The heretical pharaoh, the Jewish pharaoh and the female pharaoh - a (non-)erased history

“I am the love that sets in this world;
You are the love that rises for ever:
frightened, I hide from Your face as You pass by,
and I know that You are, but not exactly how. […]
I see You in a burning bush as in a riddle,
but I know that You desire me even more,
and in secret I say to You, lest my own hear me:
You, the One who can, have mercy on my prayer,
that You too may take
flesh from what You have created and be the beginning of a new life.”
Răzvan Codrescu, Moses Prays

Standing before the pyramids, you cannot help but feel small, no matter who you are, and no, it is not a matter of perspective. Not even a matter of antiquity, but rather an unsettling sense of the future; their Methuselah-like age is not necessarily impressive in itself, but rather because of the implicit guarantee that the pyramids will still exist long after you are gone.

At their foot, with his neck craned upwards and his eyes dazzled by the sun, Moses must once have stood—the great Moses—for whom this magnificent tableau of human glory (read ‘vanity’) was to be nothing more than the most insignificant sight that life would offer him, a life in which he would see the back of God. Indeed, having grown up in the shadow of the great pyramids, his longing for grandeur can hardly surprise us any longer; and, even setting aside his holiness, it is understandable why he who had lived in the glory of Pharaoh (yet was disgusted by it) had the insatiable ambition (and audacity) to ask the Creator: ‘Show me Your glory!’ The Lord said to Moses: ‘I will cause all My glory to pass before you; I will proclaim the name of Yahweh before you, and I will show mercy to whom I show mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ Then He added: ‘But you shall not be able to see My face, for no man can see My face and live.’ And again the Lord said: ‘Behold, here is a place with Me: sit on this rock; When My glory passes by, I will hide you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by; and when I take My hand away, you shall see My back, but you shall not see My face!’1

And if the great prophet began by beholding the pyramids, only to end up beholding God, the rest of us, sinners that we are, have no choice but to be content with them, so that we may feel, to some extent, the thrill of eternity. But when we consider that Moses, too, once stood before them, that our eyes behold what he, too, once beheld—perhaps struck by the same melancholy in the face of stones which, even for him, were already a myth—we suddenly feel greater, closer to God and – in the poet’s words – ‘contemporaries of eternity’2. Perhaps that is precisely why God has left them ‘alive’.

Studying the ancient history of Egypt is a profession that one could already practise in ancient Egypt. It is no joke – to this day, Egyptologists start from and keep returning to the chronology of the pharaohs compiled by Manetho, a historian of the Ptolemaic era, who unearths the immemorial past from the sand with the same passion with which we rummage through the ruins of Rome today. As a point of reference: Cleopatra, the tragic queen, is more ‘contemporary’ to us than the building of the pyramids. After Chinese civilisation, ancient Egypt is considered the world’s longest-lasting civilisation, although it could be argued that the Egyptians maintained their way of life and values relatively constant throughout Antiquity, whereas modern-day China has little in common with the Qing Empire of a hundred or two hundred years ago, the mummified world of the pharaohs having been spared the modernity that alters and equates civilisations.

That said, trapped in the hourglass of time and trudging through its dunes—more arduous than those of the desert itself—baked by the sun, haunted by thirst, bewitched by Morgana, who long ago moved from an inhospitable Sahara into the lush pages of the chronicles, it is almost impossible to find the oasis of genuine evidence. If history, in general, is a dizzying thicket through which one must make one’s way with a knife in hand, taking care not to confuse a medicinal herb with a poisonous one, Egyptian antiquity remains an immense desert, vaster than the Sahara – here, the journey from one oasis to another, from one truth to another, can cost you years of your life. That is why it comes as no surprise that Egyptology, this arid branch of history, is the one that receives the most meticulous attention from specialists, given mankind’s well-known fascination with the impossible.

But some oases are, as I was saying, mirages. There is no point in analysing the claims of certain atheist researchers who (probably exhausted from having wandered through the desert, without a staff, without a guide and without camels) have deserted their journey, declaring, in the delirium of fever, that Moses—if they have not found him—does not exist. The staff, in this case, would have been Holy Scripture itself, which they decided to leave on the shelf, as if it were some work of fiction, when, in reality, with this rod they could have parted not the sea, but the very desert of shifting sands that is Egyptology. They do not contradict us, the 21st-century Christians, nor even the Jewish sages who compiled the Septuagint, but rather the Egyptian priest Manetho himself, who described, in his chronicle Aegyptiaca, the figure of a certain Osarseph, leader of the Jews in an anti-Pharaonic revolt, who would lead them to the region of present-day Jerusalem. It should be borne in mind that in ancient Egypt a single person could have dozens of names, each representing a different aspect of their personality and being used in different contexts. The chronicler speaks of Osarseph and the Jews with hatred, associating them with the Hyksos who were driven out by the 18th Dynasty during the New Kingdom period.

