Revolutionising Egypt’s 19th Dynasty
by
Damien F. Mackey
“Traces of a connection between the rulers at the end of the 18th Dynasty and
Horemheb have not been found and ... Velikovsky gives Horemheb a different
place in history”.
Henk Spaan
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky had,
partly based on an inscription pairing Tirhakah together with Horemheb, shifted
the enigmatic Horemheb downwards from his conventional c. 1300 BC location to
the C8th-C7th’s BC era of Tirkahah and the neo-Assyrian potentate, Sennacherib.
We know from the Scriptures that at least Tirkahah and Sennacherib were
contemporaries. E.g. Isaiah 37:9: “Now Sennacherib received a report that
Tirhakah, the king of Ethiopia [Cush], was marching out to fight against him”.
I had briefly touched upon this historical re-location of Horemheb in my
university thesis:
A Revised History
of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
at that stage conceding that “these two kings were far closer in
time … than the “more than six centuries” gap separating them in the
conventional history”.
My view at that stage was that
the separation between the earlier Horemheb, and Tirhakah, was “approximately a
century”.
This is what I then wrote (Volume
One, pp. 252-253):
Ethiopians
The appearance of Horemheb in
an inscription with Tirhakah ruler of Ethiopia, a contemporary of king Hezekiah
and Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:9), led Velikovsky to conclude that Horemheb had
belonged to an era much later than the late C14th BC accredited to him by the
conventional chronology, and that he was in actual fact a contemporary of this
Tirhakah of the 25th (Ethiopian) [dynasty] in the C7th BC. Thus he wrote in an
unpublished work:
… In this reconstruction
Haremhab and Tirhaka, the Ethiopian, are contemporaries; in the conventional
version of history they are separated by more than six centuries, Haremhab
being dated to the late fourteenth and Tirhaka to the early seventh. A certain
scene, carved on one of the walls of a small Ethiopian temple at Karnak, shows
them together. The scene proves not only the contemporaneity of Haremhab and
Tirhaka, but also permits to establish a short period in their relations from
which it dates. ….
Given, though, that Egyptian
monuments sometimes represented two pharaohs of completely different eras,
together, e.g. “… Egyptian artwork shows [the 12th dynasty’s]
Sesostris I seated side by
side with [the 18th dynasty’s] Amenhotep I …” [a ref. to C. McDowell, ‘The
Egyptian Prince Moses’, p. 5, fig. 1.] … I cannot agree with Velikovsky that
the particular carving to which he referred necessarily “proves the
contemporaneity of Haremhab and Tirhaka”.
Though I do believe that these
two kings were far closer in time (approximately a century
apart) than the “more than six
centuries” gap separating them in the conventional history,
and that there was some sort
of relationship between them. ....
[End of quotes]
Henk Spaan also has something to
say on the subject in “Velikovsky and ancient history”, at:
….
Part 4. The Assyrian conquest
In Ages in Chaos Velikovsky shifted the end of the 18th Dynasty from about 1300 to 850 BC. Akhnaton was a contemporary of King Jehoshaphat of Jerusalem and of Ahab of Samaria. After the end of the reign of Akhnaton the 18th Dynasty fairly soon came to an end. Egypt was weakened for some time.
According to the prevailing
view of history, it was Horemheb who succeeded Ay at the end of the 18th
Dynasty. Traces of a connection between the rulers at the end of the 18th
Dynasty and Horemheb have not been found and we will see that Velikovsky gives Horemheb
a different place in history. The section on the Assyrian conquest was not
published, but can be found in the Internet archive of Velikovsky's work.
....
Assyria conquers Egypt
The power of Assyria was growing and the Assyrian annals report the payment of a tribute by the king of Egypt. Some time later they reported that power in Egypt had been seized by the king of Ethiopia who lived far away. It is the beginning of the Ethiopian dynasty in Egypt which ruled for fifty years and which, as we shall see, was several times interrupted by Assyrian campaigns.
The successor of Sargon was Sennacherib ...
Mackey’s comment” According to my
revision, Sargon was Sennacherib.
... who continued the
conquests of his predecessor. He captured the coastal areas of Palestine and
fought a battle with an Egyptian / Ethiopian army at Eltekeh. He also besieged
Jerusalem, but was finally satisfied with payment of a huge penalty. At this
point the question arises whether Sennacherib conquered Egypt too. Jewish
historians report a conquest of Egypt and Herodotus mentions that Sennacherib
invaded Egypt with a large army during the reign of Sethos. Modern historians
say that Herodotus must be mistaken because Sethos (Seti) was one of the most
important kings of the 19th dynasty, who lived around 1280 BC.
....
There is an Egyptian king
who is not easy to place in history. It is not clear who his parents were and
how he became king. His name was Horemheb and he is usually placed in the
transition period between the 18th and 19th Dynasties. On his tomb he bears all
the signs that normally only the kings of Egypt bore and he is named something
like the head of state and commander of the army, but at the same time we read
that he was chosen by the king and a delegate of the king. He is also depicted
in a reverential attitude toward a greater King, whose image was removed in a
later period. Who was the person who appointed Horemheb as king or head of
state? It seems that this greater king is not Egyptian (there is an interpreter
represented at the meeting), and the text states that he was the boss of Syria
and that his conquests were accompanied by putting complete towns to fire and
displacing entire populations from one place to another. These are
characteristics of Assyrian domination and it seems that the Assyrian king
Sennacherib appointed Horemheb as commander in chief. Horemheb was later
crowned king on the day he married Mutnodjme, someone who, according to the
text on a statue, had royal status herself. ....
