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Holy Crackpot Theory Batman! - Episode 7
52 Plays11 years ago
Episode 7 already? Wow. It’s time for The Struggling Archaeologist’s Guide to Getting Dirty to introduce its newest treasure- “Holy Crackpot Theory Batman!”
I HOPE YOU’RE READY, BECAUSE THIS AMOUNT OF AWESOME-NESS COULDN’T BE CONTAINED IN A MERE HALF HOUR. THIS IS GOING TO BE A 58 MINUTE EPISODE FOLKS! THAT’S RIGHT, ONCE YOU GET ME STARTED ON ANCIENT EGYPT I JUST DO NOT SHUT UP. OF COURSE, WHEN I DON’T SHUT UP I DON’T ALWAYS THINK STRAIGHT- AS WAS CLEARLY THE CASE WHEN I STATED THAT THUTMOSE III WAS QUEEN HATSHEPSUT’S SON (WHAT AN IDIOT RIGHT?). SO DISCLAIMER: I DO REALLY KNOW THAT HE WAS ONLY A STEP-SON, BORN TO ONE OF HATSHEPSUT’S HUSBAND’S (THUTMOSE II) SECONDARY WIVES ISET. I MEAN, LIKE DUH, RIGHT?
SO I’LL LEAVE THE JABBERING FOR THE PODCAST. IF YOU HAVE ANY COOL INSIGHT INTO ANYTHING ANCIENT EGYPT SEND ME AN EMAIL AT [email protected], OR LEAVE A COMMENT ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE! AND DON’T FORGET YOU CAN LISTEN TO OR DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST ON ITUNES, PODBEAN, OR STITCHER, HUZZAH!
AS YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL, THIS EPISODE WAS MOST LIKELY JUST ANOTHER EXCUSE FOR ME TO TALK ABOUT MUMMIES. MWAHAHAHAHAHA (EVIL LAUGH)! IF YOU'D LIKE TO SEE SOME PICTURES OF MOST OF THE MUMMIES I TALKED ABOUT ON THE PODCAST TODAY CHECK OUT ITS ORIGINAL BLOG POST HERE!
THAT'S ALL MY MUMMY NERDS, SEE YOU ON THE FLIPPITY FIP!
MCNIVEN OUT!
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 7
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello world! Welcome back! It's your favorite archaeological misfit, Jane. And I'm here for episode 7 of the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Getting Dirty.
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm totally excited. I'm totes excited about this episode you guys. Because we're talking about a subject which will probably be near and dear to many of your hearts as it is the gateway drug to all history or archaeology lovers. It is the history of ancient Egypt. That's right!
Fascination with Ancient Egypt
00:00:55
Speaker
Everyone, or at least most of the people that I know,
00:00:58
Speaker
in the fields of history archaeology, started off with a healthy interest in that big, fancy empire down by the Nile, and I am included in that group. I will admit it.
00:01:13
Speaker
While it was not my very first historical obsession, I do have to say I started out pretty heavy into the Civil War. It was a period in my life where I was young and I was searching for answers. So we started there and things got worse when I went to college. I had some friends who maybe weren't the right group of people and they got me into Egypt. It's still hard for me to talk about.
00:01:43
Speaker
But, you know, I started reading on my own histories and non-fictions and then I started watching TV specials. And then... This is so terrible. I started taking notebooks full of notes on anything I could find having to do with Egypt.
00:02:03
Speaker
I had an entire notebook devoted to hieroglyphs, and I learned how to write my name and all this stuff, and I memorized the alphabet. Oh god. It was... Okay. But you know what? I've moved on since then, and I've become a better person. I'm not gonna tell you I don't slip up now and then, and go back to Egypt. I do.
00:02:32
Speaker
But I've really cleaned my life up, you know? Now I actually study the academic discipline of anthropology and now I know how to study my
00:02:46
Speaker
Egyptian obsession safely and responsibly. Anyway, I'm glad that I went through that experience.
Lesser-Known Aspects of Egyptian History
00:02:56
Speaker
Not only did I learn a lot about myself, but I learned a lot about Egypt.
00:03:07
Speaker
I was like, oh, I could talk about Egypt all episode. So I thought maybe instead of just going over
00:03:20
Speaker
a traditional history of Egypt because I feel like listeners to this show who I'm hoping are already into history or archaeology probably have, I don't know, watched a History Channel special or two or a National Geographic about ancient Egypt and sort of, you know, know the basics of Egyptian history.
00:03:41
Speaker
Not like anything having to do with ancient aliens or anything. I mean like real history. So I'm going to kind of skip a lot of that. And we're going to talk about some of the sort of things that you don't always hear about in Egyptian studies. Maybe some like lesser known stuff. So let's get started. What? Hmm.
00:04:01
Speaker
What do I want to talk about first? I have to look at my notebook here. My old notebooks from my Egypt obsession days are kind of OCD. I used to make notebooks full of notes and then I'd re-organize the notebooks when I didn't like the way I'd done it the first time.
00:04:20
Speaker
like i tried to make a map of the egyptian pantheon of gods and i really didn't like the way that i drew it out or i had these two mixed up or something and i had to like redo my entire notebook it's very ocd my roommates used to make fun of me for it
00:04:35
Speaker
But I've also noticed going through them this week for this episode that they're also extremely like ADD because I would have a notebook that's supposed to be about Egypt or, I don't know, I went through a couple of phases, ancient civilizations or medieval history or whatever, and then inside of it there's all these little sidebars of like notes I just randomly wanted to take about something odd like, I don't know, ancient secret societies.
