Moses and Akhenaten (29 page)

They said, ‘Of course

We shall have a (suitable)

Reward if we win!

He said: ‘Yea, (and more), –

For ye shall in that case

Be (raised to posts)

Nearest (to my person).'

They said: ‘O Moses

Wilt thou throw (first),

Or shall we have

The (first) throw?'

Said Moses: ‘Throw ye (first).'

So when they threw,

They bewitched the eyes

Of the people, and struck

Terror into them: for they

Showed a great (feat of) magic.

He put it into Moses's mind

By inspiration: ‘Throw (now)

Thy rod': and behold!

It swallows up straightaway

All the falsehoods

Which they fake.

Thus truth was confirmed,

And all that they did

Was made of no effect.

So the (great ones) were vanquished

There and then, and were

Made to look small.

But the sorcerers fell down

Prostrate in adoration,

Saying: ‘We believe

In the Lord of the Worlds, –

‘The Lord of Moses and Aaron.'

Said Pharaoh: ‘Believe ye

In Him before I give

You permission? Surely

This is a trick which ye

Have planned in the City

To drive out its people:

But soon shall ye know

(The consequences).

‘Be sure I will cut off

Your hands and your feet

On opposite sides, and I

Will cause you all

To die on the cross.' (Sura VII, 104–24)

This section of the Koran presents the confrontation in such a precise way that one wonders if some of the details were left out of the biblical account deliberately. Here Moses sounds less like a magician, more like someone who presents evidence of his authority that convinces the wise men of Egypt, who throw themselves at his feet and thus earn the punishment of Pharaoh. One can only suspect that the biblical editor exercised care to avoid any Egyptian involvement with the Israelite Exodus, even to the extent of replacing Moses by Aaron in the performance of the rituals.

The Koran also mentions the white hand ritual as having been performed by Moses in front of Pharaoh. As for the promise that the Nile would turn red, this should be seen as indicating the time of the year. During the season of Inundation, the Nile waters become reddish, and, if these events took place in the Eastern Delta, this would suggest the late days of summer, by which time this change of colour would have begun to affect the lower reaches of the river.

And what of the ‘magic' rod of Moses? We know from Egyptian sources that kings used to have a collection of rods representing different aspects of their authority. One of the sceptres of the king's power was a rod in the shape of a serpent either made of, or covered with, brass. Now, the Hebrew word used in the Bible to indicate the rod of Moses is
nahash,
which has the meanings of both ‘serpent' and ‘brass'. The Haggadah, the legendary part of the Talmud, confirms the royal character of Moses's rod: ‘The rod which Moses used … was shaped and engraved in the image of a sceptre.'

During their
sed
festivals, celebrated by Egyptian kings, including Akhenaten, to rejuvenate their power, it was the custom to take part in rituals that included both the ‘serpent rod' and ‘hand' rituals performed by Moses. In the tomb of Kheruef, one of Queen Tiye's stewards, a throne scene shows the queen with her husband, Amenhotep III. Under the dais of the throne we see Kheruef and other officials, each holding something that he is about to hand to the king so that he can use it during the
sed
festival celebrations of his Year 30. In one scene, Kheruef is followed by eight palace officials, the first of whom is wearing an apron. He puts his right arm across his chest and his hand over his left shoulder while he holds his forearm with the left hand. The fourth of these officials holds a bundle of clothes in his right hand and a curved sceptre with serpent's head in his left.
¹

So, in the course of their
sed
festival celebrations, Egyptian kings performed rituals that corresponded to the ‘serpent rod' and ‘hand' rituals performed by Moses – and, in performing them, Moses was not using magic but seeking to establish his royal authority.

