This article will really be a dramatic development of the already radical conclusions at which I had arrived in “The Shattering Fall of Queen Nefertiti”, in which I had identified Nefertiti as the biblical Queen Jezebel, and had identified the overseer of Jezebel’s death, general Jehu, with Nefertiti’s contemporary, Horemheb.

Introduction

Based on Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s most important re-location of the conventional historians’ ‘C14th BC’ to the C9th BC, as discussed in his Ages in Chaos series, I was able to propose a new identification of Queen Nefertiti (supposedly of the C14th BC), with the biblical Queen Jezebel of the C9th BC. Jehu then fitted perfectly into this scenario as Horemheb. That was already radical enough, but I think that it worked. If it did, then it provided the answers to those basic questions concerning Nefertiti about which the Egyptologists do not have the answers – and that despite her immense fame. For example:

From whence did Nefertiti come?

When and how did her life end? And:

Do we have a mummy for her?

But all that, apparently, did not exhaust the biblico-historical potential of this fascinating queen. In this article, which might be regarded as Part Two of “The Shattering Fall of Queen Nefertiti”, I expect to be able to add some significant further dimensions to Queen Nefertiti-Jezebel and her relationships, by identifying her also as the formidable Queen Tiy, married to pharaoh Amenhotep III ‘the Magnificent’, and later, to Akhnaton. And now, in keeping with Nefertiti’s also being a biblical character, I shall go even further and identify Amenhotep III & IV (Akhnaton) as, respectively, king Asa of Judah and king Ahab of Israel. This will serve to streamline my previous cumbersome view that Nefertiti-Jezebel must first have married Ahab (a marriage recorded in the Bible), and had then gone to Egypt to marry Amenhotep III, for the last years of his life (as Nefertiti is known to have done), and then Akhnaton (as Nefertiti also did). The streamlined marriage sequence is now to be recognized as Nefertiti-Jezebel married to Amenhotep III-Asa and then to Akhnaton-Ahab. (Though further on I shall accept that there was another marriage before even these).

The evil and idolatrous Jezebel’s marrying Amenhotep III-Asa, as I am proposing here, would wonderfully account for certain strange aspects of that great pharaoh’s very last years. These are well described by Velikovsky, for instance, in Oedipus and Ikhnaton (1960). But they would also account for why the good and pious king, Asa of Judah, his biblical alter ego, had lurched somewhat tangentially off the rails in his very last years of kingship.

It would not be the least surprising if the mighty king Asa of Judah should have ruled also Egypt. His long reign of about 40 years (similar to Amenhotep III’s) was largely peaceful and unchallenged. God had blessed Asa with prosperity and power. “Asa had an army of 300,000 from Judah, armed with large shields and spears, and 280,000 from Benjamin who carried shields and drew bows; all these were mighty warriors” (2 Chronicles 14:8).

It is impossible to imagine reasonably that a king of this sort of might could have been contained to just the small kingdom of Judah. I think that it is very reasonable to say that he must also have had power over Egypt. Later I shall go even further, and suggest that he had also ruled Babylon.

A further supplement.

This combination of rulership over Egypt and Babylon, coupled with the contemporary presence of the semi-divine, goddess-acclaimed Nefertiti, both beautiful and cruel (certainly so as Jezebel), leads me to the conclusion that our already composite queen was also the legendary “Semiramis” of the Greco-Roman legends; a beautiful and cruel queen who had ruled both Babylon and Egypt in great magnificence and opulence.

“Semiramis” – and this may be of interest only to some Catholics – is described in great detail by the German mystic, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (In The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, section 9. SEMIRAMIS), who claims to have seen this queen in visions. And, though the mystic’s chronology is awry (but so is that of the Egyptologists), there are some very compelling points that she raises that will serve, here and there, to illuminate our reconstruction. However this article can be read without one’s needing to take into account such mystical visions.

For the link between “Semiramis” and Nefertiti-Jezebel, see my article:

The 3-Dimensional Queen Nefertiti:

As Nefertiti; Jezebel and semiramis.

Blessed Anne Catherine’s comment on the Egyptology of her (C19th) day is too intriguing to pass over here:

The scholars of the present day who write about Egypt are in gross error. They accept so many things concerning the Egyptians as history, science, and learning, which nevertheless have no other foundation than astrology and false visions. That any nation could remain as stupid and beastly as the Egyptians is a proof of it. But these savants reject such demoniacal inspirations and practices as im­possible. They esteem the Egyptians more ancient than they really are, because in those early times they appear to have possessed such knowledge of abstruse and hidden things.

