalem as one of the defeated cities in his campaign record; Shishak is allied to Israel and subjugates Judah whilst Shoshenk subjugates Israel and avoids confrontation with Judah. So can we honestly continue to contend that the Palestine campaign of Shoshenk I is identical with that of Shishak as mentioned in Kings and Chronicles?

   There is a fundamental methodological problem here. Scholars are underpinning Egyptian chronology with a biblical synchronism. They readily accept the name-equation Shoshenk = Shishak and proclaim a correspondence between the Year 20 campaign of Shoshenk I and the Shishak assault upon Jerusalem. In doing so they dismiss the obvious discrepancies of fact between the two sources.

   If you are going to use biblical data to establish both the chronology of Egypt and the stratigraphical framework of Levantine archaeology, you cannot then go on to arbitrarily disregard selected sections of the historical material contained in the biblical source simply because they do not fit your theory. Surely, if this were any sort of reliable historical synchronism, the facts from both sources, supposedly recording a single historical event, would agree in a substantial way. As it stands they do not agree at all. Confidence in this key synchronism and resulting chronological anchor point is misguided and dangerous.

   To demonstrate how reliant we are upon this synchronism to determine the chronological length of the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt we need only refer to a statement by one of the leading authorities on Egyptian chronology - Professor Kenneth Kitchen himself.

   First he establishes a date for the beginning of the 25th Dynasty working back from our safe fixed point of 664 BC (death of Taharka) using the highest regnal dates for the Kushite pharaohs. He thus arrives at a date between 716 and 712 BC for the Year 1 of Shabaka, founder of the dynasty. Kitchen then reveals the conventional chronology's crucial reliance on the Bible to establish the TIP chronology:

   ”Over two centuries earlier, the 21-year reign of the founder of the 22nd Dynasty, Shoshenk I, can be set at ca. 945-924 B.C., thanks (i) to his synchronisms with the detailed chronology of Judah and Israel, itself linked closely to a firm Assyrian chronology ..., and (ii) to the series of known regnal years of his successors, which fill up the interval 924-716/712 B.C. almost completely...”

   Note that the regnal years of Shoshenk I's successors are made to 'fill up' a period of time which has been entirely established in its length by the biblical synchronism between Shoshenk I (= Shishak) and Rehoboam which in turn is dated by the biblical chronology of Edwin Thiele. No wonder Kitchen regards the link between Shoshenk and Rehoboam as 'the essential synchronism'!

   Basic structure of the TIP in the conventional chronology of Kenneth Kitchen. START OF TIP = 1069 BC

   21ST DYNASTY

   21st Dynasty dates are back-calculated from 945 BC (i.e. Year I Shoshenk 1) using regnal data from contemporary texts and Manetho to reach 1069 BC for Year I of the dynasty founder Smendes.

   22ND DYNASTY

   Yr 20 of Shoshenk I = 925 BC via the biblical synchronism of 1 Kings 14:25-26 and 2 Chronicles 12:2-9.

   23RD DYNASTY

   The 23rd Dynasty is synchronised to the 22nd by a double regnal date recorded in a Nile Level Text at Karnak making Shoshenk III (22nd Dyn.) contemporary with Pedubast I (23rd Dyn.).

   24TH DYNASTY

   25TH DYNASTY

   The end of the 25th Dynasty is anchored to 664 BC - the sacking of Thebes by Ashurbanipal. The start of the dynasty is then established at c. 716 BC using regnal data from the monuments.

   END OF TIP = 664 BC…(p.120-127)

   In the United Church of God booklet, “The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy” we read:

   In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Pharaoh Shishak invaded Judah with 1,200 chariots, 60,000 horsemen and large numbers of infantry. Unprepared after so many years of relying on Egypt as an ally, Rehoboam panicked. The prophet Shemaiah brought this message from God to Rehoboam’s court in Jerusalem: “You abandoned me, so I have abandoned you to the hand of Shishak” (2 Chronicles 12:5, NRSV). The Bible records that the Egyptians demanded as tribute most of the golden treasures Solomon had made for the temple and his palace.

   Shishak’s own account of this invasion is preserved on the walls of the temple he built with his plunder to honor his god Amun-Re in Karnak. He boasts of taking 150 towns, mostly in Judah’s Negev region and Israel’s north (p.21).

   Upon initially reading that I assumed that the reference to the invasion being preserved on the walls of the Temple of Karnak referred to Immanuel Velikovsky’s choice for the Biblical Shishak, Thutmose III (mid-18th dynasty), who has both a similar listing of cities in Palestine as well as another wall preserving all the treasure he offered to the god Amun.

   The sentence that I have highlighted in bold indicates that the author was referring to the conventional choice of Shoshenk I of the 22nd Dynasty as the Biblical Shishak as we have seen that Shoshenk I’s campaign was mostly in the northern kingdom of Israel and the Negev.

   The Biblical accounts, especially 1 Kings 14, while discussing much about Jeroboam and the northern kingdom of Israel, are absolutely silent about any attack on the northern kingdom of Israel by Shishak. The Bible only mentions he came against Judah. Before taking the throne of the northern kingdom Jeroboam was in exile in Egypt (1 Kings 12:2) and was likely allied to Egypt so it is highly unlikely that Shishak did any campaigning against the northern kingdom of Israel.

   Conventional Egyptian chronology retains the pillar of Shoshenk I of the 22nd Dynasty as the Biblical Shishak. Without recognising any major parallelism between the dynasties Manetho’s numbers are used to “confirm” this pillar and calculate back all the dates of pharaohs before this.

   Rohl exposed the problem in the Shoshenk pillar in the earlier quote about this. If the 25th dynasty can be relatively securely dated to about 664 BC just how far out might Egyptian chronology be if we have to find another candidate for the Biblical Shishak?

   Dynasties 18 to 20 form the New Kingdom. Dynasties 21 to 25 form what is called the Third Intermediate Period.

   Did any of these dynasties run parallel with each other or even parallel with Dynasty 26 of the Late Period? Have the sum totals of each dynasty been over-extended by historians by simply putting each pharaohs reign wholly before the other according to Manetho’s questionable record of the pharaohs?

   For his comments on how much the Third Intermediate Period has been over-extended I quote again from David Rohl:

   The 1968 Catalogue des Stele du Serapeum de Memphis contains descriptions of two hundred and fifty-one stelae of which the first thirteen originate from the isolated tombs outside the main vaults. From the remaining two hundred and thirty-eight, about fifty per cent can be attributed securely to specific kings and a still smaller percentage contain actual year dates from those rulers.

   The rest of the stelae must be assigned on a more general basis using comparative analysis techniques. (The contents of the inscriptions and style of dedicatory text can give certain clues as to when a particular donation stela was made).

   

   The majority of the stelae have rounded tops in which a scene of the worship of Apis is either carved or simply painted, depending on the importance and wealth of the donor. In the bottom half of the stela the dedication text is inscribed, naming the donor and sometimes a short genealogy. As already mentioned, a small proportion of the more important stelae also contain the name of the king, the year in which the bull was buried and, in some special cases, the date of induction of the bull and his age at death.

   From the dedication stelae and other objects such as inscribed jars we can build up a list of pharaohs in whose reigns the Apis burials took place. Thus it would appear to be a relatively simple operation to formulate a chronology for the period of the Lesser Vaults from the compiled data; but archaeology and its interpretation (i.e. 'history') is never that simple!

   One so far inexplicable aspect of the finds from the Serapeum is the complete lack of stelae for the whole of the 21st Dynasty and for the first half of the 22nd Dynasty. Of the three hundred and eleven stelae found in the Lesser Vaults (including the seventy-three recently unearthed) not one single inscription can be attributed to the kings from SMENDES to TAKELOT I - a period assumed to have lasted around one hundred and ninety-five years.

   A time span of this length should have provided at least ten or eleven burials (the average age of the bulls being eighteen years). We should therefore possess a number of stelae or other inscriptions with the names of the kings of this period on them - yet none were found.

   Apart from the complete lack of stelae for the 21st Dynasty, there is a further argument which indicates that there is a clear problem with TIP chronology. This problem is perhaps best explained by listing six simple points:

   1. The archaeology of the Lesser Vaults spans a time period beginning with the burial of an Apis in the thirtieth year of Ramesses II, conventionally dated to 1250 BC. The period ends with the interment of the Apis bull which died in the twentieth year of Psamtek I. This last burial is conventionally dated to 644 BC after which the Lesser Vaults are closed.

   2. The excavations of the Lesser Vaults produced evidence for a maximum of twenty-three Apis burials.

   3. The average life-span of an Apis bull has been determined at eighteen years.

   4. If we simply multiply the twenty-two periods of eighteen years which exist between the burial of the first Apis and that of the last, we get a figure of three hundred and ninety-six years for the duration of the Lesser Vaults burial activities - based on the archaeological data.

   5. However, in the conventional chronology, a straightforward calculation (1250 minus 644) provides us with a duration for the period under discussion of six hundred and six years.

   6. Clearly this is significantly longer than a straightforward interpretation of the archaeological data suggests. The discrepancy two hundred and ten years!...

   Conclusion 1: The archaeological evidence from the Lesser Vaults of the Serapeum suggests that the length of the Third Intermediate Period may have been artificially over- extended by historians. (p.56-60)

   This conclusion is very solidly based and shows the error of conventional chronology in assigning so long a period of time for the Third Intermediate Period (TIP). The complete absence of the 21st Dynasty kings shows that they were at least secondary rulers and not primary rulers in the land.

   David Down summarises a key piece of evidence showing Dynasties 21 and 22 are out of chronological order in Manetho’s listing of kings:

   David Rohl highlights the anomaly in the sequence of the dynasties in his book “A Test of Time”. The collection of royal mummies was found in the tomb of Pinudjem II near Hatshepsut's temple. When Pinudjem was buried during the reign of Siamun, the priests took the opportunity to quietly relocate the royal mummies that were under threat from tomb robbers, and they very thoughtfully labeled the mummies with the names of their owners.

   The conventional date for this burial was 969 B.C., toward the end of Dynasty 21, but the problem for the traditionalists was the discovery by museum staff of writing on one of the bandages wrapped around a royal mummy which disclosed the date of the bandages. It read, "Noble linen which the dual king, Lord of the two lands, Hedjkhrperre, son of Re, Lord of appearances, Shoshenk-Meryamun."

   The implications were obvious. Shoshenk was founder of Dynasty 22, yet here were bandages made to wrap mummies from Dynasty 21. So Dynasty 22 must have come before Dynasty 21. Somebody could not count. It is not good enough to defensively suggest that the tomb was reopened later and the bandages inserted in the time of Shoshenk. The tomb has only a narrow passage blocked by the mummies, and it is unlikely that anyone would have squeezed past the outer mummies to inter the later mummies.

   These examples highlight the serious problems with Egyptian chronology for this particular period and illustrate why clues from Assyrian and biblical chronologies are so important (Unwrapping the Pharaohs, p.187).

   David Rohl presents further evidence for the need of this chronological reversal of Dynasties 21 and 22:

   When Montet discovered the foundation deposits beneath both the northern and southern court walls, the pits produced collections of small faience goblets and plaques bearing the cartouches of King Osorkon II - the pharaoh buried in Tomb I. So Osorkon was also the builder of the First Court of the great Temple of Amun at Tanis. For me, this clinches the case for Tomb III being built after Osorkon had constructed his Tomb I. This must be what happened:

   • Psusennes decided to add two chambers to his own tomb complex after he had begun the construction of the main burial chambers of Tomb III;

   • But he could not build the additional chambers on the north side of his tomb because the First Court of the Temple of Amun, constructed by Osorkon II, was already standing there;

   • Thus the building operations of King Psusennes of the 21st Dynasty were restricted on both north and south sides by structures of the 22nd Dynasty. Arguing that there was an earlier 21st Dynasty tomb to the south of Tomb III does not help resolve the conundrum when the additional factor of the temple wall is brought into play.

   The evidence seems to be incontrovertible: Osorkon II of the 22nd Dynasty built his tomb and added to the Temple of Amun before Psusennes I of the built his tomb and added to the Temple of Amun before Psusennes I of the 21st Dynasty began the construction of his own tomb within the sacred enclosure at Tanis.

   

   Therefore King Osorkon II could not have died one hundred and forty-one years after King Psusennes I as is currently believed. The implication of this is that the chronology of the Third Intermediate Period is in error by at least this number of years.

   The burial of Osorkon II at Tanis took place before the burial of Psusennes I. Given that the former was a king of the 22nd dynasty and the latter was a king of the 21st

   dynasty, the archaeological evidence from Tanis tends to confirm that the two dynasties were contemporary for a considerable number of years. The order of burial of the two kings indicates that the number of years currently allocated to the TIP should be reduced by at least 140 years. (p.106-107)

   Rohl believes the error in Egyptian dating is around 200-300 years. Immanuel Velikovsky believed the error was more along the lines of 500 years.

   Emmett Sweeney summarises a number of key points of evidence supporting the error to be around 500 years at the crossover point where Near Eastern sites are dated by Egyptian chronology after being dated by Assyrian chronology later in time:

   I want to take a broader view at the evidence for deleting five centuries from the history of the 18th Dynasty in order to make it tie in with the history of the Bible.

   There exists a great body of evidence, some of it missed even by Velikovsky himself, which indicates that the "dark age" gap [an artificial gap created by a faulty Egyptian chronology] between the Late Bronze Age of the second millennium and the Early Iron Age of the first (the latter dated according to the Bible) is in fact just over five centuries long.

   This is demonstrated in numerous ways, not least by stratigraphy, where, in the land of Israel, for example, the hiatus (occupation gap) between Late Bronze 2b (end of the 19th Dynasty) and the beginning of the Iron Age (contemporary in Israel with the Neo-Assyrian

   kings Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II) lasts almost exactly 500 years. This was admitted and even argued for in the 1970s by John Bimson and Peter James. (eg John Bimson "Can there be a Revised Chronology without a Revised Stratigraphy?" SIS: Proceedings. GaIsgow Conference (April, 1978).

   But there is a great deal of other evidence, either missed by Velikovsky and his supporters, or not yet published, which fully supports the 500 year gap. Let's look at just a small sample (and I emphasise that it is a small sample) of this material. Most of the material below is covered in much greater detail in my Ramessides, Medes and Persians (2001), the volume of Ages in Alignment subsequent to this:

   1. Thutmose III (c.1460 BC.) plunders a temple in Palestine belonging to a city named Kadesh. This sounds like the plundering of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem (also called Kadesh, the "holy") by pharaoh Shishak (c.920 BC) Gap of 540 years.

   2. Abdi-Ashirta of Amurru (Syria), a contemporary of Amenhotep III (c.1420 BC.) has a name identical to Abdastartus (c.875 BC), a king of Tyre mentioned by Menander of Ephesus. Gap of 540 years.

   3. In the palaces of Calah (Nimrod), the capital built by the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (c.860 BC) were found scarabs and other artefacts of 18th Dynasty kings, especially of Thutmose III and Amenhotep III (c.1480-1380 BC). Gap of 500- 600 years.

   4. Cavalry first shown in the Memphis tomb of Horemheb (c.1340 BC) and in action on the Hypostile Hall of Seti I at Karnak (c.1330 BC) are identical (in terms of equipment and deployment) to the first next appearance of cavalry in the bas-reliefs of Ashumasirpal II (860 BC). Gap of c.480 years.

   5. Full-length mail shirts used in the time of Ramses II (c.1340 BC) are identical to the first next appearance of full-length mail shirts in the time of Shalmaneser III (c.850 BC). Gap of 490 years.

   6. Hilani-house of Nikmepa of Ugarit, a contemporary of Seti I (c.1350 BC), identical in design to next-known hilani-house, of Kilamuwa of Zincirli, a contemporary of Shalmaneser III (c.830 BC). Gap of 520 years.

   7. Hittite Great King Tudkhaliash IV, a contemporary of Memeptah (c.1250 BC), is mentioned regarding preparations for a royal marriage, in Carchemish inscription dating from time of Sukhis II or his son Katuwas — believed by Turkish archaeologist Ekrem Akurgal to be a contemporary of Tiglath-Pileser III (c.740 BC). Gap of 520 years.

   8. Cilician inscription of Azitawatas, mentioning his overlord Awarkus ('Wrks) in Hittite style of 13th century BC, but known to date from time of Tiglath-Pileser III (c.740 BC) because Awarkus is also mentioned (as Urukki) in Assyrian inscriptions of this king.

      Gap of 520 years

   9. Career of Marduk-apil-iddin (Merodach-Baladan) I (c.1240 BC) a Babylonian prince, virtually identical to that of Marduk-apil-iddin III (c.730-710 BC). Gap of 520 years.

   10. Aton-city of Israel, Hanaton, built by Akhnaton (c.1370 BC) mentioned in Amama letters and next mentioned in inscription of Tiglath-Pileser III (c.730 BC). Gap of 640 years.

   11. Aton-city of Nubia, Gem Aton, built c.1370 BC, next mentioned in inscription of Tirhakah (c.690 BC). Gap of 690 years.

   12. Seti II, a great warrior-pharaoh (c.1210 BC) mentioned by Herodotus (there named Sethos) as being an enemy of Sennacherib (c.690 BC). Gap of 520 years.

   13. Seti II (1210 BC) also called Usikheprure has fort named for him at north-eastern border of Egypt — defending the Asiatic frontier. This is mentioned by Esarhaddon (who calls it Ishhupre) (c.680 BC) and by no one else. Gap of 530 years.

   14. Esarhaddon carves inscription of his Egyptian conquests at the Dog River immediately beside one of Ramses II recalling his Asiatic conquests, with obvious ironic intent. Gap of 570 years.

15. A prince called Wenamon is sent to Byblos by Herihor (c.1100 BC) during a time when Egypt is held in no great esteem abroad and is perhaps a conquered territory. Another prince Wenamon is installed in power by Ashurbanipal immediately after his conquest of the country (c.660 BC). Gap of 450 years.

The reader will note how actual persons (as opposed to art-styles, artefacts, etc) are always almost exactly 500-530 years apart. The apparent exception is Wenamon, but this is explained by the fact that the whole of the 20' and 21st Dynasties is an extremely confused period, by no means fully understood by Egyptologists.

The evidence, I contend, shows that Velikovsky was right in placing Wenamon of Dynasty 21 before the time of the 20th Dynasty. (see Peoples of the Sea (1977) pp.129-140) This Wenamon is properly no more than a couple of decades removed from Seti II, which means

that, were conventional history being consistent, he would be placed around 1180 BC, and therefore, once again 500 years before his Assyrian Age namesake.

If we add to the above the volumes of evidence presented by Velikovsky himself in Ages in Chaos 1 and the other historical works it can only be seen by any honest observer as constituting a major challenge both to the conventional chronology and to those of Rohl,

James, Bimson et al. We could, for example, have gone into the detailed evidence from Ugarit (cited in Ages in Chaos 1), where texts in alphabetic cuneiform supposedly of the 14th century were composed in a Phoenician dialect virtually indistinguishable from biblical

Hebrew of the 8th and 7th centuries. Much scholarly debate has gone into this apparent anomaly, as Velikovsky himself noted.

Consider also the precise parallels with 8th/7th century Hebrew in the letter of Amenemope (reign of Ramses II) and the dedicatory inscription in the tomb of Ahiram in Byblos, which also contained artefacts from the time of Ramses II. The debate which raged around these was discussed at some length by Velikovsky in Ramses II and his Time.

Or we could have gone into the details of Hittite archaeology. The great "Neo-Hittite" cities of northern Syria, dating from supposedly the 9th and 8th centuries, are actually indistinguishable from the Hittite Empire settlements, supposedly of the 15th and 14th centuries. Even worse (and this was fully admitted by Peter James in his "Chronological Problems in the Archaeology of the Hittites" Society for Interdisciplinary Studies: Proceedings. Glasgow Conference (April, 1978)), although the Syrian cities were

incorporated into the Hittite cultural sphere during the time of the Hittite Empire (by Suppiluliumas I in fact) not a single Syrian city can show an Imperial Hittite stratum underlying the Neo-Hittite stratum. If Imperial Hittite remains are found (eg. those bearing the name of a Hittite Great King), these are invariably found in a Neo-Hittite context, and the anomaly explained away in some manner or other.

But this brief summary can in no way do justice to the evidence and its quality; for the more amply we examine each point, the more strongly the original Ages in Chaos I position is reinforced.

Consider for example the 500 year gap between the hilani-house of Nikmepa of Ugarit and that Kilamuwa of Zincirli. Nikmepa, a contemporary of Horemheb and Seti I, must have been at the beginning of adopting an architectural style then becoming popular throughout the region of northern Syria and Cilicia. Other princes and potentates from a slightly later period, perhaps contemporary with Ramses II and Merneptah, must also have built hilani-houses. But these have never been found. Why? Is this a problem for the Ages in Chaos argument? Quite the contrary, it constitutes powerful evidence in support.

One of the fundamental principles of Ages in Chaos I is that the changeover from the 18th to the 19th Dynasty (during the time of Nikmepa) represents just the point at which the archaeology of northern Syria ceases to be dated along Egyptological lines and commences being dated according to the chronology of Assyria.

This is because, following the reign of Akhnaton, Egypt lost her control and influence in the region, with her place being taken first by the Hittites under Suppiluliumas I and later by the Assyrians under Shalmaneser III. From the time of Shalmaneser III, Assyria becomes dominant politically and the art and culture of Mesopotamia prevails (The Empire of Thebes, p.11-13 as printed in the special edition of The Velikovskian Vol VII, No.1).

Below is a comparison of the timelines for the conventional Egyptian chronology and the revised chronology that will be proposed in the next chapters.

A misguided zeal to prove the Bible originally got us into the mess of Egypt’s flawed chronology. A proper interpretation of the Bible’s history and a more careful analysis of Egyptian records will help us out of the confusion. We will see Bible history is a lot more solid than many scholars would like to believe it is.

CHAPTER 2 – WHEN IN EGYPT’S HISTORY DID THE EXODUS OCCUR?

When in the dynastic history of Egypt can we find the time of the Exodus which came about at a time of a great calamity for which there much be some evidence for in the records of Egypt?

We can synchronise Bible history with Egyptian history with an amazingly well-detailed but unrecognised document for what it really is. It is the Paprus Ipuwer that is today in the Leiden museum in the Netherlands and the original text is dated to the 13th dynasty well before conventional chronology places the date of the Exodus.

Before we look at this document in detail let’s look more in detail at the case for the placement of the Exodus in the conventional chronology of Egypt.

Because of the incorrect synchronism of Pharoah Shishak with Shoshenk of the 22nd Dynasty Egyptologists believe that the Exodus must have occurred in either the 18th Dynasty or the 19th Dynasty at the time of Ramses the Great. But is this really so?

Donovan Courville writes the following regarding the conventional choices of placing the Exodus in either the 18th or 19th dynasties:

Granting a historical dependability in the Old Testament accounts, the point of the Exodus should be marked by some unconcealable crisis in Egypt, both economically and politically.

This point should be followed by several centuries of notably decreased political power as indicated by the severity of the catastrophe in connection with the Exodus, and by the absence of any post-Exodus mention of Egypt in the Scriptures until the time of Solomon.

The point of the Exodus should follow by not more than a century, and probably by much less, the appearance of a king whose name was Rameses, and this king should provide evidence of having been a great builder using brick, specifically so in the eastern Delta region where the Israelites lived.

The Exodus event should be preceded by a record of an extended famine in Egypt in proper time relation to the Exodus incident to confirm the presence of the Israelites in Egypt in the first place.

In Palestine the event should be followed shortly by archaeological evidence of a rapid conquest of the territory to the attributed to the Israelites under Joshua. These evidences could be expected to be revealed by the appearance of a new type of pottery (culture) which extended from Megiddo in the north into the Negeb area in the south.

This same era should reveal a sedentary occupation of the territories of Edom and Moab as indicated by the refusal of their kings to permit the Israelites to pass through their territories peacefully and by the mention of cities in the Scriptural accounts.

On the other hand, it is not to be expected that there will be any evidence of a change in culture in these areas since the Israelites did not occupy the territories of Edom and Moab throughout the subsequent periods of the judges and the monarchy.

There should be evidence at this point for the fallen walls of Jericho by other than human causes. Essentially coincident in time with this disaster, the site of Ai should reveal a

complete destruction, which was to remain a "heap forever''. If there are to be found any evidences of the Hittites in Palestine, these should cease at the point of the Conquest, since the Hittites were then driven out of this area and permitted to find a new home.

While this list is by no means complete, it is adequate to lay before the reader some of the minimal finds to be expected from the archaeological investigations in Egypt and in Palestine, if Scripture is to be taken as historically reliable, even in its major aspects. Other examples will be introduced as the discussion proceeds.

Once the point of the Exodus and the Conquest are located by a satisfactory agreement with Scripture on these incidents, one could synchronise the histories of Egypt and Palestine at these points and expect to arrive at a chronology for the entire ancient world whose dates would be largely a matter of refinement…

Problems with the 18th Dynasty Exodus Theory

[According to Egyptologists]…the date c. 1445 B.C. as assigned to the Exodus, belongs to the early reign of Amenhotep II [XVIIIth Dynasty], or if one allows for a possible error of half a decade in the figures, the date might be set at or near the end of the reign of Thutmose III. Difficulties of gigantic proportions rise from the placement of the Exodus in either of these positions.

Thutmose III was undoubtedly the most powerful ruler who ever occupied the throne of Egypt. During his reign, the Egyptian empire was expanded to reach the widest limits ever attained during its long history and included all of the area now known as Palestine and specifically all of the territory conquered by Joshua some forty years later.

”... This battle at last enabled Thutmose to do what he had been fighting ten years to attain, for he himself now crossed the Euphrates into Mitanni and set up his boundary tablet on the east side, an achievement of which none of his fathers could boast. Thutmose III reached the Euphrates River, which was the natural boundary of the Egyptian Empire at its greatest extent.”(The World of the Old Testament, Gordon Cyrus, p69)

Egypt held some degree of control of this area for 150 years or more after the reign of Thutmose III, probably not continuously nor in the sense of military occupation, but as a tributary which was for no long time immune from trouble except as the tribute imposed was paid.

This control was sufficient to make quite incredible a joint control by both Egypt and Israel during the period of the judges without evidence of military conflicts. Yet the Scriptures are entirely silent as to any such conflict between Joshua or his successors and the Egyptians; nor is there the remotest sort of hint from the period of the judges of any contact whatever between Israel and Egypt.

Israel was repeatedly oppressed by neighboring peoples during this time but never is Egypt mentioned as being in any way related to these conflicts.

The situation presents an anomaly which cannot be disregarded. How could the rising power of Israel under Joshua conquer such a large slice of the Egyptian empire without any evidence of such a conquest appearing in either the Egyptian or Hebrew records? How could Israel hold this territory for several centuries without any military conflict between the two nations?

This anomaly is only the beginning of difficulties. According to Scripture, the pharaoh of the Exodus had his palace in the Delta region, not far removed from the laboring Israelites. This situation had existed from the time of Moses' birth as evidenced by the

finding of the child Moses in the bulrushes by the king's daughter. Thutmose III and his successors all had their capitals, and of necessity their palaces, far to the south of the Delta at Thebes.

Inscriptions of a profuse nature are extant from the reign of Thutmose III, but there is not the remotest sort of hint of any severe economic or political crisis at this time as is to be expected from the incidents associated with the Exodus as noted in Scripture. It was a time of unparallelled prosperity. The coffers of Egypt were filled to the brim with the booty of numerous successful wars and the tribute and loot from the conquered peoples.

The prosperity to which Egypt rose under Thutmose III continued unabated into the reign of his successor Amenhotep II. There is no room in this era for the experience of the Exodus as related in Scripture.

