The Lost Testament by Peter Martin (Sunday Times Magazine Cover Story) Even if chiefly with Tutankhamun’s fabulous burial treasure, most people have a passing familiarity with the wonders of ancient Egypt. But the enduring mystery is how such a sophisticated culture sprung up so quickly, as if from nowhere, and how this ties in with civilisation’s best-known founding story, the Old Testament. A good place to start unpicking the mystery is in the Eastern Desert, between the Red Sea and the Nile, where Egyptologist David Rohl has turned up some walloping clues. A fairly barren place and very hard on four-wheel-drives, the Eastern Desert has never really caught the interest of archaeologists. One exception was Hans Winkler who, when he came here in the 1930’s, recorded scads of ancient rock carvings depicting strange high-prowed ships, right here in the desert. Winkler died puzzled, and no one clapped eyes on the carvings again until Rohl, on his first expedition here in l997, recognised them as an extraordinary archaeological scoop. The carvings may be evidence of an epic journey made by a god-like people - exotic and terrible strangers - who, by what looks to have been a surprise invasion of Egypt, dragged their large reed ships overland from the Red Sea to the Nile. These were plainly warships, with up to eighty oars apiece, their leaders armed to the teeth and pointing aggressively westward. Great lines of other men are shown dragging the ships with ropes. Strategically, you can see how it could have worked: haul the ships two-thirds of the way, get into the dried-up river beds, then wait for the annual high Nile to carry you to war at eighty-oar speed. Rohl is convinced that these invaders came from Mesopotamia at the onset of the third millennium BC: “We can tell this from their style of weapons, ship design, their dress and their religious symbolism. “They carry pear-shaped maces, far more lethal than the disc-shaped maces the Egyptians used at that time. Long and high-prowed, their ships are typical Mesopotamian sea-going vessels, probably black ships waterproofed with bitumen. Their chieftains wear tall twin plumes, and kilts with animals’ tails attached. I’ve linked them with the mythical Followers of Horus because the carvings feature their falcon god, Horus, and another deity represented by the sun set in a crescent moon.” Rohl’s interpretation of these rock-art sequences as an all-out invasion of Egypt neatly elides with an archaeologically famous ceremonial knife. Unearthed at nearby Gebel el-Arak archaeologically dated to an era contemporary with the invasion, carved on its ivory handle is the world’s oldest pictorial record of a battle. “And we know who won it,” says Rohl, “because it shows the long-haired Nile valley dwellers succumbing to the pear-shaped maces of the short-haired invaders. We also see the high-prowed boats knocking the hell out of the people in the crescent-shaped Nile boats, who are shown drowning.” Further evidence, as Rohl deploys it, strongly suggests that these foreigners eventually became the pharaohs: “Within five hundred years, in pyramids and tombs, we begin to see all this Mesopotamian symbolism now become part of Egyptian culture. The gods wear tall twin plumes, the kings have tails attached to their kilts, and the bodies of the pharaohs are dragged to their underworld tombs in high-prowed ships. After the falcon god in the rock carvings, we soon get the Horus kings of Egypt, and the Mesopotamian deity represented by the sun and crescent moon is now the Egyptian sun god symbol. We see pharaohs smiting their enemies with pear-shaped maces and, as with King Tut, they’re all depicted wearing the false beards. Egyptians did not grow beards but Mesopotamian kings and divine heroes did.”  But what has all this to do with civilisation’s founding story, as told in the Old Testament (OT)? According to Genesis, following Adam’s ancestral line from the Garden of Eden, through Noah and the Flood, it was Ham’s second son, Mizra, who came with his tribe and settled Egypt. Still today, an Egyptian refers to himself as Masri, a descendant of Masr. Not just a phonetic similarity, it appears to be an etymological fit. Of course, the OT is by no means the only version of civilisation’s founding story. The Sumerian and Akkadian epics come to us from Mesopotamia, written down for the first time - in cuneiform script on clay tablets - circa 2,500 BC. Albeit with different names, they tell the same story - the first of all stories - involving the same major characters. As in the OT, so in Mesopotamian legend, the ‘Lady of the Rib’, forbidden food and banishment from eternal life in heaven. Next, we have Noah, exact double of the Sumerian flood hero, Utnapishtim. Both send out doves from the Ark to find dry land. Later on, Noah’s great-grandson, Nimrod – legendary warrior, mighty hunter and builder of the great city of Erech – has his twin in the Sumerian saga of Enmerkar, “Enmer the Hunter” warrior and builder-king of Uruk. Same man, same city?  