Enigmatic Imhotep - did he really exist?

by Damien F. Mackey "Probably few articles caused more disappointement in SIS circles than John Bimson's 1986 'Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba', which presents strong evidence and argument against Velikovsky's proposal that the ... queen who visited King Solomon was none other than the famous Egyptian female pharaoh. This removed one of the key identifications in Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos historical reconstruction and was a key factor in the rejection of his proposed chronology by Bimson and others in favour of the more moderate 'New Chronology'. It also took away what had seemed a romantic and satisfactory solution to the mystery of the identity and origins of Solomon's visitor, leaving her once more as an historical enigma. ...". Alasdair Beal Introduction 1: Dr. John Bimson's probing 1986 article for SIS, "Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba", critically analysing Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky's most popular identification of Hatshepsut as the biblical Queen of Sheba (in Ages in Chaos, I, 1952), came as a disappointment to many - myself included - destroying, as it did, Velikovsky's pièce de résistance, that Hatshepsut's expedition to the fabulous Land of Punt was nothing other than the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon. Two major points raised by Dr. Bimson, namely that: - Hatshepsut was no longer a Queen when she launched her Punt voyage, but was already in about her 9th year as Pharaoh; and - Hatshepsut did not personally accompany the Punt expedition, unlike the biblical Queen of Sheba, who most certainly went in person to visit King Solomon in Jerusalem, put paid immediately in my mind to any suggestion that the Punt and Jerusalem expeditions could have been one and the same. So devastating was Dr. Bimson's critique that I, for a full decade, would drop any consideration that Dr. Velikovsky had historically identified the biblical event. Then, in 1997, I took up the matter again, as Alasdair Beal goes on to tell: "In this issue [SIS 1997:1] Damien Mackey returns to the question, challenging Bimson's conclusions, giving a new twist to Velikovsky's scheme - and throwing up some controversial identifications of other famous Egyptian (and Greek) historical figures. No doubt this will not be the last word on the matter but maybe it will stimulate fresh discussion about the identities and lives of these people whose names and stories have been handed down to us from ancient times". Whilst in the process of preparing this article, "Solomon and Sheba", for SIS publication, I believed that I had discovered the person of King Solomon himself as the Eighteenth Dynasty official to Pharaoh Hatshepsut, Senenmut (Senmut). Thought to have been a commoner, but with regal pretensions, Senenmut is often described as having been 'the real power behind the throne'. Chronologically, it all fits like a glove. For, another of Dr. Velikovsky's famous identifications, related to Hatshepsut, was his identification of Pharaoh Thutmose III as the biblical "Shishak king of Egypt", who had despoiled the Temple of Yaweh and the royal palace in Year 5 of King Solomon's ne'er-do-well son, Rehoboam (I Kings 14:25-26). Now, with Senenmut fading out from the Egyptian scene in approximately Year 16 of Hatshepsut/Thutmose III, then this perfectly harmonises with Dr. Velikovsky's identification of Thutmose III's Year 22-23 (First Campaign) as the biblical incident pertaining to "Shishak". As with Dr. Velikovsky's Hatshepsut/Queen of Sheba reconstruction, this one also needed some restorative work. In the case of Thutmose III, Velikovsky's geography and topography would require some considerable amendment. I hope to have achieved this - one of the trickiest problems that I have ever encountered - in my article, "Yehem near Aruna". Dr. Velikovsky's Queen of Sheba and Shishak historical identifications can now stand as two firm pillars of revisionism. Those who embrace the so-called 'New Chronology' in its various forms, stranded as it is halfway between (wrong) convention and (right) Veliovskianism (though requiring modification), in a kind of No Man's Land, miss out on all of this. To this day, the 'New Chronology' has not managed to turn up any suitable historical candidate for the wondrous Queen of Sheba. We need the likes of Dr. Velikovsky and Dr. Bimson. The former was intuitive, and had the happy knack of being able to find the right answers despite his often poor methodology and seeming disrespect for established archaeological sequences. The latter type - who appears to be boundless - is analytical, and can make for a marvellous critic. But, this one, for the most part, hardly ever seems to find the right answers. Introduction 2: Now, the very same situation has occurred for me with IMHOTEP. Initially, I had fully embraced him as the biblical Joseph - a view held by many - just as I had initially embraced Dr. Velikovsky's identification of Hatshepsut with the biblical Queen of Sheba. Why, did