Among the historians who have neither turned back nor succumbed to heatstroke, two main schools of thought have emerged: two paths along which one can traverse the desert, each leading to entirely different destinations. Unfortunately, the path taken by most caravans today leads to a mirage, one popularised not so much by the quantity or quality of the evidence as by a taste for continuity and various media portrayals of the biblical ‘story’. This theory presents Ramses II, who had the longest reign in the history of ancient Egypt, as the pharaoh of Moses’ time, relying more on the wording of the text than on an in-depth analysis of the Scripture. Its proponents argue that, throughout the great prophet’s lifetime, the Old Testament mentions only one change of reign (following Moses’ flight to Midian), with the pharaoh being referred to only by this common noun, which might give the impression of a single pharaoh reigning for a much longer period, which is why the exceptionally long-lived Ramses would be the perfect candidate. However, for those who do not wish to go out of their way to look for a knot in the Nile’s reed bed, but prefer a broader view, it is quite clear that the Bible never sought out the names of the powerful figures of the day, treating them more as bit-part players than as full-fledged characters; the biblical pharaoh is more of a ‘concept’ that recurs throughout history than a person worthy of mention. He is important because he is the ruler of Egypt, who plays a role in the narrative of the chosen people by virtue of his office, not because of his personal qualities. In other words, the pharaoh could be anyone, and if that particular Ramses, Amenhotep or Thutmose had not been pharaoh, nothing would have been written about him. He is nothing more than a great anonymous figure.

The other aspect to which exaggerated importance is attached in support of this idea is verse 11 of the first chapter of Exodus, which speaks of the oppression of the Hebrews prior to the birth of Moses: ‘At that time the Israelites built store-cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Rameses, which served as storehouses for Pharaoh.’ It is rather absurd to believe that the name ‘Ramses’ necessarily first appeared with the first pharaoh to bear it (the grandfather of Ramses II), when Egyptian names (as, indeed, everywhere and at all times in world history) had ancient traditions; but, assuming that were the case, we must examine this city built by the Hebrews at the command of the unknown pharaoh and see whether it corresponds to Pi-Ramesses, the city erected by Ramses II, as reconstructed by archaeologists. Nothing could be simpler – whilst the Book of Exodus states that ‘it served Pharaoh as a storehouse’, we now know that Pi-Ramesses was created specifically as the new capital of Egypt, due to its strategic potential, boasting docks and military facilities unprecedented in Egyptian history. Not only that, but the area had previously served Seti I, the father of Ramses II, as a summer palace. So, from even a cursory examination, we can see that the two cities cannot be one and the same. In any case, the argument had already collapsed of its own accord, shattering more completely than the Sphinx’s nose, when we stumbled upon the lofty threshold of another verse 11, this time from Genesis, chapter XLVII: ‘Joseph settled his father and his brothers there and gave them a holding in the land of Egypt, in the best part of the country, in the land of Rameses.’ The name, therefore, came into being long before any pharaoh bore it.

Furthermore (without going into details that are impossible to explain in a few pages), the biblical chronology, as it appears in the Septuagint, makes Moses’s life incompatible with the era of Ramses; the clash between the two meaning either that the Bible is lying (heaven forbid!), or that the poor Egyptologists, who have devoted their entire lives to ‘sorting out’ the chaotic Egyptian chronology, have all failed (which would be rather hard to believe). There are still many dating dilemmas and controversies, but, at least, the reign of Ramses is not one of them.

We therefore return to a more arduous path, one which, however, is followed by the most serious specialists in the field. Alongside them, we must mention the great historians of the past, Jewish and Roman/Byzantine chroniclers, who laid the foundations in many historical fields and who, having lived somewhat closer to Antiquity than we do, had access to documents that have since been lost. Names such as Josephus and George Synkellos spring to mind; both place Moses somewhat earlier, during the 18th Dynasty, the most prosperous in Egyptian history. Even Saint Maximus the Confessor, the unrivalled theologian and scholar of the 7th century, in his work On the Calculation of the Date of Easter, describes the same dating. Today, historians such as Douglas Petrovici (a professor of Egyptology and ancient Near Eastern history at the University of Texas), Steven Rudd (a researcher in biblical archaeology), Scott Alan Roberts and John Richard Ward (authors of the famous work The Exodus Reality: Unearthing the Real History of Moses, Identifying the Pharaohs, and Examining the Exodus from Egypt) agree that Moses could only have lived during the 18th Dynasty, presenting overwhelming evidence to this effect.

