Moses and Akhenaten (34 page)

‘When Napkhuriya (Akhenaten), the distinguished son of Nimmu-riya by his distinguished wife Tiye, entered upon his reign I spoke saying: “Nimmuriya is not dead.” … [Now my brother] when he formerly wrote to me, at the time when he sent Giliya back (with the news of Amenhotep III's death and a letter from Tiye) … he sent Mani, my brother sent only wooden (statues), but gold [he did not send] … Pirizzi and Puipri I sent to express sympathy (they brought the letter dated Year 2 or Year 12: see
Chapter Eight
) … Now the word, which your mother had said to Giliya, [I heard and therefore] … and the images [of gold] … for which I made request you have not given me … my messengers for four years …

‘The images which I requested from your father, give; and now [when I have sent] my messengers for the second time [if he] does not prepare and give [them], he will grieve my heart … Your mother Tiye knows all about these things, and (therefore) ask your mother Tiye … [Now my brother said:] “Giliya ought to return to him. Because I should otherwise grieve my brother's heart, I will send Giliya back.” [However, I said]: “Inasmuch as I have sent back quickly my brother's messengers, so let my brother always my messengers [send back quickly] … gives me word and sends Mani to me, then I will … Giliya, with friendly intentions, to my brother.'
⁴

From this letter it is clear that the messenger Mani is in Egypt because Tushratta is asking for him to be despatched with the gold. In Letter No. EA28, however, we learn that he is not only in Mitanni, but being held hostage against the return of two of Tushratta's messengers. After the usual initial friendly formalities, Tushratta comes straight to the point: ‘Pirizzi and Puipri, my messengers, I sent them to my brother at the beginning of his reign, and ordered them to express sorrow very strongly. And then I sent them again. And this message, on the former occasion, I gave to my brother:' – this letter is now missing – ‘Mani, the messenger of my brother, I will retain until my brother sends my messenger, and until he arrives… Now, however, my brother has in general not allowed them to go and has retained them very much indeed.'
⁵

APPENDIX C

The
Mos
Case

T
O
start at the very beginning of the
Mos
action, the tomb inscriptions begin: ‘Copy of the examination [made by] the priest of the [litter] Aniy who was an officer of the court, of the Hunpet of the shipmaster Neshi [which was in the] village of Neshi, as follows:

‘“I arrived at the village of Neshi, the place where the lands are and of which the citizeness Ur[nero] and the citizeness Takharu spoke. They assembled the heirs of [Neshi] together with the notables of the town … ” '
¹

It was, as we saw in
Chapter Nine
, the mother of Khayri who began legal proceedings in Year 14-plus – the number of months is missing – of Ramses II to establish her son's ownership of the land, arguing that he was the descendant of Neshi through his grandmother, Urnero. In the tomb account of the events that followed Khayri is referred to by name only once and is elsewhere called
mos
(the son and heir), to indicate his claim as the rightful inheritor: ‘Then Nubnofret, my
(Mos'
s
)
mother, came to cultivate the share of Neshi, my father.
²
[But] one prevented the cultivation of it. She complained against the trustee Khay (the defendant). One [caused them to appear before] the [vizier] (in) Heliopolis in Year 14-plus of king [Usermre-Setepenre] Ramses Meiamun, given life.'
³

In the latter stages of the action the word
mos
is again used, but in this case to establish that Huy, the father of the plaintiff, was the rightful heir of Neshi, the original owner of the land. After the goatherd Mesman came:

Papa, priest of the temple of Ptah: ‘I knew … [the scribe Huy], the child (
mos
) of Urnero [who] cultivated this land [year] by year. He having been engaged in cultivating it while saying: “I am the child (
mos
) of Urnero, daughter of Neshi.” '

[Hori], bee-keeper of the Treasury of Pharaoh: ‘[As to the scribe Huy], (he was the) child (
mos
) of Urnero, and as to Urnero (she was the) daughter of Neshi.'

Nebnufer, chief of the stable: ‘As to the scribe Huy, he used [to cultivate his lands year] by year. He acted according to all his desire(s). They carried in for him the crops of the fields year by year. He used to dispute with the citizeness Takharu (his mother's sister), mother of the soldier Sementawi, and then he disputed with Sementawi her son so that [the land] should be given [to] Huy and they were confirmed.'