But I saw that, even at the coming of Semiramis to Memphis, these people, in their pride had designedly con­fused their calendar. Their ambition was to take prece­dence of all other nations in point of time. With this end in view, they drew up a number of complicated calendars and royal genealogical tables. By this and frequent changes in their computations, order and true chronology were lost. That this confusion might be firmly established, they perpetuated every error by inscriptions and the erec­tion of great buildings. For a long time they reckoned the ages of father and son, as if the date of the former’s demise were that of the latter’s birth. The kings, who waged constant war with the priests on the subject of chronology, inserted among their forefathers the names of persons that never existed. Thus the four kings of the same name who reigned simultaneously in Thebes, Heliopolis, Memphis, and Sais, were in accordance with this design, reckoned one after the other. I saw too that once they reckoned nine hundred and seventy days to a year, and again, years were computed as months. I saw a pagan priest drawing up a chronological table in which for every five hundred years, eleven hundred were set down.

I saw these false computations of the pagan priests at the same time that I beheld Jesus teaching on the Sabbath at Aruma. Jesus, speaking before the Pharisees of the Call of Abraham and his sojourn in Egypt, exposed the errors of the Egyptian calendar. He told them that the world had now existed 4028 years. When I heard Jesus say this, He was Himself thirty-one years old.

[End of quote]

King Asa was basically a good king (though with some ambivalence, I Kings 15:14), and so God blessed him with incredible prosperity and power. He was truly a ‘Magnificent’. Early in his reign, this Asa defeated a force of 1 million Ethiopians and Libyans (2 Chronicles 14:9-15; 16:8). So did Amenhotep III defeat a huge force of Libyans/Ethiopians, taking 30,000 captives. According to Joann Fletcher’s account of this (Egypt’s Sun King. Amenhotep III, Duncan Baird Publishers, 2000, p. 44):

In the fifth year of his rule Amenhotep crushed a rebellion …. Aged 16, Amenhotep triumphed in what proved to be the only major military encounter in his reign of almost 40 years. Egyptian troops led by Amenhotep and his viceroy Merymose defeated the rebel forces of Kush [Ethiopia], Irem, Tiurek, and Weretj (or Weresh), taking 30,000 prisoners. His victory was commemorated on three stelae at Aswan and on Sai island in Sudan … and fragmentary stela at Semna ….

Thanks to the testimony of these Egyptian records we can now, I think, date this victory of his, as Asa, to his 5^th year.

For clarifications on how the supposedly peaceful reign of Asa was seemingly agitated for many years by king Baasha of Israel, read my reconstruction on Baasha as Ahab himself:

A Revised History of Northern Israel

from

Jeroboam I to Jehu

Queen Tiy

Amenhotep III is also thought to have been married to the formidable Queen Tiy (Tiye) from early in his reign.

However, it is my recent view that two ‘pharaohs Amenhotep’, III and IV (the latter being Akhnaton), may have been confused here by the Egyptologists, and that it was, instead, Akhnaton who had married Tiy early in his reign, and that Tiy was Nefertiti herself. The name Tiy is considered by Egyptologists to have been an abbreviation of a longer name, such as, for instance, Neferti-ti[ye]. Indeed, Queen Tiy fades from the historical scene at the very same time, and just as mysteriously, as does Nefertiti.

Since Tiy is known to have been the mother of Akhnaton, then my new scenario would perhaps, most controversially, strengthen Velikovsky’s conclusion (in Oedipus and Ikhnaton, 1960) that Akhnaton had married his own mother (the tragic Jocasta of the Greek legends). Akhnaton is depicted hand in hand with Tiy. Though Tiy may have been Akhnaton’s foster-mother.

Perhaps Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich supplies the requisite information here, the true marriage sequences, when she tells:

…. In obedience to certain divinations, she became the wife of one of the chief shepherds of the King of Babylon, and later on she married the King himself. …. Semiramis returning home from Africa after one of her hunting or military expeditions, went to Egypt. Semiramis was very highly honored in Egypt where, by her intrigues and diabolical arts, she greatly contributed to the spread of idolatry. I saw her in Memphis, where human sacrifices were common, plotting and practicing magic and astrology. ….

