Damien F.
Mackey
Introduction
Patrick Clarke has attempted, in several articles
for Creation Ministeries International [CMI]:
·
Was Thutmose III the
biblical Shishak?—Claims for the ‘Jerusalem’ bas-relief at Karnak investigated
to show that two of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s most
famous biblico-historical identifications, Queen Hatshepsut as the “Queen of
Sheba”, and pharaoh Thutmose III as “King Shishak of Egypt”, are untenable.
Clarke’s strength is his knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he uses to
good effect. It was not one of Velikovsky’s strengths, apparently, as Clarke is
easily able to demolish Velikovsky’s hopeful identifications of objects on
Thutmose III’s Karnak wall with items pertaining to King Solomon, his palace
and the Temple. Dr. John Bimson had once done a similar demolition job on
Velikovsky when he proved beyond doubt that Hatshepsut’s Punt expedition could
not have been the same as the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon in
Jerusalem (see “Hatshepsut” article below).
But just because aspects of Velikovsky’s key
arguments have been proven wrong does not mean that these two popular
identifications themselves are wholly incorrect.
And I have argued back in favour of them in, for
example:
and:
and, also at Academia.edu:
In the early C20th Harold H. Nelson,
Professor Henry Breasted’s talented student, wrote a doctoral thesis entitled
“The Battle of Megiddo”, in which Nelson painstakingly examined the
topographical and tactical aspects associated with Thutmose III’s “first campaign”,
whose culmination Breasted believed to have been at the city of Megiddo. But
did what Nelson uncover in this thesis really bear out Breasted’s presumptions?
Essential to Part One (A) were observations made by Harold H. Nelson in his doctoral
thesis entitled “The Battle of Megiddo” (1913) pertaining to topography and
battle tactics. Egyptologist R. Faulkner published an article of the same
title, “The Battle of Megiddo” (1942), in which he lauded Nelson’s thesis as
“admirable” and his “sketch-maps … indispensable to the student”. Faulkner gave
as his justification for re-visiting the subject, not “any difference of
opinion on topographical questions”, but “because a study of the hieroglyphic
text … has led to somewhat different conclusions on various points regarding
the operations”. Here I would like to recall some of what Faulkner had picked
up.
Egyptologists believe that pharaoh Thutmose
III had, in his ‘First Campaign’ against the ‘king of Kadesh’, in the C15th BC,
assaulted the strong fort of Megiddo in northern Israel. Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky,
however, in his Ages in Chaos (I), whilst accepting that Megiddo was the
pharaoh’s target here, had lowered these dates by 500 years, to the C10th BC.
For Velikovsky, Egypt’s foe was king Rehoboam, and Kadesh, the “Holy”, was
Jerusalem. And Thutmose III was the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt” (I Kings
14:25). My own view, as expressed in Part One, is that Megiddo could not have
been the location arrived at by the Egyptians – though I would accept
Velikovsky’s dating of Thutmose III. So, what is the preferential geography for
this ‘First Campaign’? And was “Kadesh” indeed Jerusalem?
So far in this series I have embraced the
Velikovskian view that pharaoh Thutmose III had belonged to the C10th BC -
rather than to the C15th BC, as according to the text books - and that he was
at least contemporaneous with the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt”. I also
argued, following Dr. Eva Danelius, that Thutmose III’s ‘First Campaign’,
against the “king of Kadesh”, could not have been waged against Megiddo as is
commonly thought. But, now, can Thutmose III be reconciled to “Shishak”, in
both name and military aim?
In his Ages in Chaos, I, Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky boldly proclaimed - against the general view that “Qadesh” was the
famous city of that name on the Orontes - that (p. 163): “Kadesh, the first
among the Palestinian cities, was Jerusalem. The “wretched foe”, the king of
Kadesh, was Rehoboam”. However, there is good reason now to think that this
could not have been the case.
Regarding the Chief of Qadesh, Dr. I.
Velikovsky had written in Ages in Chaos, I (Sphere Books, 1973, p. 143): “Who
the king of the city of Kadesh was is not even asked”. So, who may he have
been? I have previously (Part Two C) rejected Velikovsky’s identification of
the Chief of Qadesh as king Rehoboam of Judah, son of Solomon. Here I begin my
search for a new site and identification for “Qadesh” and its ruler.
An attempt will be made here to identify
the ruler of Qadesh, who was Thutmose III’s chief foe during the pharaoh’s First
Campaign, and whose aggressive activities against Egypt were, according to
Thutmose, the very reason for this Egyptian military action.
Whilst I have accepted Dr. I. Velikovsky’s
revised chronology for pharaoh Thutmose III, as a contemporary of King Solomon
of Israel (C10th BC), and, hence, an older contemporary of Solomon’s son,
Rehoboam, I have rejected his view that the pharaoh’s ‘foe of Qadesh’ was
Rehoboam himself, and that Qadesh (Kd-šw) referred to Jerusalem (the “Holy”).
