Abraham, Moses, Akhenaten, Meritaten and the Cassiopaeans Part 2
The Ipuwer Papyrus
Quoting below from the article by Marina Sohma:
Does the Ipuwer Papyrus Provide Evidence for the Events of the Exodus?
See: Does the Ipuwer Papyrus Provide Evidence for the Events of the Exodus? | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)
The Ipuwer papyrus, also known as the ‘Admonitions of Ipuwer’, is a controversial text that describes starvation, drought, death, and violent upheavals in ancient Egypt, with some maintaining that it is an eyewitness account of the Exodus plagues. Neither the beginning nor end of this work was preserved, leaving historians with difficulty in interpreting the material and reaching a final conclusion about the events it describes.
Written in a single papyrus, the Admonitions of Ipuwer, (catalogue name Papyrus Leiden 344) is a poetic composition believed to have been written during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom era, a period corresponding to 2050 BC - 1652 BC. The origin of acquisition regarding this document is obscure. It was in possession of the Greek diplomat and merchant Yianni Anastasiou who claimed that the papyrus was discovered at Memphis, in the Saqqara region. It is currently housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Leiden, Netherlands.
The nature of the message in the Ipuwer papyrus depicts violence and chaos in Egypt. According to Dr. Lange, evidence does validate the idea that the Ipuwer papyrus was written during the Middle Kingdom, as the language style and vocabulary corresponds to those used during that era. Dr. Lange says that there are indications that the manuscript was copied from an older version, perhaps dating from the beginning of the 18th Dynasty (circa 1550 BC to 1292 BC). There are unfilled spaces which probably illustrates that it was missing or illegible in the original copied document.
Many scholars support the theory proposed by Dr. Lange, who believes the Ipuwer papyrus contains prophetic utterances of an Egyptian seer, as Alan Gardiner relates:
“It must have explained the circumstances under which the chief personage named, one ‘Ipw’ or ‘Opw-wr’, came forward to hold a long and impassioned harangue in the presence of the king and his people. These speeches, in the opinion of Dr. Lange, are prophetic in character; an era of disasters is predicted for Egypt, and is even now, as one passage declares, at hand; and it is the king himself who is responsible for the calamities the bitterness of which he is soon to taste in full measure.[…] I conclusion, it is suggested that the book may have had an historical background, and that the writer had possibly in his mind some such political situation as that of the troublous times which preceded the rise of the twelfth dynasty”.
On the other hand, a controversial, yet intriguing, interpretation of this text was proposed by
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky who brought up a theory that the Ipuwer papyrus is a source of evidence for the events of the Exodus, from the Old Testament. The contents of this papyrus have an oddly familiar ring to those who know their Old Testament. ‘
Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere…The river is blood…Gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire…. Cattle moan…The land is not light’”. Literary analyses would put the original, of which the Leiden papyrus is a copy, at some time during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the very beginning of the turbulent Hyksos period. This would certainly coincide, therefore, with the reigns of Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten.
Gardiner agrees with Velikovsky’s chronology in the sense that the Ipuwer papyrus text tells us about both a civil war and of an Asiatic occupation of the Delta. The two periods in which this might be possible are the dark age that separated the sixth from the eleventh dynasty, and the other is the Hyksos period. Gardiner inclines towards the theory of the invasion of Hyksos to explain the events in which this papyrus alludes.
Gardiner has no doubt that Ipuwer’s pessimism was intended to be understood as the response to a real national calamity and the references to Asiatic aggression on the Delta and devastation of the land through civil war leaves no room for questions on this point. However, this doesn’t stop Wikipedia from trying to rebut the Exodus connection:
“Ipuwer has often been put forward in popular literature as confirmation of the biblical account of
the Exodus, most notably because of its statement that "
the river is blood" and its frequent references to servants running away. This assertion has not gained acceptance among scholars. There are disparities between Ipuwer and the narrative in the Book of Exodus, such as that the papyrus describes the Asiatics as arriving in Egypt rather than leaving. The papyrus' statement that the "
river is blood" phrase may refer to the red sediment colouring the Nile during disastrous floods, or simply be a poetic image of turmoil.”
However, the scholars they rely on here are taking the Biblical narrative of a mass exodus of Israelites (who, as Hittites, would have been viewed as Asiatics or Amu by the native Egyptians) literally rather than the relatively small group of just 600 plus people who went into exile with Abraham/Moses, as confirmed by the C’s:
Q: (L) So, from 1627 BC to 1588 BC - that's 39 years - almost exactly 40 years of "wandering in the desert," so to say. So, they must have escaped when Thera blew and forty years later, the comets came. What was Abraham and his crew doing during that time?
A: Bedouins.
Q: (L) How many were in this tribe?
A: 623.
Q: (L) So it wasn't multiple thousands of people as the Bible would have us believe. Okay, is Abraham the same individual as is presented as his son, Isaac?
A: No.
But Gardiner and Velikovsky are not the only persons to date the Biblical plagues and the Exodus to the 18th Dynasty for, as I have pointed out in previous posts, so do the British writers and researchers Ian Wilson and Graham Phillips.
The Exodus Enigma
In his book
The Exodus Enigma, Ian Wilson makes the point that according to Egyptian sources, the Asiatics who poured into the Nile Delta spoke the same West Semitic language as that of the Biblical Israelites. Wilson quotes Genesis 12:10 “
There was a famine in the land, so severe that Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while.” However, Wilson does not, of course, view Abraham and Moses as one and the same person the way we do.
In the tomb of the 19th century BC nobleman Khnumhotep found at Ben-Hassan, 200 miles from Cairo, there is a well-known painting of a group of Asiatics making an approach to the Egyptian border.
According to the hieroglyphic inscription there were 37 people in this particular party who were the ‘Amu from Shotu’, thought to have been modern Transjordania. You may note the two sets of bellows on top of the baggage carried by the donkeys, which suggests this group were able to turn their hand to metalwork, a skill which the Egyptians in general were never particularly adept. However, we know that the Celts were from antiquity renowned as metalworkers.
