Yes, Another Poem




The Law


With sand of Sinai twixt His toes

(But does this deity have feet?)

The nameless God his people chose

And handed down the Law complete.


These sacred places shall you build,

And holy altars also raised,

Where sheep and men in prayer are killed,

When’er the God is to be praised.


Here are the foods you cannot eat,

The impure things that all must shun;

All nakedness is indiscrete,

And sinful ‘tis to have much fun.


He is not seen but surely here,

As you perform each pointless rite

And find your joy in constant fear

Of doing that which is not right.


So many rules, the Lord’s behest,

And fire will rain if they’re forgot;

But see, there’s one that trumps the rest,

Remember only: Thou shalt not!


Joshua Redux

The current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems the embodiment of intransigence and resistance when it comes to the West Bank and peace with the Palestinians, but he appears almost liberal when compared to his Economics Minister, Naftali Bennett. Bennett is head of the extremist Jewish Home party, the third largest group within the coalition currently controlling the government, and he is willing to bring that government down should “Bibi” continue showing such weakness. His is a sweeping mission: “My task is to keep Judaism alive, to make it stronger and to fight its enemies.” Inasmuch as slightly more than half of world Jewry lives outside Israel, his mission statement might be a bit too sweeping, but conservative Israeli politicians seem to feel that Israel is Judaism.

Joshua Redux

Joshua Redux

In his struggle Bennett’s main concern is the West Bank, the territory that in the eyes of the world is to become the Palestinian state. In the eyes of Bennett, however, the West Bank is Israel. He actually has a point, at least to the extent that this territory was once Judea and Samaria, the heart of ancient Israel. But that was a couple of millennia ago, and one can hardly claim, as he does, that the land has belonged to the Jews for 3000 years. There have certainly been Jews living in the area all that time, but the state of Israel disappeared in antiquity and until the creation of modern Israel Jews were a minority. If any group can claim the land on the basis of continuous habitation, it would be the Arabs. Bennett’s reply to this argument is simple: anyone who makes it does not understand history, at least history as he imagines it. Thus, referring to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank is completely wrong, because, as Bennett puts it, “You can’t occupy your own land.”



This is of course nonsense, and in any case, claiming territory on the basis of prior occupation, especially so long ago, is an extremely dangerous principle. But Bennett would doubtless point out that Israel is a special case because of the history of the Jews and especially the Holocaust, a proposition perhaps more palatable to the West because ancient Israel and its “history” are so important to Christianity. Special case or not, the problem is that people who are not Jews have been living on this land for more than a thousand years and are wondering why they must be displaced because of the actions and guilt of the West. Palestine was manifestly not, as the Zionist catchphrase put it, “a land without a people,” and in 1948 the Palestinians saw half of their homeland given to the Jews by an international organization created and dominated by a country whose President was anxious to secure the American Jewish vote for his reelection.

armed non-people

armed non-people

But historical fact notwithstanding, Bennett, like many others, fervently believes Judea and Samaria are part of Israel, and consequently, settling Israeli citizens in the West Bank, seen as a gross violation of international law by the rest of the planet (quietly by the US), is quite proper. And like the Lord of Hosts once smiting the idol worshippers in the land He gave unto His people, there is the Israeli Defense Force, smiting their modern enemies, though they are no longer idol worshippers. These are the Chosen People, chosen a second time by the United States, the closest thing earth now has to a Judge of the Nations. The world is treating Israel unfairly, according to Bennett, an ironic supposition given that under the protection of the United States Israel is permitted behavior condemned by international covenants (which we are pledged to uphold).

Bennett believes time is on his side since the settlement program, despite the (empty) objections of the Washington, is actually accelerating, and every Israeli colonist is, as they say, a fact on the ground. There are already more than a half million Israelis (including almost half the ministers in the Netanyahu cabinet) living in the West Bank; send in enough and it is Israel, regardless of quibbles about silly international law. But Bennett is not an unreasonable man and is willing to compromise. Israel will annex only Area C, which is to say, 68% of Palestinian territory, and the Arab inhabitants (180,000) will be offered the blatantly second class citizenship already enjoyed by their cousins in Israel proper. The other 32% of the West Bank will be administered by a toothless Palestinian Authority, protected of course by the Israeli Defense Force and Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police. This sounds a lot like the Generalgouvernment, the Nazi administrative structure that ruled Poland. And sooner or later the entire area would almost surely be annexed.

Apartheid plan

Apartheid plan

Bennett and friends apparently do not see the underlying problem in all this – or they simply do not care. Apart from the fact that outright annexation of that much territory, acquired through conquest, is likely to be difficult for even ever compliant Washington to swallow, Israel would then control a huge and ever growing Arab population, confined to obvious Bantustans. Not only would this guarantee eternal hostility and instability, but Israel would be not just a Jewish state but also an Apartheid state. On the other hand, so long as the United States puts up with it, what do the Israelis care what the world thinks? The Palestinians are doomed. Where are the Romans when you need them?



(I just discovered a related news item regarding the West Bank, one that demonstrates the strength of Israel in American politics.  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was speaking before the Republican Jewish Coalition and happened to refer to the West Bank as “occupied territory,” which characterization did not please the crowd.  He promptly apologized to billionaire Zionist Sheldon Adelson for his “misstatement,” though of course the West Bank is as much occupied territory as Poland was under the Germans.  The UN resolution of 1947 created the state of Israel, and the West Bank and Jerusalem were not part of that state.  That the Arabs did not accept the partition is irrelevant; the resolution also created a Palestinian state, the territory of which Israel is now occupying (and settling).  And the American media?  A former White House hack, Bill Burton, responded to a question from Candy Crowley of CNN by saying that the remark showed that Christie is “not on top of his game,” which is perhaps true if he dared to speak the truth to this particular audience.  But Crowley then told viewers that presidential candidates are “all going to make really stupid mistakes, which that was one.”  She could not be bothered to even mention that this “really stupid mistake” involved stating a fact.)



And question it they did. Former Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton told CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday that Christie’s remark is “the sort of thing that shows he’s not on top of his game like you need to be when you’re a presidential candidate.” Instead of pointing out the absurdity of Burton’s statement, Crowley validated his point, saying, “They’re [presidential candidates] all going to make really stupid mistakes, which that was one.” Just like that, the self-described “most trusted name in news” assured viewers that there is no Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Stuff from Way Back #23: Seleucids, Jews and the Birth of Hanukkah

The historian got a bit carried away on this one.)