And in Part Three B I arrived at a new identification for the ruler of Qadesh,
as the biblical Hadad, the Edomite, with Qadesh now referring to Qadesh-Barnea
in the south. Also, with my rejection (along with others) of the pharaoh’s
“Mkty” as Megiddo, in northern Israel, it remains to be determined if this
“Mkty” can be related to Jerusalem (as according to Dr. E. Danelius), in
support of Velikovsky’s Thutmose III = “Shishak”.
According to Dr. I. Velikovsky (Ages in
Chaos, I, 1952, p. 155): The treasures brought by Thutmose III from Palestine
[Israel] are reproduced on a wall of the Karnak temple. The bas-relief displays
in ten rows the legendary wealth of Solomon. There are pictures of various
precious objects, furnishings, vessels, and utensils of the Temple, of the
palace, probably also of the shrines to foreign deities. Under each object a
numerical symbol indicates how many of that kind were brought by the Egyptian
king from Palestine: each stroke means one piece, each arch means ten pieces,
each spiral one hundred pieces of the same thing. If Thutmose III had wanted to
boast and to display all his spoils from the Temple and the Palace of Jerusalem
by showing each object separately instead of using this number system, a wall a
mile long would have required and even that would not have sufficed. …. But was
Velikovsky right about this?
Patrick Clarke reminds me somewhat of an earlier
revisionist with SIS, Lester Mitcham,
who made a habit of tearing apart the efforts of fellow revisionists, earning
himself the description of a ‘nit picker’ from David Rohl who was then
valiantly trying to bring some sort of cohesion to the highly complex Third
Intermediate Period of Egyptian history - a historian’s greatest nightmare.
Whilst the critical/analytical approach is necessary, forcing one to a deeper
evaluation of things, ‘keeping us all honest’ as a colleague has recently noted,
those who excel in this approach seem rarely, if ever, to come up with a
compelling alternative. I discussed Mitcham’s case in my:
Bringing New Order to Mesopotamian History and Chronology
Mitcham’s attempted Mesopotamian revision was a
poor thing, I believe, and certainly failed to gain any stout adherents. And
Clarke, whilst being confident that he has obliterated Hatshepsut and Thutmose
III as candidates for, respectively, “Sheba” and “Shishak”, has, despite
promises for the future, failed to propose any suitable candidates of his own.
Regarding
Joseph of Egypt
(i)
Some Points of Criticism re Clarke’s article
Clarke, in his article on Joseph (http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j27_3/j27_3_58-63.pdf)
dismisses the possibility that perhaps the most
favoured candidate for Joseph, vizier Imhotep of Egypt’s Third Dynasty, could be
Joseph. He does this partly on his basis that the “godly” Joseph would not have
borne such a pagan name: “Imhotep translates as Content is
Horus (lit. Horus who is content). Again the question must be asked, ‘How
happy would the godly Joseph have been to bear the name of the Egyptian sky
god, Horus?’”
I would reply, ‘How happy would have been the godly Mordecai of the Book
of Esther to have borne the name of the god Marduk (= Mordecai)?’
Moreover, Mordecai was, according to my reconstruction at least, none
other than the godly Daniel himself:
Clarke,
moreover, shrinks from any thought that Imhotep and the Third Dynasty might be
able to be shifted down the time scale by some 700 years, though he is prepared
to shift his candidate for Joseph’s pharaoh by 300 years: “… [he] appears to meet these requirements
perfectly, needing a movement of three centuries rather that the
stress-inducing seven centuries required by Wyatt [for Imhotep] …”. More on
this in the next section (ii).
But it is not only certain ‘godly’ Creationists who appear to have
difficulty in giving any credibility to Velikovsky. I have been critical of how
former Velikovsky-inspired revisionists have come to light with their so-called
‘new chronologies’ as if Velikovsky had never existed:
Velikovsky was a Jewish nationalist, according to Martin Sieff in his
most interesting paper, “Velikovsky and His Heroes”: http://saturniancosmology.org/files/.cdrom/journals/review/12 and
consequently his heroes seem to have been more the ‘baddies’ of the Bible
(Saul, Ahab), rather than the ‘goodies’ (Moses, Isaiah). But whether or not
Velikovsky believed in God, not to have done so would not disqualify him from
being able to arrive at a right synchronism for the Eighteenth Egyptian
Dynasty, which I believe he achieved. Sure, his original model was defective
and needed modifications in various places. But the final result has been an
impressive platform for the re-building of ancient history upon proper
foundations. His critics, including Clarke, have not been able to come anywhere
near it.
So, is Velikovsky too ‘ungodly’ for the likes of Creationist Clarke, who
must therefore find a model alternative to Velikovsky’s? I don’t know for sure,
but my own view is that Creationism may not be quite as godly as its exponents
may think it to be. In fact, I believe that it can be quite un-biblical. See
my:
What Exactly is Creation Science?
(ii)
Some Points of Favour re Clarke’s article
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It
wasn’t necessarily always a ‘re-establishment of Old Kingdom policies’, or a
‘return to Old Kingdom values’. It was, rather, a ‘never having left the Old
Kingdom!’
