h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Egyptian boats, even today throughout the Red and
Arabian Sea areas, boats were/are woven from reeds.

It's possibly a question of just how big that 'basket'
was or how someone living in a far-off desert might
not have a word to translate boat.

It is not surprising that the daughters of Egyptians
went down to the shore to welcome visiting sailors
and ended up with babies.


~jwf~

Hmmm...

Israel had a coastline, and a couple of big lakes. They could probably tell the difference between a boat and a basket

Noggin

Modern Israel perhaps, but back then it was all Palestine.
The Israelites were inland and spent a lot time wandering the desert.
But let's say they wrote all that Exodus stuff down in the years just
after leaving Egypt - it woulda been a full generation or two since
they'd seen the Nile. And then of course during the Babylon days
they certainly had access to the river - but again we're talking
about big reed baskets for boats.

Also, consider the possibility that the misinterpretation of reed boat
to woven basket may have occurred even later, possibly in Europe
by someone translating Arabic into Latin.

Just saying... cuz it's a major story in our culture innit. And we oughta
see it from every possible angle - after all the suggestion is probably
as plausible as Egyptian Royalty picking trash outa the river.


~jwf~

Why build a miniature reed boat if a reed basket would suffice?

I didn't say it was miniature boat.
I suggested it was a boat full of sailors
and they came ashore and gave Egypt's daughters
babies. You know where babies come from right?

Egypt often took foreign princesses in marriage
in its many diplomatic treaties. But they never
allowed Egyptian princesses to be sent off to
forrin lands as peace offerings. So if a Jew
was raised in the Palace by an Egyptian princess
you can bet they didn't wanna talk about it and
probably told him he had been found 'drifting'.

~jwf~

Hi SA,

>Sargon and Moses were semites.
>Sargon founded a Mesopotamian Empire ... Moses "founded" a "Canaanite" empire.
>Sargon founded the Akkadian Dynasty ... Moses "founded" a "Hebrew" Dynasty.

>Any thoughts? Would Biblical Moses have been partly based on / inspired from Sargon?

I would have to say that that's a pretty tenuous link. (Sorry.) Semites covers a pretty wide range of peoples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Semitic_peoples

So, lacking any other connection, this is a little like saying that Julius Caesar was a European who founded and Empire and a Dynasty, and Alexander the Great was also a European who founded an Empire and a Dynasty, so perhaps there is a link between them?

The link between Moses and Sargon, of course, is the basket of reeds... but this I would imagine is another example of a Babylonian story that got worked into the Bible (which, I contend, was written around a century afer the rtext you refer to, and in the same rough location).


>Sargon was said to have lived during the 23rd – 22nd century yet a 7th century BCE neo-Assyrian text purporting to be Sargon's autobiography has been found. That's one heck of a memory of a distant "historical" figure.

Well... that would suggest that the 7th century text is pretty unreliable, at least as a factual history. But as noted above, it does suggest a link between the recently-written Sargon *story* and the soon-to-be-written Moses story.


>The Sumerian Kings list has a preflood and post flood (first dynasty Kish) genealogy ... .
There is step change between the reign lengths of the pre and post flood rulers. Could be associated with the

>Any thoughts?

Assuming the missing text is something to do with pre-Flood Biblical characters living longer.

Actually, this is something of a misnomer. Although Biblical lifespans start out long (900+ years) and get shorter, there is no clear division at the time of the Flood:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/topics/lifespans.html

This is also a problem for 'translation error' theories - there ought to be a sudden jump between 'miscalculated' and 'real' ages that just isn't there. I prefer a simpler theory - the Hebrews just thought that ancient people lived for longer. This sort of idealisation (or even outright worship) of ancestors is almost universal - until a couple of hundred years ago, most Westerners thought the Ancient Greeks (or Atlanteans ) were the most sophisticated people who had ever lived, the narrative of 'continuous advancement of the human species' is a relatively new concept.

The Biblical authors wrote that more ancient people lived for longer because they believed more ancient people lived for longer.