BELOW: Good News March-April 1988 article by Keith Stump promoting Thutmose III’s successor, Amenhotep II of the mid-18th dynasty, as the Pharaoh of the Exodus even showing his mummy, despite biblical references (Exodus 14:28, Psalms 106.9-11) that indicate the pharaoh was included amongst the dead of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

While Thutmose III did extensive building, this construction was not in brick as stated of the building by the Israelites under slavery. The use of brick had long since been replaced by stone secured from quarries along the Nile River. Nor was his building program in the eastern Delta region where the cities of Pi-Thom and Pi-Rameses have been located.

It is certain that neither Thutmose III nor Amenhotep II nor any other king of Dynasty XVIII had anything to do with the construction of these cities. This conclusion is brought to our attention in a most convincing manner by Wright.

”Now the point which must be stressed is this: if the Israelites worked in labor battalions on the construction of the city of Rameses it must have been during the reign of Rameses II (1290-1224 B.C.) and perhaps that of his father, but not before. Previously when the identification of this city was still in doubt, many scholars have believed that the ‘store cities’ of Ex. 1:11 might have been built earlier perhaps under Queen Hatshepsut or Pharaoh Thutmose III just before and after 1500 B.C. and that the writer of Ex. 1:11 was merely giving us the later name of the city of Rameses and not the earlier name.

“Taking their cue from the statement in I Kings 6:1 that the Exodus occurred 480 years before Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, these scholars came to the conclusion that the Exodus took place about 1440 B.C. or just before. Now that the site of Rameses has been located at Tanis, we are forced to conclude that this figure must be explained in another way...

“We now know that if there is any historical value at all to the story-city tradition in Exodus (and there is no reason to doubt its reliability) then Israelites must have been in Egypt at least during the early part of the reign of Rameses II.

“After much digging at Tanis by the archaeologists Mariette, Petrie, and Montet, not a single object of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty kings been found there.”

While the evidence referred to by Wright is negative, nevertheless the complete absence of any evidence of building by any of the XVIIIth Dynasty kings in the area of Pi-Rameses must be accepted as indicating that the Exodus and the previous period of oppression could not have occurred during the era of this dynasty. The era immediately preceding the Exodus should reveal unmistakable evidence of a large building program in this area that by no means could be concealed from archaeologists. The theory of an Exodus in the era of Thutmose III or of Amenhotep II does not provide the proper background in the preceding period for the enslavement of the Israelites.

The king commonly credited with the building of the city of Pi-Rameses (Rameses II), on the basis of the appearance of his name in profusion among the ruins, did not begin his long reign of 66 years for more than 100 years after the death of Thutmose III.

Since the store-cities were certainly built many years before the Exodus the placement of the Oppression during or prior to the reign of Thutmose III is a century and a half or more out of line with this construction by Rameses II.

Is one really adhering to Scripture as reliable history by accepting the 480 years of I Kings 6:1 and accepting also a setting for the Exodus and the Oppression in an era that is a complete blank as far as providing any evidence of a building program in the Delta?

Since Moses was born under slavery and since he was 80 years old at the Exodus the initiation of slavery must have been this long at least before the Exodus. This would call for an extension of the period of slavery and of rule from the Delta region back through the reign of Queen Hatshepsut and well into the reign of her predecessors. None of these monarchs ruled from the Delta area; none did any significant building there; and what should be of further concern is that all indications point to Queen Hatshepsut as one whose last thought or wish was to conquer or control other peoples…

Problems with a 19th Dynasty Placement of the Exodus

The XIXth Dynasty theory of the Exodus is the older of the two more popular concepts. This is to be expected since it finds its basis in the name Raamses as one of the two treasure- cities built by the Israelites under slave labor. During the earlier phases of modern archaeology, the identification of Rameses II as the builder of these cities was not hampered by chronological difficulties.

The abandonment of this placement by many conservative Bible scholars resulted when these major chronological difficulties later became apparent. The revised placement in the XVIIIth Dynasty seemed to be provided adequate support by Garstang's dating of the fallen walls of Jericho in the era c. 1400 B.C. on the basis of pottery types related by him in time with the destruction of the city.

This theory of the Exodus continues to find its major support among scholars who lean toward a conservative interpretation of the Old Testament. However, the question remains without a satisfactory answer as to why the chronology based on I Kings 6:1 should be regarded as more sacred than what appears to be an obvious synchronism between Rameses II and the era of the Oppression…

The XIXth Dynasty placement moves the Exodus event forward on the time scale by about 150 years, the more exact figure depending on just where in the reign of Rameses II the event is presumed to have occurred.

There are three major difficulties in the XVIIIth Dynasty setting of the Exodus that are presumed to be eliminated by the XIXth Dynasty placement.

The first of these is the complete absence of any evidence of a significant building program in the eastern Delta region by any XVIIIth Dynasty king. It is essentially certain that neither Thutmose III nor Amenhotep II engaged in any significant construction in this area and the same may be said of Queen Hatshepsut and her predecessors. Yet the reigns of these rulers carry us back more than seventy-five years into what must be presumed to be the period of the Oppression.

Rameses II, on the other hand, leaves a multiplicity of evidences of extended construction in this area. The ruins of the city of Pi-Rameses in this area carry his name in profusion.

A second line of evidence favoring the XIXth Dynasty placement is to be seen in the Biblical references that indicate a close proximity of the king's palace to the area of the laboring Israelite slaves. The capital of the XVIIIth Dynasty kings was at Thebes, far to the south of the Delta region and at a point that can not possibly be made to meet this specification of the Scriptural account.

With the construction of Pi-Rameses, this city became the capital of Rameses II, though part of the governmental offices may still have been located at Heliopolis, at the southern border of the Delta, but still within range of an expanding Israelite population.

Thirdly, since one of the store cities had the name Raamses, the suggestion is strong that the reigning king had this name…

While the XlXth Dynasty placement of the Exodus appears at first glance to eliminate several major difficulties confronting the XVIIIth Dynasty placement, it is not to be inferred that this setting of the incident is free of major difficulties. Not the least of these is the large discrepancy with Bible chronology.

Under no circumstance is it possible to harmonize this placement with even the short chronology of the Judges which has its basis in the 480-year period between the Exodus and the 4th year of Solomon.

In order to regard Rameses II as the pharaoh of the Oppression, the Exodus must be set more than 150 years later than the date calculated from the established dates for Solomon. This placement reduces the period allowable for the Judges by a similar period. This is not permissible within the limits of a straightforward interpretation of Bible chronology.

According to Scripture, three hundred years elapsed between the Conquest and the rule of Jephthah [Judges 11:26], and Jephthah was not at all one of the last of the Judges. Any recognition of Rameses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus leaves a scant 200 years for the total period of the Judges.

The 300-year period of Jephthah may be taken as an approximation since it is a round number, but hardly the kind of an approximation that permits cutting the figure in half.

It is to be noted clearly that the proposed synchronism between Rameses II and the building of the treasure-cities is related to the period of Israelite enslavement and not to the Exodus. This period of slavery, according to Scripture, began at least 80 years before the Exodus, since Moses was born under slavery and was 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. We cannot be certain that the building of these cities was the first assignment to the enslaved people, but neither is it reasonable to suppose that the cities were built during the late years before the Exodus, since a significant period of time must have been involved in these construction works.

If Rameses II used the recently constructed city as his capital, a date other than very early in his reign would be highly improbable. But if the construction is set early in the reign, then most of the period of enslavement belongs to the era of the kings preceding Rameses II, none of whom did any building in the Delta and none of whom ruled from this area. Hence the period prior to Rameses II does not meet the specifications of Scripture any better than the XVIIIth Dynasty settings.

Since the slavery background is in the Delta region, not alone at the Exodus, but from the time of Moses' birth, a continued residence by a series of kings ruling from this area is required to meet these specifications. Of the predecessors of Rameses II, one does not meet a builder of any significance until the time of Amenhotep IV, and his building was certainly not in the Delta region.

As highly improbable as is the placement of this construction in the later years of Rameses II, it is precluded by other evidence. Merneptah, his successor, left an inscription, dated in his 5th year, indicating the presence of Israel in Canaan at that time. Not only so, the background in Palestine described in the inscription precludes any recent coming of the Israelites into the territory. The inscription is of sufficient import to permit reproduction in part:

The kings are overthrown saying "Salem!"

Not one holds up his head among the nine nations of the bow.

Wasted is Tehenu,

The Hittite Land is pacified,

Plundered is the Canaan, with every evil, Carried off is Askalon,

Seized upon is Gezer,

Yeneam is made as a thing not existing.

Israel is desolated, her seed is not,

Palestine has become a [defenceless] widow for Egypt, All lands are united, they are pacified;

Every one that is turbulent is bound by king Merneptah…

The inconsistency of the archaeological picture which confronts us from attempts to place the Conquest in the era of either the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasties is brought to our attention by Miss Kenyon in language which cannot be misunderstood. Since Miss Kenyon, as an archaeologist in the Palestine area, continues to regard this era as that of the Conquest, in spite of the anomalous situation which results, the force of her words need not be underestimated, nor do they leave any appreciable leeway for the retention of the concept

that Scripture provides us with dependable details if it is true that the Conquest is properly positioned at any time between the end of the reign of Thutmose III and the mid-point in the reign of Rameses II. Referring to the entire period from the end of Middle Bronze I through Late Bronze (currently dated c. 1900-1200 B.C.S), Miss Kenyon writes:

”...With Canaanite Phoenicia, the ties which were established about 1900 B.C. were permanent, and on the evidence of the pottery we can say that the same basic culture grew up in an area stretching from Ras Shamra in the north to the desert fringes of Palestine in the south. Moreover, the culture now introduced into Palestine was to have a very long life. In spite of the fact that a series of events took place of major political importance, there is no cultural break until at least 1200 B.C. These political events we know of on literary evidence [sic] for we are now in a period in which written history can supplement (but by no means replace) archaeology. Archaeology can show a recognizable progression of artifacts such as pottery, and can show that towns suffered a succession of destructions, but after these destructions the old culture was re-established.”

In an attempt to account for this anomaly as it pertains to the setting of the Conquest c. 1250 B.C., Miss Kenyon followed the popular view which assumes that the invading Hebrews had no culture of their own over the entire period of their residency in Palestine. In defense of this deduction, she wrote:

”...This must be the case wherever within the period 1400-1200 B.C. one puts the arrival of the Israelites, for there is no complete break within the period. Evidence of destruction does exist, but it does not yet tell a coherent story.”

The complete havoc that this thesis makes of Scripture is the topic of a subsequent chapter. By "complete break", Miss Kenyon means that there is no time between 1400 and 1200 B.C. (by current datings) in the archaeological observations in Palestine where one finds the appearance of the new types of pottery to be expected of a conquest and occupation by a new people.

It would seem that it is this situation that has been a major factor in giving birth to the Split Exodus theory, or its alternate which assumes that part of the Israelite tribes never went into Egypt and that the returning tribes were simply adopting the culture of those that had remained there.

The ultimate question is whether or not there is any genuine demand for such violent deviations from Scripture or whether in the last analysis it is not the Scriptures that are in error but rather the theories which have been devised to substitute for them.

The writer holds that there is available a most rational interpretation of Palestinian archaeological data which eliminates the need for thus discounting the dependability of the Scriptural accounts (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications Volume 1, p.16-17, 23-26, 40-44, 63-64).

Now that we have looked at the problems associated with the place in Egypt’s history for the Exodus let’s now look at the evidence first presented by Immanuel Velikovsky to show that the place in Egypt’s history where the Exodus is to be found is at the end of the Middle Kingdom (end of Dynasty 13) which is supported by most major revised chronologies. Summarising Velikovsky’s evidence I quote from William Dankenbring’s article entitled “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?”:

If the Exodus occurred during the 18th dynasty, in the reign of Amenhotep II, then it must have been "apparently a minor occurrence in the history of that time, so minor, indeed, that the nations most concerned in it next to the Jews themselves, the Egyptians, never took the trouble to record it" (Hugo Winckler, Berlin, Kritische Schriften).

For so great an event to totally escape any mention in the famed eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, had it occurred then, would have been the strangest anomaly in all history!

The Biblical story shows the Exodus clearly was not your everyday event. It was a colossal, stupendous event! It could not have escaped the notice of the Egyptians of the powerful eighteenth dynasty, had it occurred at that time!

Was it on so small a scale that the Egyptians never thought it worth recording? The Bible shows from 3-5 million Israelites left Egypt during that Passover season. Such an event could hardly be described as trifling, minute, or trivial.

When, then, and during what dynastic reign, did the Exodus really occur?

The Papyrus Ipuwer

How can we date the Exodus? The first key is to remember that the Scriptural account is inspired by God, so we must start there…

The second key to remember is that the Scriptural account shows the Exodus was a catastrophe upon Egypt -- a holocaust such as seldom happens in the history of entire nations. It could scarcely go unrecorded as such.

Earth, sea and sky participated in the event. The plagues of God were not merely localized phenomena. They included tectonic upheaval, volcanic eruptions, turgid atmospheres of smoke, ashes, and palpable darkness, and cyclonic windstorms.

An entire nation's agriculture was laid bare. Cattle were destroyed by the millions. The earth's largest standing army of that time was destroyed and overwhelmed in one fateful night of terror.

Did this colossal event go unnoticed by the Egyptians? Not at all! Notice the amazing, incredible truth!

The Bible says of that time, "And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke...and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly" (Exo. 19:16, 18). Here is a mountain in the throes of a volcanic eruption, accompanied by severe earthquakes!

The Exodus was a time of tectonic violence seldom witnessed by man. The Bible says, "The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord" (Psalm 97:5). In the book of Judges we read, "Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir...the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from before the Lord God of Israel" (Judges 5:4-5).

Incredible as it may sound, such a catastrophe as the Bible describes in vivid detail was also recorded in ancient Egyptian historical documents!

An Egyptian eye-witness testified to the plagues which God sent upon ancient Egypt -- a sage by the name of Ipuwer who lived during the terminal phase of the Middle Kingdom.

The Ipuwer papyrus was acquired by the Museum of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1828. The text is now folded into a book of 17 pages, written in hieratic signs. Portions of it are poorly preserved, but of the portions which has been translated by Alan H. Gardiner in 1909 we have an amazing corroboration of the dramatic plagues Almighty God sent upon ancient Egypt!

As Gardiner writes, "It is no merely local disturbance that is here described, but a great and overwhelming national disaster" (Gardiner, Admonitions).

Now notice the incredible parallels between this document andthe record of the book of Exodus:

An Eyewitness to the Plagues

Ipuwer describes an incredible story of lamentations, ruin, and horror. His story is an Egyptian version of a great national calamity. He writes:

PAPYRUS 2:8 Forsooth, the land turns round as does a potter'swheel.

PAPYRUS 2:11 The towns are destroyed. Upper Egypt has become dry (wastes?). PAPYRUS 3:13 All is ruin!

PAPYRUS 7:4 The residence is overturned in a minute. PAPYRUS 4:2 ... Years of noise. There is no end to noise.

The play on the word "noise" here could mean "earthquake," as the Hebrew word raash signifies both noise and earthquake.Earthquakes are often accompanied by loud ominous sounds from the bowels of the earth.

PAPYRUS 6:1 Oh, that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult (uproar) be no more.

The Plague of Blood

Now notice this amazing parallel between the Bible account of the plagues on Egypt and the Papyrus Ipuwer:

EXODUS 7:21 . . . there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.

PAPYRUS 2:5-6 Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere.

EXODUS 7:20-24 . . . all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood . . . And all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river.

PAPYRUS 2:10 Men shrink from tasting -- human beings and thirst after water.

PAPYRUS 3:10-13 That is our water! That is our happiness! What shall we do in respect thereof? All is ruin!

The Plague of Murrain

EXODUS 9:3 . . . the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle whichis in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a verygrievous murrain.

PAPYRUS 5:5 All animals, their hearts weep. Cattle moan.

The Plague of Hail

After plagues of frogs, lice, flies, and the disease of murrain on the cattle, God brought on Egypt the destruction of a massive hailstorm which destroyed crops everywhere. This also was recorded by the Egyptian Ipuwer. Notice!

EXODUS 9:25 . . . and the hail smote every herb of the every tree of the field.

EXODUS 9:23-24 . . . the flax and the barley was smitten; for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was boiled.

EXODUS 10:15 . . . there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the fields, through all the land of Egypt.

PAPYRUS 4:14 Trees are destroyed.

PAPYRUS 6:1 No fruit nor herbs are found . . .

PAPYRUS 2:10 Forsooth, gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire.

PAPYRUS 10:3-6 Lower Egypt weeps . . . The entire palace is without its revenues. To it belong (by right) wheat and barley, geese and fish.

PAPYRUS 6:3 Forsooth, grain has perished on every side.

PAPYRUS 5:12 Forsooth, that has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left over to its weariness like the cutting of flax.

This last statement shows clearly these plagues on Egypt were not the consequence of long-lasting drought. Rather, this was a sudden onslaught of disaster, virtually overnight! What was visible yesterday was perished today! The produce of Egypt was cut down, like the cutting of flax -- a sudden, incisive event!

The Plague of Locusts

EXODUS 10:4-5 . . . tomorrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast: And they shall cover the face of the earth . . . and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remains unto you from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field...

PAPYRUS 6:1 No fruit nor herbs are found . . . hunger.

The Plague of Darkness

EXODUS 10:22-23 . . . and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days: they saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days

PAPYRUS 9:11 The land is not light...

This plague of darkness is further described in another ancient Egyptian document, a black granite monolith or shrine at the border of Egypt, inscribed with hieroglyphics all over its surface. The shrine's message declares:

EL-ARISH: The land was in great affliction. Evil fell on this earth... It was a great upheaval in the residence... Nobody left the palace during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither the men nor the gods could see the faces of their next.

With the plague of locusts covering the skies and earth proceeding the plague of darkness, of three days, undoubtedly the Egyptians counted nine days as the total length of the time of impaired vision and light. Even the Jewish Midrash books explain the plague lasted seven days -- during the first three days one could still change his position, but during the next three (the three of the Bible) one could not stir from his place!

The Tenth Plague

The final, culminating plague upon ancient Egypt has not been fully understood. The last night before the Exodus, we know, the death angel slew the firstborn of the Egyptians, but the Israelites who had the blood of a lamb over their front doorposts were spared. But let us notice this account more fully.

EXODUS 12:29 And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord SMOTE all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh...unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

EXODUS 12:30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a GREAT CRY in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead. What was this awesome plague which destroyed everywhere, throughout the land, causing the death of multiple thousands, including cattle?

The Hebrew word for "smote" is nogaf and is used for a violent blow, such as the thrusting with horns by an ox. Now notice the Papyrus Ipuwer account of this traumatic event.

PAPYRUS 4:3, 5:6 Forsooth, the children of princes are dashed against the walls. PAPYRUS 6:12 Forsooth, the children of princes are cast out in the streets.

PAPYRUS 6:3 The prison is ruined.

PAPYRUS 2:13 He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere.

PAPYRUS 3:14 It is groaning that is throughout the land, mingled with lamentations.

What happened? The evidence indicates that during this final night of the Passover, a great earthquake struck Egypt, killing those God had marked for death all over the land, from the houses of princes to those lying in dungeons, and even cattle.

The Church historian Eusebius quotes an ancient source in a book by Artapanus which tells of "hail and earthquake by night (of the last plague), so that those who fled from the earthquake were killed by the hail, and those who sought shelter from the hail were destroyed by the earthquake. And at that time all the houses fell in, and most of the temples."

This must have been a massive earthquake! It must have been a forerunner of the final earthquake and hail which will culminate the "seven last" plagues mentioned in the Book of Revelation (see Rev. 16:17-21). The Ipuwer Papyrus says:

PAPYRUS 4:4, 6:14 Forsooth, those who were in the place of embalment are laid on the high ground.

A legend in the Haggada tells that in the last night, when Egypt was smitten, the coffin of Joseph was found lying on the ground, lifted out of the grave. Earthquakes in modern times have been known to have similar effects, causing coffins to protrude from their graves in hillside cemeteries.

God smote strong and weak alike, just as an earthquake would do. The Midrashim say that "as many as nine tenths of the inhabitants have perished" (Ginzberg, Legends, II, 369).

God judged ancient Egypt. If this Judgment caused nine tenths of the population to perish, then indeed it was a TYPE of the future destruction God will wreak upon this earth during these "last days," in our lifetime! In the future "time of trouble" we find that only a tenth of the population shall survive (Isaiah 6:13).

God will overthrow the land as He did Sodom and Gomorrah (Amos 4:11). Only ten percent of the population of the nations comprising modern "Israel" shall escape death (Amos 5:3). This same figure can be extended to the judgment of the Gentiles, also, who will be judged and found wanting by God (compare Isa.10:18-19; Isa. 47:1-9; Rev. 18; Isa. 24:6).

Revolt of the Slaves

The Papyrus Ipuwer continues its amazing parallel with the book of Exodus. As Israel prepares to leave Egypt, we read:

EXODUS 11:2 . . . let every man borrow (demand) of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.

PAPYRUS 3:2-3 (gold and jewels) are fastened on the neck of female slaves.

EXODUS 12:33 And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.

PAPYRUS 4:2 Forsooth, great and small say: I wish I might die.

PAPYRUS 5:14f. Would that there might be an end of men, no conception, no birth! Oh, that the earth would cease from noise and tumult be no more!

The Papyrus describes men fleeing the cities in tents, even as Israel fled Egypt and abode in tents as they journeyed.

PAPYRUS 10:2 Men flee. . . . Tents are what they make like the dwellers of the hills.

The Scriptures show that a "mixed multitude" of Egyptians fled Egypt with the Israelites (Exo. 12:38). Their first brief stopover was at a place called "Succoth," which, in Hebrew, means "tents" or "huts."

As Israel left Egypt, God went before them. We read:

EXODUS 13:21 And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and by night. He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night. . .

PAPYRUS 7:1 Behold, the fire has mounted up on high. Its burning goes forth against the enemies of the land.

But as Israel left Egypt with a high hand, what happened to the Pharaoh? The Ipuwer Papyrus only records that the Pharaoh was lost under unusual circumstances "that have never happened before." The Egyptian eye-witness to the plagues lamented his fate, in the broken lines which are still discernible:

PAPYRUS 7:1-2 . . . weep . . . the earth is . . . on every side. . . weep . . .

After this destruction, chaos reigned in Egypt. There was no longer any authority in the land. Mob rule prevailed. Brigands and thugs seized what they could carry. Plunderers looted theroyal storehouses. Ipuwer records:

PAPYRUS 6:9 Forsooth, the laws of the judgment-hall are cast forth. Men walk upon (them) in the public places.

PAPYRUS 10:3 The storehouse of the king is the common property of everyone. PAPYRUS 8:14 Behold, the chiefs of the land flee.

PAPYRUS 9:2 Behold, no offices are in their (right) place, like a frightened herd without a herdsman.

PAPYRUS 6:7 Forsooth, public offices are opened and their census-lists are taken away.

Invaders appeared on the horizon -- the Hyksos attacked Egypt, after their encounter with the Israelites in the desert of Arabia. Egypt was helpless, prostrate before them.

PAPYRUS 3:1 Forsooth, the Desert is throughout the land. Thenomes are laid waste. A foreign tribe from abroad has come to Egypt.

PAPYRUS 15:1 What has happened? -- through it is to cause the Asiatics to know the condition of the land.

PAPYRUS 14:11 Men -- They have come to an end for themselves. There are none found to stand and protect themselves.

PAPYRUS 12:6ff. Today fear -- more than a million of people. No seen -- enemies -- enter into the temples -- weep.

When I was in Holland at the end of 2007 my friend, Gary, and I made a special trip to the museum in Leiden just to see this document on display. There was a Dutch translation of the document we took a photo of and then showed Gary’s girlfriend, Marian, later who didn’t go to the museum with us. We asked her to translate it without telling her what we thought it was and then we asked her to tell us what she thought it was. She thought it was a record of the plagues of Egypt.

There is another Egyptian record that also appears to be an eyewitness account of the plagues of Egypt. It is the Ermitage papryus. Donovan Courville writes the following about this papyrus:

The Ermitage papyrus is now preserved in the museum at Leningrad. This inscription also tells of a time when Egypt was exposed to some terrific catastrophe. One sees here again a reference to the situation that occurred at the time of the Exodus. The inscription in part reads:

''The land is utterly perished and nought remains. Perished is this land...The sun is veiled and shines not in the sight of men. None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds....''

''The river is dry (even the river) of Egypt.''

"The earth is fallen into misery...Bedouins pervade the land. For foes are in the East [side of sunrising] and Asiatics shall descend into Egypt."

''The beasts of the desert shall drink from the rivers of Egypt...This land shall be in perturbation.”

"I show thee the land upside down, happened that which never (yet) had happened...." "Men laugh with the laughter of pain. None there is who weepeth because of death.'' "None knoweth that midday is there; his [sun's] shadow is not discerned...."

Evidently the darkness of the 9th plague was a phenomenon which continued intermittently and locally throughout the experience of the Exodus and afterward as reflected in the Ermitage Papyrus inscription and in the statements of Exodus 13:21, 22; 14:20.

And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud. to lead them the way; and bv night in a pillar of fire, to give them light: to go by day and night. He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people. . And it [the pillar of cloud]came between the camp of the Egvptians and the camp of Israel, and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these so that the one came not near the other all the night (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications Volume 1, p.131-132).

Sir Flinders Petrie excavated in the Faiyum from 1880 onwards near the mud-brick pyramids of the 12th dynasty. Dr Rosalie David reviewed his work there and wrote:

It is apparent that the Asiatics were present in the town (Kahun) in some numbers and this may have reflected the situation elsewhere in Egypt…their exact homeland in Syria or Palestine cannot be determined…The reason for their presence remains unclear…[Petrie discovered] wooden boxes…underneath the floors of many houses at Kahun. They contained babies, sometimes buried two or three to a box and aged only a few months at death” (The Pyramid Builders of Ancient Egypt, p.191).

This is consistent with the decree of Pharaoh that all male children were to be killed at birth (Exodus 1:16). David also wrote the following about their sudden disappearance from Egypt:

“The quantity, range and type of articles of everyday use which were left behind in the houses may indeed suggest that the departure was sudden and unpremeditated” (The Pyramid Builders of Ancient Egypt, p.199).

How can slaves all just suddenly walk out of Egypt, particularly considering the mighty eastern defences we will look at later? For those who have eyes to see we have powerful testimony here for the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt.

Kahun, near the great lake of the Faiyum, is not the only place in Egypt where we have evidence for the Israelites before the Exodus. There is also strong evidence from the eastern Delta region where Goshen was according to the book of Exodus. I quote again from David Rohl who describes this evidence with the following words:

Early in the Austrian expedition's time at Tell ed-Daba Bietak explored some of the outlying areas in order to determine what exactly he had taken on. Soon though he was concentrating his efforts on the low tell just north of the village of Tell ed-Daba where his dig- house had been established.

The rambling mound turned out to be the last vestiges of the ancient city of Avaris which New Kingdom documents identified as the southern quarter/district of Pi- Ramesse.

Bietak quickly realised that many centuries before Pi-Ramesse had been built by the first pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty the city of Avaris had been founded on the east bank of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile in the same area.

A series of over eight hundred drill cores sunk into the soil by Josef Dorner have since revealed the ancient topography of the area.

Avaris was built on a series of sandy hillocks (turtlebacks) surrounded by swamplands to the east and south and the river to the west and north. The higher dry land was densely populated with modest domestic residences tightly packed together around narrow alleyways and streets. All the buildings were constructed of mudbrick.

Associated with the houses were the burials of the occupants, usually interred in vaulted mudbrick tombs within the compound of the family home. Bietak made the startling discovery that the grave goods associated with the majority of these tombs were of Asiatic origin. The people who had populated the sprawling city of Avaris originated from Palestine and Syria! Archaeologists call the material culture of these Levantine folk ‘Middle Bronze II' (or MB II).

The initial influx of Asiatics into the region of Kantir/Khatana appears to have been during the late 12th Dynasty (MB IIA) with the first settlement concentrated at the site of Tell ed- Daba - later to become the central core of the city of Avaris. The Asiatic occupation ended with the expulsion of the 15th Dynasty 'Hyksos' rulers of Avaris by Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom (MB IIB overlapping with LB I). Bietak has identified several major occupation levels during that period indicating a long time interval between the arrival and departure of the foreigners.