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While Clarke, owing to his complete rejection of
Velikovsky, may have placed himself in a kind of no man’s land, without any
hope now of his finding “Sheba”, or “Shishak”, or biblical others, he may have
managed to score points in “Joseph’s Zaphenath Paaneah”, already mentioned. As
I said, Clarke’s strong point is his knowledge of the hieroglyphs, and it is in
this regard that he may have trumped previous efforts of which there have been
many. Thus Clarke: “A search of the literature reveals a bewildering number of solutions
offered to the meaning of the Egyptian name of Joseph, Zaphenath Paaneah (Heb. Tsophnath
Pa`neach—pronounced tsof·nath’ pah·nā’·akh)”. And he gives a table 1 listing some
of these.
In providing his own solution
to the problem of the Egyptian name, Clarke begins with this realistic tribute
to the cultured Moses:
Moses spent four decades living as an Egyptian
where “[he] was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in
words (Greek logos) and deeds” (Acts
7:22). This clearly implies that Moses was very accomplished in the use of
words; and not just in speaking. The Egyptian system of teaching was very
thorough and, after four decades of life in the royal household, Moses would
have understood the complexities and applications of the Egyptian language and court
etiquette. Therefore his choice of the Hebrew, Zaphenath Paaneah, is very likely
to be a valid transliteration into Hebrew from the original Egyptian.
Having explained the first part of the name, “Zaphenath” as a title, according to Egyptian norm,
Clarke then proceeds to decipher the second part, “Paaneah”, which is the name by which Joseph will now be called.
And I think that what he comes up with here is excellent. Clarke explains:
The second section, p3nn’i3ḫ , is a
proper name, and like the ending ‘ty of ḏf3n‘ty, exhibits Archaic
traits. This name, p3nn’i3ḫ, is also composed of three elements—p3n ;
n’i ; 3ḫ . The first part, p3n, ‘he of’ is written
but there is no grammatical or historical evidence for it necessarily being
vocalized. The second part, n’i, and the third, 3ḫ, combine to
express Joseph’s new Egyptian name literally as [p3n]n’i3ḫ ‘[He
of the] Excellent/Gracious Spirit’ where n’i translates as
‘excellent/gracious’ and 3ḫ translates as ‘spirit’.
Clarke’s argument that a name such as
the one given to Joseph, “Zaphenath Paaneah”, and
the Joseph story in general, are most appropriate in an Eleventh Dynasty (Early
Middle Kingdom) context, is quite in accord with the following table that I
gave in my:
Jacob,
Pharaoh and the Famine. Part Three: Jacob Blesses Pharaoh
Patriarch
|
Old
Kingdom
|
Middle
Kingdom
|
Archaeology
|
Abraham
|
0-I
|
X (?)
|
EBI
|
Joseph
|
[II]- III
|
XI
|
EBII
|
Moses
|
IV-VI
|
XII (XIII)
|
EBIII
|
Joshua
(Conquest)
|
MBI on EB III/IV
|
||
Anarchy
in Egypt
|
VII-IX (?)
|
XIII-XVII
|
aligning the Eleventh Dynasty with the
Third Dynasty (Imhotep’s). (Famine dynasties).
His choice of Joseph’s Famine pharaoh
is the impressive Mentuhotep II Nebhepetre.
However, a failure to appreciate that
the so-called ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ Kingdom(s) of Egypt were, in part,
contemporaneous, leads Clarke to a statement such as this one:
Mentuhotep reestablished [sic] the foreign
policies of the Old Kingdom, sending military expeditions against the Libyan
tribes to the west, and the Bedouin to the east in Sinai. He began the process
of bringing Nubia back under Egyptian control, for the purposes of mining and
trade.38
On this, see my:
It wasn’t necessarily always a
‘re-establishment of Old Kingdom policies’, or a ‘return to Old Kingdom
values’. It was, rather, a ‘never having left the Old Kingdom!’
Strangely, Clarke does not refer
to any actual Eleventh Dynasty Famine.
Dr. J. Osgood will locate it, archaeologically,
to Late Bronze II (“From Abraham to Exodus”: http://creation.com/from-abraham-to-exodus).
And typically,
Clarke does not end up finding his man, Joseph: “Unfortunately, most of the tombs of 11th Dynasty officials have been vandalized, which makes it impossible to
identify a named official of the time as Joseph”.
Though I think that his
deciperment of Joseph’s name may now provide a positive clue.
More on that later.
Imhotep
The quasi-pharaonic Imhotep has rightly, I believe,
been identified by some revisionists with Joseph of Egypt.
According to N. Grimal, a conventional scholar who
has no intention of making any such biblical connection, this Imhotep is
“better known than” his contemporary pharaoh, Djoser (or Zoser) (A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell,
1994, p. 65):
It has
only proved possible to identify Djoser with Netjerykhet because of ancient
tourists’ graffiti at his pyramid, or sources such as the Famine Stele that confirm the importance of Memphis during his
reign. Strangely enough, Imhotep the courtier is now better known than Djoser
the king, and it was Imhotep, rather than Djoser, who later became the object
of a popular cult.