Citizeness Tentpaihay: ‘As Amun endures, and as the ruler endures, if I speak falsely, let me be (banished) to the back of the house. As to [the scribe Huy] (he is) the child [
mos
] of Urnero, and as to Urnero, (she is) the daughter of Neshi.'

APPENDIX D

Pi-Ramses and Zarw

T
HE
recent archaeological discoveries at Kantarah (see
Chapter Eleven
) have made it unnecessary to argue in as much detail as I had earlier envisaged that this was the area where Pi-Ramses, the city of the Exodus, was to be found on the site of the Hyksos capital Avaris, and the fortified city of Zarw. However, some further evidence that led me to this conclusion may be of interest to the reader.

(i) The City of Pi-Ramses

Pi-Ramses was the Eastern Delta residence and capital of kings of the Nineteenth, Twentieth and early Twenty-first Dynasties until, during the Twenty-first Dynasty, a new capital was established at Tanis, south of Lake Menzalah in the northern part of the Delta. One reason why the precise location of Pi-Ramses has been the subject of considerable debate and disagreement is that it appears to have been constructed at an existing site: another that Ramses II, the third king of the Nineteenth Dynasty who gave the city its name, ruled for sixty-seven years and left many constructions all over the Eastern Delta.

Texts of the Ramesside period speak frequently of a location called
Pi-Ramses myr Amun,
House of Ramses, Beloved of Amun. We learn, for example, from his triumphal poem known as the
Poem of Pe-natour,
mentioned briefly in
Chapter Eleven
, that when, in the summer of his Year 5, Ramses II set out on his first Asiatic campaign he ‘passed the fortress of Zarw' and it seems that he remained for some time in a location beyond the fortress. The text then proceeds to say that ‘His Majesty being in [the town of] Ramses, Beloved of Amun' started his march on Palestine from this point. This text indicates that the Ramses residence not only lay beyond the fortress of Zarw, but at the start of the ‘road of Horus' that leads to Gaza.
¹
What confirms this location is the fact that, on his return from this campaign, the first place mentioned was the ‘House of Ramses, Beloved of Amun Great of Victories'. It was only when proceeding from Egypt to Palestine that he had to pass the fortress of Zarw before reaching his Eastern Delta residence.

Dr Kitchen of Liverpool University is one of a number of scholars who does not accept this interpretation. Instead he regards the ‘town of Ramses, Beloved of Amun' as being a different city that Ramses II built in Phoenicia, to the south of Syria. This view is based upon the fact that in the text there are five missing squares, followed by the Egyptian word for ‘cedar'. The text then goes on to tell us that the king ‘proceeded northward and arrived at the upland of Kadesh (in Syria)'. It is this juxtaposition of ‘cedar' and Kadesh that has led such scholars to believe that the reference is to a city in Phoenicia.

Gardiner rejected this view, however, as there is no evidence from any other source that points to the existence of such a Ramses city in Phoenicia.
²
Then, as the extant text mentions only two points – the starting point, ‘the town of Ramses', and the arrival point, Kadesh – it seems curious that he jumped from the fortress of Zarw to a city in Phoenicia without any explanatory reason.

In fact, the mention of ‘cedar' cannot be taken as evidence of a Phoenician location for the Ramses city. In the Kamose Stela, the king, after arriving at the Hyksos capital, Avaris, on his war of liberation, talks of ‘ships of fresh cedar' as well as ‘all the good products of Retenu (Palestine)' which he captured in war from the Avaris (Zarw) area.
³

A further point is that mention in the text of
passing
the fortress of Zarw may have contributed to misunderstanding of its precise location. It is clear from the positions held by all the known mayors of Zarw that it consisted of two entities – a fortress and a city. Their relationship is made clear in Seti I's reliefs at Karnak. The fortress was situated on either side of the canal linking the Waters of Horus with the Sea of Reeds; the city lay beyond it to the east, at the start of the ‘road of Horus' leading to Palestine. Anyone coming from Egypt and wishing to reach Sinai had therefore to enter the western part of the fortress, cross to the eastern part – where Pi-Ramses was built – by the bridge (
kantarah
) that linked the two sections, and then pass through the city of Zarw.

Another text found in a papyrus known as
Anastasi V
mentions a letter, also touched on briefly in
Chapter Eleven
, sent by two army officers to the Royal Butler in which they describe how they were despatched from the palace where Pharaoh was in residence – Memphis, perhaps – to deliver three stelae to Pi-Ramses. They report how they reached Zarw by boat and are about to unload their vessels at ‘The Dwelling of Ramses, Beloved of Amun', from which point they will have to drag the stelae to their final destination.
⁴
This text appears to agree with the
Poem of Pe-natour
in placing Pi-Ramses in the vicinity of Zarw, but beyond it from the Egyptian side.

