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Did Children Build Akhetaten?


Khaemwaset

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7 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 Could the Bible`s  Moses be metaphor of Akhenaten at Armarna?  The plagues that kill so many children and all his family, in letting his people go and himself leaving , they never have found his mummy

Nope.  The stories are not even close.

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BTW, there's some good evidence that mummy 61074 (found in KV55) is Akhenaten.  He's related to Tutankamun.

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4 hours ago, Kenemet said:

BTW, there's some good evidence that mummy 61074 (found in KV55) is Akhenaten.  He's related to Tutankamun.

Hello Kenemet.  Yes, Hawass has been a champion of the Akhenaten attribution of the KV55 fellow; however, as I understand it, the forensics still seem to indicate too young an age at death to be he.  Smenkekhare is another nominee.  Despite the genetic testing results, still not enough evidence for a firm identification.  This tomb remains a curiosity.

Edited by Khaemwaset
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By the way, those who haven't read Aiden Dodson's 2012 paper "Amarna Sunset", covering the late Amarna succession, it is most interesting:

https://www.academia.edu/8206029/Amarna_Sunset_the_late-Amarna_succession_revisited

Dodson here revises his ideas from the 80's about the succession, particularly Nefertiti's status, and gives credit to Kemp's work at Amarna.

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3 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

Yahweh a Israel god.

But Yahweh's earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of YHW", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE),[15

No one can be certain if the "YHW" in that term has any real relevance to the Hebrew Yahweh. It could've been a completely different word with a different set of vowels and pronunciation—which means a completely different meaning. To this point we can't know. That the Shasu were Semitic is probably beyond question, but that might be about the same as trying to equate the Hyksos with the Hebrews. It doesn't work. As it is, there isn't any evidence for the Hebrews as early as Amunhotep III.

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9 minutes ago, kmt_sesh said:

No one can be certain if the "YHW" in that term has any real relevance to the Hebrew Yahweh. It could've been a completely different word with a different set of vowels and pronunciation—which means a completely different meaning. To this point we can't know. That the Shasu were Semitic is probably beyond question, but that might be about the same as trying to equate the Hyksos with the Hebrews. It doesn't work. As it is, there isn't any evidence for the Hebrews as early as Amunhotep III.

If one adheres to the accepted timeline, there's no evidence for Hebrews then, either. That being the case, why is the accepted timeline accepted?

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19 hours ago, Kenemet said:

BTW, there's some good evidence that mummy 61074 (found in KV55) is Akhenaten.  He's related to Tutankamun.

Kenemet, wasn't 61074 found in a cache in KV35? This mummy was long suspected to be Amunhotep III but there have always been doubters. Do you have a credible forensic article or paper so I could read more about the theor?. It sounds interesting.

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3 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

If one adheres to the accepted timeline, there's no evidence for Hebrews then, either. That being the case, why is the accepted timeline accepted?

The earliest Hebrew material culture and settlement patterns are well known in Judea and elsewhere in the Holy Land. The context has been intensively excavated and studied, and continues to be so. The earliest evidence solidly dates to the very end of the Bronze Age (1200-100 BCE).

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15 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

By the way, those who haven't read Aiden Dodson's 2012 paper "Amarna Sunset", covering the late Amarna succession, it is most interesting:

https://www.academia.edu/8206029/Amarna_Sunset_the_late-Amarna_succession_revisited

Dodson here revises his ideas from the 80's about the succession, particularly Nefertiti's status, and gives credit to Kemp's work at Amarna.

I have the book, actually. I read it at Amarna. At sunset.

Okay, I read it in my boring ol' apartment, but it's a good book.

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1 minute ago, kmt_sesh said:

The earliest Hebrew material culture and settlement patterns are well known in Judea and elsewhere in the Holy Land. The context has been intensively excavated and studied, and continues to be so. The earliest evidence solidly dates to the very end of the Bronze Age (1200-100 BCE).

Yes, but that's supposedly after they exited Egypt to conquer the "Promised Land". Before entering Egypt they were polytheistic nomadic sheep herders, virtually indistinguishable from their kindred Canaanites with whom they shared common language and culture. I'm inclined to dismiss the whole story of their sojourn in Egypt and Exodus as myth, as many archaeologists and historical scholars do, except they base this on the lack of evidence within a rigid time frame. Yet, how can a mythological story have a rigid time frame in which it was suppose to occur? It seems obvious the entire story is fiction, or else it had to occur when Egypt was ruled by the Semitic kin of the Hebrews, when there is actual evidence for Semites in Egypt.   