[End of
quote]
The
long-recognised greatness of Imhotep is apparent from Grimal’s encomium of him,
indicating Imhotep to have been the greatest of the great (pp. 65-66, emphasis
added):
[Imhotep’s]
role never seems to have been that of a politician: the only offices he is
known to have held are high priest of Heliopolis, lector-priest and chief
architect. It was his post as architect that gave him such fame, but the legend
that survived him shows that quite apart from his architectural work he quickly developed a reputation as the
most striking personality of his time. The literature of the New Kingdom
describes him as patron of scribes, not because of his qualities as a writer
but because of his role as a personification
of wisdom and therefore also of education, the principal form taken by
wisdom. His intellectual, rather than literary, abilities provide evidence of
the offices that he probably held under Djoser. In fact it was in recognition
of his achievements as a wise counsellor – which was identical to those that
Egyptian religion recognized in Ptah, the creator-god of Memphis – that Imhotep
was described in the Turin Canon as the son of Ptah. This was the first stage
in the process of heroicization that led eventually to him becoming a local god
of Memphis, served by his own priesthood and having his own mythology, in which
he was considered to be an intermediary on behalf of men beset by the
difficulties of daily life, specializing particularly in medical problems. The
Greeks, who knew him as Imouthes, recognized this specialization by equating
him with their own god of medicine, Asklepios. In fact, the cult of Imhotep was
to spread from Alexandria to Meroe (via a temple of Imhotep at Philae), and
even survived the pharaonic civilization itself by finding a place in Arab
tradition, especially at Saqqara, where his tomb was supposed to be located.
Djoser, on the other hand, was not deified, and he only achieved immortality
through his pyramid – the first example of an architectural form that was to be
adopted by his successors until the end of the Middle Kingdom.
[End of
quote]
Some
striking patterns of Jacob, and his great son, Joseph, can be identified in
Djoser’s Egypt. For, as I wrote in:
The
era of the substantial Third Dynasty pharaoh,
Zoser (c. 2670 BC, conventional dating) has been favoured by some
revisionists - myself included - as being the most likely time for Jacob and
Joseph in Egypt, with Zoser’s vizier, Imhotep, thereby accepted as Joseph.
That
would necessitate a lowering of pharaoh Zoser on the time scale by about a
millennium.
Among
the “patterns of evidence” for this scenario are the highly important reference
to a seven-year famine; the Step Pyramid, reminding one of Jacob’s dream of a
Stairway to Heaven; and, as I noted recently in:
with
reference to Genesis 32:4, Jacob’s wrestling with the man (angel): “wrestling with a young man was also a
feature of the ancient Egyptian Heb-Sed festival, as is apparent from the case
of pharaoh Zoser”.
http://www.arabworldbooks.com/egyptomania/sameh_arab_sed_heb.htm “One of the more remarkable
signs of the Heb Sed can be found at the Djoser (3rd Dynasty) Step Pyramid
complex at Saqqara, where remnants of the Heb Sed court were found, as well as
an inscription on a false doorway inside the pyramid”.
A further potential “pattern of evidence” is the testimony of the Papyrus
Chester Beatty IV (British Museum ESA 10684) that Imhotep, among others, could
tell the future with certainty (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/authorspchb.html):
Is
there another like Imhotep?
….
Those who knew how to foretell the future,
What
came from their mouths took place ….
[End
of quote]
Perhaps
an entire so-called ‘Egyptian’ mythology and religion, as like that which can
be found in the Book of Genesis, may have arisen from this extraordinary time
when, due to the famine crisis, the people of Israel burst upon the Egyptian
scene. Typically, the originally pure and inspirational Hebrew wisdom would
have been corrupted and paganised. See my:
With this
in mind, did the Greek god, “Asklepios”, actually arise from the ancient and
prototypal Imhotep/Joseph - in the same way as the Romans deified Tubal-cain
(Genesis 4:22) as Vulcan - rather than Imhotep/Joseph being equated with a
Greek god already then being honoured? In the case of Paul and Barnabas, on the
other hand, it was certainly a case of the biblical pair being appropriated to
Greek deities already being worshipped (Acts 14:12).
Philosophically,
Imhotep/Joseph was a true archetype, he being the model for the legendary
Thales:
and
(through Ptahhotep, to be discussed in Part Three of this series) of
Pythagoras:
Unfortunately,
though, the current knowledge of Egypt’s Third Dynasty is so poor as not to
enable for proper justice to be done to any proposed reconstruction associated
with it. Grimal, writing of the Third Dynasty, gets us off to this most
unencouraging start (pp. 63-64):
The Beginning of the Third Dynasty
Ironically,
the Third Dynasty is less well known than the two earlier dynasties, and there
is still no agreement on its origins, which were dominated by the personality
of Djoser. King Djoser, however, was not the first ruler of the Third Dynasty;
although the archaeological evidence and the king-lists tend to suggest that he
was its founder, there are reasonable grounds for suggesting that its king
would actually have been Nebka, who is mentioned in Papyrus Westcar.