The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, began on November 27. Until the 19th century Hanukkah was a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, nowhere near as important as Passover and Purim, but this began to change rapidly with the growing emphasis on Christmas in the same century. The movement began in Germany, where Jews were more assimilated and secure than in Eastern Europe, when Jewish families began displaying Christmas trees, though usually not referring to them as such. The dates of Jewish religious holidays are determined by a lunisolar calendar, which means that Hanukkah, which begins on the 25th of Kislev, may fall anywhere from late November to late December. This dating consequently helped facilitate the association with Christmas.


Further connecting the two celebrations is the tradition of gift-giving. In Christianity the practice probably derives from the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, which occurred around the winter solstice (probably why the feast of Christmas was placed at that time) and included a day of gift-giving. The tradition also has Biblical support in the gifts presented to the infant Jesus by the three wise men. In Judaism the custom dates back to 17th century Poland, where children were given small amounts of money (Hanukkah gelt) to present to their yeshiva teachers. Hanukkah could thus serve as a kind of alternate Christmas, when Jewish children could receive gifts like their gentile friends.


Because of these factors, as Christmas became an ever more important holiday, supplanting Easter, the importance of Hanukkah also grew. In the 20th century Christmas was rapidly commercialized in the United States, as business realized the profit potential of the holiday, and American marketing ultimately turned it into the major retail occasion of the year, vital to the American economy. So lucrative has it become that countries with only tiny Christian populations are now celebrating it as a major holiday. With its far smaller consumer base Hanukkah has lagged in this development, but by the 21th century it is every bit as commercialized as Christmas.


The Hanukkah celebration lasts for eight days and nights, during which period a nine branched candelabrum, the Menorah, is used to mark the passage of the nights. The ninth candle is actually not part of the ritual apparatus but originally served as a simple source of light. The eight candles are at the core of the holiday, since they reflect the miracle that gave rise to the festival. And that miracle is way back.


Judea, the southern Jewish state, fell under Greek control with the dismantling of the Persian empire by Alexander, and after his death in 323 BC it ultimately became part of the Ptolemaic empire. It remained under Ptolemaic control until 200 BC, when the weakness of the Ptolemaic state allowed Antiochus III, ruler of the vast Seleucid empire to the north and east, to seize all of Palestine. This exchange of Greek masters probably had little effect on the Jews beyond elevating the pro-Seleucid faction in the aristocracy and priesthood over the pro-Ptolemaic. The tiny Jewish state was, however, of particular concern to its new ruler inasmuch as it was near the frontier between the two kingdoms and covered the main road between Syria and Egypt.

The Seleucid Empire

The Seleucid Empire

The Greek policy towards the Jews was one of tolerance, an important facet of their increasingly cosmopolitan culture. Greek polytheism, like virtually all religions outside the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), had no impulse to holy war and could easily accept new gods, which were frequently identified with their own. Greek philosophy, which had been steadily moving away from the old Olympic deities towards more abstract conceptions of god, could in fact see something positive in the invisible, non-mythic god of the Jews, though many of the traditional practices of the Temple were considered barbaric superstition. Many polytheists found the aggressive exclusiveness of the monotheists to be offensive, but the Greek rulers, like the Romans later, had no problem so long as order was kept and the taxes were paid.


There was, however, a potential problem lurking in the confrontation of Hellenic (Greek) and Hebrew culture. Not only was Hellenization an important tool in the attempt to unify the Greek empires, but many of the economic and political elites in the non-Greek cities were inclined to go Greek, whether to gain advantage or because Greek civilization was simply more sophisticated and attractive. This had an impact even upon the traditionally aloof monotheists, many of whom saw this as a natural development of their religion, that is, maintaining Yahweh but forgoing the ritual and cultic practices. Moreover, since the Greeks accepted the notion of divine inspiration the Torah and the Law would still have a place.


The Hellenizing Jews of course stirred a reaction from the traditionalists, who saw their ancestral religion being assaulted and certainly resented such outrages as Greek gymnasia and nude exercise in the holy city of Jerusalem. Further, a candidate for the office of High Priest required the approval of the Seleucid monarch, which inevitably led to political intrigue and corruption. These problems were exacerbated by the existence of the pro-Seleucid and pro-Ptolemaic factions and the constant squabbling of two powerful Jewish families, the Hellenizing Tobiads and conservative Oniads. These conflicts would lead to the emergence of an independent Judea.


The sequence of events that preceded the Maccabean revolt is a hotly debated topic, but the following account, while not absolutely certain, is one that makes excellent sense of the information presented in the ancient sources.


The 170s BC saw increasing strife over the position of High Priest, during which conflict the Seleucid government played no real role. Matters came to a head in 169 BC, when Antiochus IV invaded weakling Egypt. On the way back north he visited Jerusalem, and always in need of money, while there he looted some of the gold and silver in the Temple, outraging Jews more by his entry into the Holy of Holies than by the theft. This obviously increased the tensions and aided the anti-Hellenizers, but the affair might have passed were it not for developments in Egypt.


The Second Temple?

The Second Temple?

Antiochus IV Epiphanes (and friend)

Antiochus IV Epiphanes (and friend)

In 169 BC Antiochus had left Egypt paralyzed by leaving behind two rival claimants to the Ptolemaic throne, one in Memphis and one in Alexandria. But during the winter the rivals reconciled and agreed to rule jointly, causing Antiochus to return in the spring of 168 BC. While he was there, a rumor of his death led the anti-Hellenizers to see Egypt as their savior, and a group led by the deposed High Priest Jason attempted to seize control of Jerusalem. They failed to take the citadel, where the current High Priest, Menelaus, had taken refuge with the Seleucid garrison, but they controlled the rest of the city, and the affair had ignited a virtual civil war among the Jews.


Meanwhile, in Egypt Antiochus had been thwarted from ending the Ptolemaic dynasty and compelled to leave Egypt by the Romans (see Stuff from Way Back #10: A Circle in the Sand), making Jerusalem all that more important to his defenses. With Jerusalem in open revolt Antiochus had little choice but to capture the city, free Menelaus and punish the rebels. When he left, the rebels reappeared and captured the city once again, and the king sent his minister Apollonius to crush the revolt and settle veterans in the city, enhancing its character as a gentile and Greek city. The “Macedonian” veterans were Syrians, who promptly established their own shrines and cultic practices on the Temple hill, and Jews felt that their traditional religion was threatened with extinction. Most fled the city and spread the fire of revolt across Judea. Playing an instrumental role in the rebellion were the Hasidim, the scribes and interpreters of the Law, whose livelihood was threatened along with their religion.


