I have been a stranger in a strange land. Exodus, The Bible The strength of the cliché “Christ the King”, according to the London-based Egyptian author Ahmed Osman, lies in the fact that kings in ancient Egypt were not crowned in the manner of modern European monarchs, but rather anointed with crocodile oil, the symbol of royal majesty. In much the same vein, the author argues that Moses was an ancient Egyptian monarch, or pharaoh, deposed by the high priests and courtiers of the eighteenth-century New Kingdom, persecuted and forced to flee into exile with his followers to the desolate wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. This sounds faintly heretical. The drama of the biblical story is powerful, but it is not as arresting as Akhenaten's mysterious monotheistic religion and his disappearing act. Akhenaten's vision still dominates the Amarna landscape in Middle Egypt, to the south of the sleepy provincial city of Minya. The melancholic mood of monotheistic politics predominates. Osman's kaleidoscopic points of view are intriguing. No doubt, telling the story of Moses through an ancient Egyptian perspective has its limitations, but Osman is undeterred. He explores topography, geography, archaeology, religion, plenitude and denial, with Moses as his constant muse. Many Egyptologists find Osman's theories provocative. A personal friend and a most compelling mind, Osman presented me with his latest seminal study, ironically a rather slim volume. His notions of biblical prophets such as Moses and Old Testament Joseph are certainly unconventional and even offensive to devout Christians. Many Muslims, too, have their reservations about Osman's conclusions. And so do most Jews. Jews, Christians and Muslims are generally vehemently opposed to Osman's views on religious grounds. Egyptologists, too, by and large, summarily dismiss him as an unscientific amateur. With the notable exception of Sigmund Freud, who first inspired Osman, many mainstream monotheists or those raised in the monotheistic traditions reject the notion of Moses as the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, the first monotheist ruler in recorded history. As such, it is safe to classify Osman as Freudian. “Religion, [Freud] believed, was only necessary for the development of earlier civilizations, to help people restrain their violent impulses, which can now be set aside in favour of reason and science,” Osman contends. Freud published Moses and Monotheism in March 1939, a few months before his death in September of that year. He had reluctantly fled his beloved Vienna to London at the insistence of his friends. Virulent anti-Semitism was on the rise in his native Austria and his daughter Anna had been detained by the Gestapo. Many Jewish intellectuals, and especially Zionists, strongly objected to Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Abraham Yehuda, the American Jewish theologian and philologist, visited Freud at his Hampstead, North London, home and begged him not to publish the book, a veritable bombshell. The Zionist Emmanuel Velikosvsky wrote Worlds in Collision precisely to refute Freud's theory that Moses and Akhenaten were one and the same historical figure. Osman also faced harsh criticism from fellow Muslims for championing Freud's viewpoint. During his adolescence, Osman was a student of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna. And, in his own words, he came to be a “moralistic firebrand.” Later, Osman turned to communism. Osman metamorphosed into a free-thinking secularist. “Contrary to the Brothers, with the communists there was no need to die a martyr's death to gain entrance to paradise,” Osman observes. Nevertheless, even secularists in the Muslim world, are inimical to the very notion that Moses and Akhenaten are the same person. Before Moses there was Joseph, the Old Testament's Joseph of the multicoloured cloak, the apple of his father's eye. Osman believes that Joseph is the ancient Egyptian courtier Yuya. Osman asked then Egyptian minister of culture Farouk Hosni to allow him to conduct a DNA test on Yuya's mummy. Hosni promptly refused his request. Osman told the minister that if Yuya's genes proved to be similar to Upper Egyptians, then he would accept that his claim that Yuya was Joseph is wrong. The minister's reply was blunt. He explained that even if Yuya's genes proved to be non-Egyptian, he could not accept Osman's conclusions as this would create a political problem with Israel. The former head of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, agreed with Hosni. “How can one of our pharaohs have a mixed Jewish blood?” a visibly agitated Hawass told Osman. Osman countered: “Our Prophet [Mohamed] was a descendant of Abraham, the great ancestor of the Israelites.” Be that as it may, Yuya's mummy, and in particular his prominently hooked nose, is so untypically Upper Egyptian. Evidently, Yuya has typical Semitic features. Osman's provocative