00:05:05
Speaker
Like, my Egypt notebook has an entire section on the Freemasons, the Rosicutans, Gnosticism, like, I mean Hermeticism. Like, there's nothing to do, basically, with anything. I don't know. I guess I got inspired. Or maybe the TV came on and I was like, oh shoot, gotta take notes on this.
00:05:26
Speaker
And so that's why all my notebooks were kind of laid out. It's random, but it's really interesting looking back on them. And funny, because there's just no train of thought whatsoever to most of them. So let's see here, what's going to win first prize in the Overlooked Tidbits of Egyptian History category?
Female Rulers of Egypt
00:05:44
Speaker
Ding ding, I think we have a winner in Obscure Women Rulers of Egypt.
00:05:51
Speaker
So let's talk about it for a sec. Think about it, anyone who is familiar with Egyptian history, and let me know who are the women rulers of Egypt that you can think of in your mind. The first one that probably comes to mind is either
00:06:08
Speaker
It's probably a time for most people between Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut being maybe the more obscure of those two, but she actually was the most powerful woman ruler in Egypt.
00:06:22
Speaker
And so she's a really interesting broad. Nefortiti was not actually a pharaoh, but she was very powerful. Well there, okay, well there is a portion of people who do believe that she was ruling Egypt for several years after her husband Akhenaten's death, but was actually, like there's this sort of shadowy pharaoh figure called Semenkakare, who was ruling briefly before King Tut came over, or came to the throne.
00:06:52
Speaker
And they think, they thought, you know, okay, maybe he was an older brother or maybe he was one of Akhenaten's brothers or something. And so, but they don't really have any evidence that, of his real existence. So a lot of people think that that was actually an Efertiti ruling as regent for King Tut. But that, you know, they should sort of cover it up by coming up with this character, Semenkakare.
00:07:15
Speaker
who she claimed was leading at the time, but in fact it was actually her. So that one's up for debate. But anyway, let's go back to the beginning, and I think you'll actually be surprised to learn just how many female rulers there were in Egypt. And when I say ruler, it's kind of a tricky thing because in Egypt, and this is a practice that actually was, it was practiced elsewhere in the world, but I don't think it was ever quite as common as it was in the Egyptian Empire.
00:07:45
Speaker
When a pharaoh died and his heir, the son, was too young to really be an effective leader, a lot of the times the boy's mother would serve as what they called a co-regent. So basically the little heir would be the king, he'd be the pharaoh, but since he's so young, his mother would actually kind of be in charge for him.
00:08:09
Speaker
so she would rule in his stead until he was old enough to take over power and make decisions like a big boy.
00:08:17
Speaker
So we see this happening either with the mothers of pharaohs when they're too young to rule after their father dies, or we see it with the wives of pharaohs sometimes after their husband's death when there's a period of transition or confusion and there is no other clear male ruler. So this isn't, it's usually the case and it starts off very early in Egyptian history actually.
00:08:44
Speaker
The very first woman ruler was a woman from the very first dynasty named Mernith. And some of these names are, you know, I'm going to say the popular version, but there's different people still are battling over how different names were pronounced or different aspects of them because hieroglyphs are
00:09:05
Speaker
challenging to interpret sometimes. They aren't usually written with vowels, so there can be different pronunciations for the same word in Egyptian based on the vowels that we have to make up. So I'm just going to do the best I can with them.
00:09:22
Speaker
So Mernith was a ruler of the First Dynasty, and her rule was probably around 2975 BCE, and she was a regent for her son, and his name was Den. Her son Den. And so yeah, she was ruling the roost, and I believe she was the wife of Den's father, who was the previous pharaoh Jett, or De-Jett, or something like that.
00:09:52
Speaker
So anyway, there's Mernith. Following Mernith, there's a lot of male kings for a long time. There's the old kingdom kings who built the pyramids and all of that stuff. And then we get to the sixth dynasty where we have a woman named Nitocris, or Nydocris, which is this. She rules between about 2148 and 2144.
00:10:22
Speaker
And she's a very interesting lady. She actually ruled after her king, or okay, after the king, who was her husband, and also her brother was killed. And this is very common also, of course, in Egyptian royal lineage for the sister to be married to her brother when he becomes king to keep the bloodline clean.
00:10:48
Speaker
Because Egyptian pharaohs, you know what's funny? I explained this exact thing to my class just the other day. Egyptian pharaohs were thought to be gods, basically. And their families were sort of part of that
00:11:04
Speaker
god-like family. They had a special relationship with the gods and so it wouldn't make any sense to them to bring in other people who were not related to them because that would corrupt the holiness, I guess you could call it a godliness, of their family bloodline.
00:11:24
Speaker
So that's why a lot of the times, not only in Egyptian history, but in royal history in general, a lot of royals are married to each other in order to keep the bloodline pure. Allah, Harry Potter. No mudbloods in the royal families of Egypt.
00:11:44
Speaker
So yeah, Naidukris actually ruled after her husband slash brother was killed. And she became a very romantic legend in Egyptian history. And she seems like kind of a badass. So, okay, so she takes over rule, and then what apparently she did, or at least this was what the legend says, is she invited hundreds of people to the palace, and all of these people were somehow connected with the conspiracy to kill her husband.
00:12:14
Speaker
And so she got them all in the palace and invited them to this large banquet. And once they were all in the banquet room, she somehow opened the floodgates of the Nile upon them, and they were all drowned by the Nile in the palace, and killed in revenge for the plotting and murdering of her husband, Brother the King. So that's pretty cool. Go, Nida Chris.