Of course, this complicates matters, as we are no longer talking about two pharaohs, but several. However, although the 18th Dynasty spanned three centuries, once they had narrowed it down to that period, it was easy for the researchers in question to immediately identify (in accordance with the Byzantine writers) the pharaohs of Moses. Thus, the pharaoh who began the persecution of Israel was Ahmose I (or Amosis), the founder of the dynasty; Thutmose II attempts to kill Moses, who flees to Midian, and it is only his son, Thutmose III, who is the pharaoh of the Exodus proper, the one associated with the plagues. At this point, a host of other aspects of Egyptian history begin to be explained to us, which until then had not been very clear, and the same applies to the biblical text.

We are told at the beginning of Exodus (1:7–10): ‘Now the children of Israel were fruitful and multiplied; they increased and grew exceedingly strong, and the land was filled with them. But another king came to power in Egypt, who had not known Joseph. He said to his people: ‘Behold, the people of the Israelites are a great multitude and are stronger than we are. Come, then, let us oppress them, lest they multiply any further, and lest, in times of war, they join forces with our enemies and, by fighting against us, drive us out of our land!’”

Who is this ‘other king’, and why had he not known Joseph? Why this sudden policy of persecuting a people who were friends to Egypt, indeed benefactors of the land? If it were merely a matter of a young pharaoh, having only just ascended the throne, who had not lived to meet Joseph in person, we might understand a certain reluctance, but such paranoia is unjustified. Surely the pharaoh, who had entrusted Egypt to Joseph’s care – who, in effect, had made him an uncrowned pharaoh – would have told his successor all this and raised him in the same spirit of cooperation with the Jews. Not only would the new pharaoh have known Joseph (at least by reputation), but he would have had no fear of his people. And which enemies are we talking about?

Suddenly, we realise that the only plausible explanation would be a break in dynastic continuity. This is where a little knowledge of Egyptology comes in handy. The history of ancient Egypt proper comprises three great periods of glory (to which we must add the Ptolemaic period, which differs from the other three in many respects3), intuitively named: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. Between them lie the so-called Intermediate Periods – times when Egypt was divided amongst several powers in a state of conflict. The one that interests us at the moment, the Second Intermediate Period, is characterised by the division of Egypt into its two historical regions: Upper Egypt (the southern part, so named because the Nile flows from south to north), with its capital at Thebes, and Lower Egypt (the northern part, comprising the delta), governed from Herakleopolis. The two ‘Egypts’ differed greatly in ethnic terms, with Lower Egypt being ruled and heavily populated by the so-so-called Hyksos, a nomadic pastoralist people from Canaan, of Semitic origin, who migrated peacefully into Egypt and gradually took control of it. Whether these Hyksos were in fact the Jews or not is very difficult to say (the Egyptians’ penchant for giving everything a million different names does not help us here either); in any case, their domination of Lower Egypt fits perfectly with the era in which ‘the sons of Israel were born in great numbers and multiplied; they grew and became very, very strong, and the land was filled with them. On the other hand, what is even more convincing is that even now, 3,500 years later, the link between the Hyksos and Israel is preserved in the Egyptian collective memory, to such an extent that the average Egyptian believes the Hyksos were Jews”4. But, even if they were a distinct people, it remains clear that they enjoyed a close friendship, which is the basis for the argument put forward by researchers who have ‘found’ Moses in the 18th Dynasty.

For if the new pharaoh—the one who had not known Joseph—was Ahmose I, initially king only of Theban Egypt, who did not inherit the throne of Lower Egypt but waged an extensive campaign to conquer it, as a result of which he defeated the Hyksos, the enemies he so feared might form an alliance with the Jews—he was a Hyksos himself— that paranoia regarding ‘another king who rose above Egypt’ (note the terms ‘to rise’ and ‘above’, which usually denote the very idea of conquest) is perfectly justifiable. As we know from secular Egyptological studies, at the dawn of the New Kingdom, inaugurated by Ahmose, a sustained campaign of oppression against the Hyksos began, which again fits perfectly with the oppression of the chosen people.

