ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HISTORY
Written Egyptian history goes so far back that we have no way of accurately dating the earliest of writings. Nevertheless, Champollion’s 1824 ground-breaking work on the Rosetta Stone (discovered in Rosetta, Egypt in 1799) was the start of interpreting the ancient Egyptian texts. But, it wasn’t until 1836 that Champollion’s real work on reading the hieroglyphics was published for the world to study.
By the time of his 1824 book, Champollion had discovered only the hieroglyphic characters which were alphabetic, i.e., they represented most of the sounds of today’s languages. He had also discovered the numbering system the Egyptians used in writing dates of events. Thus, in 1824, Champollion had compiled and published a list of many of the past kings and the dates in which they reigned. But the meaningful information between the kings’ names and dates was mostly unknown. Although he had ranges of dates for many kings, Champollion knew only ‘who’ and a bit about ‘when’, but nothing about the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ of their writings. In mid-1828 he started a year-long trip to Egypt where he copied Egyptian characters from stone engravings and collected as many written papyri as he could to take home for studying how to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Unfortunately, Champollion died of a stroke in 1832 and left only his copious notes on his subsequent work to fully understand much of the meanings of the rest of the hieroglyphics. That final work was compiled but was not published by his elder brother until 1836. Many scholars continued Champollion’s work during the last half of the 19th Century, and today there are many Egyptologists who are able to interpret these strange characters.
Scholars have now concluded that the ancient Egyptians could write earlier than 3000 BC. Remarkably, most of the many hundreds of basic hieroglyphic characters they used then remained relatively constant in meaning for 3000+ years. The most recent known Egyptian hieroglyphics have been dated to the Christian era, as late as about 400 AD.
In his 1824 book, Champollion listed the kings (and a few queens) with their dates of throne accession and death according to ‘dynasties.’ A dynasty started with a new family king who was succeeded by his son or brother, and whose son would become the next king. The dynasty ended at the death of the last male king who had no sons to succeed him. There were a few queens who ruled upon the deaths of their husbands or brothers who could not continue the dynasty for the lack of a male heir, but there is no record of a queen following a queen. On the occasion where there was no male heir, there usually was a powerful member of the royal court (e.g., an administrator or general) who was already fulfilling official duties, who would step in and assume command. Typically, when this happened, a new dynasty was started and passed from father to elder son to the point that eventually, there was again no male heir to reign and a new dynasty or ruling family took over.
Each king was considered to be a human form of one of many Egyptian gods and his formal name included something about that god. The name of Ramses the Great, for example, meant something like ‘born of Re’ with Re being one of many manifestation of the Sun god. When the king died, he was embalmed and mummified with great ceremony, for in their religion, he would enter the world of the dead and be resurrected to enter eternal life. The dead king was buried with plenty of food and daily living implements to sustain him on his journey to resurrection. The common Egyptian believed that HIS own continued existence depended upon sending the deceased king into eternity in great style. The dead king’s successor would ceremoniously assume a new name appended with the name of a god of his choice, and resume the link to eternity.
But, occasionally, there were periods of violent internal struggles as to who would become the new king. Brothers killed brothers or uncles; an influential member of the court could marry the recently widowed queen; and a strong son could murder his father—there were many modes of becoming king, but usually the winner was the strongest person to survive the internal struggle and settle the dispute. The new king then took on some variation of his old name that now invoked a familiar god to legitimize and represent his new dynasty.
Over the years, Egyptologists have sorted out most of the possible combinations where dynasties changed and numbered them sequentially, but all of them have built on Champollion‘s 1824 book.
Later Egyptologists have improved the record of kings but there are several problems in interpreting the existing king lists. (add link here) There were situations in which TWO kings were sharing the rule of the entirety of Egypt at the same time (co-regencies); and others where the kingdom was fragmented with different dynasties ruling different regions simultaneously. To further confuse the chronology, there were periods in which the rulers reigned for very short periods and there are questions of the order of succession (i.e., which came first); there is often a paucity of dateable documents; and a lack of independent corroboration from other known civilizations to verify time connections; and the possibility that the same ruler was incorrectly listed twice using two different names.
Thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assign reliable dates of significant blocks of time in the history of ancient Egypt. Fortunately, we do know enough external facts to verify some reasonably dependable dates during the period that we are interested in—that period during which the Israelites sojourned in Egypt. From records from parallel contemporary civilizations (e.g., Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians, Persians), we find the Hebrews (i.e., descendants of Eber, an ancestor of Abraham; ‘Aipru’ in Egyptian) we conclude that all 443 years of the of the history of Israel from Joseph being sold into Egypt to the Exodus apparently occurred during the period from the late Middle Kingdom to early in the New Kingdom.
Nevertheless, Egyptologists are pretty well in agreement that the overall history of Ancient Egypt can be divided into distinct eras as shown in this graphic. The 430 year presence of Israelites in Egypt is generally considered to be somewhere between the late Middle Kingdom and the early New Kingdom eras.
Today’s king listings show three major periods which are called, the ‘Old Kingdom’, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, and the ‘New Kingdom’–those kingdoms spanned some 3 millennia. Between those kingdoms were three relatively short periods which Egyptologists call ‘The First Intermediate Period, ‘the Second Intermediate Period’ and the ‘Third Intermediate Period.’ Characteristic of all intermediate periods, the first was unstable, with no single family able to establish dominance to end the power struggles. Sometimes a single family lost a portion of the kingdom due to war or rebellion, and a new, dynastic power arose in parallel with the first so, at times there were two ruling dynasties occupying different territories at the same time. The most common division of the country was between the upper and lower Nile valley. Northern Egypt terminated at the mouth of the Nile River and was often called Red Egypt or lower Egypt while, to the South, at the cataracts and higher upstream, was Upper Egypt, also called, White Egypt. Two distinct headdresses (crowns) represented these two areas in pictures depicting the kings. But at many points the entire length of the Nile was united under a single, strong ruling dynasty and was sometimes symbolized by the king being depicted as wearing both the Red and White crowns at the same time.
The Old Kingdom was comprised of multiple dynasties (i.e., families), each of which ended when no male heir was available to replace its last king. Most of the Egyptian pyramids were erected by kings of the Old Kingdom and this is quite contrary to the common notion that Hebrew slaves of Egypt (as frequently depicted in Bible movies) were involved in pyramid construction. The truly ancient pyramids at Giza preceded the Hebrews’ advent into Egypt by over 1000 years.
Wikipedia gives details on king lists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Egyptian_dynasties.
For our purposes, we will consider only the region of Egypt to the north, i.e., the Nile delta and over the period of roughly 600 years. In Joseph’s time, the Israelites had settled in the Land of Goshen in the Eastern delta and the capital cities were in the Delta area and this region was included in only the XIIIth, XVth and XVIIIth Dynsasties.
XIIIth Dynasty 1803–1649 BC
XVth Dynasty 1674-1535 BC
XVIIIth Dynasty 1549-1292 BC
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Ancient_Egypt_map-en.svg
ISRAEL IN EGYPT
My studies are tentative, but at present it appears most likely, that the Hebrews moved into Egypt during the Middle Kingdom or perhaps as late as near the end of the Middle Kingdom, and it is now my impression that the children of Israel arrived in Egypt just prior to the Second Intermediate Period near the end of the XIIth dynasty. I hypothesize that Joseph, as the ‘Prime Minister’ or second-in-command of Egypt, assumed full command as a new Pharaoh Ugaf (who some say was about 1794–1757 BC, starting the XIIIth dynasty—Ugaf is sometimes spelled Wegaf) when his mentor, Sedjefakare died without heirs and ended the XIIth dynasty. If this model is correct, Ugaf’s heir would have been Joseph’s elder son, Manasseh but the Egyptian name of record then was Khendjer. Wikipedia (http://www.mysteries-in-stone.co.uk/kings.htm) cites Khendjer as being, ‘the earliest known Semitic king of a native Egyptian dynasty.’