As founding stories go, the OT is by no means an exclusive. Rohl’s thesis, as per the OT, that Adam’s line migrated south through Mesopotamia, with Mizra’s tribe eventually conquering Egypt, seems to fit the archaeological evidence. Rohl puts the date of Mizra’s conquest of Egypt at 3050BC, give or take. But of all his evidence for the adoption of Mesopotamian culture by Egypt, here’s a detail to lift the hairs on your neck. The meaning of “Horus” in Egyptian is “the far distant” - the same, very odd epithet ascribed earlier to the Mesopotamian flood hero. Were the “Followers of Horus” the descendants of Noah who preserved mankind in his mighty reed ship? ****** That Rohl packs more into one book than most archaeologist-historians would attempt to set down in a life-time is only the half of it. Overturning more conventions than you could shake a Bible at, his latest work, The Lost Testament, sets out to demonstrate that the Old Testament was in great part based on real people and actual events. Covering 5,000 years of history, he draws evidence from archaeology, ancient texts, legends, etymology, flood records, seismology, even astronomical dating. Following the Mesopotamian invasion of Egypt, he pieces together Joseph’s life as Pharaoh’s right-hand man, through to how Moses came to learn the true name of God, to the Exodus and the Israelites’ storming of the Promised Land, and the extraordinary rise of King Saul and King David, ending with the fall of Jerusalem in the 6th century BC. Of course, conventional academic wisdom holds that the OT is little better than a fairy story because no archaeological evidence for it has been found. On the contrary, says Rohl – there’s evidence galore, and all sorts of specialists have been staring at it for decades. The mistake, he argues, is that the ancient world has been dated wrongly. Take Joshua and his army destroying the city of Jericho. Jericho’s massively tumbled walls are still there, along with storage jars, the grain inside burnt to a cinder, consistent with Joshua’s torching of the city. As it happens, the OT says that Jericho was abandoned after its destruction, and this, too, chimes with the archaeological evidence. The glitch is that orthodox chronology would place Joshua at the end of the Late Bronze Age, when no such fortified cities were built. Hence, goes the reasoning, either Joshua was born 300 years too late to have destroyed Jericho or he never existed. Hinged solely on the alleged immutability of the orthodox time line, it’s one of those gallingly self-fulfilling arguments. No Jericho, no Joshua and so no Israelite conquest. Everyone’s problem, of course, is that there were no calendars BC, only tantalisingly incomplete kings lists and dynastic records. For the rest, all we can rely on is evidence-based interpretation. When Rohl first advanced his New Chronology in A Test of Time, published l995, he got some awful stick. Leading Bible scholar Professor Thomas L Thompson insisted that any attempt to write history “based on a direct integration of biblical and extra-biblical sources is not only dubious but wholly ludicrous.”  Perhaps not surprisingly, the very architect of Egyptian chronology, Professor Kenneth Kitchen, dismissed Rohl’s thesis as “one hundred percent rubbish”. Undeterred, in his next book, Legend, Rohl advanced new discoveries relating to the Book of Genesis. Indeed, as Sunday Times readers may recall, he even gave a geographical fix for the Garden of Eden, in Iran, based on his cracking of the ancient-language names of the four rivers given as co-ordinates in Genesis Chapter Two. For our magazine story, we went and we saw, including a place “east of Eden”, as described in Genesis, that is today still called Noqdi, the Land of Nod. In the interim, the pendulum of serious opinion has begun to swing Rohl’s way. Dr. Ronald Walenfels, for example, curator of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and an Assyrian specialist, says there’s plenty of flexibility in the ancient Assyrian dates. Given that all chronologies are inter-dependent, the same flexibility would inevitably apply to the Egyptian time line. Just recently, too, one of Rohl’s peers, an American Egyptologist, cold-canvassed a number of other Egyptologists with a single question: If you were to place the Israelite Sojourn and Exodus in any period in history, what would it be? The majority picked the Middle Bronze Age, concurring with Rohl.  ****** Of all Old Testament characters, the best drawn is Abraham’s descendant Joseph – and Rohl presents fascinating evidence of his existence. Just to remind you, this is Joseph of the coat of many colours, so much his father’s favourite that his jealous brothers had him sold for a slave into Egypt. Eventually, his talent for dream interpretation brings him to the attention of Pharaoh, who has had a nightmare of seven emaciated cattle rising up out of the Nile to devour seven fat cattle. On Joseph’s reading, seven years of plenty would be followed by seven of famine, and the urgent course was to reorganise the nation’s entire grain supply against the lean time to come. Joseph, the Hebrew foreigner, gets the job, and is appointed vizier of all Egypt. But did it happen and, if so, what caused the famine years? Back in 