Moses and Akhenaten (11 page)

It was during this period that the old king became concerned about the growing power of the Israelites and sought advice about how to deal with them. But this cannot be simply because they had grown in number and might side with his enemies: the growth in their numbers would simply have provided him with more slaves to work for him and made him stronger in the face of foreign aggressors. What we are dealing with is a religious revolution. The vast increase in the numbers of the Israelites by this time was not simply a matter of their birth rate: the declaration by Moses that the Aten, his God, was the only true God, had attracted many Egyptian adherents who, as a result of their conversion to the new religion, became regarded as Israelites. Other evidence suggests that the Israelites had also achieved political importance and high position in the land, with, according to Manetho, priests and learned people in their ranks. At the same time, those of Moses' followers who did not follow him to Amarna were, according to Manetho, set to harsh work in the stone quarries.

At Amarna the monotheistic ideas of Moses underwent further development and, when he became sole ruler on the death of his father, Amenhotep III, after the end of his Year 38 – Year 12 of Moses – he shut down the temples of the ancient gods of Egypt, cut off all financial support for them and sent the priests home. These actions caused so much bitter resentment that, in his Year 15, Moses was forced to install his brother, Semenkhkare, as his coregent at Thebes. This action served only to delay the eventual showdown. In his Year 17 Moses was warned by his uncle, Aye, the second son of the Patriarch Joseph (Yuya), of a plot against his life, and he abdicated and fled to Sinai, taking with him his pharaonic symbol of authority, the staff topped by a bronze serpent. Semenkhkare did not long survive the departure of Moses – perhaps only a few days – and was replaced on the throne by Moses' son, the boy king Tutankhamun, who restored the old gods, but attempted a compromise by allowing the Aten to be worshipped alongside them. Tutankhamun ruled for at least nine, and perhaps ten, years and was succeeded by Aye, his great-uncle, who ruled for four years before the army leader, Horemheb, brought the era of Amarna rule to an end.

The bitterness which divided the country at the time is indicated by the actions of Horemheb and the Ramesside kings who followed him. The names of the Amarna kings were excised from king lists and monuments in a studied campaign to try to remove all trace of them from Egypt's memory, and it was forbidden even to mention in conversation the name of Akhenaten. In addition, the Israelites were put to the harsh work of building the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.

On the death of Horemheb, there was no legitimate Eighteenth Dynasty heir. Ramses, Horemheb's elderly vizier, took power as Ramses I, the first ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty. On hearing of Horemheb's death, Moses returned from Sinai to challenge Ramses' right to the throne. With him he brought his sceptre of authority, the bronze serpent. The wise men of Egypt were assembled to decide between the rival claimants to the throne, but, while they chose Moses as the rightful heir, Ramses controlled the army, which was to prove the decisive factor in the power struggle. For a short time, however, Moses did succeed in establishing his followers as a community in Zarw, which for the Israelites may be likened to the Paris Commune briefly established in the French capital in 1871. Then, having failed in his attempt to restore his former position as ruler, Moses eventually persuaded Ramses I to allow him and the Israelites to leave the country.

How long was the Oppression? If the chronology in the Book of Exodus was correct, it would have begun
before
Moses was born, lasted during the eighteen or twenty years he was growing up, and continued during the years of his exile before his eventual return to lead the Exodus – a period of several decades, which seems an unduly long time to build the two store cities. The Oppression story in the Book of Exodus, in fact, links three separate events that happened at different periods – the first the plan to murder the Israelite male children; the second related to the religious upheaval caused by Akhenaten that was already in full flow at the time he was forced to build his new capital at Amarna to avoid further confrontation with the Theban priests; the third the rigorous Oppression of the Israelites by Horemheb after the final overthrow of Amarna rule.

It seems therefore that it was the scribes, working from what Cassuto has called ‘an epic poem describing the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt and their liberation' – whether it was oral or written, or partly oral and partly written, in Egyptian – who rearranged the chronology, especially in the opening chapter of the Book of Exodus, which was regarded as an introduction to that book as well as a link with the preceding Book of Genesis.