00:12:44
Speaker
A fancy lady. And then, let's see, we've got some other six, another six dynasties. Oh, this lady has like one of my favorite names in Egyptian pharaonic history. She was the wife of King Pepe I, and she was actually the regent for their son, King Pepe II, who was, I think, the longest reigning pharaoh in Egyptian history. But her name was Ancus and Pepe.
00:13:11
Speaker
Sorry, I just like that. Anka Senpepe ruled around 2184. Okay, so yeah, nice name. So we've got Anka Senpepe. In the fourth dynasty, there was a woman apparently named Kentahas or something like that. Around 2500, she was the daughter of Menkaure, who was of the royal lineage of the
00:13:36
Speaker
Fourth dynasty, Khafre and Khufu, the pyramid builders. So he was a son there. And so she was the daughter of him and the wife of the next pharaoh Shepsikath. And so she was a queen for a little while there.
00:13:53
Speaker
There's a woman named Nimahot Heb in the Third Dynasty, who was the regent and mother of King Dozier. And he, of course, very famously was the Third Dynasty king who started the Old Kingdom, and who also had his vizier Imhotep build him the First Pyramids.
00:14:15
Speaker
So, and Emotap, of course, you will all know, as the lovable bad guy from the Mummy movies.
00:14:24
Speaker
who, in the mummy movies, is in love with a beautiful Egyptian woman named Anka Sinaman, who, in Egyptian history, it turns out was actually the wife of King Tutankhamen, King Tut himself. So, even though the two were separated by a good 1,500 years, apparently, they were long-lost soulmates. So I'm glad that the mummy movies could bring them together, finally.
00:14:54
Speaker
Anyway, so yeah, there's a bunch of ladies. It's just, there's tons of them. There's Sobek Nefru. She's a pretty famous 12th dynasty queen, which is the 1760s and 1750s. There's Tuosret, who's a 19th century queen. She was the wife of Seti II. And she was also the last ruler of the 19th dynasty, right?
00:15:17
Speaker
We've got, unfortunately, this queen has a name that I'm not sure how to pronounce. If I read it, it sounds like it's supposed to be pronounced Asshotep. I don't mean to laugh at you, Asshotep, but...
00:15:33
Speaker
Anyway, she was the regent and mother of Amos I, who was the first pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, which started in 1550 BC, and he was a pretty important dude. He was the heir to the family that expelled the Hyksos from Egypt and took rule back from them, Seqwin menrei, I believe, being his predecessor who was killed in battle.
00:16:01
Speaker
And then we've got Amos Nefertari from the 18th Dynasty, who came after Amos and was his wife. And then we've got some of our more famous ladies, Eno Hatshepsut, famous 18th Dynasty pharaoh. She ruled between 1473 and 1458. She was the co-regent to her son, Tuthmosis III. She actually reigned for 15 years because her husband, who was
00:16:31
Speaker
the pharaoh before died, and Thutmose III was very young, so she had to rule for a while. And she actually ended up doing super amazing awesome things. She was very active with building projects across Egypt, so she had major building projects at Karnak and Luxar temples. She built a fantastic super amazing funerary temple called Deir el-Bakhri, which is where she was buried.
00:17:00
Speaker
And she's most famous for leading a bunch of a very famous expedition to the land of Punt, which is on the eastern coast of Africa, where she brought back all sorts of riches and exotic things. So Hatshepsut was pretty cool, but of course her son Tothmosis III didn't really think she was that cool.
00:17:20
Speaker
because after he became ruler he kind of erased her from Egyptian history and smashed all of her statues and wiped her name off of things and all of those stuff so unfortunately for her not all of her statues there's a bunch of them if you go to the Met in New York they have an entire room full of head shops with statues so
00:17:42
Speaker
So that's cool. I also think it's funny. Hatshepsut was rumored to have been in love with a guy named Sennenmut who was like her top advisor.
00:17:55
Speaker
So apparently everyone, all the regular people of Egypt knew about this love affair. And so we actually have a piece of ancient graffiti written on the walls of, I think it's Deir al-Bakhri, maybe somewhere near there. And someone actually, I think, drew a little graffiti drawing of Sennemut and Hatshepsut doing the dirty deed. Getting down, if you know what I mean.
00:18:23
Speaker
And yeah, so that's, I don't know if it's the first example of ancient graffiti, but it's a pretty entertaining one at that. So you see that we have a long tradition of pretty cool badass Egyptian ruler ladies. And then of course, you know, we also have Nefertiti, the wife of the heretic King Akhenaten, who was one of my
00:18:46
Speaker
favorite pharaoh is just because he is so fascinating. She was very involved in the rule during his period in the 18th dynasty around 1336, and like I said she may have even briefly ruled after his death.
00:19:01
Speaker
And we don't know for sure, but it is suspected that she's King Tut's mother. It's possible there might be another woman who may have mothered him, and we are just not sure, but we know that whoever did mother him was the sister of Akhenaten. So knowing the tradition of the royals marrying full-blood sisters, it would make sense if Nefertiti had, you know, obviously was married to Akhenaten if she had
00:19:28
Speaker
been Tut's mother so that's a big old mystery but yeah so and then of course finally at the end of the Egyptian Empire we comes that that little harlot the Cleopatra
00:19:44
Speaker
lady. And I'm not going to talk about Cleopatra because she's pretty well known. If you want an interesting perspective on Cleopatra's reign, definitely check out the HBO series
Historical Fiction and Archaeological Inspiration
00:19:55
Speaker
Rome. Anyone who is into ancient history, especially classical history and in the second season Egyptian history should definitely check out Rome. It's pretty
00:20:06
Speaker
ridiculously amazing. So it's a great series and the entire second season they actually play out the entire story of Mark Antony's romance with Cleopatra and the end of their rule in Egypt when King Octavian comes to take Alexandria for the Romans. So it's pretty
00:20:29
Speaker
awesome stuff. And Kevin McKidd is in, he's the star of the series, and even though he doesn't really get to use his really sexy Scottish accent in it, he's still pretty delicious. So check that one out.