We shall skip over a succession of pharaohs of lesser importance to our story, to get to what pains us most, namely the pharaoh of the plagues, at which point the evidence becomes truly overwhelming. His father, Thutmose II (the one because of whom Moses was forced into exile) had been a minor pharaoh, one of those whom history regards as mere footnotes. Nor was his pedigree particularly impressive; Thutmose I (his grandfather) was not of royal blood, but had merely married Mutnofret, the daughter of Ahmose I, which enabled him to ascend the throne and continue the dynasty. But this princess was unable to hold the position of chief wife to the upstart pharaoh, being overshadowed by the Great Wife, Ahmose, whose auxiliary title of ‘Sister of the King’, with which she appears in various sources, suggests that she was the sister of Thutmose I, the custom of marriage between siblings being very common in the Egyptian royal family. The children born to the Great Wife always had priority to the throne; they were the official heirs, regardless of their order of birth, but Ahmose bore the pharaoh no sons, so the throne must have passed to Thutmose II, the son of the secondary wife. However, as he needed to strengthen his claim to the throne, he married one of Ahmose’s daughters and his half-sister, Hatshepsut.

So much has been written about Hatshepsut in recent years as the Egyptians struggled to erase in the early years. Regarded today as a feminist symbol par excellence, she is, of course, much more than that, suffering from the same paradox that would later afflict Egypt’s other great queen, Cleopatra, namely that their fame has to some extent obscured their historical reality. Among Egyptologists fascinated by Moses, a myth has arisen suggesting that she was the daughter of the pharaoh who saved the future prophet—his adoptive mother—with the claim that she herself was a child when the event took place. Presumably because they are fascinated by the possibility that Moses might have had as his ‘mother’ the greatest female monarch in Egyptian history. They explain the systematic persecution endured by her memory precisely through its association with Moses, who was, in turn, almost eradicated from the collective memory of the Egyptians, which is periodically ‘lobotomised’. The balance on this tightrope, which one walks in search of the female pharaoh, is incredibly precarious – two hostile mindsets clash until sparks fly. On the one hand, we have the feminist movement, omnipresent in all contemporary historical research, which, viewing the facts through its own lens – slightly clouded by a persecution complex – is certain that Hatshepsut was condemned to oblivion because the Egyptians could not bear the shame of having been ruled by a woman. This does not, however, explain at all why no one stepped in to usurp her throne, and even less so how it is that she was not the first queen to wear the double crown5, her predecessors, Merneith and Sobekneferu, not having suffered the same fate after their deaths. On the other hand, we have the Protestant conservatives, convinced that there could be no other reason why Hatshepsut was banished from the walls of her own temples, other than her alleged connection to Moses, failing to realise that neither God nor his prophet needs the gaudy glitter of human power. Although chronologically the pieces would fit, factually there is no evidence other than that the two were contemporaries, and Egyptian princesses were as numerous as the stars in the sky at the court of Thebes. Byzantine authors say that it was not she, but a certain Faria—a minor figure in the history of her time, yet essential in the history of eternity—who adopted the infant brought by the Nile.

But let us see who Hatshepsut was. Married to a mediocre half-brother, she soon found herself a widow, with a two-year-old child whom she had to raise and who was not even her own. Like her mother, she had failed to bear the pharaoh an heir, but, as the Great Wife of the deceased, the right to the regency fell to her, not to the child’s real mother. However, within the web of criminal intrigue that characterises every imperial court in world history, she does not attempt to kill her defenceless rival, nor does she even seem to adopt the stereotypical attitude of a scheming woman; on the contrary, she transforms little Thutmose III into the ‘Napoleon of Egypt’. This is the final ‘name’ by which the pharaoh in question will be ‘christened’, so many millennia after his death, and I do not know whether Richard A. Gabriel, the historian who coined the nickname for him, was aware that it suited him not only for his bellicose nature (he waged some 17–20 victorious military campaigns), but also for the disaster at the end of his reign and, above all, for his hubris. For he alone, through his own stubbornness, brought the series of plagues upon Egypt.

Meanwhile, his stepmother had acquired such a taste for power that she donned the beard of Osiris, the cobra, the whip and the sceptre6, and proclaimed herself pharaoh with full titles: daughter of Amun, mother and father of Egypt. Hatshepsut did all this without removing Thutmose and, apparently, without coming into conflict with him, quite naturally, as if nothing could be more natural. It is not for us to speculate on what the young pharaoh thought of his new ‘colleague’ in government, nor on what the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring entailed; but what is certain is that, whilst Napoleon before Napoleon would lose every trace of humanity on the battlefield, the queen would take charge of domestic policy. In any case, their collaboration, at least on paper, strikes us today as one of the most successful, with Egypt experiencing an unprecedented golden age. Besides this, Hatshepsut seems rather obsessed with her new identity as a semi-goddess, which she flaunts everywhere, making it rather difficult for us to regard her as a possible candidate for the title of true and eternal glory, that of Moses’ ‘mother’. It is estimated that she died sometime around the twenty-second year of Thutmose’s reign, and, no, the removal of her name and image did not begin immediately after her death, which would have been logical if it were indeed her femininity that bothered the Egyptians. Not to mention that her stepson was himself so ‘on the rise’ that it is impossible he could have felt his prestige threatened by the spectre of her death. It was only later that the Egyptians suddenly began to scratch her name out of documents, topple her statues, and destroy her likeness from her countless and colossal edifices.