It is worth drawing attention at this stage to a few points in which this suggested outline of the historical events that lie behind the story in the Book of Exodus agree with what we know of the life of Akhenaten. As in the case of Moses, the childhood of Akhenaten is largely uncharted territory. Yet as soon as he appears on the scene at Thebes he is already bubbling with different ideas about art and rebellious ones about religion, suggesting that he must have been brought up in a manner that differed from the traditional upbringing of a future king. He had evidently not had the normal sport and warfare training common to his ancestors, nor does he seem to have known the sons of the Egyptian nobility, who were customarily educated at Memphis with the royal princes. It is more likely, as his new religion and rituals had many similarities with the solar worship which had developed in the lower end of the Eastern Delta, that it was there that he lived and was educated. The threats to the life of Moses in his early years also find an echo in Akhenaten's later life. The strange epithet ‘Great in his Duration' (‘He who Lived Long') that he applied to himself constantly has been interpreted by Gardiner as an indication that, as a child, he was not expected to live long. In addition, it is curious on two grounds that he allowed himself to be represented as an Osiris (god of the dead) in a large number of colossal statues placed in the massive Aten temple he built at Karnak early in his reign. Firstly, it was normally a dead king who was shown in this Osiride form, and, secondly, Akhenaten did not believe in Osiris or his underworld. The only possible explanation is that he saw himself as having escaped from death, supporting the idea that during his childhood his life, too, had been threatened.

Yet if, in outlining the story of Moses we are also outlining the story of Akhenaten, why is it that the world has remembered him as Moses rather than by the name under which he ruled Egypt, as coregent and alone, for seventeen turbulent years?

The Name Moses

It seems that neither the Bible nor the Koran gives us the proper name of the leader of the Jewish Exodus, but what on the evidence appears rather to be a codename.

In his last book,
Moses and Monotheism,
Sigmund Freud argued that Moses was an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaten, who later led the Jews out of Egypt. Freud was first persuaded to take this view by the fact that Moses was itself an Egyptian name: ‘What first attracts our interest in the person of Moses is his name, which is written
Moshe
in Hebrew. One may well ask: “Where does it come from? What does it mean?”'

The answer to Freud's question is found in Exodus, 2:10 when we are told how the mother-nurse returns the child to his royal mother who adopted him and called him Moses because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.' For a Hebrew name,
Moshe
is a rare, even unique, formation. In fact, the Hebrew word
m sh a
does not mean what the biblical editor would like us to believe. As a verb it can mean either ‘to draw' or ‘one who draws out'. In order to agree with the explanation given by the biblical editor, the name should have been
Moshui,
‘one who has been drawn out'.

There are other questions to be raised about this explanation of why the name was chosen. How, for instance, can we expect the Egyptian royal mother to have sufficient knowledge of the Hebrew language to be able to choose a special Hebrew name for the child? Then again, as we can see from the case of the Patriarch Joseph, when Pharaoh appointed him as his vizier he bestowed on him an Egyptian name to go with his new Egyptian identity. How could we expect that the royal mother of Moses could still give her royal Egyptian son a Hebrew name at a time when the Israelites, in the lingering aftermath of the invasion by the Hyksos shepherds, were still regarded as ‘an abomination' by the majority of Egyptians?

In Ancient Egyptian, the word meaning a child or son consists of two consonants,
m
and
s.
If we take away the two vowels
o
and
e
from Moshe we are left with only two consonants,
m
and
sh.
As the Hebrew letter
sh
is the equivalent of the Egyptian
s,
it is easy to see that the Hebrew word came from the Egyptian word. Short vowels, although always pronounced, were never written either in Hebrew or Egyptian, and using long consonants for long vowels, as we saw earlier in examining the identity of the royal mother of Moses, was a later development in both languages. A final point is that the
s
at the end of the name Moses is drawn from the Greek translation of the biblical name.