I think the correct interpretation of these accounts is that, when Akhenaten was forced to abdicate, he must have taken his royal sceptre to Sinai with him. On the death of Horemheb, the last king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, about a quarter of a century later, he must have seen an opportunity to restore himself to the throne. No heir to the Tuthmosside kings existed and it was Pa-Ramses, commander of Horemheb's army and governor of Zarw, who had laid claim to the throne. Akhenaten returned to Egypt and the wise men were gathered in order to decide between him and Pa-Ramses. Once they saw the sceptre of royal authority and Akhenaten had performed the
sed
festival rituals – secret from ordinary citizens – the wise men bowed the knee in front of him, confirming that his was the superior right to the throne, but Pa-Ramses used his army to crush the rebels. Moses was allowed to leave again for Sinai, however, accompanied by the Israelites, his mother's relatives, and the few Egyptians who had been converted to the new religion that he had attempted to force upon Egypt a quarter of a century earlier. In Sinai the followers of Akhenaten were joined subsequently by some bedouin tribes (the Shasu), who are to be identified as the Midianites of the Bible.

No magic was performed, or intended, by Moses. The true explanation of the biblical story could only be that it was relating the political challenge for power in a mythological way – and all the plagues of which we read were natural, seasonal events in Egypt in the course of every year.

19

WHO WAS WHO? – AND THE DEATH OF MOSES

I
F
Moses and Akhenaten were the same person, it must be possible to match some biblical characters with characters we know of in Egyptian history. We can best begin with Jochebed, the daughter of Levi, who is described in the Book of Exodus as Moses' nurse. She is, I think, to be identified as Tiy, the wife of Aye, last of the Amarna kings.

The American scholar Keith C. Seele has noted the special importance attached to Aye's wife at his Amarna tomb: ‘The tomb of Aye and Tiy at Amarna is the only one in which both husband and wife are depicted with so nearly equal prominence. This exceptional treatment of the wife suggests the possibility that Aye owed his favour at court to her, or even that she was his superior in rank and family.'
¹

What strikes us first is that Tiy seems to have been named after Queen Tiye. We know from the Amarna tomb that she was ‘nurse and tutress of the queen', Nefertiti. She was also, as Baikie noted: ‘The great nurse, nourisher of the god (king), adorner of the king (Akhenaten).'
²

Scholars have long debated the identity of Queen Nefertiti's parents. As we saw earlier, some have suggested that she was Tadukhipa, the daughter the Mitannian king Tushratta sent to Amenhotep III as a bride towards the end of his days, and that she could then have married his son, Akhenaten, instead: others that she was, in fact, Aye's daughter by an earlier wife who had died. Neither of these hypotheses has any grounds for support. Akhenaten, himself rejected on account of the non-royal origins of his mother, would not have married someone other than the heiress, the eldest daughter of Amenhotep III, and he had, in any case, married Nefertiti in his Year 28, eight years before the arrival of Tadukhipa in Egypt. Nor can Nefertiti have been Queen Tiye's daughter, otherwise she would not have been the heiress.

Seele has argued that, as Nefertiti became ‘Great Royal Wife of the King', it is probable that she was a princess of royal blood.
³
In addition, Ray Winfield Smith, reporting on the reconstruction work of the temple project of Akhenaten at Karnak, makes the point: ‘An astonishing emphasis on Nefertiti is demonstrated by the frequency of her name in the cartouches on offering tables, as contrasted with the relatively few cartouches of Amenhotep IV. The queen's name alone occurs sixty-seven times, whereas only thirteen tables carry both names, and a mere three show only the king's name.'
⁴
He goes on to discuss the appearance of statues of the king and queen on offering tables that appear on the
talalat,
the small stones used in building Akhenaten's Karnak temple and later re-used by Horemheb after the temple's destruction: ‘There are sixty-three Nefertiti statues and thirty-eight Amenhotep IV statues, with eleven unidentified. Significant is not only the preponderance of Nefertiti, but even more important the extraordinary domination of the larger offering tables by Nefertiti statues. It will be noticed that all of the five identified statues of the large size (72cm) are of Nefertiti.'
⁵

The greater importance attached to Nefertiti than even the king himself in the first years of their marriage makes it more possible to agree with Seele's theory that she must have been a daughter of Amenhotep III, not by Tiye but by one of his other wives. As Horemheb later married Nefertiti's sister Mutnezmet, to strengthen his claim to the throne, this reinforces the view that Nefertiti's mother was Sitamun, Amenhotep III's sister and wife, who, from the traditional point of view, would have been regarded as the real Queen of Egypt, being the heiress daughter of Tuthmosis IV.