not an ancient record (Sehel Famine Stela) tell of Imhotep's having saved Egypt from a seven-year famine during the reign of Netjerikhet of the Third Dynasty? Then came the adverse reaction. I have just described this above, in the case of Dr. Velikovsky's thesis. In the case of Imhotep, it was a critique by one Brenton Minge, in a so-far unpublished work on Joseph and the Famine, that set me thinking. Brenton is arguing that there was no contemporary attestation for Imhotep in ancient Egypt. Nor could I immediately find any. The Sehel Famine Stela record is very late, dated to Ptolemaïc times. Moreover, Brenton showed that the word 'Imhotep', appearing as it does among the titles of an official on the base of Netjerikhet's statue, must therefore be a title, and not a name. Because officials, he says, but not the rulers, were always named after their titles. In the case of the statue base's inscription, an erasure has occurred at the end of the document where Brenton thinks that the official's name would have been. Thankfully, this second disappointment has lasted only a matter of months, not the full decade that elapsed after Dr. Bimson's 1986 critique. Because I believe that I have since found Imhotep well represented in Third Dynasty records. And to reveal him is my purpose in writing this article. Identifying a Third Dynasty Imhotep For, it is not a question of could Khasekhemwy have been Imhotep. Khasekhemwy was Imhotep! The Nebti name of Khasekhemwy was hotep im(-ef), that is, IMHOTEP. Who was Khasekhemwy? "Little is known about ...". This phrase is, as I have noted in various articles, one of the most common ones that one will encounter in historical studies. And it has been applied to Khasekhemwy (Khasekhemui) as well. "Little is known about him". (Wikipedia) Who was he? Was Khasekhemwy, as some Egyptologists have suggested, the same as the Khasekhem, supposedly of Egypt's Second Dynasty, changing his name to Khasekhemwy upon his having achieved the unification of Egypt's north and south? Or was he of the Third Dynasty, the father of pharaoh Netjerikhet (also thought to have been known as Djoser or Zoser), as has also been suggested. Was Khasekhemwy-Netjerikhet really a sequence, though, as we have just read, or was this, instead, a contemporaneous partnership? After all, Khasekhemwy seems to be encroaching upon Netjerikhet's activities. Nabil Swelim has assigned Saqqara's Gisr el-Mudir enclosure, to Netjerikhet's third dynasty. But the name of Netjerikhet's presumed father, Khasekhemwy, also occurs at two of the four enclosures (Abydos and Hierakonpolis) - massive ancient granary storage places - just as do both names at Khasekhemwy's Abydos tomb. Khasekhemwy is credited with having erected the massive Shunet es-Zebib enclosure. According to Mirsolav Barta ("The Search for Imhotep: Tomb of Architect-Turned-God Remains a Mystery": "Imhotep ... invented building in stone ... at the beginning of the third dynasty. This achievement corresponds with the spread of monumental stone architercture during the reign of Khasekhemwy". And, could Khasekhemwy also have been one of the most mysterious of all pharaohs, Sekhemkhet (= Ka-Sekhem-), whose Buried Pyramid lies right next to Netjerikhet's majestic Step Pyramid? Was Khasekhemwy also Imhotep? Imhotep, one of the most celebrated characters in ancient Egypt - and favoured as the biblical Joseph - is, for all that, a most obscure figure, with no seeming contemporaneous (Third Dynasty) mentions. Though, interestingly, Imhotep's name does appear as a graffito in the Buried Pyramid of Sekhemkhet, who, I am hinting, may also have been Khasekhemwy. Now I think that Imhotep can be more substantially than hitherto identified. And in the Third Dynasty. For, it is not a question of could Khasekhemwy have been Imhotep. Khasekhemwy was Imhotep! The Nebti name of Khasekhemwy was hotep im(-ef), that is, IMHOTEP. Was the Vizier, lector-priest, Imhotep, even a sub-pharaoh? Was Khasekhemwy the real Djoser? According to the king-lists, Sekhemkhet was also identified as Djoser (-ti): http://www.phouka.com/pharaoh/pharaoh/dynasties/dyn03/03sekhemkhet.html He, not pharaoh Netjerikhet, may have been the actual Djoser (Zoser). Khasekhemwy was also Bebi In my article: Bebi's Famine, like Joseph's, was of 'many years' duration https://www.academia.edu/120335321/Bebis_Famine_like_Josephs_was_of_many_years_duration I identified the protracted Famine at the time of the vizier Bebi with the one at the time of the quasi-pharaonic lector-priest, Ankhtifi, another potential ID for Joseph, under a hypocoristicon version of his given Egyptian name, Zaphenath paneah. Now, Khasekhemwy appears in the king lists as Bebi, or Bebti: http://www.phouka.com/pharaoh/pharaoh/dynasties/dyn02/07khasekhemwy.html Conclusion Khasekhemwy was indeed the father of Netjerikhet, but only in the biblical sense with reference to Joseph as “Father to Pharaoh” (Genesis 45:8). Khasekhemwy was Joseph-Imhotep, who saved Netjerikhet's Egypt from a seven-year Famine that the Hebrew man of dreams had predicted under Divine inspiration.