Why then, of all times? One theory suggests that Thutmose did so to strengthen his son’s claim to the throne, but this theory stands on as firm a footing as a single-stemmed dandelion fluff in the midst of a typhoon. The queen had had only one daughter, and there was not a soul in Egypt who would question the legitimacy of the heir to the greatest of all pharaohs. So we shall (partly) humour the Protestant Egyptologists. The reason for Hatshepsut’s banishment into oblivion, far from the Duat7, where only those whose memory endured were granted an immortal soul, is once again linked to Moses. But not because the great queen necessarily raised him (we have seen the fruits of his upbringing), but because Thutmose III, a Napoleon after Trafalgar8, just as the warrior pharaoh was when he lost his army (that is, his pride and his reason for being) in the Red Sea (a fact confirmed by the sudden cessation of the annual military campaigns he had waged for decades), he was in dire need of a scapegoat (when the term had not even been coined yet) for the empire’s military (and economic – let us recall the dreadful plagues) crisis. The queen’s elimination begins precisely when Thutmose’s expeditions come to an end. (Coincidence? Probably not.) As Moses could not be declared solely to blame (that would have meant admitting that the octogenarian, without an army, office or wealth, had God on his side), the most convenient target was his stepmother, against whom he must have harboured some grudge—even if only a small, milk-tooth-sized one—because she had forced him to share his glory. Hatshepsut could be accused of many things: for example, that she might have tolerated the Hebrews whilst he was ‘away’. That she had tolerated Moses in particular. On another note, all the patristic authors insist that the pharaoh drowned along with his army, so the heir (Amenhotep II) managed to ‘retrieve’ him from the shore (Thutmose’s mummy still exists 9) and, out of a desire to ‘whitewash’ his father’s memory in order to justify his claim to the throne (we shall see why below), began to persecute the memory of Hatshepsut. Here another theory put forward by Egyptologists comes into play, one that has become increasingly popular in recent times. According to this theory, Moses (although he was erased from the Egyptian chronicles wherever he was mentioned by this name, which, as we have noted, is specific to the 18th Dynasty) is nevertheless one of the well-established figures in Egyptology, in the person of Senenmut (as I said, the Egyptians had many names), the mysterious statesman, architect and right-hand man of Hatshepsut. The importance he held in the Egyptian administration, as well as in the queen’s life, is remarkable10, as are his titles11, which suggest he may have been a member of the royal family. I say ‘mysterious’ because, at a certain point, Senenmut simply vanishes from all sources (whether written or carved), and the tomb that was being built for him remains empty and unfinished. Now we might jump for joy at the thought that this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the flight to Midian. But, once we’ve swallowed our enthusiasm and calmed down a little, we finally see that a shadow does indeed exist—and one even larger than that of the Great Pyramid. Partly because this theory is supported by those who consider Moses, without a doubt, to be the queen’s adopted son, and partly because the great official is the architect who designed Hatshepsut’s most notable pagan temples. We learn of Moses from the Antiquities of the Jews12 that he had received the thorough education of an Egyptian prince, being a military strategist of genius and therefore capable of governing even a queen’s kingdom. It is impossible that he was not respected—indeed, he may even have been indispensable during his time at court—regardless of the ideological disagreements within his ‘family’. However, as the chronological fit is rather tenuous (Moses could not have been both the adviser to a widow and a refugee at the same time, due to her husband’s fault), we mention Senenmut merely as a curiosity.

We had left off in the middle of the Red Sea, fleeing to avoid being swept away by the water. For the sake of research, we shall not follow in Moses’ footsteps – behold, the depths of the sea are trodden by his feet – but we shall return to the land of Egypt, following Amenhotep as he returns to Thebes with his tail literally13 between his legs. How he ‘wipes’ them both out of history. We recall that, even whilst the sun of the pharaohs was still burning in the sky, this erasure proved ineffective, because (isn’t that so?) nothing is lost, everything is transformed. Moses becomes Osarseph, but he does not disappear.