00:20:46
Speaker
So I think that's going to do it for our Egyptian ladies portion of the episode. So I think we're going to move on to something else which I think most of you will find extremely interesting and if not interesting at least extremely entertaining.
00:21:03
Speaker
So I was actually reminded of this the other day because I had this discussion with my class. I'm teaching anthropology to high schoolers right now and generally they don't know too much about a lot of ancient history and archaeology, things like that. But when you ask them what they do know, one of the things that generally comes up is people are familiar with the
00:21:27
Speaker
archaeological discovery of the city of Troy and its relationship to the Homeric epics like the Iliad. And we had this whole discussion on how
00:21:39
Speaker
You know, they're trying to figure out if the Iliad is a true story or if it's like the real history of Troy. And so we talked about how the archaeology, Schliemann's discovery of... Schliemann's discovery, sort of destruction, and then recovery of the city of Hisirlik or Troy.
00:22:02
Speaker
has actually led to now over a hundred years of scholarship that has really let us flesh out the entire story of what the actual historic influence
00:22:15
Speaker
was for the writing of the Iliad. Obviously the Iliad is not a history, it's fantasy, but it's based in part on the real place and some real people. So they thought it was just so interesting to see how we can take a story that we know is fiction, but that's based on reality and go to the archaeology and then actually use the archaeology to figure out what was real about the influence for that story.
00:22:45
Speaker
And so it inspired me to, I was thinking about this book that I had read a long time ago, about it's kind of the quest to find evidence in Egypt for the Old Testament, archaeologically.
00:23:00
Speaker
And this is kind of a topic, I don't know if a lot of people interested in archaeology really know that this type of stuff is for real going on and there's actually serious academic people working on it, but they are. And I find it really fascinating. I remember reading this book
00:23:19
Speaker
And it is, I have it right here. It's by a guy named Ahmed Azman. He's actually a pretty popular historic author. He has two other books, or had two other books at the time, called Moses and Akhenaten. So he's really into Egyptian history, right? He wrote this book called The Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, The Secret Lineage of the Patriarch Joseph.
00:23:42
Speaker
And when I bought this, probably on some sort of kick in biblical archaeology, I read it and I was like amazed at the evidence he seemed to collect for his theory, and I'm not going to call it a crackpot theory, but it's a theory that, let's just put it, is not widely accepted by the academic community, okay?
00:24:08
Speaker
but he has a theory that the biblical patriarch Joseph was a real figure in Egyptian history who we actually have discovered the remains of and who actually fathered pharaohs in Egyptian or began a lineage of pharaohs in Egyptian history.
00:24:30
Speaker
So a lot of people have looked at the Old Testament and there's a sort of a history of the Old Testament in Egypt throughout the period after Joseph comes to Egypt and then the Canaanites come to Egypt with Joseph's family and they stay there for about 430 years during which time they kind of become slaves and they're there until Moses leads them in the exodus out of Egypt.
00:24:57
Speaker
And a lot of people have looked at this in the Old Testament and tried to place it in Egyptian history. And the timeline of when it happens in ancient history is what has been up for debate for a long time. It's usually placed with Joseph arriving in Egypt around 1800 BCE because
Biblical Figures in Egyptian History
00:25:20
Speaker
The only thing in the Old Testament that really gives us an indication of when the Exodus happens is the mention of Ramses, which most people have taken
00:25:34
Speaker
to assume that the king and the exodus who Moses is escaping from is Ramses II because the word Ramses is in the Old Testament during that part of the story. So a lot of people place the exodus around between 1279 and 1213, which was the reign of Ramses II.
00:25:54
Speaker
but scholars learned looking at it and looking at the Old Testament now and seeing that it isn't exactly cut and dry that Ramses II was the Exodus pharaoh because the Old Testament actually doesn't mention Ramses as the pharaoh by name, so people mistake that sometimes. What he does say is that
00:26:17
Speaker
The Israelites had settled in the land of Goshen in Egypt, which was in the Ramses region. And this, scholars think, is actually referring to the city of Pye Ramses, which is one of the two cities, along with the city of Python, built in theory by the Exodus Jews, the Israelites who were in Egypt before the Exodus.
00:26:40
Speaker
And so because it says that they were living in the Ramses region, people assumed that this was during the reign of Ramses, but some people are saying it is not necessarily the case. And it's interesting because the city of Ramses was not actually named after Ramses II. It was actually built before the reign of Ramses I, who was his father, and the first king of the 19th dynasty.
00:27:07
Speaker
So, it was built before he took power during the reign of Horemheb, who was a general in the army under Tutankhamun, who basically after his death took control and became the ruler of Egypt for a while before Rameses began.