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21 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

Yahweh a Israel god.

But Yahweh's earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of YHW", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE),[15

Shasu was an Egyptian term; but in the bible they were characterized as descendants of "Esau".  

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Quote

On two stelae at Memphis and Karnak, Thutmose III's son Amenhotep II boasts of having made 89,600 prisoners in his campaign in Canaan (around 1420 BC), including "127 princes and 179 nobles(?) of Retenu, 3600 Apiru, 15,200 Shasu, 36,600 Hurrians", etc.

 

Couldn't the Apiru,Habiru( Hebrew)  have adopted the Shasu god  YHW ? after all they were all wandering tribes

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21 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

The earliest Hebrew material culture and settlement patterns are well known in Judea and elsewhere in the Holy Land. The context has been intensively excavated and studied, and continues to be so. The earliest evidence solidly dates to the very end of the Bronze Age (1200-100 BCE).

Is that the stele referring to the defeat of "the house of David"?

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2 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 

Couldn't the Apiru,Habiru( Hebrew)  have adopted the Shasu god  YHW ? after all they were all wandering tribes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habiru

The Israelites originated as Bronze Age Canaanites, but Yahweh does not appear to have been a Canaanite god.[12][13][Notes 1] The head of the Canaanite pantheon was El, and one theory is that the name Yahweh is a shortened form of el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel.[14] But Yahweh's earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of YHW", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE),[15] the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia.[16] In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning "he blows", appropriate to a weather divinity.[17][18]

There is considerable but not universal support for the view that the Egyptian inscriptions refer to Yahweh.[19

 

 

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3 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 

Couldn't the Apiru,Habiru( Hebrew)  have adopted the Shasu god  YHW ? after all they were all wandering tribes

The Habiru could not have been the Hebrews. They appeared on the scene much earlier, than the Habirus, ranged much farther than the Hebrews, and consisted of a wide diversity of ethnicities and languages. In fact, the Habiru were pretty much gone from the stage of history by the time the Hebrews did appear in the Levant.

2 hours ago, Jarocal said:

Is that the stele referring to the defeat of "the house of David"?

That would be the Tel Dan stela (ninth century BCE).

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/

(Sorry if there's a pop-up ad, but the source is reliable. I've used BAR's library and archives for my lectures and in my own research.)

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I should have read more closely above.  A thousand pardons.  Here's my understanding (will bow to higher authority, of course!):

mummy 61074: found in KV35, identified as Amenhotep III, DNA testing revealed as familial precedent to:

mummy 61075: found in KV55, identified as Amenhotep IV/Akenaten or Smenkhkare, DNA testing revealed as familial precedent to

Tutankhamun.

http://www.swissmummyproject.uzh.ch/en/research-1/egyptology.html       /see bottom of page for pertinent section

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Sorry about the multiple posts.  I wanted to return to the OT for a moment:

From Prof. Nick Cipolli USC @2001 on the city:

As was already mentioned, the city of Akhetaten was abandoned soon after the death of Akhenaten, though this process did not occur overnight. As best as scholars have been able to discover, the city remained the seat of royal power and center of religious worship through the reign of Neferneferuaten and into the first year or so of Tutankhamen's. It was then that the city lost its royal patronage, but it was not altogether abandoned. The following ruler was the former leader of chariotry for Akhenaten, a commoner named Ay (1323-1319 BC). Not much is known about his involvement with the now languishing city of Amarna, but from the lack of any building programmes or dedicatory inscriptions, we can probably deduce that there was no interest paid to that site. The final pharaoh of the 18th dynasty was a general named Horemheb (1319-1307 BC). It was during his rule that the Aten temples at Thebes and Karnak were despoiled for their stone, reused in many pylon towers built for the sanctuary of Amun there. Furthermore, Horemheb began the dismantling of the structures of Amarna itself, starting with the blocks of the Great Temple being ferried across the Nile to be used at Hermopolis. However, W. Murname has translated two dedicatory inscriptions indicating that Horemheb presented temple furniture at the Great Temple. One explanation is that the temple may have been rededicated to Amun. Still, this somewhat contradictory evidence aside, the general abandonment of Akhetaten continued. The final nail in Amarna's coffin came by the end of the Rammesside period only a few generations later, the buildings of Amarna were stripped down to their foundations.  http://www-scf.usc.edu/~cipolla/virtour7.htm