In the New Chronology these Asiatics have to be the proto-Israelites. Our Israelite population

- that is to say the Asiatic peoples whose historical existence formed the basis of the traditional history of late Genesis and Exodus - occupied strata H and G/4 to G/1, the first levels of the Asiatic town. The later strata F to D/2 also represent an Asiatic settlement but these people, although culturally similar, were distinct from the earlier group of H to G/1. Bietak notes that the early Asiatics were highly ‘Egyptianised'.

The later Asiatics, whom I shall subsequently identify with the Hyksos invaders who entered Egypt during the late 13th Dynasty, were very different. According to Bietak the tombs of this group were ‘purely Canaanite ... and showed little Egyptian influence' - in other words newcomers from the Levant.

Why were the early Asiatics so much more Egyptianised than their later cousins? Now that we can identify the former with Joseph's brethren the answer is obvious. It is clear from the Bible that Joseph himself was highly Egyptianised and readily accepted the influences of Egyptian culture for his people. However, adopting a partly Egyptian way of life did not mean sacrificing the most important Hebrew cultural traits which were of religious significance - in other words their burial practices.

It is readily apparent that there was a clearly defined settlement break between Stratum G/1 and F. For the historical model being developed here, it is important to note that this break marks the biblical Exodus in the archaeology of Tell ed-Daba as will become clear in the next chapter.

Let us look in a little more detail at the inhabitants of the earlier strata H to G/1. There are several interesting aspects to this settlement group which merit discussion.

First, an anthropological analysis of the skeletal remains by Eike-Meinrad Winkler and Harald Wilfing shows that more adult women were buried in the settlement than adult men. This could simply indicate that there was a disproportionately high female population at Avaris.

In the context of the Sojourn tradition this might be explained by the culling of the Israelite male children - an act of the ‘pharaoh who did not know Joseph' in fear of the perceived political threat resulting from a strong Asiatic population in Egypt.

In the context of this same story it was discovered that there was a higher percentage of infant burials at Tell ed-Daba than is normally found at archaeological sites of the ancient world. Sixty-five per cent of all the burials were those of children under the age of eighteen months.

Based on modern statistical evidence obtained from pre-modern societies we would expect the infant mortality rate to be around twenty to thirty per cent. Could this also be explained by the slaughter of the Israelite infant males by the Egyptians?

In the graves of Stratum G the Austrians found broad-bladed ceremonial daggers made of bronze, copper ornamented belts, various types of pottery and dismembered sheep, the latter undoubtedly funeral offerings. Analysis of the sheep remains has shown that they were of the longhaired variety. The Asiatic folk of early Avaris introduced the Levantine long- haired sheep into Egypt clearly indicating their pastoralist origins.

Taking their livestock and all that they had acquired in Canaan, they (the Israelites) arrived in Egypt - Jacob and all his offspring. [Genesis 46:6]

The pottery included the type of small oil or perfume vessel known as Tell el-Yahudiya Ware. This black or dark grey ceramic, decorated with incised patterns which were then highlighted with white pigment, comes in three basic forms: zoomorphic (usually fish-shaped), piriform and cylindrical.

The last appears to be generally later than the piriform type. This chronological trend will play a part in the story of the conquest and destruction of Jericho when I deal with the Joshua narratives.

The adult male graves found in strata H to G/1 were found to contain a number of weapons (mainly daggers and socketed spears). These men were not just shepherds but also warriors. The Bible tells us little about the military character of the early Hebrews, though it is interesting to note that the extra-biblical rabbinic writings, fanciful as they may be, do contain traditions in which the Israelites fight to protect Egypt's eastern border from marauding nomads listed as ‘the sons of Esau', the Ishmaelites and the Edomites - one battle even takes place at Raamses.

What the Austrian archaeological mission has unearthed at Tell ed-Daba is a fascinating Western Asiatic culture which, in virtually every respect, mirrors the Western Asiatic settlers known to us from the Old Testament as the early Israelites.

Archaeological evidence of the Israelite Sojourn in Egypt has been sought in Egypt for the best part of two centuries but the archaeologists have searched in vain. No Israelite settlement has ever been found in the 19th Dynasty occupational levels where the orthodox chronology predicted its stratigraphical locus.

Within the strata of New Kingdom Pi-Ramesse (biblical Raamses) so far no evidence has been unearthed to support the conventional hypothesis that a large Asiatic population resided there. On the other hand, dig down below the 19th Dynasty capital and you reach the city of Avaris, the vast majority of the population of which was Asiatic.

The only period in Egyptian history with incontrovertible archaeological evidence for a large Asiatic population in the eastern delta (i.e. Goshen/Kessan) is the Second Intermediate Period - the era into which the New Chronology places the historical events which lie at the heart of the traditional stories of the Israelite Sojourn, Bondage and Exodus.

Conclusion 24: The Israelite Sojourn in Egypt began in the late 12th Dynasty and continued throughout most of the 13th Dynasty. It is represented in Egypt’s archaeological record by the Asiatic culture known as the Middle Bronze IIA. The main settlement of the Israelites in Egypt was located at the city of Avaris in the region of Goshen. Their archaeological remains are represented by the dwellings and tombs of Tell ed-Daba strata H to G/1.

The Brooklyn Museum possesses a tattered papyrus roll, whose uninspiring catalogue number is Brooklyn 35.1446. The papyrus was originally purchased by Charles Wilbour, the intrepid ‘secret agent' of Emil Brugsch sent to Thebes in 1881 on a mission to ferret out the tomb robbers believed to have found an intact royal tomb. (As you now know that tomb turned out to be the famous Royal Cache.)

Wilbour's papyrus roll is dated to the reign of Sobekhotep III, the predecessor of Neferhotep I, and therefore the king who reigned in Egypt a generation before the birth of Moses in the New Chronology. The biblical narrative tells us that, prior to the birth of Moses, the Israelite population was subjugated by the native Egyptians and forced into slavery.

The recto of the Brooklyn Papyrus contains a copy of a royal decree by Sobekhotep III which authorises the transfer of ownership of a group of domestic slaves/servants (Egy. khenmu) to an estate in the Theban area. The verso then contains a list of household servants which can probably be identified with the slave group mentioned on the recto.

Analysis of the list of servants reveals that over fifty per cent of the ninety-five names are Semitic in origin. These foreign servants are each clearly designated as aamu - the Egyptian term for ‘Asiatic'. Their Egyptian names are also separately listed - the names given to them by their owners. For example we read: ‘The Asiatic Dodihuatu, who is called Ankhuemhesut'.

So, half of the domestic slaves of this Egyptian estate were Asiatics who had been given Egyptian names. What is more, when we study the actual appellations themselves we find that several are biblical names.

1. Thus we see at position 11 the name 'Menahem' later recorded for the sixteenth king of Israel (743-738 BC);

2. At 13, 14, 16, 22 and 67 we have variants of the tribal eponym 'Issachar' the name of the fifth son of Leah by Jacob;

3. At 23 the name of the clan 'Asher' occurs, named after its eponymous ancestor, the second son of Zilpah by Jacob;

4. And finally at position 21 we read 'Shiphrah', the name carried by one of the two Hebrew midwives instructed to kill the Israelite newborn males in Exodus 1:15- 21:4…

If the verso of the Brooklyn Papyrus is representative of a typical Egyptian estate in the mid 13th Dynasty then at least half the total servant population in Egypt at this time was of Syro- Palestinian origin. The great American philologist William Foxwell Albright long ago recognised that the names of these Asiatic people belong to the northwest-semitic language group which includes biblical Hebrew.

Bearing in mind that the Brooklyn Papyrus lists the domestic slaves of an Upper Egyptian estate we may logically conclude that the Asiatic slave population in the north (Lower Egypt), and especially the delta nearest to the Levant, would have been much larger and may have constituted the vast majority of the bonded work force. Other documents confirm that the size of the Asiatic community in Egypt at this time was significant. This state of affairs accords well with the biblical tradition.

“But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they became so numerous and powerful that eventually the whole land was full of them.” [Exodus 1:7]

In the previous chapter I noted that an analysis of the graves at Tell ed-Daba has shown that there were more females than males in the burial population of Avaris. I suggested this could conceivably reflect the story of the culling of the Israelite males described in Exodus 1:15-22.

A similar picture emerges from the Brooklyn Papyrus. In his commentary William Hayes (the editor of the document) remarks on the problem of determining the origins of this large Asiatic slave population and then goes on to ponder the high proportion of female slaves listed in the papyrus.

Perhaps the most surprising circumstance associated with these Asiatic servants is that an Upper Egyptian official of the mid Thirteenth Dynasty should have had well over forty of them in his personal possession.

If a comparable number of similar servants was to be found in every large Egyptian household one wonders by what means such quantities of Asiatic serving people found their way into Egypt at this time and how they chanced to be available as domestic servants for private citizens…The ratio of women to men, which is here about three to one, might further suggest that they were the spoils of war taken during military campaigns or raids in which most of the local male population went down fighting. We know, however, of no large-scale Egyptian military operations in Western Asia at any time during the Middle Kingdom and certainly of none during the Thirteenth Dynasty.

By applying the New Chronology model for the SIP it is now possible to explain the quandaries highlighted by Hayes. The reduction in the male Asiatic population is not due to a series of (unattested) wars in the north but rather as a result of a deliberate policy on the part

of the Egyptian state to reduce the perceived Israelite threat by means of male infanticide (as described in Exodus 1:15-22). The origin of these foreigners is also explained: they entered Egypt in the years following the arrival of Jacob and his immediate brethren into the land of Goshen. During their long sojourn these disparate Asiatic groups…would gradually forge nationhood through the common burden of slavery under the late 13th Dynasty pharaohs.

Conclusion 25: The bonded Asiatic servants recorded in various documents of the 13th Dynasty (especially Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446) are to be identified with the mixed multitude of Asiatics who eventually left Egypt under the leadership of Moses (Exodus 12:38). The Israelite population descended from Jacob formed the major part of this group and a number of Hebrew/Israelite names can be recognised within the documents of the period (A Test of Time, p. 268-278).

Other evidence of the Israelites being in Egypt is the frequency of Egyptian names among the Israelites (Phineas, Hophni, Pashur and perhaps Hur and Merari). Moses is an abbreviated Egyptian name, meaning drawn or born from. It is seen in the names of pharaohs such as Thutmoses and Ra-moses or Ramses, meaning they were born from the gods Thoth and Ra. Moses may well have originally been named Hapi-moses, meaning drawn from the Nile god Hapi.

We have seen how the older view, based on the mention of the store city of Pi-Raamses in the Nile Delta, that the Exodus occurred in the reign of Ramses II of the 19th dynasty (dated conventionally around 1250 BC) is too late to allow sufficient time for the period of the Judges. Also, we have the mummy of Ramses the Great though the Bible indicates (Exodus 14:28, Psalms 106.9-11) that the pharaoh was included in the death of Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

The view that the Exodus took place in the mid 18th dynasty under the reigns of either Amenhotep II or Thutmose III (dated conventionally around the biblical date of 1445 BC for the Exodus) is also flawed as this dynasty was one of the most prosperous and documented dynasties of Egypt and there isn’t so much as a hint of the enormous catastrophe that befell Egypt at the time of the Exodus.

The 18th dynasty also ruled from southern Egypt in Thebes, not anywhere close to the Goshen area in the Delta. Also, we have the mummies of all the 18th dynasty pharaohs though the Bible indicates (Exodus 14:28, Psalms 106.9-11) that the pharaoh was included in the death of Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence supporting the Middle Kingdom being the time of the Israelites in Egypt and there is a great catastrophe documented at the end of the Middle Kingdom that matches the enormous catastrophe that befell Egypt at the time of the Exodus.

Beitak’s excavation at the site in the Nile Delta which he identifies as Avaris shows an Asiatic population from the 12th to 15th dynasties. The earlier group of Asiatics was much more Egyptianised than the culturally different later group and this is consistent with an order of the Israelites followed by the Hyksos.

Amongst the earlier group dated to the 12th and 13th dynasties there was a disproportionally higher number of women as well as a disproportionally higher number of infant burials consistent with the decree by the pharaoh to kill the Israelite male babies.

This disproportionally higher number of infant burials is also reflected at Kahun near the mudbrick pyramids in the Faiyum area. Kahun is a Hebrew name for priest and the mud brick pyramids of the Middle Kingdom are not replicated in any other time in Egypt’s history where stone was mainly used and these mud brick pyramids reinforced with straw match the building materials used by enslaved Israelites at the time of the Exodus.

Further support for a Middle Kingdom placement of the Exodus is found in the Brooklyn Papyrus dated to the reign of Sobekhotep of the mid to late 13th dynasty which documents a disproportionally higher number of Semitic slaves, some of which included biblical Israelite names such as Menahem, Isaachar, Asher and Shiphrah.

Bringing an end to this period of slavery was a catastrophe known as the plagues of Egypt for which we have two papyrii documenting dating from the late 13th dynasty. The Ipuwer Papyrus has an eeriely high number of statements that match the biblical record of the ten plagues. The slaves at Kahun leave suddenly according to Rosalie David, a situation that matches the biblical record of the Exodus.

The plagues of Egypt brought an end to the Middle Kingdom devastating Egypt leaving it vulnerable to the Asiatic Hyksos who conquered Egypt without a battle as noted by Manetho who then occupied the site Bietak identified as Avaris. Manetho says of them and this time:

Tutimaeus. In his reign, I know not why, a blast of God’s displeasure broke upon us. A people of ignoble origin from the east, whose coming was unforseen, had the audacity to invade the country, which they mastered by main force without difficulty or even a battle (Against Apion, I, 74-75).

Who were these mysterious invaders called the Hyksos? In chapter 2 of his seminal work “Ages in Chaos” Immanuel Velikovsky puts together much evidence in support of his view that the Hyksos were the same people that troubled the Israelites on the way to the Promised Land – the Amalekites. I quote some of his evidence below:

After the Amalekites reached Syria and Egypt they established a dynasty of their pharaohs. Al Samhudi (844-911) wrote:

“The Amalekites reached Syria and Egypt and took possession of these lands and the tyrants of Syria and the pharaohs of Egypt were of their origin.”

Masudi, who wrote about the plagues that befell Arabia and the flight of the Amalekites and the flood recounted also the conquest of Egypt by the Amalekites:

“An Amalekite king, el-Welid, son of Douma, arrived from Syria, invaded Egypt, conquered it, seized the throne and occupied it without opposition, his life long.”

We are reminded of the words of Manetho previously quoted “…without difficulty or even a battle”… Masudi continues:

“When this conqueror came to Syria he heard rumours about Egypt. He sent there one of his servants named Ouna with a great host of warriors. El-Welid oppressed the inhabitants, seized their possessions and drew forth all the treasures he could find…

“The Amalekites entered Egypt, destroyed many monuments and objects of art…The Amalekites invaded Egypt, the frontier of which they had already crossed and started to ravage the country…to smash the objects of art, to ruin the monument.”

These words recall those of Manetho, as cited by Josephus in “Against Apion” and quoted above:

“[The Hyksos] savagely burned the cities, razed the temples of the gods to the ground and treated the whole native population with the utmost cruelty.”

Abulfeda (1273-1331) in his history of pre-Islamic Arabia wrote:

“There were Egyptian Pharaohs of Amalekite descent”…

The problem of why, in the books of Joshua and Judges, which cover more than four hundred years, there is no mention of Egyptian domination over Canaan or any allusion to military expeditions headed by pharaohs has remain unsolved…

In harmony with this revised scheme the Amalekites must have been regarded as the mightiest among the nations.

Balaam, the sorcerer, was called upon to curse the Israelites approaching Moab on their way from the desert. He set his face toward the wilderness but instead of cursing, he blessed with these words:

NUMBERS 24:7 “His seed shall be in many waters and his king shall be higher than Agag and his kingdom shall be exalted.”

Agag [Agog] was the name of the Amalekite king…

NUMBERS 24:20 “And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable and said Amalek [is] the first of [among] the nations; but his latter end shall be that he perish for ever”…

The Amalekites are supposed to have been an unimportant band of robbers; why were they called “the first among the nations”...

The name of the king Agog is the only Amalekite name that the Scriptures have preserved. Besides the king Agog mentioned in the Book of Numbers there was another Amalekite king Agog, their last king, who reigned some 400 years later and was a contemporary with Saul.

In the history of Egypt the most frequently mentioned name of the Hyksos kings is Apop [or Apophis]. One of the first and most prominent of the Hyksos rulers was Apop; their last king of the Hyksos was also Apop [Apophis].

The early Hebrew written signs as they are preserved on the stele of Mesha show a striking resemblance between the letters g (gimel) and p (pei)…similar to the written number 7; the size of the angle between the two oblique lines consistutes the only difference…

The Song of Deborah, like the blessing of Balaam, is an old fragment. An obscure verse reads: “Out of Ephraim their root is in Amalek” (Judges 5:14)…The verse cited seems to mean that the strength of the Canaanites was based upon the support they received from the Amalekite citadel in the land of Ephraim.

The citadel is also mentioned in another verse of the Book of Judges: “Pirathon, in the land of Ephraim, in the mount of the Amalekites (Judges 12:15).

The Amalekites supported the Canaanites; this explains the reversal in the progress of the Israelite penetration into Canaan and their occasional status as vassals. The Amalekites ruled over vast territories and in their colonial politics allied themselves with kindred nations…

The dark age in the Near East continued as long as the supremacy of the Amalekites endured…Every effort on the part of the Israelites was doomed to failure as long as the Amalekites ruled northern Africa and Arabia up to the land of the Euphrates, as long as garrisons were stationed at fortified points scattered throughout many countries…

It was during this time that the saying was coined (Exodus 17:16): “…the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation…

According to Manetho as cited by Josephus (Against Apion, I, 84), the Hyksos period lasted 511 years. But in modern books on Egyptian history this period is drastically reduced (Ages in Chaos, p. 61-70).

The Hyksos period is given a length of about 235 years by Egyptologists today. Velikovsky believes that Josephus’ figure is inflated due to counting reigns of kings who may have reigned parallel to each other and believes the correct figure is about 400 years.

He believes that the mission God sent Saul on to avenge what Amalek did to Israel was an offensive war on the power base of the Hyksos and that King Agag, who was slain by Samuel after Saul disobeyed his orders from God, was the last Hyksos king Apop II [Apophis].

With the Amalekite power base broken, the native Theban dynasty was able to take back control over Egypt and the native Egyptians, during the 18th dynasty, were able to prosper and become a great power again.

Without the Amalekite support Israel was able, through the wars of Saul and David, to defeat the neighbouring nations that had held Israel down and Israel was able to expand to its greatest heights during the reign of Solomon.

The evidence that Velikovsky gives showing the clear connection between the Amalekites and the Hyksos adds further proof that the Exodus occurred in the transitional period at the end of the Middle Kingdom and the arrival of the Hyksos who ruled following the end of th 13th Dynasty.

Now there has been a rather persistent myth that has continued to be perpetuated that the slavery of the Israelites lasted some 400 years. This is based on a misunderstanding of Exodus 12:40 that says that the sojourning of Israel was 430 years. Notice carefully the word is sojourning not the word slavery.

Exodus 12:40-41: And the time that the sons of Israel sojourned in Egypt was 430 years. And it happened at the end of the 430 years, even on the selfsame day, all the armies of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.

Paul says in Galatians 3:16-17 that from Abraham when the promises were made till Mt Sinai and the giving of the law was the same period of time – 430 years.

Josephus further explains that the 430 years was from when Abraham came into Canaan till the Exodus and that from Jacob moving to Egypt till the Exodus was exactly half that period – 215 years which I have corrobarated in the bottom left of the above slide.

From that remaining 215 years you have to subtract the remaining 71 years of Joseph after his father moved to Egypt so in reality the slavery was probably not much more than 100 years at most. The Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) translates Exodus 12:40 this way:

The sojourning of the children and of their fathers, which they sojourned in the land of Canaan AND in the land of Egypt was four hundred and thirty years.

It’s interesting that it says that they left on the selfsame day as their forefather Abraham left the land of the Chaldees. It is quite fitting that Abraham came out of the land of the Chaldees on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread when the Israelites came out of Egypt, which pictures us coming out of this world and sin.

Who was the pharaoh of the Exodus? The inscription on the el-Arish monument pictured here says the name of the Pharaoh who perished in the Whirlpool was Thom or Toum.

“Now when the majesty of Ra-Harmachis fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the Place of the Whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his majesty. His majesty leaped into the Place of the Whirlpool…His Majesty......finds on this place called Pi-Kharoti.”

Pi-Kharoti is very similar to Pi-ha-hiroth where the Red Sea crossing was. One thing interesting on the el-Arish monument is the hieroglyph with three waves and two knives meaning cut or divided waters.

The Egyptian historian Manetho calls the name of the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt just before the invasion of the Hyksos "Tutimaeus or Timaios" which is similar to King Thom of the el-

Arish monument. One of the cities the Israelites built was called Pi-Thom after this king. Eusebius calls the pharoah of the Exodus Cencheres who Donovan Courville equates with Koncharis, the Sothis list name of a 13th dynasty pharaoah.

David Down has thrown another 13th dynasty, Neferhotep I pictured below, into the ring as another contender for the Pharoah of the Exodus. Remember that the Egyptian pharoahs went by many different names.

Another fascinating item I got to see when I was in Athens, was the famous Mycenae funeral stelas which are first things you see when entering the main museum in Athens. Simcha Jacobovici in his documentary “The Exodus Decoded” makes a compelling case that most people have not recognised for what he believes it really is – a visual representation of the crossing of the Red Sea. You can see swirling spirals in the top and bottom most likely representing a body of water. In the middle is a figure on a chariot and a man on higher ground facing him with a spear or staff. The museum label says:

The upper and lower panels are filled with spirals while the central panel has a chariot pulled by a galloping horse and driven by a standing charioteer. In front of the horse is a second male figure that appears to be attacking the chariot with the spear held in his raised right hand.

It’s very similar to the scene here with Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea, one of the most dramatic scenes ever seen. Whenever I think of the Red Sea crossing I have etched into my mind that scene from the “Ten Commandments” and Charleton Heston saying “Behold his mighty hand!”

It has to be remembered that it was probably a lot wider than we see here. It was probably at least a mile wide to allow 2 million people to cross. Author and historian Steven Collins believe that many Israelites settled in Greece soon after this time which could be part of the reason why a second census was called for.

So where was the Mount Sinai where they travelled to and received the law on route to the Promised Land? Traditional views place it in the south of the Sinai peninsula but a couple of things in the Bible tell us otherwise.

Remember that Moses had fled to the land of Midian where God appeared to Him in the burning bush on Mount Sinai. There is universal agreement that Midian was in Saudi Arabia. Paul is quite plain about its location in Galatians 4:25 where he says “For this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia.”

We are told in the book of Exodus that they didn’t go by the way of the Philistines along the sea but by the way of the wilderness of Sinai (Exodus 13:17-18) and then God told

Moses to take a turn towards the Red Sea in a place where they would be boxed in by mountains (Exodus 14:2-3).

One thing we have to remember is that much climate and topgraphical change has occurred since this time and that the Sinai was not completely arid as it is at this time. C.

C. Robertson explains in his book “On the Track of the Exodus” that:

The great CENTRAL PLATEAU forming the basin of the River El Arish provided AMPLE PASTURE LAND. Leone Caetani holds that the El Arish was a GREAT STREAM within historic times. Although desert country extended to east and west, there would be pasture and arable land like the country south of Gaza at the present day, where the barley harvest is enormous (p.15-16).

Not only did the people need sustenance, by manna and quail, but also the livestock needed sustenance.

There is no place near the left arm of the Red Sea where the Israelites would have been boxed in by mountains but there are such places on the right arm known as the Gulf of Aqaba.

Two theories about the location of the Red Sea crossing focus on the Gulf of Aqaba.

One places the crossing at the bottom of the Gulf of Aqaba but this is highly unlikely as stripped of water the sea floor has jagged coral and a plunging cliffs.

The other theory places the crossing point mid way along the Gulf where there is this enormous beach called Nuweiba.

As you can see there is just a narrow part in to it and it is boxed in by mountains. They were told to camp between Migdol (meaning tower) and Pi-Ha-hiroth which means mouth of the gorges.

One discovery made on this beach was this column. According to Ron Wyatt when he was in Saudi Arabia a second column was found on the opposite side with the following words in Phoenician letters: “Mizraim (Egypt), Solomon, Edom, death, Pharaoh, Moses, Yahweh”.

Diving excursions along this proposed crossing site have uncovered discoveries such as these coral encrusted objects that appear in the shape of chariot wheels. The one on the left is from the Nuweiba beach side. The one on the right and bottom was independently found on the other side.

Of special interest was this very fragile gilded chariot wheel that has the same colour of electrum, a mixture of gold and silver, which was common in Egypt.

On either side of this proposed crossing site the depth of the sea is up to a mile deep, however, at the proposed crossing site there is an underwater land bridge. After I heard Ron Wyatt make this claim I read a counter article saying there is no such underwater land bridge.

After that I ran across a DVD called “The Exodus Revealed” that provided independent confirmation that this underwater land bridge does indeed exist showing underwater footage of how shallow and suitable it would be to walk across when stripped of water. One can see how sand and sediment washed down through the gorges created the enormous beach at Nuweiba and one can also see how this would have extended out to the sea floor.

Now which mountain in Arabia today is the true Mount Sinai? The mountain with the strongest traditional links to being Mount Sinai in Arabia is Jabal Al-Lawz which has a blackened peak and a large plain in front of it.

Near the base of the mountain is this absolutely extraordinary rock that is split in two and has clear evidence of strong water erosion at its base. It really is absolutely amazing and a fantastic proof of what it says happened here in the Bible!

Nearby is this levelled stone platform that resembles an altar that has many Egyptian- styled bull petroglyphs on it.

Here is a view of the area looking down from the top of the mountain. In yellow is the campsite. In front of it you see photoshopped in a small river where an ancient river bed is today. In purple is the altar platform from the previous slide and the great split rock is to the right of it.

According to Hebrew tradition all nations heard the roaring of the lawgiving (Exodus 20). At Mount Sinai the sound that "sounded long" rose 10 times; in this roaring the Israelites heard the Ten Commandments. According to the Babylonian Talmud:

These words [of the Decalogue]...were not heard by Israel alone, but by the inhabitants of all the earth.. The Divine voice divided itself into the 70 tongues of men, so that all might understand it...The souls of the heathen almost fled from them when they heard it."

There is much evidence supporting the biblical story of the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt as well as much evidence showing that this event occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom (end of the 13th dynasty) and not during the 18th or the 19th dynasties.

CHAPTER 3 – WHO WAS JOSEPH’S PHARAOH?

Now that we have established that the Exodus occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom do we have evidence in Egypt’s history for the major influence that the patriarch Joseph had on Egypt that we read of in the Biblical record?

If we were to look for Joseph in the history of Egypt exactly where and when can we expect to find him?

Prior to the invasion of the Hyksos were Dynasties 12 and 13 and they are known as the Middle Kingdom. According to Josephus there were 215 years between the settling of Jacob in Egypt and the Exodus.

By working back we can see that the logical time in Egypt’s history for the time of Joseph would be some time in the 12th dynasty but where in the 12th dynasty do we find the time for Joseph’s amazing ascension to power as vizier and which pharaoh was the one who’s dreams Joseph interpreted and who appointed Joseph as vizier?

The conventional chronology places the time of Joseph to the middle of the Hyksos rule somewhere around the transition between the 14th and 15th dynasties. Those who accept the older view of the Exodus being during the reign of Ramses the Great would place the time of Joseph to the latter part of the Hyksos rule.

David Rohl and Donovan Courville have proposed two different rulers of the 12th dynasty for being the pharaoh who promoted Joseph to being vizier over Egypt. Let’s firstly look at the evidence offered by David Rohl who writes:

So we have established that the Sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt began in c.1662 BC - according to Genesis 45:6 during the second year of the great famine. Eight years earlier, in 1670, Joseph was appointed vizier of Egypt at the age of thirty [Genesis 41:46]. Thirteen years before his sudden elevation to the highest office in the Black Land, the seventeen- year-old Hebrew had been brought into Egypt to be sold into slavery by Midianite caravaneers [Genesis 37:2]. Joseph's arrival in Egypt can then be dated to around 1683 BC.

Who was ruling Egypt in the years from 1683 to 1662 in the New Chronology? To answer that question we must return to our astronomically derived date for Neferhotep I of the 13th Dynasty and then work our way back through the king-list of the Royal Canon.

Although column VI of the Royal Canon is extremely fragmentary, it is possible to determine that Neferhotep was the twenty-first ruler in the list following the last pharaoh of the 12th Dynasty - Queen Neferusobek. Only about half of the reign lengths for the early 13th Dynasty survive in the damaged papyrus, but, from the fifteen (of the first thirty-six) that do, we can calculate an average reign duration of five years in this particular period.

So, if we assign five years each to the fifteen missing reign lengths prior to Neferhotep in the Canon, then add the five extant reign lengths and the six years recorded at column VI:4, when there was no king ruling Egypt, we arrive at a total of approximately ninety-two years between the end of the 12th Dynasty and the first regnal year of Neferhotep (15 x 5 = 75 + 3 + 0.3 + 2 + 3 + 2.3 = 85.6 + 6 = 91.6).

As in the New Chronology Year 1 of Neferhotep fell in c.1540 BC, then the 13th Dynasty must have begun in around 1632 BC. Joseph, appointed to office in 1670, was therefore a 12th Dynasty vizier. But under which king precisely? Finding an answer to this question is a little tricky because we need to consider the chronological effects of the practice of co-regency which appears to have been in use during the Middle Kingdom.

There is some convincing evidence to suggest that most of the years of the reigns of the last two rulers of the 12th Dynasty should be subsumed into the long reign of Amenemhat III. In other words, King Amenemhat IV and Queen Neferusobek - both offspring of Amenemhat III

• were junior co-regents of their father, Queen Neferusobek perhaps only surviving as sole pharaoh for two to three years beyond her father's death.

  Amenemhat III probably reigned for a grand total of forty-seven years and so we can estimate that his reign would have begun around fifty years before the end of the dynasty. His accession year can then be assigned to c.1682 BC. With Joseph becoming vizier in c.1670 BC, it must have been King Amenemhat III who raised the Hebrew slave up to the highest political office in the land.

  Conclusion 38: Joseph, son of Jacob, was vizier of Egypt during the reign of Amenemhat III, the most powerful pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom and continued in office through the reigns of the first rulers of the 13th dynasty.

  According to the traditional history of Genesis, Joseph's appointment was marked by a seven-year period of abundance and prosperity in the Nile valley (1670-1664) when Egypt enjoyed bumper harvests. This was then followed by seven years of disastrous famine which must have begun in around 1663 BC - that is Year 20 of Amenemhat III in the New Chro- nology. The Israelites then arrived in Egypt a year later in 1662 BC. So, can we find any evidence for famine at this period in the reign of King Amenemhat?

  BELOW: Semitic settlers journey to Egypt as depicted on the wall of the tomb of Ameni at Beni Hassan during the 12th dynasty. Were these the family of Jacob and their servants?

  

  During the Middle Kingdom the pharaohs constructed a series of forts along the length of the Second Cataract in southern Nubia. The purpose of these military strongholds was to protect Egypt's new African frontier and to act as launching stations for military campaigns and trading expeditions into Africa. Upstream from the Second Cataract was the kingdom of Kush. The Egyptians were constantly at war with their southern neighbours and many of the 12th Dynasty rulers undertook military campaigns beyond the Second Cataract fortresses.

  The southernmost Egyptian bastions were located either side of the Nile, at the start of the cataract, where the desert escarpment encroaches into the valley on both sides leaving a

  narrow rocky defile. On the western ridge stood the citadel of Semna and on the east side the twin stronghold of Kumma. Between them, in the narrow gorge (now submerged under Lake Nasser), the white waters of the Nile used to dance northwards along their rocky course towards Egypt. In summer the annual Nile flood raised the river into a fast-flowing torrent many metres higher than that of the regular low Nile. This was an ideal spot to monitor the level of the Nile inundation, and for a brief period the Egyptians did precisely that.

  For about sixty years, starting in the reign of Amenemhat III and lasting down into the early 13th Dynasty, the highest point to which the Nile flood reached in a given year was marked by a short hieroglyphic inscription on the rock face...

  The first question scholars asked was why these inscriptions were made in the first place? What was different about the inundations of the late Middle Kingdom to require that they should be so closely monitored?

  Why were only about a third of the inundations of the period recorded? Even allowing for lost or destroyed texts, it did not seem as though the Egyptians made a record for every year. Why were there no inscriptions at all on the rocks from the years immediately following Year 8 of Senuseret III when the fortresses were first garrisoned? To find out what prompted scholars to believe that these inscriptions were abnormal we must determine what was regarded as a ‘good inundation' level during the Middle Kingdom and then compare that level to the records of high Niles in the Semna Gorge.

  In the reign of Senuseret I (near the beginning of the 12th Dynasty) we are told that a ‘good flood' reached a level of twenty-one and a half cubits (11.3 metres) at the island of Elephantine (Egy. Abu, at modern Aswan). This compares well with inundations of modern times (prior to the construction of the Aswan Dams). Lepsius noted that the high water level at Semna in the 1840s was nearly twelve metres above the low water level. In other words the river surface rose by twelve metres in the peak month of inundation (August) as it passed through the gorge.

  When we compare this to the late Middle Kingdom levels recorded on the rock face we get a bit of a shock. The average high Nile level in this period was nineteen metres above the low water mark! So, there appears to have been a very dramatic rise in the Nile flood levels in the reign of Amenemhat III compared to those recorded in the early Middle Kingdom and in modern times.

  The evidence from Semna indicates that, during the first two decades of Amenemhat's reign, the Egyptians observed a rise in the flood levels to about the seventeen-metre mark (probably beginning in Year 3) - an increase of about five metres above the norm for the previous period. This may not have been problematical for the agriculture of the Nile valley and, indeed, may have been considered a ‘very good flood' bringing extra silt and expanding the area of cultivation to its maximum extent. However, a seventeen-metre flood was probably right on the edge of calamity.

  By Amenemhat's twentieth year the picture drastically changes. For the next twelve years or so the flood levels at Semna rise to an average height of twenty-one metres - some nine metres above the ‘good flood' level of Senuseret I, and four further metres above the very high Niles of the previous two decades of Amenemhat's reign. This extra four metres may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

  Barbara Bell, an American specialist in the ancient climates, convincingly argues that these great floods - bringing three to four times the volume of water compared to a normal inundation - would almost certainly have led to a period of famine. If the inundation rises above a certain level it can wash away villages, break down dykes and causeways, and flood temples, tombs and palaces; but worst of all, if the period of the rise is sustained as is the case in a normal inundation, then the waters take much longer to subside and, as a result, the fields cannot be made ready for the planting season.

  Bell highlights various aspects of late Middle Kingdom history and culture which indicate that Egypt was indeed suffering great trials and tribulations in this era. For example:

  The faces of the statues of Kings Senuseret III and Amenemhat III are well known for their stern, careworn demeanour. Egyptologist and art historian William Smith writes:

  “The dominating quality of these (statue) heads is that of an intelligent consciousness of a ruler's responsibilities and an awareness of the bitterness which this can bring ... A brooding seriousness appears even in the face of the young Amenemhet III ... it is immediately apparent that this man lived in a different time from that which produced the serene confidence of the people of the Old Kingdom.”

  In one of his more speculative moments, Pierre Montet pondered whether these sad heads portrayed some kind of premonition of impending collapse in pharaonic authority and presaged an end to their magnificent dynasty.

  Perhaps Amenemhet III had sensed that his family and all Egypt were to fall on evil days and the sculptors of Karnak caught these forebodings.

  Bell, however, suggests that the ‘erratic behaviour of the Nile, evidenced by the Semna inscriptions' may have been the real cause of the anxiety etched on the faces of these pharaohs. In the New Chronology, the second decade of Amenemhat III's reign (con- temporary with the fourth decade of Senuseret III) was the time of Joseph's prophecy relating to the oncoming famine - ample reason, I believe, for concern on the part of the co- regent pharaohs.

  During the time of the high Nile floods (extending down into the early 13th Dynasty) we begin to see, for the first time, the appearance of the crocodile god, Sobek, in the names of the pharaohs. So Amenemhat III's daughter and future co-regent is called Sobekkare Sobekneferure ('Sobek is the spirit of Re' and 'Sobek is the perfect form of Re') and in the next dynasty we find that the most common nomen is Sobekhotep ('Sobek is satisfied'), carried by at least six rulers.

  The great crocodile god was intimately associated with the River Nile and this royal emphasis upon his cult does suggest some tangible concern over the water levels of the great river and perhaps reflects, in Barbara Bell's words, ‘a desire (on the part of Pharaoh) to propitiate this water god'.

  Bell also invokes the political history of the early 13th Dynasty, arguing that the remarkable series of very short reigns which follow that of Amenemhat III reflect the unstable situation brought about by the erratic inundations.

  If we now put all this into the historical context revealed by the New Chronology, a very attractive picture begins to emerge.

  The book of Genesis tells us that Joseph arrived in Egypt as a prisoner of Midianite caravaneers and was sold into slavery. According to the New Chronology this happened during the reign of Senuseret III. Whilst Joseph served in the household of Potiphar (a commander in the armed forces) Senuseret III's son, Amenemhat III, was crowned co- regent. The young Hebrew slave was then thrown into prison for several years (accused of molesting the wife of his Egyptian master). In Amenemhat's thirteenth year Joseph was released from prison and elevated to the position of vizier as a reward for his interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams.

  Joseph, the seer, had predicted first a period of plenty for Egypt lasting seven years. The number seven, of course, is again one of those biblical numbers (like the number 40) which has a traditional significance. This period of plenty (which according to the Nile records seems to have commenced before Joseph's elevation to the vizierate and then continued for a further seven years) represents symbolically the years of the seventeen metre floods at Semna which, once adjusted to, would have produced very generous crop yields in the Nile valley proper.

  At the end of the second decade in Amenemhat's reign the annual floods suddenly rose to twenty-one metres at Semna and the inundation of the Nile valley continued to drown the land for weeks beyond its due time of recession (assuming the period of rising of the waters to have followed the usual pattern). Seed could not be planted and so the harvest was badly affected. A severe famine would have rapidly ensued if Joseph had not previously persuaded the king to store vast quantities of grain harvested during the period of plenty.

  The local chieftains of the Nomes (i.e. the 'Nomarchs'), having failed to take Joseph's warning seriously soon found their own grain silos exhausted. As Genesis 47:20 informs us, these local bigwigs were then forced to sell their land holdings to Pharaoh. The power of the nomarchs was broken and the palace administration became the sole authority in the Black Land.

  This fundamental political transformation is readily apparent in the late Middle Kingdom. Some time in the reign of Senuseret III the grand tombs of the nomarchs ceased to be built in Middle Egypt. Egyptologists have, in the past, generally recognised this as signalling the diminution of the authority of a semi-independent nobility and the return of political control to the kingship.

  In accordance with the scenario being developed here, I would continue to see this as a period of momentous political change in which Joseph's agrarian policy had a direct and lasting impact. By monopolising the Egyptian grain supply, the Asiatic vizier had brought the nobility cap in hand to the palace and had provided the 12th Dynasty co-regents, Senuseret III and Amenemhat III, with the means to control the powerful baronies.

  Conclusion 39: The extremely high Niles recorded at Semna Gorge from the 20th year of Amenemhat III were the root cause of the severe famine in Egypt which played a major part in the Joseph story (Genesis 40-41) (A Test of Time, p.332-342).

  One of the more interesting structures uncovered by Beitak in his excavations at the site he identified as Avaris was what appeared to be a large palace. There’s a reasonably good chance that this may have been built for Joseph. Before we look at Donovan Courville’s evidence for an earlier pharoah in the 12th dynasty being Joseph’s pharaoh let’s have a look at David Rohl’s description of this palace that may have been Joseph’s residence in the Goshen region of the Nile Delta:

  Let us now concentrate on the archaeological site at Tell ed-Daba designated by Bietak as Area F. There, lying on top of the century-old ruins of the workmen's town, the Austrians unearthed a large Egyptian-style palace, to which was attached a beautiful garden.30 The pottery and stratigraphy indicated that the palace had been built during the early 13th Dynasty. This fine residence clearly either belonged to a local eastern delta ruler or was the home and private estate of a very important official.

  Once this splendid structure had been removed by the archaeologists, a much smaller villa was revealed immediately below the heart of the 13th Dynasty palace. This earlier building was of Syrian design classified by the archaeologists as a 'Mittelsaal Haus' ('central hall house').

  The modest villa represented the first `residence' built at Rowarty on the southern turtleback. The tombs located in the garden of the Mittelsaal Haus contained Asiatic grave goods confirming that the occupants also originated in the Levant. The Syrian villa has been dated by Bietak to the late 12th Dynasty - in other words to the time of Jacob's arrival in Egypt according to the New Chronology. Everything fits. This surely has to be the residence of Jacob, built and planned in the tradition of his original homeland...

  

  Let us take a wander around the palace built for Joseph's retreat. We enter via an impressive portico of nine columns. Straight ahead are a pair of entrances leading into two identical suites of rooms. This may be an accommodation area for guests, or perhaps audience rooms (although this seems unlikely given the double configuration). It also occurred to me that, in the situation postulated here where the palace is identified as that belonging to Joseph, these twin sites of chambers may represent the quarters of Joseph's two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. When they had reached marriageable age they would have needed accommodation for their families and these apartments might have been built precisely for that purpose. The double suite was probably an addition to the original building which we are now about to enter.

  At the western and eastern ends of the entrance portico two passages lead around the twin suites and into an enclosed courtyard fronting the main residence. This charming private court is surrounded on three sides by slender columns which support the roof of a cloister. On the fourth and principal side of the court stands a second portico, this time supported by twelve stouter columns (representing the twelve sons of Jacob?) which fronts the great hall of the palace. Architect Dieter Eigner has determined that the court was erected after the twin suites but almost certainly also after the main palace building. I would suggest that the great hall was constructed first, followed by the twin suites and finally the courtyard which was built to integrate the two original elements of the complex.

  As we enter the hall, the beautiful blues and greens of the painted brick floor reflect and diffuse the indirect sunlight coming from the court. The cool colours reach into the darker recesses of the chamber creating a relaxing ambience. Four large columns stretch up to support the roof at the centre of the hall. This is where Joseph and his family received visitors and where petitioners came to seek an audience with the great vizier.

  Joseph's own bedchamber is located next to the main hall and can be visited on our tour. A doorway set in the north-east wall of the hall leads into the private sleeping quarters of the vizier and his wife Asenat. At the far end of a large narrow room the archaeologists unearthed the actual plinth upon which Joseph slept. It is an impressive size - a fitting resting place for the `interpreter of dreams'. To the rear of the hall another doorway leads into two rooms, one of which was apparently the dressing-room of the vizier. Just think, it was in this little chamber that Joseph kept his wardrobe full of coats of many colours!

  The palace is not grandiose or ostentatious either in size or layout, but it is a fine villa for a man who has done well for himself during his active lifetime. In the peaceful garden to the south - furnished with its ornamental pool, shady trees and flower beds -Joseph passed his remaining years in the company of his sons, their wives and his grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Eventually, after a prolonged and fruitful life, he was placed in the tomb long since prepared for him within the garden he had so much enjoyed during his retirement. Joseph was laid to rest amongst his brethren, at the very heart of the Israelite settlement. The garden tomb had already been surrounded by the graves of his elder brothers before the Patriarch was interred there (A Test of Time, p. 355-358).

  

  

  

  David Rohl believes that the downturned faces of Sesostris III and Amenemhat III are the result of a sad anxiety from the stress of the times brought on by famine. Is this true or are they more indicative of those pharaohs being mean-spirited, tyrannical pharaohs?

  David Down, who supports Donovan Courville’s chronology, suggests the latter and that these two pharaohs were respectively the pharaoh “who knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8-14) and enslaved the Israelites and the pharaoh who had all the male Israelite babies killed (Exodus 1:15-22).

  David Rohl, in his evidence above, uses an approximation of the correct time and circumstancial evidence of times of famine to support his choice of Amenemhat III as Joseph’s pharaoh.

  Donovan Courville has evidence supporting much of the 13th dynasty running parallel as a secondary line of rulers with the 12th dynasty before taking over as the primary line following the end of the 12th dynasty. This would mean Joseph’s pharaoh would be an earlier pharaoh than Amenemhat III. Courville chooses Sesostris I, the fourth pharoah before Amenemhat III and second pharaoh of the 12th dynasty as Joseph’s pharaoh.

  Courville has inscriptional evidence supporting a major famine in the days of Sesostris I with details that match the famine in Joseph’s time. There are also two famine inscriptions in the tombs of officials by the names of Ameni and Bebi which speak of a famine of many years and also speak of food being collected in advance of the famine.

  Donovan Courville in his book “The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications” dates these two inscriptions to the time of Sesostris I in the 12th dynasty. Courville writes the following of this third pillar equating the pharaoh of Joseph to Sesostris I:

  Sesostris I was the second king of the XIIth Dynasty. A famine inscription from the reign of this king appears in the tomb of one Ameni who dates the record in the 25th year of his own official capacity and in the 43rd year of the reign of king Sesostris I under whom he served.

  The famine may then be dated at some point in the last 27 years of the reign of this king since he reigned 45 years in total. The translation of the original account of this famine is provided to us by Brugsch, and that part of the lengthy inscription which is of interest here reads:

  ”No child of the poor did I afflict, no widow did I oppress, no landowner did I displace; no herdsmen did I drive away; from no small farmer did I take away his men for my own works.

  “No one was unhappy in my days, not even in the years of famine. For I had tilled all the fields of the nome of Mah, up to its southern and northern frontiers. Thus I prolonged the life of its inhabitants and preserved the food which it produced. No hungry man was in it. I distributed equally to the widow as to the married woman. I did not prefer the great to the humble in all that I gave away.”

  This inscription meets the criteria for the famine of Joseph's time in three major aspects. The famine lasted a plurality of years; preparation was made in advance to meet the famine by the gathering of food, and this food was distributed during the years of famine.

  Since the details are so strikingly like those provided in the Scriptures for the famine of Joseph, it would seem strange if historians had not considered the possibility of such an identity. The comments of Brugsch on this inscription are hence of more than common interest. He wrote:

  ”The concluding words of this inscription, in which Ameni sings his own praises, have given rise to the idea that they contain an allusion to the sojourn of the patriarch Joseph in Egypt and to the seven years of famine under his administration. But two reasons especially tell against this supposition, which would recognize in Usertasen I, the Pharaoh of Joseph. First there is the difference in time, which cannot be made to agree with the days of Joseph, and next, still more, the indisputable fact that, in other inscriptions...years of famine are mentioned which thoroughly correspond as to facts and time with the Biblical account.”

  It is quite apparent that the reasons given by Brugsch for rejecting the identification of the famine of Ameni's inscription with that of the Scriptural Joseph are based on the acceptance of the traditional chronlogy of Egypt which would require a famine during the late Hyksos period or in the early XVIIIth Dynasty. A famine in the early XIIth Dynasty must then be considered as far out of line with the expected position for the era of Joseph. When, however, the Exodus is placed at the only point in Egyptian history which meets the specifications of the Exodus story, there is no discrepancy in the matter of time when Sesostris I (Usertasen I) is made contemporary with Joseph. Hence Brugsch's first objection does not hold.

  It must be admitted that there is another reference to extended famine in the Egyptian inscriptions. It is presumed that Brugsch had primary reference to the famine inscription of Beba (Bebi), which was found in the tomb of this personage, since it is this inscription which he later quotes in support of a famine in the XVIIth Dynasty. That part of the inscription of Beba referring to an extended famine reads:

  ”I collected corn as a friend of the harvest god. I was watchful at the time of sowing. And when the famine arose lasting many years, I distributed corn to the city each year of the famine.”

  Brugsch comments as follows on this inscription in support of his dating in the era of the XVIIth Dynasty as demanded by the popular theories of the Exodus:

  ”Not the smallest doubt can be raised as to whether the last words of the inscription relate to an historical fact or not; to something definite, or to something only general. However strongly we may be inclined to recognise a general way of speaking in the narrative of Ameni where ‘years of famine’ are spoken of, just as strongly does the context of the present statement compel us to refer this record of ‘a famine lasting many years’ to an epoch historically defined.

  “Now since famines succeeding one another on account of deficiency of water in the overflowing of the Nile are of the very greatest rarity, and history knows and mentions only one example, namely, the seven years' famine under the Pharaoh of Joseph;—since Baba (or, if one prefers to say, the Babas, for the most part the contemporaries of the Thirteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties) lived and worked under the native king Ra-Sekenen Taa III in the ancient city of El-Kab about the same times in which Joseph exercised his office under one of the Hyksos kings; — there remains for a satisfactory conclusion but one fair inference that the many years of famine in the days of Baba must exactly correspond to the seven years of famine under Joseph's Pharaoh, who was one of the Shepherd Kings[sic].”

  Brugsch's error in presuming that this inscription is to be dated in the XVIIth Dynasty under King Sekenenra was later pointed out by Vandier, who commented on the dating of this inscription in the following words (as translated from the French):

  ”The second text is found in another tomb of El Kab, quite near to the aforementioned one. Brugsch dates this tomb in the XVIlth Dynasty, but gives no reason for his choice. At El Kab, the most ancient tombs are located high on the slope to the north. This is the case with that of Sebek-Nakht and that of Bebi, with which we are here concerned and which I believe can be dated impartially in the Xlllth Dynasty. If it was of the XVIlth Dynasty, it would be located much lower, near the tomb of Ahmose and that of Paheri. Tylor, in his introduction to the tomb of Sebek-Nakht, spoke incidentally of the tomb of Bebi, and stated that the two tombs are very much more ancient than all the others which he also regarded as contemporaneous.”

  It is thus clear that the second objection offered by Brugsch for the rejection of the identity of the famine of Ameni with that of Joseph's time also fails to hold, for the inscription of Bebi on which Brugsch depended to provide a famine record as demanded by the traditional theories of the Exodus had obviously been misdated by him and properly belongs to a much earlier era.

  With the recognition that the famine inscription of Bebi belongs to a much earlier era than Dynasty XVII, which was estimated to be that of Dynasty XIII, it follows from the rarity of extended famines in the Nile Valley that the famine of Bebi is quite the same famine as that of Ameni's inscription and is properly to be dated in the era of the early XIIIth Dynasty which must have been contemporary with the early XIIth.

  While it is true that there are other inscriptions referring to famine in Egypt, those of Bebi and Ameni are the only ones which have been suggested as that of Joseph's time and the only ones which meet the general criteria of the Scriptural account (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, Volume 1, p.134-136).

  Another famine inscription that explicitly refers to seven years is the Hungry Rock inscription at that First Cataract at Aswan that claims the famine occurred in the reign of Djoser of the 3rd dynasty.

  The account dates from a very late period - possibly from the reign of Ptolemy V (Epiphanes), who lived in the first century BC. The inscription records the famine as a historical fact, placing it in the 18th year of Djoser. The inscription purports to date from Djoser’s time, though this is generally dismissed. Nevertheless, it may well be a copy of an extremely ancient record. I’d like to quote now from John Keyser’s article “Joseph And The Engineering Wonders Of Egypt!” for his comments about this inscription:

  The biblical story of SEVEN YEARS of famine was not at all unusual in Egypt. Many inscriptions speak about famines in the land, and at least two officials, giving glowing summaries of their good deeds on the walls of their tombs, tell of distributing food to the hungry "in each year of want." One inscription that Herman L. Hoeh of Ambassador College latched upon to prove his particular arrangement of the Egyptian dynasties, is that written under Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty. Carved on a rock on the island of Siheil near the First Cataract of the Nile, the inscription reads, in part, as follows:

  

  “I was in distress on the Great Throne, and those who are in the palace were in Heart's affliction from a very great evil, since the Nile had not come in my time for a space of seven years. Grain was scant, fruits were dried up, and everything which they eat was short....The infant was wailing; the youth was waiting; the heart of the old man was in sorrow....The courtiers were in need. The temples were shut up....Every(thing) was found empty” -- Translated by J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 31.

  That this particular famine was NOT the one of Joseph's time is evidenced by a number of observations. First of all, the reign of Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty was far TOO EARLY to coincide with Joseph's sojourn in Egypt -- there are many factors that PROVE the time of the bondage and exodus was in the MIDDLE KINGDOM…NOT the time of Djoser!

  Also, famines of seven year's duration are not uncommon in Egyptian history. G. Ernest Wright notes "that seven-year famines [plural] were otherwise known in Egypt" (Biblical Archaeology, p. 53). The text of the inscription at the First Cataract states that Djoser's Prime Minister was Ii-em-(ho)tep, the son of Ptah -- NOT Zaphenath-paneah or Joseph! Ii-em-(ho)tep (or Imhotep) was famous in Egyptian history, and later became deified.

  Finally, in reading the inscription, we learn that the "seven lean years...by a contractual arrangement between pharaoh and a god, were TO BE FOLLOWED BY YEARS OF PLENTY." (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 31).

  The Bible plainly shows that SEVEN YEARS OF PLENTY WERE TO BE FOLLOWED BY SEVEN YEARS OF FAMINE -- not the other way around!

  To top this off, there is some question regarding the authenticity of this inscription -- James Pritchard notes that "it is a question whether it is a PRIESTLY FORGERY of some later period, justifying their claim to territorial privileges, or whether it correctly recounts an actual grant of land more than 2,500 years earlier. This question cannot be answered in final terms." (Ibid., p. 31)

  There are a couple of other factors that discount this famine from being the one in Joseph’s time.

  In the text of the inscription noted in the last quote it states “The courtiers were in need. The temples were shut up....Every(thing) was found empty”. This differs from Joseph’s famine as there was sufficient grain preserved in the granaries to last the famine. The granaries weren’t empty.

  Emmett Sweeney, who supports the Hungry Rock inscription as being a record of Joseph’s famine writes:

  Chetwynd points to the grants of land and the levy of tithes in both accounts. From the Egyptian story we hear that “The King endowed Khnum and his priesthood with 20 shoinoi, or measures, of land, on each bank of the river.” This is compared with the biblical “And Pharaoh said to Joseph: I will give you the best of the land of Egypt and you shall eat the fat of the land.” (Gen. 47:22)

  The whole question of social reforms under Joseph’s administration, including land ownership and tithes, is of course of the utmost importance, and ties in with reforms and rituals traditionally associated with Imhotep.

  Chetwynd also emphasises parallels between the cult of Imhotep and the enduring reputation of Joseph, as well as the role of magic, dreams and oracles in the traditions surrounding both men…

  Imhotep’s other title/position, that of high priest of Heliopolis (On), also presents no real problem. Indeed, here there is a direct affirmation of biblical tradition about Joseph: for we are told that pharaoh married him to Asenath, daughter of the High Priest of Heliopolis, who is named Potiphar (Gen. 41:45) (The Genesis of Israel and Egypt, p?).

  Imhotep, the vizier of Joseph, was a High Priest. While married to the daughter of the High Priest, Joseph was never a priest nor could the Israelites be referred to as “his priesthood” who received land on either side of the Nile in the reference to land grants mentioned by Sweeney. Imhotep was deified by the Egyptians. It is very unlikely they would do this to a foreign Israelite especially after the Israelites were enslaved so soon after. The vizier of Sesostris I, Mentuhotep, who Courville believes was Joseph has great titles like those bestowed on Joseph is never referred to as a priest.

  Another piece of evidence supporting Sesostris I with the pharaoh who appointed Joseph as vizier is the likeness of the powers and titles bestowed on Sesostris I’s vizier Mentuhotep compared with those bestowed by the pharaoh on Joseph. Donovan Courville writes the following on this:

  Our reasoning has now led us into a situation which demands that we recognize in the vizier of Sesostris I the person of Joseph of the Scriptures. The term vizier is one which is applied to the second man in the kingdom next to the king. When Joseph was elevated from his recent prison experience to take over the responsibility of preparing for the coming famine, the position given him, as clearly described, is that of vizier. Pharaoh said to Joseph at that time:

  ”Forasmuch as God hath skewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art. Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled; only in the throne will I be greater than thou.”

  The vizier of Sesostris I, who occupied this position second only to the king, is perhaps the most familiar figure in the Egyptian records of the many who held this office through the era of the Pharaohs. This fact makes possible a rather critical scrutiny of this identification which is demanded by the proposed reconstruction.

  The vizier of Sesostris I was known to the Egyptians as Mentuhotep. The extraordinary powers which were granted to Mentuhotep are clearly those also granted to Joseph. The vizier to the king of Egypt had powers which were great, irrespective of which one is under consideration, but the powers granted specifically to our Mentuhotep were so strikingly great that Breasted was prompted to comment on this point in the following words:

  ”When he [the vizier] also held the office of chief treasurer, as did the powerful vizier Mentuhotep under Sesostris I, the account which he could give of himself...read like the declaration of the king's powers.”

  This is quite the same picture of Joseph's authority as stated in Scripture.

  ”See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph’s hand and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; And he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him; Bow the knee; and he made him ruler over all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt.

  Speaking of Mentuhotep, Brugsch commented:

  ”In a word, our Mentohotep, who was also invested with several priestly dignities, and was Pharaoh's treasurer, appears as the alter ego of the king. ‘When he arrived, the great personages bowed down before him at the outer door of the royal palace.’"

  ”An examination of the inscriptions relative to Mentuhotep, which gave rise to the remarkable statements of Breasted, shows us that Mentuhotep carried, among others, the following titles: ‘Vizier, Chief Judge, Overseer of the Double Granary, Chief Treasurer, Governor of the Royal Castle, Wearer of the Royal Seal, Chief of all the works of the King, Hereditary

  Prince, Pilot of the People, Giver of Good-Sustaining Alive the People, Count, Sole Companion, Favorite of the King.’''

  

  Not before nor after the time of Sesostris I was there ever a man occupying this position who could claim such a list of titles. We compare these with the titles ascribed to Joseph in Scripture where he is "Lord of the Land" (Gen. 41:40), "Father of Pharaoh" (Gen. 45:8), “Lord of all his House'' (Gen. 41:40) and ''Ruler throughout the Land of Egypt" (Gen. 41:43, 45:26).

  Since the recognition of Mentuhotep as Joseph was farthest from the mind of Breasted in making these comments on the powers of Mentuhotep, there is no call to underestimate the significance of these words which so clearly show that Joseph of the Bible meets in a most remarkable manner the powers of the vizier of Sesostris I of the famine record (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, Volume 1, p.141-142).

  Mentuhotep’s statue in the Louvre has been decapitated. This is easily understandable in the light of the hatred of the Israelites fostered by the pharaohs that lived after Joseph who enslaved the Israelites.

  In Egypt there is also a very long canal over 200 miles long that runs parallel with the Nile that feeds into an enormous lake known as the Faiyum. This canal, which was built in the 12th dynasty, is known by the name “Bahr Yusef” which is an Egyptian name that simply means the Canal of Joseph, a most remarkable confirmation of the role of Joseph in Egypt’s history. Donovan Courville writes the following about this canal:

  An incident is recorded for us from the early XIIth Dynasty, which cannot be dated in any exact manner, but which finds its logical place in the era just before the famine. It is generally presumed that the incident is to be referred to the time of Amenemhet I or his son Sesostris. There are indications that the work; was not completed until later in the dynasty though perhaps these later references man have to do with renovation procedures. Reference is here made to the initiation of a vast project which held for its purpose the increasing of the available irrigation water and expanding the tillable soil of the Nile Valley.

  

  An artificial canal was dug which ran parallel to the Nile northward to permit the flood waters of the Nile to flow into a natural basin. When the flood state was past the impounded waters could be returned to the Nile by means of a second shorter canal. Examination of the remnants of this system indicates that it could well have doubled the tillable soil of the Nile Valley through which it passed.

  This canal which served to turn the waters of the Nile into this natural basin is still known to this day among the natives as the Canal of Joseph, and is so named on modern maps.

  Since by the traditional chronology of Egypt the early XIIth Dynasty is far out of line with the time of Joseph, it has been necessary to presume that the name of Joseph ascribed to this canal does not refer to the patriarch Joseph but to some later person, possibly of Mohammedan ancestry.

  In the light of the present reconstruction, there is no valid reason for presuming otherwise than that the builder of this canal was the Joseph of Scripture as held by the native populace.

  What better reason can be imagined for the instigation of such a project than the anticipation of an extended and grievous famine? And who can we imagine to have been more astute than Joseph in recognising the possibilities of such a system as a factor in ameliorating the disastrous effects to be expected from the coming crisis. The confidence which the Pharaoh placed in the wisdom of Joseph was not without reason (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, Volume 1, p.142-143).

  In Genesis 41:50 we read that Joseph married the daughter of Poti-Phera, the priest of On. There is also an obelisk there today known as the pillar of On which was built by Sesostris I. On was the name of the city during the Middle Kingdom which later came to be called Heliopolis by the Greeks.

  Sesostris I appears to have a much more pleasant demeanour than his successors Sesostris III and Amenemhat III who look a lot more meaner than Sesostris I. Sesostris I, just going on his appearance, looks like a much more happy chap, a nicer guy who looks much more likely to have shown favour and appreciation to Joseph.

  

  One Egyptian king list that doesn’t receive as much attention as others is the Sothis List. It lists somewhat alternate names for kings that have been identified starting with dynasties 1, 4 and 5 followed by dynasties 12 and 13. Kings numbered 18 and 20 through to 24, which match up with the 12th dynasty, all include Rameses as part of their names.

  

  While the mention of Raamses as a city built by the Israelites in Egypt may have been a later edit giving contemporary Israelites the current name of a city that may initially had a different name, it is probably more likely that this was the original name since Moses, who wrote the Book of Exodus, lived before Ramses the Great. If it is the original name then we have evidence in the Sothis List that many of the 12th dynasty pharaohs had alternate names of which one was Rameses.

  I’d like to now quote from Donovan Courville’s book “The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications” (Volume 1) where he gives further evidence for the building programs in the Nile Delta as noted in the Book of Exodus and the evidence for much of dynasty 13 running parallel with dynasty 12 until that dynasty ran its course:

  There is no lack of evidence that during the reign of Sesostris III, and of his successor Amenemhet III, an enormous building program was carried out which could not have been accomplished except by means of slave labor.

  Unlike the structures of the huge building program in the Pyramid Age, and again unlike that which occurred later in the XVlllth Dynasty, this building was of brick and not of stone.

  The Biblical account states that ''...they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter and in brick." Josephus states that the Israelites built pyramids for the Egyptians. All save one of the XIIth Dynasty kings used brick in the construction of their pyramids.

  The center of this building program of Sesostris III, and of his successor Amenemhet III, was in the Delta region of the Nile, and more specifically, in the eastern Delta region, which included the very area that comprised the land of Goshen. It is in this area that the cities of Pi-Rameses and Pi-Thom have been located.

  

  As previously noted, most of the extant remains of Pi-Rameses are credited to Rameses II of a much later date and represent renovations carried out by this later king.

  The extant remains of the construction under the XlIth Dynasty kings is recognised by archaeologists as representing but a mere fraction of the original, the major part having been destroyed by the vandalism of the XlXth Dynasty kings. In spite of all this, sufficient evidence remains to indicate that the era of Sesostris III and of his successor was characterized by one of the most extensive building programs in all of Egyptian history…

  “All the Delta cities of all ages, as we have so often mentioned, have perished, and but little survives to testify to the activity of these kings there, but in the eastern part, especially at Tanis and Bubastis... massive remains still show the interest which the Twelfth Dynasty manifested in the Delta cities.

  Amenemhet I followed their example in the erection of his pyramid at Lisht; the core was of brick masonry and the monument was then protected by casing masonry of limestone...The custom was continued by all the kings of the dynasty with one exception. Their pyramids are scattered from the mouth of the Faiyum northward to Dashur, just south of Memphis.”

  Sesotris III meets the specifications of the oppressor of Israel, and we may safely presume that it was he or his imediate successor under whom the original cities of Pi- Thom and Raamses were built.

  With the pharaohs of the famine and of the Oppression identified as kings of Dynasty XII, it follows that the list of Ramessides in the Sothis list are but alternate names for Xllth Dynasty kings…

  Since the XIIth Dynasty, by the Turin list, had a duration of 213 years, and since, by the inscription of Ameni, a the famine must have occurred within the last 27 years of the reign of Sesostris I, and since the period from the beginning of the famine to the Exodus was 217 years, it follows that Dynasty XII came to its end about 30 years before the Exodus.

  Since Dynasty XIII was contemporaneous with the XIIth, and since Koncharis of the Exodus belongs to the XIIIth, it can only be concluded that the rule passed to some prominent member of the XIIIth Dynasty princes at the end of Dynasty XII.

  The interpretation of the Sothis list as given previously, leaves one king between the end of Dynasty XII and Koncharis. This king had the name Rameses and is said to have been the son of Uaphres.

  The reigns of this king and of Koncharis thus make up the period between the end of Dynasty XII and the Exodus. The reigns attributed to these kings are 29 and 5 years respectively. Hence, we conclude that the Exodus occurred 34 years after the end of Dynasty XII.

  

  The insertion of the statement in the Sothis list that this Ramesse was the son of Uaphres provides a basis for presuming that he was not of the line of the previously ruling king. Otherwise, it would not have been necessary to state his parentage.

  The appearance of the name Uaphres in the Turin list of Dynasty XIII in this general position stands to confirm the conclusion and correctness of the proposed structure, which calls for a change of family at this point…

  Dynasty XII is stated to have had its origin at Thebes, but the monuments indicate that early in the dynasty the capital was moved to Ithtowe, a few miles south of the Delta region.

  This location is not far from the area included in the land of Goshen where the Israelites first settled, and it may be presumed that long before the Exodus, they had multiplied to the point of occupying the territory this far south and west, at least in the capacity of slaves. The structure as developed is thus in agreement with the Scriptural detail that Moses was born under slavery at a point not far removed from the king's palace.

  The previous discussion has introduced the evidence that Sesostris III clearly meets the Scriptural specifications of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and the builder of the cities of Raamses and Pithom was either Sesostris III or more probably his successor Amenemhet

  III. This building program was in brick, and this king had the alternate name of Rameses [as noted in the Sothis list] to agree with the statements of Exodus 1:11…

  At his death, Amenemhet III…the rule passed to a woman ruler who took the throne name Sebek-nefru-re, a name which, like so many of the XllIth Dynasty princes, honors the crocodile god, Sebek. This situation suggests that there was no male heir to the throne. With

  her death, after a brief reign of four years, the dynasty, according to Manetho, came to its end.

  That Sebek-nefru-re died before the Exodus is abundantly clear if we grant the general correctness of the identity of the famine under Sesostris I with that of Joseph's time. The period from the beginning of this famine to the Exodus was 217 years as previously calculated. The Xllth Dynasty, according to the Turin king list, had a duration of 213 years…The dynasty must then have come to its end some 30 years before the Exodus. In a later connection, this figure will be refined to 34 years [Rameses, son of Uaphres (29) + Koncharis (5) on the Sothis List]…

  Since Mentuhotep, whom we have identified as Joseph, was a prince of a nome and since he occupied a most exalted position as vizier at the same time, it would be strange if the name of Joseph did not appear among the names of the XIIIth Dynasty princes as provided by the Turin king list.

  

  With a degree of expectancy we then scan this early list carefully in search of a name that could be construed as an Egyptianized form of the name Joseph. Our eye falls quickly on the fifth name in the list which Brugsch transliterates as Aufni but which Breasted gives as Yufni. Breasted comments on this name in the following words:

  “The succession may have lasted during four reigns when it was suddenly interrupted and the list of Turin records as the fifth king. One Yufni. a name which does not display the royal form showing that at this point the usurper...had again triumphed.”

  Such an interpretation may be considered logical if these rulers were actually the primary rulers of Egypt. In the light of the present reconstruction, this name is capable of another interpretation.

  If these rulers are but princes, then this foriegn name would suggest one who was able to merit the position of a prince in spite of his foreign origin and we immediately think of the rise of the Hebrew Joseph to an even more exalted position than prince. Since this name occurs early in the list, we have a further suggestion that this name belongs to an era contemporary with an early king of the XlIth Dynasty…

  The king numbered 24 in the list has the prenomen Kha-nefer-re. This name has been transliterated into Greek as Kenephres. There is an extant legend that the foster- father of Moses had the name Chenephres.

  Professor Wiedemann calls attention to the similarity of the prenomen of Sebek-hotep III, Kha-nefer-re, to the name Chenephres, a king whose wife Merrhis, according to a legend, reared Moses, the great lawgiver of Israel.

  The coincidence of the name Chenephres with Ka-neferre of the Turin list has long since been pointed out. It was impossible, however, to accept this identity, since Chenephres of the Turin list is far out of line with the supposed background of Moses in Egyptian history. Buf if Yufni is Joseph, and if Koncharis [as identified on the Sothis List] is the pharaoh of the Exodus, then Ka-nefer-re is not out of line to be thus identified.

  The contemporaneity of Dynasty Xlll with Dynasty XII is further evidenced by the provision of a solution to another unsolved problem. In the royal tomb of Ra-au-ab a was found a coffer of canopic jars still sealed with the clay impression reading Ra-en- Maat, a name recognized as an alternate of Amenemhet III. Attempts to explain this fact on the basis of a sequence of Dynasty Xlll following Dynasty XII led to a difference of opinion noted by Petrie.

  If the seal be held to prove that Amenemhat III sealed up the funeral objects, we then require to introduce Hor [the personal name of Ra-au-ab] into the Xllth dynasty, and place him as a coregent son of Amenemhat III, who died during his father’s reign. The difficulty lies in supposing that such a person should altogether have escaped notice in the many monuments of that king which we know. On the other view, this king is the Ra-au-ab named in the Turin papyrus, 13th king of the Xlllth dynasty; but the seal has to be accounted for.

  In an attempt to explain how the seal of Amenemhet III was used to seal jars that belong to an era a century or more later, Petrie presumed on the possibility that a later king of Dynasty XIII assumed the name of Amenemhet Ill and that the seal impression is that of this later unknown king. While similar names were used by two kings in Dynasty XIII, these both are earlier in the list, and not later, than the name Ra-au-ab; hence it was still necessary to assume that this king represented a king totally unknown to the monuments.

  We know so little about that age that it is far easier to grant an unknown king Ra-en-Maat then, than to grant an unknown coregent in the Xllth dynasty.

  The difficulty is immediately eliminated when it is recognized that Dynasty Xlll represented but a series of selected princes in the feudal system of the Xllth Dynasty era. Even with the abolishment of the feudal system as such under Sesostris III, some of the more favored continued to hold offices of high responsibility in the government that followed...

  There is no difficulty at all in assuming that this Ra-au-ab, as 13th in the Turin list, belonged to the era of Amenemhet III.

  Still further confirmation of the contemporaneity of Dynasty Xlll with Dynasty Xll is to be seen in the provision of the proper background for the story of Moses.

  The Background of Moses in Egyptian Chronology

  Granting the previously calculated period between the end of Dynasty Xll and the Exodus as approximately 30 years, the birth of Moses falls in the reign of Amenemhet III who is then to be identified as the pharaoh who made the edict calling for the destruction of all the male Hebrew children to be born after that time.

  The daughter of pharaoh, who found the child Moses hidden among the bulrushes, was then the daughter of Amenemhet III. This daughter must have married Chenephres in order for this prince to become the foster-father of Moses as by the extant tradition. Since Chenephres is not one of the Xllth Dynasty kings, it follows that he never attained a rank above a prince, which title he obtained by marriage into the royal family:

  It was this daughter who became the woman ruler, Sebek-nefru-re, last of the Xllth Dynasty rulers. The brief period of her reign suggests that she was quite old at the time. We may presume that if Moses had not of necessity fled Egypt, he would have become the reigning pharaoh on the death of Amenemhet IV, who also had but a brief reign (The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, Volume 1, p. 147-149, 221-225, 150, 153-157).

  

  David Rohl, in his evidence we looked at earlier, uses an approximation of the correct time and circumstancial evidence of flood levels through the 12th dynasty to support his choice of Amenemhat III as Joseph’s pharaoh.

  Courville has inscriptional evidence supporting a major famine in the days of Sesostris I in the tomb of Ameni with details that match the famine in Joseph’s time with a famine of many years where grain was collected in advance and provision was made all throughout the period of the famine. It proved to be a better match than the Hungry Rock inscription dated to Djoser of the 3rd dynasty which has a question mark over its authenticity being a “later copy” and has its seven year famine followed by years of abundance than preceeding it.

  Courville also showed solid evidence for a long period of secondary parallel rule by the 13th dynasty under the rule of the 12th dynasty before taking over when the female ruler Sebek-nefru-re died after a brief reign. This appears to be supported by the otherwise unnecessary insertion of “son of Uaphres” after the name Rameses (number 24) on the Sothis king list. It is also supported by the seal of Amenemhat III found in the tomb of 13th dynasty king Ra-au-ab.

  This parallel rule of the 13th dynasty under the rule of the 12th dynasty puts the correct time frame to look for Joseph back to the early 12th dynasty. The time of Sesostris I is the ideal match based on the famine inscription of Ameni.

  Sesostris I, from his statues, looks a far more happier chap to deal with than David Rohl’s candidate, Amenemhat III. Sesostris I’s vizier, Mentuhotep had titles and power that make a good match to those bestowed on Joseph for his efforts in helping Egypt survive the great seven year flood. One of those efforts is a 200 mile long canal that runs parallel with the Nile and feeds into the Faiyum that is today called Bahr Yusef (Canal of Joseph) that native tradition assigns to the biblical patriarch Joseph.

  Some time after Sesostris I, his successors, Sesostris III and Amenemhat III, conducted a major building program in the Delta which makes a good fit to the time that the Israelites were enslaved (most likely by Sesostris III) and built the Delta cities of Pi-Thom and Raamses.

  

  Further support for this chronological viewpoint is the occurrence of the name Aufni (Yufni) in the Turin list of 13th dynasty princes and kings, an Egyptianized form of the name Joseph.

  It is my personal conclusion that Sesostris I was the pharaoh of Joseph who appointed him vizier.

  CHAPTER 4 – THE PROBLEM OF JERICHO

  The Exodus of Israel from Egypt occurred about 1445 BC and the Israelites, according to the Bible conquered the city of Jericho 40 years later just before 1400 BC.

  Using the conventional Egyptian chronology the conquest of Jericho occurred in the middle of the 18th dynasty, the dynasty which began the New Kingdom and the archaeological dating age called the Late Bronze Age. The year 1400 BC is the crossover point between the Late Bronze I and Late Bronze II periods.

  The problem simply stated for Jericho is that the destruction, based on the pottery and artifacts found, is dated to the Middle Bronze Age and there is no evidence of the city being occupied for most of the Late Bronze Age.

  

  An excellent DVD on the subject of Jericho is “Jericho Unearthed” shot on location featuring interviews with Peter Parr, who worked on the site in the 1950’s with Kathleen Kenyon, and Biblical archaeologist, Dr Bryant Wood. The physical evidence is graphically shown to match the events described in the book of Joshua but the issue of dating is the key issue that archaeologists, secular and biblical, argue over regarding the site.

  Garstang in the 1930’s dated Jericho’s destruction to 1400 BC but Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950’s re-dated the destruction, which she felt was clearly Middle Bronze Age, to 1550 BC.

  Dr Bryant Wood argues for a re-dating of the site forward from the Middle Bronze to Late Bronze I.

  If the city was destroyed in the year that Kenyon dates it (150 years before the Bible date) then there would have been no city for the Israelites to destroy and the Bible was wrong. Many critics of the Bible have used Jericho’s archaeology to discredit the Bible.

  

  As well as he argues his case, the unfortunate thing is that Dr Bryant Wood is labouring under the faulty belief that the conquest of Jericho is contemporary with the 18th dynasty. Whatever is contemporary with the first half of the 18th dynasty is given the dating of Late Bronze I yet, according to our revised chronology, the 18th dynasty started a few centuries later around the time of the kings in Israel.

  As we have seen in previous chapters, the Exodus occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom. The Middle Bronze Age consists of the 1st Intermediate Period (Dynasties 7-11), the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 12-13) and the time of the Hyksos rule (Dynasties 14-17).

  Jericho, according to our revised chronology, fell during the time of the 14th dynasty and so fell during the Middle Bronze Age as Kenyon argued NOT during Late Bronze I as Dr Bryant Wood is trying to re-date the site to. Our revised chronology fits the archaeological age (Middle Bronze) that Kathleen Kenyon dated Jericho resolving the dating problem.

  Jericho is Middle Bronze. It’s the Middle Bronze Age that needs to be re-dated NOT the site to a different archaeological age.

  Let’s take a look at the archaeology of the site as described on the documentary “Jericho Unearthed”. The outer perimeter of the city of Jericho had a stone retaining wall. Above the stone retaining wall at the top of the earthen embankment above it was a mudbrick wall. Further up was another wall around the city.

  

  What the archaeological teams discovered was that the mudbrick wall had collapsed, not the stone retaining wall. The red mud bricks had collapsed as noted in Kenyon’s archaeological diagram (below right). This was a perfect match with the account in Joshua 6:20 which says:

  And the people shouted when the priests blew with the ram's horns. And it happened when the people heard the sound of the ram's horns, and the people shouted with a great shout, the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, each man straight before him. And they took the city.

  The fallen bricks of the mudbrick wall made a very convenient ramp for the Israelites to go up over the stone retaining wall.

  

  

  There are several other key details in the Biblical account that perfectly match what was found at Jericho. Lots of storage jars full of grain were found. This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it tells us the time of year that the destruction took place as it must have been soon after the harvest was gathered in. We read in the book of Joshua:

  As those who bore the ark had come to Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bore the ark were dipped in the edge of the water (for Jordan overflows all its banks, all the time of harvest) (Joshua 3:15).

  And the sons of Israel camped in Gilgal and kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month at evening in the plains of Jericho (Joshua 5:10)

  Also, grain was valuable and if an army set fire to Jericho this is highly unusual. This is further support of the Biblical account that says that the Israelites did not plunder the site and all was to be left to God as a firstfruits of the land that He was going to give them:

  And the city shall be devoted to Jehovah, it and all in it. Only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And you surely shall keep clear of the cursed thing, lest you make yourselves cursed when you take of the cursed things, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it (Joshua 6:17-18).

  

  

  The city was then burned according to Joshua 6:24 and everything in it and this is exactly what was found in the archaeological record – a collapse of the walls followed by the city being burnt leaving a layer of ash and then an erosional layer after it where the city was abandoned for some time exactly as described in Joshua 6:26:

  And Joshua charged them at that time, saying, Cursed before Jehovah is the man who rises up and builds this city of Jericho. He shall lay the foundation of it in his first-born, and in his youngest son he shall set up the gates of it.

  The only way Wood can credibly date Jericho to the biblical date is to date similarly pottery from other sites which others have dated to around 1400 BC.

  

  Kathleen Kenyon based her date on what she didn't find. She did not find in the destruction layer an imported type of pottery from Cyprus which was common and easily distinguished and dated. She did not pay any attention to the local Canaanite pottery that was there in abundance which Garstang used. Since there was no Cypriot pottery it must have been destroyed before the dating of this pottery.

  Dr Bryant Wood is basing his work on the dating of Canaanite pottery that are local copies of the imported pottery Kenyon was basing her dating on. Above is the pottery Kenyon was using for her dating and the Canaanite copy of it that Dr Bryant Wood is saying should be dated to Late Bronze I.

  What we need to note here is that the pottery on the left is Middle Bronze Age pottery while the copy is claimed by Dr Bryant Wood to be Late Bronze I. Should not the copies be dated to the same age if one is a copy of the other? Assuming that it is a copy of the one on the left then the pottery should be dated to the same age – the Middle Bronze Age.

  The destruction of Jericho should not be re-dated from the Middle Bronze Age to Late Bronze I but the Middle Bronze Age is what needs to be moved forward in time to include the period of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan.

  David Rohl in chapter 14 of his book “A Test of Time” has quite a bit to say about the subject of Jericho. This is what he has to say about how Jericho’s occupation levels and features should be dated:

  Serious excavations first began in 1907 with three seasons by an Austro-German expedition under the direction of the respected German biblical scholar Ernst Sellin. Professor John Garstang of Liverpool University was the next archaeologist to tackle the site between the years 1930 to 1936 and it was not very long before he was proclaiming the discovery of the fallen walls of Joshua's Jericho. He had found a thirk, reddish mudbrick city wall encircling the upper slopes of Tell es-Sultan and in places it appeared as if this wall had indeed collapsed. At last one of the biblical stories seemed to be confirmed: Jericho's wall had come tumblin' down!

  Over the years further work was undertaken at other sites thought to be the cities conquered and destroyed by the Israelites. Gradually a picture was emerging which appeared to conform to the understanding scholars had of the Joshua campaign. Of course, by this time, archaeologists were looking for a series of destructions which post-dated the time of Ramesses II, because it was this Egyptian king who had already been cast as the Pharaoh of the Oppression and hapless Pharaoh of the Exodus.

  

  

  In archaeological terms this meant that Joshua's wholesale destruction of the cities of Canaan had to be sought in the strata marking the end of the Late Bronze Age (contemporary with the late 19th and early 20th Dynasties). The early Israelite settlement of Palestine was thus placed in the Early Iron Age (or Iron Age I). There are indeed widespread city destructions at around this time but gradually it has become clear that these destructions span a period of more than a century and so cannot all have been the work of Joshua and his men.

  At the time of Garstang's Jericho dig the archaeological phases had not yet been so well defined. It took the follow-up excavation by Dame Kathleen Kenyon of the Institute of Archaeology, London, to put the record straight. It was her discoveries at Jericho which would have such a crucial influence on the late twentieth century's rejection of the ‘historical' Bible.

  Kenyon began work at Tell es-Sultan in 1952. She excavated a series of deep trenches which cut through the outer slope of the mound. By using this technique Kenyon was able to study the side balks of the trenches to record what was effectively a chronological and stratigraphical chart of the city's life.

  The lowest level or stratum in a mound is the earliest and the uppermost the latest. Ancient Near Eastern city mounds or tells are generally formed by the gradual deposition of occupation levels, one on top of the other, giving an inner structure somewhat like a layer cake.

  If an archaeologist then comes along and cuts himself a slice of that cake the various layers can easily be seen. With an occupational mound this method gives you a good idea of the chronological development of the site but fails to provide much indication as to the cultural content of any specific stratum. For that one needs to open out a larger area and peel off each level as the excavation team slowly works down into the mound. This technique employs a grid of five- or ten-metre squares, each with its own set of balk walls in which the chronological profile of the city can be plotted. Kenyon used this second technique for a small area on the western side of the tell where the mound profile suggested Late Bronze Age occupation might be found.

  Kenyon's detailed stratigraphical analysis of Jericho's occupational history demonstrated that Garstang's walls in reality belonged to the Early Bronze Age, a thousand years before the time of Joshua. The problem for Kenyon was that her work produced no walls belonging to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. In fact, her analysis seemed to clearly show that there was no Late Bronze Age city of Jericho at all which the Israelites could have destroyed during their entry into the Promised Land.