00:27:25
Speaker
And a lot of people sort of tie Horemhab's name in history as this villain who's sort of tied into perhaps a plot to assassinate Tutankhamun and take power. So he's kind of this shady figure. But anyway, so the city was built and it was actually named after Ramses the first by Horemhab after it was built. So it had actually been built and called Ramses before Ramses the second ever even took
00:27:55
Speaker
the throne. So yeah it's hard to tell if it's being called the area of Ramses because this is where the city was at the time and everybody called it Ramses or whether this is just something like the city had been there before and then later on in history everybody knew it as Ramses because that's what it had been called for a long time and so that's when the Old Testament was written that's what was recorded as the place where it happened because that's what they were calling it at the time.
00:28:25
Speaker
So we don't really know if the mention of the Ramses region can actually tie the Old Testament Exodus to the reign of Ramses II. At least Mr. Osman says that it does not in fact do that. So let's talk about his theories for a second about how is Hebrew kings came to rule Egypt. Okay, so and what that has to do with the Old Testament.
00:28:50
Speaker
So basically the author is trying to kind of just rewrite the timeline here based on what he sees as the evidence that supports his theory of Joseph coming to Egypt at a different point in time than was traditionally accepted.
00:29:05
Speaker
Now, a lot of people only say that Joseph came to Egypt around 1800 because of the 430 years they believed the Old Testament states that the Israelites were in Egypt before the Exodus, which they had placed
00:29:21
Speaker
in around the reign of Ramses. Now, traditionally some, I guess people had thought that his reign had been in the 1400s, 1446, which is why they placed Joseph around 1800, but of course we know that Ramses reign was actually in the 1200s, so that would place the arrival of Joseph more around 1600.
00:29:50
Speaker
Now, so Osman says more apropos date for Joseph's arrival in Egypt for those who believe that Joseph and the Israelites were actually the Hyksos. Now the Hyksos were an Asiatic people who came to lower Egypt and took control around 1650.
00:30:10
Speaker
during the Second Intermediate Period and ruled that half the Upper Egypt during that period. And because they were Asiatic, they were Semitic in ethnic origin. And so people had always thought, oh, well, Joseph's people were in Egypt for a while before they were expelled, and the Hyksos were in Egypt for 100 years before they were expelled. So maybe those were the Israelites that we were talking about in the Bible.
00:30:38
Speaker
But Osman says that's not true either. He says his date for Joseph coming to Egypt is in the late 1400s.
00:30:50
Speaker
So he places Joseph in Egypt sometime around between 1413 and 1400 BCE, and where he gets the dates for this is from the arrival of a figure in Egyptian history named Yuya.
00:31:10
Speaker
Now let me tell you a little bit about this guy named Yuya that the author of the book is convinced to be the historical Joseph from the Old Testament. Now Yuya was a figure, he was basically a vizier to the Pharaoh.
00:31:30
Speaker
and his tomb was discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1905 by Theodore Davis, Arthur Weigel, and Gaston Maspero, who was a very famous Egyptologist.
00:31:42
Speaker
and he wasn't found alone, he was buried with his wife Tuya. So, Yuya and Tuya were a very important family in Egyptian history. They kind of come out of nowhere as far as historical records are concerned. We know that Tuya is an Egyptian woman who may have actually been somehow related to the royal family during the 18th dynasty.
00:32:03
Speaker
but Yuya we're not so sure about. So they pop up and it turns out that Yuya had been a trusted advisor to the Pharaoh, Tathmosis IV. And so at some point, probably around the end of Tathmosis IV's reign, he was appointed vizier to the Pharaoh. And so he was vizier who served with Tathmosis's son, Amenhotep III, between 1405 and 1367.
00:32:32
Speaker
So even though he wasn't royal himself, he was married to a very prominent Egyptian woman who we think may have been royal, and he was serving as vizier. So he was pretty important to the royal family. And he was so important, apparently, that him and his wife Tuya's daughter was married to the pharaoh Amenetep III.
00:32:58
Speaker
She is a very famous queen in Egyptian history. Her name is Queen Ti, and she is very well known from New Kingdom history because she was a very powerful queen and Amenatep III, who was a very beloved pharaoh actually, he was probably
00:33:19
Speaker
from what I know, one of the most beloved pharaohs by the Egyptian people in their history, and she was one of their most beloved queens. She was powerful as well, and Amenetep apparently was very much in love with her. So he was so in love with her that
00:33:36
Speaker
He actually married her and made her his royal wife, which is basically saying like, she's the queen, even though he has other wives as well. He was also married to his sister, as most good pharaohs are, but he did not make his sister his royal wife. He made Queen Ti his royal wife. So his sister sort of sat on the back burner for a little bit, okay?
00:34:03
Speaker
And so, yeah, so Queen Ti was, she was the tits, I guess you could say it. So, she was the daughter of Yu-Yantuya, and Queen Ti and Amenetep III gave birth, well, he didn't give birth, but you get the idea. They had a son, Amenetep IV, who you may know by another name, that rascally little heretic king, Akhenaten,
00:34:30
Speaker
who, you know, thought, oh, we don't need all these Egyptian gods and goddesses. Why don't we just worship this one god? He's like the sun and he's pretty awesome. So I'm just gonna move the capital of Egypt to Amarna and worship the sun dude with my wife Nefertiti. And, you know, we're just gonna surf on our little pleasure lake and worship the sun god.
00:34:58
Speaker
And yeah, so he did that and everybody hated him and then he disappeared mysteriously from history. And so that happened. But anyway, Akhenaten was Queen T's son.