Note also the multicoloured clothing that is evocative of the patriarch Joseph’s coat of many colours, which may establish a strong link to the Scythians and their later Scoti or Scottish descendants who are famous for their multicoloured, plaid or tartan kilts. This reference reminds me of what the C’s once said about the Celts:
Q: (L) I am curious about what I call the "Scottish Question." Why is it that every time I start a paper trail on any issue of conspiracy, there always seems to be a link to Scotland and Scots?
A: "Celtic," what does it mean?
Q: (L) Well, the word "kilt" comes from "Celtic," but no one seems to know where they originated... they just sort of appeared on the landscape, so to speak.
A: Exactly!
I have in previous posts mentioned the possibility that the Hebrews of the Bible may be equated with a group known to the Egyptians as the ‘Habiru’. Ian Wilson is also alive to this possibility but wisely urges caution. However, he does point out that earlier references to the Habiru do locate them in the northern reaches of the river Euphrates, which is in accordance with the patriarch Abraham’s origins as described in Joshua 24:2: “Long ago your forefathers, Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor, lived beside the Euphrates, and they worshipped other gods.”
Recalling the bloodline covenant Moses made with the Israelites, as referred to above, Wilson noted that there were a variety of strange practices uniquely referred to in association with the patriarchs of the book of Genesis, which can be traced to social customs peculiar to the Mesopotamian city states of Mari and Nuzi. As a mark of his covenant with God, in Genesis 15 Abraham is described as having halved some animals down the middle, then ‘placed each piece opposite its corresponding piece’, a ritual act seemingly intended to invoke the fate of the animals upon anyone breaking the covenant. Wilson then adds that a nearly identical practice, the killing of an ass to bind treaties, is referred to in the tablets from Mari.
Furthermore, Wilson notes that three times in the Book of Genesis (chapters 12, 20 and 26) Abraham and his son Isaac are represented introducing their wives as their sisters to friendly monarchs – an apparently motiveless piece of deception leading to inevitable embarrassment once they were found out. For Wilson this confusion is explained by the Nuzi tablets. At Nuzi a man could impart particular sanctity to his marriage if, on marrying, he adopted bis wife as his sister. Does this mean that Abraham may have been married to Sarah/Nefertiti (both being Hittites and Levites) before they arrived in Egypt? Although one cannot rule this possibility out, I think it unlikely (unless they were betrothed at a very young age as has been the custom with royalty from time immemorial in order to cement dynastic ties) since my understanding is that Nefertiti was supposed to have grown up at the court of Pharaoh (as did Moses for that matter) as part of his extended household.
But Wilson also mentions a third example which concerns the practice of surrogacy. In Genesis, the marriages of both Abraham and Jacob (who the C’s confirmed was yet another persona of Abraham/Moses) reached a stage of near despair from them being childless. In both cases their wives, suspecting it is they who are infertile and suggested that a servant girl should act as a surrogate mother. In Genesis 16:12 Abraham is told by his wife Sarah or Sarai: “Take my slave girl [Hagar]; perhaps I shall find a family through her.” In Genesis 30:3 Jacob is similarly told by his wife Rachel: “Here is my slave girl Bilhah. Lie with her, so that she may bear sons to be laid upon my knees, and through her I too may build a family.” Wilson notes that such a concept is totally absent from the later scriptures, but this practice had official blessing at the city of Nuzi. There, if a man’s wife was barren, it was her duty to find another woman to bear her husband’s children, those children becoming hers as if she had borne them herself – reflecting Sarah’s words – “perhaps I shall find a family through her”. For Wilson, these practices strongly suggest that the ancestors of the Biblical Hebrews spent some time in their wanderings on the fringes of Mari and Nuzi at a date which may be roughly assigned to the first half of the second millennium BC.
I would point out that even of this link is true, it may not explain the peculiar circumstances in which Abraham/Moses/Jacob had a child, Ishmael. with his wife’s (Nefertiti/Sarah/Rachel) daughter Meritaten - otherwise known in the Bible as Hagar the Egyptian. Even if Abraham/Moses and Sarah/Nefertiti had roots which lay with the people who were the Biblical Hebrews, who were possibly the Habiru, they would seem to have been Hittites according to the C’s, who at that time occupied Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and not the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotomia) where the cities of Mari and Nuzi were situated. Moreover, it is more likely that as two persons who had spent many, if not most, of their formative years in Egypt at the Pharaoh’s court, they would have naturally adopted Egyptian customs and practices. We know that the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty practiced incest with female close family members, so although it may seem shocking to our sensibilities today, the act of Abraham/Moses having a child with his stepdaughter would not have been viewed as something out of the ordinary in the Egyptian culture of that period.
Who was Moses?
This issue of Abraham/Moses and Nefertiti/Sarah living at Pharoah’s court leads to the question of who really was Moses? Wilson points out that the name “Moses” is an Egyptian one meaning “is born”, the same as “mosis” in the name Tuthmosis or Tuthmose, an Egyptian prince and elder brother of Akhenaten, who some think people could have been the real Moses, who mysteriously disappeared from the record prior to Akhenaten’s ascent of the throne (see more below on this). Wilson also points out that several of the Levites (recalling here that the C’s have told us they were Hittites) described in the Bible as having been involved in the Exodus, including Phinehas, Merari and Hophni, had, like Moses, Egyptian names. For Wilson, this does not mean that these people were necessarily Egyptian, but they had been so long Egyptianized that they had no Semitic names to fall back on.
Like Laura, Wilson entertained serious doubts about the truth of certain aspects of the Biblical story of Moses’s birth, but he noted that there were clues in the account which suggests he had a relatively well-to-do Egyptian upbringing. Wilson noted that during the 18th Dynasty, it was not uncommon for the children of subject foreign princes to be brought up in the Egyptian court – the apparent reason being to gain their loyalty in adult life. Wilson wonders whether Moses was one of these children, noting that if this was the case, then the practice of Egyptian inculturation had clearly failed where he was concerned.
