it is now a small step, I believe, to connect this sage also to the alleged ‘first user of the word philosophy’, Pythagoras – thought, however, to have been born at Samos in c. 570 BC.
As in the first part of the name Tha-les, so here again in the case of the name Pyth-agoras, the Egyptian divine name “Ptah”
has, I think, been Grecised.
Also once again, as with Thales, we appear to have the problem of a lack of first-hand written evidence [W. Guthrie, “Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism”, Ency. of Phil., Vol. 7, (Collier Macmillan, London, 1972), p. 39]: “The obstacles to an appraisal of classical Pythagoreanism are formidable. There exists no Pythagorean literature before Plato, and it was said that little had been written, owing to a rule of secrecy”.
Consistently though, Pythagoras, like Thales, was much influenced by Egypt.
I have suggested that, in fact, the great ‘Pythagorean’ contribution to mathematics (numbers, geometry, triangles) may also have been bound up with Egypt and with pyramid measuring and other activities of the architects.
Now consider the pattern of the life of Pythagoras and his descendants in relation to Joseph and the family of Israel (the Hebrews).
Pythagoras, like Joseph,
left his home country and settled in a foreign land, founding a society with religious and political, as well as philosophical aims. Compare the Hebrews settling in the eastern Delta of Egypt (Genesis 46:33).
The society gained power there and considerably extended its influence. Compare this with the growth of Israel in Egypt, and its spreading all over the country (Exodus 1:9, 12). After Pythagoras’ death,
a serious persecution took place. Likewise, about 65 years after Joseph’s death, the “new king” of Exodus 1:8, became concerned about the amount of Hebrews in Egypt and resolved upon a cruel plan.
Moses was born into this very era – the pyramid-building 4th dynasty era – at the approximate time that the founder-pharaoh Khufu (Greek Cheops)/ Amenemes I had resolved to do something about the increase of Asiatics (including Hebrews) in Egypt. The Prophecies of Neferti, “All good things have passed away, the land being cast away through trouble by means of that food of the Asiatics who pervade the land” (www.touregypt.net/propheciesofneferti.htm). The pharaoh thus ordered for all the male Hebrew babies to be slain (Exodus 1:10, 15-16).
(d) The (Pythagorean) survivors of the persecution scattered. This may equate with the Exodus of Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 12).
“While many Egyptologists have been reluctant to allow Ramesses III
any military action in western Asia north of Sinai, archaeologists were identifying a phase at the transition from the Bronze to Iron Age in Palestine as a period
of “Egyptian empire”—largely under the early 20th Dynasty”.
Peter James
That Ramses II ‘the Great’, and Ramses so-called III, need to be identified as being just the one mighty pharaoh, I have argued in articles such as:
only serves to reinforce me in my view that, to minimalise Ramses III, as one merely aspiring to – but by no means succeeding in – emulate (ing) Ramses II, does a great disservice with regard to the stupendous achievements of Ramses III.
Beginning on p. 65 (through to p. 73), Peter James will write about the minimalising assessments of the career of Ramses III:
…. “MINIMALIST” VIEWS OF RAMESSES III’S CLAIMS
Returning to trends in attitudes towards Ramesses III’s campaigns, in 1906 Breasted was prepared to see both land and sea battles with the “Sea Peoples” as having taken place near the coast south of Arvad (northern Phoenicia). …. British Egyptologist Henry Hall was far more cautious, placing the land and sea battles with the Sea Peoples close to the frontier of Egypt itself; he did allow, however, that Ramesses III later marched to Amurru to restore Egyptian authority there, although not as far as the Euphrates. ….
In Hall’s understanding the place names from the Euphrates region in Ramesses III’s toponym lists (such as Carchemish) were “due probably to a very bad habit begun in his reign, that of copying the names of cities captured in the wars of Thothmes III…”
Mackey’s comment: Ramses III was copying no previous pharaoh.
His records are likely genuine accounts – allowing for some degree of pharaonic embellishment – of his own achievements.
Attitudes against the reality of Ramesses III’s claimed campaigns continued to harden in the mid-to-late 20th century. By then it was becoming the received wisdom that Ramesses III did not campaign as far as northern Phoenicia. This view was symptomatic of a more general one regarding the originality of his war records, which casually dismissed them often in toto as copies from the records of the “great” Ramesses. Of the Medinet Habu war records Faulkner wrote that “the inscriptions contain but a halfpenny-worth of historical fact to an intolerable deal of adulation of the pharaoh …”
Regarding the Nubian battle scenes, the magisterial Alan Gardiner felt that they “seem likely to be mere convention borrowed from earlier representations.” …. Likewise Faulkner: “…the scenes of a Nubian war at Medinet Habu are surely only conventional with no historical reality behind them.” ….
Gardiner dismissed a Syrian campaign entirely. …. Faulkner was only slightly more generous: “…the scenes in question are anachronisms copied from a building of Ramesses II. Yet there may be a substratum of historical fact beneath them…” ….
Mackey’s comment: If Ramses III were II, as I am claiming, then there was involved no “copying” whatsoever.
Surprisingly, after his generally scathing remarks, Faulkner allowed that Ramesses III “may have attempted to follow up his success [defeating the “Peoples of the Sea”] by “pushing on into Syria to drive the enemy farther away from Egypt…”
Mackey’s comment: Now it’s a two bob each way bet.
George Hughes stressed “the fact that Ramses III patterned his mortuary temple after that of Ramses II, but on a smaller scale.” …. Nims listed the many comparisons he observed between the two buildings, from the general arrangement to specific details of iconography and text:
The evidence of the copying of the Ramesseum reliefs by the scribes who planned the reliefs in Medinet Habu shows that a large number of the ritual scenes in the latter temple had their origin in the scenes in the former and occupied the same relative positions in both temples. ….
Mackey’s comment: Same pharaoh, probably same architects and same scribes.
Most of the similarities concern cult and religious scenes per se, though with some differences with respect to the placement of military scenes:
Ramses III used the rear face of the first pylon of Medinet Habu for accounts of his military exploits, just as Ramses II used the equivalent space at the Ramesseum for his. The long account of Year 8 of Ramses III was carved on the front face of the north tower of the second pylon at Medinet Habu; the parallel wall at the Ramesseum seems to have been occupied by the famous battle poem of Ramses II. The rear face of this pylon at the Ramesseum, on the other hand, shows battle reliefs below scenes of the Min Feast, as does the lower register of the east wall of the first hypostyle hall south of the axial doorway, while in Medinet Habu the corresponding walls have religious scenes. ….
Mackey’s comment: Same pharaoh, probably same architects and same scribes.
Building on the observations of Nims, Lesko took the extreme position that all of Ramesses III’s war records at his mortuary temple of Medinet Habu and elsewhere, were copied from the work of predecessors—with the exception of his second Libyan campaign, dated to Year 11. …. In Lesko’s view, even the famous records of the “Sea Peoples” battles were borrowed from the nearby (and now-destroyed) mortuary temple of Merenptah.
A major factor in the dismissal of Ramesses III’s northern campaigns has been the assumption that the Medinet Habu reliefs show his troops storming two Hittite towns (see above). Indeed, the inhabitants of the two towns look Hittite in appearance. One is labelled “Tunip,” while the name of the second has been frequently read as “Arzawa.” As the location of the Hittite vassal kingdom of Arzawa in western Anatolia (on the Aegean seaboard) is certain … the idea that Ramesses III would have been able to campaign this far, Sesostris-like, strikes as absurd.
Mackey’s comment: The location of Arzawa if far from “certain”.
I have grappled with it in my recent article:
More uncertain ancient geography: locations Tarḫuntašša and Arzawa
“Arzawa … a poorly-recorded state with uncertain borders …”.
Peter James continues:
Gardiner flatly stated that:
All these pictures are clearly anachronisms and must have been copied from originals of the reign of Ramessēs II: there is ample evidence that the designers of Medinet Habu borrowed greatly from the neighbouring Ramesseum. Confirmation is given in the papyrus [Harris I] cited above; this has no mention of a Syrian campaign, still less of one against the Hittites.
All that is said is that Ramessēs III “destroyed the Seirites in the tribes of the Shōsu”; the Shōsu have already been mentioned as the Beduins of the desert bordering the south of Palestine, and ‘the mountain of Se‘īr’ named on an obelisk of Ramessēs II is the Edomite mountain referred to in several passages of the Old Testament. It looks as though the defeat of these relatively unimportant tent-dwellers was the utmost which Ramessēs III could achieve after his struggle with the Mediterranean hordes….
With these words, a nadir was reached in the assessment of Ramesses III’s military activities. It still prevailed forty years later when Kenneth Kitchen wrote:
There is no evidence that he invaded Palestine in Year 12 (a rhetorical text of that date itself proves nothing). The Medinet Habu Syrian war-reliefs are most likely merely copies from those of Ramesses II, as they include entities no longer extant for Ramesses III to battle against. Ramesses III attacked not Israel, but Edom in south Transjordan, as the factual descriptions in Papyrus Harris I make clear. ….
By the “entities” which Kitchen described as “no longer extant for Ramesses III to battle against,” he meant various Anatolian states such as Hatti and Arzawa which were allegedly swept away by the “Sea Peoples” invasion of Ramesses III’s Year 8. …. Otherwise it is clear that in 1991 Kitchen, like Gardiner, was arguing that Ramesses III did not campaign any further than the Sinai/Negev area—as no campaigns further north are mentioned in the “factual descriptions” from Papyrus Harris. More recently Strobel went even beyond Gardiner, Kitchen, Lesko and others, writing what can only be described as a tirade against Ramesses III. For reasons of space only a few quotes follow:
Ramses III started his triumphal report on the walls of the temple in Medinet Habu, which was finished in his year 12, with his “Nubian War.” However, this war never happened. The same is true for the “Asiatic or Syrian War”, the last of the reported military deeds. Ramses’ ideological invention of these wars should bring his deeds on the same level as the triumphs of Ramses II and Merenptah, especially Merenptah’s Asiatic war. The texts and reliefs of Ramses III are no “war journal” or realistic picture of his military campaigns, but a triumphal self-representation on a highly ideological degree. The texts are first of all rhetorical and formulaic; the events are presented and described in a fixed ideological scheme and language…Ramses III was a “plagiarizer and self-aggrandizer of the first order.” He ordered direct copies from the records and illustrations of the Ramesseum and without doubt, from the today destroyed funerary temple of Merenptah in his direct neighbourhood. He even took a quite important amount of blocks, recuts and not recuts, by quarrying other temples, especially those of his predecessors. ….
Were we to take all the negative opinions together, Ramesses III’s military efforts would have been confined to repelling Libyan invaders in his year 11 and a minor raid against “bedouin” in the Sinai area.
Such a picture seems unrealistic, to say the least. Ramesses III’s records talk of tribute from northern lands, the supply of his temples by goods and tribute from foreign lands (notably Djahi and Kharu), and the revenues drawn from temples maintained in the empire, including the construction of a new one in “Canaan.” …. Ramesses III ruled Egypt for 31 years in relative security and prosperity, with tribute drawn from Levantine domains. One wonders how this feat was achieved, in economic terms, if the Egyptian army was so idle, only fighting defensive wars and never active beyond the frontiers—with the exception of an allegedly trivial foray against the Shasu of Edom. Such a picture goes totally against the grain of what we know of New Kingdom dominion and economics. It has also long run counter to the archaeological evidence from the Levant.
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
In the days of Sayce (see above) the Amarna and Boghazköy archives were the “smoking guns” proving the reality of the campaigns of Thutmose III and Ramesses II. Was there an equivalent for Ramesses III? No, but what Ramesses III lacked in terms of new literary documents was amply recompensed in terms of archaeological finds—from small finds such as numerous scarabs … a statue fragment from Byblos … the “pen-case” of an of an officer at Megiddo … to the plethora of discoveries at Beth-Shean, beginning in 1923 with a seated life-size statue outside the “northern temple” to inscriptions from its doorways and jambs, and the “pen-case” of another local official. …. Most of these finds had been made by the mid-20th century, such as the Megiddo pencase in 1937. Taken together they should have had an impact on views about the reality of his Levantine expeditions further north than the Sinai region (where inscriptions are known from the mining centre of Timna, etc.).
So how did Egyptology react to such finds?
An interesting dichotomy arose. …. While many Egyptologists have been reluctant to allow Ramesses III any military action in western Asia north of Sinai, archaeologists were identifying a phase at the transition from the Bronze to Iron Age in Palestine as a period of “Egyptian empire”—largely under the early 20th Dynasty. Evidence for this comes most clearly from southern sites like Tell esh Shari‘a, Tell el Far‘ah (south), Gaza and Deir el-Balah and, to the north, Megiddo and Beth-Shean in the Jezreel Valley. ….At the latter, pottery and other evidence suggest an increased Egyptian presence during the early 20th Dynasty. …. It is clear that his successor Ramesses IV maintained a presence at Beth-Shean … 51 though it seems that he was the last pharaoh to hold sway so far north. ….
With respect to the reality of Ramesses III’s campaigns, the arch-minimalist Lesko noted: “Archaeological evidence should help to resolve these problems.”53 But he restricted his comments here to an alleged destruction of Beth Shean by Ramesses III (for which there is not a shred of evidence), mentioning but failing to appreciate the significance of an inscription of his Chief Steward from that site, i.e. the power of Ramesses III reached as far as the Jezreel Valley. The idea that Ramesses III’s campaigning in Palestine was limited to Edom overlooks the archaeological evidence. Other mid-to-late 20th century Egyptologists, such as Wilson, appreciated more fully the importance of the archaeological finds:
Ramses III still held his Asiatic empire in Palestine. His statue has been found at Beth Shan and there is record of him at Megiddo. He built a temple for Amon in Palestine, and the gods owned nine towns in that country, as his duepaying properties. The Egyptian frontier was in Djahi, somewhere along the coast of southern Phoenicia or northern Palestine. ….
Wilson allowed Ramesses III’s empire a fairly generous reach, but the implication is that he merely “held” it as an inheritance from his 19th dynasty predecessors (see below) without any active campaigning. Likewise, Kitchen states that “the Egyptians under Ramesses III maintained their overlordship over both the Canaanites and the newcomers…” ….