00:35:12
Speaker
So you can see now how Yuya's ancestors did become the royal line because his daughter's son was the pharaoh, and after Akhenaten, his son King Tut was the pharaoh as well.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, very influential on Egyptian history, right? So what's the deal with this guy, Uya anyway? Why would this, you know, Osman guy think, oh yeah, well he's obviously Joseph from the Old Testament. So he says that there are many similarities between Uya and this Joseph man.
00:35:52
Speaker
One of them has to do with the name Yuya and its relation to the Hebrew for Joseph, which apparently I guess he was called Yahweh for a while, which is God's name, I think. But anyway, there's some connection there. It was kind of hard for me to understand, but something about the syllables and sounds and stuff like that in the Hebrew language that made Joseph into something vaguely
00:36:20
Speaker
resembling YUYAH for the Egyptians. Also, YUYAH was the first person in Egyptian history to hold the title master of the horse and deputy of the chariotry for the king. And we didn't see this previously in Egyptian history because chariots and horses were not a very large part of the Egyptian military until after the Hyksos came to Egypt because they brought the chariots with them.
00:36:49
Speaker
So that was in 1650 and when I left in 1550 that was when you very first really see horses and the chariot being a big part of Egyptian culture
00:37:03
Speaker
and especially military culture. So to have this person titled Master of the Horse is a big deal because that was Joseph's title. You see? You see the similarities? Just start piling up, right? So they have the same title. They're both made vizier to the king, even though they're not royal-born and they're of some type of obscure birth. They're both given Egyptian wives.
00:37:33
Speaker
Because in the Old Testament, Joseph is given to wife a woman named Asenath, who was the daughter of a man named Potiphar.
00:37:45
Speaker
Now, Potiphar, an Egyptian, is not a person. Potiphar is a title. At this point in the 18th Dynasty, the title of Potiphar means the priest of On, and we know from the Old Testament that Potiphar was a priest of On. So that's obviously where the name comes from, the title.
00:38:10
Speaker
And apparently in history we see that the name Potiphar being actually applied to a person as a naman does not actually happen until the period of Akhenaten.
00:38:23
Speaker
So it is exactly this point in history, basically, give or take 10-20 years, where the name Potiphar is first being used to describe people and not titles. And that is what we see being used in the Old Testament story where Joseph's wife is the daughter of Potiphar.
00:38:45
Speaker
So there's another connection for you. There's some other things. There's something about, in the Old Testament, about Joseph being given a golden rings and a necklace by the Pharaoh. And while we don't have golden rings on the mummy of Euya, we do have a golden necklace. And we do have an inscription on his tomb mentioning that he had been given a gold ring by the Pharaoh.
00:39:13
Speaker
So there's two other Old Testament references that do kind of match up with what we find with Yuya in the tomb. And then there's this third thing. Yuya was mummified and buried in Egypt in the Valley of the Kings.
00:39:29
Speaker
And that's all great, well and good. But, um, okay, so archaeologists are used to seeing Egyptian mummies by this point when he's found. And so they've seen their fair share of Egyptian mummies. They're, especially in this period, they're all kind of similar looking, a lot of them related. And they find Yuya and Tuya and they take the mummies out and they look at Tuya and she's an Egyptian woman and they're like, oh yeah, okay, she's an Egyptian. They look at Yuya and they're like, huh,
00:39:59
Speaker
he uh he doesn't look so Egyptian he looks kind of jewish yep i recommend you go to my website and check out
00:40:11
Speaker
pictures I'm going to post with this blog entry of Yuya and Tuya's mummies. They're very well preserved, and I think, I don't know, it seems fairly evident to me that Yuya is not Egyptian, or at least he does not look like any other Egyptian mummy that I have ever seen. I have to say, does look
00:40:34
Speaker
not to be stereotypical, but he looks pretty Jewish. So this I think is probably the main point that Osman began with in his search to prove Joseph as Yuya
Revised Timelines of Biblical Events
00:40:48
Speaker
in history, is that they found this mummy and ever since 1905 people have been trying to figure out why Yuya, the father of the Egyptian queen Ti, does not look ethnically Egyptian.
00:41:01
Speaker
So I guess this is Osman's theory as to why he does not look Egyptian, but in fact looks like a person of Semitic heritage. Because he's Joseph! Joseph in the amazing type of color dream coat! It was red and yellow and orange and pink and purple and blue and asher and gray and... I'm not gonna sing the entire song. But yeah.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah, by the way, that's a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. So, I took my coat of many colors. I don't know if that's the words or not, but it's something like that. I did the show once. It was a long time ago. Yeah, I played one of Jacob's wives. Joseph's father Jacob had many wives.
00:41:52
Speaker
And I played one of his wives, and to signify that I was a housewife, I wore a hat with a cooking pot on top of my head. Yep. So that happened, and it was fun. But back to the story at hand.
00:42:09
Speaker
So it is basically this description of the Yuya mummy that has inspired people now to believe that he is Joseph. So this is a whole thing, yeah. And the author provides a bunch of evidence as other evidence to support his theory. I think a lot of it is kind of misleading.
00:42:33
Speaker
Like he'll say, I have a theory about Joseph's name and he kind of explains it or I have a theory about Joseph's wife's heritage and her father Potiphar and all this and he'll explain it and then he'll act for the next section like what he just theorized is the fact and that's what he's going off of? I don't know.
00:42:52
Speaker
But anyway, there's other things. He talks about the evidence of Israelites living in the land of Goshen, which is in the northeastern part of the Nile Delta. And there is pretty good evidence that the people living in Goshen at the time who were building the cities of Python and Ramses were of some sort of Semitic origin.
