Moses and Akhenaten Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘attendant’, also known as Syncellus ( AD 800), of Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople – who contributed greatly to the transmission.
    According to Josephus in his book Contra Apionem, Alexandria had become a main centre for the Jews during the time of the Ptolemies. They enjoyed both Alexandrian citizenship and the city’s ‘finest residential quarter’ by the sea. The Alexandrian Jews were naturally interested in Manetho’s account of their historic links with Egypt, although they found some aspects of it objectionable. His original work therefore did not survive for long before being tampered with. The efforts of Jewish apologists account for much of the subsequent corruption of Manetho’s text and the creation of what is known as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian’ literature.
    Although, as we shall see, Egypt tried to wipe out all trace of the four Amarna kings – Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye – by excising their names from king lists and monuments after the fall of the Amarna regime, they are correctly named by Manetho as having ruled between the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, and Horemheb, who is to be identified as the Pharaoh of the Oppression. In addition, an epitome of Manetho’s history had already been made as early as Ptolemaic times in the form of lists of dynasties accompanied by short notes on outstanding kings and important events, including the defeat of the Hyksos invaders, followed by the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the Exodus. These versions of the epitome differ from one another, indicating that some distortion has occurred in the process of transmitting and editing Manetho’s Aegyptiaca itself. However, a number of points are worth making:
    â€¢Â Â The list of Syncellus (according to Africanus) places the Exodus, when ‘Moses went forth from Egypt’, in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who drove out the Hyksos shepherds: this is an error arising from wrongly identifying, as Josephus did, the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and the subsequent expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmosis as the Exodus;
    â€¢Â Â The lists of Syncellus (according to Eusebius) and the version of Eusebius which was found translated into Armenian place the Exodus of the Jews, with Moses at their head, more than two centuries later in the reign of the king who succeeded Orus (Amenhotep III, c. 1405–1367) – his son and coregent Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten);
    â€¢Â Â Syncellus (according to Africanus) also states that it was in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, that Moses led the Exodus;
    â€¢Â Â Syncellus (according to Eusebius) claims that it was ‘about’ the reign of a Pharaoh named Achencherres (Amenhotep IV, who later became Akhenaten) – that ‘Moses led the Jews in their march out of Egypt’;
    â€¢Â Â The Armenian version of Eusebius similarly lists the reign of Achencheres (Akhenaten) as the time ‘when Moses became the leader of the Jews in their Exodus’.
    Josephus made an error by identifying the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and their subsequent expulsion by Ahmosis as the Exodus. What helped him to make the mistake was his desire to show that the Israelites had left Egypt long before Amenhotep III and the religious revolution that began in his reign. Josephus begins by saying that the Jews’ ancestors, whom he regarded as the Hyksos, ‘entered Egypt in their myriads and subdued the inhabitants’. 4 Later they were driven out of the country, occupied Judaea and founded Jerusalem. At this point he complains that Manetho ‘took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us [the Israelites] as mixed up with a crowd of Egyptian lepers and others who for various