Gif

So we've all heard that Dawkins and the 'new atheists' have failed... turns out the facts are not so straightforward:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19262884

Gif

<< Semites covers a pretty wide range of peoples: >> (Giford)

Oddly enough, this was exactly what I said in an earlier discussion of ours, when I pointed out that the assumption that the 13th dynasty Semites of Avaris/Pi_Rameses and the 14th dynasty Hyksos Semites at the same location were the same people, on the grounds that both were Semitic, was not strong enough to justify ignoring the written records (including an eyewitness account) stating that the Hyksos were invaders immediately following the end of the 13th dynasty, you gave that notion pretty short shrift. But if they're not the same the situation of a Semitic people in the eastern delta of Egypt disappearing during the great disaster at the end of the 13th dynasty does look like a possible precursor for the Exodus story (although as I said we have no extra-biblical confirmation for the existence of Moses).

That aside I generally agree with your last posts, though having failed to find the 7th century Sargon text, I wonder if this has something to do with Sargon II, the Assyrian king of the end of the 8th century, rather than Sargon of Akkad, whose story can certainly be found in earlier texts than this.

Noggin

<>

This is interesting. Colin Tudge's rather excellent 'The Day Before Yesterday' (a kind of ecological history of human evolution, *very* broadly) thinks this kind of belief might a relic of the much better life people had pre-agriculture. A kind of folk-memory of a less harsh life. Dunno how accurate that may be (and nobody else does either), but I like the idea.

And as for all the (global) flood stories, well, there was a global flood about 10,000 years ago, when the last ice age ended.

Hi Nog,

Yes, I know that was where we had got to in the Velikovsky thread. I know I haven't replied to you at length for ages, despite our obvious shared interest and your repeated bumping, and unfortunately there is not much chance of me doing so in the near future - I just don't have the time to do the kind of in-depth fact-checking that that discussion requires. (Which is a shame, because I was really enjoying it and learning things, and it was an all-too-rare example of a genuinely friendly online debate, or at least I thought so.)

For the record, I never argued that the two groups were the same simply because they were Semitic. I argued that they were the same because they were both described as 'Hyksos', which is a much more specific sub-group of the Semites. I know you disputed that, and claimed that only one of the groups is near-contemporaneously described as 'Hyksos' and I know I never responded properly on that point, and I accept in principle that if one of the groups is not identified as 'Hyksos', merely as 'Semites', that makes the identification considerably less certain. So I don't think there's any inconsistency in my positions there and here - a potential error, if I am wrong, but of course that is pretty much an oxymoron!

But as I said, I do not have time at present to check this in detail, so I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to engage with you on this at present; the purpose of spinning the discussion off into another thread as so as not to clutter up this one, let's not merge the two back in now!

Gif

Fair enough.

But before I sign off on this, the article which gave you the impression that the 12th/13th dynasty Semites at Avaris were Hyksos was this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos . The inscription referred to, however (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beni_Hasan under Khnumhotep II), refers only to Amu, not Hyksos, so the identity is not confirmed. Josephus/Manetho and Ipùwer both describe the Hyksos as invaders. Taken at face value that would indicate that the two groups were different, and that the earlier group disappeared from Egypt at the time of the disaster that ended the 13th dynasty.

Since this came up in reference to the origin of the Moses/Exodus story, it seemed reasonable to suggest that the disaster that overwhelmed Egypt at the close of the 13th dynasty, at which time a settled population of Semites at Avaris/Pi-Ramess (the biblical "city of the oppression") disappeared from Egypt, could be an origin for the Biblical story, without bringing up the chronological questions or the extent to which that story may have been embellished at a later date.

Noggin

Very interesting Nog!
What was the disaster? Was it the famines
described in the Old testament? A drought in
the Nile Valley? Followed by flood or some
earthquake/tsunami effect that might also have
created an apparent parting of the Red Sea?


~jwf~

Yes, it is fascinating, isn't it?