To support this hypothesis further, Wilson cites the Biblical scholar George Mendenhall who argued that the possibility Moses spent some time at a royal court is indicated by the similarity between the covenant which he is described as having set up between God and the Israelite people (see above) and the type of covenant between lord and vassal that was common around the middle of the second millennium BC among such people as the Hittites. This argument is even more persuasive once you take into account the C’s confirmation that Abraham/Moses was in fact a Hittite. Mendenhall points out that the form of covenant is in each case almost identical: the lord’s identification of himself and his titles, “I am the Lord your God”; a statement of his past munificence, “Who brought you out of Egypt”; a requirement of loyalty and obedience, “You shall have no other gods to set against Me; you shall not make a carved image …” and so on.
But for Wilson, the links with Egypt go further than just the adoption of Egyptian names. Intriguingly, Wilson notes that the idea of an ‘ark’ as a portable god-house was typically Egyptian. He points out that on his military campaigns Tuthmosis III would travel with a portable shrine, which was the cabin of a ceremonial boat housing an image of the god Amon - ‘he who is hidden’ - and Egyptian armies paraded before it, regarding it as their divine protection, in a manner reminiscent of the Israelites subsequent use of the Ark of the Covenant. Like the Israelite Ark, the Egyptian one could be opened only by specially privileged persons, in this case the pharaoh and his most senior priests. Let us also recall that an ark like contraption, which may have been a similar portable shrine, was found by Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
However, if the Hittite Abraham/Moses had been brought up in the Egyptian court then the same could be equally true of the Hittite Nefertiti, whose Egyptian name meant ‘the beautiful one is come’. She may have been quite young when she originally came to the Egyptian court, whether voluntarily or otherwise. Alternatively, she may have already been mature at that time and may have known or had a relationship with Abraham/Moses before arriving at Pharaoh’s court, which the Biblical story of Abraham passing her off as his sister to Pharaoh may allude to.
This last point may link up with Laura and the Chateau crew’s observation, which the C’s confirmed was true, that Abraham/Moses was also Paris in Homer’s account of the Trojan War as set out in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Nefertiti/Sarah was Helen of Troy:
Session 2 February 2003:
Q: One of the questions we would like to clear up is the issue of the Holy Grail and the Ark. Is the Ark of the Covenant - the ark thing given to the early pre-Mosaic Jews that you have described previously - the same as the Holy Grail?
A: No.
Q: (L) So there are two completely different technologies?
A: If you wish to term it such.
Q: (Galahad) Thanks guys! That's real clear!
A: This is an issue that will clarify itself soon enough.
Q: (L) Is my idea correct that we can identify the presence of these more-or-less technologies by the architecture or art or megalithic structures of the different groups on the planet?
A: To some extent, yes. But do not let that be the only clue. You might consider "lifestyle" as well as the presence and uses of metals; particularly gold vs. iron. [MJF: Gold was used a lot in Ancient Egypt for ornamentation, although it was mined outside of Egypt mainly in Nubia, whereas iron ore was mined and refined in Hittite Anatolia and used for the Hittite’s powerful war chariots and weapons.]
Q: (Galahad) Well, we got that part right. (L) Once before we discussed Nefertiti and Sarah being one and the same person. We have now been discussing the idea, based on some significant clues in ancient documents, that this individual was also Helen of Troy. Is this, in fact, a useful idea to follow? Is it a correct assessment of the clues?
A: Indeed!
Q: (L) That would mean that, according to the story, that Paris/Alexander would be the same individual as Abraham and that Herodotus' story of Paris and Helen sojourning in Egypt was true?
A: Yes.
This revelation opens up a whole new avenue of speculation and potentially links Abraham and Nefertiti to the Trojan War, which rather than taking place in Asia Minor, as the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann believed when he discovered what he thought was the ancient city of Troy at Hissarlik in Turkey, occurred instead in what today is Cambridge in England according to Iman Wilkens. Does this then suggest that the Hittites/Levites were Trojan refugees from Britain who had succeeded in escaping the burning city of Troy?
In Homer’s Iliad, Paris, also known as Alexander (Ἀλέξανδρος, Aléxandros), was the son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. However, we should probably not take the mythic elements of Homer’s story too seriously here. For example, the account of Paris falling in love with Helen and spiriting her away from her husband King Menelaus of Sparta and taking her to his native city Troy, thereby causing the Trojan War, may simply be a reflection of the story of Abraham/Moses/Paris falling in love with Nefertiti/Sarah/Helen and eloping with her into the Sinai Desert with her cuckolded husband Akhenaten in hot pursuit. Herodotus’s alternative spin on Homer’s original tale with Paris and Helen sojourning in Egypt after their ship was blown off course by a violent storm (echoes perhaps of the rough conditions that prevailed in the eastern Mediterranean as a result of the explosion of Thera) would again appear to be a further reflection on the love story of Abraham/Moses and Nefertiti/Sarah. Is there anything in the historical record to support the idea of there being a Hittite prince by the name of Alexander during the period in question?
Alaksandus of Wilusa
I recently discovered at my uncle’s house an interesting book on the Hittites by
Oliver Gurney, which mentioned an Anatolian kingdom called
Wilusa ruled over by a king called
Alaksandus circa 1300 BC. You will immediately note that Alaksandus is phonetically similar to Aléxandros and by extension Alexander. Wilusa (or Wilusiya) was a Late Bronze Age city in western Anatolia known from references in fragmentary Hittite records. This ancient city and archaeological site is located at
Hisarlik in present-day Turkey. For our purposes, the city is particularly notable for its identification with the archaeological site of Troy (see above), and thus its potential connection to the legendary Trojan War.
In 1924,
Emil Forrer, a Swiss Hittologist, suggested that the name
Ahhiyawa corresponds to the Homeric term for the Greeks,
Achaeans. Forrer's work was primarily motivated by linguistic similarities, since "
Wilusa" and the associated placename "
Taruisa" show striking parallels to the Greek names "
Wilios" and "
Troia" respectively. Subsequent research on Hittite geography has lent these identifications additional support and they are now generally accepted by scholars, though they are not regarded as firmly established. One alternative hypothesis proposes that Wilusa was located near
Beycesultan, which was known in the Byzantine era as "Iluza" (Ἴλουζα), similar phonetically to
Ilium (Latin) or
Ilion (Greek).