00:43:16
Speaker
And so that's good evidence as well, that during this time at the start of the 19th dynasty, when Moses is born, he's supposed to be born in close proximity to the Pharaoh and the royal family. And now before this point in history, the capital had been down further the Nile, down by Thebes. And it wasn't until the start of the 19th dynasty
00:43:41
Speaker
that Hormab had really been residing in Ivaris, north in the Northeastern Delta, which is where the Hyksos had been originally.
00:43:52
Speaker
So if Moses is going to be born in the land of Goshen, which is where the Israelites were, and he was going to be nearby the Pharaoh and the royal family, this is basically the only point in history where it would make sense for that to happen if he was really in Goshen, because then he would have been by the royal family who had just relocated to that area.
00:44:18
Speaker
if it was not Ramses II, but if it was the Pharaoh, Horemheb, or Ramses I.
00:44:27
Speaker
And so the author of the book theorizes that the Old Testament oppressor king, who was the one who had basically enslaved the Israelites at this point, is none other than Horemheb, who had ruled for almost 30 years. And during that period, him and his son, Seti, had been in the Delta region building these cities, Python and Pyramzis,
00:44:55
Speaker
and they were basically using heavy labor that we think might have been Semitic peoples. And so I guess it makes sense if he's the oppressor king. And then Osman says in the Old Testament the oppressor king dies and it's when this happens and the new king takes over that Moses says let my people go
00:45:19
Speaker
And then the new king says, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. And then Moses sends the plagues, and then the fifth year was plague, and the second year was plague, and the fourth year was plague. Yeah, so he sends the plagues, and then he splits the Red Sea, and then the second pharaoh is killed as Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt.
00:45:45
Speaker
And so he says the second king, who by the Old Testament estimations only reigned for about two years, must be Ramses I, who in real life only reigned for two years before his death. So this is his theory of the new timeline of the Old Testament story of Joseph and the Exodus, with star players including
00:46:13
Speaker
Yuya, Tuya, their daughter Queen Ti, her husband Amenachep III, their crazy son Akhenaten, his unfortunate soul of a son King Tutankhamen, and his successors Ai, Hormheb, and Remzies the First.
00:46:34
Speaker
Oh yeah, he also has this interesting theory that briefly after King Tut dies, there is a two-year period where his advisor Ai becomes the pharaoh. And Osman thinks that Ai was actually the son of Euya. In the Bible, apparently it says that Joseph had two sons as well. And apparently Euya has two sons. And the name of one of them may have actually been pronounced Ai.
00:47:03
Speaker
Ai shares the same title as Yuya, he's the vizier, and so it would make sense, I guess, if his father was the vizier, that his son Ai would rise up in the ranks to become the next vizier. So, he was the Pharaoh's advisor, and then he became the king.
00:47:21
Speaker
And I think Osman also says the mummy of Ai or the body or something like that does resemble Yuya more than he resembles the Egyptian kings and pharaohs and stuff or viziers and stuff. So that's another theory.
00:47:36
Speaker
was I, in fact, Joseph's son, who in the Old Testament, apparently, they both were very important and they came to be blessed and prosper as people. So that is Osman's correct-pot theory of Joseph, a.k.a. Euya, fathering a line of Egyptian pharaohs.
00:48:00
Speaker
Oh yeah, and he also says, you know how Akhenaten and Semenkakare, if that's a real person, and Tarankhamen were sort of shunned by Egyptian society afterwards, and their stuff was all destroyed and their names were scratched off of monuments and stuff, and they think that maybe Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tarankhamen were all assassinated. He also says that that was possibly
00:48:27
Speaker
also because they were pharaohs of Semitic or ethnic background because
00:48:34
Speaker
Yuya was their grandfather and father. So that's another theory. And then to really wrap things up, we've got two final points that really, you know, bring things home, like shabang! So Osman goes back to the timeline and he looks at everything he's just said and he goes, okay, so if we place the arrival of Joseph and Egypt at this time when we find Yuya and the
00:49:03
Speaker
reign of Amenachap III. And then we go to where we see the Exodus at the end of Horemhab's reign and the beginning of the reign of Ramses I. We don't have that period of 430 years that people think the Bible is talking about. What we do have is a period of four generations. Because biblical interpretation is basically in the hands of the reader, Osman says a lot of people have interpreted this wrong.
00:49:32
Speaker
The authors aren't talking about 430 years, they're talking about four generations, the life span of four generations. And if you think about the four generations of basically kings in between Amenetep III and Hormheb and Ramses, you get a period of about four generations, which would make the timeline for this Old Testament story between the arrival of Joseph and the Exodus
00:50:01
Speaker
completely perfect with what he has laid out of Yuya's life leading to the exodus and the death of Ramses I as the last Exodus king.
00:50:13
Speaker
Boom! Alright, so there's your first big point. And the second big point is, so obviously we went over how the reign of Akhenaten, Smenkakari, Nefertiti, whatever, and Tutankhamen is, you know, frowned upon by the rest of Egypt and, you know, kind of politely erased from history.
00:50:35
Speaker
So this is because one, yeah, he thinks it may be because they were Semitic in origin, but also mainly as far as the Egyptians are concerned, because Akhenaten shows up and he's like, dude, let's get rid of all the rest of these gods. We don't need to be polytheists. Let's worship one god, which technically makes him, yeah, you guessed it, a monotheist. In fact, he's the first major monotheist in history.
00:51:04
Speaker
And where do they think that Akhenan just randomly came up with this idea to be a monotheist from? Well, Osman says, maybe it was from his Semitic ancestors, his grandfather, Nuya, we're supposed to believe.
