Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (29 page)

The account appears in Manetho's
Aegyptiaca,
in the third century
BC
, which was reproduced in the work of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus around
AD
70. According to Manetho, a king named Amonhotep was advised by one of his officials, a man also called Amonhotep, to purge the country of 'undesirables' and set them to work in the stone quarries. After many miserable years in bondage, the king grew sorry for the wretched slaves and allowed them to live in their 'ancestral home' at Avaris. However, although they lived in better conditions, they still remained as slaves. In Avaris, the slaves were joined by a
priest from Heliopolis, who had himself abandoned the Egyptian ways, and preached to them not worship the gods of Egypt. Ultimately, the priest decided to free them from captivity by training them to fight the Egyptians. He sent an emissary to the 'shepherds who had been expelled by Tuthmosis' asking for their help. 200,000 men apparently responded, and eventually they all manage to leave Egypt.

This was obviously a legendary account that the Grecian Manetho had heard from some native Egyptians. However, it seems to contain certain elements of truth. The only king called Amonhotep who also had a chief minister of the same name is Amonhotep III. In Amonhotep III's reign, a certain Amonhotep, son of Hapu, was the master of works .responsible for the country's labour force. He oversaw the conscription of site workers and the allocation of foreign captives for quarrying, transportation and building. He also filled the post of 'Scribe of the Elite Troops', making him responsible for army recruitment. In short, Amonhotep, son of Hapu, was responsible for the country's entire work force. Such a man would be responsible for conscripting quarry workers, just as the story relates.

In essence, therefore, there is no reason to doubt the account. If it is true, then it not only demonstrates that Avaris was occupied during the reign of Amonhotep III, but it shows that slaves were employed there. Might they have been the Israelites?

The 'shepherds who had been expelled by Tuthmosis' are quite clearly the Hyksos, as elsewhere in his works Manetho describes them as the 'Shepherd Princes'. The 'undesirables' must have been related to them in some way: not only do the Hyksos come to their aid, but Avaris – once the Hyksos capital
– is said to be their 'ancestral home'. As the Israelites do appear to have been an important Hyksos faction (see Chapter Eight), Manetho's account is the nearest thing we have to an historical report of the Hebrew bondage in Egypt outside the Bible. Moreover, as the 'undesirables' rebel and ultimately leave the country, it may also be an allusion to the Exodus itself. It is possible that the story arose to cover the humiliating truth. The Israelites had escaped in large numbers, and later made it an issue of propaganda: the Egyptians countered by claiming that 200,000 Hyksos had actually helped them. This is blatantly an unrealistic figure, as the greatest army that Egypt ever assembled numbered only 20,000 men.

We turn finally to the archaeological evidence. Can this tell us when the Exodus occurred? The first archaeological signs of an identifiable Israelite presence in Palestine appear around the early-to-mid thirteenth century
BC
, and from the distinctive style of Mycenaean pottery found on the site, we know that Hazor had fallen to the Israelites around 1250
BC
, give or take thirty years (see Chapter Eight). According to the Bible, the Israelites were in the wilderness for forty years before they arrived in Canaan, which, if based on any historical truth, would place the Exodus somewhere between 1340 and 1290
BC
. However, the latest radiocarbon tests to date the fall of Jericho may provide a somewhat earlier date.

In 1952, when Kathleen Kenyon excavated the site of ancient Jericho, she concluded that the city was destroyed by fire around 1500
BC
– much too early to have been the work of the Israelites. However, the recent radiocarbon tests, at the Centre for Isotope Research at Groningen University in Holland, have determined a much later date for the destruction. In July 1996, Hendrik J Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht published their findings in
the journal
Nature
(see Chapter Nine), after they had dated ancient cereal grains found in the burned layer of the citadel excavation. (The samples had actually been excavated by Kathleen Kenyon herself in the 1950s.) Caution is called for with regards radiocarbon dating, due to the margins of error involved (see Chapter Nine). In this case, however, six separate sets of samples were tested, providing dates spanning a period of 150 years. The dates arrived at were: 1316, 1292, 1335, 1316, 1244 and 1397, giving a central date of 1315
BC
. This would actually fit with the Biblical account.

According to the Bible, the Israelite conquest of Canaan began with the fall of Jericho and was followed by a lengthy campaign, as a number of city states were taken in succession, culminating in the fall of Hazor. In the fifteenth century
BC
, Tuthmosis III also conquered Canaan, and we can use his campaign as a comparison to arrive at a plausible chronology. We know from inscriptions on the Seventh Pylon at Karnak, that in the Year 42 of his reign Tuthmosis completed the conquest by capturing Kadesh. He did not come to the throne in his own right until his mother, Hatshepsut, died in his ninth regnal year, and the campaign did not start until this time. His conquest of Canaan therefore took around thirty-three years. Taking into account that the city states were far less formidable by the period Joshua was campaigning, with a lesser, but growing army of Hyksos recruits, it may have been possible for him to have completed the conquest in about the same time. Consequently, if the Israelite campaign started with the fall of Jericho around 1315
BC
, the conquest may have been completed around 1280
BC
, a date which falls within the parameters of the dating of Hazor's fall.

As the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan fits so well into the archaeological chronology, then perhaps the forty
years in the wilderness also reflects an historical framework. Based on these findings, forty years earlier than Jericho's fall places the Exodus around 1355
BC
. When we allow for a certain margin of error, this makes an Exodus in the 1360s
BC
, in the reign of Amonhotep III, a very real possibility.

Let us, therefore, summarize the historical and archaeological evidence available. Give or take ten or twenty years, these are the historical events as best we know them:

• Circa
  1315
  BC
  : The burning of Jericho.
  