Carrying on with the Byzantine connection, the book explained that
Stephanus of Byzantium* preserved the legend that the town of
Samylia in Caria (a region of western Anatolia) had been founded by one
Motylos who had received Helen and Paris (presumably on their voyage from Sparta to Troy), which may be reflected perhaps in the historical treaty of vassalage between the Hittite king
Mawatalli II and Alaksandus. Alaksandu's obligations under that treaty included both timely intelligence about potential anti-Hittite activity as well as soldiers for military expeditions. Some evidence suggests that Muwatalli invoked this later obligation, as Wilusan soldiers appear to have served in the Hittite army during the Battle of Kadesh (see more below on this).
*Stephanus of Byzantium was a 6th century AD Byzantine grammarian and the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled Ethnica (Ἐθνικά), only meagre fragments of which survive, although an epitome, i.e., a summary or miniature form of it, is extant. Nearly every article in the epitome contains a reference to some ancient writer, as an authority for the name of the place.
Although Herodotus claimed they were Minoans, the Carians themselves maintained that they were Anatolian mainlanders and were akin to the Mysians and the Lydians. Interestingly, the Homeric name for the Lydians was Μαίονες, who were cited as being among the allies of the Trojans during the Trojan War. There is today a Turkish town in this region called
Selimiye, which to me seems etymologically close to Samylia. This town’s name may therefore be a distant echo of the ancient Carian town of Samylia. As Iman Wilkens has shown, names have a way of surviving even after successive invasions and conquests.
Map of the Near East depicting location of Wilusa in Northwest Anatolia.
Wilusa was apparently part of a confederation of Arzawa or Assuwa. Indeed, Wilusa first appears in the historical record around 1400 BC, when it was one of the twenty-two states of the Assuwa Confederation, which formed in an unsuccessful attempt to oppose the Hittite Empire. The name was recorded in various centres in Mycenaean Greece as Asiwia, which later acquired the form “Asia”. Hence, if you ever wondered where the European name of Asia as representing the Far East came from, this is its root.
King Alaksandus reigned in the late Bronze Age, and thus far too late for Abraham/Moses, but could this king’s name have been cognate with that of the patriarch Abraham in his persona as Paris, who was also known as Alexander? If so, was Wilusa Troy, not the original Troy but a new Troy named after the original city of that name located in England and destroyed at the culmination of the Trojan War in the same way that today’s city of New York in the USA is named after the city of York in England? Although some scholars would like to identify Wilusa with Troy and the Trojan War, others sanction caution in this regard as no one has yet found any historical evidence for any particular event from the Greek legends of Troy, and the Hittite documents themselves do not suggest that Wilusa-Troy was ever attacked by Greeks-Ahhiyawa (Achaeans). Noted Hittitologist Trevor Bryce cautions that our current understanding of Wilusa's history does not provide evidence for there ever having been an actual Trojan War since "the less material one has, the more easily it can be manipulated to fit whatever conclusion one wishes to come up with".
The Dardanians and the Trojans
The same book also revealed that an Egyptian source confirmed that the ‘
Drdny’ (i.e., the Dardanians – as no other similar name is known) fought as allies of the Hittites, like the Wilusans, at the Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC) against the Egyptian forces of Ramesses II. The
Dardanoi (Greek: Δάρδανοι; its anglicised modern terms being
Dardanians or
Dardans) were a legendary people of the Troad, supposedly located in north-western Anatolia (Turkey). The Dardanoi were by legend the descendants of
Dardanus, the mythical founder of Dardanus, an ancient city in the Troad. The Dardanelles Strait was named after the Dardanoi, who lived in the region. From our perspective, it is important to note that a contingent of Dardanians figures among Troy's allies in the Trojan War. If the Wilusans were Trojan descendants, then it makes sense that the Dardanians would continue to be allied with them, as they had been during the earlier Trojan War, unless this later event (i.e., the Battle of Kadesh) somehow became superimposed upon Homer’s account due to distance in time.
The Royal House of Troy was also divided into two branches, that of the Dardanoi and that of the Trojans (their city being called Troy, or sometimes Ilion/Ilium). The House of the Dardanoi (its members being the
Dardanids, Greek: Δαρδανίδαι; Latin:
Dardanidae) was older than the House of Troy, but Troy later became more powerful. Aeneas is referred to in Virgil’s
Aeneid interchangeably as a
Dardanian or as a
Trojan, but strictly speaking, Aeneas was of the branch of the Dardanoi. Many rulers of Rome, for example
Julius Caesar and
Augustus, claimed descent from Aeneas and the Houses of Troy and Dardania. Homer adds the epithet
Dardanides (Δαρδανίδης) to King Priam and to other prominent characters denoting that they are members of the house of the Dardanoi.
According to Wikipedia, the ethnic affinities of the Dardanoi, and of the Trojans, and the nature of their language remain a mystery. This would make sense if they were refugees who migrated to the Dardanelles region after the fall of Troy, their original homeland, and then established themselves in Anatolia as the people who would subsequently be known to the Egyptians and the Mitanni as the Hittites/Dardanians. Their migration to the eastern Mediterranean, possibly via Italy and Illyria, may, of course, have been part of a general Celtic migration from Northern and Northwest Europe after a calamity such as a cometary bombardment similar perhaps to the one which brought about the end of the Western Roman Empire in the 6th Century AD, as confirmed by the C’s. This eastwards migration might also explain the C’s following comments in the
session dated 19 February 2000:
Q: What was the connection between the Hyperboreans, including the Celts of Britain, I believe, and the people of Delos?
A: Northern peoples were responsible for civilising the Meditteranean/Adriatic peoples with the encoded secrets contained within their superior extra-terrestrially based genetic arrangement. Practice of which you speak was multi-trans-generational habit.
Note that they specifically say “extra-terrestrially based genetic arrangement”, which is a curious phrase. Does this refer to their Kantekkian origins or to an off-planet, Orion laboratory hybridisation experiment perhaps even related to the 353535 tribal code?