The exact nature of the disaster is difficult to pin down. It's not the "famine of biblical proportions", which happened much later, in the time of Ahab. The 3rd century BC Egyptian historian Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, simply describes it as "a blast of God's displeasure", which was followed almost immediately by the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos, a Semitic tribe who ruled the northern part of Egypt in the following period. The Papyrus Ipuwer, dated on linguistic grounds to exactly this same point in time, describes a country in chaos, with the normal social order overturned, crops destroyed, and the River Nile turned to blood (as in the first biblical "plague of Egypt"), followed by the arrival of Asiatic occupiers. At the archaeological site of Tell el-Daba, identified as the site of ancient Avaris, and later also of Pi-Rameses, the "city of oppression" in the bible, and occupied at this time by a Semitic population, hearth burials indicate an excessive number of deaths immediately before the Hyksos period

Perhaps most significantly the contemporary civilisation of Crete also collapsed, with many buildings apparently destroyed by an earthquake. Since the destruction extended as far as Upper Egypt (Ipuwer), there is a significant possibility of a tsunami, which could have affected the northern coast and vulnerable delta region of Egypt. There is more, but it's also more controversial.

Noggin

Yes, or alternatively Santorini might have errupted, throwing the region into a 'nuclear winter' and causing crops to fail.

I note also (again) that Exodus tells of semitic people *leaving* Egypt, not conquering it.

In other words, the only similarity between these two disasters (the one described in the Ipuwer papyrus and the one described in Exodus) is the phrase 'rivers of blood'. And the dates don't match either - the Ipuwer event (though not the papyrus itself) is regarded as being around 300 years older than the traditional date for the Exodus - though of course Nog also rejects the standard dating for Egyptian history, so this will cut no ice with him

Like, I said, don't want to get too drawn into this... I really, really should be getting on with more important things...

Gif

I haven't looked into the matter much, but it seems much of the traditional stories had counterparts / origins in Sumaria - Babylon, which seems to fit in with the idea that the exile and post-exile period was influential in putting pen to papyrus. It much of the OT was written by Judaens - rather than Israelites in the kingdom to the north of Judah, whiched vanished with the Assyrian conquest. Shame that the section detailing the history of the Assyrians went missing from Herodotus' Histories.

The story of the Exodus - the ten plagues, the crossing of the red sea, seems to have no counterpart anywhere else - except some details of Moses seems to have been cribbed from stories/myths circulating around Babylon - which the Babylonians ascribed to Sargon. I wonder whether that library in Alexandria had any interesting information before the Romans ended up destroying it - Julius Caesar and Lucius Aurelianus.

Hi Gif

<>

Well, yes, but whoever suggested otherwise?

As you well know, the Hyksos invasion serves to *date* the disaster (Manetho and Ipuwer). The evidence for the presence of a settled Semitic population in Avaris/Pi-Rameses for some two hundred years *before* the disaster is the archaeology of Tel el-Daba. If the Hyksos invasion is real (and I know this is disputed by some authorities), then the earlier Semites are not Hyksos, and we have no further record of them in Egypt.

We agree, I think, that the Biblical story was most probably written during the Babylonian exile, or possibly the early Persian period, perhaps 550-450BC, though nothing hangs on these dates being precise (and the Moses nativity was probably added to the story at this time, as I said before).

We can also agree that the story appears in the bible as part of a continuous narrative that connects to known historical events (without any comment on the accuracy of the portrayal of the said events), rather than in a "mythological" time, and can consequently be dated internally to around 1450BC (without any comment as to accuracy), nearly a thousand years before it was written down.

It is therefore a fairly surprising coincidence that just 250-300 years earlier than this date (and yes, I do think this absolute date is too early, though we can agree that relatively it was the end of the 13th dynasty and Middle Kingdom) Egypt was indeed devastated by some disaster, which is known to be contemporary with the end of Middle Minoan II on Crete, again in some form of disaster. It is an even more surprising coincidence to find a settled Semitic population in the right place in Egypt, who on a reasonable (though not unequivocal) interpretation of the Egyptian evidence, left the country at the time of the disaster.

The "weak" hypothesis that I've confined myself to on this thread is that it seems unlikely that the two stories are entirely unconnected, and that the historical event is at least the "seed" of the biblical account.

