The Moses/Akhenaten Connection and Monotheism

Exerted ftom: Crypto-History, Instalment 18: Moses, Monotheism and Magic

While Akhenaten's monotheistic reforms were later overthrown by a jealous priesthood, and his name nearly erased from history, his status as the first monotheist remains unchallenged. The next great monotheistic figure in history - Moses - is in many ways informed by the so-called Amarna Experiment. In factor, some commentators have gone so far as to conflate the two. In his 1939 monograph Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud theorized that Moses may have been a priest allied to Akhenaten - when monotheism was rejected by the Egyptians, Moses brought it to the Jews he escorted out of bondage.

Others go farther than Freud, though.

Historian and linguist Ahmed Osman, for one, contends that Moses and Akhenaten were the same man!

”In a stunning retelling of the Exodus story, Osman details the events of Moses/Akhenaten's life: how he was brought up by Israelite relatives, ruled Egypt for seventeen years, angered many of his subjects by replacing the traditional Egyptian pantheon with worship of Aten, and was forced to abdicate the throne. Retreating to exile in Sinai with his Egyptian and Israelite supporters, he died out of the sight of his followers, presumably at the hands of Seti I, after an unsuccessful attempt to regain his throne.”

Osman reveals the Egyptian components in the monotheism preached by Moses as well as his use of Egyptian royal and Egyptian religious expression. He shows that even the Ten Commandments betray the direct influence of Spell 125 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Osman explains that upon the death of Tutmose IV, his son followed the Pharoahonic tradition and married his sister Sitamun to take the throne as Amenhotep III. Not long afterwards, Amenhotep also married Tiye, who was the daughter of the Chief Minister or Vizier, a man named Yuya, who Osman identifies as the Biblical Joseph. However, the power accumulated by the Hebrew Vizier, made him numerous power enemies in court, so when Tiye became pregnant it was ruled that if she bore a son, it should be killed at birth. Osman explains that Tiye had relatives in the Land of Goshen, to which she retired to bear the child. When her son was born around 1394 BC, she and her royal midwives defied the ruling of death by placing the newborn in a basket sealed with pitch and floating it to the home of house of her father Joseph's half-brother, Levi.

According to Osman, the boy was named Aminadab (born around 1394 BC), was sent to be educated by priests of Ra in the eastern Delta, and then to Thebes. Osman contends that it was here that the boy fully embraced Aten, seeing in that deity an equivalent of the Hebrew "Adonai" (Phoenician for 'Lord').

When Amenhotep III fell ill with no direct male heir, Aminadab/Amenhotep IV married his half-sister Nefertiti (daughter of Sitamun), and ruled as co-regent until Amenhotep III's death, at which time Aminadab/Amenhotep IV/Akhentaen became Pharoah and took his place on the stage of history.

Osman's theory is only possible if the timelines conventionally accepted in both Egyptology and Biblical studies are incorrect. Since Josephus, a sizable contingent of commentators have identified the expulsion of the Hyksos with the Exodus - which is much too early. The so-called 'late date' for Exodus, the more popular theory, is equally problematic, since at 1290 BC, it is too late for the Amarna Period.

It is possible, however, that our current understanding of the chronology of Ancient Egypt is flawed, however. An early proponent of the notion that the conventional timeline is out of synch was the maverick Immanual Velikosvsky who, in his Ages in Chaos, proposed that a number of pharaohs were inadvertently duplicated through mistranslation of various king lists, adding "ghost years" to the timeline. In his revised chronology, Rameses I is also Necho I, Seti I is identical to Psamtik I, Rameses II is Necho II, and so forth.

To read the full text:
http://primarysources.newsvine.com/_news/2009/10/15/3382491-crypto-history-instalment-18-moses-monotheism-and-magic



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