The Thracians
The remains of the Dardanians material culture reveal close ties with Luwian, and other Anatolian groups, and
the Thracians. In his book
Where Once Stood Troy,
Iman Wilkens argued that the Thracians originally hailed from western Brittany in France rather than Thrace or Thessaly in today’s Greece. Like the Dardanians, the Thracians were allies of the Trojans during the Trojan War according to Homer. Could the Thracians have been the ancient Dardanians?
The Thracians were an Indo-European speaking people who resided mainly in the Balkans (mostly modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Greece) and other locations in the southeast of Europe, but importantly they were also located in Anatolia. This would have made them close neighbours of the Wilusans (see previous map above).
As Wikipedia explains, the exact origin of Thracians is unknown, but it is believed that proto-Thracians descended from a purported mixture of Proto-Indo-Europeans and Early European Farmers arriving from the rest of Asia and Africa through Asia Minor (Anatolia). This could, of course, just be wishful thinking on the part of scholars.
This proto-Thracian culture developed into the Dacian, Getae and several other smaller Thracian cultures. Thracian culture was described as tribal by the Greeks and Romans, which is similar to the way in which the Romans later described the western European Celts. Interestingly, Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher and poet, writing in the 6th century BC described the Thracians as "
blue-eyed and red-haired", which again, if true, is indicative of the Celts (and Scythians). Ancient Greek artwork also tended to depict Thracians as redheads. Among their customs was tattooing, common among both males and females, which again is a practice the Celts widely indulged in. Both the Romans and the Greeks called them barbarians owing to the perceived backwardness of their culture. This perceived primitiveness may be related to their living simple lives in open villages. However, the Romans said the same of the Celts who preferred to live in open villages rather than large walled towns. Intriguingly, the first historical record of the Thracians is found in the
Iliad, where they are described as allies of the Trojans in the Trojan War. This brings us back to Iman Wilkens and his contention that the Thracians had come from western Brittany in France. One must be critical here and state that Homer (writing in the eighth century BC) was really a poet not an historian, so relying on him as an authentic historical source is tantamount to relying on Shakespeare as a reliable source for English/British history (think of his historical plays such as Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth for example).
With regard to Homer’s influence on Greek mythology and history, Laura pointed out in her article
Jupiter, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and the Return of the Mongols, “…
the so called “Greek” culture later imposed many of its stories and names on events and places in the Mediterranean.
Certainly, the problem is unavoidably complex due to repeated waves of invasion and conquest and mixing of peoples throughout time.” She also pointed out in that article that the name Thrace may derive from the meaning of the adjective “
thracus” meaning “
courageous”, which may have been a popular epithet of many warrior people who gave the name to their respective regions. Whatever their origins, the Thracians were regarded by other peoples as warlike, ferocious, bloodthirsty, and barbarian. This is certainly borne out by the fact that ancient Greek and Roman historians agreed that the ancient Thracians, who were of Indo-European stock and language (as were the Hittites and Scythians too), were superior fighters, something the Romans also said of the Celts, as did the C’s:
Q: (L) Where do the Celts come from?
A: Same. Ferocious people. Came from fifth planet.
Curiously, Plato in his famous work Republic groups the Thracians with the Scythians calling them extravagant and high spirited. In his Laws, he portrays them as a warlike nation, grouping them with Celts, Persians, Scythians, Iberians and Carthaginians. Recall here though that the Carthaginians were originally Phoenicians, who had already settled in Iberia prior to Plato’s era, as had the Milesian Celts (Gaels), who were themselves Scythians, as we learned above.
As Wikipedia admits, the origins of the Thracians remain obscure, in the absence of written historical records before they got into contact with the Greeks. Evidence of proto-Thracians in the prehistoric period depends on artifacts of material culture. It is generally proposed that a proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age, when the latter, around 1500 BC, mixed with indigenous peoples. However, 1500 BC puts us in the same ballpark as Abraham/Moses, Akhenaten and the eruption of Thera (circa 1600 BC or earlier?), which destroyed the Minoan civilisation. This calamity, followed by a deadly plague, saw large numbers of people on the move all over the Eastern Mediterranean, which means that there is no reason to rule out a similar migration of Celts from locations in northern Europe such as Brittany to places like modern-day Thrace and Anatolia due to some similar catastrophe.
Could a group of Dardanians have migrated from Brittany to Thrace and mixed with the people there to become the Thracians at around the same time as a group of defeated Trojans from England migrated to Wilusa (establishing a new Troy) who in time would be absorbed by the expansionist Hittites? Is this how Abraham/Moses/Paris may have come to be viewed as both a Trojan prince and a Hittite?
Geoffrey of Monmouth and Brutus the Trojan
Perhaps some tentative support for this idea may be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain. Written in 1136, it purported to be a story of the early inhabitants of the British Isles covering a sweep of nineteen hundred years, stretching from the mythical Brutus, the great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, who was supposed to have given his name to the island of Britain after he landed there in the twelfth century before Christ, down to the last British king, Cadwallader in the 7th Century AD. As Laura has previously mentioned, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book cannot be taken seriously as an historic work since much of it is based on myth and legend. However, there is always some scintilla of truth behind every myth and legend, and this may well be true of the story of Brutus.
In essence the story of Brutus was taken from the British historian Nennius’s book Historia Brittonum written towards the end of the 8th Century AD. Nennius, a British monk, was drawing on even older sources., including no doubt Roman and, as I mentioned above, the Romans liked to believe they were the descendants of the Trojans. Monmouth writes that after the Trojan War, Aeneas fled the ruined city with his son Ascanius and came to Italy where he and his son settled. His son Ascanius supposedly founded the city of Alba beside the river Tiber (which would go on to become Rome) and was elected king by the people. This narrative therefore ties in well with the Romans’ origin story that they were the descendants of the Trojans. We might also note here that the name “Alba”* just happens to be the same name the Brythonic Celts gave to Scotland before they were in turn conquered by the Scotti (Gaels) who renamed the land Scotia, today Scotland.
*Indeed, the oldest name for England would seem to be Albion. The names for Scotland in the Celtic languages were also related to Albion: Alba in Scottish Gaelic, Alba in Irish, and Alban in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Could Albion have been Trojan Britain’s original name perhaps?