1844, a German Egyptologist discovered a series of flood records - water-heights chipped into cliff faces just south of the Nile’s Second Cataract. Dating from the late 12th Dynasty, when Rohl’s chronology places Joseph in Egypt, under Pharaoh Amenemhat III, the records show flood heights of nine metres above normal. Just recently, American hydrologist Barbara Bell has calculated that, on those reckonings, the Nile valley would have been inundated with four times the usual volume of water – making seed-sewing impossible for several years, and famine inevitable. “Which actually gives us a better interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream than the Old Testament does,” says Rohl. “The seven emaciated cattle rose up out of the Nile because the Nile itself caused the famine.” The OT also tells us that Joseph, as part of the grain strategy, forced Egypt’s landowners to sell their stocks to him: nationalisation and central control. Intriguingly, the 12th Dynasty archaeological record shows that tomb-building for regional chieftains suddenly ceased, as if they’d been dispossessed. Separately, contemporaneous Egyptian papyrus documents mention the setting up of an agricultural office called the “Department of the People’s Giving.” Grain to be handed in for later redistribution in the famine years?  Stronger evidence suggests that re-organising Egypt’s grain supplies was by no means Joseph’s only great work. We know from Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, that a canal was dug to drain off the Nile’s destructive inundations. Today, in the Arabic, the canal is still known as Bahr Yussef, the Waterway of Joseph. At the time, Amenemhat III was so taken with the canal, he had his pyramid built overlooking it, plus two monumental statues of himself just where it flowed into Lake Moeris.   Rohl’s research has produced evidence that Joseph, a Hebrew regarded as the saviour of Egypt, had his own palace at Avaris in the part of the Egyptian delta known to the OT as Goshen. Meantime, Semites were now so welcome in Egypt that they soon became powerfully influential in Egyptian affairs, as the archaeology shows: wealthy, Semitic graves at the Middle Bronze Age level have been found at Avaris. Joseph, at his death, unheard of for a foreigner, was entombed in a small pyramid in the grounds of his palace, with a chapel containing his colossal cult statue.   When excavated, the pyramid tomb at Avaris turned out to be empty. “But that’s consistent with Joseph’s dying wish to be returned to the Promised Land,” argues Rohl. “At the Exodus, they took his body with them.” What was found in the chapel of the tomb, however, was a busted-up, painted statue of an Asiatically pale fellow with reddish hair adorned with the multi-coloured coat of a Middle Bronze Aged chieftain. On Rohl’s reading, it was following a weak series of 13th Dynasty pharaohs, with consequent political chaos in Egypt, that the Hebrews were infamously pressed into slavery. Grimly tallying, Middle Bronze Age documents have yielded up pharaonic slave lists with Hebrew names, and the tin-pot grave goods of a pathetic underclass have been unearthed at Avaris. Although seemingly outrageous, Rohl’s bold placing of these events in time, sometimes to the very year, has lately been vindicated by independent researchers in the complex field of astronomical dating, both here and in North America. What they did was to retrocalculate the dates of astronomical events, chiefly eclipses and moon phases, as described in the ancient texts. And the results? Rohl had fixed the coronation date of Joseph’s pharaoh, Amenemhat III, at 1678BC. It turned out that, according to astronomical retrocalculation using state of the art computer software, he had missed by just four years, and has since tweaked his time line. Rohl’s placing of Amenemhat III in the 17th century BC resulted in 37 out of 39 lunar month-length matches, whereas orthodox chronology – which keeps its options open with two possible placings  – scored no better than 21 matches. Astronomer Dr. David Lappin of Glasgow University concluded, “Most of the astronomical data – particularly the 12th Dynasty lunar dates - simply do no fit with the Orthodox Chronology, whilst the support it gives to David Rohl’s New Chronology is nothing less than startling.” ****** In the ancient world, it was customary to worship several gods. Christians don’t like to be reminded of it, but the people of Abraham did, too, clear through to Moses. On the orthodox time line, however, the world’s first monotheist is supposed to have been Pharaoh Akhenaten in the late 18th Dynasty. He worshipped the Aten sun-disc and banned all previous gods. As a result, the Egyptians slid into psychic and political turmoil. Hence their timeless, golden gratitude to the next pharaoh, the boy King, Tutankhamun, whose advisors successfully pressed him to restore the old order. Rohl doesn’t argue with this sequence of events, but his New Chronology re-establishes Moses as the very first monotheist. “In Genesis, certainly, the gods – plural – “Elohim” in Hebrew – speak of creating man in “our” image,” he reminds