[Mackey’s
comment: Well, how confusing is all that!].
[Nebka]
was also known to Manetho, and a priest of Nebka’s mortuary cult is known to
have lived in the reign of Djoser. However, nothing is known of Nebka’s reign
since this section is missing from the Palermo Stone. He and Djoser would have
reigned for about the same length of time.
[End
of quote]
I would
tentatively suggest that Nebka and Djoser (djeser-sah) were the
same pharaoh, given that either may have
founded the Third Dynasty; and may
have reigned for the same length of time; and (Grimal, p. 64): “Their
parentage is not documented ...”. And (p. 67): “Djoser and Nebka ... became
legendary ...”.
Sadly, though
(loc. cit.): “It is not possible to
give a satisfactory account of the Third Dynasty, but archaeological research
may yet provide the data for more sense to be made of it”. Yes, indeed, but I
would strongly suggest, too, that the picture can be filled out by a proper
alignment of the dynasties, so that we no longer have to be content simply with
an impoverished one-dimensional view.
A
reconstructed Joseph will, I believe, enable us to achieve this bigger picture.
Here, in
fact, I am pitching for a three-dimensional view, something more akin to
Joseph’s ‘years of plenty’, as opposed to the famine of the meagre conventional
structure as evidenced again by Grimal (p. 66): “The end of the Third Dynasty
was hardly any clearer than its beginning had been ...”.
I have
already explored the possibility of a Third Dynasty and an Eleventh Dynasty
correlation (see earlier chart).
The
Eleventh Dynasty of Egypt will be the focus of the Khety (Akhtoy) section below.
Sub Note
According
to the Papyrus Chester Beatty IV, a late (Ramesside)
product, Egyptian folklore could boast the following seers who had the ability
to foretell the future unerringly:
Is there one here like Hardjedef?
Is there another like Imhotep?
None of our kin is like Neferti,
Or Khety [Akhtoy], the foremost among
them.
I give you the name of Ptah-emdjehuty,
Of Khakheperre-sonb.
Is there another like Ptahhotep,
Or the equal of Kaires?
Those sages who foretold the future,
What came from their mouth occurred;
It is found as their pronouncement,
It is written in their books.
Who of
these, apart from Imhotep, already discussed (and Ptahhotep, already hinted
at), may be the biblical Joseph?
Ptahhotep
is a stand-out, given that he wrote a very biblical-like set of wise
Instructions, and that he lived to be 110 years of age, exactly the same as
Joseph (Genesis 50:22).
But
Ptahhotep belonged to Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, and so far (refer to chart above)
I have tentatively aligned only the Third and Eleventh dynasties.
Further
consideration of this Ptahhotep, and a possible Fifth Dynasty scenario for
Joseph, will be found later, in Part Three of this series.
The wise
Khety/Akhtoy, on the other hand, being (as I would interpret it) a high
official of the Eleventh Dynasty, and “the foremost
among” the scribes, now becomes a most intriguing prospect for the biblical Joseph.
Khety (Akhtoy)
Introduction
Having accepted that the era of the Eleventh
Dynasty was one of apparent suitability to the time of Joseph, a conclusion
reached also by Creationist and
revisionist, Patrick Clarke (http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j27_3/j27_3_58-63.pdf)
the next step was to try to identify within the
Eleventh Dynasty a fitting candidate for Joseph. I had already concluded - along with other
revisionists - that Imhotep of the Third Dynasty was Joseph. In my scheme, the
Third and Eleventh run parallel.
Now the Eleventh Dynasty could boast a high
official, the Chancellor Khety, or Akhtoy, who has been described as
“ubiquitous”, and who was obviously very closely connected to the royal family.
Imhotep, likewise, was a Chancellor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor):
- There are two ancient Egyptian titles
sometimes translated as chancellor.
There is the "royal sealer" (xtmtj-bity
or xtmw-bity), a title attested since the First Dynasty (about 3000 BC).[10] People holding the post include Imhotep and Hemaka.[11]
The other title translated as chancellor is
"Keeper of the Royal Seal" (or overseer of the seal or treasurer—imy-r
xtmt[12][13]). Officials holding the post include Bay or Irsu, Khety[14] Meketre,[15] and Nakhti.[16]
The first title (royal sealer) announced a certain
rank at the royal court, the second (supervisor of the sealed goods, i.e.
treasurer) was responsible for the state's income. This position appears around
2000 BC.
[End of quote]
Name
But what had especially drawn me to the Eleventh
Dynasty Chancellor as a potential Joseph type was the name Akhtoy – the first
element of which, Akh, I had
initially thought, might be able to be matched with the name that Clarke had
painstakingly shown to have been Joseph’s given name.