Although foreign policy takes a 180-degree turn, the pharaoh, stubborn as a mule, remains true to himself, to what he inherited from his father: boundless pride. Perhaps he is not even driven by a rational purpose in his posthumous persecution of Hatshepsut, but, in fact, his pride has suffered a blow far too severe for him to bear the memory of even a single moment in which his glory was in the slightest way overshadowed. The woman who dared to call herself Thutmose’s equal, who placed her throne alongside his, must disappear. From the scrolls, from the walls, from people’s memories, from eternal life itself. The same goes for the man who should have been pharaoh in his stead. For now he knows. The son of a secondary wife, with a father born of a secondary wife and a parent from outside the dynasty, younger in age. Had Moses remained at court forty years ago, the history of Egypt would have been different. As the son of the pharaoh’s daughter and older than him, this insufferable Jew could at any time have challenged his right to the throne. Thutmose was merely a child when Moses was in the prime of his youth – an imposing prince at the time, who had led military campaigns crowned with glory (if what Josephus says is true) – whilst Thutmose was still playing with wooden swords. In ancient Egypt, the law granted full rights to adopted sons, placing them on an equal footing with their biological brothers, including with regard to inheritance. The old pharaoh looked back with a certain nostalgia on the terror of the night when Moses had told him that, if he did not let the Jews go, ‘every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die’14. Biologically speaking, he was the first-born; biologically speaking, he should have died. That night he had not been toying with swords, but with his very life. Then Amenemhat, the heir, the pride and hope of his old age, had died, and he had breathed a sigh of relief whilst, at the same time, sinking into the blackest despair. Not knowing which he would have preferred: to die happily, with the undimmed glory of the firstborn, the legitimate pharaoh, or to live a thousand years, haunted by the ultimate shame. If he had ever doubted that the throne rightfully belonged to him, if the shadow of Moses had haunted his dreams, he now had divine confirmation that the old Jew was the ‘firstborn’ of Pharaoh’s house. That Moses was the pharaoh from whom he had usurped the throne. Amenhotep therefore had every reason to cross the Red Sea by any means necessary (literally, one might say), so that everyone would forget he was the descendant of a usurper.

Or, at least, that is what some Egyptologists believe. The fantasy, we must admit, is irresistible, and the existing evidence is the caravan of camels leading us, slowly but surely, towards Thutmose III. Could this be the reason why the pharaoh could not resist pursuing Moses right to the very bottom of the sea, literally? Did he see in him not only a mortal enemy, but also a rival? We know that his eldest son died and that his second son succeeded him. We also know that, if Hatshepsut is the ‘mother’ of the prophet, then the two were indeed half-siblings.

An unexpected ‘supporter’ of this theory comes from the Byzantine world itself – unexpected because he is not one of the chroniclers of that golden age of historiography, but an emperor as iconic as Byzantium itself. In Istanbul, in Sultanahmet Square, in the heart of the Constantinople of yesteryear, a piece of ancient Egypt still survives. Surrounded by all those Ottoman and Byzantine curves, so soothing to the eye, between arched vaults like well-fed bellies and domes that seem to circumscribe time itself, stands an Egyptian obelisk, defiant as a splinter driven into the palm of the sky. It is called the Obelisk of Thutmose III and is, by far, the oldest monument in the capital of the Byzantine Empire – so old that it makes even Hagia Sophia seem like a young girl. It was erected for the great temple at Karnak (the Vatican of the Egyptian pantheon) and, on each of its four sides, bears inscriptions celebrating Thutmose’s victory over the kingdom of Mitanni. Istanbul has become famous for the multitude of stray animals it shelters; amongst them, this obelisk is also a dog lost by its first master, which is why today it bears the name of its new master, the one who rescued it from the ruins, and is known as the Obelisk of Theodosius. One might well ask why the Great Theodosius (famous for his relentless struggle against paganism) chose toadorn his city with an eminently pagan symbol, and it would not be difficult to conclude that this was due more to the piety aroused by a ‘relic’ from the time of Moses than to a fascination with Egypt. Or perhaps even more than that – Theodosius, the emperor who established Christianity as the empire’s state religion, chose to bring, to the new Christian capital, a monument to the victory of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, precisely to symbolise the victory of the New Israel over paganism.