The intriguing Nahr al-Kalb inscription depicts Esarhaddon together with
Ramses II.
If this inscription is meant to indicate contemporaneity between Esarhaddon
and Ramses II, then I would have to reconsider Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s
extraordinary view that
pharaoh Ramses II was a contemporary of (my Esarhaddon =) Nebuchednezzar
II.
We read about the Phoenician
located inscription at, for instance:
Esarhaddon's Nahr al-Kalb Inscription
Esarhaddon's Nahr al-Kalb Inscription:
inscription, just north of Beirut in
modern Lebanon, documenting the Assyrian
conquest of Egypt in 671 BCE.
….
In the first quarter of the seventh century
BCE, king Esarhaddon (r.680-669) tightened the Assyrian grip
on the cities of Phoenicia. In the winter of 677/676, he was able to subdue the
powerful coastal city of Sidon and
in the next year, he started to demand tribute from
the other Phoenician cities.
Having in this way secured his rear, and no
doubt with the support of a Phoenician fleet, the Assyrian king decided to
attack Egypt (674/673).
After a first setback, he was more
successful in 671 and forced the Egyptian king Taharqo to
abandon Egypt and retreat to his homeland, Nubia.
However, Esarhaddon was forced to suppress insurrections in the north. Among
the rebels were Ashkelon and Tyre,
which Esarhaddon forced into submission. After Essarhaddon's death in 669, his
successor Aššurbanipal would in 667/666 gain full control of Egypt, even
sacking Thebes.
Esarhaddon
(R) facing Ramesses (L)
To make sure that the Phoenician cities
better understood that Esarhaddon was and would always be victorious, the king
left an inscription at the mouth of the Nahr al-Kalb,
opposite one of the reliefs that the Egyptian king Ramesses II had once made to
commemorate his Syrian campaigns. Everyone traveling along the coast from Byblos to Beirut
would see Esarhaddon's relief and understand that Esarhaddon was a greater
conqueror than the heroes of the past.
The inscription
Exposed to the elements, Esarhaddon's
relief is now badly damaged, but the general meaning of the text is
sufficiently clear, and we're certain that the text ended with a reference to
the insurrection of Askhelon and Tyre.
The text, known as ANET 289, was translated
by Daniel David Luckenbill.
[End of
quote]
The dates for Esarhaddon given
above, conventional dates, I would be inclined to reject based upon my view,
now, that Esarhaddon was Nebuchednezzar II: See e.g. my articles:
Esarhaddon a tolerable fit for King Nebuchednezzar
and
Earlier, we found that an
Egyptian pharaoh (Horemheb), supposedly belonging to the C14th BC, had been
depicted with an Ethiopian pharaoh (Tirhakah) belonging approximately half a
millennium later.
Now we find that an Egyptian
pharaoh who is thought to have arrived on the scene somewhat less than a
century after Horemheb, the long-reigning Ramses II ‘the Great’, is depicted in
an inscription (though very much the worse for wear, or mutilation) alongside
Esarhaddon, who is my Nebuchednezzar II.
If this inscription is meant to
indicate contemporaneity between Esarhaddon and Ramses II, then I would have to
reconsider Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s extraordinary view that pharaoh Ramses II
was a contemporary of (my Esarhaddon =) Nebuchednezzar II.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky appears
to me to have been a scholar of immense intuition.
He managed to arrive at some
extraordinary conclusions that absolutely revolutionise the study of ancient
history, though his methodology could sometimes be questionable.
Revisionists have rightly
dismissed his separation of the 19th Egyptian dynasty from the 18th, based on
the archaeological and genealogical data. Velikovsky thought that his new
approach had enabled for him to identify Ramses II’s Hittite ally, Hattusilis,
with Nebuchednezzar II. But this was a wrong archaeology, a wrong geography and
a wrong ethnicity.
The secret may be, instead, to
collapse the late neo-Assyrian period into the early neo-Babylonan period,
thereby making Esarhaddon (as I have) Nebuchednezzar II. Then, by this means,
and not by wreaking havoc with established Egyptian archaeology, to make Ramses
II and Nebuchednezzar II (= Esarhaddon) contemporaries based upon, e.g., the Nahr
al-Kalb inscription.
Velikovsky had interpreted the Nahr
al-Kalb (or Dog River) inscription most unconventionally, with his Ramses II
coming after Esarhaddon. Emmet Sweeney writes of it in his book, EMPIRE OF THEBES (or Ages In Chaos Revisited, p.
20): “In Ramses II and his Time,
Velikovsky mentions the Dog River inscriptions but, contrary to accepted ideas,
makes Ramses II’s carving come after that of Esarhaddon. This is because he
accepted the traditional date of Esarhaddon (early 7th century) whilst placing
Ramses II in the early 6th century”.
Now, Esarhaddon was (like his
father, Sennacherib) a known contemporary of pharoah Tirhakah, whom Velikovsky
had accepted as being a contemporary of Horemheb.
Tirhakah Ramses
II
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