Akh glyph
Clarke, discussing the “Paaneah” element of
Joseph’s new name, had written [unfortunately the hieroglyphs Clarke provides
do not reproduce here]:
The second section, p3nn’i3ḫ
, is a proper name, and like the ending ‘ty of ḏf3n‘ty,
exhibits Archaic traits. This name, p3nn’i3ḫ, is also composed of three elements—p3n
; n’i ; 3ḫ . The first part, p3n, ‘he of’ is written
but there is no grammatical or historical evidence for it necessarily being
vocalized. The second part, n’i, and the third, 3ḫ, combine to
express Joseph’s new Egyptian name literally as [p3n]n’i3ḫ ‘[He
of the] Excellent/Gracious Spirit’ where n’i translates as ‘excellent/gracious’
and 3ḫ translates as ‘spirit’.
[End of quote]
My initial research had suggested to me that the Akh element in Akhtoy had the very same meaning, “spirit”, as
Clarke’s “3ḫ translates as
‘spirit’.”
Further investigation, though, revealed that the
Chancellor’s name, usually given as Khety (Kheti), did not include that
element:
|
||
Kheti
ẖtj(j) in hieroglyphs |
Prominence
Given Khety’s high
rank, however, and his closeness to the royal family, as we shall read, and the
fact that he officiated in Egypt for at least forty years, I would not discount
him as the sought after Eleventh Dynasty candidate for Joseph. We can read
about Mentuhotep II’s Chancellor, for instance, in J. Allen’s “Some Theban
Officials of the Early Middle Kingdom” (http://gizapyramids.org/pdf_library/festschrift_simpson/01_allen.pdf):
Khety’s
office is attested throughout the reliefs from his tomb, as well as in his
sarcophagus and on the offering table from the tomb’s entrance. The reliefs
preserve a number of his other honorary and functional titles as well,
including … “Hereditary Noble, High Official, King’s Sealbearer, Unique
Friend,” … “Director of the King’s
Acquaintances,” … “King’s Acquaintance and Intimate,” … “God’s Father and
Beloved,” …. “Overseer of the Two Treasuries,” …. “Overseer of silver and gold,
Overseer of lapislazuli and turquoise,” and …. “Overseer of horn, hoof, scale,
and feather.” His name and title also occur on linen from the tombs of
Mentuhotep’s queens Aashyt and Henhenet, in the king’s mortuary complex; and
from Tomb 23 in the triangular court north of the temple, which also yielded
linen dated to Year 40.
[End of quote]
More
can be read about the high official, and his tomb near to the king’s, in the
following passage in which he, here called Akhtoy, is descibed as “ubiquitous”
To the
soldier who commemorated his existence at Abisko is owed the further
information that King Nebhepetre', that is to say Menthotpe … in his third
phase, 'captured the entire land and proposed to slay the Asiatics of Djaty'.
The pacification of the entire land must have been accomplished before the
forty-sixth year, since a stele at Turin of the date tells us that 'a good
course was set by Mont's giving the Two Lands to the sovereign Nebhepetre'.
Before the end of the reign it had even become possible for a god's seal-bearer
name Akhtoy to engage in extensive foreign travel and to bring back much
valuable metal and precious stones of various sorts. But all this involved much
successful conflict with the inhabitants. So mighty a king could not rest content
with a saff-tomb like his ancestors. The site which he chose for his sepulcher
was the cliff-bound inlet of Der el-Bahri, and it would be impossible to
conceive of surroundings more impressive.
….
It was
perhaps more on account of this visible token of his splendor than because of
his victories that Nebhepetre' was revered centuries later as a patron of the
Theban Necropolis, but he was also the first king since Dynasty VIII who was
deemed worthy of a place in the Abydos and Saqqara
king-lists. The cliffs around his funerary temple are honeycombed with the
tombs of his courtiers, systematically excavated by Winlock for the
Metropolitan Museum of New York. Here, for example, were buried the vizier Ipi
and the ubiquitous chancellor Akhtoy. ….
[End of quote]
Campaigns
Aidan
Dodson tells of Khety’s leading a successful military campaign to Nubia on
behalf of the pharaoh (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Jsq0AHsC-YMC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA5): “Year 41 saw the arrival at Aswan of a large fleet
from Lower Nubia, led by none other than the Chancellor, Khety, illustrating
the interest shown in re-opening Egypt’s access to Nubia and beyond”.
And
N. Grimal writes of more forays (A History
of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, 1994, p. 157):
But Nubia
itself still remained independent, despite the fact that such areas as Abu
Ballas were reconquered and various expeditions were sent under the command of
the chancellor Khety, who had been entrusted with the rule of all the countries
in the south. Two of Khety’s forays are known to have taken place in the
twenty-ninth and thirty-first years of [Menthotep] II’s reign ….
[End of
quote]
Heb-Sed
Festival
The celebration of this festival, fairly
rare in Archaïc Egyptian history (which, in my system, includes the Eleventh
Dynasty), by Djoser, by Mentuhotep II, adds some strength to my identification
of ‘these’ as the one pharaoh of the biblical Famine Era. Now, the
consideration that Khety may have been involved in the very planning and organisation
of Mentuhotep II’s Sed Festival could be a further point in favour of his
identification with Joseph. For I had thought it highly likely that incidents
in the life of Jacob and his son, Joseph (as Imhotep), had re-emerged in
features associated with the Sed Festival of Djoser.