But perhaps the best evidence for placing Moses on the chronological timeline within the 18th Dynasty remains Akhenaten, the third ‘erased’ pharaoh of our story. Giving the floor once again to historians who do not recognise Scripture, we hear them trying to convince us that this strange pharaoh gave the world its first monotheistic religion. To quote a biblical archaeologist: ‘One of the most astonishing events in religious history is Akhenaten’s conversion to monotheism. […] Akhenaten became pharaoh […] just two years before the death of Joshua. […] He reigned for 17 years […] whilst being fully aware of the power of the God of the Hebrews, Who demanded monotheistic worship. As pharaoh, he knew how Moses’ ten plagues had devastated Egypt, how the Hebrews had crossed the Red Sea as though on dry land, between walls of water, 300 metres high on either side, which then collapsed and drowned the entire Egyptian army. It was clear to Akhenaten that the monotheistic God of the Jews was superior to the entire polytheistic pantheon of Egyptian gods, and therefore that monotheism was superior to polytheism. For this reason, he converted to monotheism by worshipping the Sun God, ‘Aton’. Akhenaten’s conversion to monotheism [...] is an astonishing milestone, unrivalled in Egyptian history, explainable only by the Exodus of the Jews and the conquest of Joshua”15.

Following this successor to the Egyptian Napoleon, we shall be struck by the ‘visionary nature’ of his principles, but above all by the fact that, unlike his predecessors, he did not implement them in a tyrannical manner. Admittedly, he ‘reset’ Egypt from the ground up, but he did not create ‘martyrs’ amongst his opponents; rather, he simply brought order to what was a jumble of superstitions and idolatry. It is impossible to determine whether Akhenaten attempted to adopt the Jewish religion per se or was merely inspired by it, whether the sun disc venerated in the religious images of Aten was or was not a symbol of the Jewish God, created specifically for his subjects, who could not be persuaded to worship, out of the blue, an immaterial deity. Was the sun cult a pagan cult, which worshipped the sun itself, or was the sun a metaphor—the only one the pharaoh could offer the Egyptians? It is even harder to say whether he himself understood the immaterial nature of Yahweh.

Modern-day materialists have put forward the idea that perhaps Akhenateninitiated this ‘schism’ for the sake of religious convictions, but out of pure political interest, eager to rid himself of the immense power of the excessively corrupt caste of the priests of Amun. But whilst such a pragmatic supposition may sound plausible to our modern ears, we must splash cold water on our faces and snap out of the reverie of our secular age. Three thousand years ago, the state was an eminently religious institution, and fear of the gods was the only universal sentiment. In a world where monarchs did not take a single step without consulting the oracles, and the peace and war of an entire nation were determined, at best, by the dance of the stars and, at worst, by the veins on a calf’s liver, to imagine that a man could have changed the religion of an empire for strictly political reasons is science fiction. Egyptian society was so intensely theocratic, down to its very core, that the emergence of any blasphemous thought would have been nipped in the bud (with horror) by the very person who conceived it. Where there are no ideological alternatives, it is impossible to imagine that an individual (and a very young one at that, as Akhenaten was) would risk the wrath of the supreme god (whom no one had ever challenged in his presence), however rebellious he might be, unless he were to experience a profound, earth-shattering revelation. What better proof could there be of this than his very singularity in the almost infinite history of Egypt? The fact that in three thousand years no other pharaoh ever fancied the idea of renouncing the myriad gods in favour of a monotheistic cult (even though the problem of the corrupt pagan clergy was as ‘eternal’ as Egypt itself) only serves to confirm that faith was required—an extraordinarily strong faith—for such a change to take place. Otherwise, Akhenaten did not demonstrate any great political talent and, generally speaking, was a pharaoh with his head in the clouds. Nowhere does he display the fierce pragmatism of someone who would have defied the gods simply to destroy the priestly class. (Even the maniacal Henry VIII, an eternity later, would need to delude himself with sound religious arguments to satisfy his desire to break with Rome16.) We might have expected such a Machiavellian plan from a Thutmose III or a Ramses II—cunning, shrewd individuals, mad for power—and yet, in the presence of Amun and his priests, these bloodthirsty monarchs fawned like little puppies. At most, we can accept that Akhenaten’s decision was a mixed matter, but by no means strictly political.

Pagan posterity declared him a heretic and diligently erased his memory, though without much thought – his edifices, built from talatați (small, standardised stone blocks, innovated and used exclusively by Akhenaten), were as easy to tear down back then as they were for today’s archaeologists to reassemble. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, freeing them from their confinement within the walls of Karnak, where the victorious Egyptian priesthood took great delight in recycling them, to the glory of Amun. And his wife, the splendid Nefertiti, sits enigmatically in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin – the veritable Mona Lisa of Antiquity.