00:51:21
Speaker
is one of the early, the Jewish faith coming out of Canaan. So yeah, maybe perhaps the little birdie whispering in Akhenaten's ear saying, we don't need all the rest of these gods. Let's just worship the one god. Maybe that might have been his grandfather, Yulia. We don't know, but that is Osman's big world blasting theory at the end of the book.
00:51:48
Speaker
And that monotheism was passed down. Tut wasn't really a big fan of it. In fact, Tut's first name when he was born was Tatantatin, as in Aten, who was the sun god of Akhenaten's. And Tut didn't really like that, because after Akhenaten died, or was murdered or whatever, everyone was pretty pissed off at him. So he actually changed his name from Tatantatin to Tatantat... Whoa, whoa,
Ongoing Interest in Biblical Archaeology
00:52:15
Speaker
whoa, what am I saying?
00:52:25
Speaker
So there you have it folks, the big bad crazy theories of one Mr. Osman
00:52:36
Speaker
So, just interesting stuff. If anyone of you guys are interested, there's other people who have been writing about this stuff, and there's other theories as well. If you can still find it, I think you can probably find it online somewhere. I remember a couple years ago, there was a TV special on either Discovery or History or something like that, made by the filmmaker James Cameron of Titanic, and the naked archaeologist himself, Simka Jakobovich.
00:53:06
Speaker
And the entire special was about their theory that the Exodus story actually happened around 1550 BC with the reign of King Amos I, who was the first king of the 18th Dynasty. And they put forward a bunch of evidence which they believed pointed to
00:53:29
Speaker
to the reign of Amos coinciding with the plague because there was a volcanic eruption at the island of Santorini, Greece, which would have produced some of the side effects similar to what is mentioned in the Bible. It also coincides with the Exodus, with the expulsion of the Hyksos, Asiatic peoples from Egypt.
00:53:54
Speaker
If, you know, 1550 there was a large bunch of Semitic, Asiatic people expelled from Egypt, and at the end of the Exodus there is a large bunch of Semitic Asiatic people expelled from Egypt. So, obviously they went with that coincidence and ran with it.
00:54:11
Speaker
But it was an interesting special. They also say there's evidence in Greece, I think, of, you know, these stelae or inscriptions that actually show the parting of the Red Sea, or the Reed Sea, as I think we know now is probably the most likely candidate for the
00:54:31
Speaker
Red Sea, apparently that Moses was crossing, and the drowning of the Pharaoh and the Egyptians in the Red Sea with Moses and his staff standing in the middle of it. So that was an interesting special. Maybe you should check it out if you're interested. Again, that's the James Cameron and Simka Jokobevich's special. I think it's called something like Decoding the Exodus, something like that.
00:54:55
Speaker
So anyway, you know, all of these theories on the biblical archaeology of Egypt and its connection to the Old Testament are all very interesting. And so that's one of the random things about Egypt I thought I would bring up today because maybe you find it interesting. I don't know. I do. So I thought I'd tell you about it.
00:55:18
Speaker
And maybe I'll do another Egypt episode sometime in the future where we talk about some more traditional parts of Egyptian archaeology. I'm not sure if everybody here is really into this biblical stuff, but I think it's interesting.
00:55:35
Speaker
And so that's about it for us today, folks. We're gonna hit the road and shuffle off to Bedfordshire.
Teaser for Upcoming Episode
00:55:43
Speaker
But tune in, I think in a week or two I'm gonna have another episode out, because if you haven't noticed, we are coming upon the first three days of July, which happened to be the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. That's right, folks.
00:56:00
Speaker
All of you Civil War buffs out there I'm sure will know that we are coming upon a big event in Civil War commemoration history and it's going to be a pretty exciting event for that gorgeous little town of Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania with which I am very familiar because I've been there like a dozen times.
00:56:19
Speaker
So I think I'm going to do a Civil War episode, which is going to be super exciting because I have like weird random personal connections to the Civil War, some interesting stories, and some great insight into the life of Civil War soldiers that comes to me from different people in my life and our heritage. So I think that's going to be very interesting to share with you guys.
00:56:46
Speaker
So stay tuned for that and definitely check out this blog episode you can download the rest of my episodes on stitcher or iTunes and Yeah, keep tuned for more struggling archaeologists guide to getting dirty in the near future and I would also like to give a shout out to my new friends at the anomaly podcast and
00:57:07
Speaker
I think it's safe to say, as someone who has devoted copious amounts of time trying to learn ancient Greek and hieroglyphs, that I too am an anomaly. And for those listeners interested in all things geek, you can check out the Anomaly Podcast at anomalypodcast.com and on iTunes. But anyway, it's been a great community and I'll make sure to keep a part of it because geeky girls rock!
00:57:33
Speaker
So that's it for this podcast, ladies and gents. We'll talk to you soon and make sure to keep posted for the Civil War episode coming up next. I think this one may be called something like, hmm, holy crackpot theory, Batman. How about that one? So this is McNiven signing out for me and my girls, Ankison Pepe and Asshotep.
00:58:03
Speaker
May your ma'at always stay in order, and your aunt be eternally awesome. McNiven out.
00:58:20
Speaker
Reuben was the eldest of the children of Israel with Simeon and Levi and the next in line. Naphtali and Issachar with Asher and Dan. Zebulon and Gad took the total to nine. Jacob, Jacob and sons. Benjamin and Judah, which lives on their own. Jacob, Jacob and sons. Joseph, Jacob's favorite son.