J. Allen tells of Khety’s possible
involvement in the pharaoh’s sed festival:
Nearly
all of Khety’s attestations are associated with the final phase of Mentuhotep’s
reign, marked by the Horus name [Zematawy]
and prenomen [Nebhepetre]. Besides
the graffiti from the Wadi Shatt el-Rigala, this titulary also occurs, along
with the king’s image, in the fragmentary stelae from Khety’s tomb. The
graffiti are commonly dated to
Mentuhotep’s
Year 39 on the basis of year-dates scratched secondarily on either side of the
two main inscriptions showing the figure of the king. The relationship between
the dates and the graffiti is not completely certain, but the fact that the
king is shown, in one instance, in Sed-Festival garb suggests that Khety was
involved in the planning or celebration of this event, probably sometime
between Years 30 and 39.
[End of quote]
And
again we read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kheti_(treasurer)):
Kheti was an Ancient Egyptian treasurer of the 11th Dynasty, under king Mentuhotep II. Kheti appears in several sources and was
one of the most influential figures at the royal court of the king. He is
depicted in two rock reliefs at Shatt er-Rigal where he is standing in front of the king. Once the king wears the Sed festival dress. It can be assumed that Kheti was
involved in arranging the festival for the king.[1] His name and title appear in the funerary
temple of the king in Deir el-Bahari and he had a tomb near the funerary
temple of his king.[2] The tomb (TT311) was
found heavily destroyed but there are still many remains of reliefs showing
that it was once decorated. The burial chamber was better preserved and was
also decorated.[3] His successor was Meketre.[4]
[End of quote]
Wisdom
Of the
various sages referred to in the Papyrus Chester
Beatty IV, one Khety is identified as being “the foremost among them”. I have
taken this “Khety” to refer to the Eleventh Dynasty official who is the subject
of this article - though scholars are unclear as to who he actually is. See
e.g.: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=MCTbJ0VozGQC&pg=PA1).
Joseph
was indeed the “foremost”, even in the mind of the pharaoh,
in
discerning wisdom
(Genesis
41:39):
So Pharaoh asked them, ‘Can we find anyone like this
man, one in whom is the spirit of God?’ Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘Since God
has made all this known to you, there is no one so discerning and wise as you’.
and,
subsequently, in rank (v. 40):
‘You shall be in charge of my palace, and all my
people are to submit to your orders. Only with respect to the throne will I be
greater than you’.
Whilst Khety has some definite points in his favour as a possible candidate
for Joseph, to include him in the mix does add further complexity, such as an
extra name, without its having that apparent correspondence with Joseph’s name,
“Zaphenath Paaneah”, as I had originally hoped.
Ptahhotep
Ptahhotep of the Fifth Dynasty, having, as he has, some obvious
Joseph-like traits, not surprisingly has been identified by various revisionists
with the great biblical patriarch.
Ptahhotep is, as said previously, a ‘stand out’
candidate for Joseph of Egypt, due to his Bible-like wisdom writings and his
death at age 110. Whilst the latter figure is generally considered by Egyptologists
to be simply an ‘ideal lifespan’, based on references to it in Egyptian
inscriptions and literary compositions, I would suggest that Genesis 50:22
was the foundation for it: “Joseph stayed in Egypt, along with all
his father’s family. He lived 110 years”.
|
N. Grimal tells us of the great man (A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell,
1994, p. 79): “But the most famous noble of [Djedkare] Isesi’s reign was
Ptahhotep, who was traditionally considered to have been the author of an Instruction often quoted by
philosophical and royal texts, until the Kushite period”.
We recall that the Imhotep tradition was long
honoured and remembered, “and even survived the pharaonic civilization itself
by finding a place in Arab tradition”.
Grimal also notes here that Ptahhotep was buried
“at Saqqara in the area north of Djoser’s pyramid”.
One would do well to read the inspiring collection
of wisdom writings to be found in Christian Jacq’s The Wisdom of Ptahhotep.
Most
interesting, in light of P. Clarke’s view that the Eleventh Dynasty pharaoh,
Mentuhotep II, had, through the agency of Joseph, brought about a “semi-feudal
system”: “It is not unreasonable to say that Joseph had, in the process, helped
create a semi-feudal system not dissimilar to the later European feudal system
of the Middle-Ages; and this almost 3,000 years before the Europeans”, is
Grimal’s similar statement regarding pharaoh Isesi: “The acquisition of greater
powers by officials continued during Isesi’s reign, leading to the development
of a virtual feudal system”.
To
co-ordinate into one these ‘feudal systems’, which I think is necessary, will
mean a chronological shift of some 400 years.
Heb-Sed Festival
In common
with Djoser, with Mentuhotep II, the long-reigning pharaoh Isesi “celebrated
his sed festival (jubilee), the
evidence for which is an inscribed vase in the collection of the Louvre”
(Grimal, p. 79). That is, however, very scant evidence for so significant an
occasion during the reign of so powerul a pharaoh. If this is the same Heb-Sed
festival as Djoser’s, as Menthuotep’s, then there is available far more
evidence for it than the mere Louvre vase.
