To
begin with, however, Osman explains that the Hebrew word for “daughter”
was indistinguishable, except by context, from the polite word for
“wife”. Hence it was actually Pharaoh’s wife who not only found him but
was really his mother. Even that version of the story is put in
question by the fact that setting a child afloat in a basket was really
an allegorical image of initiation. Perhaps to our surprise, however,
Osman identifies Moses as the son of Solomon (Amenhotep III) and Tiye,
known to history as Akhenaten.
In this Egyptian version, as he is not the son of the royal
heiress, Sitamun,
however, and is not purely Egyptian, he poses a threat to the 18th
Dynasty. When his life is seriously threatened, his mother sends him to
live with her Hebrew relatives in
Goshen.
He grows up there, largely in the city of Zarw,
where there is a temple and worship of Aten, in contrast to the worship
of Amun-Ra, at that time the dominant religion in Egypt.
At about 16, he appears in
Thebes
and becomes co-regent with his father. His mother Tiye, in order to
secure his claim to the throne, has him marry his half-sister, Nefertiti,
daughter of Sitamun. As co-regent, he begins to snub the priests of
Amon-Ra and the other gods, and further arouses their hostility by
building temples to Aten. Reacting further to that hostility, he starts
building his own capital at Tell el-Amarna.
When his father dies, he is 27 and now becomes sole ruler.
He changes his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, and becomes more
aggressive still, closing down the other temples and erasing the names
of their gods. To appease his enemies, he appoints his brother
Semenkhkare as co-regent. This does not suffice, however, and in 1361
BCE at 33, in order to avert a civil war, he is forced to abdicate and
flee the country. He goes to the wilderness of Sinai, but Semenkhkare
is soon killed, and the throne passes to Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten.
Tutankhaten tries to make peace with both sides. He manages
to reconcile with the Amon-Ra priesthood, even changing his name to the
one we know him by—Tutankhamun--and moving back to Thebes. He seems to
have retained something of his Aten faith, however, seeing Aten as the
supreme god, and the others as lesser intermediaries. Even this
concession is too much for his supposed allies, the Atenists, however.
At 19, after only 9 years rule, when he attempts to convert them to his
all-inclusive view, and bring back his father from exile, he is killed
by the priest Panehesy, also known by the name Phineas, who had been a
trusted follower of his father. More about Tutankhamun later.
He is succeeded by his great-uncle and protector Aye
(Ephraim), who also only survives for four years, until an army general
named Horemheb takes the throne. This is the “new king over Egypt
which knew not Joseph[x]
as the four Amarna rulers, Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye
had all been descendants of Joseph (Yuya), whom even Genesis had
called “father of Pharaoh”.
Horemheb erased their names from the records (which confused
archaeologists at first) abolished the worship of Aten, and made it a
crime to mention Akhenaten’s name. This could explain how the latter
came to be called Moses, for, as we saw, it means ”child” but it can
also mean “rightful son and heir”, making it a useful euphemism by which
to refer to him.
Horemheb began to persecute the Atenists. He closed off the
area around their city, Zarw, and began the oppression remembered by the
Hebrews. He appointed Pa-Ramses (later Ramses I) as overseer, who
forced them to rebuild the city and a new residence for himself.
When Horemheb died, Pa-Ramses prepared to claim the throne.
This led Akhenaten to try to re-claim it for himself. It seems he used
his rod of power, which he had used as pharaoh and which was topped by a
brass serpent, and according to the Koran’s version, convinced many of
the priests of his legitimacy by demonstrating secret rituals. (Hence
the story of Moses casting down his rod and it turning into a serpent.)
When however Pa-Ramses intervened with his military might and staged a
kind of coup, Akhenaten (Moses) gathered his followers and fled in 1335
BCE, in what is called the Exodus, towards the Promised Land of
Canaan.
The identification of Tuktankhamen is probably the most
contentious point in Ahmed Osman’s thesis. Seeing him as the innocent
young man who actually held the key to peace, but who is killed, Osman
says he was the original Jesus. He sees Jesus also as the Teacher of
Righteousness of the Essenes’ Dead
Sea
Scrolls, who is also killed, and is identified usually as Jeshu ben
Pandira. Ben means “son of”, and Pandira is not a Hebrew word, but an
ancient Egyptian royal title, as Pa-ntr-ra, or Pa-neter-ra, Son of Ra,
one of the titles of Akhenaten, his father.
Thirdly he identifies him as Joshua, Son of Nun (fish), the successor of
Moses in the Hebrew story. Joshua, like Jeshu, is a variant of Jesus,
and in the first Christian centuries, many authorities referred to
Joshua as Jesus. The vast military campaign Joshua is supposed to have
carried out in the 13th c. BCE, according to the Book of
Joshua and Deuteronomy, has however been shown to be
fiction. For instance, two of the cities he is supposed to have
destroyed had been destroyed earlier (one of which was
Jericho),
and the other two were not destroyed until much later.
The cause of these radical distortions of history Osman
believes to have been the Hebrews’ desire first to conceal their
connection with the Egyptians and then to cover up the fact that their
priest-king had been killed at all, let alone by one of them. In fact,
the condition of Tutankhamen’s mummy, with many broken bones and a
severed head, shows he was tortured as well, then hanged. Yet it still
exhibited “a refined and cultured face” and a “serene and placid
countenance”.[xi]
It is striking that many early Christian groups apparently
believed Jesus had lived much earlier, and were awaiting his return, the
Essenes, for instance.