• Circa
  1300–1250
  BC
  : Earliest archaeological evidence for Israelites in Palestine.
  
• Circa
  1300
  BC
  :
  Apiru
  involved in a revolt in Palestine.
  
• Circa
  1250
  BC
  : The burning of Hazor.
  
• Circa
  1220
  BC
  : Israel Stela reveals that the Israelites had established some kind of state in Canaan.
  

This completely tallies with the biblical account: the Israelite conquest of Canaan, starting with Jericho, which was razed to the ground, and finishing, after a lengthy campaign, with the burning of Hazar. The Bible also tells us that the Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness before they took Jericho. Because of the remarkable accuracy so far, we might assume that the Bible is also right on this point. If so, then the Exodus would have taken place around 1355
BC
, give or take ten or twenty years either way.

Let us now look at what the historical and archaeological evidence tells us concerning events in the 1360s
BC
– a time which, based on the above chronology, falls well within the margin of error for the date of the Exodus:

• Circa
  1360
  BC
  : Egypt is at the height of her power. The pharaoh Amonhotep III is firmly entrenched as absolute ruler. The God Amun-Re is unquestioned as supreme deity.
  
• Amonhotep suddenly behaves strangely, makes Sekhmet – the goddess of devastation – chief goddess and erects more statues to her than any other god in Egypt's history. Soon after, he hands over complete authority to his son Akhenaten.
  
• Akhenaten abandons two thousand years of tradition, denies the existence of all the old gods, and establishes the previously obscure Aten – which is not actually a god at all – as a universal and omnipresent deity. There is no evidence of dissention.
  
• Akhenaten's new religion is almost identical to the Hebrew religion.
  

According to the Bible, the Exodus occurred after God had afflicted Egypt with a series of dreadful plagues. The terrifying events left the country devastated and demonstrated to the Egyptians the power of their God. From what we see above, it is quite clear that around 1365
BC
something frightening and devastating had challenged the nation's beliefs. Moreover, it seems to have had something to do with the Hebrews. Remarkably, even without the inclusion of the Thera eruption, everything fits with the Exodus having happened at this time.

The latest scientific evidence, from both the ice core samples and the independent radiocarbon tests, does show that Thera erupted in the early fourteenth century
BC
. Not everyone, however, would agree with this date. Even at the present time
of writing, scientists are disagreeing by hundreds of years: some placing the eruption as early as the seventeenth century
BC
, others as late as the twelfth century
BC
(see Chapter Nine). It is the same with archaeologists: some, having found traces of pumice in Egyptian ruins dating from the period of Tuthmosis III, have suggested that Thera erupted in the fifteenth century
BC
; while others, having found similar pumice in the Avaris region dating from the Hyksos period, have suggested that the eruption occurred in the eighteenth century
BC
.

The confusion may well be due to a number of lesser eruptions of what was an extremely active volcano. A decade before the
Vema
survey of 1956, a Swedish survey ship called the
Albatross
conducted an analysis of the eastern Mediterranean, taking core samples from the seabed. These marine geologists discovered evidence of an earlier Thera eruption than the one uncovered by Ninkovich and Heezen, the fallout from which had drifted further to the north. The
Vema
itself found evidence of a third, and possibly a fourth, dating back some 25,000 years. The
Albatross
eruption has not been dated, but all these findings clearly demonstrate that Thera had erupted on a number of occasions with enough force to cover vast areas of the Mediterranean seabed with ash. Indeed, Thera is still active today, and last erupted on 26 June 1926. Although a minor event compared to the ancient eruptions, it was of sufficient magnitude for its accompanying tremors to destroy over 2,000 houses on the island itself and a further 50 on neighbouring Crete, with considerable damage to a further 300. There was only ever one massive
explosion,
however: the one with sufficient magnitude to have been responsible for the plagues described in Exodus.

Datable archaeological evidence from outside Egypt which does suggest that the big one happened around 1365
BC
comes
from the Mitannian city of Ugarit, an ancient port on the coast of Syria, some twelve kilometres north of modern Latakia. Excavations conducted on the site since the 1930s have shown that a massive tidal wave washed away half the city sometime between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries
BC
. By a remarkable stroke of luck, this event can be dated to within a few years of the Amarna period in Egypt. One of the Amarna letters sent to Akhenaten by King Abimilki of Tyre, talks of the king's horror on visiting Ugarit to find the population gone and half the city washed away into the sea. Some massive seismic activity must therefore have been responsible for the destruction either during – or shortly before – Akhenaten's reign.

The debate will no doubt continue. It is a virtual certainty, however, that Egypt
was
subjected to the devastating effects of the massive Thera eruption: the only question is when? From the widest scientific perspective, the independent ice core studies and separate radiocarbon tests show that Thera erupted in the early fourteenth century
BC
. From the historical perspective, the eruption of Thera around 1365
BC
is just about the only event that makes any sense of the otherwise bewildering Amarna period. From the archaeological perspective, if the Exodus did occur, then it had to have happened around 1365
BC
, and the Thera eruption is about the only natural phenomenon that could have caused the events the Bible describes. We can say with a high degree of confidence, therefore, that the eruption was responsible for both the sudden rise of Atenism and the Exodus plagues; and, as such, explains why Akhenaten seems to have been influenced by the Hebrew religion.

The next question concerns a Hebrew presence in Egypt during Akhenaten's reign. Realistically, it seems unlikely that all the Israelite slaves in Goshen at the time would have left when their fellow countrymen escaped. As Akhenaten had essentially
embraced the Israelites' religious ideas, would not some of them have freely remained behind in the new Egypt?