by
Damien
F. Mackey
Professor Joseph Davidovits, French polymer scientist, has made some
extraordinary claims about pharaoh Amenhotep III’s famed scribe-architect,
Amenhotep son of Hapu, arguing that the latter was in fact the biblical
patriarch Joseph in Egypt.
We may read at the professor’s site
the following intriguing suggestions (http://www.davidovits.info/the-lost-fresco-and-the-bible-my-new-book-in-french/):
The Lost Fresco and the Bible (my new book in French)
On 18 Sep 2009
I am
presenting my 5th book on the Egyptian civilization, here in connection with
the Bible, published by Éditions Jean-Cyrille Godefroy, Paris, ISBN
978-2-86553-216-2
Released on: 29 september 2009
In 1935
in Karnak, in Egypt, two French Egyptologists discover a fresco in the ruins of
the memorial temple of Amenophis (Amenhotep) Son of Hapu, the most eminent
scribe and scientist of ancient Egypt, Great chancellor of the Pharaon
Amenhotep III, father of the monotheist Pharaon Akhenaton. Recently, 75 years
later, I noted that the text of this fresco was reproduced word for word in the
Bible, Genesis 41,
when Pharaon installs the biblical Patriarch Joseph to rule over all Egypt. Royal
scribe Amenophis Son of Hapu and the Patriarch Joseph are thus the same person.
I have found the following table
at : http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?paged=5 apparently reproducing the
professor’s comparisons between Joseph and Amenhotep (Amenophis) from sites of
his: http://www.davidovits.info/wp-content/uploads/joseph-amenophis-english.pdf and: http://www.davidovits.info/filmtv-documentary-proposal-on-egypt/
Biblical Patriarch
Joseph = Scribe and Genius Amenophis Son of Hapu
| |
Joseph, Genesis 41,
40-46
|
Amenophis, Son of Hapu
|
And
Pharaoh took off his ring from his
hand,
and put it upon Joseph’s hand
|
He
was bestowed with ornaments in gold
and
all kind of precious minerals
|
and
he arrayed him in vestures of fine linen
|
He
was arrayed with clothes made of linen
of
the finest quality
|
and
put a gold chain about his neck
|
A
necklace in pure gold and all kind of
minerals
was placed around his neck
|
And
Joseph was thirty years old when he
stood
before Pharaoh king of Egypt
|
Year
XXX… The great royal scribe,
Amenophis,
bowed down before his Majesty
|
These are the sorts of eye-catching
parallels that can delight those who seek verification of the historicity of
the Bible.
But, since the patriarch
Joseph belonged to an archaïc period of Egyptian history :
far removed in time and
style from the age of pharaoh Amenhotep III and his genius official, Amenhotep
son of Hapu - in the el-Amarna period revised - see e.g. my:
then perhaps the most that
we can say about comparisons such as the above is that this may have been a conscious
return to the formulary of the older Egyptian period.
Later pharaohs often
hearkened back to much earlier periods of Egyptian history for their names
(titulary) and architectural styles, etc.
There is by now so much from
Egyptian history to verify the biblical record that we do not need to insist
upon such unrealistic identifications as professor Davidovits’s «Royal scribe
Amenophis Son of Hapu and the Patriarch Joseph are thus the same person ».
In the light of the definite
similarities here, though, it is most interesting to wonder who was this
Amenhotep son of Hapu.
Professor Davidovits
continues :
Moreover,
the fresco contains a surprising detail which underlines its authenticity.
Indeed, in Genesis 41, Pharaon names Joseph: çaphenat-paneah
(sapnath-panéakh), a name which does not mean anything in Hebrew.
Indeed, I discovered that çaphenat-paneah is the Egyptian name Amenophis Fils
of Hapou, written reversely, from left to right, the hebrew language being
written from right to left. The surprising detail in the fresco is that,
precisely, the Egyptian name Amenophis is also written in hieroglyph reversely,
from left to right, instead of from right to left like the rest of the text.
There is thus absolute agreement between the fresco text and the Bible.
Even though I have not read
the professor’s book, this bold claim strikes me as being highly unlikely to
say the least. His « … absolute agreement between the fresco text and the
Bible » is a very strong statement indeed.
