Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (21 page)

Dr Yadin was satisfied that the discoveries at Hazor matched the biblical account of Joshua's conquest in a number of ways. The conquerors had razed the city to the ground, just as the Bible says; they had attempted to destroy the cultic practices of the Canaanites, as we are told God charged the Israelites to do; and they had been a nomadic people just as the Israelites had recently been. He was certain that the Israelites had occupied the area from the time of the burning, but had not had the power or motivation to rebuild the city until the creation of the unified kingdom after the time of David.

Although there is much difference in opinion as to how structured their civilization was, there is little doubt that the Israelites – or at least the people who would later form the kingdoms of Israel and Judah – were in Canaan as a distinct culture by around 1250
BC
. According to the Old Testament, the period between Joshua's campaigns and the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel by David was the age of the Judges, when the Israelites existed as twelve tribes who were constantly fighting the Philistines. Historically this would seem to reflect the period between 1200 and 1000
BC
when both the Philistines and the Israelites (among others) were struggling for possession of Canaan. This is known from Egyptian and Hittite sources to have been a time of considerable upheaval, when both the Egyptian and Hittite empires were collapsing. The golden age that linked Canaan to Egypt ended with the collapse of the trade routes, which in turn resulted in the collapse of the city states. It seems that in many ways it was a period similar to the European Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Britain, for instance, descended into virtual anarchy, allowing
the Anglo-Saxons from Scandinavia and northern Germany gradually to take over the country. Today most archaeologists agree that after the upheavals of the twelfth and eleventh centuries
BC
, the kingdom of Israel emerged.

As the age of Judges – as described in the Book of Judges – seems to reflect historical events, then perhaps the same is true of Joshua. If he did exist, then, from the archaeological perspective, he would seem to have entered Canaan sometime around 1250
BC
. Accordingly, if there is any historical truth reflected in the biblical account of the forty years previously spent in the wilderness, then the Israelites must have been in Egypt until around 1300
BC
– the end of the eighteenth dynasty and the period of Horemheb. This is certainly interesting: Horemheb was the pharaoh who instigated the anti-Atenist reprisals. As the Bible seems to reflect some evidence of an Atenist element among the Hebrews when they left Egypt (see Chapter Seven), it may be that both groups were forced to flee Egypt at the same time, and for similar reasons: persecution under Horemheb. We shall return to this question later. For the moment, however, we still have no real historical evidence – outside the Bible – that the Israelites were ever in Egypt. We must, therefore, start at the begining. How and when does the Bible tell us the Israelites arrived in Egypt?

After the account of the Creation, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and the great flood, we come to the first of God's chosen people – Abraham. When Abraham's father dies God speaks to Abraham and tells him to move from his home at Haran, high on the Euphrates, and settle in the Promised Land of Canaan. According to Genesis 12:7, God tells Abraham: 'Unto thy seed will I give this land.' Canaan, therefore, is seen right from the beginning as the Israelites' true home. The name Israelite emerges with Abraham's grandson, Jacob, whom God
renames Israel. According to Genesis 35:10, God tells Jacob, 'Thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name.' It was from Jacob that all the Hebrews later held captive in Egypt are said to descend. Hence the term children of Israel or the Israelites.

The Genesis account of how the Israelites came to be in Egypt begins with the famous story of Joseph and his 'coat of many colours'. Joseph is a younger son of Jacob, whose ten elder brothers grow jealous of him because he becomes their father's favourite. Eventually they come to detest him when he develops prophetic powers and tells them of a dream in which he sees them paying him homage. One day the brothers seize Joseph, stripped him of his 'coat of many colours', with which Jacob has honoured him, and sell him for twenty pieces of silver to a caravan of traders heading for Egypt.

In Egypt, Joseph is sold to an official who soon promotes him to the position of overseer of his household. Eventually, when the official's wife tries to seduce Joseph and he refuses her, she falsely accuses him of trying to seduce
her
and he is thrown into prison. In prison he developed a reputation as an interpreter of dreams, and when the pharaoh himself is disturbed by a series of strange dreams, Joseph is summoned to tell him what they mean. Joseph tells the pharaoh that his dreams predict a period of seven years of abundance in Egypt, followed by seven years of famine. He therefore advises the pharaoh to appoint someone to oversee the gathering of stockpiles of food to tide the country over the lean years that are to follow. The grateful pharaoh accepts Joseph's interpretation and appoints him as the grand vizier, or chief minister, to supervise the seven-year plan.

Eventually, when the famine occurs as predicted, it affects Canaan too, and Jacob sends his sons down to Egypt to buy
corn. When they appear before the chief minister to beg for help, they do not recognize him as their grown brother Joseph. He, however, recognizes them and makes them humble themselves before him – just as his dream had once foretold. Ultimately, he reveals his true identity, forgives them and sends for his father. The entire family then settles in Egypt and are raised to high estate. Over the following centuries the descendants of Jacob – the children of Israel – remain in Egypt, their numbers continuing to grow until they are thousands.

Historically, the Israelites belonged to a large group of Asiatic people collectively called Semites, and Semite trading journeys into Egypt, as described in the Joseph story, did occur as early as early as the nineteenth century
BC
. A wall painting in the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep, at Beni-Hassan 322 kilometres south of Cairo, shows a group of thirty-seven Semites with laden donkeys entering Egypt at a border post where they are met by frontier officials. Described as traders, they are depicted wearing colourful striped garments which some biblical commentators once associated with Joseph's 'coat of many colours', as described in Genesis 37:3. More recent textual studies, however, have shown that this familiar phrase from the King James version of the Bible is another example of a mistranslation – the original Hebrew phrase seems to have meant 'a long, sleeved robe'. In any event, it would seem unlikely that these first Semite traders had any link with the Joseph story. There is no evidence of these early Semites ever having settled in Egypt: certainly not in any great numbers. Besides which, as the painting dates from around 1890
BC
, it seems to be far too early for the Genesis account of Joseph.