These were the three most controversial figures in Egyptian history and, at the same time, those whose memory the Egyptians have striven hardest to erase. The current craze, dubbed ‘cancel culture’, is, in fact, as old as the hills and is known in history by a more radical and pompous phrase, in the common language of Antiquity (let’s call it ‘Middle Ages’): damnatio memoriae. But it was not the Romans who invented the concept, nor was it Plato, who, at the height of Greek classicism (considered so liberal today), advocated the absolute censorship of literature that did not meet his standards (and which was nothing other than fiction as a whole, incomparably more moral than the work of the famous philosopher, itself a victim of censorship in various circles of the contemporary West – oh, the splendid irony of history!) What for Plato was nothing more than a meagre aspiration, expressed with a heavy heart in The Republic, had for thousands of years been a ‘craft’ which the Egyptians had perfected to the point of virtuosity. They did not make works—or even people—disappear, but, one might say, entire eras, when, with the treacherous innocence of an ostrich with its head buried deep in the sands of the Sahara, they scraped away the silhouettes and names of troublesome forebears, imagining that they could erase the past by pretending it did not exist. That the eternal existence of the soul—which is the breath of God—depended on their own feeble memory. The splendid irony of history strikes again, like a cannonball: the pharaohs whose memory was fought against with delirious zeal (precisely for that reason) are the very ones who have become the obsessive delight of Egyptologists.

And Moses, well, however fictional some may wish to make him—erased as he is from so many history books, because his memory is just as embarrassing today as it was three thousand years ago—is the only one of the pharaohs who has come close to their ideal. Without building pyramids, burying himself with treasures or even mummifying himself, this stammering old man, whose tomb remains undiscovered to this day, has become eternal. And not merely eternal, but immortalised, etched in hot iron into the memory of mankind.

At the pyramids, you get the unsettling feeling that you are a grain of sand, passing from one half of an hourglass to the other. Here, history has shattered its hourglass—hence the desert. There’s nothing special about it, really, just some stones, a cheeky sun lying on its side, a tonne of dust – nobody’s cleaned up here for millennia – and that distinctly human taste of transience.

The pyramids predated Moses by a long way. But Moses will remain even after they are no more.

• 1

  Exodus XXXIII, 18–23

• 2

  Vasile Voiculescu, ‘Contemporary’ – ‘O Lord, I am Your contemporary / And I am the contemporary of Eternity’.

• 3

  The Ptolemies were a foreign dynasty of Macedonian origin who came to rule Egypt following its conquest by Alexander the Great. They introduced Hellenism to Egypt, bringing about significant changes to the country’s political, social and cultural landscape.

• 4

  Orly Goldwasser, ‘The Hyksos Challenge – The Cultural Hypothesis’ in Contributions to the Archaeology of Egypt and the Levant, vol. IV, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, Vienna, 2019.

• 5

  The pharaonic crown, in its final form, dates from the First Dynasty, when Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt were unified for the first time. It consisted of the white crown of Upper Egypt, known as the Hedjet, surrounded by the red crown of Lower Egypt, the Deshret.

• 6

  The royal insignia that formed part of the pharaohs’ ceremonial attire.

• 7

  The afterlife, in Egyptian mythology, where the dead were judged for their deeds in life. However, if the body of the deceased, along with any trace of their memory, were to vanish from people’s minds, their soul would cease to exist.

• 8

  Following the Naval Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805), Napoleon suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the British and abandoned any plans to invade Great Britain.

• 9

  Exodus 14:30, ‘Thus the Lord saved the Israelites from the hands of the Egyptians on that day; and the Israelites saw the Egyptians lying dead on the seashore.’

• 10

  Senenmut is appointed guardian of Princess Neferure, daughter of Hatshepsut.

• 11

  His very name literally translates as ‘mother’s brother’, ‘uncle’.

• 12

  Josephus’s magnum opus.

• 13

  The bull’s tail, attached to the traditional robe, was another royal symbol of the pharaoh.

• 14

  Exit XI, 5.

• 15

  Steven Rudd, ‘The Date and Pharaoh of the Exodus’, in Bible.Ca, November 2019 (Thutmose III was the Pharaoh of the Exodus in 1446 BC).

• 16

  Although his motives were largely personal (the Pope would not grant him a divorce from his first wife), Henry VIII was also dissatisfied with the lack of autonomy of the Church of England and attracted by the riches he could obtain by abolishing the English monastic system. He surrounded himself with scholars and clergy who sympathised with the Protestant movement, who provided him with the theological arguments necessary to take the step of breaking away from the Catholic Church without a twinge of conscience.