The professor apparently
follows the conventional dating system, which would locate the el-Amarna era and Amenhotep son of Hapu more
realistically closer (about half a millennium), [c. « 1350 B.C »] to
the time of the patriarch Joseph. But even that date falls centuries short of
the patriarch’s era according to the biblical reckoning.
Davidovits continues and
concludes with further striking claims:
With
this text going back to 1350 B.C., I prove that “the text in the Bible
originated from this fresco ” and I describe the historical character of the
Patriarch Joseph. I show how the Hebrew craftsmen were indeed Egyptians, yet,
their leaders, the priests of Amenophis Son of Hapu’s Memorial Temple were of
Semitic origin.
Why was
this fresco then occulted by Egyptology? That remains a mystery. One does not
find it mentioned in any works and books published by Egyptologists. This
explains why biblical researchers and archeologists do not know of its
existence and ignore its content. The historicity of the Bible goes back now to
3400 years and I claim that this fresco is the oldest text written word by word
in the Bible. I have found many old and modern archaeological documents that
fit in this new context. While following the written history of Amenophis Son
of Hapu’s Memorial Temple from 1356 to 1060 B.C., one discovers the personality
of Moses and the causes for Exodus around 1050 B.C., after heavy religious
tensions, agitations and exemplified by the first strikes ever recorded in
History, those of the craftmens working in the Valley of the Kings, Karnak,
Egypt, called hepkher/hebbrer,
the Hebrews.
I also
explain in this book who were the Hebrews and their brothers (or cousins) from
Madian who hosted Moses during 40 years, those who will be called later, the
Arabs.
Part
Two:
Ahmed
Osman Prefers Yuya for Joseph
Ahmed
Osman’s attempt to identify the biblical patriarch Joseph with el Amarna’s Yuya
is to be rejected for the same chronological reasons as given in Part One, regarding professor
Davidovits’s proposed identification of Joseph with Amenhotep son of Hapu.
In my rather un-sympathetic review of Ahmed Osman’s historical “mish-mash”
as I called it, Out of Egypt. The
Roots of Christianity Revealed (Century, 1998), which I entitled:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses
I began as
follows:
Perusing Osman’s book as a revisionist historian,
I find it fascinating that he has located David and Solomon precisely where
Immanuel Velikovsky did, to the early 18th dynasty of Egypt. No doubt
Velikovsky’s 18th dynasty revision (Ages in Chaos I and II) was his main
achievement, that will stand in pyramid-like strength after much else of his
historical revision has collapsed under the weight of scientific criticism.
The 18th dynasty is also Osman’s entire showcase,
encompassing all of his major characters. However, nowhere in his book do I
find reference to Velikovsky or any other of the well-known revisionist
historians. Osman either has not been influenced by Velikovsky at all, or
perhaps does not bother to mention him because Osman retains the conventional
dating of the early-mid 18th dynasty, instead of lowering it by the 500-600
years that Velikovsky had maintained was necessary.
More radical still – and even the most intrepid
revisionists would baulk at this one – is Osman’s lumping together of Abraham,
Joseph and Moses, into the same 18th dynasty scenario with, not only David and
Solomon (his Part I: the Chosen People), but even with Jesus (his Part II:
Christ the King); thereby totally ignoring customary chronological spacings. According
to Osman, the 18th dynasty characters: Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Yuya,
Akhnaton and Tutankhamun, are to be identified as, respectively: David,
Solomon, Joseph, Moses and Jesus Christ. Thus, once traditional heroes of
Israel – even a great father-figure like King David – are now transmogrified
into Egyptian (or, in Yuya’s case, a Syrian). Osman’s excuse for so radical a
bouleversement seems to be that he is the one best suited to rediscover “the
true Egyptian roots of Christianity and of Western civilization”.
Well, I believe that he has gone about it all in a
most biased fashion. I cannot see how Osman – himself a followed of both Sothic
dating and Higher Critical view – can possibly escape the label of
anti-semitism (here meaning anti-Israel) as described in my earlier TGN article
(“Velikovsky and Academic Anti-Semitism”). Osman is guilty of historical
piracy, ‘hijacking’ famous Israelites into an Egyptian environment and
‘forcing’ Egyptianhood upon them. But that is an old trick – the Greeks had done
it (in favour of Greece) long before him. Whilst admittedly the revision that
has grown out of Velikovsky’s efforts can be at times radical, its protagonists
are generally careful not to up-end established sequences. Much of the revision
revolves around the more plausibly allowable, like deleting ‘Dark Ages’, or
shortening artificially over-stretched eras (such as Egypt’s Third Intermediate
Period). Velikovsky in fact lost many supporters when he, flying in the face of
hard archaeological evidence, had indulged in such a radical up-ending by
separating the 18th from the 19th dynasty (sequentially) and inserting in
between foreign dynasties of 150 years duration (In Ramses II and His Time, and
Peoples of the Sea).