Exodus 12:40 tells us that the Sojourn – the period that the children of Israel spent in Egypt before the Exodus – was 430 years. As we have seen, if the Exodus did occur it must have
been somewhere around 1300
BC
– about half a century before the destruction of Hazor and the first archaeological appearance of the Israelites in Canaan. If the Joseph story in any way reflects historical events, it would therefore need to be set around the eighteenth century
BC
. The peoples who occupied much of Canaan at this time were the Hyksos, a people who seem originally to have come from the Mesopotamian kingdom of Mari. The site of the city of Mari lies on the west bank of the Euphrates, just inside Syria on a hill called Tell Hariri (about twenty kilometres north of what is now the Iraq boarder). In 1933 a team of French archaeologists, led by Professor Andre Parrot, began excavating the site. Here they discovered a splendid royal palace dating from around 2000
BC
, which had more than 300 rooms, richly furbished with statues and frescoes. Since 1933, the Mari excavations have unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets which provide valuable information about the history of the Mari kingdom and its vassal states.

The Mari kingdom was invaded by the Babylonians around 1750
BC
, and its capital taken and destroyed. With the overthrow of the kingdom, many of the various peoples previously under its sway migrated south into Canaan, and within about a hundred years they had formed themselves into an effective alliance of tribes with considerable military muscle – enough, in fact, to invade northern Egypt. The Egyptians at the time refer to the tribal chiefs of these people as
Hikau khasut
– 'rulers of the desert uplands' – a term which the Graeco-Egyptian historian Manetho later rendered as Hyksos – 'desert princes'.
Hikau khasut
seems to have been the term the Egyptians used for the chieftains of the city states which the migrant Mari people had established in Canaan. City states is actually a misleading term – they were in fact fortified Bronze Age hilltop enclosures, from where a regional warlord could dominate the
immediate countryside. To save confusion, the word Hyksos is now generally used to describe all these peoples, but what they actually called themselves is unknown. It is doubtful whether they had anyone name, as they existed as separate tribal groups.

The first of the Hyksos in Egyptian records appear shortly after the collapse of the Mari kingdom. Unlike the previous Semitic traders, these people seem to have been settling in the country. A text dating from around 1745
BC
, for instance, in the reign of the pharaoh Sobekhotep III (now in the Brooklyn Museum), contains a list of seventy-nine household servants, of which forty-five seem to be Hyksos. Over the next half century, increasing numbers of Hyksos continued to settle in the Nile Delta, where the authority of the ailing Middle Kingdom pharaohs was weak, and within a further fifty years they had set up their own rival kingdom in the area. For the next century, the Hyksos would rule northern Egypt. According to Manetho, writing in the late fourth century
BC
, the Hyksos came to power through a fierce and bloody invasion, but modern scholars tend to discount the invasion theory in favour of a steady build-up of power from within.

Were the Hebrews the Hyksos? Or at least one of the tribes which the Hyksos comprised? It certainly appears to sit with the story of Jacob's family settling in Egypt, attaining an exalted position and ultimately growing in number. According to Exodus 1:7, 'The children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.' Then in verse 9, the pharaoh says to his people: 'Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we.' There is only one historical period when any Semites were so mighty and numerous within the boarders of ancient Egypt, and that was during the Hyksos era. Perhaps the family of Jacob represent an influential Hyksos tribe
of this time. The words used by the pharaoh in verse 9 appear to suggest just this: he refers to the threat coming from the
people
of the children of Israel, seemingly implying that the Israelites were part of a larger group over which they held sway.

The Bible tells us that Joseph was appointed the pharaoh's grand vizier. It is certainly feasible, indeed almost certain, that the Hyksos rulers of northern Egypt appointed as their chief ministers those of Canaanite extraction – after all, they were from Canaan themselves. It is also a period from which few records survive, meaning that someone like Joseph could have gone unrecorded. The story would further sit with the Genesis account, as the Hyksos rulers did see themselves as pharaohs. (Although the term pharaoh did not emerge until the New Kingdom, the word is generally used to refer to a specifically Egyptian style of king.) According to Manetho, the Hyksos not only ruled Lower Egypt, they emulated the Egyptians and established their own pharaonic dynasty. This is demonstrated by archaeological evidence which has unearthed their royal palace.

The Hyksos kings established their capital in the Nile Delta at the city of Avaris where, Manetho tells us, they installed a garrison of 240,000 men. Until recently Avaris was thought to have been the Egyptian city of Tanis, near the modern fishing village of San el-Hagar. Today, however, Egyptologists have identified it as a site thirty kilometres to the south, at Tell-el-Daba. Recent excavations by the Austrian archaeologist Dr Manfred Bietak, of Vienna University, have revealed four distinct levels, three of them certainly levels of occupation: a Middle Kingdom layer; a layer that is distinctly Semitic and culturally associated with Canaan, dating from around 1650 to 1550
BC
; a period of abandonment and relative inactivity; and a level of extensive rebuilding from around 1300
BC
. The ruins
and artefacts unearthed at Tell-el-Daba clearly demonstrate that the Hyksos rulers lived as Egyptian-style kings and not as the 'desert princes' they had once been. These must have been the five so-called fifteenth-dynasty kings of Lower Egypt mentioned by Manetho, and the two mysterious sixteenth-dynasty pharaohs, also seemingly of Hyksos origin, whose names have been found on scarabs discovered in both Egypt and Palestine. These dynasties co-existed with the seventeenth dynasty of the Egyptians proper in Thebes: the Theban princes who continued to rule unoccupied Upper Egypt.