As (or if) Asa, then Amenhotep III would have been a descendant of king Solomon, whom he resembled in his power and his wealth. If Solomon were also Hammurabi of Babylon, as I have argued in various articles now, then so ought Amenhotep III have been one of Hammurabi’s successor-rulers of the Babylon of the pre-Kassite era. Before Tiy/Nefertiti married Amenhotep, she may must therefore have been married to Ahab’s father, Omri, a one-time servant of the king of Judah (I Kings 16:17?) (Anne Catherine’s “one of the chief shepherds of the King of Babylon”), who became king of Israel. Omri (the name is often considered to be foreign) may have been Amenhotep III’s famous commander and viceroy, Merymose. This would mean that we still have to accept three successive marriages for the queen (to Omri; to Asa-Amenhotep III and to Ahab-Akhnaton). [According to the German mystic, “Semiramis” lived to be 107. This would need to be tested in this new context]. But at least I no longer have the complication of separate marriages to Ahab and also Akhnaton, whom I have now fused into one.

Amenhotep III’s brief marriage to Nefertiti/Tiy in his last few years could well explain why this otherwise good king, Asa, had gone off the rails right at the end. He suffered a disease in his feet [was he, rather than Akhnaton, or in part, the Oedipus of the Greeks?], and he turned to physicians (presumably magicians or wizards-witch doctors), and not to God (2 Chronicles 16:12) as he had done in the case of the Ethiopian and Libyan war, and, when chided by a prophet, he persecuted him, and he “inflicted cruelties on some of the people at the same time” (16:10). Cruelty was of course the trademark of “Semiramis”.

And his marrying Nefertiti/Tiy would also explain why Atonism had begun to raise its ugly head even during his reign. Amenhotep III’s dominance also of Egypt and Babylon would be amongst those “the rest of the acts of Asa, all his power, all that he did, and the cities that he built …” elsewhere recorded (I Kings 15:23), that the biblical scribe does not bother to detail.

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich’s testimony bears out the opinion of some Egyptologists that the queen (as Nefertiti) was regarded as a virtual goddess, even during her lifetime:

Semiramis was honored almost as a divinity.

Queen Tiy, also, was invested with extraordinary powers for a woman of her time. She certainly was depicted in some formidable ways, like Nefertiti, smiting female captives, and with Tiy being the first person to have been depicted as a sphinx in female form – and vicious at that. Egyptologists imagine that these smiting scenes were merely figurative. But a reading of Anne Catherine Emmerich might prompt quite a different view, depicting a very cruel and ruthless queen (I have taken her “Melchisedech” here to have been the prophet Elijah):

…. Semiramis was born … at Ascalon … and then taken by pagan priests to some shepherds in a wilderness. She spent much of her time during her childhood alone on a mountain. I saw … the devil under various forms playing with her …  I saw near her birds of brilliant plumage. They brought her all kinds of curious toys. [Ravens would bring food to Jezebel’s contemporary and foe, Elijah (1 Kings 17:4, 6)]. I do not remember all that went on connected with her, but it was the most horrible idolatry. She was beautiful, full of intelligence and seductive arts, and everything succeeded with her. ….

…. Thus I saw Melchisedech at the court of Semiramis in Babylon, where she reigned with indescribable grandeur and magnificence. …. Semiramis received Melchisedech with great reverence. She secretly dreaded him on account of his wisdom. …. She fancied that he might perhaps woo her for his bride. But he spoke to her sternly, reproached her with her cruelty ….

…. This building [a pyramid of hers] was the real center of Egyptian idolatry, astrology, witchcraft, and abominable impurity. Here children and the aged were offered in sacrifice. …. Astrologers and necromancers … there had their diabolical visions. Near the baths was im­mense machinery for purifying the muddy waters of the Nile. The baths witnessed the most infamous horrors of idol worship. I saw later on Egyptian women practicing the greatest abominations in them. This pyramid [perhaps at ‘Fort Babylon’ in today’s Coptic Cairo - the ancient historian Ctesias does date this “Babylon” to the time of Semiramis] did not long exist; it was destroyed. ….

Once after “Melchisedech” had sternly reprimanded her, “Semiramis” suffered a temporary insanity:

Semiramis grew speechless from terror …. She became like a beast. She was for a long time penned up, and they cast to her in derision grass and straw in a manger; only one servant was faithful to her and furnished her with food. She was freed from the chastisement, but she carried on her disorders anew. ….

The queen does in fact, as Jezebel, disappear completely from the biblical scene for the 12 years from the death of Ahab (which I had previously imagined to have been the period of her marriage to Akhnaton, but no longer) to her re-emergence in Israel at the death of Ahab’s son, Jehoram, when she herself will be slain. Her crushing death at the hands of General Jehu at Jezreel was depicted by the latter’s alter ego in Egyptian history, Horemheb, who turned upside down the talatat blocks in one of Nefertiti’s shrines, and slashed the Aton’s rays across the fingertips, eliciting this comment from R. Winfield Smith: “It is certain that the queen was held in contempt by those responsible for this undignified treatment. To turn a beautiful female upside-down, to slash her viciously, and to place her where she would be symbolically crushed by the enormous weight of massive, soaring walls, can hardly be explained otherwise” (as quoted by J. Tyldesley, Nefertiti, Penguin, 1998, p, 60).