Weinstein was more positive. Stressing the scarcity of late 19th dynasty remains from Palestine … coincident with “Egypt’s domestic problems,” he clearly attributed a more active policy to Ramesses III than one of inheritance: “Ramesses III seems to have done his best to restore a measure of control in Palestine.” …. Likewise Redford: “… Ramesses III had been able, by dint of military activity, to reassert his authority over much of Palestine and perhaps parts of Syria as well…” …. So also Morkot:
Ramesses III certainly did emulate Ramesses II—but in no superficial way. Archaeology is now showing that Ramesses III did, in fact, manage to renew Egyptian control over parts of western Asia….
These writers appreciated the obvious: the “smoking” gun for Ramesses III is provided by the archaeological and inscriptional remains from both southern Palestine (e.g. Lachish) and the Jezreel Valley (notably Beth Shean and Megiddo).
With “Shishak” properly identified by Dr. I. Velikovsky … with Thutmose III,
the mighty pharaoh of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty … then pharaoh Shoshenq I
must needs be lifted right out of the C10th BC and located some centuries later.
Conventional dates for Smendes, considered to have been the first ruler of Egypt’s Twenty-First Dynasty, are c. 1069-1043 BC.
Conventional dates for Shoshenq I, considered to have been the first ruler of Egypt’s Twenty-Second Dynasty, are c. 945-924 BC.
In terms of biblical chronology, pharaoh Smendes would probably have been a younger contemporary of Samuel; whilst pharaoh Shoshenq I has famously been identified (e.g. by Jean François Champollion) as the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt” at the time of King Rehoboam (I Kings 4:25-26).
However, I have – along with other revisionists – rejected Monsieur Champollion’s view of Shoshenq I as “Shishak”:
The Third Intermediate Period usually refers to the time in Ancient Egypt from the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI (reign 1107–1078/77 BC) during the Twentieth Dynasty to the foundation of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty by Psamtik I in 664 BC, following the expulsion of the Nubian rulers of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. ….
Smendes, apart from being considered as the founder of the Twenty-First Dynasty, is also thought to have been the first ruler of TIP.
A possible solution to early TIP would be to identify Smendes with Shoshenq I of supposedly a century later.
That there was a degree of similarity between Smendes and Shoshenq I is apparent from this quote from N. Grimal (A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell 1994, p. 332): “Shoshenq I immediately sought to prove that his claim to the throne went back to the preceding dynasty, and did so by adopting a set of titles based on those of Smendes I”.
Similarity can – but does not always – mean identity.
However, it is at least worth considering that Smendes and Shoshenq I were one and the same, with the possibility of aligning dynasty 21 with 22 to overcome at least some of the dynastic crushing of TIP.
Shoshenq I considered a ‘new Smendes’
“… Shoshenq was, so to speak, ‘another Smendes’ … a ‘new Smendes’.
Kenneth Kitchen
As I noted above: “Similarity can – but does not always – mean identity”.
And, just because someone is described as ‘a new’ someone else, or ‘a second’ someone else (e.g. ‘a new king David’; ‘another Solomon’, ‘a second Judith’) does not necessarily mean that the ‘second’ version is the same person as the original.
Hitler, for instance, is considered to have been a new Haman (of the Book of Esther).
But Hitler was not Haman, who was, though – like Hitler – an historical character.
(Volume One, p. 335), with reference to Kitchen’s text, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt, 1100-650BC, pp. 287-288):
[Shsohenq I’s] very titulary exemplifies his qualities and policies. By taking the prenomen Hedjkheperre Setepenre, that of Smendes I, founder of the previous dynasty, Shoshenq proclaimed at one stroke both his continuity with the past – i.e. that he was, so to speak, ‘another Smendes’ – and a new beginning. Like Smendes, he now opened a new era. Nor is the concept of a ‘new Smendes’ limited to Shoshenq’s prenomen. He also adopted Horus, Nebty, and Golden Horus names reminiscent of those of Smendes I. Just as the latter had been Horus ‘Strong Bull, beloved of Re’ plus epithets (whose arm Amun strengthened to exalt Truth), so now Shoshenq I was Horus ‘Strong Bull, beloved of Re’ plus epithets (whom he (= Re) caused to appear as King to unite the Two Lands).
[End of quote]
Whilst similarity does not necessarily mean identity, there are reasons to think that, in this case, it might.
For one, the obviously significant pharaoh Smendes is, yet, so poorly attested, is crying out for an alter ego.
And, in the context of the revision at least, a crunching of Smendes with Shoshenq I would provide far more room for chronological manoeuvring.
More room is needed.
Smendes so poorly attested
“… most of what we know of Smendes predates his rise to the throne”.
“… we can only guess at Smendes’ origins”.
“… there is a great deal of confusion concerning the origin of Smendes”.
Jimmy Dunn
Statements like the above from Jimmy Dunn (Tour Egypt) would suggest that pharaoh Smendes, said to have reigned for as many as 26 years, may be sorely in need of an alter ego – with Shoshenq I being my suggestion for another face of Smendes.
Smendes (Smedes), who we believe founded the 21st Dynasty, ending the New Kingdom at the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period, is a very difficult individual with almost intractable origins and affiliations. His reign, which Manetho assigns 26 years, produced only a tiny handful of monuments and we have never discovered either his tomb or his mummy (though many believe his tomb to be NRT-I at Tanis, this structure offers up no clues concerning Smendes).
Smendes is a Greek rendering of this king’s name. His birth name and epithet were Nes-ba-neb-djed (mery-amun), meaning “He of the Ram, Lord of Mendes, Beloved of Amun”. His throne name was Hedj-kheper-re Setep-en-re, meaning “Bright is the Manifestation of Re, Chosen of Re”.
In fact, most of what we know of Smendes predates his rise to the throne. From the Report of Wenamun, dating to Year 5 of the “Renaissance Era” during the last decade of the reign of Ramesses XI, we learn much of what we know of this future king. While on the way to Lebanon to obtain wood for the renewal of the divine barque of Amun-Re, Wenamun stopped at Tanis, which he describes as “the place where Smendes and Tentamun are”. Smendes is specifically described as being the one to whom Wenamun gave his letters of credence from Herihor, the High-Priest of Amun and a powerful general in the south. Wenamun was then sent in a ship by Smendes to Syria. Smendes, along with Herihor and others, was cited as having contributed money to this expedition.
Smendes, together with Tentamun, are therefore shown to be of great importance in Egypt’s Delta, equals at least of the High-Priest of Amun in the south. Consider the fact that Ramesses XI at this time presumably lived at Piramesses, only about 20 kilometers to the southwest of Tanis, and yet Wenamun came to Smendes for assistance rather than to the king. In fact, Herihor assumed some royal titles even while Ramesses XI was still alive, and the implication would seem to be that Smendes had a similar standing in the north.
Nevertheless, we can only guess at Smendes’ origins. It has been suggested that he was a brother of Nodjmet, the wife of Herihor, but it has also been suggested that Nodjmet could have been a sister of Ramesses XI. However, Tentamun, who was presumably Smendes’ wife, may have been a member of the royal family. She could have been a daughter of another woman named Tentamun, who may have been the wife of Ramesses XI (or possibly another Ramesside king). The older Tentamun was certainly the mother of Henttawy, who later became the wife of the High-Priest of Amun, Pinedjem I, who also acquired kingly status in the south. As a royal son-in-law, Smendes’ status is more easily understood, though perhaps not his total eclipse of the king.
Obviously there is a great deal of confusion concerning the origin of Smendes. Nevertheless, it is very probable that the families of Smendes and Herihor, or at least their descendants, were linked.
Whatever his original status, after the death of Ramesses XI, Smendes became a king of Egypt, and is recorded as such in most reference material. However, only two sources specifically name him as pharaoh, consisting of a stela in a quarry at Dibabia near Gebelein (Jebelein), and a small depiction in the temple of Montu at Karnak. Interestingly, while there are no known unambiguously dated documents from his reign, the contemporary High-Priests of Amun used year numbers without a king’s name, and it is generally believed that, at least through year 25, these refer to Smendes’ reign.
In fact, Smendes probably never ruled over a united Egypt as such, a condition which probably also existed at the end of the reign of Ramesses XI. During much of what we refer to as the 21st Dynasty, there was also a dynasty of High-Priests of Amun at Thebes who effectively ruled Upper Egypt, while the kings at Tanis ruled the north. However, there appears to have been a rather delicate balance of powers, and perhaps even a formal arrangement for this division of Egypt. The Priests at Thebes seem to have held sway over a region which stretched from the north of el-Hiba (south of the entrance to the Fayoum) to the southern frontier of Egypt, and their aspirations became apparent around year 16 of Smendes’ reign, when Pinedjem I apparently began to take on full pharaonic titles, yet at all times he continued to defer to Smendes as at least a senior king. ….
May Psusennes I and II be the actual same person?
“On the Dakhleh Stela of the Twenty-second Dynasty reference is made to
the 19th year of ‘Pharaoh Psusennes’. …. As Gardiner observes, one cannot determine from this statement whether Psusennes I or II is intended”.
Beatrice L. Goff
If my suspicion in this article that Smendes of Egypt’s Twenty-First Dynasty was the same pharaoh as Shoshenq I of the Twenty-Second (Libyan) Dynasty, then this is going to assist in the necessary curtailing of the difficult Third Intermediate Period (TIP), so-called, of Egyptian history.
It will the open the door for further shrinkage, enabling, e.g., for the Psusennes I at the time of Smendes to have been the same as the Psusennses II at the time of Shoshenq I – as some have already suspected.
Conventionally, the Twenty-First Dynasty is set out something like this:
some have been suggesting an identification of Psusennes I and II:
While some authors, including New Chronology followers claim that Psusennes I may actually be identical with Psusennes II, this is impossible because Psusennes II is clearly distinguished from Psusennes I by Manetho and is given an independent reign of 15 years in the author’s Epitome. Moreover, Psusenness II’s royal name has been found associated with his successor, Shoshenq I in a graffito from tomb TT18, and in an ostracon from Umm el-Qa’ab. This shows that Shoshenq I was Psusennes II’s successor. In contrast, Psusennes I died almost 40-45 years before Shoshenq I’s appearance as Chief of the Ma, let alone King of Egypt.
[End of quote]
“Psusennes I died almost 40-45 years before Shoshenq I …” according to the conventional calculations.
But that would no longer apply if Smendes were Shoshenq I, and Psusennes I and II were also the same person.
a partner to this present one, I had concluded that:
Pharaoh Ramses II ‘the Great’ was a younger contemporary of Shalmaneser; and he was
an older contemporary of Sargon II/Sennacherib.
Ramses II was also to be identified as:
Ramses III;
Psibkhenno (Šilkanni);
Shabako;
“So king of Egypt”
His famous son, Khaemwaset, was all of:
Khaemwaset, son of Ramses III;
Si’be (turtan);
Shebitku Khaemwaset;
Shabataka (Tang-i Var)
Sargon II/Sennacherib, for his part, was also Tukulti-ninurta (and, as identified elsewhere) Shamsi-Adad (not I of that name).
The reign of Ramses II was so long (66-67 years), however, that it – having spanned the latter part of the reign of Shalmaneser and the entire reign of Sargon II/ Sennacherib – still had some approximately three further decades to run after that.
Now, according to Tobit 1, whose neo-Assyrian sequence I firmly follow, Sennacherib was succeeded by Esarhaddon, he being the king whose statue appeared alongside that of Ramses II at Nahr el-Kalb. Unlike convention and Dr. Velikovsky, I had Esarhaddon as a younger contemporary of Ramses II. I explained this in the companion article:
The Nahr el-Kalb inscription juxtaposes a statue of Ramses II alongside a statue of Esarhaddon.
Conventional scholars presumably might argue that Ramses II is worn because he (c. 1280 BC, conventional dating) is much older than Esarhaddon (c. 680 BC, conventional dating).
Dr. I. Velikovsky, who made Ramses II a contemporary of Nebuchednezzar (c. 580 BC, conventional dating), would have considered Ramses II as ruling later than Esarhaddon.
I (Damien Mackey) have Ramses II as an older contemporary of Esarhaddon’s predecessor, Sargon II/Sennacherib. Esarhaddon, for his part, likely scratched out his foe, Ramses II, from the Nahr el-Kalb inscription.
This last point, Ramses II’s being contemporaneous with the Assyrian king, Sargon II/ Sennacherib, now needs to be explained. ….
[End of quote]
My Esarhaddon is also different in other ways from the conventional and Velikovskian versions of him.
For one, I do not believe that Esarhaddon was a biological son of Sennacherib, the Assyrian, but was a Chaldean, thereby commencing a new dynasty.
And, secondly, I have identified Esarhaddon as Nebuchednezzar the Chaldean:
Esarhaddon a tolerable fit for King Nebuchednezzar
Dr. Velikovsky’s thesis in Ramses II and His Time (1978), that Ramses II was a contemporary of Nebuchednezzar, accords perfectly with my own reconstruction, insofar as I have Ramses II as a contemporary of Esarhaddon, my Nebuchednezzar.
Despite my manifold identifications of Ramses II (as given above), I have not followed Dr. Velikovsky, though, in his view that Ramses was the same as pharaoh Necho of Egypt’s Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, also a contemporary of Nebuchednezzar.
In my article, “The Complete Ramses II”, I had identified Ramses II, instead, as Tirhakah of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, who is also Piankhi.
Two more mighty identifications of Ramses II to be added to the list.
Nor have I been able to accept Dr. Velikovsky’s ingenious thesis that Nebuchadnezzar was Hattusilis, the Hittite emperor, who famously made a treaty with Ramses II.
The Chaldean dynasty consisted only of Nebuchednezzar and his son, Belshazzar.
The latter, who is also Amēl-Marduk, is referred to in Baruch 1:11, 12:
…and pray for the life of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven. The Lord will give us strength and light to our eyes; we shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and under the protection of his son Belshazzar, and we shall serve them many days and find favor in their sight.
Ramses II was thus a contemporary also of the second Chaldean king, Belshazzar, but only while Belshazzar was yet a prince.
King Belshazzar was subsequently succeeded by the Medo-Persian king (Daniel 5:31).
When Seti I died in 1279 BCE, Ramses II was only about 20 years old. He succeeded his father to the throne and became Pharaoh of Egypt.
During his early reign, Ramses II faced many challenges. There were rebellions in Canaan and Libya.
The Hittites were also a constant threat, as they continued to try and expand their empire. In order to protect Egypt’s borders, Ramses II needed to build up his army.
He did this by conscripting soldiers from all over Egypt and training them to be loyal and disciplined soldiers.
Ramses II also formed alliances with other countries in the region, such as Babylon and Assyria. ….
[End of quote]
Checking the standard Assyrian king lists, the beginning of the reign of Ramses II would fall right withing the long reign (32 years) of king Adad-nirari I (1295-1264 BC):
Adad-nirari I in my revision, on the other hand, belongs to the first half of the C8th BC, approximately half a millennium after his conventional placement (above).
I explained my radical revision and re-identifying of a relevant set of Assyrian kings as follows in e.g. my article:
Chaotic King Lists can conceal some sure historical sequences
Marc Van de Mieroop will give one perfect sequence (as I see it) of four Middle Assyrian kings, who, nevertheless, need to be folded into the Neo Assyrian era, where Van de Mieroop has these four kings listed again, but now in the wrong sequence. I refer to his “King Lists” towards the end of his book, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 -323 BC.
The following I would consider to be a perfect Assyrian sequence of kings (p. 294):
Adad-nirari [I]
Shalmaneser [I]
Tukulti-Ninurta [I]
Assur-nadin-apli [I]
where Tukulti-Ninurta = Sennacherib and Assur-nadin-apli = Ashurnasirpal = Esarhaddon.
This sequence accords perfectly with the neo-Assyrian sequence given in Tobit 1: “Shalmaneser”; “Sennacherib”; “Esarhaddon”.
But on p. 295, the same four kings will become skewed, as follows:
Adad-nirari [II]
Tukulti-Ninurta [II]
Ashurnasirpal [II]
Shalmaneser [III]
….
[End of quote]
If Ramses II were a ruling contemporary of Adad-nirari (I/II) – [and I don’t believe that he was, though he came close to it] – then he would have begun to reign in the first half of the C8th BC.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ramses II and his Time, 1978) had identified Ramses II with Necho II of Egypt’s Twenty-Sixth Dynasty. In Dr. Velikovsky’s scheme of things, Ramses II was a contemporary of King Nebuchednezzar ‘the Great’.
The Nahr el-Kalb inscription juxtaposes a statue of Ramses II alongside a statue of Esarhaddon.
Conventional scholars presumably might argue that Ramses II is worn because he (c. 1280 BC, conventional dating) is much older than Esarhaddon (c. 680 BC, conventional dating).
Dr. I. Velikovsky, who made Ramses II a contemporary of Nebuchednezzar (c. 580 BC, conventional dating), would have considered Ramses II as ruling later than Esarhaddon.
I (Damien Mackey) have Ramses II as an older contemporary of Esarhaddon’s predecessor, Sargon II/Sennacherib. Esarhaddon, for his part, likely scratched out his foe, Ramses II, from the Nahr el-Kalb inscription.
This last point, Ramses II’s being contemporaneous with the Assyrian king, Sargon II/ Sennacherib, now needs to be explained.
Assyria encountering Egypt
In approximately 720 BC (conventional dating) Sargon II, very early in his reign, chased away Egypt’s young turtan (commander), Si’be.
Egypt’s Turtan, Si’be
This Egyptian military commander has been enormously difficult for scholars (whether they be conventional or revisionist) to identify. Was he: Ramses III; or Psibkhenno (I had liked Dr. Rohl’s attempt here due to its close transliteration); or Shabako; or Shebitku; or the biblical “So king of Egypt” (2 Kings 17:4)?
Or some, or all, of these?
As I had observed in my article:
Identifying neo-Assyrian era Egyptian names, “So”, Si’be and the pharaoh Shilkanni
Sir Alan Gardiner had looked to identify [the biblical] “So with the Sib’e, turtan of Egypt, who the annals of Sargon state to have set out from Rapihu (Raphia on the Palestinian border) together with Hanno, the King of Gaza, in order to deliver a decisive battle” (Egypt of the Pharaohs, 1961, p. 342).
That conclusion was also, as we have read, the view of Charles Boutflower.
Whilst I, too, have wondered if this might be the correct interpretation, such a view would need to address why one whom the Second Book of Kings had entitled ‘King’, prior to the Fall of Samaria, had become, some half a dozen or so years later, a mere Egyptian official (turtan, general); albeit an important one.
Dr. Kenneth Kitchen has confidently held that So is an abbreviated form of Osorkon (IV) of the Twenty-Second (Libyan) Dynasty (The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt: 1100-650 BC, 1972).
Revisionist, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, had also thought to locate King So to the period of the Twenty-Second (Libyan) Dynasty, as one of the pharaohs Shoshenq (or Sosenk) – a good name fit in its abbreviated form (So-senk = So).
Others prefer for So pharaoh Tefnakht[e] of the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty. ….
[End of quote]
As noted here, Si’be, as a military commander, is unlikely to have been a pharaoh.
Sargon II will distinguish “Pharaoh (Pir’u) king of Egypt [Musri]”.
Actually, all Ramses III; Psibkhenno; Shabako; Shebitku; the biblical “So king of Egypt” will be found to be very close to the mark. For only two Egyptian persons are represented amongst these names: namely (1) Ramses II and (2) his son, Khaemwaset.
Thus, as argued in “The Complete Ramses II” article:
Ramses II, whose son is Khaemwaset, is Ramses III, whose son is Khaemwaset;
Ramses II is Psibkhenno (Psusennes) Ramses;
Ramses II is Shabako (Sabacos = Psibkhenno);
Ramses II is “King So [Sabacos] of Egypt”.
Khaemwaset is Shebitku Khaemwaset.
I, reluctant to let go of Dr. Rohl’s linguistic connection of Si’be with Psib-khenno, eventually, however, decided that, whilst the latter was a pharaoh, the former had to be a subordinate. Psibkhenno Ramses was Ramses II, and his turtan, Si’be, was his famous son, the highly talented (Shebitku) Khaemwaset.
Sargon II will allude to Shebitku Khaemwaset (now as a sub-pharaoh to his father) in the Tang-I Var inscription. Here Sargon calls him, not Si’be (Sibu), but Shabataka. Dan’el Kahn writes of it in his article, “Was there a Co-regency in the 25th Dynasty?:
…. According to the inscription, king Shebitku (=Shabatka) extradited Iamani to Sargon. The inscription can be dated quite certainly to 706 BC, not long before the death in battle [sic] of Sargon II. in the summer of 705 BC. …. Thus, the Tang-i Var inscription indicates that Shebitku was already king of Kush in 706 BC. This new date is at least four years earlier than has generally been thought. Frame continued and claimed that this is a “piece of information which will require Egyptologists to revise their current chronology for Egypt’s twenty-fifth Dynasty”, and added: “This would raise difficulties for the current Egyptian chronology”. ….
Egypt’s King, Šilkanni
Ann E. Killebrew, writing from a conventional point of view in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology,tells of the exchange between pharaoh Šilkanni and Sargon II:
“With the Assyrian army in the region, Silkanni, the king of Egypt (Osorkon IV), felt compelled to send Sargon twelve magnificent horses as a gift. These were probably Kushite horses from the Dongola Reach area, already an important horse-breeding center at this time” (pg 240; also citing Heidorn).
Since the Nineteenth Dynasty ruled Kush (Ethiopia) it would not surprise if: “These were probably Kushite horses from the Dongola Reach area, already an important horse-breeding center at this time“.
But it would surprise me if Šilkanni was, as according to the conventional estimate, Osorkon. Despite the admittedly apt name comparison of Šilkanni with Osorkon, I think that the even better fit would be Psibkhenno (Psibkhanni), who is my Ramses II.
To match, the names Psibkhanni and Šilkanni one need only swap the letters b and l.
The Šilkanni incident would have occurred about 4 years before the Tang-I Var inscription incident when Shebitku had joined his father as a co-ruler of Egypt/ Ethiopia.
The biblical “So King of Egypt” was likewise Ramses II, but at the time of Sargon II’s predecessor, Shalmaneser. Ramses II knew two great Assyrian kings, Shalmaneser and Sargon II/Sennacherib. What of Esarhaddon? He was Chaldean, not Assyrian.
Who was this Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem, and when did he live?
We know at least who were his pharaonic contemporaries.
With the inadequacies of the Sothic dating upon which the conventional Egyptian chronology has been based (and to which the other nations have been tied) now laid bare, e.g.:
and the ground thus cleared for the raising of a scientific chronological model that is not based upon artificial a priori assumptions, revisionist scholars have been able to re-assess the abundant El Amarna [EA] archive to re-determine its proper historical location.
One of the EA correspondents who has aroused special interest, owing to the mention of Jerusalem (Urusalim) in connection with him, is the king of that city, Abdi-Hiba (Abdi-Heba),the author of six letters (EA 285-290):
Who was this Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem,and when did he live? We know at least who were his pharaonic contemporaries. As I have previously written about EA in a general fashion: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/elamarna_period.html#ere
EA’s Egyptians
Identifying the EA pharaohs is the easiest … challenge as it is almost universally agreed that Amenhotep III and Akhnaton are those who are referred to in the EA correspondence by their throne names, respectively, of Nimmuria (i.e. Nebmare, Nb-m3’t-R’) and Naphuria (i.e. Neferkheprure, Nfr-hprw-R’). These two pharaohs, having been Sothically dated to the late C15th-early C14th BC, are – from a biblical perspective – usually considered by historians to have pre-dated the arrival of the Israelites in the Promised Land – or at least to have coincided with their arrival there. Thus it is common to read that the habiru rebels who feature prominently in the EA letters were either the Hebrews of the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or perhaps the newly arrived Hebrews (Israelites) under Joshua. ….
But To Which Era Do Revisionists
Re-Locate EA’s Abdi-Hiba?
——————————————————————————————————–
…. two … pieces of evidence in EA letters 285-290 … determine the historical
terminus a quo for king Abdi-Hiba: namely, the mention of Jerusalem;
and the mention of Beth Shulman (“House of Solomon”).
——————————————————————————————————–
We ourselves, set completely free as we are from Sothic theory, are able to begin to zone in on the correct era of Abdi-Hiba, and we are going to find that it is nothing like what the conventional text books say about this king as a ruler of Jerusalem in the mid 1300’s BC, and probably, therefore, corresponding with pharaoh Amenhotep III. In terms of biblical correlation, the era of Abdi-Hiba would be considered to approximate to the Judges period, some would say to the time of Joshua (as said above). Thus:
The Bible states in Joshua 10:26 that Joshua defeated these kings, captured them and killed them, including the king of Jerusalem, Adoni-Zedek.
It is very likely that Abdi-Heba and Adoni-Zedek are one [and] the same man. The reason being is that “Adoni-Zedek” is a title rather [than] the actual name of the king. Adoni-Zedek means the “Lord of Zedek,” similar to the name Melchi-Zedek which means “Prince of Zedek,” who was the ruler of Salem according to Genesis 14:18. The Hebrews would have associated this title with the prince of Salem, an early name for the city of Jerusalem.
So the letters written by Abdi-Heba, trying to stop the advancing Hebrews [sic], were likely written by either Adoni-Zedek, mentioned in Joshua 10:1, or Adoni-Bezek, another king mentioned in Judges 1:7 who was defeated by Joshua and buried in Jerusalem.
The letters from Abdi-Heba seem to have been written to either Amenhotep II or Amenhotep III. Since one of the letters from Abdi-Heba mentions that the pharaoh, whom he was requesting help from, had conquered the land of Naharaim and the land of Cush, this would likely point to Amenhotep II who indeed had military campaigns against both these countries.
[End of quote]
Evidences would suggest that a Joshuan alignment with the EA Pharaohs is not sustainable. For, two such pieces of evidence in EA letters 285-290 that spring to mind determine the historical terminus a quo for king Abdi-Hiba: namely, the mention of Jerusalem; and the mention of Beth Shulman (“House of Solomon”). In other words, the conventional scenario, and any other that would locate the reign of Abdi-Hiba in Jerusalem to a period ante-dating kings David and Solomon, are immediately to be cancelled out as having historical validity (and that even apart from the ramifications of Sothic theory).
That means that Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s revision, in which he chronologically re-locates Abdi-Hiba – along with Nimmuria and Naphuria – to the early period of Israel’s Divided Monarchy (about half a millennium after the Joshua/Judges period), is not to be cancelled out at least by our ‘two pieces of evidence’.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s Pioneering Effort
In Dr. Velikovsky’s firm opinion, Abdi-Hiba was to be identified with king Jehoshaphat of Judah. He, reflecting later upon this choice, commented:
“In Ages in Chaos (chapters vi-viii) I deal with the el-Amarna letters; there it is shown that the king of Jerusalem whose name is variously read Ebed-Tov, Abdi-Hiba, etc. was King Jehoshaphat (ninth century)”.
In this same article, Dr. Velikovsky made a most significant discovery towards re-setting his revised EA period to the approximate time of King Solomon:
The Šulmán Temple in Jerusalem
In the el-Amarna letters No. 74 and 290 there is reference to a place read (by Knudtzon) Bet-NIN.IB. In Ages in Chaos, following Knudtzon, I understood that the reference was to Assyria (House of Nineveh).(1) I was unaware of an article by the eminent Assyriologist, Professor Jules Lewy, printed in the Journal of Biblical Literature under the title: “The Šulmán Temple in Jerusalem.”(2)
From a certain passage in letter No. 290, written by the king of Jerusalem to the Pharaoh, Lewy concluded that this city was known at that time also by the name “Temple of Šulmán.” Actually, Lewy read the ideogram that had much puzzled the researchers before him.(3)
After complaining that the land was falling to the invading bands (habiru), the king of Jerusalem wrote: “. . . and now, in addition, the capital of the country of Jerusalem — its name is Bit Šulmáni —, the king’s city, has broken away . . .”(4) Beth Šulmán in Hebrew, as Professor Lewy correctly translated, is Temple of Šulmán. But, of course, writing in 1940, Lewy could not surmise that the edifice was the Temple of Solomon and therefore made the supposition that it was a place of worship (in Canaanite times) of a god found in Akkadian sources as Shelmi, Shulmanu, or Salamu.
The correction of the reading of Knudtzon (who was uncertain of his reading) fits well with the chronological reconstruction of the period. In Ages in Chaos (chapters vi-viii) I deal with the el-Amarna letters; there it is shown that the king of Jerusalem whose name is variously read Ebed-Tov, Abdi-Hiba, etc. was King Jehoshaphat (ninth century). It was only to be expected that there would be in some of his letters a reference to the Temple of Solomon.
Also, in el-Amarna letter No. 74, the king of Damascus, inciting his subordinate sheiks to attack the king of Jerusalem, commanded them to “assemble in the Temple of Šulmán.”(5)
It was surprising to find in the el-Amarna letters written in the fourteenth century that the capital of the land was already known then as Jerusalem (Urusalim) and not, as the Bible claimed for the pre-Conquest period, Jebus or Salem.(6) Now, in addition, it was found that the city had a temple of Šulmán in it and that the structure was of such importance that its name had been used occasionally for denoting the city itself. (Considering the eminence of the edifice, “the house which king Solomon built for the Lord”,(7) this was only natural.) Yet after the conquest by the Israelites under Joshua ben-Nun, the Temple of Šulmán was not heard of.
Lewy wrote: “Aside from proving the existence of a Šulmán temple in Jerusalem in the first part of the 14th century B.C., this statement of the ruler of the region leaves no doubt that the city was then known not only as Jerusalem, but also as Bet Šulmán.”—“It is significant that it is only this name [Jerusalem] that reappears after the end of the occupation of the city by the Jebusites, which the Šulmán temple, in all probability, did not survive.”
The late Professor W. F. Albright advised me that Lewy’s interpretation cannot be accepted because Šulmán has no sign of divinity accompanying it, as would be proper if it were the name of a god. But this only strengthens my interpretation that the temple of Šulmán means Temple of Solomon.
In the Hebrew Bible the king’s name has no terminal “n”. But in the Septuagint — the oldest translation of the Old Testament — the king’s name is written with a terminal “n”; the Septuagint dates from the third century before the present era. Thus it antedates the extant texts of the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls not excluded.
Solomon built his Temple in the tenth century. In a letter written from Jerusalem in the next (ninth) century, Solomon’s Temple stood a good chance of being mentioned; and so it was. ….
Though I cannot locate the exact reference at present, I recall a brief article pointing out that, contrary to Dr. Velikovsky, Beth Šulmán could not properly refer to the actual Temple of Solomon, since this edifice was always referred to as the Temple of Yahweh. So, the better translation of the EA phrase is “House of Solomon”.
Now, that accords with contemporary usage, in that we have at least two documented references to the “House of David” (the Tell Dan and the Mesha Moabite Inscription), see André Lemaire at: http://www.cojs.org/pdf/house_of_david.pdf
For a time, this equation of Abdi-Hiba = Jehoshaphat held as the standard amongst revisionists. However, the Glasgow School, in 1978, seriously re-assessed Dr. Velikovsky’s entire EA revision – with, as I believe, some outstanding results. This included a reconsideration of Velikovsky’s corresponding opinion that king Jehoshaphat of Judah’s contemporaneous ruler of Samaria, king Ahab of Israel, was to be identified with the prolific EA correspondent Rib-Addi.
The “Glasgow” School’s Modification of Velikovsky
The Glasgow Conference of 1978 gave rise to important contributions by scholars such as Martin Sieff; Geoffrey Gammon; John Bimson; and Peter James. These were able at the time, with a slight modification of Dr. Velikovsky’s dates, to re-set the latter’s revised EA period so that it sat more comfortably within its new C9th BC allocation. Thus pharaoh Akhnaton (Naphuria) now became a contemporary of king Jehoram of Judah (c. 848-841 BC, conventional dating) – and, hence, of the latter’s older contemporary Jehoram of Israel (c. 853-841 BC, conventional dating) – rather than of Dr. Velikovsky’s hopeful choice of Jehoshaphat (c. 870-848 BC, conventional dating) and of king Ahab of Israel (c. 874-853 BC, conventional dating).
Peter James, faced with J. Day’s “Objections to the Revised Chronology” in 1975, in which he had raised this fundamental objection to Dr. Velikovsky’s identification of Abdi-Hiba with Jehoshaphat (ISG Newsletter 2, 9ff):
Velikovsky claims that Abdi-Hiba, king of Jerusalem, is to be equated with Jehoshaphat. Abdi-Hiba means ‘servant of Hiba’ – Hiba being the name of a Hittite goddess. Can one really believe that Jehoshaphat, whom the Old Testament praises for his loyalty to the Israelite god, could also have borne this name involving a Hittite goddess?
plus James’s own growing belief that the lowering of the date of the EA letters (within a revised model) was demanded by “several chronological and other considerations …”, arrived at his own excellent comparison of Abdi-Hiba with king Jehoram of Judah.
I give only his conclusion here, with which I fully concur, whilst recommending that one reads James’s full comparisons (“The Dating of the El-Amarna Letters”, SIS Review, Vol. II, No. 3 (London, 1977/78), 84):
To sum up: the disasters that befell Jehoram of Judah and Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem were identical. Both suffered revolts of their subject territories from Philistia to Edom. During the reign of both the Philistines invaded and swept right across Judah, entering Jerusalem itself, in concert with the sack of the king’s palace by “men of the land of Kaši” or men “that were near the Cushites”. These peculiar circumstances could hardly be duplicated in such detail after a period of five hundred years. It is clear that Velikovsky’s general placement of the el-Amarna letters in the mid-ninth century must be correct, and that the modification of his original model suggested here, that Abdi-Hiba was Jehoram rather than Jehoshaphat, is preferable.
[End of quote]
Rib-Addi, for his part, could not have been king Ahab of Israel, Glasgow well determined. Dr. Velikovsky had been wrong in his proposing that the Sumur mentioned in relation to Rib-Addi (though not necessarily even his city, it has since been suggested) was Samaria, when Sumur is generally regarded as referring to Simyra, north of Byblos on the Syrian coast.
David Rohl’s Intriguing Angle on EA
Whilst I personally fully accept the Glasgow School’s basic conclusions about Abdi-Hiba and Rib-Addi, those, generally, who had worked these out went on later to disown them completely. James would team up with David Rohl to devise a so-called New Chronology, that I find to be a kind of ‘No-Man’s-Land revision’ hovering awkwardly mid-way between convention land and real base. Rohl, in The Lost Testament, would re-locate EA back from Dr. Velikovsky’s Divided Monarchy, where (when modified) I think that it properly belongs, to the time of the Unified Monarchy of kings Saul and David. Rohl will, like Dr. Velikovsky, propose an EA identification for a king of Israel, but it will be for Saul rather than for the later king Ahab. According to Rohl, king Saul is to be identified with EA’s Labayu, generally considered to have been a local ruler in Canaan.
And Rohl identifies David with the Dadua (“Tadua”) who is referred to in EA 256.
For Rohl, Abdi-Hiba is now a Jebusite ruler of Jebus/Jerusalem.
Dr. Rohl is extremely competent and his reconstructions are generally most interesting to read. However, his EA revision, locating Abdi-Hiba as it does as an early contemporary of David’s, who is defeated by the latter, cannot therefore discern in EA’s Beth Shulman any sort of reference to David’s son, Solomon.
Moreover, Rohl’s revision may have difficulty accounting for the fact that the name Urusalim (Jerusalem) occurs in the letters of Abdi-Hiba, supposedly a Jebusite king ruling over Jebus, but apparently known to David as Jerusalem (I Chronicles 11:4).
Conclusion
Whilst the New Chronology is superficially impressive, it, based as it is upon rocky ground, fails to yield the abundant fruit that arises from the fertile soil of a modified Velikovskian EA. James’s erstwhile identification of EA’s Abdi-Hiba as king Jehoram of Jerusalem not only yields some impressively exact comparisons between these two, supposedly separate, historical characters, but it is also able to accommodate most comfortably (chronologically) those two EA evidences of Shulman (Solomon) and Urusalim (Jerusalem).
Hence
EA’s Abdi-Hiba = King Jehoram of Judah
is worthy to be regarded now as a firm pillar of the revised chronology, from which fixed standpoint one is able to generate a very convincing series of further correlations between EA and the particular biblical era.
Peter James has thereby provided the definitive answer to the questions that I posed earlier: Who was this Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem,and when did he live?
With whom was Abdi-hiba corresponding?
Abdi-hiba “also makes clear that it was not his “father or mother who put me in this place” (on the throne), but rather the “strong arm of the king”.”
The question is: which “king”?
The following would be a typical view of the El Amarna [EA] situation of Abdi-hiba of Jerusalem (“Urusalim”), that he was a C14th BC Canaanite king enthroned by a pharaoh:
The Amarna Letters are a group of inscribed clay tablets discovered around 1887 at Amarna, a site in Egypt on the east bank of the Nile about 190 miles south of Cairo. The city was founded by the Egyptian king (pharaoh) Amenhotep IV, who later became known as Akhenaten. Akhenaten was known as a heretic king; he worshiped only the Egyptian god Aten, perhaps becoming history’s first monotheist, and he apparently attempted (unsuccessfully) to impose this monotheism on Egyptian religion more broadly.
The tablets total almost 400 in number and are written (almost without exception) in Akkadian. Most of these letters come from vassal cities in Syria-Palestine, including Byblos, Tyre, Gezer, Hebron, Shechem (Nablus), Ashkelon, Megiddo, and Jerusalem, and contain diplomatic correspondence with officials in Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni (an area of northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia), Alashia (Cyprus), and Hatti (central Anatolia). They date to the 14th century B.C.E., primarily to the reigns of the Egyptian kings Amenhotep III (reigned circa 1382–1344 B.C.E.) and Amenhotep IV (reigned circa 1352–1336 B.C.E.).
The letters from Jerusalem (written as “Urusalim” in the Amarna texts) are from a Canaanite ruler named Abdi-Heba. He states that he is a “soldier for the king, my lord” and requests that the Egyptian monarch send him a messenger and some military men to help resist his enemies. In multiple letters he states that he “falls at the feet of my lord the king, seven times and seven times,” a stock phrase and common ancient Near Eastern motif that conveys his faithfulness to his Egyptian suzerain. He also makes clear that it was not his “father or mother who put me in this place” (on the throne), but rather the “strong arm of the king.” Here Abdi-Heba reveals that he was not the heir to the throne but given the throne of Jerusalem by the Egyptian king himself. He goes on to state that for this reason he will always be a faithful vassal of his Egyptian lord, regardless of any accusation by an enemy to the contrary. Among the enemies he refers to in his correspondence are the “Apiru” (people living on the fringes of society in the second millennium B.C.E., sometimes serving as mercenaries) and the Kashites (a Hittite people from Anatolia).
The Amarna Letters from Jerusalem have attracted substantial attention because of their dialect. It is normally argued that they are quite different in terms of cuneiform signs used, orthography, and syntax from the rest of the letters from Canaanite cities¾more sophisticated in certain ways, which may indicate the scribal culture at Jerusalem was of a particularly high quality.
The Amarna Letters from Jerusalem are of interest for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they come from Jerusalem a few centuries before King David would ostensibly vanquish the Canaanite (Jebusite) population of Jerusalem and make it his own capital (2 Samuel 5). Also, the correspondence with a Jerusalem ruler in the 14th century provides evidence for occupation in the city in a period (Late Bronze Age II) for which there is little archaeological evidence. Recently a fragment of an Akkadian tablet (now called “Jerusalem Tablet 1) was found in excavations at Jerusalem, and some scholars have claimed that this tablet contained some correspondence between a king of Jerusalem and a king of Egypt. But this tablet is ultimately too fragmentary to determine if it was a letter. Among the most important things that these tablets demonstrate is that there was a vibrant and sophisticated scribal apparatus in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze Age. This Canaanite city was certainly not a backwater, but precisely the reverse.
[End of quote]
In terms of the revised chronology, however, Abdi-hiba was instead a C9th BC Jewish king of Jerusalem – a name not known for the city during the C14th BC, when it was called Jebus.
And, in terms of the revised chronology that I follow specifically in the case of Abdi-hiba (following an early idea of Peter James), he was a biblical king, namely, Jehoram of Judah, son of the great king Jehoshaphat.
To establish who may have set Abdi-hiba on his royal throne, as indicated by him in EA 286:
Seeing that, as far as I am concerned, neither my father nor my mother put me in this place, but the strong arm of the king brought me into my father’s house, why should I of all people commit a crime against the king, my lord?
– and one presumes from the above that it could not have been king Jehoshaphat himself – might the better be determined by an examination of who was/were the recipient/s of his letters (EA 285-290).
One is most surprised to find out, upon perusing these letters of Abdi-hiba, that – despite Rollston’s presumption that Abdi-hiba’s “the king, my lord” was an “Egyptian monarch” – no Egyptian ruler appears to be specifically named in this set of letters.
Moreover, “Egypt” itself may be referred to only once in this series (EA 285): “ … Addaya has taken the garrison that you sent in the charge of Haya, the son of Miyare; he has stationed it in his own house in Hazzatu and has sent 20 men to Egypt-(Miṣri)”.
When we include the lack of any reference to Egypt in the three letters of Lab’ayu (252-254):
and likewise in the two letters of the woman, Baalat Neše -ten letters in all – then we might be prompted to reconsider whether the extent of Egyptian involvement was as much as is generally claimed.
EA 285 is as follows:
To the king [my lord, thus hath spoken] Abdi-{iiba, thy
servant. [At] the feet [of the king, my lord], seven times
and seven times I fall. Behold, I am not a [loeal ruler] ;
an officer am I to the [king, my lord]. Why has the king
. . . not sent a messenger . . A Under sueh cireum-
stanees Eenjiamu has sent. . . . Let the king [hearken] to
Abdi-Juba, his servant! [Behold], there are no troops.
Let the king, my lord, send an officer, and let him take the
loeal rulers with him! The lands of the king . . . and
people . . . who are . . . and Addaya, the offieer of the
king, [has] their house. . . .
Let the king take heed for them, and let him send a
messenger quiekly When … I die. . . .
Letter from Lachish (Constantinople, W. 21 9). 2
[To the] great, thus hath spoken Pabi, at thy feet I fall.
Thou must know that Shipti-Ba’al and Zimrida are eon-
spiring, and that Shipti-Ba’al hath spoken to Zimrida:
” My father of the eity, Yarami (?) has written to me — Give
me [six] bows, and three daggers, and three swords ! If I
go forth against the land of the king, and thou dost join me, I shall surely conquer. He who makes (?) this plan is Pabu. Send him before me. w Now I have sent Rapi-el.
Ho will bring to the great man information about this
affair (?)
EA 286 is as follows:
–Say [t]o the king, my lord: Message of Abdi-Heba, your servant. I fall at the feet of my lord, the king, 7 times and 7 times.
(5-15)–What have I done to the king, my lord? They denounce me : ú–ša–a–ru[2] (I am slandered) before the king, my lord,1“Abdi-Heba has rebelled against the king, his lord.”
Seeing that, as far as I am concerned, neither my father nor my mother put me in this place, but the strong arm of the king2 brought me into my father’s house, why should I of all people commit a crime against the king, my lord?
(16-21)–As truly as the king, my lord, lives,3 I say to the commissioner of the king, [my] lord, “Why do you love the ‘Apiru but hate the mayors? Accordingly, I am slandered before the king, my lord.
(22-31)–Because I say4“Lost are the lands of the king, my lord,” accordingly I am slandered before the king, my lord. May the king, my lord, know that (though) the king, my lord stationed a garrison (here), Enhamu has taken i[t al]l away. [ … ]
Reverse:
(32-43)–[Now], O king, my lord, [there is n]o garrison, [and so] may the king provide for his land. May the king [pro]vide for his land! All the [la]nds of the king, my lord, have deserted. Ili-Milku has caused the loss of all the land of the king, and so may the king, my lord, provide for his land. For my part, I say, “I would go in to the king, my lord, and visit the king, my lord,” but the war against me is severe, and so I am not able to go in to the king, my lord.
(44-52)–And may it seem good in the sight of the king, [and] may he send a garrison so I may go in and visit the king, my lord. In truth,5 the king, my lord, lives: whenever the commissioners have come out, I would say (to them), “Lost are the lands of the king,” but they did not listen to me. Lost are all the mayors; there is not a mayor remaining to the king, my lord.
(53-60)–May the king turn his attention to the archers so that archers of the king, my lord, come forth. The king has no lands. (That) ‘Apiru6 has plundered all the lands of the king. If there are archers this year, the lands of the king, my lord, will remain. But if there are no archers, lost are the lands of the king, my lord.
(61-64)–[T]o the scribe of the king, my lord: Message of Abdi-Heba, your [ser]vant. Present eloquent words to the king, my lord. Lost are all the lands of the king, my lord.
EA 287 is as follows:
Say to the king, my lord: Message of Abdi-Heba, your servant. I fall at the feet of my lord 7 times and 7 times. Consider the entire affair. Milkilu and Tagi brought troops into Qiltu against me… …May the king know (that) all the lands are at peace (with one another), but I am at war. May the king provide for his land. Consider the lands of Gazru, Ašqaluna, and Lakisi. They have given them [my enemies] food, oil and any other requirement. So may the king provide for archers and send the archers against men that commit crimes against the king, my lord. If this year there are archers, then the lands and the hazzanu (client kings) will belong to the king, my lord. But if there are no archers, then the king will have neither lands nor hazzanu. Consider Jerusalem! This neither my father nor my mother gave to me. The strong hand (arm) of the king gave it to me. Consider the deed! This is the deed of Milkilu and the deed of the sons of Lab’ayu, who have given the land of the king to the ‘Apiru. Consider, O king, my lord! I am in the right!….
EA 288 is as follows:
To the king, my lord, my sun, hath spoken thus Abdi-
hiba, thy servant. At the feet of the king, my lord, seven
times and seven times do I fall. Behold, the king, my
lord, hath set his name upon the East and upon the West.
It is a wickedness which they have wrought against me.
Behold, I am not a local ruler, I am an officer 2 of the king,
my lord. Behold, I am a shepherd of the king, and one
who brings tribute to the king. Neither my father, nor
my mother, [but] the mighty hand of the king, hath
established me in my father’s house . . . came to me. . . .
I gave him ten slaves into his hand. When Shuta, the
officer of the king, came to me, I gave him twenty-one
maidservants and eighty (?) asiru . . . gave I into the
hand of Shtita, as a present for the king, my lord. Let
the king care for his land I The whole land of the king
will be lost. They have assumed hostilities against me (?)
As far as tho territory of Sheri, as far as Ginti-kirmil, it
goes well with all the local rulers (?), and hostility prevails
against mc. If one could see ! 3 But I do not see the eyes
of tho king, my lord, because hostility is established
against me. When there was a ship on the sea, and the
mighty hand of the king held Najjrima and Kapasi. But
now the habiru hold the cities of the king. There is no
local ruler left to the king, my lord ; all are lost. Behold,
Turbazu has been slain in the gate of Zilu ; yet tho king
docs nothing. Behold, Zimrida of Lachish, his servants
havo slaughtered him . . . the Habiru, Iaptiji-Adda, has
been slain in the gate of Zilu ; yet the king does nothing.
. . . l Let the king take care for his land, and let the king
give his attention in regard to troops for the land of
tribute (?) 1 For if no troops come in this year, all the
lands of the king, my lord, will be destroyed and in ruins.
They must not say before the king, my lord, that the land
of the king, my lord, is destroyed, and all the local rulers
are destroyed. If no troops arrive in this year, then let
the king send an officer to take mo to thee with my brothers, and wo will die with the king, my lord.
EA 289 is as follows:
Lines 1-4)–[Say t]o the king, my lord: Message of ‘Abdi-Heba, your servant. I f[all] at the feet of my lord, the k[ing], 7 times and 7 times.
(5-10)Milkilu does not break away from the sons of Labaya and from the sons of Arsawa, as they desire the land of the king for themselves. As for a mayor who does such a deed, why does the king not (c)all him to account?
(11-17)–Such was the deed that Milkilu and Tagi did: they took Rubutu. And now as for Jerusalem-(URUUru-Salimki), if this land belongs to the king, why is it((not)) of concern1to the king like Hazzatu?
(18-24)–Ginti-kirmil belongs to Tagi, and men of Gintu are the garrison in Bitsanu.2 Are we to act like Labaya when he was giving the land of Šakmu to the Hapiru?
(25-36)–Milkilu has written to Tagi and the sons ((of Labaya)), “Bethe both of you a protection.3Grant all their demands to the men of Qiltu, and let us isolate Jerusalem.”4 Addaya has taken the garrison that you sent in the charge of Haya, the son of Miyare; he has stationed it in his own house in Hazzatu and has sent 20 men to Egypt-(Miṣri). May the king, my lord, know (that) no garrison of the king is with me.
(37-44)–Accordingly, as truly as the king lives, hisirpi-official,5Pu’uru, has left me and is in Hazzatu. (May the kingcall (this) to mind when be arrives.)6And so may the king send 50 men as a garrison to protect the land. The entire land of the king has deser.
(45-46)–Send Ye((eh))enhamu that he may know about the land of the king, [my lord].
(47-51)–To the scribe of the king, [my lord: M]essage of ‘Abdi-Heba, [your] servant, Offer eloq[uent] words to the king:I am always, utterly yours.7I am your servant.—
EA 290 is as follows:
Let it be known what Milkilu and Shuwardata did to the land of the king, my lord! They sent troops of Gezer, troops of Gath . . . the land of the king went over to the ‘Apiru.
But now even a town near Jerusalem, Bit-Lahmi (Bethlehem) by name, a village which once belonged to the king, has fallen to the enemy . . . Let the king hear the words of your servant Abdi-Heba, and send archers to restore the imperial lands of the king! But if no archers are sent, the lands of the king will be taken by the ‘Apiru people. This act was done by the hand of Milkilu and Shuwardata.
Good Correspondence Between EA and Revision
According to 2 Kings 8:16-17: “In the fifth year of Joram son of Ahab king of Israel, when Jehoshaphat was king of Judah, Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat began his reign as king of Judah. He was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years”.
In favour of Abdi-hiba as king Jehoram of Judah, and Lab’ayu as Ahab of Israel, is the fact that Lab’ayu is appropriately dead by the time of Abdi-hiba.
Thus EA 280:
Say to the king, my lord, my god, my Sun: Message of Shuwardata, your servant, the dirt at your feet. I fall at the feet of the king, my lord, my god, my Sun, 7 times and 7 times. The king, my lord, permitted me to wage war against Qeltu (Keilah). I waged war. It is now at peace with me; my city is restored to me. Why did Abdi-Heba write to the men of Qeltu, “Accept silver and follow me?”… Moreover, Labaya, who used to take our towns, is dead, but now another Labaya is Abdi-Heba, and he seizes our town. So, may the king take cognizance of his servant because of this deed…
Interestingly, Abdi-hiba is being designated here as “another Labaya”.
And (EA 287) “the sons of Lab’ayu”, are now active in place of their deceased father.
Jehoram of Judah, who, according to P. Mauro (The Wonders of Bible Chronology) was both prorex and corex during the latter part of his father Jehoshapat’s reign (and had three regnal beginnings), was also a contemporary, then, of the two sons of Ahab, Ahaziah and Jehoram – these being, according to my revision, “the sons of Lab’ayu”.
At the approximate time of Moses’s impending return from his exile in the land of Midian, the rulership of Egypt had fallen into the hands of a woman, due, apparently to the lack of male heirs (Exodus 4:19): “And the Lord said to Moses in Midian, ‘Go, return to Egypt; for all the men who sought your life are dead’.”
The Hebrew specifically says “the men” (הָ֣אֲנָשִׁ֔ים) here.
I have identified this woman ruler variously with Khentkaus of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasty; Nitocris of the Sixth Dynasty; and Sobekneferu(re) of the Twelfth Dynasty, thereby further securing my amalgamating of these dynasties (and kingdoms) in the one era:
What happens when kingdoms, rulers and dynasties are set out in a ‘single file’ fashion, instead of being recognised as, in some cases, contemporaneous, is that rulers become duplicated and, hence, tombs, pyramids and sun temples, and so on, attributed to various ones, go missing.
This is not because these are missing in reality, but simply because they have already been accounted for in the case of a ruler under his/her other name, in a differently numbered dynasty.
However, with my revision of dynasties, these ‘missing links’ can be satisfactorily accounted for.
According to an historical scenario that I am building up around the biblical prophet, Moses, the great man’s forty years of life in Egypt (before his exile to Midian) were spanned by only two powerful dynastic male rulers, with a woman-ruler rounding off the dynasty – presumably due to the then lack of male heirs.
Women rulers in Egypt, being scarce – and now even scarcer, due to my revision – can be chronologically most useful. For three of my four re-aligned-as-contemporaneous dynasties, the Fourth, Fifth and the Twelfth, have a powerful woman-ruler, or, in the case of Khentkaus (Khentkawes), Fourth Dynasty, at least a most significant queen who possibly ruled.
I can only conclude, in the context of my revision, that these supposedly three mighty women, Khentkaus; Nitocris; and Sobekneferu(re); constitute the one woman-ruler triplicated.
And hence arise shocks and problems (e.g., the famous “Khentkaus Problem”), “amazement and even sensation” (see below) for Egyptologists, as well as those exasperating anomalies of missing buildings to which I have alluded above.
N. Grimal, writing about Nitocris last ruler of the Sixth Dynasty (A History of Ancient Egypt), tells of her yet to be discovered pyramid (p. 128): “Nitocris is the only genuine instance of a female ruler in the Old Kingdom, but unfortunately the pyramid that she must surely have been entitled to build has not yet been discovered”.
Yet there is another “instance” of an Old Kingdom female ruler, and that is Khentkaus.
Better to say, I think, that there was only one female ruler during Egypt’s Old-Middle Kingdom period.
The semi-legendary and shadowy figure of Nitocris needs to be filled out with her more substantial alter egos in Khentkaus and Sobekneferu(re).
Grimal (on p. 89) tells of how archaeologically insubstantial Nitocris is:
…. Queen Nitocris … according to Manetho was the last Sixth Dynasty ruler. The Turin Canon lists Nitocris right after Merenre II, describing her as the ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’. This woman, whose fame grew in the Ptolemaic period, in the guise of the legendary Rhodopis, courtesan and mythical builder of the third pyramid at Giza … was the first known queen to exercise political power over Egypt. …. Unfortunately no archaeological evidence has survived from her reign. ….
On p. 171, Grimal, offering a possible reason for the emergence of the woman ruler, Sobekneferu(re), at the end of the Twelfth Dynasty, likens the situation to that at the end of the Sixth Dynasty:
The excessive length of the reigns of Sesostris III and Ammenemes III (about fifty years each) had led to various successional problems. This situation perhaps explains why, just as in the late Sixth Dynasty, another [sic] queen rose to power: Sobkneferu. …. She was described in her titulature, for the first time in Egyptian history [sic], as a woman-pharaoh.
Whist the conventional history and archaeology has failed to ‘triplicate’ as it ought to have (i) Khentkaus, as (ii) Nitocris, and as (iii) Sobekneferu(re), it has, unfortunately, managed – as we shall now find – to triplicate Khentkaus herself into I, II and III.
Here I am following the intriguing discussion of Khentkaus as provided by Miroslav Verner, in his book, Abusir: The Necropolis of the Sons of the Sun (2017).
The “obscure and confused period which set in at the end of the Fourth Dynasty”, to which Verner will refer, is due in large part, I believe, to the failure to fill out the period with the other portions of contemporaneous Egyptian history.
P. 91 Three Royal Mothers Named Khentkaus.
….
But, beside Shepesekaf, there was yet another figure who came to the fore during the obscure and confused period which set in at the end of the Fourth Dynasty. This figure was Queen Khentkaus. In almost every respect she is surrounded by mystery, beginning with her origins and ending with her unusual tomb.
P. 95
Among the many extraordinary discoveries from Khentkaus’ tomb complex in Giza, one in particular produced amazement and even a sensation.
This was the inscription on a fragment of the granite reading “Mother of two kings of Upper and Lower Egypt, daughter of the god, every good thing she orders is done for her, Khentkaus”. The inscription contained the never before documented title of a queen, and its discovery immediately raised a fundamental controversy amongst archaeologists, since, from a purely grammatical point of view, two translations … were possible …. King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and mother of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Pp. 99-100
All the available evidence concerning the titulary of Khentkaus and the form and location of her tomb in the royal cemetery in Giza clearly suggests that she not only belonged to the royal line buried there but that, at the end of the Fourth Dynasty, she played a very important role in dynastic politics …. Importantly, in the vicinity of Khentkaus’ tomb were found several artifacts bearing the name of King Khafre which may indirectly suggest a closer relationship …. between the two personalities. This possibility seems to be supported by an (intrusive?) fragment of a stone stela, discovered in the adjacent building abutting Menkaure’s valley temple, with a damaged hieroglyphic inscription reading “[beloved of] her father, king’s daughter… kau”. According to some Egyptologists, the inscription might refer to Khentkaus and suggest that she could have been a king’s daughter. ….
… The confusing array of different but incomplete historical sources and theories attempting to interpret them finally earned the question its own telling title in Egyptological literature: the ‘Khentkaus problem’.
Khentkaus II
While Miroslav Verner will take the conventional line that centuries separated the Fourth from the Sixth Dynasty, my view is that ‘they’ were one and the same dynasty.
P. 105
The mortuary cult of Queen Khentkaus II lasted … for about two centuries up until the end of the Sixth Dynasty.
P. 106
The most significant result of the excavation of the pyramid complex of Khentkaus at Abusir was the surprising discovery that there were two different royal mothers bearing the same name as Khentkaus and the same unusual title
“Mother of the two kings of Upper and Lower Egypt”, each of them enjoying high esteem and a high-level cult at the place of her burial – Khentkaus I in Giza and Khentkaus II in Abusir.
Khentkaus III
P. 108
Quite recently a third Fifth Dynasty queen named Khentkaus was discovered in Abusir. ….
“… I suggest that Cicero explicitly employs unhistorical
(or at least not certifiably true) exempla, with a view to the
internal consistency of the dialogues’ fictional world”.
Dan Hanchey
Some Commonalities
Some obvious similarities between the text-book Ptolemy Soter (so-called IX) and Cicero are their supposed beginnings before 100 BC, and their sharing of a name, or nickname, meaning “Chickpea”.
In the book, Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols (eds. B. Bickel et al.), 2013, we read as follows about this name (p. 303):
The possible prehistory of *ḱiḱer- is more interesting. The attested forms are Latin (Glare 1996) cicer ‘chickpea’ (Cicer arietinum), cicera ‘chickling vetch’ (Lathyrus sativus), Armenian siseṙn ‘chickpea’, Macedonian (Hesychius) kíkerroi (Lathyrus ochrus), and Serbo-Croatian sȁstrica (Lathyrus cicera or Lathyrus sativus). …. There is also the possibility of Greek kriós, ‘chickpea’, which Pokorny (1994: 598) tentatively suggests might be from *kikriós with dissimilation, and Hittite kikris, a food item used in a mash, and measured in handfuls. ….
[End of quote]
Likewise, Ptolemy was, Cicero was, contemporaneous with a Cleopatra, who had no great love for the “Chickpea”, or vice versa.
In the case of Ptolemy, we read (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ptolemy-IX-Soter-II): “Although [Cleopatra, so-called III] preferred his younger brother, Ptolemy Alexander, popular sentiment forced the dowager queen to dismiss him and to associate Ptolemy Soter on the throne with herself”.
In parallel fashion, Cleopatra [so-called VII] ruled as co-regent with Ptolemy [so-called XII]: “Before his death, Ptolemy XII chose his daughter Cleopatra VII as his coregent.
Interestingly, Cicero, according to what we read at this site, is supposed to have commented unfavourably on this latter situation:
Throughout his long-lasting reign the principal aim of Ptolemy [XII] was to secure his hold on the Egyptian throne so as to eventually pass it to his heirs. To achieve this goal he was prepared to sacrifice much: the loss of rich Ptolemaic lands, most of his wealth and even, according to Cicero, the very dignity on which the mystique of kingship rested when he appeared before the Roman people as a mere supplicant.
[End of quote]
As for Cicero and Cleopatra: “Without doubt Cicero was hoping for bad news about Cleopatra. He did not like Greeks and he did not like women, and most of all he hated the Greek woman Cleopatra …”. (Michael Foss, The Search for Cleopatra, 1999).
…. The latent hostility between the son and his mother finally erupted in October 110, when Cleopatra expelled him from Egypt and recalled his brother from Cyprus. Soter II returned in early 109 but was evicted anew by his mother in March of the following year.
After a reconciliation in May 108 he fled a third time and established himself in Cyprus, from where in 107 he invaded northern Syria to assist one of the claimants to the Seleucid empire, while his mother, allying herself with the Jewish king in Palestine, actively aided another Seleucid pretender. ….
[End of quote]
Nor was Cicero a stranger to exile, as we learn at:
Cicero was elected quaestor in 75, praetor in 66 and consul in 63—the youngest man ever to attain that rank without coming from a political family. During his term as consul he thwarted the Catilinian conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. In the aftermath, though, he approved the key conspirators’ summary execution, a breach of Roman law that left him vulnerable to prosecution and sent him into exile.
Cicero: Alliances, Exiles ….
During his exile, Cicero refused overtures from Caesar that might have protected him, preferring political independence to a role in the First Triumvirate. Cicero was away from Rome when civil war between Caesar and Pompey broke out. He aligned himself with Pompey and then faced another exile when Caesar won the war, cautiously returning to Rome to receive the dictator’s pardon. ….
[End of quote]
Cyprus
Continuing with the Encyclopædia Britannica account of Ptolemy IX, we read of his lengthy sojourn in Cyprus:
After a reconciliation in May 108 [Ptolemy] fled a third time and established himself in Cyprus, from where in 107 he invaded northern Syria to assist one of the claimants to the Seleucid empire, while his mother, allying herself with the Jewish king in Palestine, actively aided another Seleucid pretender. During the protracted war his mother died (101) and Ptolemy X Alexander became the sole ruler of Egypt, while Soter II remained entrenched in Cyprus. ….
[End of quote]
As for Cicero, Ismail Veli has called him “Cicero The Most Famous Governor in Cypriot History!”:
If I was to choose the most famous Governor in Cypriot history I would choose the great Marcus Tullius Cicero ….
In 51 BC and much against his will he was assigned to Cilicia which was associated to Cyprus. As usual the previous Governor’s considered their post as an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the local people. Arriving in August 51 B.C he remained until the following year until 3rd August 50 B.C. Though not pleased on his post Cicero as usual set about his task with honesty, hard work and aimed at making the lives of the locals much more comfortable. In addition to the corruption, Cilicia was in an unsettled state due to the Parthian wars. His first order was that the locals need not present him with gifts they could ill afford. He also did away with spending on many forms of Roman entertainment. He only accepted invitations to modest dinner parties so as not to force the locals extra spending. He himself restrained from having extravagant dinner parties, only well served and delicious food at the lowest cost possible was on offer.
He never ordered anyone to be beaten with rods or stripped of their clothing. His biggest achievement was in fighting the embezzlement of public funds which was at a chronic level. He invited the culprits to hand over the funds on the condition that they would not be charged and allowed to retain their citizen rights. The effect was that much money was given back to the point that financial stability and prosperity grew. Any chiefs who refused were met with the wrath of the Roman army at Cicero’s disposal. By the time he left Cilicia the people honoured him with the title of ‘Imperator’.
Meanwhile in Cyprus he found the same if not worse problems as he confronted in Cilicia.
He assigned one of his most trusted men Q. Volusius as prefect to help with the task. The previous Governors had exacted large sums of money from the locals in compensation for not stationing Legionaries on the Island in winter at their expense. Instead they blackmailed the local cities to pay a charge amounting to over 200 Attic talents (one talent was worth 6000 Denarii. The average pay for a citizen was about 1-2 denarii a day). In addition when the city of Salamis needed a loan, Marcus Brutus levied a charge of 48% interest which was crippling the local economy. Raising loans by provincials in Rome was illegal under the Gabinian law (introduced in 67 B.C) Therefore Brutus together with Cato raised it on their behalf. The reason for their exorbitant interest was the excuse that times were volatile and with wars raging in Asia Minor and the Middle East they were at great risk of losing their money. In the end after heavy negotiation the locals were happy to settle for 106 Talents therefore reducing their heavy burden by almost half. Cicero made good the rest from some of the money he had won back from the embezzlers in Cilicia. A Scaptius complained bitterly to M. Brutus that Cicero was so unreasonable that he was not even allowed fifty troopers to have with him in Cyprus, to which Cicero replied that “Fifty troopers could do no little harm among such gentle folk as the Cypriotes. Spartacus had begun his insurrection with a smaller troop”.
After leaving Cyprus, Cicero retained an interest in Cypriot affairs.
In 47 B.C he wrote to C Sextilius Rufus who was quaestor for the Island in that year warmly commending to him all the Cypriotes, especially the Paphians; and suggesting that he would do well to set an example to his successor, instituting reforms in accordance with the law of P. Lentulus and following Cicero’s decisions and policies on the Island.
So ended Cicero’s period of short but effective Governorship of the Roman province of Cyprus. Not many rulers treated the Cypriots with the care and concern as did Cicero. Even if some did I don’t have any doubt that anyone more famous in history can claim to have presided over the people of the Island. ….
[End of quote]
Sack of Athens
An event that occurred at the hands of the Romans in the lifetime of Ptolemy IX, of Cicero.
Thus, according to: Encyclopædia Britannica “Ptolemy Soter refused to give aid to the Romans in the course of their war with Pontus, a Black Sea kingdom, and after the Roman sack of Athens in 88 the Egyptian rulers helped rebuild the city, for which commemorative statues of them were erected”.
Roman aristocrats returned to Athens soon after Sulla’s sack, in search of education and high culture. A shipwreck, found a century ago by sponge divers off the island of Antikythera at the southern point of Greece, revealed a cargo of extraordinary statues and other treasure en route for Italy. Excavations of the luxurious villas constructed in the last century BC show the probable destinations of such cargoes. Ancestral mansions in the city had been rebuilt on ever more lavish scales since the sixth century, but from the later second century Roman aristocrats had begun to expand their property portfolios. Cicero was far from the richest of senators, but even he owned eight villas. ….
[End of quote]
Dan Hanchey may be closer to the truth than he realises when he writes of Cicero’s employment of “unhistorical (or at least not certifiably true) exempla”:
DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED: FICTION FORMING FACT IN CICERO’S DIALOGUES
….
This paper analyzes Cicero’s citations of the not-always-historical past in his theoretical corpus. Examining both the Marian oak in the prologue of De Legibus and Cicero’s overall use of historical references, I suggest that Cicero explicitly employs unhistorical (or at least not certifiably true) exempla, with a view to the internal consistency of the dialogues’ fictional world. By encouraging the reader’s acceptance of such fictional examples, Cicero establishes an intersubjective and empathetic relationship with his audience. Ultimately, Cicero seeks to uphold and use others to confirm his internal world as an alternative to the tense world of Roman politics. ….
“A congiarium of three gold coins was distributed in Rome … with Trajan’s portrait on the obverse, in military dress … and Hadrian’s portrait on the reverse, identical to Trajan’s in profile but with a beard and nude,
bearing the name Hadrianus Traianus Caesar”.
Amanda Claridge
As far as conventional history is concerned, Trajan and Hadrian are two most notable Roman emperors, with Hadrian being perhaps the adopted successor of Trajan.
Sometimes in ancient history, though, as I have found, two supposed sequential kings, each considered to be great in his own right, have turned out to be just the one king. My major example of this phenomenon, worked into a university thesis (2007), was the neo-Assyrian case of two of the greatest names, Sargon II and Sennacherib, generally considered to have been, respectively, a father and his son.
My first step, assisted by a colleague, was to see a significant overlap in the reigns, something not recognised by conventional scholars. Partial overlap began to merge into a total overlap, eventually leading me to conclude that Sargon II was Sennacherib:
Sargon II and Sennacherib: More than just an overlap
After long consideration about Trajan, and where to fit him into a revised scheme of things, I have come to the same conclusion as with those neo-Assyrian names, that Trajan was his supposed successor and adopted heir, the look-alike Hadrian.
Why do coins frequently include the name Traianus (Trajan), or Traian, in Hadrian’s name? For example:
RIC II, Part 3 (second edition) Hadrian 57. Denarius. Struck AD 117. Rome mint. Obv: IMP CAES TRAIAN HADRIANO AVG DIVI TRA, Bust of Hadrian, laureate, bare chest, traces of drapery on far shoulder usually visible, right Rev: PARTH F DIVI NER NEP P M TR P COS // FORT RED (in exergue), Fortuna seated left, holding rudder and cornucopia
Could this presumed succession of Roman emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, have been, instead, just the one mighty ruler?
And was this ruler an ethnic Roman anyway?
While I have left Trajan virtually untouched so far, for want of ideas about him, I have written a lot about Hadrian, who, I have concluded, was not a Grecophile Roman at all, but a Seleucid Greek, the most notorious one of all: King Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’.
Yet Hadrian was much more even than that.
In my article:
Hadrian was not ‘Nero Redivivus’ – but was close to it
I identify Hadrian all at once as – apart from Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’:
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus; and
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus ‘Caligula’
with Constantine also under some serious consideration.
According to my revision, Hadrian belonged, not to the C2nd AD, but to the time of the Maccabees, when he, as King Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’, the “little horn” of Daniel 7:8, desecrated the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem.
In other words, Hadrian, the Philhellene emperor, was a Seleucid Greek, and not a Roman.
But I have also made a second major chronological move, collapsing the Maccabean era, in part, into the Infancy period of Jesus Christ – the Bar Kochba revolt against Hadrian pertaining to the Maccabees:
Judas the Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2’s “rock cut out of a mountain”
Comparative Essay on Roman Empire: Rule of Augustus and Trajan
….
There are many debates as to which emperor was the better ruler, Trajan or Augustus? It can perhaps be considered an unfair question, as each ruled the empire in vastly different political climates. Trajan ruled for nineteen years between 98 AD to 117 AD and is considered to be one of the greatest emperors in the history of Rome. Known as ‘Optimus Princeps,’ which translates to ‘greatest of princes,’ Trajan’s rule is believed to be “the period in history during which the human race was most happy and prosperous.” So much so that subsequent emperors often attempted to elevate their own reign by association with Trajan.
He conquered many lands and grew the Roman Empire to its largest expanse in history which resulted in his rule being a time of great prosperity for Rome. Similarly to Augustus, Trajan embraced his role as emperor by showing his support for adhering to traditional hierarchies and senatorial morals. He did this by openly shunning many of Domitian’s policies, such as his preference for equestrian officers. Many political writers of the Imperial Roman Age considered this to be one of the many reasons Trajan was such a well-received emperor, as he ruled less by fear such as Domitian and Titus, and more by acting as a role model and setting a good example, “men learn better from examples.” Aligning himself with Augustus’ autocratic way of ruling, Trajan “wielded autocratic power through moderatio instead of contumacia – moderation instead of insolence.” It was this approach to autocracy, his deferential behaviour towards his peers, that garnered him the respect and regard as a virtuous monarch.
Trajan is acknowledged to have created the best model of ruling an empire than any emperor before or after him. Domitian only strived to please the military and paid little attention to the Senate and Nerva concentrated his efforts on the Senate and disregarded the army whereas Trajan proved that actions could be taken to satisfy both the Senate’s and the army’s needs. However, in direct contrast with Augustus’ way of ruling, Trajan transformed the role of the emperor as he encroached on the senate’s authority, turning several senatorial provinces into imperial provinces in order to quell out-of-control spending on the local magnates part. Trajan essentially absolved the role of the senate as, according to Pliny, Trajan was a good emperor due to him approving and blaming the same things that the Senate would have approved or blamed.
Trajan garnered widespread support from his subjects as he presented himself very differently than previous emperors. Upon Trajan’s arrival in Rome he displayed a refreshing and grounding humble personality, as instead of arriving in a litter or chariot, he walked amongst the streets, greeting his subjects, senators and knights with equal warmth. Trajan did what no emperor had done before him, when referring to his subjects and in particular the army, Trajan uses the term ‘we’ instead of ‘them,’ showing solidarity and fellowship with those others considered to be below them. Trajan even went as far as becoming a ‘regular’ soldier himself; eating in the military mess, marching on foot, fording rivers, campaigning in person and honouring his fellow fallen soldiers with an annual ceremony. It is a measure of a great leader when one can inspire bravery and action in so many, and it is because of the way Trajan presented himself as ‘one of them’ that his troops were willing to risk all and display great prowess on his behalf, as he would do for them. This is further exaggerated when we look at documents written regarding Trajan’s death,
“After his death, it was said that no other emperor excelled or even equalled him in popularity with the people and his memory remained green for centuries. It was said that he displayed the utmost integrity and virtue in affairs of state and arms. The forum of Trajan, no matter how often we see it, is always wonderful.”
In conclusion, the conception of the role of the emperor across the years, particularly between the rule of Augustus and Trajan, experienced many changes. Augustus established the empire after his victory at the Battle of Actium and therefore began his rule as a strong and respected leader. He transformed the crumbling ruins of the Republic into a thriving and successful empire.
Augustus’s role as emperor consisted of heavy intervention into both private and public affairs, undertaking the role as ‘pater’ for all Roman households and sculpting the ‘perfect’ Roman family. He delegated much of his power to the senate and the people of Rome, whilst simultaneously establishing himself as an autocratic ruler. Additionally, Augustus believed that one’s family also played a part in the role of an emperor. Augustus was well-received and liked by his subjects, especially after his revival of traditional Roman morals and many popular policies of the idealised Republic. Although Trajan and Augustus shared many similarities in the role they performed as emperors, the main difference in the conception of the role of the emperor was Trajan’s decision to effectively absolve the power of the Senate and rule on their behalf. Trajan is considered to be the most loved of all the Roman Emperors as he presented himself as a humble, well-meaning and hard-working man. From walking on foot with his fellow soldiers to walking the streets and greeting his subjects, Trajan appeared to align himself as a fellow subject and soldier. If one is to attempt to answer the question of who was the better emperor, one can consider the quote, “May he be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan,” which suggests that Augustus was a good emperor establishing the empire at a terrible time of turmoil and that Trajan was a good emperor because he began his rule at a time when Rome was already stable and flourishing. However, both emperors presented themselves as one who wanted to rule with the intent to improve the political, legal and social systems of Rome and did so without the use of fear or intimidation.
1. Spanish heritage: Both Trajan and Hadrian were of Hispanic origin.
2. Military achievements: Both emperors had successful military campaigns, with Trajan conquering new territories and Hadrian consolidating existing ones.
3. Administrative reforms: Both Trajan and Hadrian implemented administrative reforms to improve the functioning of the Roman Empire.
4. Attention to infrastructure: Both emperors invested in public works and infrastructure projects to improve cities and provinces.
5. Civic projects: Trajan and Hadrian sponsored numerous civic projects, such as the construction of public buildings, roads, and bridges.
6. Favorable public opinion: Both emperors were generally well-regarded by the public, being known for their fair and just rule.
7. Interest in architecture: Both Trajan and Hadrian demonstrated a strong interest in architecture and left a lasting architectural legacy.
8. Patronage of the arts: Both emperors supported and patronized the arts, particularly literature and poetry.
9. Honoring the military: Both Trajan and Hadrian showed great respect and appreciation for the Roman military.
10. Longevity of reigns: Both emperors had relatively long reigns, with Trajan ruling for 19 years and Hadrian for 21 years.
“If the Forum of Trajan remained relatively intact until the late Antiquity, it virtually disappeared in the Middle Ages. Many of the forum’s buildings were destroyed in an earthquake in 801.
Subsequently, the Forum’s materials were looted and new buildings were gradually built above the ruins of the ancient monuments”.
The main culprit is given here as an earthquake, followed by looting, and new buildings over built on the site.
I discussed a similar problem for ancient Egypt, with Sun Temples unable to be found:
A similar problem arises with the so-called Fifth Dynasty,
with four of its supposed six sun temples undiscovered.
A different approach is obviously needed when, after decades or more of searching, a famous ancient capital city such as Akkad (Agade) cannot be found; nor can the tombs of virtually an entire dynasty (Egyptian Second); nor can four whole sun temples (Egyptian Fifth Dynasty).
The Second Dynasty of Egypt, however – whose beginning I would re-date to about a millennium later than does the conventional model – appears to overlap, in great part, with (according to what I have already tentatively determined) the very beginnings of Egyptian dynastic history.
That the Second Dynasty may be, to a great extent at least, a duplication of the First Dynasty, may be supported by the disturbing (for Egyptologists) non-existence of Second Dynasty burials (Miroslav Verner, Abusir, p. 16. My emphasis): “The tombs of the rulers of the Second Dynasty, which for the most part have not yet been discovered, represent one of the greatest problems of Egyptian archaeology”.
A similar problem arises with the so-called Fifth Dynasty of Egypt, with four of its supposed six sun temples undiscovered.
Thus Jeff Burzacott, “The missing sun temples of Abusir”:
Abusir is one of the large cemeteries of the Old Kingdom kings, around 16 kilometres south of the famous Great Pyramids of Giza.
Although the history of the Abusir necropolis began in the 2nd Dynasty, it wasn’t until King Userkaf, the first ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, chose to build here that the Abusir skyline changed forever.
What Userkaf built here wasn’t a pyramid; he nestled his final resting place close to the world’s first pyramid, that of Djoser at Saqqara. What Userkaf raised at Abusir was something new – a sun temple.
The sun temple was a large, squat obelisk, raised on a grand pedestal, and connected with the worship of the setting sun. Each day the sun sank below the western horizon into the Underworld where it faced a dangerous journey before rising triumphantly, reborn at dawn. It was a powerful symbol of cyclical resurrection. The obelisk shape is likely symbolic of the sacred benben stone of Heliopolis, which represented the primeval mound, the first land to rise from the waters of Nun at the dawn of time, and where creation began. This was the centre of the cosmos.
For the next 70 years, Abusir was a hive of activity as the pyramids of Userkaf’s sons, Sahure (rightmost pyramid) and Neferirkare, (leftmost pyramid), as well as his grandson, Niuserre (centre) raised their own step pyramids and sun temples there.
Buried in the Abusir sand are also the barely-started pyramids of Fifth Dynasty pharaohs whose short-lived reigns saw their grand monuments hastily sealed, just a few courses of stone above the desert.
Six sun temples are mentioned in inscriptions, although only the ruins of Userkaf’s and Niuserre’s have been discovered. Hopefully, buried out there somewhere lay four more sun temples, waiting to feel Ra’s rays once again.
[End of quote]
Massimiliano Nuzzolo and Patrizia Zanfagna have sensibly turned to high tech for the purpose of detecting any lost Egyptian monuments:
The Search for the Lost Sun Temples: A Glimpse from the Satellite
But, just as I would not hold much hope for Jeff Burzacott’s “four more sun temples, waiting to feel Ra’s rays once again”, I would not expect satellite technology to find those four, supposedly missing, sun temples. For it is my belief that the rulers of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt, just like those of the Second, have been duplicated – {a duplication of dynasties occurring at various stages of Egyptian history as well} – meaning that there were not six rulers who built six sun temples.
Most likely, then, all (two) of the sun temples that were built have already been discovered.
[End of article]
Could the same be the case for Trajan’s Forum?
That we already have more of it, but under the name of a duplicated ruler (rulers)?
Boys and wine
Trajan:
I know, of course, that he was devoted to boys and to wine, but if he had ever committed or endured any base or wicked deed as the result of this, he would have incurred censure; as it was, however, he drank all the wine he wanted ….
Although it was not uncommon for his predecessors to have taken gay lovers alongside a female spouse, Hadrian was unique in making his love “official” in a way that no other emperor had before him.
… [Hadrian] followed Trajan to the Dacian Wars in a position of fairly close intimacy; at this time, indeed, he states that he indulged in wine too, so as to fall in with Trajan’s habits, and that he was very richly rewarded for this by Trajan.
The gymnasium of Salamis in Cyprus, with its colonnaded palaestra, was built over the ruins of an earlier Hellenistic gymnasium in the 2nd century CE [sic] during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian after Salamis had been greatly damaged during the Jewish revolt in 116 CE.
I Maccabees 1:14-15
So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.
The emperor Trajan … was a vicious anti-Semite, and the Jews suffered terribly through his long reign. Dreaming of extending the Roman Empire beyond the countries Alexander the Great had conquered, even to fabled India, Trajan knew that Babylon, heavily populated by Jews, lay in his path. The Babylonian Jews found themselves in a terrible dilemma: Should they resist the Romans, thereby endangering all the Jews in the Roman Empire, or should they not fight alongside their Babylonian countrymen to repulse Trajan, and thereby being accused of treason? Alarmed at the prospect of all the world’s Jews falling under Roman domination, the Jews of Babylon chose the former. As such, the Romans conquered Babylon, but held it only a short time.
Infuriated by the Jewish role in Trajan’s defeat, the anti-Semitic Greeks of Alexandria, Egypt, assisted by Roman troops, instigated pogroms against the Alexandrian Jews, the largest Jewish population of any city in the Roman Empire. Many Jews had assembled for prayer at the Great Synagogue, which was so vast that sextons standing with flags indicated the time to respond Amento the blessings.
At prayer, the Jews were massacred to the last person.
When the Jews of Cyprus and Libya discovered what had happened to the empire’s largest and wealthiest Jewish community, they readied themselves to resist the inevitable attacks. Taking their preparations as a sign of incipient revolt, Trajan sent Roman legions to assist the Greeks in wiping out the Jews. To this day, church historians, full of malice toward Jews, have distorted these events, stating that the Jews both attempted a general uprising against Rome and engaged in wholesale massacres of Greeks and Romans. However, papyrus writings of that period indicate that the Greeks were the instigators.
During Trajan’s rule, the sages had to leave Yavneh and met secretly. Convening surreptitiously in the town of Lod, in the attic of the Nitzah family, their meetings are recorded in the Talmud as B’Aliyas Beit Nitzah B’Lud. At this time, Trajan appointed a special governor for Eretz Israel, Quietus, who caused so much anguish that to commemorate the intense suffering the sages forbade brides to wear crowns. He was so hated that the date of Quietus’ removal from office was celebrated annually.
Hadrian
If Trajan was horrible, he was benign compared to his successor Hadrian, who of all the Roman emperors was the single worst ruler of the Jewish people. Remarkably, though, Hadrian began his reign favorably inclined to the Jews. Roman oppression of Jews throughout the empire ceased, and the Sanhedrin was permitted to reconvene openly, this time in the town of Usha in the Galilee. Hadrian even gave permission to rebuild the Beit Hamikdash.
Understandably, excitement in the Jewish world reached a fever pitch. Vast sums of money were gathered, and multitudes of Jews streamed toward Eretz Israel. However, the Samaritan inhabitants of the land, long-time foes of the Jews, were terrified by the possibility of a Jewish rejuvenation. Convincing Hadrian that a Jewish rejuvenation would spark a revolt, the Samaritans advised Hadrian to retract his magnanimous gesture. Not willing to change his mind openly, Hadrian allowed the Jews to rebuild the Beit Hamikdash, but stipulated that it could not be in its original place. Since Jewish law precisely fixes the site of the Temple, this decree was tantamount to a revocation of the promise.
Greatly dismayed at having their hopes so cruelly dashed, many Jews began talking openly of revolt, and it took the valiant efforts of the great sage Rabbi Joshua to ameliorate the people’s anger. The turning point was his parable of a bird that removes a bone stuck in a lion’s throat, then demands a reward. The lion replies that the ability to boast of sticking one’s neck into a lion’s mouth and escaping unscathed is itself the greatest reward. Likewise, Rabbi Joshua continued, Jews should be grateful that they are not being persecuted, and therefore not demand too much from the Romans. Mollified, the people accepted Rabbi Joshua’s logic, and calm was temporarily restored.
Over time, however, Hadrian realized that the mitzvahsof the Torah, rather than national independence, were the backbone of the Jewish people – and he set out to break it. Indeed, Hadrian took several steps that convinced the Jewish people that there was no alternative to rising up against an oppressor bent on destroying them spiritually.
First, Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Beit Hamikdash, and then began constructing a new Roman city, naming it Aelia Capitolina, on the ruins of Jerusalem. To accomplish his aims, Hadrian completely ploughed over the remnants of Jerusalem, thereby removing all traces of the former Jewish presence. As the destruction of the Holy Temple itself, this tragedy also occurred on Tisha B’Av, and is one of the reasons for the fast. In a departure from previous Roman policy, Hadrian also decreed against the observance of key mitzvahs: bris milah, the Sabbath, and taharas mishpacha, family purity. As in the times of Antiochus, this blow against the Torah sparked the second great Jewish revolt against Rome.
[End of quote]
“As in the times of Antiochus … the … great Jewish revolt …”.
Hadrian’s era was “… the times of Antiochus … the … great Jewish revolt …”.
showing that the land of Chaldea was not actually in Mesopotamia, at all, but was in NW Syria, I can no longer accept my original view based on convention.
The same goes now, too, for Babylon, that needs to undergo a tectonic geographical shift corresponding to Royce Erickson’s movement of Chaldea. On this, see my article:
He even apparently bore the name of “Nebuchednezzar”:
“The Chronicle of John of Nikiu who wrote of Cambyses[’] exploits after his name change to Nebuchadnezzar. He wrote of how Cambyses under his new name Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and desolated Egypt. It becomes apparent therefore that John gave credit to Cambyses for what Nebuchadnezzar accomplished”.
So basically what I am getting at here is that the above presumed century and a half of history (c. 670 BC and c. 525 BC) may need to be collapsed, like a star into a presumed black hole, into just the one point in time.
Three major invasion eras of Egypt becoming reduced to just the one.
Meeting and identifying Udjahorresne
If this Ushanahuru were Udjahorresne, then it would provide a
chronological connecting link between c. 670 BC and c. 525 BC.
Cambyses’ (Darius’) assistant or mentor (tour guide) in Egypt was one Udjahorresne (or Udjahorresnet, Wedjaḥorresnet, and many other variants).
We read about this important official as “Wedjahor-Resne” in the following account:
The … Egyptian inscription was written over a naophoros-statue, i.e., a statue representing a man carrying (“phoros“) a small shrine (“naos“) with an image of a god. In this case, the god can be identified with Osiris, the ruler of the Underworld. The text commemorates all pious acts of the carrier, an important courtier named Wedjahor-Resne or Udjahor-Resnet. The statue, which is about 70 centimeters high, was brought to Italy by the Roman emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138), who kept it in his villa in Tivoli. Currently, it is displayed in the Egyptian department of the Vatican Museums.
Wedjahor-Resne was not only the pharaoh‘s personal physician, but was also responsible for the royal navy. In 526 BCE, king Amasis died and was succeeded by his son Psammetichus III. During the transitional period, the Persian king Cambyses attacked Egypt and defeated his unprepared enemies near the Pelusian branch of the Nile. The standard account is written by Herodotus.
It is probable that Wedjahor-Resne defected to the Persians at some stage before or during this war, because nothing is known about naval operations, although the Egyptians owned a large navy and had occupied Cyprus.note[Herodotus, Histories 2.182.] The Greek historian Ctesias of Cnidus, who is not known for his reliability but may for once have had access to reliable information, explicitly mentions a traitor, although his name is Combaphis.note[Ctesias, Persica10.] It should be noted that an ally of Egypt, the Greek leader Polycrates of Samos, allowed himself to be bribed away.
Cartouche of Cambyses (“Mesuti-Ra Cambyses”)
When Cambyses had taken the Egyptian capital Memphis, he was recognized as the new king. Wedjahor-Resne was reinstated in almost all his former functions and helped Cambyses to behave like a true Egyptian king. For example, he persuaded Cambyses to direct the Persian garrison in the holy city of Sais to another camp, making sure that the ancient sanctuary of Neith, the mother of the supreme god Ra, and the shrine of Osiris were purified. Wedjahor-Resne also composed Cambyses’ new royal name, Mesuti-Ra (“born of Ra”).
…
Cambyses left Egypt in the spring of 522, taking Wedjahor-Resne with him as his physician. Unfortunately, the king had an accident on his way back, and his doctor was unable to cure him.
After Cambyses’ death and a violent civil war (described in the Behistun Inscription), Darius became king. The new ruler allowed Wedjahor-Resne to return home and ordered him to supervise the medical schools – the “houses of life” in the text – that had been destroyed (by Cambyses?). Since the text does not mention Darius’ visit to Egypt in 519/518, it is likely that the naophoros-statue was made soon after Wedjahor-Resne’s return.
His tomb has been discovered in 1995 at Abusir. Except for two damaged sarcophagi, little was found in the burial chamber. It is interesting to note that in c.340 BCE, Wedjahor-Resne seems to have been venerated as a more or less holy person in Memphis.
[End of quote]
What I am interested in within my new historical context is this:
Does our Udjahorresne emerge elsewhere, in an era other than
the supposed Persian era, in, say, the neo-Assyrian period?
I think that he Udjahorresne may well thus emerge.
My suggestion is that Udjahorresne was the same person as Tirhakah’s (Taharqa’s) son and heir, Ushanahuru, as referred to by Esarhaddon (N. Grimal’s A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, 1994, p. 350):
I laid siege to Memphis, [Taharqa’s] royal residence and conquered it in half a day by means of mines, breaches and assault ladders. His queen, the women of his palace, Ushanahuru his ‘heir apparent’, his other children, his possessions, horses, large and small cattle beyond counting I carried away as booty to Assyria ….
[Pritchard 1955: 293].
If this Ushanahuru were Udjahorresne, then it would provide a chronological connecting link between c. 670 BC and c. 525 BC.
And I think that we find the very same elements in the two names, Ushanahuru and Udjahorresne, the latter of which the Assyrians may well have found rather difficult to transliterate:
Udja – horre[s] – ne
Usha – huru – na
It would make perfect sense that Esarhaddon (= Ashurbanipal = Nebuchednezzar), as Cambyses (named “Nebuchednezzar”), might later have used a man of such culture, education and high-standing as his Egyptian prisoner Ushanahuru, to take back home with him.
The Udjahorresne Inscription
Offering by the king to [the god] Osiris-Hemag: thousands of bread and beer, beef and birds and all other things good and pure, for the ka of a man honored with the gods of the province of Sais, the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne.
Offering by the king to Osiris, who lives in Khet-Bjet: a funeral offering of bread and beer, beef and birds, alabaster vases and garments, incense and perfumes and all other good things, for the ka of a man honored by the gods of the province of Sais, the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne.
Oh Osiris, Lord of Eternity! The chief physician
Wedjahor-Resne keeps you in his arms to
protect you. May your ka order that people do all kinds of useful things to him
because he stands guard behind your eternal shrine.
This man honored with the great [goddess] Neit, the mother of the god [Re], and with the gods of Sais, the prince, the royal chancellor, the unique companion,
the one truly known and loved by the king, the scribe, the inspector of the scribes of the dedet-court, the first among the great scribes of the prison, the director of the palace,
the admiral of the royal navy of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Khnemibre [Amasis], the admiral of the royal navy of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt,
Ankhkaenre [Psammetichus III], Wedjahor-Resne, son of the director of the castles, khrjep-priest, renep-priest, khepetwedet-priest, prophet of Neit, who is the head of the province of Sais Peftuôneit,
says: ‘The great king of all foreign countries Cambyses came to Egypt, taking the foreigners of every foreign country with him. When he had taken possession of the entire country,
they settled themselves down therein, and he was made great sovereign of Egypt and great king of all foreign countries. His Majesty appointed me his chief physician
and caused me to stay with him in my quality of companion and director of the palace, and ordered me to compose his titulary, his name as king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mesuti-Ra [born of Ra]. And I made sure that His Majesty knew of the greatness of Sais,
which is the seat of the great Neit, the mother who brought forth Re, and who unveiled birth when birth did not exist. [And I made sure that His Majesty knew] the significance of the temple of Neit, which is the sky in all its dispositions, and knew the greatness of the castles of the Red Crown
and all the gods and goddesses who live there, and knew significance of the greatness of Khet-Bjet, which is the dwelling of the sovereign, the lord of heaven [Osiris], and knew the greatness of the Resenet and the Mekhnet, of the dwelling of Re and the dwelling of Atum, which are the mysteries of all gods.’
The man honored with his town’s god [Osiris] and all other gods, the prince, the royal chancellor, the unique companion, the one truly known and loved by the king,
the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, son of Atemirtis, says: ‘I made a petition
to His Majesty the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Cambyses concerning the many foreigners billeted on the temple of Neit
that they should be driven thence, so that the temple of Neit was restored to its former greatness. And His Majesty ordered that all the foreigners
who were living in the premises of Neit should be driven out, that all their houses and all their garbage should be thrown out of the temple, and that
all their baggage should be carried away from its premises, His Majesty ordered the purification of the temple of Neit and its restoration to the people
[lacuna] and the schedule of the priests. His Majesty ordered to restitute the revenues of the wakf-estate to the great Neit, the mother of the god, and to the gods of Sais. His Majesty ordered
to conduct all their festivities and all their processions as they had always been. His Majesty ordered these things because I had informed him about the greatness of Sais, which is the town where all gods have placed their eternal thrones.’
The man honored with the gods of Sais,
the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, says: ‘The king of Upper and Lower Egypt Cambyses came to Sais. His Majesty came to the temple of Neit in person. Like all kings before, he prostrated himself before Her Majesty [Neit]. Like all good kings, he made a large sacrifice
of all good things to the great Neit, mother of the god, and to all great gods of Sais. His Majesty did this because I had informed His Majesty about the greatness of Her Majesty,
who is the mother of Re himself.’
The man honored with Osiris-Hemag,
the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, says: ‘His Majesty did all useful things in the temple of Neit. Like all kings before him, he established libations to the lord of eternity in the interior of the temple of Neit.
His Majesty did this because I had informed His Majesty about all useful things which had been done in the temple by all kings because of the greatness of this temple, which is the eternal dwelling of all gods.’
The man honored with the gods of the province Sais, the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, says: ‘I restored the revenues of the wakf-estate of the great Neit, the mother of the god,
for eternity, as per His Majesty’s orders. I established [new and] pious funds for Neit, the mistress of Sais, like a servant
excelling his master does. I am the benefactor of my city: I have saved its inhabitants from the very large troubles
which had come over the whole country and which had not yet existed before in this country. I defended the meek
against the powerful; I saved those who were afraid after an accident had happened to them; I gave them all useful things
when they were unable to take care of themselves.’
The man honored with his town’s god, the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, says: ‘I am honored by my father, praised by my mother,
trusted by my brothers. As per His Majesty’s orders, I established them in the function of prophet and gave them a fief
for eternity. I made a fine tomb for those who had no tomb. I nourished all their children. I made their houses strong. I did
all useful things for them, like a father does for his children, when trouble came over
this province, when very large troubles came
over the country as a whole.’
The prince, the royal chancellor, the unique companion, the prophet of the one who lives with them, the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, son of Atemirtis, says: ‘His Majesty the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Darius (may he live forever!) sent me back to Egypt, while His Majesty was in Elam, having become great king of all foreign countries and great sovereign of Egypt, ordering me to restore the Houses of Life
and the [lacuna] after they had been ruined. The foreigners carried me from country to country until we reached Egypt, as per orders of the lord of both countries [Upper and Lower Egypt]. I did what His Majesty had ordered. I provided the [Houses of Life] with students, all sons of fine people; there were no sons of common men. I placed them under the direction of all teachers
[lacuna] all their works. His Majesty ordered to provide them with all necessary means to ensure that they could do their work. [Consequently], I gave them all they needed and all the scribes’ accessories, as it had always been.
His Majesty did this, because he knew how useful this art can be to survive illness and to ensure that the names of the gods, their temples, the revenues of their wakf-estates and their rituals are remembered for eternity.’
The chief physician Wedjahor-Resne, says: ‘I was honored by all my masters for all my life. They gave me golden ornaments and all kinds of useful things.’
The man who was honored with Neit, says: ‘Oh great gods of Sais,
remember all merituous actions done by the chief physician Wedjahor-Resne. Ensure that all kinds of useful things are done for him and ensure that his good reputation will remain unshattered in this country for ever.’
Psammetichus and other links
Psammetichus coincidences
We are told that:
Ashurbanipal invaded Egypt at the time of Psammetichus I (c. 664 BC);
Nebuchednezzar invaded Egypt at the time of Psammetichus II (c. 595-589 BC);
Cambyses invaded Egypt at the time of Psammetichus III (c. 526-525 BC).
Greek coincidences
Each of the above phases was said to be a time when Egypt was ‘opening itself up to the world’, including the Greeks.
Thus we read in N. Grimal’s A History of Ancient Egypt:
P. 355: “Egypt opened up increasingly to the outside world during the fifty-four years of Psammetichus [I]’s reign. Foreign merchants arrived on the heels of foreign soldiers, and diplomatic relations between Egypt and Greece evolved …”.
P. 360: “Necho II [presumed father of Psammetichus II] pursued a policy of opening Egypt up to the Greek world …”.
P. 262: “Psammetichus [II] … had troops – including numerous Carians …”.
P. 363: “[Psammetichus III] … there was a peculiar mixture of Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and Oriental themes”.
Divine Adoratrice
P. 361: “Psammetichus I had Nitocris adopted by the Divine Adoratrices of the time, Shepenwepet II and Amenirdis II”.
P. 361: “Psammetichus [II] made sure that Ankhnesneferibre … was adopted by the Divine Adoratrice Nitocris”.
P. 365: “Saites and Kushites were moreover agreed on the maintenance of the office of Divine Adoratrice at Thebes”.
Parallel Lives, Also BC Afterglows In AD 