Brutus was Ascanius’s grandson, and he had a complex backstory which I won’t go into here save to say that he ended up being exiled from Italy and landed up in Greece (Thrace?), where he discovered the descendants of Helenus, King Priam’s son, who had been held captive by the Greeks. In Nennius’s version, Brutus wandered 42 years in Africa [MJF: shades of Abraham/Moses wandering with the Israelites in the Sinai Desert for 40 years] and arrived with his family at Lake Osiers in the country of the Philistines, whereafter he passed through the hills of Syria and then, travelling by river, he passed through Mauretania to the Pillars of Hercules where they discovered further Trojan descendants who joined Brutus and his group. Returning to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, Brutus then became the leader of these exiled Trojans and, after numerous bold exploits and battles with the Greeks, he would eventually lead the Trojans to occupy a deserted Britain, save for a few giants here and there, where they would build a second Troy, Troia Nova, later called Trinovantum.
Of course, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius would have placed the original Troy near to Greece or in Asia Minor, in accordance with Homer’s account, and not in Britain where we believe Troy was really located following Iman Wilkens’ alternative view of Homer’s account. Moreover, we should note that in the timeframe Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius set Brutus’s tale, the Greeks as we know them today from Homer and classical history had not yet occupied the Peloponnese. However, leaving on one side the clearly mythic nature of this tale, it certainly does create an interesting link between the Trojans and Britain, which impels one to think that there must have been some much earlier oral tradition that had linked Troy and Britain together that Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius had been drawing upon. Is it possible that a group of Trojan exiles did reoccupy their former homeland after it had been laid waste by war, famine, plague and natural disaster and reconstituted Troy in what is today Ilford in North-East London? As Laura remarked in her article Jupiter, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and the Return of the Mongols Troy was considered the greatest, most resplendent city of its age (akin to Athens and Rome in later ages) so much so that its terrible destruction was an episode that would resound down through the subsequent centuries and even find an echo in the writings of the Jewish Prophet Jeremiah as a byword for Armageddon. It is curious then that the New Troy should be built in what is now London, which even today is still one of the greatest cities of the world and was until 1947 the capitol of a vast world-wide empire. This last point may strangely reflect something Geoffrey of Monmouth said of Brutus, which relates to a dream Brutus had of the goddess:
“It seemed to him the goddess stood before him and spoke these words to him: ‘
Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and your people; and to your descendants it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and round the circle of the whole earth will be subject to them’.”
This, of course, could have come straight out of Homer or even the Bible (think of Yahweh’s prophecy concerning the seed of Abraham). In a curious way the prophecy would be fulfilled with the rise of the British Empire in the late 16th Century. Could it have been a passage like this that inspired John Dee to persuade Queen Elizabeth I to establish the British Empire?
The Illyrians
However, the Dardanoi or Dardanians were also linked by ancient Greek and Roman writers with the
Illyrian people of the same name who lived in the Balkans (i.e. the
Dardani), a notion supported by a number of parallel ethnic names found both in the Balkans and
Anatolia that are considered too great to be a mere coincidence. Illyrian pirates in the Adriatic would centuries later become a menace to Roman shipping for well over a hundred years, even after the Romans had become the supreme maritime power in the Mediterranean following their crushing defeat of Carthage. If they were originally northern European Celts from Brittany, this makes perfect sense, since the Celts were, along with the Phoenicians, the great mariners of the ancient world.
Tutu Vizier of Egypt and Nefertiti’s Father?
One last point I would make on Wilson’s Biblical observations is that he notes that there was an isolated instance of an 18th Dynasty pharaoh appointing an Asiatic as a vizier. From our point of view, it is very interesting to learn that this pharaoh was
Akhenaten. Wilson makes an obvious comparison with the Biblical story of Joseph here save that this man’s name was
Tutu.
Is it possible that Tutu could have been Abraham/Moses or, if not, was he perhaps a close relative of Queen Nefertiti? Although we know from the C’s that the Joseph of the Bible was really based on the
Scorpion King of Egypt, this does not rule out that the Jews when compiling the Bible during the Babylonian exile may have superimposed elements of the Scorpion King’s story on a real Hebrew/Israelite figure such as the vizier Tutu. Proof of Tutu’s importance can be found in the remains of a rock tomb that was cut for him at El-Amarna (Akhenaten’s new capital city) high in the cliffs overlooking the city, which was one of many such tombs for high-ranking officials of Akhenaten’s court. Although Wilson describes Tutu as a vizier his correct title might be more that of Chamberlain and first servant of the King. In this role he would appear to have been the overseer of all the King’s craftsmen, of all the King’s works in Egypt, of all the King’s silver and gold, of the King’s treasury and finally he was also the chief spokesman of the entire land. The size and quality of Tutu and other high-ranking officials’ tombs amply reflects the importance of their intended owners. However, almost none of these tombs were ever used for the purpose they were constructed for since El-Amarna was abandoned soon after Akhenaten’s death. As Nicholas Reeves in his book
Egypt’s False Prophet Akhenaten states “
For all their high rank, however, it remains a curious fact that any mentions of these officials beyond the confines of their sepulchres are rare and generally inconsequential. The exception is Tutu, whom we encounter on several occasions as a royal envoy in the Amarna letters: and of course the god’s father Ay, who comes into his own following the accession and early demise of his ward, the tragic Tutankhamun”.
Many Egyptologists consider Ay to have been the father of Nefertiti. His title of “
god’s father” could be construed literally as father-in-law to the King, if Nefertiti was in fact his daughter. However, Ay was Egyptian born and raised as was his father Yuya before him, although it is claimed Yuya may have had Syrian ancestry. Moreover, Ay was a prominent official in Amenophis III’s court, the pharaoh possibly being his brother-in-law and therefore Akhenaten’s uncle by marriage. Against this is Nefertiti’s evident foreign, pale-skinned appearance, which can readily be explained if she was in fact a Hittite, as the C’s have proposed. The C’s also suggested that Nefertiti may not have come from a prominent, well known family where ancient history is concerned:
Session 2 February 2003:
Q: (L) Previously we were told that Helen was a genetically tweaked Hittite. Were her parents anybody who would be familiar to us outside of mythology?