us. “And, while the great flood is sent by the god Enlil, “Lord Wind”, it’s another god, Eya, whose epithet is ‘the friend of man’, who whispers through the reeds, telling the Mesopotamian Noah to build an ark. All that stops, of course, when Moses, having descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, angrily informs his people that they will worship no other god but Yahweh.” Although not a new idea, Rohl fleshes out the proposition that Moses was best placed to have been one of the OT’s major authors – or, more precisely, one of the foremost collators of the several versions of the founding story that had been going the rounds for aeons. As a well-educated, adoptive Prince of Egypt, he would have been familiar with the Egyptian founding legends. As well, the Mesopotamian epics, on clay tablets, were already in circulation throughout the Middle East. Next, after fleeing Egypt, Moses spent decades living with the tribe of the Midianite priest, Jethro. As per the OT, the Midianites were the Arab ancestors of Abraham’s dispossessed son, Ishmael - another tradition Moses would have absorbed. According to Rohl’s close collaborator, Bible scholar and entymological detective, Peter van der Veen, it was from Jethro that Moses most likely learned “the true name of God”, Yahweh in the Hebrew, otherwise Jehovah. “Of course, if there was one people in ancient history in dire need of a founding legend and an almighty god of their own,” says Rohl, “it was the Israelites following generations of Egyptian slavery.” As for the orthodox argument that there’s no archaeological evidence for the Israelites’ “wilderness” years in the Sinai and Negev deserts, he reasons: “Nomads leave little behind.” But Rohl believes he knows what the Israelites were doing in the wilderness prior to their acquisition of the Promised Land: “Turning themselves into a warrior class and preparing for a savage war. Although it makes Christians like Peter (van der Veen) uncomfortable, the Book of Joshua describes them not just destroying the cities of Jericho, Ai, Debir, Hebron and Hazor. They put every man, woman and child to the sword. The sole survivor of Jericho was the prostitute who’d harboured the Israelite spies. They had no interest in settling cities. Like a Mongol horde, they left them in ruins and “sowed them with salt”.” In the destroyed city of Hazor, Rohl has nailed a nice piece of evidence corroborating the OT version. “In the Book of Joshua the name of the king of Hazor is actually mentioned – King Jabin, who was personally put to the sword by Joshua. Now, at Hazor they’ve found a tablet with Jabin’s name on it. And where? In the same Middle Bronze Age levels that mark the destruction of Jericho. But the orthodox consensus still won’t make the connection between this Hazor and the Israelite conquest because they’re looking at a later time for Joshua, and have concluded that the MBA Jabin can’t be the Jabin of the Bible!” ****** Rohl’s most impressive marshalling of hard evidence, however, concerns the life and times of King Saul. For four hundred years following their storming of the Promised Land, the Israelites had continued to live as little more than nomads. But now they were surrounded by several city-states, most of which were vassals of Egypt. Chief bugbears were Pharaoh’s surrogate policemen, the Philistines, who kept the Israelites under the thumb. But then a singular window of opportunity opened. At the same time that a politically complacent pharaoh came to power in Egypt, the monotheist, Akhenaten, the Israelites suddenly found themselves with a fierce warrior leader in Saul. Saul – Shaul in Hebrew – was not his actual name, however, but an epithet meaning “asked for (by the people)” given to him by the later Bible writer. So who was this first king of Israel, what was his real name, and what evidence is there – outside of the OT – of his existence? One of the great finds of the mid-19th century was the el-Amarna letters – 3,000-year-old eye-witness accounts, in the form of 380 clay tablets, representing the correspondence sent to Pharaoh Akhenaten by the rulers of the north. In them, we read of a new and belligerent Habiru rebel leader called Labaya. Some letters from vassal kings complain to Pharaoh that Labaya keeps making war against them. Other letters, from Labaya himself, reveal a Shogun-type playing a very long game. In Rohl’s chronology, Saul and Labaya come up as exact contemporaries, but are they the same man? Judge for yourself. As per the OT, Saul, having declared his war of liberation, seized the two towns of Gibeah and Michmash. Similarly, in a letter from Labaya to Pharaoh, the Habiru chieftain argues that his recent taking of two (unamed) towns was justified because they were his in the first place. Bolshie in the extreme, this particular letter not only omits the customary obeisance - “I am the dirt under your feet” - but issues Pharaoh with a veiled warning: “…if an ant is struck, does it not fight back and bite the hand of the man that struck it?” More persuasive that Labaya was Saul is their identical family politics. In the biblical account, Saul was enraged by the