CaptainChewbacca wrote:Interesting. I wonder how much of this is actual history and how much is intellectual conjecture and how much is your own creation.
Most of it is real history - or at least as real as the available records can tell us. The Pharaoh Akhenaten really existed (his wife was Nefertiti) and Tutenkhamun was his son. He really did create a new monotheistic religion based around the Sun God Aten and attempt to destroy the previous polytheistic religions. There really was immense civil disturbance as a result, the evidence is that the civil war went on for over 50 years. Egypt really was reduced to ruin. The surviving followers of Aten really were enslaved and the old religion restored. Enslaved PoWs in Egyptian were called Hibaru, there really is only a single reference to Israelites in Egyptian records and that dates from 50 - 60 years after Ramesses II.
Whether the surviving slaves became the Israelites is something that, short of a miraculous discovery, we will probably never know. The evidence is pretty thin but personally I find it plausible to the point of being compelling. I find it very hard to believe that the Israelites just suddenly appear in Egypt without any other references to them and the phonetic similarity between Hibari and Hebrew is telling. That makes a very strong case that the "Hebrews" were enslaved PoWs and the timing at the end of the Aten civil wars is too much coincidence to be comfortable as does the fact that the Exodus escapees were monotheistic, something unique in Egypt to the followers of Aten. There were no significant foreign advantures in the time period in question so captives from outside seems unlikely. I believe it is almost certain that some sort of major battle resulting in a catastrophic Egyptian defeat did take place and those events are the "death of the first born" and the subsequent Exodus.
The Osiris legend (or the version presented in Ten Plagues) is genuine in the sense that it is a real Egyptian myth. I bought a copy of "The Book Of The Dead" translated by E.A. Wallis Budge (British Museum 1910) a while ago. In addition to translating the Book, Budge provided an introduction to Egpytian mythology that includes the Osiris story more or less as repeated in "Ten Plagues". I was struck by the similarities to the Moses story and spent most of a flight from Nellis AFB, Nevada to Chicago with my eyes closed writing this story in my head. Oddly, (and in quite a different connection) I'd already come around to the idea that the events described in Exodus was actually a slave revolt and that the "parting of the Red Sea" was some sort of battle in a marsh. When I saw the Ramesses program "Ramses:Wrath of God or man, I felt it fitted in perfectly. It provided the link and, read one way, Exodus is also telling us the Akhenaten story but heavily re-written and edited. Linked with the Osiris legend it seemed to fit together rather well, a combination of scribes and folk-historians retelling old legends and blending them with recent events.
The contentious part us the creation of Sammael. When I was thinking about this, it seemed to me that the most likely story that explained the Sammael mythology was that a king, somewhere along the route, inflicted a series of savage defeats on the escapees. As such, he would be regarded as a deadly enemy, the source of evil (we're good, he beat hell out of us so he must be BAD) and be seriously demonized.
So, I took the legends and worked them backwards. Sammael becomes a king who
first welcomed the refugees and then turned on them (the scribes would argue that they're good, he turned on them so he revolted against Heaven).
Who defeated them repeatedly (again, the scribes would argue he was opposed to us, we are good so he's evil incarnate),
Whose army was built around armored heavy infantry that came as a dreadful shock to lighly-armed and unarmored escaping slaves no matter how tough the ex-slaves were (which the scribes transformed into an army of invincible demons),
who was a good and just ruler who converted enemies to his cause rather than slaughtered them (which was rewritten as him seducing his enemies and luring them into his evil ways),
in whose kingdom women were treated somewhat better than the prevailing social norms and thus enjoyed a healthier and better life (which the scribes rewrote as being surrounded by lustful female demons who were wanton and immodest and enjoyed long life and great beauty as a result of their seducing the scribes' good, honest comrades).
Sammael may have been a Canaanite, or perhaps another king of a tribe whose name was either one of those listed in the Bible or has been lost to history.
The epilogue to High Frontier will explain who the Contractors are and what they are up to. Promise.