The revolt was perceived by Antiochus as essentially a political act, compromising the security of his kingdom, but it certainly had a religious content, especially with the leadership of the Hasidim. Antiochus consequently targeted the religion, not because he objected to the faith per se and wanted a holy war – such was a virtual impossibility for a Greek monarch – but because the religion was an integral part of a movement that threatened the state. The result in late 167 BC was the prohibition of traditional practices, such as circumcision (always despised by the Greeks as an assault on the body) and honoring the stipulations of the Law, and the notorious “abomination of desolation,” the establishment of a cult of Zeus Olympios in the Temple. Destroy the religion, the barbara superstitio, and thus destroy the rebellion.


But the religion was not destroyed. Rather, Seleucid rule in Judea was. In 166/5 BC scattered opposition to the decrees coalesced into an organized revolt under the leadership of the five brothers of the Hasmonean house, particularly Judas, called Maccabeus. Fortunately for the rebels, the Seleucid empire was in decline and with troubles elsewhere could not spare adequate forces for Judea, and in 164 BC peace was bought by rescinding the offensive decrees. Judas ordered the cleansing of the Temple, and in the process it was discovered that there was only enough purified oil to burn in the Temple for one night. Miraculously, the oil lasted for eight nights, which was long enough for more purified oil to be produced. And thus the festival of Hanukkah was born.


Potatohead Maccabeus

Potatohead Maccabeus

Judas Maccabeus

Judas Maccabeus

The truce did not last, and more warfare resulted, ending with the defeat and death of Judas in 160 BC. Seleucid rule in Judea was seemingly restored, but in 150 BC a civil war erupted in the empire, allowing the Hasmoneans to reassert their independence and ultimately extend their power north into the former state of Israel and south to the Egyptian frontier. The Jewish kingdom lasted almost a century. In 64 BC Pompey the Great ended the Seleucid empire, which by then was limited to the city of Antioch, and when in the following year the king of Judea reneged on a deal with Rome, he captured Jerusalem. Judea became a Roman dependency and ultimately a province.


One might wonder what might have developed had there been no troubles with Antiochus and thus no desecration and Jewish revolt. The success of the Hasmoneans marked the resurgence of the traditional form of Judaism, and without it the Hellenization of the Jews might well have ultimately resulted in the disappearance of the old religion. And the world would have been spared Christianity and Islam.










The real Moses?

The real Moses?






King Josiah gets the first reviews.

King Josiah gets the first reviews.



Stuff from Way Back #14: The New God on the Block

(In keeping with the season I present a brief historical (leaving any deities out of it) understanding of exactly why Christianity was so damn successful.  Next week I will deal with the other question: what exactly was the reaction of the Roman government and why, a topic that has been seriously distorted because, well, the Empire no longer exists and Christianity does.)

Christianity is clearly a fusion of east and west, being a sort of religious hybrid produced by the intersection of Hebrew monotheism and the Greek mystery cult brought on by several hundred years of Greek control of Palestine. To some degree it is also a mix of oriental mysticism and Greek rationalism, inasmuch as the basic beliefs were later influenced by Stoicism and neo-Platonism. In essence, the Jews supplied the idea of the sole, ethical creator god, disconnected from the natural world, while the Greeks, through their mystery religion, contributed the notion of the dying and resurrected god. Paul and his associates made the new religion palatable for the world outside Judaea by stripping it of unappealing Jewish ritual, such as circumcision and dietary laws, and Greek rationalism then proceeded to refine the understanding of the godhead.

First of all, Christianity shared the ideas that had made the mystery cults so popular in Greece and later the Roman Empire. Traditional Greek and Roman religion was essentially civic in nature, primarily serving the community and devoid of any personal or inspirational quality. The mystery religion, which came in a variety of specific cults, did not deny the traditional gods but rather focused in on a single or tiny group of deities, providing the worshipper with a more personal and intimate relationship with divinity. The cults also involved emotional initiations and revealed knowledge, known only to the initiates, who gained in the cult at least a measure of equality with their richer and more powerful brethren. Christianity had no secrets but it rested on revealed knowledge and also offered a sense of special community within its ranks. Most all the mystery cults revolved around the central figure of a god or human who either literally or figuratively dies and is resurrected, thus providing an analogue of hope for the worshipper facing the inevitability of death. Further, the cults promised some reward, initially in this life, but by the end of the fifth century BC evidence appears suggesting the idea of judgment and reward in another life.

Christianity offered all these things but was something more than just another mystery religion. The Christian god was not just some Olympic retread, but the god of love, completely absorbed in those he had created. His death and resurrection was not simply some mythic event that had nothing to do with humanity beyond providing a message of hope. Rather, he became human and died specifically for humanity, a divine sacrifice that reveals an entirely novel concept of god. He was the god of all – rich, poor, slaves, free, men, women – something that was not always true of polytheist deities; for example, Mithraism, far and away the most popular cult in the Empire, was open only to men. And Christianity (at least until a powerful church emerged) cost nothing but commitment, while the polytheist religions required sometimes costly sacrifices, such as the bathing in bull’s blood incumbent on Mithraists.

Above all, this new god may have been open to everyone, but he definitely had a bias towards the poor and downtrodden. The rich and powerful had always had the edge in spiritual affairs, whether in the quality of their gifts or in outright control of the mechanisms of the religion. For the first time in history there was a god who favored the meek and chided the wealthy, and of course the vast majority of the in habitants of the Empire fit into the former category. This must have made for immense drawing power.

The religion also quickly developed the primitive ideas of judgment in the mystery cults into a full-blown system of reward and punishment in the next life and firmly rooted the judgment in the moral code inherited from Judaism. Obviously, promise of a better life in the next world is going to turn the heads of those whose life in this one is not that great, and while Christianity is born into an imperial society that constituted one of the more comfortable periods in history, in a few centuries life in the Roman Empire was going to become very unpleasant for most of its subjects. Now, the reward and punishment was based on the observance of a fairly strict ethical code, which might be expected to turn away potential converts. Most of us can get through life without committing homicide or adultery, but the thought crimes are very tough; “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is after all a rule even Jimmy Carter violated. But most people want a moral structure provided for them, and the basic rules provided by Christianity struck a favorable chord precisely because they were good rules. The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments because they proclaim the basic laws absolutely necessary for a stable society.