A: No.
Q: (L) So her parentage was strictly mythical. Was she a member of any esteemed family or royal family along that line as has been claimed?
A: Here also you will make a discovery.
If Nefertiti’s father was Ay, then we know for certain that he came from a prominent Egyptian family that had married into the Egyptian royal family. He was clearly no myth for he would go on to become Pharoah in his own right after Tutankhamun’s death. This leaves me wondering whether Tutu could have been Nefertiti’s father since he fits the picture of a foreigner (an Asiatic) who seems to have come from nowhere to become one of Akhenaten’s most senior and trusted advisors. Could he have owed his rise to prominence perhaps to his relationship with his fellow Asiatic, Queen Nefertiti?
Thera’s Eruption and the Exodus from Egypt
Ian Wilson, like Graham Phillips, connects the Biblical Exodus with the apocalyptic events experienced in Egypt, which they think resulted from the eruption of the Thera volcano, the remnants of which today form the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea. It is important to note here that there was a period of a few years (no one knows how many) between the first major eruption of Thera and the final catastrophic eruption which blew the caldera to pieces, an event which appears to have brought the great Minoan civilisation of Crete to an end overnight and almost did the same for that of ancient Egypt. Wilson tends to place the main eruption in an earlier period than that of Akhenaten, preferring to connect the event to Queen Hatshepsut’s era, since there is evidence that some great misfortune befell Egypt towards the end of her reign. However, there could perhaps have been an ongoing series of eruptions of Thera over many years that eventually culminated in the big one.
Graham Phillip’s View of the Exodus
Phillips dealt with the issue of when the Exodus took place in two of his books, the first being Act of God and the second being The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant. I have, of course, commented from both these books in previous articles. Unlike Ian Wilson, Phillips places the Thera eruption and the ensuing biblical plagues of Egypt in the last year of the reign of Pharoah Amenhotep III’s reign. He was Akhenaten’s father and Akhenaten may well have reigned alongside him by that stage, as this was the established practice when a pharaoh was old and clearly coming towards the end of his reign. Phillips made this deduction when he compared the events described in the Biblical story of the Exodus to the events that occurred after the volcanic eruptions at Krakatau and Mount Saint Helens.
In the Bible, when Pharaoh refused Moses’s demands to let the enslaved Israelites have their freedom, God (Yaheweh) is said to have punished Egypt by a series of what the Bible calls plagues. These were: darkness over the land, the Nile turning to blood, fiery hailstorms, cattle deaths, a plague of boils, and infestations of frogs, lice, flies and locusts. Although these plagues sound the stuff of myth and legend, Phillips’ research showed that these events could certainly have been the result of a natural catastrophe such as a gigantic volcanic eruption. As noted above, first came darkness over the land. Fast forward to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens where the sun was obscured for hours even five hundred miles from the volcano. With the even larger eruption of Krakatau near Sumatra in 1883, the skies were darkened to a much greater distance being dark as night for days on end almost a thousand miles away. One should note that the eruption of Thera was exponentially much greater than Krakatau and made Mount Saint Helens look like a firecracker by comparison*. In the Bible narrative, it speaks of three days of thick darkness over all the land of Egypt (MJF: which makes me think of the prophesied three days of darkness Laura once alluded to in the transcripts).
*Krakatau exploded with a force 20 times that of Mount Saint Helens. Where the Mount Saint Helens’ eruption produced a cloud of ash some five miles high, the volcanic cloud that ensued from Krakatau’s eruption rose fifty miles into the air. However, it has been estimated by comparing the size of the resultant craters that Thera’s explosion was almost six times greater than that of Krakatau and the volcanic debris would therefore have been hurled over a hundred miles high, with the ash fallout covering well over a million square miles. To put things in perspective, it would take today 6,000 of the most destructive modern nuclear warheads to equal the explosive magnitude of Thera.
Next Phillips showed how the Biblical thunder, hail and fire that rained upon the land of Egypt, killing all the cattle in the open fields, and breaking every tree was replicated in Krakatau when pellet-sized volcanic debris fell like hail, the fiery pumice setting fires alight on the ground and destroying trees and houses, with lightning flashing around, generated by the tremendous turbulence inside the volcanic cloud. Even after the lesser eruption of Mount Saint Helens, volcanic debris fell like hailstones flattening crops hundred of miles away. This resulted in millions of dollars’ worth of crops being destroyed.
As to the Biblical plague of boils caused by the fine dust blown over all the land of Egypt, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens saw hundreds of people being taken to hospital with skin sores and rashes due to exposure to the acidic fallout and a great deal of livestock perished or had to be destroyed due to prolonged inhalation of the volcanic dust. The ash and dust, which fell like rain, clogged motor vehicle engines, halted trains and aircraft, and blocked roads.
After the Mount Saint Helens’ eruption, fish also died and were found floating on the surface of hundreds of miles of waterways. The pungent odour of pumice permeated everything, and water supplies had to be cut off until the impurities could be filtered from reservoirs. These observed occurrences reflect very closely what was said in Exodus 7:21:
“
And the fish that was in the river died: and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the river, and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.”
At Krakatau, thousands of tons of red iron oxide were discharged besides the grey pumice ash, killing fish for miles around. If Thera’s eruption also saw huge volumes of iron oxide being discharged, this would certainly explain the reference in Exodus to the Nile turning to blood (Ex 7:20: “And all the waters that were in the river turned to blood”), as large amounts of iron oxide would have turned the river red.
Phillips points out that the remaining plagues may not on first sight suggest they could have anything to do with a volcanic eruption, but he notes that often with a large-scale volcanic eruption, the entire ecosystem can be affected. Although most forms of life suffer from volcanic devastation, remarkably some actually thrive. Hence, when volcanic ash blankets the countryside, crawling invertebrates, and insects in their larval, chrysalis, or egg stage can remain safe underground, as can burrowing snakes and rodents and frogspawn, protected under submerged ledges. Thus, swarming insects are commonly associated with the aftermath of volcanic eruptions and without their natural predators they can reproduce and multiply in huge numbers. This fact can readily account for the swarms of lice, flies and locusts that beset Egypt according to the Biblical narrative set out in Exodus.