It was also at Zarw that Seti I, the second king of the Nineteenth Dynasty, was welcomed – as can be seen from his Karnak records – by high priests and officials on his return from his first-year campaign against the Shasu in Sinai and Southern Palestine. This indicates that the royal family must have had a residence in this area from the early days of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The implication, as they had no means of knowing precisely when Seti I would return from his campaign, is that the high priests and officials who greeted him were residing in Zarw at the time of his arrival. As for Seti himself, both he and his father had been Mayors of Zarw and Commanders of its Troops during the reign of Horemheb and it is a logical deduction that he had had a residence there since that time.

This is by no means the end of the evidence linking Zarw with Pi-Ramses. In 1886, Francis Griffith, the English Egyptologist, found part of an obelisk at Kantarah bearing the names of Ramses I, Seti I and Ramses II. Clédat later discovered the missing portion of the obelisk and recognized correctly that it came from Zarw. Griffith also found at this location a base for an image, dedicated by Ramses I. Both the obelisk and the image base mentioned the god ‘Horus of Mesen' (Seth), often referred to as the god of the Eastern Delta's fourteenth nome.

Although from an early time in Egyptian history Seth was regarded as a god of Upper Egypt, he was also associated with the area of the Eastern Delta at the frontier, near the start of the Sinai desert and the road to Asia. It is even thought the whole of the fourteenth nome, the north-eastern area of the Delta between Kantarah and the ancient Pelusiac branch of the Nile, was named Sethroite after him.

From the end of the Sixth Dynasty, during the twenty-second century
BC,
Seth, as mentioned earlier, became discredited as a result of the development of the myth that he had been responsible for the assassination of the good god Osiris: he became associated with Evil and is the source of the later name Satan. However, after another four centuries, as we saw in
Chapter Eleven
, Nehesy, a king of the weak Thirteenth Dynasty, re-established the worship of ‘Seth, Lord of Avaris' as the chief deity of the fourteenth nome. According to Manfred Bietak, the Austrian Egyptologist: ‘Nehesy
(c.
1715
BC
) is known from several monuments as the first king with the title: Beloved of Seth, Lord of Avaris. This Seth later became the principal god of the Hyksos, but was clearly established in Avaris by the local dynasty before the rise of the Hyksos rule.'
⁵

An obelisk of this Nehesy was found in Tanis, but must have been brought there from its original location as it was not
in situ.
John van Seters, the American Egyptologist who researched the origins of the Hyksos, tried to identify the obelisk's origin from its text: ‘On one fragment … were traces of a dedication by the “eldest royal son, Nehesy, beloved of Seth, Lord of Rakhit” and on another fragment the inscription “beloved of Hershef (Arsaphes)”. There is a degree of uncertainty about the location of the place name Rakhit, which means “gateway of the cultivated fields”. The gateway referred to would then be the region of Sile (Zarw), where the cultivated area meets the desert.'
⁶

It is clear that Nehesy established Seth, Lord of Avaris, in the same location as that of Zarw. Further confirmation of this is provided by the 400-year stela, the most important evidence regarding the continuity of worship of the god Seth at Avaris and Pi-Ramses for four centuries. Although the stela was actually found at Tanis, which became the new capital towards the end of the Twenty-first Dynasty and is one of the other sites suggested as the location of Pi-Ramses, it was not
in situ,
and Jean Clédat, the French Egyptologist, believed that it must have been moved there from Zarw because, although it was made during the reign of Ramses II, it includes a commemoration of an event – the four centuries of worship of Seth – that took place at Zarw during the reign of Horemheb when his grandfather, Ramses I, and father, Seti I, were both Mayors of Zarw and Commanders of the fortress: ‘Now there came the Hereditary Prince; Mayor of the City and Vizier; Fan-Bearer on the Right Hand of the King, Troop Commander; Overseer of Foreign Countries; Overseer of the Fortress of Sile (Zarw); … Seti, the triumphant, the son of the Hereditary Prince; Mayor of the City and Vizier; Troop Commander; Overseer of Foreign Countries; Overseer of the Fortress of Sile; Royal Scribe; and Master of Horse …'
⁷