Can it be deduced from the remains analyzed from the North cemetery, that this conscripted work force was used not to build the city, but to demolish it, later.  If so, we cannot lay the use of this work force at the feet of Akhenaten, but of another authority.  Any thoughts?

 

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4 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

...

Can it be deduced from the remains analyzed from the North cemetery, that this conscripted work force was used not to build the city, but to demolish it, later.  If so, we cannot lay the use of this work force at the feet of Akhenaten, but of another authority.  Any thoughts?

 

It's an interesting question but I would wager most (if not all) were from Akhenaten's occupancy. There was such a high number of burials that I can't see the majority of the remains coming from the period between Akhenaten and Ramesses II (your excerpt mentions all of the Ramesside period, but the leveling of Akhetaten probably was largely complete already by or during Ramesses II's reign). Wth most of the men who were brought in to raze the heretic's city, even if some died I can't picture any of them or their families wanting to be buried at an abandoned and officially proscribed site. One must also consider the grave goods buried with the bodies. Certainly many of the burials had nothing in the way of grave goods, but some did. There is a clear differentiation between the ceramics of Akhenaten's time (such as beautiful Amarna blueware) and the ceramics of the early Ramesside period. I'm speculating on that idea because I haven't seen the sorts of grave goods found in the North Cemetery, but I've seen good museum examples of Amarna ceramics and Ramesside ceramics.

But to be honest I have a hard time thinking even Akhenaten was terrible enough to work to death more than 6,000 laborers. I still think epidemic was a big factor.

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6 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

I should have read more closely above.  A thousand pardons.  Here's my understanding (will bow to higher authority, of course!):

mummy 61074: found in KV35, identified as Amenhotep III, DNA testing revealed as familial precedent to:

mummy 61075: found in KV55, identified as Amenhotep IV/Akenaten or Smenkhkare, DNA testing revealed as familial precedent to

Tutankhamun.

http://www.swissmummyproject.uzh.ch/en/research-1/egyptology.html       /see bottom of page for pertinent section

Oh, please, like we can keep all of those official designations straight? Don't feel bad. I happened to remember 61074 but I had forgotten KV55's formal designation because I always call him, well, KV55. 

I will go on record (again) that I don't think KV55 is the body of Akhenaten. Only Hawass seems to be wedded to that idea.

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23 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

The Habiru could not have been the Hebrews. They appeared on the scene much earlier, than the Habirus, ranged much farther than the Hebrews, and consisted of a wide diversity of ethnicities and languages. In fact, the Habiru were pretty much gone from the stage of history by the time the Hebrews did appear in the Levant.

kmt how do you know these place names were not all the same, and just different in the spelling or in the  punctuation?  

 

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22 minutes ago, docyabut2 said:

kmt how do you know these place names were not all the same, and just different in the spelling or in the  punctuation?  

I'm not sure what you mean. To what place names are you referring?

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1 minute ago, kmt_sesh said:

I'm not sure what you mean. To what place names are you referring?

 Apiru,Habiru( Hebrew) 

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1 minute ago, docyabut2 said:

 Apiru,Habiru( Hebrew) 

A fair question. First it's important to understand that Habiru is what Levantines and Mesopotamians called them, while the Egyptian variant is Apiru. So there's consistency there,  The word originally developed in the Akkadian tongue around the 18th century BCE and fell out of use by the 11th century BCE, so right about the time the first Hebrews were emerging in the Levant. The word means "migrant," although later it took on the derogatory meaning "bandit. Hebrew means "to cross over" or "pass through," so there's definitely a different shade of meaning. A big difference is, the Hebrews called themselves by this name (as well as others) while the bandits of the Habiru were given that name by others. But the biggest point is, again, the Habiru emerged too early to have been the Hebrews, and they were not of the same ethnicity or language.

I once explained all this in more detail in this old thread.

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