For support of this hypothesis, I must turn to the Bible because there is NOTHING that has been found in Egyptian writings to support the Biblical account that the Israelites ever were in Egypt. The sole known Egyptian written reference to the people of Israel is found on the Meremptah Stele which commemorated his victory in a battle in the Levant (today’s Israel). All the Meremptah Stele says is that ‘Israel is no more,’ (‘Israel has no seed’), implying that it was Meremptah’s prowess that destroyed the Israelites.
Meremptah was the successor of Ramses II, who is believed by some, as being the Pharaoh of the Exodus. But it would seem that Ramses II could NOT have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, for that would make the Exodus much later than the Armana era and not provide a reason for Akhenaten to ‘convert’ to monotheism.
The lack of any mention of Israel by Ramses II (if he actually was the Exodus Pharaoh) is not surprising because the Egyptian rulers rarely mentioned their failures and wrote their histories in a light that would exaggerate their successes and gloss over their failures. Some kings were known to have destroyed all available records of predecessors they did not like, as if the defacing of their names carved in stone would erase the fact they really existed.
Thus, if we are to find information about Israel being in Egypt, we are limited to the Bible and the findings of science as discovered by archaeologists.
For purposes of investigation, I am now going to assume that sometime around the Second Intermediate Period, Joseph would have become the first Semitic king, his sons (and their sons) would have continued the new dynasty, either starting just before the Second Intermediate Period or commencing during that period. The Hyksos (Asians from the Palestine area, sometimes called the ‘Shepherd Kings’) were ousted from power by Ahmose I, the first king of the New Kingdom with its capital being in Thebes, far up the Nile River to the South. This would have been the time when ‘there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.’ (Exodus 1:8) and led to the slavery period of Moses’ time and under the Pharaoh of the Exodus.
Egyptian scholars have long wondered how Semites became the kings without any sign of war or conflict to bring them to power. In this suggested model, Joseph (Ugaf??) as ‘second only to the Pharaoh’ and proposed first ruler in the XIIIth dynasty could have been the replacement to the sonless, Sedjefakare when he died. This would provide the critical overlap of the histories of Egypt and the House of Israel and explain the presence of the Hyksos–a new dynasty– without any sign of conflict upsetting the balance of power as would result from an outside group of Asians forcing their way into power. The XIIIth Dynasty ruled only from Itjtawy, the as-yet unidentified location of the royal city founded by Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian King Amenemhat I, who ruled from about 1991 BC to 1962 BC, during year 20 of his reign. The site of Itjtawy was in the Nile Delta region, (north-eastern Egypt) in the same general area as the Land of Goshen where Jacob was settled by Joseph when he arrived in Egypt.
According to Wikipedia,
“The Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt was the first Hyksos dynasty, ruled from Avaris (also in the north-east delta region) , without control of the entire land. The Hyksos preferred to stay in northern Egypt since they infiltrated from the north-east. The names and order of kings is uncertain.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Egyptian_dynasties
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Ancient_Egypt_map-en.svg
EGYPTIAN GODS
There were many gods in Egypt.
“Most Egyptian gods represented one principle aspect of the world: Ra was the sun god, for example, and Nut was goddess of the sky. The characters of the gods were not clearly defined. Most were generally benevolent but their favor could not be counted on. Some gods were spiteful and had to be placated. Some, such as Neith, Sekhmet, and Mut, had changeable characters. The god Seth, who murdered his brother Osiris, embodied the malevolent and disordered aspects of the world.” https://discoveringegypt.com/ancient-egyptian-gods-and-goddesses/
Approaching the time of the Exodus we find a one-of-a-kind oddity in the history of Egypt. Following close to two thousand years of worshiping many Egyptian gods, one king stands out as a monotheist! King Amenhotep IV declared to all of his people that there were NOT dozens of Egyptian gods, but only the ONE great god, Aten. He changed his own name to Akhenaten in honor of the new One God. He closed all other temples and defaced the statues and inscriptions of the old gods, and demanded that his people worship only Aten; he then proceeded to move the capital of his kingdom SOUTH where he constructed a brand new city from scratch. He named the new capital city Amarna and there, constructed a temple dedicated to Aten.
Akenaten’s closing of other temples was not at all pleasing to the thousands of priests who performed the daily sacrifices and his monotheism disturbed the entire religious and economic cultures of the common Egyptian man and woman. Add