  There was evidence for a small Late Bronze Age village but this had no defensive fortifications that could conceivably represent the walls which came 'tumblin' down'. In the orthodox chronology most of the mound of Jericho had already been a desolate ruin (with occasional meagre settlement) for several centuries by the time the Israelite tribes would have crossed the Jordan. In the late 1950s there was only one conclusion which could be drawn from Kenyon's discovery: the story of Joshua's conquest of Jericho had to be a myth.

  Conclusion 28: There was no walled city of Jericho during the Late Bronze Age when in the conventional chronology the Israelites were supposed to have massacred the population and burnt the city to the ground.

  You may now be ahead of me. If Jericho was at best a small unfortified village towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, then when was it a thriving city with impressive defensive fortifications?

  The answer, of course, is some three hundred and fifty years earlier in the Middle Bronze Age when the New Chronology places the Israelite Conquest.

  So, let us now take a look at what Kenyon found for Middle Bronze Age Jericho. Near to the bottom of her cuttings Kenyon observed that the glacis came to a sudden end and that beneath it the builders had constructed a wall of field stones. Beyond this ‘revetment wall' was a deep trench, no doubt intended to slow down any assault upon the lower slopes of the mound. The very top of the Jericho tell has been badly eroded by centuries of weathering. As a result remains of the Middle Bronze Age city wall no longer exist to any great extent. However, remember that the walls of Joshua's Jericho came tumblin' down. Where would they have tumbled down to? The bottom of the glacis slope is the obvious answer!

  In the trench at the foot of the mound Kenyon found a thick deposit of red-brown earth which she interpreted as the remains of the great MB city wall which had collapsed outwards and fallen down into the defensive ditch. The walls of MBA Jericho had indeed tumbled down, thus affording any attacker easy access into the city by filling up the ditch which protected the base of Jericho's elaborate defensive system.

  Within the MBA city itself all the houses and civic buildings had been blackened by a severe conflagration. In some places the ash and debris was a metre in depth.

  “They (the Israelites) burned the city and everything inside it, except the silver, the gold and the things of bronze and iron; these they put in the treasury of Yahweh's house” (Joshua 6:24).

  According to Joshua 3:15 the assault upon Jericho took place during the harvest season in the Jordan valley. When Garstang uncovered the floors of the houses of the MBA city he found large storage jars filled to the brim with carbonised grain.

  

  Evidence of mass burials in the rock-cut tombs of MBA Jericho, contemporary with the very last phase of the city's existence, suggested to Kenyon that a plague had struck in the period immediately prior to its destruction. The abundance of food in the city ruled out famine and there were no visible signs on the skeletal remains of war wounds. Her archaeological interpretation of a Jericho plague provides another striking parallel with the biblical narratives.

  We learn from the book of Numbers, verse 25, that the Israelites themselves were devastated by a plague, whilst they were encamped at Shittim in Transjordan, immediately prior to their assault upon Jericho. Twenty-four thousand Israelites were struck down. It is just possible that the plague may have been brought into Jericho by Joshua's spies - sent to reconnoitre the city's defences - where they were protected by the prostitute, Rahab, in her ‘house of ill-repute'. Indeed, the Shittim plague was associated with widespread sexual intercourse which had been going on between the Israelite men and Moabite prostitutes prior to the invasion.

  I will let archaeologist Piotr Bienkowski sum up Kenyon's analysis of the fate of MBA Jericho:

  “Jericho was destroyed at the end of the MBA, probably by enemy action and possibly through a failure of the fortification system. Perhaps there was a fatal flaw in the design of the fortifications ... The reason for the destruction of Jericho is unknown.”

  Bienkowski's last sentence no longer applies thanks to the work of Dr. John Bimson, which I will now come on to, and the revised archaeological date for the destruction of MBA Jericho provided by the New Chronology. Both have determined that Middle Bronze Age Jericho was attacked and destroyed by invading Israelites.

  Conclusion 29: Biblical Jericho destroyed by Joshua’s forces is to be identified with the Middle Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan which was devastated by fire and remained a desolate ruin for several centuries thereafter…

  Before we leave Jericho I would like to add a couple of further potential points of consistency between the New Chronology and the archaeological record. During Garstang's excavations at Tell es-Sultan he uncovered a substantial building near the summit of the mound. The archaeological date of this structure has been notoriously difficult to pin down but the general feeling is that Late Bronze IIA is most likely.

  In the New Chronology the end of LB IIA is the time of David and Solomon in Israel (c. 1010-931 BC). It is interesting to note therefore that the next time we hear mention of Jericho after Joshua's destruction of the town is during the reign of David. In II Samuel 10 the king sends his ambassadors to Hanun son of Nahash, ruler of the Ammonites. But, Hanun insults David by cutting off the beards of the Israelite representatives before sending them home. The embarrassment to the Davidic court was too great to allow their return to Jerusalem so David told his delegation to ‘Stay in Jericho ... until your beards have grown again and come back then' [II Samuel 10:5].

  We may envisage in this strange folktale some temporary occupation of the ruin-mound at Jericho, lasting a few years, for a limited group of David's courtiers. This fits nicely with Garstang's ‘Middle Building' which was abandoned within a short period of its construction.

  The next phase of occupation at Jericho is during the Late Bronze IIB when there is limited evidence of some construction work on the mound, including what may have been a small palace. The village – for all that is what it could have been – remained unfortified, although it may have had a perimeter ring of houses as was the case with some Late Bronze Age settlements. Now let me remind you of a passage in 1 Kings 16:34 where we hear of the rebuilding of Jericho during the reign of King Ahab.

  “It was in his time that Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. Laying its foundations cost him his youngest son Segub, just as Yahweh had foretold through Joshua son of Nun.”

  Ahab’s reign is dated in the New Chronology to the time of late 19th Dynasty in Egypt – in other words the very end of the Late Bronze Age.

  Conclusion 32: Garstang’s Middle Building at Jericho is to be identified as the residence of David’s ambassadors following their unsuccessful embassy to Ammon in Transjordan.

  The later LB IIB village represents the rebuilding of Jericho by Hiel (c.850 BC) during the reign of Arab…

  The evidence for tying this building that Rohl attributes to David’s ambassadors to a particular time period is very tentative. I see two possibilities.

  I think it is more likely one of Hiel’s buildings or it could have been built by the Moabite king Eglon during the time of the Judges who possessed the city of palm trees (Judges 3:12), an expression that well fits Jericho. The curse for re-building at Jericho applied primarily to Israelites. Why would David’s ambassadors build even one building on the summit of the ruin knowing about the curse?

  Jericho, according to our revised chronology, fell during the time of the 14th dynasty and so fell during the Middle Bronze Age as Kenyon argued NOT during Late Bronze I as Dr Bryant Wood is trying to re-date the site to. Our revised chronology fits the archaeological age (Middle Bronze) that Kathleen Kenyon dated Jericho resolving the dating problem.

  Jericho is Middle Bronze. It’s the Middle Bronze Age that needs to be re-dated NOT the site to a different archaeological age.

  CHAPTER 5 - WHO WAS THE REAL PHARAOH SHISHAK?

  We looked at evidence presented by David Rohl in chapter 1 exposing the problems with Egyptology’s main synchronism equating Sheshonk I of the 22nd dynasty with the Biblical Shishak. Can we find a new candidate who clearly fits the profile of the Biblical Shishak?

  There are a few contenders put forth by scholars offering revised chronologies. Conventional chronology equates Sheshonk I of the 22nd dynasty with the biblical Shishak.

  The closest revisionist chronology to this conventional equation is Peter James who equates Ramses III of the 20th dynasty with the biblical Shishak.

  The next revisionist chronology offering a different pharaoh as the biblical Shishak is David Rohl who belives that Ramses II of the 19th dynasty was Shishak.

  The next revisionist chronology that is further from the conventional Egyptian chronology is that of Immanuel Velikovsky who advocates that Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty was the biblical Shishak.

  An even more reduced chronology is put forth by Eric Aitchison who contends that the Hyksos period was the full 511 years stated by Josephus, over 100 years longer than the 400 years claimed by Immanuel Velikovsky. He advocates that the last Hyksos ruler, Apop II [Apophis], was the biblical Shishak.

  Let’s now compare the relative merits of the contenders for the biblical Shishak.

  

  The most conservative of the above chronologies compared to the conventional chronology is Peter James who equates the biblical Shishak with Ramses III of the 20th dynasty. He gives the evidence for his position in his book “Centuries of Darkness”:

  With the demise of Sothic dating and the apparent untenability of the equation of Shoshenq I with the biblical Shishak, the entire basis for the conventional length for the Third Intermediate Period (TIP) collapses. A throng of evidence from almost every area of the Mediterranean, and from Nubia on the very doorstep of Egypt, calls for a lowering of the Egyptian dates and a radical shortening of the TIP. Indeed, our review of the internal evidence from Egypt itself suggests the same.

  It is too early to offer a complete revised scheme, with every king slotted neatly into place. The sheer bulk of the material to be assessed requires lengthy re-examination. But without giving precise dates for each pharaoh, broad lines of a new construction already emerge from the evidence.

  The starting point for a revised chronology must be the later 25th Dynasty, whose last kings can be fixed exactly in time by links with the 26th Dynasty and the Assyrian kings. Whilst there is still some doubt, the date of the Kushite invasion of Egypt by Shabaqo is most likely to fall within the parameters established by Kitchen and Bedford, i.e. 716-711 BC. The important question for the early 25th Dynasty is whether Piye invaded Egypt before or after Shabaqo.

  The Piye Stela is one of the most valuable sources for the history of the later TIP, as it lists the Libyan dynasts he confronted in Egypt. As well as Piye's main opponent Tefnakht, “Great Chief of the Libu” and ruler of Sais, there were numerous “Chiefs of the Ma” and other local dignitaries, and four rulers classed as Pharaohs: Osorkon, Iuput, Peftjauawybast and Nimlot.

  The identification of these kings has posed a major problem. Objects of Nimlot and Peftjauawybast confirm their status as kings, but the identity of both remains obscure, although it is assumed that they were scions of the 22nd or 23rd Dynasty. luput is even more puzzling: there are a few royal monuments bearing this name, but it is a moot point whether to attribute them to the luput (‘II') of Piye's time or to an earlier king of this name, Iuput ‘I'.

  Osorkon, whilst evidently the most respected of the pharaohs listed by Piye, remains an enigma. Kitchen makes him “Osorkon IV”, a ruler attested only by the slender evidence of one small object. Earlier Egyptologists assumed that Piye's Osorkon was to be identified with the well-documented Osorkon III. That he must be close in time to the early 25th Dynasty is manifest from the adoption of Shabaqo's sister by Osorkon III's daughter as a God's Wife.

  An inscription of the two God's Wives in the Wadi Gasus is dated to years 19 and 12 of two respective kings. It is most likely that these are the two rulers who are elsewhere associated with these votaresses: Osorkon III and Shabaqo. This would mean a substantial reduction in the dates given by Kitchen for Osorkon III (787-759 BC). Following Kitchen's date of 716 for the accession of Shabaqo, the Wadi Gasus inscription would belong to 705 BC, placing the beginning of Osorkon III's reign in 723 BC. There are important repercussions from this:

  1. Osorkon III would be the King Osorkon (“Shilkanni”) reigning in 716 BC referred to by Assyrian records.

  2. He can also be equated with the like-named king of the Piye Stela, obviating the need for the creation of a fourth King Osorkon.

  3. Likewise, there is no need for two kings Iuput when only one is monumentally attested.

  4. Peftjauawybast can be identified with the High Priest of Memphis of that name, who was of the senior line of the Tanite royal house.

  5 A general lowering of Libyan period dates can be effected, which would suit the evidence from private genealogies showing a much shorter time between the contemporaries of Osor- kon III and individuals of the late 25th/early 26th Dynasties.

  6. The genealogical and related evidence establishing that Osorkon II and III were separated by no more than two generations means that the dates for the mid-22nd Dynasty as a whole should be considerably lowered.

  Fitting with the above, there is evidence that the length of the 22nd Dynasty has been greatly overstretched. The chronicle of Prince Osorkon lists the offerings he made as High Priest of Amun at Thebes between year 11 of his father, Takeloth II, and year 28 of Shoshenq III. There is nothing recorded after year 24 of Takeloth or before year 22 of Shoshenq III. Unless we assume a gap of twenty years in his career as High Priest, there must have been a considerable overlap between these two reigns.

  Such an overlap is supported by the Apis data, where there are no known bulls between year 23 of Osorkon II and year 28 of Shoshenq III. A compression of the chronology at this point would also remove the only obstacle to the otherwise attractive identification of Osorkon the High Priest of Amun with the future Osorkon III, assumed by earlier Egyptologists but incompatible with Kitchen's long chronology. To have served under both pharaohs (without any overlap of reigns) his pontificate would have had to have lasted for fifty five years, and if twenty years old when appointed, Osorkon would have been seventy-five years old at his accession and, after twenty-eight years of reign, about 103 at his death.

  If Osorkon Ill's first regnal year (c. 723 BC) immediately followed his last attestation as High Priest of Amun in year 39 of Shoshenq III, then the latter's accession can be placed around

  761 BC. An overlap of some twenty years between Shoshenq III and Takeloth II brings Takeloth's first year to c. 765 BC.

  The reign of Osorkon II must also overlap with the early reigns of Takeloth II and Shoshenq III to satisfy the Apis evidence. Taking nineteen years as the average life-span of an Apis bull, and assuming that the bull buried in year 23 of Osorkon II was the predecessor of that buried in year 28 of Shoshenq III, the reign of Osorkon II would have begun in c. 775 BC.

  There is no evidence for an independent reign of a 'Takeloth I' before Osorkon II. Osorkon I, who reigned for fifteen years, may be taken as his immediate predecessor, beginning his reign c. 790 BC. The twenty-one years of his father, Shoshenq I, brings the foundation of the 22nd Dynasty to c.810 BC.

  For the 21st Dynasty the major anomalies reviewed above - the lack of Apis burials, statuary and genealogies and objects outside of Egypt - strongly recommend a return to the solution proposed by Lieblein at the turn of the century, which was to treat the 21st and 22nd Dynasties as largely contemporary. This would resolve some of the archaeological mysteries connected with the 21st Dynasty, notably the problems of the Inhapi cache and the royal tombs at Tanis. The evidence of the latter, taken at face value, suggests that Psusennes ‘I' of the 21st Dynasty was buried after Osorkon II of the 22nd.

  The surprising conclusion reached is that the 20th Dynasty, rather than ending in 1069 BC, may have ended shortly before the accession of Shoshenq I, here dated to c. 810 BC. The 21st Dynasty may have ruled independently for only one generation. Allowing twenty-five years for this period and 115 years for the 20th Dynasty would place its founder, Sethnakht,

  c. 950 BC.

  The period of time between the accession of Sethnakht and year 30 of Ramesses II is some sixty years, bringing us to c. 1010 BC for the year in which the first Apis bull under Ramesses was buried in the Lesser Vault.

  Between 1010 BC and 644 BC (year 21 of Psamtik I) are 366 years. Seventeen bulls are known from the Serapeum to fill this period. If we assume no gaps in the Apis bull evidence (bar, say, one), then we arrive at a very plausible average age for the life of the intervening bulls of between twenty and twenty-one years, agreeing well with previous estimates of the average life of these bulls.

  Application of this experimental chronology to other areas produces some remarkable results. It agrees with the external datings for the Libyan Dynasty finds outside Egypt. Now only a few of the objects need to be considered as heirlooms; most would have been deposited in contexts shortly after their manufacture. The new accession date for Shoshenq I of c. 810 BC agrees perfectly with the late 9th-century date for contemporary material at Byblos. Thus Shoshenq I cannot be the biblical Shishak.

  Who, then, was the king of Egypt who brought about the downfall of Solomon's empire, and looted the Temple of its treasures c. 925 BC? On the dates suggested here, the king in Egypt at this time would have been Ramesses III, who is known to have re-established Egyptian control in Palestine. The biblical name 'Shishak' could well be a corruption of the Egyptian 'Sessi', the common abbreviation of the name Ramesses.

  Our compression of Third Intermediate Period chronology results in an overall lowering of the dates for the New Kingdom (18th-20th Dynasties) by some 250 years. Arguments against such a reduction could cite radiocarbon evidence, some of which apparently supports the conventional chronology. Other results, however, accord with the reduced dates advocated here. There is also a suspicion that the publication of dates is far from unprejudiced. The currently available radiocarbon results can best be described as equivocal, and far more need to be available to test out both accepted and revised chronologies.

  The stubborn - indeed arrogant - refusal of modern Egyptologists to consider a reduction of dates, and their insistence on the “correctness” of the standard Egyptian chronology, still provides the mainspring of the interminable Dark Age arguments afflicting the archaeology of Nubia, the Near East and the Mediterranean.

  Early Egyptologists were usually more tentative about their chronology, continually revising their opinions in the light of fresh evidence. Sadly, the study of Egyptian chronology seems to have become so ossified that it cannot question its fundamental assumptions, accepted more for familiarity than for any basis in fact (p.254-259).

  Peter James provides some excellent arguments for the need to compress the dating of the Libyan Dynasties (21st and 22nd) and his estimates for the overall length of these dynasties look quite sound.

  Equating Shishak with Ramses III is more done on the basis of adding up best guesses for the lengths of these dynasties and finding the pharaoh who best fits the general timeframe and the biblical date of around 925 BC.

  Peter James does not use any synchronisms with other histories outside of Egypt to make a case for Ramses III. He purely uses internal Egyptian evidence.

  Peter James states: “The biblical name 'Shishak' could well be a corruption of the Egyptian 'Sessi', the common abbreviation of the name Ramesses.” It is quite possible that this is the derivation of the name Shishak.

  What should be noted about this point is that it can apply to any king with the name Ramesses or Thutmoses as it is derived from the end part of these names.

  Peter James’ logic in drawing his conclusion is quite sound but there is some evidence that seriously challenges it.

  On tiles of the palace of Ramses III found at Tell el-Yahudiya with that pharaoh’s hieroglyphic name on there are Greek letters on the back of them. No traces of the Greek language have been found to date before 750 BC.

  Not only that, these letters not look like the early Greek letters of the 7th century BC but they look like classical letters of the time of Plato in the 4th century BC. The perculiar form used of the letter alpha was not introduced until then as was the symbol used for sigma.

  Tell el-Yahudiya, or “The Mound of the Jew”, is an Arab village east of the Delta, twenty miles north-east of Cairo on the road to Ismailia...the Swiss Egyptologist Edward Naville excavated there the ruins of a palace of Ramses III. Tiles, coloured and glazed, once adorned its walls. They were found in great numbers on the site by travelling scholars and also by Emil Brugsch in the service of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, before Naville, assisted by F. L. Griffith, came to dig there. The tiles have rich designs, mostly of flowers, and some bear the hieroglyphic name of Ramses III. On the reverse side of these tiles are found incised signs: these are apparently the initials of the craftsmen who produced them, Inscribed before the tiles were fired.

  There was no doubt that the signs on many tiles in the palace of Ramses III at Tell el- Yahudiya were Greek letters. ‘The most noticeable feature is that several of the rosettes have Greek letters at the back, evidently stamped on during the process of making," wrote T.

  H. Lewis…

  But how could Greek letters have been used in the days of Ramses III, early in the twelfth century before this era? The Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician or Hebrew much later; no traces of it have been found in Greece, on the islands, or in Asia Minor before

  - 750. The problem of the Greek letters on the tiles of Ramses III cannot be solved even by

  assuming that the Greek alphabet derived…a number of centuries earlier. What really matters is the fact that the Greek letters on the Egyptian tiles do not look like the early Greek letters of the seventh century but like the classical letters of the age of Plato…

  "The Greek letters, and especially alpha, found on the fragments and discs leave no room for doubt that the work was executed during the last centuries of the Egyptian Empire and probably in the time of the Ptolemies; but the matter becomes more difficult if we ask who the author of this work was…

  "‘There is a curious fact about the discs which have been found in such a large number; some of them are inscribed on the back with Greek letters, while others bear Egyptian signs. The Greek letters show that strangers were at some time employed in the work... It is not likely that later kings, such as the Saites or the Ptolemies, would have taken the trouble to build for their predecessor, Ramses III, such a beautiful chamber, the walls of which were not only ornamented with representations of plants or animals, but also recorded the feats of war of Ramses III.’ So wrote Edward Naville.”

  Not only is there the issue of the Greek letters but the relief design on the front of the tiles is similar to that of Persian art in the words of Naville. (Peoples of the Sea, p. 7-12)

  Shishak plundered Jerusalem and its Temple around 925 BC. The Greek tiles give an upper limit of 750 BC to the time of Ramses III, some 200 years after the biblical Shishak, though the evidence indicates he reigned much later than even that date.

  David Rohl’s New Chronology is founded predominantly upon his equation of the biblical pharaoh Shishak with Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty or Ramses the Great as he is also known as.

  In conclusion 7 of “A Test of Time” David Rohl states:

  “The apparent equivalence between the biblical Shishak and the pharaonic name of Shoshenk is misleading. On the other hand, the name may well have its origins in the hypocoristicon of Ramses II (‘Sysa’ – equivalent to Hebrew Shishak – the only pharaoh known to have recorded a defeat of Jerusalem(=Shalem)” (p.163).

  Additionally in conclusion 8 he states:

  “The evidence from the Egyptian monumental reliefs, artefacts and documents points to the identification of Ramses II as the historical counterpart of the biblical Shishak, conqueror of Jerusalem (p.170).

  The whole of the structure for David Rohl’s New Chronology for the New Kingdom rests on this foundation. Is it a solid foundation or not? Let’s look at his evidence for his key synchronism:

  It was a searingly hot afternoon in the City of the Dead. The sensible fellaheen of Sheikh Abd El-Gurna were inside their cool mudbrick houses taking a siesta before the evening meal. The tarmac roads which criss-cross the desert necropolis of Western Thebes bubbled like black soup under the crushing heat of an unusually oppressive Egyptian summer. Only the occasional Peugeot taxi flitted to and fro in search of tourists who had found themselves stranded on the west bank of the River Nile after a gruelling morning's visit to the Valley of the Kings.

  Here I was, at the tourist entrance-gate to the shattered edifice of the Ramesseum - the mortuary temple of Ramesses II - with a pair of heavy cameras shackled around my neck, a bottle of warm Baraka water in one hand and site entrance ticket in the other. The coach park was bereft of visitors, so it looked as if I had the place to myself…

  A short pathway led me to the Second Court. As I trudged past the colonnade of mighty Osirid statues of King Ramesses the Great my thoughts were focused on a very different destination within the compound. These decapitated giants, guarding the inner sanctum of the temple, stood in their lofty arrogance as yet another eccentric English Egyptologist flitted in and out of their welcoming shadows.

  I worked my way past “Ozymandias” (the fallen colossus which provided the inspiration for Shelley's poem) and on down into the First Court. This part of the temple is not on the well trodden tourist path for, in truth, there is little here to interest the non-specialist visitor. At this lonely spot the fertile Nile valley merges into the desert plateau, swathing the crumbling edifice of the pylon gateway in its camouflage of acacia trees and bedraggled clumps of elephant grass. My destination was the rear facade of the northern pylon tower where I was in search of one particular block of weathered sandstone.

  The challenge was to obtain a photograph of a scene inscribed in shallow relief on that block

• a scene which was of special significance to the theory which I had been developing over the past decade. This unprepossessing slab was for me a vital piece of the jigsaw which would help bring the stories of the Bible back onto the stage of world history. I had come to the temple of Ramesses in search of Jerusalem…

The block is actually a cornerstone of the north tower of the pylon with two exposed surfaces and a broad rolled border running vertically up the adjoining edge. The only decorated surface is that facing west. This forms part of a large well cut scene relating to the campaign of Ramesses into Palestine and Syria in the spring of his eighth regnal year. Ramesses II was one of the legendary pharaohs of the NEW KINGDOM, when Egypt possessed a northern “empire” in Palestine.

This campaign - perhaps the most significant and successful of the young king's military adventures - is also recorded on the walls of other temples in Egypt, but, in most cases, the names of the towns captured by Ramesses are damaged, worn away, or hidden behind later Islamic building work (as at Luxor Temple). Here at the Ramesseum, however, the condition of the reliefs is relatively good and the city names easily read.

In the angled light of the two o'clock sun the wall slowly began to reveal to me the horizontal rows of fortress-towns, with groups of captives from those towns being brought in shackles to Egypt by Ramesses II's soldiers.

I moved as close as I could to the subject block. Even though I was still fifteen feet below the relief, through my camera's telephoto lens I gradually began to discern the hieroglyphic text running down the centre of the fortress. Perspiration from a combination of the oppressive heat and the strains of holding a heavy telescopic lens at an awkward angle caused the camera viewfinder to steam up continuously as I tried to focus on the target. Fortunately, the reading of the text was facilitated by the fact that it began with a fairly standard formula: “The town which the king plundered in Year 8”. Then followed the name of the city. At this point the inscription was a little more worn than the upper section, but I could still make out the hieroglyphic signs: 'sh-a-l-m'.

Visiting the site for myself had confirmed the research I had already completed in the library of the Egypt Exploration Society in London. The town which Ramesses II had plundered, and which appeared to be one of the high points of his Year 8 campaign into Palestine, was called “Shalem” - the earliest-known name for the holy city of Jerusalem (mentioned in Genesis 14:18, Psalm 76:2, and Hebrews 7:1 & 7:2).

Indeed, the later and better known name of “Yerushalim” (Hebrew for Jerusalem) is made up of the West Semitic word Yeru meaning “foundation’ or “city” and the name of the early local

deity - Shalem - giving us “Foundation” or “City (of the god) Shalem”. My quest for Jerusalem in the ruins of Ramesses' temple had been successful.

I took my photographs. Pleased with my afternoon's work, I departed the scorching west bank, crossing the River Nile for a refreshing frowla juice in the lounge-bar of my hotel in Luxor town…

Ramesses II’s hegemony over Nubia and Kush is most impressively represented in the great rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel. Upon the precipitous face of a rocky crag overlooking the River Nile in southern Nubia the king ordered the hewing of an awe-inspiring monument to his power. Anyone travelling towards Egypt from the lands of Kush to the south could not have failed to be impressed by the four mighty twenty-one-metre-high seated colossi of the pharaoh, gazing out across the eastern desert. Here, carved in uncompromising sandstone, was the divine majesty of Pharaoh Ramesses in all his arrogant glory.

When I was just nine years old I ventured upon the first of my countless pilgrimages to Egypt. That earliest experience has remained in my memory ever since, but the passage of time has inevitably dimmed much of the detail. I do, however, vividly recall my first meeting with Ramesses at Abu Simbel…

Behind the towering Osirid pillars on the north side of the main temple axis was the great battle scene of Ramesses' fifth year - the famous “Battle of Kadesh” - in which the youthful pharaoh had single-handedly (or rather with the support of Amun-Re) wrenched victory from the jaws of defeat by dint of his personal courage and strength. His “defeat” of the northern confederacy, led by the Hittite emperor, Muwatalis, was a remarkable turn-around following the initial decimation of the vanguard battalions of the Egyptian army.

Ramesses had triumphed on the day, but, with all the northern city-states having gone over to the Hittite side, there was no way for the pharaoh to retain his hold on the northern part of the old Egyptian empire. The battle may have been won but the war to save Amurru (ancient Syria) from falling into the Hittite sphere was lost. Ramesses would spend much of the next five years of his reign shoring up the southern part of the northern empire with a number of victorious campaigns to put down revolts following the Year 5 calamity.

The chaotic jumble of bodies which make up the Kadesh battle scene at Abu Simbel did not impress me greatly at the tender age of nine. For a historian there is much to study and analyse, but, somehow, the complex story-telling, in a muddle of vignettes, falls short of reflecting the heroism of the hour. I turned to cross the main axis of the temple to the wall on the opposite (southern) side of the hall. Here was a scene in direct contrast to the melee of Kadesh - a scene of heroic simplicity to thrill any young Egyptophile.