close friendship of his son, Jonathan, with the rebel mercenary, David. Since David was also Saul’s son-in-law, he and Jonathan should have been rivals for the kingship. Problem was, famously, they doted on each other. In the OT, Saul cursed Jonathan as the “son of slut” - and you can see why. At one point, his bosom-pal David and his Hebrew mercenaries were fighting on the side of the Philistines, against Saul. And guess what? In an ostensibly embarrassed letter to Pharaoh, Labaya protests that he didn’t know that his son was consorting with the Habiru. The name of one of the rebel leaders in the Amarna letters, Tadua – an epithet bestowed on him by his Hurrian warriors – means “the beloved.” The Hebrew name David also means “the beloved” and in its earlier Canaanite form would have been written Dadua. But the clincher is that Saul and Labaya appear to have shared exactly the same death. As in the OT, so in the Amarna letters, both die in battle – against a coalition of city states from the coastal plain – on or near Mount Gilboa, both as a result of betrayal. Combining information from both the Bible and Amarna letters, Rohl has been able to reconstruct the course of the battle in detail. At first, it seemed that Labaya/Saul couldn’t lose. He was at the top of Mount Gilboa, and his southern flank, the only access for Philistine chariots and archers, was protected by his ally, Tagu. But Tagu had done a treacherous deal with the Philistines. His forces melted away and, in a surprise onslaught from the rear, Labaya wa mortally wounded. But rather than be taken in shackles to Egypt for ritual slaughter, he fell on his own sword. Rohl completes this chapter with a stunning flourish. The OT also tells us that Saul’s body was taken from Mount Gilboa to the fortress of Beth-Shean, beheaded there, and hung on the wall. Three thousand years later, in l993, the excavators of Beth-Shean found a fragment of a small cylinder seal, the sort used for quick communication between allied commanders in battle. Cylinder seals usually came with a string attached for hanging them around your neck. The Beth-Shean seal fragment reads, “To Labaya, my Lord, speak. Message from Tagu: ‘To the king my Lord. I have listened carefully to your message from me…’” The rest is missing. Let Rohl savour it: “So here we have a message from the traitor, Tagu, probably delivered to King Labaya/Saul before the battle on Mount Gilboa, then carried here to Beth-Shean still around his neck, fallen to the ground when he was beheaded.” But what of David? Later in the OT, King David, as he now is, storms and takes Jerusalem. Among the Amarna letters is an actual plea from Abdi-Heba ruler of Jerusalem, begging Pharaoh for reinforcements against the besieging Habiru army. Then the pleas stop. Jerusalem has fallen. The final battle between the Philistines and the all-conquering Hebrews is described in both the OT and Amarna letters as having taken place in exactly the same spot – just outside Jerusalem, in the Vale of Rephaim. One difficulty in fixing David as a real historical figure was the lack of evidence outside of the ancient texts. Until just under a decade ago, that is, when a stone stela fragment bearing the phrase “The House of David” was found in the city of Dan, incorporated into a 2,800-year-old wall. ****** As after a round of musical chairs, not the least effect of Rohl’s New Chronology is that many ancient figures have switched seats. That of mighty Ramesses II of the 19th Dynasty, once thought to be the repressive Pharaoh of the Exodus, is now taken by Dudimose, a petty king of the 13th Dynasty in more senses than one and Moses true protagonist. Ramesses, meanwhile, becomes a contemporary of the Israelite King Solomon. Orthodox Chronology puts Solomon in the relatively impoverished early Iron Age. But, as described in the OT, Solomon’s reputation as a fabulously successful merchant king certainly sits better in the wealthy Late Bronze Age of Ramesses II, where Rohl now has him. That makes Solomon a near contemporary of King Agamemnon of Golden Mycenae, which also feels right. One nice detail of evidence placing Solomon in the cash-rich Late Bronze Age are the fabulous palaces he commissioned from the crème de la crème of ancient stonemasons, the Phoenicians. As described in the OT, they’d use three rows of fine cut stone, topped by a cedar beam backfilled with rubble to protect the structure against earth tremors. Today, Solomon’s Late Bronze Age gate at Megiddo is a perfect example. No similar construction technique was used in the early Iron Age where orthodoxy has him.  A “non-believer”, Rohl has no religious mission to vindicate the Old Testament. “I don’t doubt I’ve got some of the details of this historical reconstruction wrong,” he says, “but the big picture is just so convincing that it has to be right. If I’m wrong, so be it – but let’s see the evidence. Make your criticisms using logic and argument, not rhetoric and dogma.” Meantime, with the publication of The Lost Testament – at £17.99 from Century – verily, ancient history ain’t what it used to be.

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