There does seem to have been an invasion of
'sea people' into the middle east somewhere
around 1300BC. It was speculated that these
barbarous peoples were refugees displaced
from the western Mediterranean following
the same cataclysmic volcanic/tsunami event
that destroyed Minoa, Crete and the coastal
ports of Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

At least that was the theory proposed on a
recent TV series to explain the fall of so
many early civilisations.

~jwf~

That's more or less right, according to the standard view.

The only extant reference to the "Peoples of the Sea" actually dates to around 1170BC, and is from the mortuary temple of the pharaoh Rameses III at Medinet Habu (although some of the groups listed there, together with a couple of others) also appear on an inscription of the pharaoh Merneptah, a couple of generations earlier). The story goes that a horde of barbarians from the northern Mediterranean, and a people called the Peleset (interpreted as Philistines), attempted to invade Egypt from a base in Canaan, but were defeated and turned back. Nothing definitive is known of where they came from, or where they went afterwards, although a number of cities around the Mediterranean were abandoned or destroyed at this time, and a long "Dark Age" followed in Greece and Anatolia. The migration, if it was such, cannot be connected either to the event that ended Middle Bronze II around 1750-1700BC, or to the eruption of Santorini, also much earlier. In fact, the entire episode recounted by the Egyptians seems to lack both any coherent connection with the histories of other peoples or regions in the Middle East, and any internal coherence with its accepted explanation.

Noggin

Thanks, Nog.
Obviously there's a lot more to it than we
currently can speculate from the remains
unearthed to date. All we can say for certain
is that a lot can happen in a 600 year gap.

Imagine trying to fill in the blanks if we
had no record of the last 600 years or tried
to understand the Rise and Fall of Rome over
a similar span of time based on as few scraps
of evidence as 1800 - 1100 BC provides.

The only thing we may safely assume is that
empires rose and fell, people lived and died
and Mother Nature is a bitch.



~jwf~

Hi Nog,

>As you well know, the Hyksos invasion serves to *date* the disaster (Manetho and Ipuwer). The evidence for the presence of a settled Semitic population in Avaris/Pi-Rameses for some two hundred years *before* the disaster is the archaeology of Tel el-Daba. If the Hyksos invasion is real (and I know this is disputed by some authorities), then the earlier Semites are not Hyksos, and we have no further record of them in Egypt.

So in other words, *if* the Hyksos invasion happened, and *if* it is connected to the Ipuwer disaster, and *if* the Hyksos were Semitic... then we simply assume that the earlier Semitic peoples in Egypt must have been those of the Exodus? It doesn't seem a strong line of argument to me.

>It is therefore a fairly surprising coincidence that just 250-300 years earlier than this date [...] Egypt was indeed devastated by some disaster

On the other hand, Egypt was also devastated by a disaster 400 years later than this date, and 700 years earlier than this date, and on many other occasions. And those are just the ones major enough to disrupt (but not destroy) the Dynastic system.

>It is an even more surprising coincidence to find a settled Semitic population in the right place in Egypt

Again, not particularly. Semites were very common in the region, and several Semitic peoples had been conquered (and presumably enslaved) by the Egyptians by this point. Basically everything east of mid-Sinai (including, for instance, the Assyrians, Babylonians and Chaleans and their descendants) falls into that broad group. The only surprising thing to me would be if the two groups that we know of were the only Semites in Egypt around that time.

>The only extant reference to the "Peoples of the Sea" actually dates to around 1170BC

The only reference by that name - there is clear evidence of a major period of migration at this time (from before 1600 to just after 1200 BC), unlike at the time associated with the 'Exodus' (around .

>The migration [of the 'Sea Peoples'], if it was such, cannot be connected either to the event that ended Middle Bronze II around 1750-1700BC, or to the eruption of Santorini, also much earlier.

Again, I disagree - Wikipedia, for instance, states that:
'Recent examinations of the eruption of the Santorini volcano suggest that it occurred very close (estimated between 1660-1613 BC) to the first appearances of the Sea People in Egypt'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_peoples#Minoan_hypothesis

Gif