As a large number of scholars have noted,
mos
was part of many compound Egyptian names such as Ptah-mos and Tuth-mos, yet we also find some examples of the word
mos
used on its own as a personal pronoun belonging to the New Kingdom, which started with the Eighteenth Dynasty.
²

After Akhenaten fell from power, the Egyptian authorities forbade any mention of his name. Consequently, it seems to me that an alternative had to be found in order that his followers could refer to him. Apart from that, Akhenaten's name was part of his royal power while he was king, but once he was no longer on the throne use of his royal names was forbidden to him, and he was referred to officially in latter days as ‘The Fallen One of Akhetaten (Amarna)' and ‘The Rebel of Akhetaten'. Faced with the accusation that Akhenaten was not the real heir to the throne, I believe the Israelites called him
mos,
the son, to indicate that he was the legitimate son of Amenhotep III and the rightful heir to his father's throne. We shall see how
mos
was used in a legal sense in a subsequent chapter where a protracted land dispute has added to the confusion and debate about the length of the reign of Horemheb, the Pharaoh of the Oppression.

Later, the biblical editor, who may not have had any knowledge of the original name of the greatest Jewish leader, attempted to put forward a Hebrew explanation of the Egyptian word Moses in order to sever any possible link between Moses and Egypt.

7

THE COREGENCY DEBATE (I)

I
F
Moses was born in 1394
BC,
and if he was Akhenaten, according to the king-list of Gardiner (see p. 11) he would have been in his mid-forties when he fell from power in 1350
BC,
not an unreasonable age. However, he would have been in his mid-eighties when he led the Exodus during the brief reign of Ramses I at the start of the last decade of the century. This is clearly unlikely – but the whole chronology changes into a more realistic one if it can be shown that the seventeen years Akhenaten spent on the throne included twelve years as coregent with his father, and that Horemheb ruled for less than half the twenty-seven or twenty-eight years assigned to him conventionally.

There is little dispute about the length of the reigns of the three Amarna kings who suceeded Akhenaten. To take them in reverse order, the king before Horemheb, who brought the Amarna era to an end, was Aye. The highest known regnal year for Aye, from the stele in the Louvre and the Berlin Museum, is Year 4. Tutankhamun preceded Aye. In the tomb of Tutankhamun wine dockets dating from Year 10 of his reign have been found, although it seems that he could have died early in this year, signifying that he reigned for only nine complete years. Before Tutankhamun there was Semenkhkare, who is known to have had a coregency period with
his
predecessor, Akhenaten.

At Amarna, Semenkhkare's name appears on many small objects enclosed within a cartouche, confirming his kingship, as well as on the wall of the tomb of Meryre II, High Priest of the Aten, Superintendent of the King's Harem, Royal Scribe and Steward, while in the North Palace Akhenaten's name is found in many examples, accompanied by the names of Semenkhkare and his queen, who was Akhenaten's eldest daughter Merytaten, the heiress. His praenomen (coronation name) is Ankh-kheprw-re, meaning ‘Kheprw-re lives', Kheprw-re being the praenomen of Akhenaten. Some reliefs found at Amarna showed Akhenaten and Semenkhkare together as kings, indicating that they ruled together. But did Semenkhkare rule alone for any period of time? From a graffito in the tomb of Pere, a Theban nobleman, at Western Thebes, the last date – Year 3 – was found and indicated that, at this point, Semenkhkare was sole ruler. The text does not mention Akhenaten at all and here Semenkhkare seems to have begun to number his own years. We also have a hieratic docket inscribed in Year 17 of Akhenaten, the last year of his reign, and later changed to Year 1 of Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun). The only possible conclusion is that Semenkhkare became coregent in Year 15 of Akhenaten and, after Akhenaten's fall from power, Semenkhkare, who was probably at Thebes at the time, became sole ruler for a few months, or maybe only days, before he met his death and Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun) followed him on the throne.

The question of whether Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) shared a coregency with his father, Amenhotep III – important in trying to establish a precise chronology – is a vexed one. Many objects bearing the name of Amenhotep III were found at Tell el-Amarna (Akhetaten), the new capital city built by Akhenaten. This has led a large number of Egyptologists to believe that Amenhotep III was alive at the time the new city was built and may even have visited it in person. Others, who did not agree with this argument, have rejected entirely the notion of a coregency.