So the demanding moral code was likely also an attraction of the new religion, which was offering reward in the afterlife for behavior that virtually all normal humans consider good and proper. On the other hand, not even a Mother Teresa could keep all these rules all the time, and what made the whole system feasible for the average Joe was the loophole: forgiveness. Were it not for the mechanism of contrition and forgiveness, the new religion would be making impossible demands and simply not work.

Extremely important in the triumph of Christianity is the simple fact that it happened in history. The core event of the religion, the death and resurrection of the god, did not take place in some distant mythic past, as in the mystery cults, but right there in the Roman province of Judaea during the reign of Tiberius (14-37). The first apostles of the new god had actually been there, first hand witnesses of the essential events of the religion. They heard the sermons and saw the miracles and the crucifiction, and some claimed experience of the resurrection itself. This gave the religion an impetus unmatched by the old belief systems.

Additionally, though it may have played something of a negative role in the spread, the exclusiveness of the monotheistic religion certainly helped preserve it intact. Syncretism, the identifying and combining of gods across cultural lines, was an inevitable component of polytheism and produced religious hybrids, such as the cult of Isis and Serapis. This simply could not happen to Christianity – at least in any serious way – because there were no other gods. This would produce a religious fanaticism unknown in antiquity outside the Hebrews, and that fanaticism presumably helped a bit. These were people who were willing to die for their god, and that kind of commitment surely had to impress potential adherents.

Finally, there is the element of coincidence: the charismatic preacher was born at the height of the Roman Empire.  Without this huge area of political stability and easy communications the new religion would very likely not have been anything more than another eastern cult.  Two centruies earlier Rome was only beginning to nose into the eastern Mediterranean, and it is not all clear that the new religion, which would be perceived as a heresy by the Jews, would have survived the religiously reactionary Hasmonean kingdom.  Two centuries later and the religion would almost certainly not have the time to spread and develop its infrastructure before the western Empire collapsed.  It might survive in the east, but the conversion of the barbarian tribes becomes more problematic, and what would the history of the west be like without the Church to carry civilization through the Dark Ages?

"In hoc signo, Baby!"

“In hoc signo, Baby!”

Such are the reasons for the initial survival and spread of Christianity, but the final triumph and emergence of the new creed as the exclusive religion of the western world owed less to its nature than to political developments. Because of popular hostility and ultimately government obstruction (tune in next week), by the beginning of the fourth century Christians constituted perhaps only ten percent of the population, but for seemingly cynical political reasons Constantine the Great (sole emperor 324-337) embraced the religion. One might question the conviction of Constantine, who converted only on his deathbed, but the imperial family became Christian, and after Constantine every emperor but one (Julian the Apostate) was a member of the faith, thus making Christianity a powerful force in the government of the Empire. With the power of the sate behind it Christianity began a rapid expansion, as polytheists were subject to greater and greater persecution.

The collapse of the western Empire in the fifth century guaranteed the complete supremacy of Christianity, as the Church, now the only surviving governing structure in the west, emerged as a kind of international corporation manipulating the emerging barbarian kingdoms. The conversion of the Germanic tribes, especially the
Franks, resulted in a new warrior Christianity, which spelled doom for the surviving polytheists of Europe. The Prince of Peace had finally triumphed, albeit with a sword in his hand.

Hear, O Israel: IV

(I am running out of already written chapters.  Should I continue this or keep my day job?)





And they made their lives bitter with hard

bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all

manner of service in the field.

Exodus 1:14




Ahmose could hear the commotion well before he reached the brickyard.  From the shouted words he was able to catch through the mid-day hum of insects he guessed it was another fight.  Business as usual, he thought and quickened his pace, sidestepping a brick carrier heading towards the granary.

The brick pits were barely a half hour’s walk west of the construction, not an unusual circumstance in the clay-rich delta, but a blessing for Ahmose nevertheless.  Not only could the brick be carried directly to the site, saving the time and effort of loading and unloading barges, but the immediacy of the pits also gave him direct control over his brick supply.  Since most of the construction was of sun-dried brick, this was a great advantage.  The project would be desperately far behind schedule were the steady stream of bricks interrupted by the same delays and problems that were plaguing the delivery of his stone.

Watching the line of carriers passing in the opposite direction, loads bobbing at either end of their carrying poles, Ahmose could only wish for the same sort of control over the other facets of the construction.  It was enough to frustrate a god.  He had just enough authority to clothe him with overall responsibility, but not overall control, leaving the project at the mercy of the fools in Heliopolis and Pi-Ramessu.  And leaving himself vulnerable, Ahmose well understood.  Any failures and he would be at the center of a ring of accusing fingers, while success would have to be shared with officials and priests who had never set foot in Tjou.  At least Pharaoh and the Overseer of Granaries recognized his contribution, despite the lies he was now sure were being carried from the temple of Atum to the capital.

These thoughts gave way to more immediate concerns as the acacias, sycamores and scattered palms gave way to the marshy clearing containing the brickyard.  At the far side of the clearing men with mattocks pulled the dark gray alluvial mud from a shallow excavation and passed it to the hod carriers, who transported it the short distance to the mixing pits.  There it was kneaded and stirred with water brought up from the canal and sand hauled in from the Red Land just to the north.  Ahmose’s careful search before the construction got under way had provided him with a clay source that was both close to the construction site and rich enough to require only sand as a binder in the bricks, eliminating the need for a constant supply of reeds or straw.  The only straw on the site was used by the actual brickmakers, who kept their hands powdered with straw dust in order to keep the finished mixture from sticking to them.

The pits were worked by quarter sections, an innovation introduced by Ahmose.  When the clay master determined the mixture in one section was ready, work by the pit men ceased in that quarter and carriers began moving the ready mud to the brick tables.  Mixing continued meanwhile in the other sections, which were arranged so that the next batch would be ready when the previous load had been consumed at the brick tables.  There, almost as quickly as it arrived, the brickmakers packed it into rectangular wooden molds, dipped in water and sand to prevent sticking, and struck off the excess with a flat strip of wood.  The mold was then removed, leaving the brick on a board by which it was carried to the leveled drying area and dumped off.  After three days in the sun the bricks were dry enough to be stacked and transported; after eight they were ready for use.

This set-up insured an unbroken stream of clay to the brickmakers and eliminated the need for a dump of clay at the brick tables.  Ahmose had organized the whole process around his estimated daily brick requirements: this determined the number of brickmakers constantly at work, which in turn determined the output of the mixing pits.  Producing too few bricks could bring construction to an expensive halt, while producing too many wasted labor.

At the moment the whole operation was threatening to stagger to a halt.  A fight had indeed broken out in one of the two mixing pits, providing all the workers with an entertaining diversion from the tedium of brickmaking.  The half dozen overseers of the yard, all of them Egyptians, were running about yelling in Egyptian and gutter Canaanite, arms rising and falling as they punctuated their commands with strokes of their steer hide whips.  It was immediately clear to Ahmose they were engaged in a losing struggle.  There was temporary order and the appearance of work around each overseer, but as soon as he passed the workers returned their attention to the fight, cheering on the combatants.

Despite the crack of the lash the affair had a festival air, centered as it was around a fight between two clay men that was more comic than damaging.  Ahmose took this as evidence of his sound management, the disturbance sparking a burst of seemingly good-natured exuberance rather than an angry explosion.  But he also knew how easily this situation could get out of hand.  These were after all sixty odd men, many of them former desert warriors, who nurtured a deeply rooted anger and resentment towards Egyptians and countless petty, but nevertheless earnest disputes among themselves.  At any moment high spirits could easily lead to the unthinkable act of striking an overseer and turn the impromptu party into a deadly riot resulting in Egyptian deaths and massive reprisals against his labor force.  This was definitely not the sort of thing that advanced one’s career.

As he entered the clearing Ahmose noticed that the two spearmen from the fort had apparently made the same analysis.  Normally lounging in any convenient shade, the two soldiers were on their feet and alert, ready to flee if a mob should begin to take shape from the crowd of workers.  Their presence was far more a deterring reminder of Egyptian authority than any real guarantee against serious trouble.  Their faces said as much to Ahmose when he appeared: This is your job, not ours.

Ahmose strode quickly towards the mixing pit, ignoring the greetings and jests from the workers he passed.  The problem was instantly clear.  The fight could not be broken up without entering the clay, and it was no surprise that none of his overseers had done so.  One was at the edge of the pit, screaming and lashing at several men he had apparently ordered in to stop the fight, to no avail.  The men were making little effort to reach the two flailing at each other in the center of the pit and had instead begun pelting each other with clay, laughing despite the occasional sting of the lash.  As Ahmose approached, one of them slipped and crashed through a supporting pole, dumping a corner of the palm frond sunscreen into the pit and stirring an approving roar of laughter.

Once Ahmose reached the pit, the crowd quieted, eager to see how the farce would be resolved.  No one was working now, including the overseers, and brick carriers returning from the building site for another load were lingering in the clearing.  The only real activity in the yard was the fight, which for all its comic aspect, Ahmose concluded, was deadly serious, so oblivious were the contestants to what was happening around them.

The overseer at the pit edge, reduced by anger and frustration to screaming curses in Egyptian, was completely unaware of his boss’s approach and started when Ahmose put a hand on his shoulder.  He whirled suddenly, his whip hand instinctively coming up to deliver a cut to his attacker.  Prepared for such a reaction, Ahmose stepped back quickly and felt a rush of air as the leather thongs whistled past his bare chest.  The overseer’s eyes went wide when he recognized his target, but before he could get his mouth working Ahmose had stepped forward again and clamped his shoulders in powerful hands.

“You idiot,” he said quietly to the now frightened Egyptian, who had suddenly realized that the angry man effortlessly pinning him to this spot had the mob of workers on his side.

Without loosening his grip Ahmose looked up at the other overseers, who had collected near the pit.  “Is this job too difficult for you?  Four of you can’t figure out how to stop a simple fight?  It’s easy, but first you have to get near the fighters.”  He shoved the overseer into the pit, where he immediately lost his balance and flopped into the clay.  An enthusiastic cheer went up from the workers.

“Quiet!” bellowed Ahmose in pidgin Egyptian, looking around the yard, which went completely silent.  “It seems you all chose to take your midday break early.  Well, it’s over now, and any man who is not back at work at once will receive special consideration.  And for stopping work without permission you’ve all lost a ten day’s beer ration.”

There was a murmur as the older hands translated for their fellows, though Ahmose’s tone carried a meaning clear enough to all.  Men began returning slowly to their tasks, but attention was still focused on the scene at the mixing pit, where the surprise battle of the overseers promised unusual entertainment.  The original fight appeared to be coming to an end anyway.  One of the two men, the clay on his face and chest stained red from a smashed nose, had managed to get a grip on the other despite the slippery clay and was proceeding to throttle him.

The overseer Ahmose had dumped into the clay quickly regained his feet, but made no move towards the impending homicide in the center of the pit.  Instead, he climbed out and stood glaring at Ahmose, the muscles of his face working and the whip trembling in his hand.  After the barest moment, the internal struggle resolved and dangerous courses of action rejected, he spoke, rage threatening to swamp the carefully measured words.

“It doesn’t end here, Habiru.”  Throwing his whip at Ahmose’s feet, he turned and stamped out of the yard, accompanied by the odd snigger.

Ahmose did not watch him go.  The Egyptian overseers were hired labor, and his control over them went only as far as their desire to keep the job.  Which meant not very far, given Egyptian resentment towards subordination of any kind to a non-Egyptian, especially one of his particular blood.  Ahmose had tried overseers elevated from the ranks of his conscript labor, but they had no credibility.  No matter how he supported them, they lacked that authority that was automatically accorded freeborn Egyptians by the scum that made up his work force.  And Habiru overseers played favorites, punishing and rewarding according to tribal politics and personal whim rather than the justice of the moment.  The Egyptians on the other hand were quite impartial; they treated all the conscript labor, including the few Egyptians, as shit.

Stripping off and tossing his linen kilt to one of the overseers, Ahmose stepped carefully into the pit and despite the knee-deep mud reached the struggling men in three strides.  Actually, the struggle had come to an end.  Eyes bulging and rolled back, the man being choked hung almost completely limp in the other’s grasp, clearly only moments from his journey to the west.  The victor was like some mud-spawned executioner from the realm of Apophis.  Wild eyes stared out of a face hastily molded from clay, and the blood smeared mouth and chest prompted the image of a predator already begun to feed on its victim.

Yelling at him to let go, Ahmose grabbed the man’s wrists and attempted to pull the hands from their death grip.  He might as well have tried to rearrange the limbs of a statue cut from granite.  The clay man gave him absolutely no notice.  Ahmose stepped back slightly and sent his right fist crashing into the already ruined nose, dappling himself with spots of red and gray and sending a message of pain up his arm.  To his surprise the blow did not drive the man back or even cause him to cry out, but it did get his attention.  Dropping his victim, whose semi-conscious body immediately began gasping for air, he turned towards Ahmose, rapid and shallow breaths hissing through clenched teeth, eyes glazed and unrecognizing.

Oh shit, thought Ahmose.  Have I just picked a fight with something more than human?  Gods did often walk the Two Lands, but Ahmose could think of no reason why one should appear in this situation.  He had been careful to sacrifice to all the appropriate deities at each stage of the project and before setting up the brickyard had in particular honored Hapi for the use of his water and mud.  In any case he could not flee – if indeed one could run away from a god – since that would seriously undermine his authority with his workers.  Besides, was he not under the protection of Thoth?

Egyptian hostility towards easterners was not limited to adults, and growing up in the streets of Pi-Ramessu Ahmose had learned early on how to take care of himself, usually against odds.  Bending slightly, he scooped up a handful of clay and flung it hard into the eyes of his opponent.  Temporarily blinded, the man paused and naturally brought his hands up to clear the mud away.  At that moment Ahmose, taking careful balance, kicked him solidly in the crotch, and he promptly doubled over and went to his knees, retching uncontrollably.

Not a god.  Just a poor wretch in a blood fury.  Thanks be to Thoth.  He climbed out of the pit and surveyed the yard, hands on hips.  He suspected he cut something of a comic figure: dark gray from the knees down and speckled gray and pink above.  And to the Bedouin a man out in only a loincloth was both ridiculous and indecent.  He could in fact easily identify the newest arrivals in the work force – they wore shifts and even heavy robes rather than the virtually indestructible slit leather loincloths favored by the veterans.  Daylong toil under the delta sun would overcome desert habits and modesty soon enough.

Comic or not, no one was laughing, though he was surrounded by smiling faces.  The whole incident had turned in his favor.  The Lord Moses – he’s one of us, they would say – humiliated the Egyptians and took charge of the situation.  The story would spread and be exaggerated and gain Ahmose enhanced respect and authority, at least among his workers.  Unfortunately, it would do him no good at all with his Egyptians, who could only see it as further proof that this uppity Habiru had completely forgotten his place in the scheme of things.  But then, most of them would feel that way no matter what he did.

“See to those two men,” he ordered the overseers.  “When they recover, give them both ten solid lashes for fighting.  Then give the bloody one another ten for attacking me.”  It bothered Ahmose to punish a possibly innocent man, who was only defending himself, but he could not spend the time attempting to investigate and judge every case.  There were few innocents among his workers anyway, and most likely one of the two fighters would be dead in a couple of days, his throat cut in the night.  Among the Bedouin honor was far more dear than life.

“These men” – he glared at the four clay-covered workers standing sheepishly in a corner of the pit – “apparently enjoy playing in the mud.  Fine.  Pharaoh likes happy workers.  You will enjoy a two month shift in the mixing pits.”

The men’s faces fell, though they could hardly have expected less; Ahmose had little choice but to shore up the authority of his overseers.  He could never quite understand why most of his workers feared the pits so much.  True, the labor was very hard on the legs until the muscles became accustomed to lifting against the suction of the clay, but the pits were shaded and the mud was cool from the constant addition of water.  He supposed it was the utter tedium of the job, especially so for the restless men from the desert, that put it at the bottom of the hierarchy of conscript labor jobs.

His right hand was now beginning to ache.  He would be paying for his crowd-pleasing performance in the pit.  Flexing the fingers of the sore hand a few times, he retrieved his kilt and surveyed the yard.  The operation was quickly returning to normal.  Once more the dominant sounds in the yard were the reassuring plop-squirt of legs kneading the mud and the splat of clay being slapped into molds.  Ahmose concentrated for a moment on the splats, timing them against the blood throbbing at his wrist.  Allowing for a quickened pulse, he estimated the brick flow was already back to normal – normal for his brickyards, that is.  He made a mental note to hire another overseer and to make an additional offering to Hapi for the bounty of his mud.  And perhaps to Thoth for guiding him through yet another difficulty, minor though it had been.

Before heading out of the yard he intercepted one of the water carriers before the man reached the mixing pits.  While the worker stood holding his kilt and grinning hugely – he had evidently seen the fight – Ahmose dumped the contents of the water jar over himself, washing away the crust of clay and blood.  The water on his skin evaporated quickly, providing a refreshing coolness.  He felt ready to face another problem.

“Like father Jacob at the Jabbok,” the water carrier said suddenly as he traded back the kilt for his jar.

“What was that?” replied Ahmose, taken by surprise.

“The Lord Moses in the pit reminded me of the hero Jacob, beloved of Baal-Hanam, when he fought the demon at the Jabbok river.”

“The Jabbok river?  Where’s that?”  Baal-Hanam was obviously a Canaanite god, one of the dozens of lesser deities who looked after the miserable towns of Canaan, and Jacob was presumably a local hero.

“It flows from the east into the river Jordan, straight by my city of Succoth.”  Realizing that he had an unexpected and exalted audience, the worker quickly launched into his tale.  “In olden days Jacob, father of Succoth, was stopped from crossing the Jabbok by a mighty demon.  All night they wrestled until at dawn the demon sought to escape the light, but Jacob, who had the strength of three normal men, held him fast.  Only when the demon blessed him did he then free him, naming the river Jabbok, which means ‘wrestled,’ and founding nearby the holy place of Penuel.”

Ahmose nodded at the story, which had poured out of the man in a smooth, memorized stream of eastern accented Canaanite.  He had heard of none of the places named, but if the Jabbok was a tributary of the Jordan, it could hardly be more than an insignificant stream.  And Succoth, he guessed, would probably make Tjou seem a major metropolis.  Still, any man born in a building rather than a tent could be counted as one of his more civilized workers.

“Interesting,” he said, fastening the kilt about his waist.  “The world is filled with the wonders of the gods, isn’t it?”

The man beamed, and as he turned to leave the yard, Ahmose wished it were that easy to lift the morale of all his men.  But tell most Habiru their stories were interesting and you would only increase their suspicions.  Only natural perhaps for men who were so universally despised.

After surveying the yard a final time to insure the operation was running smoothly again, he headed back through the trees to the construction site, falling in with the line of loaded brick carriers.  He noticed absently that those within sight picked up their pace to match his, something he could have easily predicted.  That in fact was the primary reason he spent so much time wandering, sometimes randomly, about the work sites; that and the need to be present to deal with unexpected problems.  He often wished he could make copies of himself.  He had spies of course, but they were good only for a constant stream of low-level, though sometimes useful information.  Spies provoked resentment, but his workers would assume he had them whether he did or not.  What he really needed were better subordinates and overseers, a tough problem given the special resentment he himself provoked among Egyptians.

He glanced up at the sun winking through the leaves and fronds passing overhead.  It was close to the zenith.  The crews on site would shortly be taking their midday meal, and Ahmose preferred if at all possible to be present for the architect’s inspection that took place during the break.  Also, Merab had promised to come by around noon to discuss his problems with the Heliopolis priesthood, and he knew the busy little man would not wait long.  He quickened his pace a bit.

From the relative quiet and absence of returning brick carriers Ahmose could guess well before he actually reached the site that the workers had already downed tools.  This was confirmed when the path emerged from the last copse of trees and the low bushes gave way to ragged alfa grass and the bare sandy soil of the construction area.  Most of the workers had already received their ration of bread and beer and had retired to shaded spots around the periphery of the site to eat.

The midday break and meal were not inevitable among the conscript labor gangs.  In their brutal contempt for their workers and their desperation to keep to schedule many construction overseers pushed their people straight through the day, and few were willing to budget money for the extra meal.  Less food for each worker means more workers went the simple equation of many managers, and Ahmose could not understand why they could not see the shortsighted fallacy of this belief.  Well-nourished and rested workers produced far more than exhausted skeletons, not simply because of their better physical condition, but even more so because of higher morale, a concept that seemed totally beyond the average Egyptian overseer.

Ahmose headed southeast past small stockpiles of bricks and other materials towards the actual buildings, which were situated just north of the road and canal.  The town of Tjou, such as it was, lay immediately to the east of the temple-granary.  A number of poor huts had in fact been demolished in the original clearing of the site, but new mud and reed dwellings were already springing up all around.  Ahmose allowed his workers free use of damaged bricks, and many had built simple shelters near the site.  Some, the poorest, had even built substantial houses and brought in their families, though most left wives and children elsewhere to tend their flocks and gardens.  When the job was completed, Tjou might actually grow enough to become a noticeable town, as priests and granary officials moved in.

Ahmose passed through the east gate in the brick enclosure wall, cursing the temple of Atum at Heliopolis.  The wall itself, nine cubits high and two thick at the base, was complete on this side, waiting only to be plastered and painted, but the gate was unfinished.  Missing were the massive stones that would form the uprights and lintel of the doorway and of course the gates themselves.  The gates would normally be hung only in the last stage of construction, but the actual gateway should have already been in place and receiving the attention of the stonecutters.  Instead there were no gateways because the stone remained undelivered, and the skilled and expensive stonecutters were sitting about idle rather than carving bas-reliefs as originally scheduled.

Inside the enclosure Ahmose found Setnakht, the project architect, in front of the temple of Atum and Seth, which occupied the central part of the sacred precinct.  The temple was of very modest size, roughly fifty cubits by twenty cubits.  The massive pylon or entrance wall gave way to a small open court, which led in turn past a single row of four stone columns into the three small rooms that made up the sanctuary.  Unlike that of most of the large temples along the Nile, the long axis of this one lay not approximately, but exactly along an east-west line, so that with the gates of the enclosure open Re, rising above the eastern horizon, would send his rays directly into the sanctuary.

Behind the temple, occupying most of the western half of the enclosure, were the living quarters of the priests and the four granaries, their beehive domes rising well above the top of the precinct wall.  Made solely from brick, these structures were complete, but like the gates the temple was behind schedule.  At the moment the pylon rose to only half its planned twelve cubit height, the upper courses unfinished because the stone had yet to arrive.  This meant that the stonecutters and artists who should at this moment be covering the pylon with painted bas-reliefs of Atum, Seth and Ramses were instead sitting about drinking beer with their colleagues unable to work on the gate, all of them nevertheless still drawing salaries.

Setnakht, despite the heat dressed in an expensive wig and immaculate white pleated linen skirt, was watching two of his assistants reach the top of the pylon scaffolding.  The stones used in the upper levels of the pylon were small enough to be hoisted directly, sparing the need for the large earthen ramp used in the larger projects.  For this Ahmose was thankful, the wooden scaffolding being far easier to set up and remove than the thousands of hekats of earth necessary for a ramp sufficiently high to reach the top of the pylon in its final stages of construction.  Whenever he glimpsed the great pyramids of Khufu and Kephren on his occasional journey south to Memphis, he inevitably considered the mammoth labor involved in just building the ramps needed to lift the great blocks.

By the time he reached Setnakht the assistants were already repacking their cords and water pans, having quickly completed the routine check of the topmost course of stone.  Rolling up the sheets of papyrus he had been studying, the architect slipped them into a leather case and turned to Ahmose.

“Well, that’s it.  As far as we go until the rest of the stone shows up,” he said to a point just over Ahmose’s left shoulder.

Ahmose wondered if he was that predictable in his site inspections; Setnakht always seemed to know it was he before actually seeing him.  He looked directly into the pinched face of the old Egyptian.

“You know I’ve done what I can.  If the Third Divine of Thebes can’t help, who can?  Pi-Ramessu won’t respond.  They have never even really agreed there is a problem.  You have important friends at court, don’t you?  Perhaps if you sent…”

“Arranging for the delivery of building materials is hardly my concern,” interrupted Setnakht, indignation supplementing the annoyance that seemed always to be in his voice when he spoke to Ahmose.

“And seeing the project completed is also not your concern?” goaded Ahmose.

“I am the architect.  Seeing to it that the work gets done is the responsibility of the labor overseer.  You.”  He continued to look anywhere but at Ahmose.

Ahmose had had plenty of time to get used to the arrogant architect and his silly game of refusing to look at him directly.  A bent old reed of a man, he was competent enough, at least for an unambitious construction such as this, and Ahmose had years of experience in dealing with contempt.  At the moment, however, his growing frustration with the supply problems and the dull pain in his hand were conspiring to undermine his patience with such pettiness.  He looked up at the assistants climbing down the scaffolding and then back at Setnakht.

