Moses and Akhenaten Read Online Free PDF Page B

to him and at his service’. This king made Amenophis welcome and provided accommodation and food for him and his followers for the thirteen years of banishment that the son of Habu had predicted. Manetho’s account, according to Josephus, then continues:
    â€˜Meanwhile, the Solymites [who originated in Jerusalem] came down with the polluted Egyptians and treated the inhabitants in so sacrilegious a manner that the regime of the shepherds seemed like a golden age to those who now beheld the impieties of their present enemies. Not only did they set cities and villages on fire, not only did they pillage the temples and mutilate the images of the gods, but, not content with that, they habitually used the very sanctuaries as kitchens for roasting the venerated sacred animals, forced the priests and prophets to slaughter them and cut their throats, and then turned them out naked …’ Manetho adds that Amenophis subsequently advanced from Ethiopia with a large army and his son, Rampses, at the head of another, and that the two attacked and defeated the shepherds and their polluted allies, killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria.
    Modern scholars have tended to accept the view that Manetho did not rely in his account of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt entirely on Ancient Egyptian historical sources. Gardiner, for instance, says in his book Egypt of the Pharaohs: ‘… the story of Amenhophis (Amenhotep III) and the lepers quoted from him by Josephus … show that he made use not only of authentic records, but also of popular romances devoid of historical value.’ He also makes the point a page earlier: ‘… Josephus’ excerpts from Manetho were introduced to support the latter’s belief that the biblical account of the Exodus and the expulsion of the Hyksos under Tethmosis refer to one and the same historical event … Admittedly the lengthy excerpts in question embody also several popular stories of the most fantastic description, explicitly recognized as such by the Jewish historian.’
    This view has been challenged recently, however, by Redford in Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day Books. After giving an account of the surviving library of the temple of Sobek in Fayum, which dates from the first century BC to the fourth AD, has been brought to light over the last hundred years and is currently in process of publication, he comments, in discussing some aspects of Manetho’s work that is conventionally dismissed as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian’: ‘There is absolutely no justification in … construing them as interpolations. Nor is it correct to imagine Manetho garnering oral traditions and committing them to writing. He would have had no use for, and probably would have despised, material circulating orally and not found formally represented by the temple scroll. What he found in the temple library in the form of a duly authorized text he incorporated in his history; and, conversely, we may with confidence postulate for the material in his history a written source found in the temple library, and nothing more.’ Redford identified the source of Manetho’s Osarseph story as the events of the Amarna religious revolution, first remembered orally and later set down in writing.
    Although the leader of the contaminated people was given as Osarseph by Manethos, other writers have favoured the name of Moses. In his History of Egypt in five books, Apion himself – who lived in the first half of the first century AD, was born in Upper Egypt, studied in Alexandria and taught rhetoric in Rome under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius – wrote in his third book, as quoted by Josephus: ‘Moses, as I have heard from old people [the elders] in Egypt, was a native of Heliopolis who, being pledged to the customs of his country, erected prayer-houses open to the air in various precincts of the city, all facing eastwards, such