In the centre of the high, wide wall stands Pharaoh Ramesses, resplendent in his golden chariot drawn by a team of proud young stallions. The king has the reins of his charging

steeds wrapped tightly around his waist to allow him to fire his bow whilst at the gallop. Behind Pharaoh's chariot come three young princes, driven into battle by their personal charioteers.

Ahead of the king is a large citadel or fortified town standing upon a steep-sided hill. The citizens of the town, dressed in typical “Canaanite” robes, are pleading with Ramesses to spare them and their families. A siege banner flies above the highest ramparts. Below, in the valley, a herdsman flees, driving his cattle ahead of him. Outside the gate of the fortress a woman of high rank is on bended knee - pleading for the king's mercy. No one in the fortress-town is resisting the king's advance; no weapons are in evidence. High on the rampart a man with a long “Canaanite” beard proffers an incense burner as a peace offering to Ramesses. This is a city in abject defeat whose citizens are begging the Egyptian king to spare it from destruction. Unfortunately, the city is not identified by name and the year of the campaign is also not recorded.

I have always been deeply impressed by this graphic scene. On that first visit to Abu Simbel I was taken with the simple dramatic dynamic of the image. The pharaoh, surrounded by a plain background, stands majestic and brave as his chariot advances towards the city - his team of horses in full flight; the victims of the king's campaign are cowed and pitiful. The text inscribed between the advancing chariot and the besieged city reads:

“O perfect god; O son of Amun who seizes the initiative; O lord of the scimitar who protects his army; O fighter and strong one who is skilful and steady upon his chariot - just like the lord of Thebes; O lord of might who fights hundreds of thousands; O strong bull with many tails who unites by might and crushes the rebels who are upon the hills so that they enter into their valleys like the sons of cowards; may you make slaughter amongst them so that your enemies will pour forth, O king, mighty of the scimitar, Usermaatresetepenre Ramesses-meryamun.”

This is a campaign into a mountainous part of Palestine. The city atop a hill is the culmination of that campaign. The city surrenders without a fight. Could this be a graphic representation of the capture and subjugation of Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam? Is the steep slope below the ramparts the eastern escarpment of the City of David falling away into the Kidron valley? Might the bearded man offering the incense burner be King Rehoboam himself? And could the high-ranking woman at the gates of the city be Solomon's now aged widow - Pharaoh's Daughter?

The Year 8 campaign of Ramesses into Palestine was initiated to put down a revolt which appears to have been inspired by the Egyptian losses in Syria three years earlier. Was Rehoboam's fortification of the fifteen Judaean towns in the south and west of his mountain kingdom part of that revolt movement in Palestine? Whilst you ponder these possibilities, let me summarise the main points of the campaign in Year 8.

Ramesses records the plundering of a city called Shalem in the Year 8 campaign reliefs from the Ramesseum.

Kitchen's study of the Year 8 Palestine campaign led him to the conclusion that Ramesses went up into the Judaean hill country and reached Jerusalem (which means “City” or “Foundation of Shalem”).

The New Chronology for Egypt (so far arrived at independently of biblical dating) places the reign of Ramesses II in the late tenth and We now have to deal with the name “Shishak” to see if it can be linked in any way to Ramesses II.

Washmuaria Riamashesha - This extraordinary mouthful is how the ancient Hittites wrote 'Usermaatre Ramesses' - the prenomen and nomen of Ramesses II.

The fifteen years following the Battle of Kadesh were spent in a titanic political struggle between the Egyptian and Hittite empires for dominance of the Levantine city-states. Finally, having fought and cajoled themselves to a standstill, the two parties agreed to a lasting peace and a sharing of the vassal territories of Amurru.

That treaty, sealed by the marriage of Pharaoh to a daughter of the new Hittite emperor, Hattusilis III, was signed in Year 21 of Ramesses. Fortunately for historians, both the Egyptian copy of the treaty (recorded on a stela at Karnak) and the Hittite version (found at Hattusus) have been preserved.

The Egyptian version is, of course, in monumental hieroglyphs, but the Hittite copy is written upon a clay tablet in cuneiform. We are indeed fortunate to possess this relatively rare type of document which enables us to view an event recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs from a foreign perspective and in a different language.

The peculiarities of the conservative hieroglyphic script are such that the full royal name Egyptologists express as “Usermaatre-Setepenre Ramessu-Meryamun” (in the hybrid Egypto-speak of modern scholarship), would have sounded like double-Dutch to Ramesses' contemporaries and the foreign officials who had dealings with the pharaoh's court.

In the Hittite copy of the peace treaty, the emperor's scribes, faced with a difficult foreign name, wrote down the titulary of the Egyptian signatory to the treaty as 'Washmuaria- shatepnaria Riamashesha-maiamana'.

It is interesting to note that the Hittite scribes transcribed the Egyptian hieroglyphic ‘s' with the cuneiform 'sh' (for example writing `wash' and 'shatep' for ‘user' and ‘setep'). Confusing as it at first seems, it is readily apparent that the semitic scripts of Western Asia often substituted Egyptian `s' with 'sh' and vice versa.

One clear example of this phenomenon is the Egyptian royal name Shoshenk which is written in cuneiform as Susink(u), indicating that the ‘obvious similarity' between the names Shoshenk and Shishak may be more apparent than real.

Now, in Egypt, as in the rest of the ancient world, it was common practice to abbreviate names - just as we do today. This was not only the case for ordinary folk but also for the great rulers themselves. Thus we have “nicknames” such as “Ameny” for Pharaoh Amenemhat I (“The Prophecies of Neferti”), “Pul” for King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria (II Kings 15:19 & I Chronicles 5:26) and “Ululaya” for another Assyrian king whose official name was Shalmaneser (Babylonian King List A).

Could it be, then, that “Shishak”, rather than being the Egyptian name “Shoshenk” (Akk. Susinku) as argued in the conventional chronology, is in fact a hypocoristicon (accepted shortening) of the full nomen of Ramesses II?

To begin the process of revealing the secrets of the biblical name “Shishak” come with me on the short walk southwards from the Shalem inscription at the Ramesseum to the fortified gate which leads into the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. Having passed between the two imposing towers of the migdol gateway and under the “window of appearances” from which Ramesses III used to receive the acclaim of his subjects, we make a sharp turn to the left - as if heading for the “Temple of Relief” located in the south-east corner of the Medinet Habu compound. After a few paces south we stop and turn around. Stretching up towards the sky in front of us is the southern outer fascade of the gate-tower…

The relief we are particularly interested in is badly eroded. Given its exposed position, high up on the south face of the migdol, this is hardly surprising. However, the crucial brief hieroglyphic inscription is still very clear. The figures of the seated Ramesses III and three princesses, approaching him from the left, can be discerned only at close range, but they have been accurately recorded in the magnificent folio volumes of the Chicago Oriental Institute's epigraphic survey of the Medinet Habu temples.

The text located between the king and his daughters is in two parts. The cartouches on the right, in front of the king's head, give the official ‘monumental' names and titles of Ramesses

- both the prenomen (Usermaatre-meryamun) and nomen (Ramesse-Netjerherainu) - with the hieroglyphic signs facing to the left. The four columns of hieroglyphs on the left side face to the right - and therefore represent the spoken words of the princesses. They read:

“[For] your KA, Ss, the king, divine one, [...] and the sun for all the earth. May you repeat jubilees like ATUM, your might being like that of KHEPRI - vigorous for many year during the lifetime of RE in heaven.”

The name Ss (for the moment we can use the pronunciation “Sese”) is written inside a cartouche and clearly refers to the seated figure of Ramesses on the right of the scene. So the daughters of Ramesses III called their father “Sese” - a hypocoristic form of the full name Ramesses. The name Sese had been around for a long time prior to the 19th Dynasty. From as far back as the Old Kingdom, there had been private individuals with this name, and it remained in regular (if not common) use through the Middle and New Kingdoms. Most often the name was a personal nickname, but it also became one of the recognised abbreviations of the full-form name, Ramessu/Ramesse, for both kings and commoners. (The other hypo- coristicon for Ramesses was “Mose” or “Mes”)…

To discover more about the intriguing hypocoristicon of Ramesses we must now turn to another document - Papyrus Anastasi I - a satirical letter, written from one scribe to another. Here we see Hori, knowledgeable about Palestine, poking fun at his inexperienced colleague, Amenemopet, for knowing little about the northern territories of the Egyptian empire. The papyrus is dated to the late 19th Dynasty and reflects the political situation during the long reign of Ramesses II. The following excerpts are of considerable interest in respect of our “Sese” research:

“What is it like, this Simyra of Sysw?

“Come, let [me] tell you many things as far as the Fortress of the Ways [of Horus]. I begin for you with the Dwelling of sysw!

“Come now to the region of Uto of Sysw! - in his stronghold of Usermaatre, life, prosperity, health!

“Simyra of Sysw” was the Egyptian port of Sumer in northern Syria (identified with Tell Kazel named after Ramesses II but employing his hypocoristicon rather than full formal nomen.

Similarly, the “Dwelling of Sysw” was a residence of Ramesses II on the main route across northern Sinai to the Levant; and “Uto of Sysw” was an oasis in Sinai. Here, then, we have

three examples of the use of Ramesses II's hypocoristicon, demonstrating that it was in common use throughout the Egyptian northern empire - at least amongst the Egyptians…

Then in November 1993, fellow UCL post-graduate researcher, Bob Porter, came up with the missing link - a faience chalice from the temple of Hathor at Serabit El-Khadim in Sinai. Its few shattered fragments were found by Petrie in 1906 but were only pieced together in 1992. Around the outer rim of the vessel is a band of black ink hieroglyphs (incised into the faience) giving the titulary of King Usermaatre-setepenre Ssw, providing the intermediate writing between Sysw and the hieroglyphic Ss.

Finally, in 1994 I came across the pyramidion of a courtier named Meryamun Ramessu which is on display in the Kaiserisches Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum in Vienna. On two sides the hieroglyphic inscription gives the deceased's name as “Meryamun Ramessu”. On the east face it appears as “Usermaatre-setepenre Meryamun Ramessu”. But on the west face we read simply Ssy. Clearly this man was named after the reigning pharaoh, Usermaatre-setepenre Ramesses-meryamun (i.e. Ramesses II), so in Ssy we have yet another version of the hypocoristicon of Ramesses.

So why should the same name be written in a number of different ways? The simplest explanation is as follows:

Ss - the form of the name at Medinet Habu - is the stark hieroglyphic version of the word skeleton.

Ssw, Ssy and Sysw - the fuller forms of the name - are trying to indicate the position of the vowels in the Egyptian word. It was common practice for Egyptian scribes to use the consonants y and w as `vowel markers' for this purpose.

Unfortunately, the Egyptian scripts are rarely so helpful as to establish exactly how a name was vocalised by the ancients, but the fuller nameforms of Ss suggest that each ‘s' was followed by a vowel of indeterminate quality. To summarise what we have learned so far about the shortened name forms of Ramesses II and Ramesses III:

Egyptian texts over several centuries demonstrate that there was a name written Ss, Sysw or Ssy which, in the New Kingdom, was clearly adopted as a hypocoristicon for the royal name Ramesses. This familiar name, written in several ways, applied to both Ramesses II and Ramesses III.

We cannot be sure how the abbreviated name was vocalised, but it must have been something like 'Sesy', 'Sesa', 'Sysu' or 'Sysa'.

However, we have not finished yet! Earlier I noted that the Akkadian writing of Ramesses in the Hittite treaty is Riamashesha, and that the hieroglyphic ‘s' was consistently represented by the cuneiform 'sh'. The problems faced by the Hittite scribes writing the Egyptian name in their own script would not have been far removed from those faced by the biblical redactor who gave us the name Shishak.

There are many biblical examples where we see the Egyptian ‘s' (Heb. sin) rendered as 'sh' (Heb. shin). Just as Egyptian 'Askelan' is biblical 'Ashkelon' (and Arabic ‘salam' is Hebrew ‘shalom'), so with the biblical name ‘Shishak'. We should expect it to represent an Egyptian original something like 'Sisak'.

Think about the implications of all this. At one time, we had an apparently convincing identification of the biblical Shishak with the Egyptian king Shoshenk I. But then we saw how the historical scenario created by this identification collapsed under the weight of a whole series of contradictions so that we were left with nothing more substantial than the superficial similarity between the names Shishak and Shoshenk.

Even then we learnt that the name Shoshenk was transcribed in cuneiform as Susink(u) - just as you would expect with the common transformation of Egyptian 'sh' into semitic ‘s'. The same logic must apply to the biblical name Shishak which should therefore represent the Egyptian name Sysa.

The historical record (and the chronological imperative) strongly suggests that Pharaoh Shishak of I Kings and II Chronicles was Ramesses II. The hypocoristic form of his name - Sysw (perhaps vocalised Sysa - and thus Shisha[k] in Hebrew) - was the original basis of the name which many centuries later became enshrined in a foreign text as Shishak.

The last round of the “name game” is to explain the final ‘k' (Heb. qoph) in the name Shishak which is not present in the original Egyptian. The best explanation is to be found in the way that the biblical redactor often makes a play on words, particularly when dealing with foreign names. This is usually done to pour scorn on those who do not follow in the path of Yahweh.

For instance, the original writing of the famous name Jezebel (borne by the Phoenician wife of King Ahab) is attested on a contemporary ninth century scarab as Yzebel, meaning “[Baal] is prince”. However, the redactor turns this into Ayzebel which means “Where is the piece of dung (i.e. Baal)”.

Did the redactor do the same with the Egyptian name Sysa? If so, then he chose a very appropriate pun because the name Shishak may be derived from the Hebrew name Shashak, meaning “assaulter” or “the one who crushes [under foot or under wheel]” - a most descriptive synonym for Ramesses the Great who “crushes the rebels on top of the hills”.

It should be stressed here that the arguments for identifying Ramesses II with Shishak are not based on the similarity between the king's hypocoristicon and the biblical name (as has been the case with the Shoshenk = Shishak equation of the conventional chronology - which may be a red herring) but rather because there is evidence that Ramesses did undertake a military campaign into the hill country of Judah and did, according to Kitchen, reach Jerusalem.

It is based on the campaign relief at the Ramesseum stating that Ramesses defeated a city called Shalem in his eighth year which, I argue, refers to the defeat of Rehoboam in that king's fifth year and the capture of the treasures of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. My identification of Ramesses II as the biblical Shishak is predominantly based on archaeological and historical arguments (A Test of Time, p. 1-5, 151-163).

He also uses similar evidence to Peter James in connecting the end part of name of Ramses with the Hebrew Shishak.

As noted earlier, this evidence can be used to support any pharaoh that has the names of either Ramses or Thutmoses.

Additionally, he provides direct monumental evidence for the conquest of Jerusalem by Ramses II stating the he was the only pharaoh known to have recorded a defeat of Jerusalem.

David Rohl’s arguments are quite sound. His point, though, of saying that Ramses II was the only pharaoh known to have recorded a defeat of Jerusalem is not necessarily correct as we will see shortly when we examine Velikovsky’s candidate for the biblical Shishak.

Based on the booty of Thutmose III and the list of cities conquered in Judah by Thutmose III, both of which are on visual record at the Temple of Karnak, Immanuel Velikovsky identifies Shishak with Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty.

To begin with I would like to quote from an article by William Dankenbring called “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” in which he summarises Velikovsky’s evidence. Dankenbring writes:

Thutmose was a mighty conqueror. The records of his military successes adorn the walls of the great Amon Temple in Karnak. A list of 119 cities in Palestine is engraved three times on the walls of the Temple...Surely the chronicles of ancient Judah and Israel could not have overlooked this victorious Egyptian campaign! Indeed, they do not.

Thutmose III led his army into Palestine, and defeated the enemy arraigned against him at Megiddo. After Megiddo fell, the king conquered 118 other cities. The most important, and first on his list, was a city called simply "Kadesh." Where was this city? Who was its king?

Investigators have been puzzled why so many cities were listed in Palestine, yet the name of Jerusalem was not mentioned in the text. But this Kadesh could not be the Kadesh on the Orontes in northern Syria. The list of cities is of Palestinian cities, not Syrian cities. Secondly, Kadesh is listed first, even before Megiddo, where the king fought his greatest battle. Obviously, Kadesh was considered even more important!

The word "kadesh" in Hebrew means "holy." This was a "holy city." Is Jerusalem ever called "the holy city"?

In many places in the Scriptures, Jerusalem is referred to as "my mount kadesh," my mountain kadesh," thy city kadesh" (Psalm 2:6, Joel 2:1, Isa. 66:18). Daniel refers to Jerusalem as "thy city kadesh" (Dan. 9:24). The "Holy Land" and "Holy City" were names given to Palestine and Jerusalem from early times. Therefore, it is no strange thing for the Pharaoh Thutmose III to refer to Jerusalem by this common name used for it at that time! Kadesh, "Holy," referred directly to Jerusalem, regarded as the "Holy City." During this time, when the Temple of Solomon stood, it was especially so regarded by the envious peoples of the surrounding nations!

Do the Scriptures also speak of this time of invasion and humiliation for the Jews…when Jerusalem was attacked and conquered?

We read, "And it came to pass, in the fifth year of king Rehoboam. Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem...With twelve hundred chariots, and threescore thousand

horsemen: and the people were without number that came with him out of Egypt; the Lubim (Libyans), the Sukkiim, and the Ethiopians. And he took the fenced cities which pertained to Judah, and came to Jerusalem" (II Chron. 12:2-4).

Jerusalem opened its gates…without offering any further resistance…(Shishak) "took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he took all; he carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made" (II Chron. 12:9).

These treasures are reproduced upon a wall of the Karnak temple. The bas-reliefs display in ten rows the legendary wealth of Solomon, including vessels and utensils of the Temple, of the palace, the golden altar, the brazen altar, the shewbread (gold and silver), and the candlesticks.

If all Thutmose III's booty had been painted on the Temple wall, it would have been a mile long! But instead numerical signs were marked beneath each picture to illustrate the quantity!

If Thutmose III lived 600 years before Solomon [the time of Israel’s slavery when only the Canaanites dwelt in Palestine], how could he have possibly captured such a treasure trove which didn't yet even exist?

The Temple pillaged by this king was an extremely rich and significant Temple, with tremendous wealth. It could be none other than the Temple pillaged by Shishak, in the time of Rehoboam, son of Solomon! No wonder Thutmose III was looked upon as such a mighty conqueror!

I now quote from Immanuel Velikovsky book “Ages in Chaos” discussing this proposed synchronism between Thutmose III and Shishak:

The treasures brought by Thutmose III from Palestine are reproduced on a wall of the Karnak temple. The bas-relief displays in ten rows the legendary wealth of Solomon. There are pictures of various precious objects, furnishings, vessels, and utensils of the Temple, of the palace, probably also of the shrines of foreign deities. Under each object a numerical symbol indicates how many of that kind were brought by the Egyptian king from Palestine: each stroke means one piece, each arch means ten pieces, each spiral one hundred pieces of the same thing.

If Thutmose III had wanted to boast and to display all his spoils from the Temple and the Palace of Jerusalem by showing each object separately instead of using this number system, a wall a mile long would have been required and even that would not have sufficed. In the upper five rows the objects of gold are presented; in the next rows silver things are mingled with those of gold and precious stones; objects of bronze and semiprecious stones are in the lower rows.

Wealth accumulated by a nation during hundreds of years of industrious work and settled life in Palestine, spoils gathered by Saul and David in their military expeditions, loot of the Amalekite Auars, earnings from the trade between Asia and Africa, gold from Ophir, the gifts of the queen Sheba-Hatshepsut, all became the booty of Thutmose III.

The work of Huram, of the tribe of Naphtali, is reproduced on the walls of the Karnak temple; Huram and his workmen were skilled artisans, and the hand of their royal master, Solomon, supplied them lavishly with precious metal and stone. Specimens of the skill of David's craftsmen must also be found in this exhibit for

1 KINGS 7:51 ... Solomon brought in the things which David his father had dedicated; even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put among the treasures of the house of the Lord.

The sacred objects wrought by the ancient master Bezaleel, son of Uri, may also have been reproduced here. An exhaustive indentification of objects pictured in the Karnak temple and of those described in the Books of Kings and Chronicles is a matter for prolonged study and should preferably be done with the help of molds from the bas-reliefs at Karnak. The following short excursus is not intended to be complete and definitive; it is only tentative. Yet it will demonstrate the identity of the booty of Thutmose III with that carried out of Jerusalem by the Egyptian king in the days of Rehoboam, son of Solomon.

A large part of the booty of Thutmose III consisted of religious objects taken from a temple. There were altars for burnt offerings and incense, tables for the sacrifice, layers for liquid offerings, vessels for sacred oil, tables for showbread, and the like in great quantity. No doubt it was an extremely rich temple that was pillaged by Thutmose III. The objects taken by Shishak from Jerusalem were the treasures of the Temple of Solomon and of the king's palace (II Chronicles 12:9).

On the Karnak bas-relief Thutmose III is shown presenting certain objects to the god Amon: these objects are the part of the king's booty which he dedicated to the temple of Amon and gave to the Egyptian priests. This picture does not represent the whole booty of Thutmose

1. He chose for the Egyptian temples what he took from the foreign Temple, and in this collection of "cunning work" one has to look for the objects enumerated in the sections of the Books of Kings and of Chronicles describing the Temple.

   On the walls of the tomb chambers of Thutmose's viziers treasures are shown in the process of transportation from Palestine. Besides the art work familiar from the scene of presentation to Amon, there are also other objects, apparently from the palace. These were delivered to Pharaoh's palace and to the houses of his favorites.

   The books of the Scriptures have preserved a detailed record of furniture and vessels of the Temple only. Fortunately the separation of the sacral booty in the scene of dedication to Amon makes the task of recognition easier. The metals used and the style of the craftsmanship will be compared briefly in the Hebrew and Egyptian sources. The material of which the objects were made is indicated by accompanying inscriptions on the bas-relief; they were made of three different metals, translated as gold, silver, and bronze. The metals used for the sacral furniture and for the vessels in the Temple of Solomon were of gold, silver and bronze ("brass"). The "cunning work" was manufactured of each of these metals.

   Often an article is represented on the wall in gold and another of the same shape in brass. The fashioning of identical objects in gold as well as in bronze (brass) for the Temple of Solomon is repeatedly referred to in the Books of Kings and of Chronicles. When gold was used for the vessels and the furnishings of Solomon's Temple, it was either solid gold or a hammered gold overlay on wood. The pictures of the objects in Karnak are described by the words "gold" and "overlaid with gold".

   

   In the period when Israel had no permanent site for its place of worship, the Ark of the Covenant and other holy objects were moved from one place to another and were sometimes taken into battle. In order to facilitate transportation, the furnishings of the tabernacle were made with rings and bars. The old furniture of the tabernacle was placed in the Temple by Solomon, and was carried off, in the days of his son, by the pharaoh and his army.

   The Ark of the Covenant, however, was not removed but remained in the Temple until the Babylonian exile. It was probably a model for other transportable sacred paraphernalia used in the holy enclosure in Beth-el and in Shiloh and thereafter in Jerusalem.

   In the second and seventh rows of the Karnak bas-relief are shown various arkshaped chests with rings at the corners and bars for transportation.

   

   

   "A crown of gold round about" was an ancient Judean ornament of sacred tables and altars. Such ornamentation is seen on the golden altar in the second row (9) of the mural, as well as on the bronze (brass) altar in the ninth row (177). The preferred ornament on the vessels was the shoshana, translated as "lily" (lotus).

   1 KINGS 7:26 ... the brim thereof [of the molten sea] was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies.

   The lotus motif is often repeated on the vessels reproduced on the wall of Karnak. A lotus vial is shown in gold, in silver, and in colored stone (malachite?). A rim of lily work may be seen on various vessels (35, 75, 175), a very unusual type of rim ornament found only in the scriptural account and on the bas-reliefs of Thutmose III.

   Buds among flowers ("his knops and his flowers"') were also used as ornamentation in the tabernacle. This motif appears on a vase (195) in the lower row of the Karnak mural and also in the fifth row (75). Of animal figures, lions

   and oxen are mentioned as decorative motifs of the Temple of Jerusalem (I Kings 7:29 and 36). The Karnak mural shows lion heads (20, 60), and the head of an ox is recognizable as an ornament on a drinking vessel (132).

   Gods were often depicted in Egyptian temples in shameless positions. Among the figures of sacred objects on the Karnak bas-relief there are none of phallic form, neither are there any pictures of gods at all.

   A few animal heads (lions) with the sign of the uraeus on their foreheads and the head of a hawk are wrought on the lids of some cups. These cups might have been brought from the palace Solomon had built for his Egyptian wife.

   Idols were and still are used in all pagan worship. The hundreds of sacred objects appearing in the mural were obviously not of an idolatrous cult; they suggest, rather, a cult in which offerings of animals, incense, and showbread were brought, but in which no idols were worshiped. The Temple of Kadesh-Jerusalem, sacked by Thutmose III, was rich in utensils for religious services but devoid of any image of a god.

   Piece by piece the altars and vessels of Solomon's Temple can be identified on the wall of Karnak. In the Temple of Solomon there was an altar of gold for burnt offerings (I Kings 7:48; II Chronicles 4:19). It was the only such altar. In the second row of the bas-reliefs is an altar with a crown around the edge, partly destroyed, but partly plainly discernible (9). The inscription reads: "The [a] great altar." It was made of gold.

   

   Another altar in the Temple of Jerusalem was of "brass" (bronze); it was square and very large. In the ninth row of the Karnak relief an altar of "brass" (bronze) is pictured, the shape of which is similar to that of the gold altar. The inscription says (177): "One great altar of brass [bronze]." Inasmuch as its height is equal to its width, the altar does not fit the description of the altar mentioned in the Second Book of Chronicles, which was half as high as it was wide. However, from the first chapter of the Second Book of Chronicles we know that another brazen altar made by Bezaleel was among the holy objects of the Temple at Jerusalem.

   Next to the altar was the table "whereupon the shewbread was" (I Kings 7:48; II Chronicles 4:19). The showbread was obviously not of flour, but of silver or gold; in the Book of Exodus it is said that showbread was made by Bezaleel, who was a goldsmith. Showbread is pictured on the bas-relief of Karnak in the form of a cone. The cone in the seventh row (138) bears the explanation: "White bread." This bread was of silver. The thirty cones of gold (48) and the twenty-four cones of colored stone (malachite) (169), identical in form with the silver cone, also represent showbread.

   

   The "candlestick with the lamps" (II Chronicles 4:20) was an illuminating device with lamps shaped like flowers. Figures 35, 36, 37, and 38 of the mural are candlesticks with lamps. One of them (35) has three lily lamps on the left and three on the right. The other candlesticks (37, 38) have eight lamps to the left and eight to the right. The candlestick with lamps wrought by Bezaleel for the tabernacle had three lamps to the left and three to the right." There were almonds, a knop, and a flower on the arms. A later form showed a preference for seven lamps on both sides of the stem.

   Other candlesticks are mentioned in addition to those with lamps. In the Book of Kings they are described as bearing flowers (I Kings 7:49). This form is seen in the third row of the bas- relief (25, 26, 27, and 28). The candlestick is in the shape of a stem with a lotus blossom. Next to the altar, the tables with the showbread, and the candlesticks were the tables for offerings.

   Exodus 35:13 “The table ... and all his vessels.

   Exodus 37:16 “... vessels ... upon the table: his dishes, and his spoons, and his bowls, and his covers to cover withal, of pure gold.”

   

   The table, like its vessels, was of gold (I Kings 7:48). "The tables of sacrifice" in the third row (of gold) and in the seventh row (of silver) of the mural have sets of vessels on them: three flat dislies, three large cups, three pots (or bowls), one shovel. Many tables of gold and silver and bronze are reproduced on the bas-relief. The paraphernalia of the Temple contained also "hooks and all instruments" (II Chronicles 4:16). In the third row of the Karnak mural, near the table of offerings, and in the same row at the left end, there are hooks, spoons, and

   

   other implements (30, 31, 32, 33, 43, 44); bowls appear in most of the rows, but especially in the second and sixth (of gold).