As for the Biblical plague of frogs, after the Mount Saint Helens’ eruption, whilst the predatory fish were decimated, the tiny frog eggs survived, and once the hazardous chemicals deposited by the fallout had washed down river, the result was a veritable plague of frogs throughout much of Washington State. They littered the countryside in their thousands with so many being squashed by motor vehicles on the roads that they made driving conditions hazardous. They also clogged waterways, covered gardens and infested houses just as the Biblical account in Exodus 8:2-8 relates.
Whilst Phillips recognises that the biblical plagues of Egypt could have been caused by individual natural phenomena, he points out that the likelihood of them all happening together at the same time seems just too remote for the laws of probability. A volcanic eruption would, however, account for all of them. Phillips does recognise that one problem with attributing the plagues of the Exodus to a volcanic eruption is that the Bible does not present them in the order that they would naturally have occurred in. However, he notes that the Book of Exodus was written many centuries after the events being described. No doubt the account of the plagues would have been handed down orally over many generations and, as a result, the order could easily have been shuffled.
Proof it was Thera
Phillips produces a number of arguments based on hard data to prove it could only have been the eruption of Thera that could account for the Biblical plagues of Exodus.
First, he shows that the Vema seabed survey showed that pumice and volcanic debris from the Thera eruption covered the seabed only to the southeast of the volcano, showing that the prevailing wind had carried the fallout cloud right in the direction of Egypt some 500 miles away. Judging from the effects of the smaller Krakatau and Mount Saint Helens eruptions, it is certain that Egypt would have suffered the full horrors of the fallout cloud.
Secondly, over the years the Thera eruption has been variously dated between 1600 and 1300 BC. However, in 1980, a Danish team of scientists publishing data gathered from ice core samples from Greenland were able to demonstrate that there had been a massive volcanic eruption somewhere in the world in 1390 BC, with a margin of era of 50 years either way. The only known large-scale volcanic eruption in that period to have caused the atmospheric conditions recorded in the ice core samples was that of Thera.
Thirdly, on the island of Crete only 70 miles south of Thera (Santorini), archaeologists found evidence of a massive tsunami having struck the densely populated northern coast of Crete (home of the Minoan civilisation), sweeping through its ports and pulverizing its towns and villages. When in the 1930’s the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos was excavating the site of Amnisos, once the harbour town for the Minoan capitol of Knossos, he uncovered a villa whose walls had been strained outwards in an unusual way with large upright stones seemingly prized out of position by some huge external force, suggesting they may have been hit by the backwash of a n enormous tidal wave. However, he also found an Egyptian artefact that strongly suggested the eruption could not have taken place until at least the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III (see above) who ruled from circa 1385 to 1360 BC.
Fourth, although there are no surviving written records in Egypt of the Thera eruption in this timeframe (unless we consider the Ipuwer papyrus referred to above to be relating the effects of the eruption and the ensuing woes that followed), Phillips points out that there may be indirect contemporary evidence that an unprecedented catastrophe did occur in the last year of the reign of Amenhotep III, in 1360 BC. In that year, Amenhotep III erected literally hundreds of statues to honour the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. Phillips tells us that at Asher (N.B. today a common Jewish name), just south of the contemporary Egyptian capitol of Thebes, Amenhotep was in the process of rebuilding a temple to the chief goddess Mut, when he suddenly reconsecrated it as a temple to Sekhmet instead and decreed that Sekhmet should replace Mut as the principal goddess. He subsequently ordered the erection of literally hundreds of statues to the goddess throughout Egypt. As Egyptologist Cyril Aldred pointed out in 1988, no other deity of ancient Egypt is represented by so many large-scale statues and nearly all of them were erected at Amenhotep’s order. As Phillip’s points out, the erection of so many statues of Sekhmet are a clear indication that despite the apparent stability and wealth of the country, something was evidently wrong. This is because Sekhmet was the goddess of devastation.
Phillips notes that the reason why so many monumental statues of Sekhmet exist in such numbers has never been satisfactorily explained. The fact that Amenhotep erected far more statues to Sekhmet than he did to the chief god Amun suggests that something must have occurred to make him question the power of the principal deity. Usually, Sekhmet was represented as a lioness or a woman with a lion’s head. In Egyptian mythology she was the daughter of the sun god Ra and she had once almost annihilated mankind [MJF: was this a folk memory of a near cometary collision or of the rogue planet Venus perhaps coming close to Earth as she did, according to the C’s, at the time of the building of Baalbek?] According to the myth, she had obscured the sun and rained down fire from heaven and humanity was only saved by Ra’s personal intervention. Sekhmet’s mythical vengeance might have been seen as markedly similar to the calamity that would have been caused by the Thera eruption. If Amenhotep believed Sekhmet was responsible for the catastrophe, one can see his erection of all these large-scale statues to her as an attempt to appease her wrath.
Graham Phillips on who was the Real Moses
Like Laura, Phillips rules out the Exodus account that Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses as baby and raised him as a prince. As Phillips points out, in Ancient Egypt the bloodline of the royal family was strongly controlled and manipulated. Since the pharaohs were considered gods, their daughters could only conceive children with someone of the king’s choice – this very often being the king himself. Adoption was therefore completely out of the question. Hence, it is inconceivable that a pharaoh’s daughter could have been allowed to adopt a son.
Phillips takes the view that if Moses really was a prince of the Egyptian court, as the Bible states, then he is far more likely to have been a native Egyptian. However, what Phillips does not consider is that the sons of kings of other races, being royal princes of the blood, may have been acceptable for adoption or assimilation into the Egyptian royal household. Certainly this had been the case for foreign princesses since the Amarna letters describe how a peace treaty between Pharaoh Amenhotep II and Artama I, the king of the Mittani, by which both countries hoped to contain the common threat posed by the Hittites, was sealed by a gift to pharaoh of a Mittani princess who would grace pharaoh’s court and no doubt his bed (apparently the first of several foreign ladies who would over the years be sent to the Egyptian court including most probably Nefertiti too).
Continued in Part 3