Tiy, then, was Nefertiti's nurse and also nursed her half-brother, Akhenaten, and Seele goes on to explain: ‘It would be especially understandable if, as I have indicated, Nefertiti was the daughter of Amenhotep III. In that case, Nefertiti and her half-brother, Akhenaten, perhaps from childhood destined to be her husband, would have grown from infancy to maturity in close association with both Tiy and Aye. Egyptian history presents repeated precedents for the reward of royal nurses and their families at the hands of Pharaoh.'
⁶
Seele also indicates that the nurse of Nefertiti and Akhenaten must have had another child of her own: ‘The Egyptian word for “nurse” employed in her title almost certainly means that Tiy was the actual nurse – the wet-nurse – of Nefertiti during her babyhood. If this interpretation be correct, it is evident that Tiy had been the mother of a child – presumably the child also of Aye – and thus became available as the nurse of the princess, Nefertiti.'
⁷

Even today, bedouin children thus nursed by a woman call her ‘mother', the same name that they use for their real mother. The naming of Akhenaten's nurse after his real mother, Tiye, confirms the relationship, and at the Amarna tomb of Aye and Tiy the king is seen bestowing honour on his nurse as well as on her husband.

If Nefertiti were the eldest daughter, she could have been a few years older than Akhenaten, which would explain why she is more prominent in the scenes of the king's Karnak temple. Although we do not know for certain whether the child Tiy nursed at the same time as Nefertiti was a boy or a girl, if the other elements of the biblical story can be identified from Egyptian evidence, then it must have been Aaron, about three years before the birth of Akhenaten. Thus Nefertiti would stand for the biblical character of Miriam, while the nurse's real son, Aaron, was simply what the bedouin call ‘a feeding brother' to Moses.

Such a relationship would explain the strange way he is introduced in the Book of Exodus, for, after the birth of Moses is reported in the second chapter, a long time elapses before we hear of Aaron. He makes his appearance in the story only after Moses had grown to manhood, fled to Sinai and is resisting the Lord's orders to return to Egypt to rescue the Israelites, pleading that he is ‘slow of speech, and of a slow tongue'. It is only then that we learn of Aaron, and in a very strange way, when the Lord asks: ‘Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.' (Exodus, 4:10, 14)
⁸

The Koran also confirms that Moses and Aaron were related only through the feeding-mother relationship. When Moses comes back from the Mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, he becomes very angry, so he:

Seized his brother by (the hair

Of) his head and dragged him

to him. Aaron said

“Son of my mother!” … (Sura VII:150)

In Manetho's account, it was Amenhotep III who fled to Ethiopia (Nubia): in the Talmud it was Moses. The strange name given to Moses' queen, Aten-it, relates her to Akhenaten's God. No doubt what is meant by the Talmud reference to Ethiopia, which is described as being a city, is the Amarna location, and the queen's desire to place her son on the throne instead of Moses could represent Tutankhamun replacing his father, Akhenaten, whose policies had placed the whole dynasty in the possible danger of being overthrown.

One can even see the character of Aye as the man who, according to the Koran, advised the king to leave the city as the chiefs (nobles) were plotting to kill him.

And there came a man,

Running, from the furthest end

Of the City. He said:

‘O Moses! the Chiefs

Are taking counsel together

About thee to slay thee:

So get thee away, for I

Do give thee sincere advice.' (Sura XXVIII, 20)

The only clue to the historical source of the account of how Moses slew an Egyptian would appear to lie in the Amarna Tablets, the foreign archives of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which were found by a peasant woman in the ruins of Akhenaten's capital in 1887 and, unfortunately, suffered considerable damage before they reached a dealer in antiquities and their importance was realized.

Among them is a letter, sent to Akhenaten by Abd-Khiba, King of Jerusalem, in which the king accuses him of allowing the Hebrews in Egypt to kill two Egyptian officials without being punished for their crime: ‘… the Khabiru (Hebrews) are seizing the towns of the king … Turbazu has been slain in the very gate of Zilu (Zarw), yet the king holds back … Yaptih-Hadad has been slain in the very gate of Zilu, yet the king holds back.'
⁹