Moses and Akhenaten (36 page)

As for the suggestion that two neighbouring locations – Tell el-Dab′a, which Bietak takes as Avaris, and Qantir, just over a mile distant, which he takes to represent the Ramesside residence – formed part of the same site, we have no archaeological evidence to support this assumption, no ancient connecting road, no walls enclosing both locations or, as in the case of Akhenaten's pre-planned new capital at Amarna, no boundary stelae. We are asked to take Bietak's word for it. The area that separates the two locations has yielded nothing to suggest that they formed one ancient site. In addition, we know that the Ramessides built their residence on the existing site of Avaris, whereas the site of Qantir had not previously been used.

We also know that the siege of Avaris conducted by Ahmosis lasted for many months. The reason was that he could not assault it on foot, but had to approach by water. In the case of Zarw, the Waters of Shi-hor covered the approaches to the north and west, the Waters of Pa-Twfy protected the south, and a canal, crossed by a guarded bridge, connected the two waters, closing off the west side completely. To the east lay the Sinai desert. That is why Ahmosis' siege lasted so long. In the case of Qantir and Tell el-Dab′a, however, both locations were easily accessible by land from almost any direction, as well as lacking the heavy fortifications to resist an attack.

Furthermore, the Tell el-Dab′a excavations have revealed no settlement in the area from the end of the Hyksos rule to the time of Horemheb. If Pi-Ramses is to be regarded as the Ramses of the Old Testament, the city rebuilt by the Israelites – who arrived in Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep III and settled in the very Pi-Ramses area – the lack of any trace of their existence at Tell el-Dab'a is yet another indication that this cannot have been the site of Pi-Ramses. In any case, as I believe the Israelites had already left Egypt proper for Sinai during the second year of Ramses I, the city of Ramses must have started before that date.

(iv) A Theban Site for Tiye's City

One scholar who has championed a site for Zarw-kha, Tiye's city, distant from the Eastern Delta is Georg Steindorff, the German Egyptologist, who suggested that the pleasure lake referred to in the scarab was actually the lake known today as Birket Hapu, which was dug to the south-east of Amenhotep III's Malkata royal compound at Western Thebes, where it served as a palace harbour connected to the Nile. Steindorff was led to this view because the Malkata complex was known as ‘The House of Neb-Maat-Re Aten Gleams', which repeats the name of the vessel in the pleasure lake scarab. However, scholars have not been happy with this theory for a variety of reasons:

1  None of the many inscriptions found that bear the name Malkata mentions Zarw-kha or relates Malkata to Queen Tiye;

2  The dimensions of Birket Hapu are 2750 by 1080 yards, about four times the size of the pleasure lake, and there is no evidence that Birket Hapu was enlarged after its original construction;

3  While the Malkata remains prove that the king was there from his early years – Year 8 has been found – the majority of the buildings in the Malkata compound, which would have been accompanied by the construction of the lake, do not seem to have been built before the beginning of Amenhotep's third decade, contradicting the scarab date of Year 11 ;

4  As the scarab lake covers an area of about 720, 000 square yards, it would not have been possible to complete it in fifteen days unless it involved digging a short canal to fill an existing depression with the waters of the Nile: a much bigger, artificial lake like Birket Hapu must have taken far longer to create.

(v) A Middle-Egypt Site for Tiye's City

More recently, the fact that a similar name to Zarw-kha – Darwha – has been found on two papyri of the Twentieth Dynasty led Yoyotte to suggest
¹
the possibility of identifying Tiye's city with the location mentioned in these Ramesside texts – the vicinity of the city of Akhmim in Middle Egypt. As some of the titles held by Yuya and Tuya, the parents of Queen Tiye, indicate that they held positions in Akhmim, it has been thought by many scholars that this must have been their city of origin. On the other hand, while it is possible that Tuya could have come from Akhmim, Yuya has been suspected of being of non-Egyptian origin (and I have argued that he was actually Joseph, the Israelite Patriarch).

But even if, as Yoyotte suggests, Tiye was born in Akhmim, this does not make it her city in the sense that she owned it, which is the implication of the scarab text. Furthermore, Yoyotte places Tiye's city as being in the
vicinity
of Akhmim, in which case, on the basis of Yoyotte's own argument, ‘her city' cannot have even been the city of her birth, but another city which she acquired later, and the scarab reference cannot relate to Akhmim. Nor is Akhmim called Zarw-kha in any text. Finally, as the location suggested by Yoyotte comes from a Twentieth Dynasty text, this could have been a new place that did not exist at the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty two centuries earlier.

Yoyotte has put forward this alternative siting for Tiye's city because he objects to the identification of the border city of Zarw on mainly philological grounds, his reason being that the name Zarw-kha is spelt in the scarab with different hieroglyphic signs from those we find in other texts:

If we take away the two final signs, as they are not to be regarded as letters but determinatives indicating a city, we are left with five letters. And if we take off the final letter ‘kha',
as it is not to be regarded as part of the name but merely as indicating that the name belongs to a city, we are left with four signs on the scarab.
Henri Naville, the Swiss Egyptologist, has been able to show that the first sign in Zarw,
is the equivalent of the Hebrew letter
sadhê,
the Arabic
çade,
the same as the other hieroglyphic first letter appearing in the other texts
.
²
(The fact that there is no matching letter either in Greek or Western languages explains why different readings – Thel, Sile and Djarw as well as Zarw – occur.) In a private discussion Yoyotte agreed that Naville's interpretation of the first sign on the scarab was correct. He also has no quarrel with the final hieroglyph,
which can be interpreted as either ‘w' or ‘u'. It is the symbols in between which persuaded him that we are dealing with two different cities, not one.

On the scarab we have
– that is, the Hebrew and Arabic ′
ayin,
plus ‘r' – while in other texts we simply have a seated lion
. However, the distinction is more apparent than real. Naville was also able to show that it was the practice sometimes to use the seated lion, for which the Ancient Egyptian word was ‘′r' as an alternative method of expressing the two consonants, ′
ayin,
plus ‘r': ‘The reading of the lion is ′r; we have a considerable number of examples of it.' He went on to cite various words sometimes spelt one way, sometimes the other: ‘Therefore in the name
, Zarw, we find according to the usual transcription of Egyptian into Hebrew,
צ
×¢
, = ç′ and
ר
, = r.'
³