work, Stranger in the Valley of the Kings: The Identification of Yuya as the Patriarch Joseph, was considered by Hawass and his colleagues as a “Zionist cultural plot to give Egyptian pharaohs a Hebrew ancestry.” So was Yuya — “Bearer of the Ring of the King of Lower Egypt” and “Seal-Bearer of the King of Lower Egypt” — actually Joseph? Note that Yuya's two titles indicate that he was inextricably associated with Lower Egypt, or the Nile Delta, the geographical area historically chronicled as the territory swamped by “Asiatics”, Hyksos in ancient Egyptian records and Hebrews in the Bible. The thesis that Yuya is Joseph is key to the understanding of whether Moses was Akhenaten. So was Yuya Joseph? The trickier question is whether Moses was indeed a historical figure, and as Osman insists, was Akhenaten himself. This fascinating premise is seen as a heretical outrage by devout Jews, Christians and Muslims. In the case of Muslims, the respective arguments of Osman and Freud are not only tantamount to blasphemy but also have political inferences. Osman's brush with Hawass is most revealing. “Hawass rejected my argument about Akhenaten and Moses, refusing to accept that Akhenaten had mixed Egyptian-Israelite blood, which for him was taboo,” Osman explained. “When I reminded him that, like Moses, Akhenaten's body has not been found, Hawass decided to prove me wrong by finding the mummy of Akhenaten,” the author added. “The debate about the ownership of tomb KV55 [discovered in January 1907] has rumbled on for a whole century, and is still going on. It was Cyril Aldred, the Scottish Egyptologist, who insisted that the skeletal remains of KV55 belonged to Akhenaten.” Osman is inclined to believe that the remains found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings, Upper Egypt, belong to Semenkhkare, a mysterious, short-lived pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Amarna Period) of whom very little is known. “The age of skeletal remains in KV55 was key to the mystery. Since its discovery, almost all examinations of the skeleton showed that it belonged to a young man in his early twenties,” Osman notes. The sheer precision and meticulousness of the author's arguments contrast sharply with his detractor's pertinacity, based primarily on religious dogma. “Hawass's conclusion cannot be taken seriously,” Osman states categorically. So far so unconventional, and yet, irresistibly compelling. Osman has conjured up multiple thrilling worlds, enough for the broad-minded and impartial reader to get blissfully lost in. Some will undoubtedly find Osman's assumptions and convictions to be flights of fancy, and perhaps even fun. Others will spurn his ideas as mystic mumbo-jumbo, gobbledygook. The evidence that Moses was an ancient Egyptian aristocrat, perhaps even a pharaoh, long predates Freud. The third-century BCE Egyptian priest and historian Manetho insisted that the biblical Moses was an Egyptian and not a Hebrew. Manetho also asserts that Moses lived at the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten (1403-1367 BCE). And even more curious is Manetho's claim that the Israelites' Exodus came to pass in the reign of a succeeding pharaoh named Ramses. Osman has conjured up an idea that that has stood up to the test of time. “As for the Pharaoh of the Exodus, while the Bible does not mention the name of the king concerned, Manetho calls him Ramses,” he explained. “While looking for Joseph under the Hyksos produced no evidence, search for the Exodus in the time of Ramses II failed to find any positive results.” In the chapter entitled “The Miracle of Santorini” the author explains the miraculous events of the versions of the Exodus in the Bible and the Quran. The author explicates that the Minoan volcanic eruption of Santorini, also referred to as the Thera eruption, occurred between 1635 and 1616 BCE, according to radiocarbon and tree-ring dating. The Thera eruption was catastrophic. The tsunami it created devastated the Minoan Civilisation, historically, Greece's first on the island of Crete. It is vital to note that the heaviest ash fall of the volcanic eruption was towards the east of Thera, and no doubt created a giant tidal wave that flooded the Nile Delta. Perhaps the Thera disaster explains the seven biblical plagues that struck Egypt, as well as the Red Sea crossing of the Hebrews. “Chronology is the backbone of history, and Bible chronology, as we have seen before, provides us with two contradicting dates [for the Biblical Exodus]: 400 years and four generations (which would come to 100 years),” the author continues. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus vehemently repudiated Manetho's theory that Moses was an Egyptian aristocrat. He identified the Hebrews with the Hyksos (Shepherd Kings), who overran the Nile Delta and ruled the northeastern part of the Delta until they were driven out of Egypt by Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty and liberator of Egypt from Asiatic rule. Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici contends that the Hyksos and the Hebrews were one and the same people. What stayed with the viewer after the airing of Jacobovici's hugely popular documentary, aired in Canada on Easter Day in 2006 and later that year in the United States, was Exodus. The ruins of Zarw, the lost city of the Exodus, confirms the historicity of the Exodus story in the Bible and the Quran. So Osman concludes his fascinating study. His is a tradition of liberalism and rebellion that incenses most conventional Egyptologists and religious zealots. It contravenes received wisdom. So if the Moses of the Bible and the Quran was the historical Akhenaten, who was Nefertiti, his chief consort? And who was Aaron, the biblical and quranic brother of Moses? Who was the biblical Miriam, the sister of Moses? The etymology and the meaning of Miriam, or Mary, indicates that it is related to the ancient Egyptian “MRY”, or Beloved. Indeed, is it not a curious coincidence that many Levite (Hebrew) names have Egyptian roots? Perhaps it is no coincidence. When the first archaeologists visited Egypt in the late 1800s, they arrived in the eastern Nile Delta to verify the events described in the Bible's Book of Exodus. “In 1896 W M Flinders Petrie, the British archaeologist, discovered a granite stele in the funerary temple of Amenhotep III (1405-1367 BCE) to the west of Thebes, which includes the name of ‘Israel'. The stele, which had originally belonged to Amenhotep III and bore a text of his, was later usurped by Merenptah (1224-1214 BCE), who recorded on the other side the story of his victory over an invading Libyan tribal coalition. Now in the Cairo Museum, this stele has come to be known as the Israel Stele because it includes the first, and only, known mention of Israel in an Egyptian text,” Osman extrapolates. His ability, and his ingenious mix of old and new hypotheses, make Osman a formidable challenge for conventional Egyptologists, historians and politically-minded officials. To them, the alliance between Yuya and Joseph and Moses and Akhenaten does not altogether gel. “Many authors in modern times, including specialized scholars, use the words ‘Hebrew', ‘Israelite', and ‘Jew' as if they are synonyms, all referring to the same people. This, however, is not true,” Osman asserts. “So Abraham was a Hebrew, Moses was an Israelite, and Freud was a Jew.” According to Osman, it is vitally important to make the distinction between “Hebrew”, “Israelite” and “Jew”. The origin of the English word “Hebrew” is derived from the Hebrew “Ivri”, meaning those who traverse the wilderness, or the wanderers. It is identical to the Arabic word “Ibri”. Israelite is inextricably intertwined with the ancient Semitic God El or Elohim in Hebrew. El, is also closely associated with the Arabic Allah, or God. “In 1987, Alain-Pierre Zivie, the French archaeologist, discovered the tomb of Aper-El who was a vizier of both Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, during the time of their co-regency,” notes Osman. Aper-El's name, the author argues, indicates that he was of Hebrew origin. Aper-El is related to Yuya, whom he succeeded as “Commander of the Chariots.” Such relevant details are corroborated by archaeological findings. “Under the Macedonian Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, Egyptian historians made sure to include the story of Moses and his Exodus in their historical accounts. When Ptolemy II Philadelphus asked Manetho, the third-century BCE Egyptian priest and historian, to write the history of Egypt in Greek to be placed in the Library of Alexandria, he included the story of Moses in his Egyptiaca,” Osman expounds. The author proves his hypothesis by examining the racial composition and physical characteristics of the personalities in question, and in particular, the case of Yuya. “It is fairly clear that the cultural roots of ancient Egypt lie in Africa and not in Asia,” Osman states categorically. “Egypt was a subtropical desert environment, and its people had migrated from various ethnic groups over its history (and prehistory), thus it was something of a ‘melting pot', a mixture of many types of people with many skin tones, some certainly from Sub-Saharan regions (in Africa) and others from more Mediterranean climes. It is impossible to categorize these people into tidy ‘black' and ‘white' terms of today's racial distinctions. The Egyptians are better classified using evidence of their language and their material culture, historical records, and their physical remains,” writes Osman. “Skulls are more similar to those found in Northern Sudan and less similar to those found in West Africa, Palestine and Turkey. That the Egyptians were by and large dark is certain, and many must have been what we today call ‘black'. We can safely conclude that the ancient Egyptians were of various skin colours, few of which were light.”