Jehu-Horemheb has thereby left a testimony for posterity, in Egypt, of the death of Nefertiti-Jezebel – and now Tiy? – that he himself had witnessed before the “massive, soaring walls” of the palace at Jezreel in Israel. The queen was thrown down from the window. As Nefertiti, she had often displayed herself at the “Window of Appearance” in Akhet-aton, to be admired by the throngs below. But as far as Jehu-Horemheb was concerned, she was a vile creature of “whoredoms and sorceries” (2 Kings 9:22). Egyptologists like Joann Fletcher can cease searching for the mummy of Nefertiti, because there would be no mummification for the evil queen as the biblical Jezebel. There could not be, as there was nothing left of her. Sic transit gloria mundi.

This new scenario will of course require a complete re-think of the children (mainly girls) of Tiy/ Nefertiti, and who were the fathers of these.

And Read :

• Prophet Jeremiah Ghosted Into Renaissance
• Ancient Sumerian Deities
• Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple Deir El Bahri
• Hatshepsut Poetry : Speak to Me
• Hatshepsut
• Life of Hatshepsut (1479-1457BC)
• The Story of Queen Hatshepsut
• The Suns of God – The Biggest Secret
• Women in Ancient Egypt
• Diffusions from Mesopotamia to Egypt Hattusas Remains of Hittite capital, Hattusas Amenhotep IV Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton) Hyksos, Hittite and Hurrian Conquests

© eni for Ancient Civilizations, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: into, Merged, Nefertiti, One, Queen, Queen Tiy

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

About a decade ago, when I was sitting in one of my early art history courses, my professor offhandedly mentioned some speculations that Imhotep, the architect of the Stepped Pyramid at Djoser (ca. 2530-2611 BC, shown right), may have been the biblical figure Joseph of Egypt. I have been quite skeptical of this theory for years, largely because none of my art history textbooks allude to any connection between the two historical figures. For years I have meant to research this topic and see what speculations exist, and I decided that today was the day.

After doing an initial search, I discovered that a lot of people speculate that Joseph and Imhotep are the same person. If you’re curious, you can see two less-scholarly sites here and here. I was surprised to see that someone thinks that the stepped pyramid was actually created to store grain (for the biblical famine associated with Joseph). Seriously? I find that incredibly unlikely.

As I suspected, I couldn’t find any reputable scholars discussing such a topic. It also seems unlikely that Imhotep and Joseph are the same person, since the Djoser pyramid predates Joseph’s arrival into Egypt by about 1,000 years. (You can follow some of the theories regarding Joseph’s historical timeline here).

I also learned a few new things about Imhotep during my research. He seemed like a very interesting and intelligent man. In addition to creating the stepped pyramid at Djoser (the shape of which is seen as the precursor to the sleek angles of the Pyramids at Giza), Imhotep was probably the architect for the step-pyramid complex Horus Sekhemkhet at Saqqara.¹ By the Late Period (c. 750-332 BC, which is about two thousand years after Imhotep lived), the architect had achieved the status of a god. As a deified being, Imhotep was associated with medical learning and healing. There are many Late (and Greco-Roman) period statues of Imhotep seated and holding a papyrus scroll (you can see an example here).

If anyone can provide some solid, scholarly evidence to support a connection between the Joseph and Imhotep, I’d be interested in reading it. For now, though, I’ve decided that the apparent lack of connection is for the best. It’s quite awkward to sing, “Go, go, go, Imhotep!” anyway.

1 Nabil Swelim, “Imhotep,” in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T039994. Accessed

And Read :

• Ancient Egypt Pyramids Texts
• Ancient Egypt Civilization & Map
• King tut’s Gold Throne
• Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple Deir El Bahri
• Hatshepsut Poetry : Speak to Me
• Hatshepsut
• Life of Hatshepsut (1479-1457BC)
• Ancient Egyptian Sexuality and Girl
• Literature In the Life of Ancient Egypt
• Morals and Sexual Morality in Ancient egypt

© eni for Ancient Civilizations, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ancient, Ancient Egypt, egypt, egypt civilizations, eyptian, Imhotep, Joseph, Joseph of Egypt

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh