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The Moses Mystery

The name Moses meant son in ancient Egypt and had been common amongst Egyptian Pharaohs at the end of the 17^th dynasty and during the 18^th dynasty. (1539 – 1295). A table of these God kings shows six God kings with this name. Thus, Kamose, the first of these, was son of Ka.

Kamose (Wadjkheperre) 1514 – 1501

Ahmose (Nebpehtyre) 1539 – 1514

Amenhotep I (Djeserkare) 1514 – 1493

Thutmose I (Akheperkare) 1493 – 1481
Thutmose II (Akheperenre) 1491 – 1479
Hatshepsut (Maatkare) 1473 – 1458
Thutmose III (Menkheperre) 1504 – 1450
Amenhotep II (Akheperure) 1427 – 1392
Thutmose IV (Menkheperure) 1419 – 1386
Amenhotep III (Nebmaatre) 1382 – 1344
Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten 1350 – 1334
Smenkhkare (Ankhkheperure) 1336-1334
Tutankhamun (Nebkheperure) 1334 – 1325
Ay (Kheperkheperure) 1325 – 1321
Horemheb (Djeserkheperure) 1323 – 1295

Exodus tells us: Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter of Levi. ² The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. ³ And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river’s brink. ⁴ And his sister stood at a distance, to know what would be done to him. ⁵ Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens walked beside the river; she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it. ⁶ When she opened it she saw the child; and lo, the babe was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” ⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” ⁸ And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹ And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. ¹⁰ And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses, for she said, “Because I drew him out of the water.” ¹¹

Given that the word Moses means son, the last few words in verse 11 above would seem to be superfluous and misleading.

There are eminent researchers who have proposed the idea that Moses could have been one of the Pharaohs. For this to have been the case there would have had to be some logic to his accession. Amongst historians there are two schools of thought regarding royal succession. One group believe that succession was matrilineal, ie, that the throne went to the man who married the Heiress Princess. The Heiress Princess would be the eldest daughter of the Heiress Queen, so in many cases kings would end up marrying their sisters.

The alternative and more popular belief in this regard says that the next pharaoh would be the eldest son by the King’s Great Wife. Failing that, it would be a son by a lesser wife. This creates some difficulty for researchers since we do not know which of the lesser wives would have been chosen and the criteria (if any) for such a choice.

In particular, it has been suggested that Moses was Akenaten.[1] The noted psychoanalytic psychologist Clement Freud suggested that Moses was actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and that he was either a follower of Akhenaten, or that he could have been Akhenaten himself.[2]

When he acceded to the throne, historians tell us that Akhenaten was crowned as Amenhotep IV (meaning ‘Amun is content’) and temple construction and decoration projects began immediately in the name of the new king. The earliest work of his reign is stylistically similar to the art of his predecessors, but within a year or two he was building temples to the Aten or divinised sun-disk at Karnak in a very different artistic style and had changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of this god. These radical changes Akhenaten made have led to his characterisation in some places as the ‘first individual in human history.

Akhenaten’s ‘great king’s wife’ was Nefertiti and they had six daughters. There were also other wives, including the enigmatic Kiya who may have been the mother of Tutankhamun. Nefertiti disappears from the archaeological record around year 12 and some have argued that she reappears as the enigmatic co-regent Smenkhkare towards the end of Akhenaten’s reign.

The Egyptians had traditionally worshipped a whole pantheon of gods who were represented in human or animal form or as animal-headed humans. Some gods were specific to particular towns or places; others had broader appeal. From early periods gods such as Re or Ra had played an important role in Egyptian state religion because the distant but universal power of the sun fitted well with prevailing ideas of the supreme power of the king both within Egypt and beyond its borders. In the New Kingdom, solar gods again became prominent, among them the Aten, the visible sun-disk which can be seen traversing the sky each day. Akhenaten raised the Aten to the position of ’sole god’, represented as a disk with rays of light terminating in hands which reach out to the royal family, sometimes offering the hieroglyphic sign for life. Akhenaten and his family are frequently shown worshipping the Aten or simply indulging in everyday activities beneath the disk. Everywhere the close ties between the king and god are stressed through art and text. The king forms the link between the god and ordinary people whose supposed focus of worship seems to have been Akhenaten and the royal family rather than the Aten itself.

Other gods still existed and are mentioned in inscriptions although these tend to be other solar gods or personifications of abstract concepts; even the names of the Aten, which are written in cartouches like king’s names, consist of a theological statement describing the Aten in terms of other gods. The majority of traditional gods were not tolerated, however, and teams of workmen were sent around the temples of Egypt where they chiselled out the names and images of these gods wherever they occurred.

Early in his reign

In addition to the changes he made to religious practices and art, Akhenaten also instigated changes in temple architecture and building methods: stone structures were now built from much smaller blocks of stone set in a strong mortar. Even official inscriptions changed, moving away from the old-fashioned language traditional to monumental texts to reflect the spoken language of the time. In the cliffs around the boundaries of the city the king left a series of monumental inscriptions…

Akhenaten decided that the worship of the Aten required a location uncontaminated by the cults of traditional gods and to this end chose a site in Middle Egypt for a new capital city which he called Akhetaten, ‘Horizon of the Aten’. It is a desert site surrounded on three sides by cliffs and to the west by the Nile and is known today as el-Amarna. In the cliffs around the boundaries of the city the king left a series of monumental inscriptions in which he outlined his reasons for the move and his architectural intentions for the city in the form of lists of buildings.

To the east of the city is a valley leading into the desert in which the king began excavating tombs for the royal family. On the plain near the river massive temples to the Aten were constructed: these were open to the sky and the rays of the sun and were probably influenced by the design of much earlier solar temples dedicated to the cult of Re. Other sites of religious importance are located on the edges of the desert plain. There were also at least four palaces in the city which vary considerably in form, plus all the administrative facilities, storage and workshops necessary to support the royal family, court and the temple cults.

Akhenaten disappeared in his seventeenth year on the throne and his reforms did not survive for long in his absence. His co-regent Smenkhkare, about whom we know virtually nothing, appears not to have remained in power for long after Akhenaten’s death. The throne passed to a child, Tutankhamun (originally Tutankhaten) who was probably the son of Akhenaten and Kiya. The regents administering the country on behalf of the child soon abandoned the city of Akhetaten and the worship of the Aten and returned to Egypt’s traditional gods and religious centres. The temples and cults of the gods were restored and people shut up their houses and returned to the old capitals at Thebes and Memphis. His image and names were removed from monuments.

The evidence for the claim that Moses was in fact Akhenaten is circumstantial;

1 Akhenaton’s appearance was different from the conventional Egyptian appearance, implying that he could have been Hebrew or Hykosite.

2 Moses name implies that he was thought to be the son of someone generally recognized to be important

3 Akenaten disappeared when the Egyptian establishment condemned his attempt to replace Amen (in his many guises) and the other Gods with Aten. The timing of this disappearance coincided with the known time of the Exodus.

4 If Moses had been thought of by his followers as a God-King, it would explain how his pronouncements were thought by them to be the teachings of God.

5 The tomb of Akhenaten has never been found.

Akenaten 6 Moses and Akhenaten were both strong individuals who prosecuted the idea of ‘one god’, at exactly the same time and place in history.

7 Both men were leaders who were not frightened of big decisions that greatly influenced their followers.

8 The short life of Smenkhkare and the fact the throne was taken by a child imply great power held by the priests and politicians that pulled the strings after Akhenaton’s disappearance.

We are told that Moses was brought up as son of the Pharaohs daughter and was even called son. If Akenaten was Moses, his mother must have been a Pharaoh’s wife or he must have married the eldest daughter of the Queen (depending on what rules of succession were in place). Since neither of these two can be proved, we are only left with the strangely compelling circumstantial evidence and set of coincidences listed above.

Find out more about these compelling mysteries in The God Secret by Greg Rigby

www.thegodsecret.com

[2] Moses and Monotheism; Sigmund Freud