   "The incense altar, and his staves, and the anointing oil" were in the Temple of Jerusalem (Exodus 35:15). As no detailed description of the form of this altar is given in the Scriptures, various objects in the form of altars suitable for incense may be considered. Did the smoke of the burning incense pour through the openings in the ornamental spouts? Was the incense burned in a dish set on a base (41, 181)? Vessels containing anointing oil are shown on pedestal altars (41); over the figures in the lower row (197-99) is written: "Alabaster, filled with holy anointing oil for the sacrifice."

   Golden snuffers were used in the Temple of Solomon for spreading the fragrance during the service (II Chronicles 4:22; I Kings 7:50). “Masrek” in Hebrew means a fountain or a vessel that ejects a fluid. Such fountains are mentioned as having been in the Temple of Solomon (I Kings 7:50; II Chronicles 4:22). Among the vessels shown on the wall at Karnak there are one or two whose form is peculiar. The vessel in the fifth row (73) has two side spouts and is adorned with figures of animals. The spouts are connected with the basin by two animals (lions?) stretching toward them; rodents run along the spouts, one pair up and one pair down; amphibians (frogs) sit on top of the vessel. It is not unusual to decorate modem foun- tains in a like manner. The figures of frogs are especially appropriate for this purpose. The tubes and the mouths of the animals on the vessel could be used to spout perfume or water. The neighboring object seems also to be a fountain.

   

   One hundred basins of gold were made by Solomon for the Temple (II Chronicles 4:8). Ninety-five basins of gold are shown in the sixth row of the mural; six larger basins are shown apart. The walls and floor of Solomon's Temple were "overlaid with fine gold" and "garnished with precious stones" (iI Chronicles 3:5-6; 1 Kings 6:28). Pharaoh, who "took all", did not leave this gold or these stones on the walls. Some of them were worked into jewels, and the inscription (over 63-65) reads: "Gold and various precious stones his majesty had reworked." Other gold was taken in the form of bricks and links (chains) (23, 24). Chains of gold are also mentioned as having been in the Temple of Solomon (II Chronicles 3:16): "And he made chains."

   Thirty-three doors are represented in the lower row of the basrelief and the inscription says they are "of beaten copper" (190).

   

   II CHRONICLES 4:9 Furthermore he made the court of the priests, and the great court, and doors for the court, and overlaid the doors of them with copper .

   Targets or shields of "beaten gold" are named among the booty of the pharaoh (II Chronicles 9:15). These three hundred shields, together with the two hundred targets of gold (II Chronicles 9:15, 16), were not part of the furnishings of the Temple; they adorned "the house of the forest of Lebanon".

   In the seventh row of the mural there are three disks marked with the number 300, which means that they represent three hundred pieces. The metal of which they are made is not mentioned; some objects in this row are of silver, but the next figure has a legend indicating that it is of gold.

   The large "sea of brass" and the brazen bases (I Kings 7:23; II Chronicles 4:2) were not removed by the pharaoh (II Kings 25:16). Among the things which were taken later by Nebuzaradan, the captain of Nebuchadnezzar, were "two pillars, one sea, and the bases which Solomon had made for the House of the Lord”.

   The ephod of the high priest (a collar with a breastplate) was not mentioned in the Scriptures among the booty of the pharaoh and might not have been taken. But precious garments of the priests were carried off. The fourth row displays rich collars, some with breastplates; they were destined to be gifts for the priests of Amon.

   In the bas-reliefs of Karnak we have a very excellent and detailed account of the vessels and furniture of the Temple of Solomon, much more detailed than the single bas-relief of the Titus Arch in Rome, showing the candlestick and a few other vessels of the Second Temple, brought to the Roman capital just one thousand years after the sack of the First Temple by the Egyptians (Ages in Chaos, p.148-154).

   Regardless of whether the wall at the Temple of Karnak attributed to Thutmose III is treasure from the Temple in Jerusalem or just wealth accumulated locally and/or from external booty there can be no question that the wealth represented on that wall is absolutely enormous!!!

   Eric Aitchison rejects this synchronism of Shishak with Thutmose III preferring to date Thutmose III’s reign to a century later and his Megiddo victory recorded on the list of Palestinian cities to 823 BC. Commenting on the enormous cache of treasure attributed to Thutmose III on the wall at the Temple of Karnak, Eric writes:

   Thutmose also records with great detail the list of booty captured from Megiddo and environs. Glaringly non-evident are the shields of gold that Solomon had made. Also glaring non-evident from the list of booty are those Temple appurtenances that remained in the Temple until the times of Ahaz, at least. Thutmose listed an indeterminate amount of “bronze

   vessels” but never bothered to take the “brazen altar” nor the “bronze laver” for ritual washing, nor the ten bases of brass. Also non-evident in his list were the pots, and the shovels, and the basons; all made in bright brass.

   In his summary Thutmose neither mentions the golden altar, nor the table of gold, on which the shewbread was. The candlesticks with the flowers, the lamps and the tongs of gold, plus the minor gold implements for general Temple use, all fail to get a specific mention by Thutmose in his list unless they are included in the phrase, ‘apart from bowls of costly stone and gold, various vessels’ (14 – Thutmose III Revisited, p. 13-14).

   Eric mentions a number of objects which are missing on the Temple of Karnak when compared with the objects in the Temple in Jerusalem. Eric’s usual attention to detail appears missing in these comments. Below I quote the objects Eric refers to and the object number and page reference in Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos that details these objects:

   • Shields of gold - Possibly object 127 which matches the number of 300 shields of 2 Chronicles 9:16 (Ages in Chaos, p. 154)

   • The brazen altar - Object 177 (Ages in Chaos, p. 151)

   • The bronze laver – Not mentioned by Velikovsky

   • The golden altar - Object 9 (Ages in Chaos, p. 151)

   • The table of gold on which the shewbread was – Velikovsky doesn’t mention the table but object 14 looks like it may be a table. Velikovsky does mention gold and silver shewbread (Objects 48 & 138, Ages in Chaos, page 152)

   • The golden candlesticks - Objects 35-38, (Ages in Chaos, p. 152)

Eric also states “Also glaring non-evident from the list of booty are those Temple appurtenances that remained in the Temple until the times of Ahaz, at least.” Let’s compare two Bible passages before I comment on that point:

And it happened in the fifth year of King Rehoboam Shishak king of Egypt, he came up against Jerusalem. And he took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house. He took ALL away. And he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made (1 Kings 14:25-26).

And the bronze pillars in the house of the LORD, and the bases, and the bronze sea in the house of the LORD, the Chaldeans broke into pieces and carried the bronze from them to Babylon…also the two pillars, the one sea, and the bases which Solomon had made for the house of the LORD. The bronze of all these vessels was without weight” (2 Kings 25:13-16).

Notice the apparent contradiction. Shishak takes everything yet later they have the original bronze bases.

There are two possibilities to reconcile these verses. First is that the ALL refers only to everything that was on display in the Temple but does not include certain objects (eg. Ark of the Covenant and possibly the bronze bases) which were hidden by the priests in a separate location knowing that Shishak was at the gates of the city.

The second possibility is that certain objects like the bronze bases were a part of Shishak booty he took away but were later returned on request to the Temple. Being bronze the Egyptians may not have put much value on them and were happy to return them.

Following on from that I continue to quote from Eric’s paper (14 Thutmose III Revisited) for his views on the Thutmose III treasure wall :

Velikovsky, and later Sweeney, claim that Thutmose brought back to Karnak the treasures from the Temple of Solomon. They further make the point, (Velikovsky, page 159) that there was no image of any god depicted in the Karnak reliefs. Thutmose himself however lists two statues, one of silver but does not specify them as representative of the gods of his enemies. The descriptions and enumerations of the temple accoutrements is very telling and on the face of their presentation, supportive of Velikovsky’s claim. However Bimson has another version of the Karnak reliefs that requires consideration:

“However, I also encountered problems with his identification of Thutmose III as the biblical Shishak. When examining the Karnak relief that Velikovsky interpreted as showing booty from Solomon’s temple, I noted:

“Many of the objects are pure Egyptian in style and ornamentation, e.g. the common occurrence of the uraeus, (nos. 15, 58, 59, 60, 68, 77), several Egyptian style human figures

(nos. 35, 69, 91, 173, 174) and the use of the cartouche as a decorative motif (nos. 11, 149, 172, 183) – in one case specifically the cartouche of Thutmose III.

“The inscription over one of the vases read, ‘Of costly stone, which his majesty made according to the design of his own heart’, i.e. which Thutmose III had designed himself. An almost identical phrase can be found in scenes from the tomb of Menkheperresenb, Thutmose III’s High Priest of Amon and Chief of the Overseers of Craftsmen. These show Menkheperresenb inspecting ‘the work of the craftsmen in real lapis lazuli, and in real malachite, which his majesty made after the design of his heart, to be monuments for his father Amon, in the house of Amon…’ It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these scenes in the tomb of Menkheperresenb show the making of the same vessels that are being presented to Amon for his temple in the Karnak relief.

“In short, the most natural interpretation of the relief is that the items are of an Egyptian manufacture, designed from the start for the temple of Amon at Karnak and not booty from a campaign. I know of nothing in the text accompanying the scene that suggests they were booty and, if they were, we would expect this to be clearly stated, since it would be to the pharaoh’s glory” (Bimson, Dr. John, “Finding the Limits of Chronological Revisions”, SIS C & C Review, ‘Proceedings of the SIS 2002 Conference, vol 2003: 1 page 77).

In my opinion it would also follow that worship of whatever god in whatever temple would require accoutrements similar to those described for Solomon’s and Amun’s temples and indeed the temple, if there was one, at Kadesh or Megiddo. Thus the premise argued by Velikovsky and now Sweeney is not watertight (14 – Thutmose III Revisited, p. 14).

There are two key points noted above in bold. In regards to the comment above a number of Egyptian objects amongst the treasure offered to Amon by Thutmose III Velikovsky writes:

Gods were often depicted in Egyptian temples in shameless positions. Among the figures of sacred objects on the Karnak bas-relief there are none of phallic form, neither are there any pictures of gods at all.

A few animal heads (lions) with the sign of the uraeus on their foreheads and the head of a hawk are wrought on the lids of some cups. These cups might have been brought from the palace Solomon had built for his Egyptian wife (Ages in Chaos, p. 151).

In addition, it is possible that the vast amount of what Thutmose III offers to Amon is a composite of mostly booty from the Temple in Jerusalem and supplemented by some locally made objects as noted by Bimson.

The weakest point in Velikovsky’s argument for this wall representing the booty of Shishak is the lack of clear inscriptional notation as to the origin of the treasure. According to Bimson he states that he has seen no inscriptional notation stating that any of the treasure was booty. I can neither confirm nor deny this statement.

While there is small amount of Egyptian ware on display, by and large Velikovsky is correct in stating there is a big relative absence of images of gods and phallic objects in the vast majority of the objects dedicated.

Would we not see a much greater amount of images of gods and phallic objects if the vast majority of the objects were locally produced in Egypt?

While there is a certain basic similarity in objects used in temples of Egypt and Near East compared to the biblical Temple in Jerusalem there would be some differences as well as I just noted in the lack of imagery of the gods. Velikovsky has amply shown a very striking match between the objects on the Karnak wall compared to those of the Temple in Jerusalem.

While I have to acknowledge that Eric is correct in stating Velikovsky’s case is not watertight due to the lack of inscriptional comment on the origin of the treasure there is far more that supports Velikovsky's case than there is against it based solely on the evidence on the treasure wall at Karnak.

Eric’s alternative for Shishak is not based on any documented evidence any such conquest as Velikovsky attempts to use to support his point of view but based solely on probability and the limits set by other factors in his revised chronology. Eric writes:

The dates I am forced to use for the start of Dynasty XVIII and ergo the finish of XV helps identify who might be Shishak. On the basis of probability I nominate Apophis [last king of the Hyksos] (15 - So, Who Was Shishak?, p.11).

1 Chronicles 29:4 says that David gave Solomon 3000 talents of gold for the Temple and in verse 7 that the people gave another 5000 talents of gold. There are 30 kilos in a talent so 8000 talents is over 260 tonnes of gold !!!

If Ramses the Great, well known for his boasting, had plundered the Temple of God as believed by David Rohl and took back that phenomenal amount of gold would there not be a great boast showing all the treasures of the Temple on some temple wall as well like the Temple of Karnak? And ditto for Ramses III in his Temple at Medinet Habu!

The lack of such a booty record by those two Ramses is very telling in comparing just who the real biblical Shishak was.

David Rohl has Ramses II of the 19th dynasty as the biblical Shishak and Thutmose III as contemporary with Samuel and the late Judges period. Peter James has Thutmose III as contemporary with the earlier back in the period of the Judges.

Would Israel have accumulated that phenomenal amount of gold (over 200 tonnes) in the more feudal period of the Judges when they often were invaded by the neighbours to the point where they asked for a king?

Eric Aitchison has Apopis, the last king of the Hyksos as the biblical Shishak and Thutmose III as contemporary with the middle period of the divided kingdom of Israel. Again, why is there no great boast of such booty in the records of Apophis.

Also, if Thutmose III was contemporary with the middle period of the divided kingdom of Israel after Apophis plundered Jerusalem, as Eric proposes, is it realistic to believe that Israel in its divided kingdom period was able to re-accumulate such wealth again (over 200 tonnes of gold alone) particularly when there are indications that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were often under the hegemony of Egypt?

A consequence of Eric’s view that Apophis, last king of the Hyksos, was Shishak is that the Egyptian wife who Solomon married (daughter of the pharaoh, 1 Kings 11:1) was an Amalekite since Eric supports Velikovsky’s view that the Hyksos were the Amalekites.

On this point my friend, Adam Stuart, in an email to me shared these thoughts:

Solomon reportedly had an Egyptian wife and built a house for her. Given the hatred that the Hebrew prophets had for the Amalekites, I suspect that there would have been more opposition to Solomon during his reign if he had married a Hyksos-Amalekite wife and fostered peaceful relations with Egypt under the Hyksos.

I suspect that if this had occurred, the Bible's authors would have mentioned that Solomon had an Amalekite wife and made an issue of it specifically. They did not, and I still think that Solomon's reign occurred during native Egyptian rule over Egypt, not while some of Egypt was still under Hyksos rule.

Not long before Solomon God instructed Saul to kill all the Amalekites during his campaign where he failed to kill Agag. Samuel then finished off the job after telling Saul he would lose the kingdom.

Would Solomon so soon after make a treaty with these sworn enemies of Israel and married the daughter of an Amalekite king? This seems very unlikely to me.

The cities recorded paying tribute to Sheshonk I of the 22nd dynasty, who conventional Egyptology says was Shishak, are just about all cities in the northern kingdom of Israel and NOT the southern kingdom of Judah as noted clearly by David Rohl (A Test of Time, p. 126).

In addition to the treasure wall Thutmose III recorded a list of over 100 cities in Palestine from his campaign. How do these match up with what we read in the Bible.

Unlike the Sheshonk tribute listing there is far greater uncertainty in the matching of names on the list with cities in Palestine. Velikovsky notes some Judean cities that appear to match what is in the list. In 2 Chronicles 11:5-10 we read of the key cities in Judah at the time:

And Rehoboam lived in Jerusalem and built cities for defense in Judah.

And he built Bethlehem, and Etam, and Tekoa, and Beth-zur, and Shoco, and Adullam, and Gath, and Mareshah, and Ziph, and Adoraim, and Lachish, and Azekah, and Zorah, and Aijalon, and Hebron, which are in Judah and in Benjamin, fortified cities.

The very first city on Thutmose III’s list is qds which is translated as kadesh. Kadesh means “holy” and this is a strong contender for Jerusalem.

Velikovsky believes Itmm (No. 36) is likely to be Etam. He also believes that Bt sir (No.

110) is Beth-zur and Sk (No. 67) is Shoco (Ages in Chaos, p.146). Msh (No. 25) possibly could be Mareshah. One source has these comments about the cities on the list:

Starting from the very top we read the names of cities like “Qadesh” the Holy City, Jerusalem. “Mkty” [No. 2] which many read as Megiddo could also be “Maqtar”, 14 miles north of Jerusalem, or it also could be the region surrounding “qds”. According to Hieroglyphic Dicitionaries ... is tranlated as “mkt” and means “district” or “region”, a remarkable resemblance to “mkty”.

“Tmsq” could be Damascus, “itmm”, Etam. One may ask, if “mkty” is not “Megiddo” where on the list is it then? While it is tempting to suggest “mkty” refers to Megiddo, there were many towns located between Jerusalem and Megiddo.

His attack probably being an almost simultaneous attack on Jerusalem and Megiddo, the towns in between which were in the territory of Judah, came later for it appears the Egyptians studiously avoided the territory of Israel, Jeroboam's homeland now (Thutmose III's Karnak City List, http://www.specialtyinterests.net/clist.html).

While the connection is far from watertight, there is some good supporting evidence here that some Judean cities are included in the list including Jerusalem.

There are what apparently are two key northern Israelite cities – mkty (Megiddo) and tnk (Taanach). Velikovsky did not disagree with the identification of Megiddo, the second city on the list.

Megiddo is well into the territory of the northern kingdom though the Bible doesn’t give enough indication as to whether Megiddo was initially in Judean or the hands of the northern kingdom. The record of Thutmose III indicates that the chief of Kadesh holed himself up in mkty. This seems unusual if mkty was Megiddo since Jerusalem was more important to preserve.

I’d like to quote now from an article called the “The Conquest of Kadesh” for its thoughts on this subject:

The case of `Mkty' as Megiddo vs `Mkty' as the region around Jerusalem Velikovsky's View

In the relevant Egyptian records we read:

"Year 231 ... His majesty went forth in a chariot of electrum ... The southern wing of this army of his majesty was on a hill south of the [brook of] a Kina (Ky-n'), the northern wing was at the northwest of ‘Mkty', while his majesty was in their center, with Amon as the protection of his members ... Then his majesty prevailed against them at the head of his army, and when they saw his majesty prevailing against them they fled headlong to ‘Mkty' in fear, abandoning their horses and their chariots of gold and silver. The people hauled them (up), pulling (them) by their clothing, into this city; the people of this city having closed (it) against them [and lowered] clothing to pull them up into this city..." [Breasted, ‘Records', Vol. II, Sec. 430]

A look on the map of the region of Kadesh/Jerusalem located in the territory of Judah is inconclusive as to the topographical location of the brook of Kina, but see adjacent column. A more helpful hint in what geographical area the southern army was moving in is given by the reference to ‘Aruna'.

"Now, the rear of the victorious army of his majesty was at the city of Aruna ('-rw- n), the front was going forth to the valley of ...; they filled the opening of this valley.

..." [Ibid., Sec. 427]

It appears that ‘Aruna' has to do with a biblical location known as "the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite." [2. Samuel 24:16, 18-24]

In the days of David the Beth-Horon road led to the threshing floor of Araunah, in the days of Rehoboam it led just north of the Temple mount.

Comparing ‘Mkty' with Megiddo, and ‘Ta-a-na-ka' with Taanach

Breasted identified the `Road to Aruna' with the Wadi Ara connecting the Valley of Esdraelon with the Sea Coast route coming from the direction of Egypt. The problem with that choice is that it does not fit the description found in the annals of Thutmose III. Nelson traveled the Wadi Ara pass in 1909 and again in 1912 and describes it as follows:

"... the road enters the Wadi Ara which is there ... flat and open ... All the way to a quarter of a mile above ‘Ar'arah the valley is wide and level ... the ascent is so gradual as to be scarcely perceptible ... a watcher posted on the hill above Lejjun could discern an approaching army at least a mile above the mouth of the pass." [Nelson, ‘The Battle of Megiddo', 1913]

What is in the name `Mkty'? An explanation for the name is found in 2 Samuel 2:8,12,13.

"And Abner the son of Ner ... took Ish-bo-sheth ... and brought him over to Ma-ha-na-im." and they "went out from Ma-ha-na-im. And Joab ... and the servants of David went out, and met together by the pool of Gibeon: and they set down, the one on the one side of the pool, and the other on the other side of the pool."

"The hieroglyophs read ‘My-k-ty' by Breasted, have been read ‘mak-ta' by Gauthier .... According to the Annals, Gibeon was south of it, which excludes identification of this ‘mak-ta' with Beth-Makdis, the Temple Mount of Jerusalem." Similarly Breasted's translation ‘brook of Kina' (hnw), where `kina' means lamentations in English, may also be translated as ‘waters of lamentations' and therefore is well explained by the pools of 2 Samuel chapter 2. The ‘brook of Kina' then is not necessarily the name of a river.

"Details of the route to be taken by an attacker on Jerusalem from the north are described in Isaiah 10:28-32. From north to south, the list enumerates twelve cities or forts. It starts with Aiath, Migron, Michmas, and ends with `the hill of Jerusalem'.

In the corresponding list of the Septuagint, `Migron' is called `Magedo', also `Makedo' ..." [Septuagint, `Isaias' 10:28-32; p. 581] "This Makedo is north of Gibeon, which lay south-west of this `mak-ta'; even further south are the `waters', the camping place of Thutmose's army, a geographical fact that meets the requirements of the Egyptian text."

According to Breasted, the name of the city was ‘Mkty'. It seems however that the Egyptian scribes met with some difficulties in rendering the place names in hieroglyphics ... As we noted Gauthier read the name as `Makta'. In later 19th Dynasty inscriptions the name's last element ‘ty' or ‘ti' is written as ‘sh', ‘s' or ‘tsh' making it ‘Mksh' or ‘Mktsh'.

We have written evidence from 10th century AD Arabic sources that Jerusalem was called

`Bait-al-Makdis' or just plain ‘Makdis'. The 10th century writer who mentions this name called himself `Mukadassi' - the Jerusalemite. [Mukadassi in his description of Syria, p. 34.]

What about Taanach? How do the Egyptian documents pinpoint Taanach? Taanach was transliterated from the hieroglyphics yielding "T'( )n'-k". The inscriptions refer next to a more northerly town by the name of "Df-ty" (Zefti). This could be the biblical ‘Zephathah' known from the days of the successor of Rehobeam, king Asa of Judah and his battle against Zera, the Ethiopian/Egyptian king/general under Amenhotep II. We read:

"Then went Asa out against them ... Zerah the Ethiopian ... and they set the battle in array in the valley of Zeph-athah' at Mareshah." [2.Chronicles 14:10; See also Breasted, ‘Records', Vol. II, Sec. 421, 426]

A more decisive geographical locator is ‘the difficult road' and `Aruna'. Those two descriptions lead invariably to the Beth-horon ascent and the threshing floor of Aruna, the Jebusite. From the above verse it is clear that `Zephathah' is located to the south, in the Negev region of Israel. Therefore to conclude that `T-n-k' is Taanach is not for sure. There were many towns and hamlets even in those days which could account for `T-n-k'.

Which Scenario should we credit with the better explanation? The List of pros and cons

1. The Egyptian army could not reach Megiddo undetected and the mostly level land should have given Rehoboam the opportunity to put up for a fight.

2. At Wadi Ara there is no place where the Egyptian army could fill the valley at the mouth of the pass they had just traversed.

3. The road to Aruna is also philologically not the Wadi Ara.

4. `Mkty' could also be `Mksh' or `Mktsh'.

5. The logistics and time used fit the Beth Horon to Gibeon, Makedo, Jerusalem scenario better.

6. There was more to be had in Jerusalem than in Megiddo.

7. The 3 pillared grid and other aspects we mention require placing Thutmose III into the time of Jeroboam.

The Egyptian Records The `Brook of Kina' we explained above. When Thutmose raided locations northwest of `Mkty', again, Meggido as well as Jerusalem offer choice locations. To the northwest of Megiddo is a valley stretching alongside the Carmel range toward the Mediterranean Sea. If we transpose this scene to the environs of Jerusalem there are likewise several possible valleys, slopes, towns and hills to choose from where he could have been moving around in on his arrival from the steep `Road of Aruna'. It becomes apparent therefore that the `steep Road to Aruna' is a more decisive factor than any other geographical markers mentioned and that is why we elaborate on it.

While Thutmose not infrequently decapitated or otherwise killed the inhabitants of conquered locations he seems to have done less of that to those from Retenu. We read:

"... I deprieved their nostrils of their breath." "It (the diadem on his brow) burned all those in their settlements with flame decapitating the heads of the Amu foreigners, their children fell to its power." "I have come, I have given thee to strike those who belong to the land of Sat [probably Arabia], thou hast taken captive the heads of Retenu they see Thy majesty equipped with the decorations ..." [SBA, `Records of the Past', Vol. II, `Tablet of Thutmose III', Sec. 8, 10, 14]…

The intend of the biblical account is that the walls of Jerusalem were not breached and no significant damage was done to the city. Thutmose was ingenious in doing so, for a people who still had their city left to them could pay future tribute while a completely devastated, killed or enslaved population could not (http://www.specialtyinterests.net/clist.html).

David Rohl’s evidence for Ramses II as Shishak is based on a singular line of evidence documenting Jerusalem as a city that Ramses II went to.

Eric Aitchison’s evidence to support the last Hyksos king as Shishak is based on who approximately best fits that place in time based on the greater overall chronology he has built. We have looked at one particular weakness of choosing a Hyksos-Amalekite king as it appears highly unlikely that prior to this that Solomon would have had an alliance and married the daughter of the Amalekites who were sworn enemies of Israel.

Peter James’ candidate, Ramses III, is excluded on the basis of the Greek tiles from his palace with Greek writing that put an earliest date of 750 BC for the time of his reign.

Velikovsky has marshalled some excellent evidence from two bas-reliefs at the Temple of Karnak. One shows a remarkable match of objects with the Temple in Jerusalem. The other shows a listing of cities in Palestine that are the likely origin of the treasure on the other bas-relief . A careful study of some of the key towns gives more evidence for the towns being in Judah than in the northern kingdom.

If the treasure wall represents what would be a phenomonal and amazingly rich amount of booty from Palestine then all other candidates for Shishak face problems to account for this treaure trove taken back by Thutmose III.

For Eric Aitchison’s Shishak candidate, could feudal Israel in Samuel’s time when they were harassed by their neighbours have accumulated such a vast amount of treasure?

For David Rohl and Peter James’ candidate could Israel have re-accumulated such a vast amount of treasure in the divided kingdom period of Israel when they were often under the hegemony of Egypt?

David Rohl has been able to provide evidence showing Ramses the Great conquered Jerusalem but this one inscription pales in comparison to the two major pieces of monumental evidence Velikovsky cites supporting Thutmose III being the Shishak of the Bible!

What about the name of Shishak and can that be linked with Thutmoses III? We have already seen that the evidence from both James and Rohl showing that Shishak is possibly derived from the ending of the name Ramses. As the ending of the name Thutmoses is the same as Ramses then it equally applies to Thutmoses III.

Velikovsky provides further evidence for this in his book “Ages in Chaos”:

As was demonstrated in a previous chapter, Shishak is the scriptural name of Thutmose. Since the tablets of Ras Shamra belong to the period of the Amenhoteps and Thutmoses [18th dynasty NOT the 22nd dynasty], we should expect to find in them, besides the biblical name of Zerah, that of Shishak.

It was, in fact, among the first of the deciphered words and it caused considerable surprise. "Le mot Swsk semble, un nom propre, k rapprocher peut-etre de !'egyptien Sosenq, hebreu Sosaq, et Sisaq." Dhorme, Revue biblique, XL (1931), 55.

The translator did not dare to draw the correct conclusion, for what was this pharaoh of the ninth or tenth century doing in the middle of the second millennium? (p. 212-213)

My personal conclusion is that there is far more evidence supporting Velikovsky’s identification of Shishak with Thutmose III than there is against it or supporting the other candidates we have looked at.

Velikovsky’s synchronism gives us a key anchor point for dating the Thutmose III and the 18th dynasty during which he ruled.