Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (28 page)

From Avaris, the Israelites could easily have reached the Manzala causeway within a couple of days of the initial eruption. If a section of the causeway, usually under water, had been exposed by the pre-
tsunami
conditions, then the phenomenon might indeed have saved the Israelites if the Egyptians were in close pursuit. The sea would have been made dry land, as the Bible relates: 'And the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided'. (Exodus 14:21.)

This is an excellent description of what would have happened at the Manzala causeway, with the waters of the Mediterranean having divided from the waters of the Lake Manzala. The pressure drop over the lowering coastal waters of the Mediterranean would even have caused a strong wind to blow from the east over Lake Manzala. The Israelites could have made it safely across and, if the timing was fortuitous, the pursuing soldiers may have been attempting to follow when the
tsunami
hit, washing them all away. 'And the waters returned and covered the chariots, and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.' (Exodus 14:29.)

In every aspect but one – there would not be a wall of water to the left and right as the Bible says – the scenario precisely matches the biblical account of the crossing of the 'Sea of Reeds'.

The plagues alone, being so similar to the effects of Thera,
would be evidence enough that the volcanic eruption was responsible for the Exodus events. That the pillar of cloud and fire, and the parting of the sea also match the Thera effects is all the more compelling. From the scientist's perspective, the Exodus could indeed have happened pretty much as the Bible describes. From the historian's perspective, the unique set of circumstances favoured the Israelites to such a degree that faith in their God endured for generations to come. From the theologian's perspective, such a incredible series of events favouring one group of people is surely beyond coincidence. Whatever way you look at it, if Thera was the cause of the Exodus, then it certainly ranks as one of the most remarkable events ever to have shaped the course of human history. Without it, Judaism might never have developed, nor indeed Christianity – in which case the Western world would be a very different place.

Let us return to the Egyptians at the time of Thera. From the sheer magnitude of the events and the fear that must have been aroused, it is quite understandable that Amonhotep III should frenziedly erect so many statues to Sekhmet. In the north-east, however, spared the worst horrors of the fallout, the priesthood would almost certainly have considered their god Re responsible for the event: he had punished Thebes for the worship of the god Amun. For some reason Akhenaten allied himself with the cult of Re, which may have been because he too was in north-east Egypt when the eruption occurred. Traditionally, the eldest son of the New Kingdom pharaohs – the heir to the throne – would serve as the governor of Memphis, less than fifty kilometres south of Heliopolis. As governor of Memphis, he would have been responsible for Lower Egypt. It is in this role that he may have actually come to associate the Thera eruption with the Hebrew God.

If the Israelites were escaping from Avaris, it would certainly have been Akhenaten's responsibility to bring them back. Akhenaten, therefore, may have been the very pharaoh who pursued the Israelites. Although he would not have been pharaoh at the time, we have seen how the Exodus account often refers to things by their later names. It is quite possible that they might refer to Akhenaten as pharaoh, even though he did not become king until some time later. (Although the popular movie interpretation of events often has the pharaoh being washed away with his army, the Bible does not make it clear whether he was with them or not. We are merely told that all those who followed the Israelites across the sea perished.)

Akhenaten's adoption of the Hebrews' religious beliefs would therefore be quite understandable. The apparently miraculous circumstances surrounding the Israelite escape may have convinced him that the Hebrew God was responsible. That he initially associated his new god with Re does not contradict this hypothesis. Ancient cultures were forever identifying other people's gods with their own. The Romans, for instance, considered the Greek Zeus to be their Jove, and sky god of the Gauls to be their Mercury. There is no reason for Akhenaten to think differently. It would make sense for him to associate the Hebrew God with the Egyptian Re. He was, after all, the god of the sun, and it was the sun's appearance that had been strangely altered. Re had also spared much of the north where the cult of Re flourished. Akhenaten may, therefore, have converted to the Hebrew God, firstly linking Him with Re, then later, aware that Re did not fit the profile of an invisible and omnipresent deity, represented Him as the Aten.

The Thera eruption is just about the only episode that makes any sense of the otherwise bewildering Amarna period: an event which must surely be linked with the biblical plagues and the
miraculous flight from Egypt. How, therefore, does the dating of the Exodus to around 1360
BC
compare with the traditional dating of the Exodus to the reign of Ramesses II, almost a century later?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Strangers in a Strange Land

For many years biblical scholars have tended to place the Exodus during the early thirteenth century
BC
, some hundred years later than the time that Thera seems to have erupted. This dating is primarily because of the reference in Exodus 1:11, naming the cities where the Israelites were enslaved: 'And they did build for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.' The city of Raamses is generally accepted to have been a reference to the city of Pi-Ramesses – meaning 'The Domain of Ramesses' – which was built during the reigns of the first three kings of the nineteenth dynasty. Like Amarna, it was basically two cities in one – an administrative centre and a palace and suburban district. Pithom, therefore, may also be referring to a part of the same city. Work on Pi-Ramesses actually seems to have started in the reign of Ramesses I, the first pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty, around 1307
BC
. Horemheb had been the last eighteenth-dynasty king who, during his thirty-year reign, had purged the country of undesirable elements, such as the Atenists, and restabilized the nation under a virtual military dictatorship. Like his four predecessors, he had no male heir to succeed him, and so his general, the 'Vizier and Troop Commander' Ramesses, became the new king – Ramesses I. This time there were no royal princesses to marry and so a completely new dynasty emerged. To signal a break with the past, the new king decided to move his capital from Thebes to the old Hyksos capital at Avaris, in the north-east Delta of Lower Egypt, and there construction on the new city of Pi-Ramesses began.

Ramesses I only lived for some two years as king and also died without an heir. Ramesses' chief general, Seti, therefore succeeded him as pharaoh. Seti broke completely with tradition and married a commoner named Tuya, the daughter of a humble junior officer. This seems to have been a wise move, for it broke an hereditary bane that had afflicted six pharaohs, not one of them having produced a male heir for over half a century. Although Tuya's first boy died in infancy, the second, also called Ramesses, lived to become Ramesses II.

Ramesses II came to the throne around the age of twenty-five and soon earned his title, 'Ramesses the Great'. He reigned for a remarkable sixty-seven years, making him one of the oldest men recorded in Egyptian history. During his reign he did everything on a gigantic scale, and even exceeded the building projects of Amonhotep III. He added to the great temples of Karnak and Luxor and built one of his own at nearby Abydos. All over the empire he erected monuments that in some ways rival the architectural achievements of the Old Kingdom. In Nubia, for instance, at Abu Simbel, he built the so-called Great Temple. Well deserving its name, it is a remarkable piece of engineering, even by today's standards: a huge artificial cave cut into a mountain, some 60 metres deep and 40 metres high. Inside the vast excavated dome are a series of temples, and outside the imposing entrance is flanked by four 18-metre-high statues of the king, hewn from solid rock.

These remarkable building projects required a vast labour force. On the west bank of the Nile, at Thebes, Ramesses
constructed a massive mortuary temple called the Ramesseum, and inscriptions from a nearby quarry reveal that 3,000 workers were employed in the cutting of its stone alone. This must have been a tiny portion of the complete work force necessary to erect the temple which, by Ramesses' standards, was a modest undertaking. When we consider that the entire army, as described on the south wall of the Hypostyle Hall at the Ramesseum, only numbered some 20,000 men, we can gather that large numbers of conscript workers were needed – and many of them would have been foreign captives. The majority of these would have been used in the construction of the new city of Pi-Ramesses which, when completed, became the wonder of its age. It was here, it is argued, that the Hebrews were used as slaves.

Apart from the name of the city being mentioned in the Exodus account (which we shall examine shortly), the advocates of a Ramesses II Exodus also draw attention to references to the
Apiru
at this time. As we have seen in Chapter Eight, the
Apiru
were used in construction gangs, and are recorded making bricks in Fayum and erecting a pylon at Memphis during the reign of Ramesses II. In Exodus 1:14, this is exactly what the Hebrews are made to do: 'And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick.'

If these
Apiru
are the Hebrews, which they certainly seem to be, then their presence in Egypt at this time does not necessarily imply that the Exodus had not yet occurred. They may have been recaptured during Ramesses' fierce campaigning in the early part of his reign. In his fifth regnal year, around 1287
BC
, Ramesses assembled one of the greatest war machines the country had ever seen – around 20,000 soldiers – for an all-out offensive against the hated Hittites. Following in the footsteps of Tuthmosis III, some 200 years earlier, Ramesses moved north
through Canaan and up the Gaza Strip, so as to attack the Hittites in their Syrian strongholds. However, he had not banked on the Hittites' similar resolve to crush the Egyptians: they had assembled an even bigger army, a staggering 40,000 strong. Remarkably, Ramesses managed to survive the conflict with his army intact, neither side gaining the advantage. For the next fifteen years there were repeated battles between the Hittites and the Egyptians with no one getting the upper hand. Eventually, both sides agreed on a ceasefire. The consequence of all this fighting was that Ramesses was continually' storming through Canaan, often returning with Hyksos captives to be used to support the war effort. A number of Israelites could easily have been among them.

There are, in fact,
Apiru
captives in Egypt a century later, working for the twentieth-dynasty pharaoh Ramesses III, both as attendants at the Atum temple at Heliopolis and elsewhere as quarry workers (see Chapter Eight). This is around 1180
BC
, well after the Exodus must have occurred. We know from the Israel Stela that the Israelites had established some kind of kingdom in Canaan by the reign of Merenptah, some thirty years earlier. If these
Apiru
had been recaptured, then so equally could those referred to in the reign of Ramesses II. In fact, one the
Apiru
references actually shows that they were already in Canaan a few years before Ramesses' time. In the reign of Seti I, around 1300
BC
, they are recorded as having been involved in a revolt at Beisham in Palestine (see Chapter Eight). Seti I had initiated the conflict with the Hittites which, although not on the scale as his son's campaigns, did necessitate repeated excursions along the Canaan coast. During such forays, he may well have become embroiled in skirmishes with the Israelites.

The Exodus narrative can be somewhat misleading from an
historical perspective, as it gives the impression that the Israelites experienced no immediate trouble from the Egyptians after they had settled in Canaan. Historically, although their main foes would have been the native Canaanites and the marauding Philistines, as the Bible relates, they would also have been stuck in the middle of an ongoing war between the two biggest empires of the day – Egypt and the Hittites. Although usually out of harm's way in their hilltop fortifications, they would have been no match for either side should they decide it was to their advantage to occupy their encampments.

The references to the
Apiru
in Egypt during the reign of Ramesses II, therefore, cannot be taken as evidence that the Exodus had not yet occurred. On the contrary, the Seti reference appears to show that it had already taken place some years before Ramesses II's reign.

We move, therefore, to the principle arguments for placing the Exodus in the early nineteenth dynasty. Firstly, that Ramesses II was the chief architect of the city that the Hebrews were forced to build. Secondly, that Eastern Delta was named the Land of Ramesses at this time, and Exodus 12:37 refers to it by this name as the starting point of the Exodus: 'And the children of Israel journeyed from Ramesses to Succoth . . .'

It would therefore
seem
fairly straightforward that the Exodus occurred during the reign of Ramesses II. However, we must remember how the Pentateuch often use later names for locations, and not always those contemporary with the events being described. In this particular instance, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Bible is using a later name for the area. The Old Testament actually refers to the area around Avaris as Ramesses when it speaks of a period hundreds of years before Ramesses II was born. In Genesis 47:11, Ramesses is the name given for the land where the Israelites are allowed to settle
on their arrival in Egypt. 'And Joseph placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Ramesses . . .'

As we have seen, this is hundreds of years before the time of Ramesses II, during the Hyksos era (see Chapter Eight) – even the Bible tells us that this was over four centuries before the Exodus (Exodus 12:40). As Genesis calls the Eastern Delta the land of Ramesses when referring to a time well before it was actually called by that name, the same could equally be true of the Ramesses references in connection with Goshen and the city of Avaris in the Exodus account.

Independent reigns of the 18th- and early 19th-dynastypharaohs

Neither the references to the
Apiru
in Egypt nor the biblical allusions to Ramesses can therefore be taken as a case for placing the Exodus in the reign of Ramesses II, or during the reigns of his immediate nineteenth-dynasty predecessors. So is there
any
historical evidence to tell us when the Exodus took place?

Dr Manfred Bietak's excavations of ancient Avaris (see Chapter Eight) revealed four distinct levels of occupation: a Middle Kingdom layer; a Hyksos layer, dating from around 1650–1550
BC
; a period of abandonment and relative inactivity; and a level of extensive rebuilding from around 1300
BC
– the period of Ramesses I, Seti I and Ramesses II. It has been suggested that between the expulsion of the Hyksos and the rebuilding by these first nineteenth-dynasty kings, the city was completely abandoned. However, although it may not have been a major centre, this clearly was not the case. The reason why these kings – principally Ramesses II – decided to build their new city at Avaris, rather than anywhere else, is that it seems to have been their family home. Horemheb's regime had succeeded in dislodging the old ruling elite, and replaced them with army officers. For three decades, the country had been run by something approaching a military junta. Like most of Horemheb's senior officials, Ramesses I had been a professional soldier. Ramesses I's tomb was found by Belzoni in the Valley of the Kings in 1817, and hieroglyphic inscriptions from its modest decorations reveal that the pharaoh had been
the son of a troop commander, Seti, who had been stationed at Avaris. Accordingly, Avaris
must
have been occupied to some extent.

It would seem as though Ramesses I was somehow related to his successor, Seti I, as his father bears the same name. Besides which, the military elite were trying to establish a new dynasty, and for Seti to have been accepted as pharaoh, he must have had some family connection to his predecessor. Accordingly, all three pharaohs probably had family links with Avaris. The most likely conclusion is that Avaris had been a garrison town. As it was the nearest large settlement to the major trade route – or potential invasion route – into Egypt at the time (the Ballah–Timsah crossing), it would make sense for it to have housed a military barracks. In any age, whenever you have a important military base, a town grows up around it. Exactly such a thing happened in Roman times, with many of Europe's largest cities having begun life as a fort of the Roman army. It is, at present, impossible to tell from the excavations at Avaris when such an occupation may have begun, as so little of the site remains. However, one particular Egyptian reference to the town does survive which suggests that it was reoccupied during the time of Amonhotep III.