Names
Ptahhotep
Tshefi, generally thought to have
been the grandson of Ptahhotep, even though the former, too, was a writer of wisdom,
was an official during the reign of Isesi’s successor, Wenis. But that does not
mean that he could not have been the long-lived original Ptahhotep. Imhotep is
thought to have lived on into the reign of pharaoh Huni, who came to the throne
after Djoser.
Interestingly,
ancient Semitic writing has been discovered on the walls of the pyramid of
pharaoh Wenis (or Unas) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070205-snake-spells.html
Ancient Semitic Snake Spells Deciphered in
Egyptian Pyramid
Mati
Milstein in Jerusalem
for National Geographic News
for National Geographic News
February
5, 2007
The ancient Egyptians believed
themselves superior to their neighboring nations in almost every aspect.
But
newly interpreted symbols—the oldest Semitic passages ever deciphered—reveal
that the Egyptians turned to outside help for magic.
The
passages, inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at
Saqqara, reveal that the Egyptians enlisted the magical assistance of Semitic
Canaanites from the ancient city of Byblos, located in what is now Lebanon.
The Canaanite spells were invoked to help protect mummified kings
against poisonous snakes, one of ancient Egypt's most dreaded nemeses.
[End of quote]
But,
getting back to names, the element Tshefi
(attached to a Ptahhotep) comes very close to the Tsoph element that constitutes the first part of Tsophnath
Pa`neach, which Clarke gives as the Hebrew transliteration of the Egyptian
given name for Joseph.
(Tshefi, Tsoph).
Less
happily: As was the case with my attempting to match the name Khety (Akhtoy)
with any name pertaining to Joseph, I have not yet been able either to connect
any names of Mentuhotep II with Djedkare Isesi. However, a possibility of linking
the king-list name of Zoser with the king-list name of Izesi (a variant of
Isesi) is perhaps worth a thought.
Wise Friend of Pharaoh
We
read Dr. E. Martin at: http://www.askelm.com/doctrine/d040501.htm
“The Instruction
of Ptah- Hotep”
This
brings us to consider the author of an early Egyptian work called “The
Instruction of the Vizier [the Prime Minister] Ptah-Hotep.” The man who
wrote this document of proverbial teaching was so close to the Pharaoh that he
was considered Pharaoh‘s son — from his own body. This does not
necessarily mean that the author was the actual son of the Pharaoh. It is
adesignation which means that both the author (the Prime Minister) and the
Pharaoh were onein attitude, authority, and family.
Could
this document be a composition of the patriarch Joseph? There are many
parallels between what the document says and historical events in Joseph‘s
life. Indeed, the similarities are so remarkable, that I have the strong
feeling that modern man has found an early Egyptianwriting from the hand of
Joseph himself. Though it is evident that the copies that have comeinto our
possession are copies of a copy (and not the original), it still reflects what
theautograph said; in almost every section it smacks of the attitude and
temperament of Josephas revealed to us in the Bible. Let us now look at some of
the remarkable parallels.
This
Egyptian document is often called ― “The Oldest Book in the World” and was
originallywritten by the vizier in the Fifth (or Third) Dynasty. The Egyptian
name of this vizier (i.e., the next in command to Pharaoh) was
Ptah-Hotep. This man was, according to Breasted “the ―Chief of all Works of the
King.” He was the busiest man in the kingdom, all-powerful (only the Pharaoh
was over him). He was the chief judge and the most popular man in Pharaoh’s government.
“The
keeping of these laws have gained for me upon earth 110 years of life, with the
gift of the favor of the King, among the first of those whose works have made
them noble, doing the pleasure of the King in an honored position.”
“The
Instruction of Ptah- Hotep,” Precept XLIV
[End
of quote]
Some Concluding Thoughts
If
Imhotep, Ptahhotep, and Akhtoy were all Joseph - and I think that first two
certainly were - then the later Egyptians, the Ramessides, responsible for the Papyrus
Chester Beatty IV, may have forgotten their ancient history by apparently
listing these seers all as separate characters. But the same confused situation
has occurred with the highly popular, The
Tale of Sinuhe, which, according to professor E. Anati shared a ‘common
matrix with the story of Moses’s flight to Midian and subsequent return to Egypt.
The story has become hopelessly corrupted, with Sinuhe finally returning to a
benign pharaoh, quite unlike the pharaoh Moses and Aaron would encounter.
What
I am confident about, now, is that the Third, Fifth and the Eleventh Egyptian
dynasties were basically concurrent. And so I would like here to include the
Fifth in my table, since it was lacking to it previously:
Patriarch
|
Old
Kingdom
|
Middle
Kingdom
|
Archaeology
|
Abraham
|
0-I
|
X (?)
|
EBI
|
Joseph
|
[II]- III - V
|
XI
|
EBII
|
Moses
|
IV-VI
|
XII (XIII)
|
EBIII
|
Joshua
(Conquest)
|
MBI on EB III/IV
|
||
Anarchy
in Egypt
|
VII-IX (?)
|
XIII-XVII
|