Though Osman certainly becomes most interesting
when he departs from the conventional norm, this is only the case when he does
so with some sort of coherence. He correctly maintains that his country, Egypt,
exerted an influence upon biblical and Christian thinking. However, as I intend
to show, he does not appear to have properly understood what he has rightly
sensed. He tries to force his examples; thereby missing Egyptian influences
that really are there, whilst creating ones that are not. The Sothic chronology
lets him down badly, exacerbating his mishmash. Osman proposes David as an
Egyptian pharaoh of the C15th BC, who impregnates Sarai. And, taking his cue
from the Babylonian Talmud (Osman, op. cit., p. 12), he recklessly makes David
the father of Isaac. Despite his avowed aims, Osman lets himself down by his
failure to appreciate the relevance of Egypt’s Old Kingdom; his lack of
perspective regarding the 18th dynasty; but, most of all, by his anti-Israel
bias. He locates the era of the Exodus to the 19th dynasty (New Kingdom), Late
Bronze Age.
[End of quote]
It comes as no surprise, then,
that Osman completely mis-dates and mis-identifies the patriarch Joseph and his
most distinctive era of Egyptian history. Whereas professor Davidovits had, as
we found, tried to identify Joseph with Amenhotep son of Hapu, Osman has chosen
instead the latter’s contemporary, Yuya – both prevailed during the long reign
of Amenhotep III.
I wrote of this in the following
section of my review of Osman:
- Joseph = Yuya
Osman maintains that Joseph was the highly credentialled
Yuya, Syrian relative of Akhnaton. …. Yuya, like Joseph, he states, was the
only official in Egypt ever to be called “Father of Pharaoh”. And he
optimistically claims that the details of Joseph’s life after his interpreting
Pharaoh’s dreams “are matched by only one person in Egyptian history – Yuya,
the minister of Amenhotep III (ibid., 39). But again Osman’s apparent
ignorance of pre-18th dynasty Egyptian history lets him down.
Professor A. Yahuda (op. cit., 23-24) had already found the equivalent
title, “Father of Pharaoh” in Old Kingdom Egypt; the Genesis expression, ab,
‘father’, a title borne (centuries before Yuya) by the Vizier, Ptah-hotep,
who was itf ntr mryy-ntr, ‘father of god, the beloved of
god’; god here indicating Pharaoh. Now, since Ptah-hotep was also a wise sage,
whose writings resemble the Hebrew Proverbs, and since he – like Joseph – lived
for 110 years, then it is worthwhile considering that Ptah-hotep was Joseph in
his guise as scribe and sage.
Osman’s identification of Joseph is a classic
example, I think, of where revisionists would think that they could easily
trump him. T. Chetwynd, for instance (in “A Seven Year Famine in the Reign of
King Djoser with Other Parallels between Imhotep and Joseph”…” C and AH, 1987,
49-56), has found numerous parallels between Joseph and the celebrated Vizier,
Imhotep, of the 3rd dynasty (Old Kingdom), who supposedly saved
Egypt from a 7-year Famine. ….
Imhotep, who according to J. Hurry (Imhotep, 90)
was “one of the few men of genius in the history of ancient Egypt … one of the
fixed stars of the Egyptian firmament”, is portrayed as a kind of ‘Leonardo da
Vinci’ of Egypt: mathematician, scientist, engineer, architect. He was more
besides. Carved on the base of a statue of Zoser in the Cairo Museum is a short
inscription describing Imhotep as: “The seal-bearer of the King of Lower Egypt
… the high priest of Heliopolis … the chief of the sculptors, of the masons …”.
Imhotep has also come down through history as a thaumaturgist, healer and Egyptian
patron saint of medicine.
Joseph also, according to Yahuda (op. cit., 24),
would have been of the high priestly caste” of Heliopolis – like Imhotep. ….