“Is the pylon stonework still true?” he asked innocently.

For the briefest moment the architect’s eyes flicked into contact with Ahmose’s and then darted away again.  His words came evenly, but clearly wrapped in anger.

“Of course the stonework is true!  Any apprentice could build this little pylon.”  He hesitated, apparently realizing the implication of his statement.  The pitch of his voice increased noticeably, and his face began to redden.  He now glared directly at Ahmose.

“I have done my job!  Now I waste my time because you haven’t done yours.  My career is threatened because you can’t control your thieving friends.  I suffer because somebody in Pi-Ramessu was bought.”

He turned abruptly and threw the cylindrical papyrus case at the two assistants, who were listening intently, expressions of studied indifference on their faces.  Taken by surprise, they instinctively ducked, and the case landed under the scaffolding, where one of the men retrieved it.  Setnakht was meanwhile already on his way to the gate, and gathering up their instruments, the assistants hurried after him.

Ahmose watched the party storm out, suddenly alone in the precinct.  Prodding Setnakht into a rage was hardly a challenge, but he did feel at least a momentary satisfaction.  He wondered if the old geezer really did worry about his career, when he so obviously already had one foot in the boat to the west.  He shrugged and headed out of the complex towards his house.

His residence was a short distance northeast of the temple precinct, close enough to the site to double as an office, but away from the squalor of Tjou.  The mud brick house, which had been built by his workers as the ground for the temple-granary was being cleared, consisted of a tiny courtyard and a building of only three rooms.  Though immense compared to the huts of most of his conscripts, it would be thought inadequate by the average Egyptian workingman, especially since Ahmose had not bothered to plaster and whitewash the exterior walls.  It made little difference to him; he considered the dwelling temporary, like the project itself.

Two men, household slaves by their look, lounged in the shade of the ancient acacia that stood before the house.  As he drew nearer, Ahmose recognized them as Merab’s.  The absence of any animals suddenly struck him.  Merab must be traveling by boat, which meant in turn that he had walked up from the canal.  He could easily imagine the round little man puffing and sweating as he performed this feat, walking a distance routinely covered by the country folk a hundred times in a day.

Ignoring the slaves, he went directly to the wooden entrance door, upon which he himself had painted the ankh and the winged eye of Horus as wards against evil spirits.  Still discernible above the door as a darker patch on the dun bricks was the smear of lamb’s blood, dabbed there by one of his Habiru workers back in the spring, when the house was built.  It was the blood of the first-born, a powerful barrier, Ahmose knew, to night-roving demons.  He understood and respected the potent magic found in the life fluid, but to him the blood rituals that were the heart of Bedouin worship only reflected the bloody nature of their warrior society.  According to his grandfather, the blood of captives and even infants sometimes stained the crude rock altars of the Habiru, a practice denied those living under Egyptian rule.  It was all too barbaric for a civilized man, but Ahmose left the mark as a concession to his workers and for its efficacy.  You never knew when dealing with the powers of the dark.

The door opened directly into the courtyard, where he found Merab hovering about the tiny kitchen set in one of the corners away from the house, which formed the rear of the court.  Dressed in only a linen kilt, a cup in his hand, he was issuing instructions to Heditkush, who was hidden in the coffin-sized building and from the smell of roasting meat, preparing the midday meal.  Ahmose doubted that the Nubian was paying any attention whatsoever to Merab’s words.

“I see you managed to find the wine,” he said, stepping into the yard.

“Ah, Ahmose.  Yes, it’s been a long hot journey.”  He waved his wine cup in the direction of the kitchen.  “Your man took care of me, though I must say he’s been very uncooperative over the details of lunch.”

The subject of the conversation emerged from the kitchen and handed Ahmose a cup of wine.  He wiped the sweat from his face with an exaggerated gesture.  “Eat soon.  Very hot, cooking.”

“Yes, very hot,” said Ahmose.  “A cup of beer would probably cool things down considerably.”

At the sound of the word “beer” Heditkush was already on his way towards the large covered jar standing next to the kitchen.  Ahmose turned back to Merab, who was staring into his now empty cup.

“Heditkush!  Bring wine to the house,” he called after the slave.  “And we’ll take the meal on the roof.”  He started across the yard, Merab following.

“Sorry I couldn’t get by sooner, but there’s been a press of business in Tjeku.  I’m on my way to Pi-Ramessu, and this seemed a good time to talk with you about your problems.  Ahmose, how the hell can you live like this?”

They had entered the main room of the house, an area hardly larger than the anteroom of the nomarch’s villa.  Reed mats covered the mud plaster and gypsum floor, and the whitewashed walls were painted with prayers to Thoth and other gods.  Pushed up against the walls were several large ceramic pots and low wooden chests, one supporting an alabaster statue of the ibis-headed Thoth.  A sketch of the completed temple-granary was tacked to one of the walls, and everywhere across the floor were neat piles of papyrus.  Sunlight from the door and a row of small windows set high in the walls illuminated the scene.

Ignoring Merab’s question, Ahmose threaded his way through the stacks to one of the chests, from which he took a sheaf of documents.  He sat cross-legged on the floor and began spreading the papyrus sheets out in front him.  More ponderously, Merab sank down opposite, groaning as he did so.

“Those who aren’t poor or trained as scribes are definitely not used to this.  Now I remember why I insist that you visit me rather than the other way around.”  He looked around at the prayer-lined walls.  “Min’s prick, Ahmose.  This is like living in a tomb.”

Before Ahmose, who had heard all this before, could reply, Heditkush arrived with the jug of wine, which he set down between the men.  Ahmose refilled their cups and handed one to Merab.

“I had another important dream.”

Merab rolled his eyes, but Ahmose continued.

“Come on, Merab.  You know how important this stuff is, especially since Thoth has spoken to me directly.”

“I thought he only nodded.”

“You know what I mean.  Listen, in the dream I climbed a tall cedar and began sawing off its branches.  You see!  You hardly need a Dream Book to interpret this, the meaning is so clear.  All my enemies and ills will be destroyed.”

“Or it could mean that you’ll end up a slave pruning trees for some rich man.  Or reduced to stealing firewood.”

“This is serious, Merab,” replied Ahmose, exasperation replacing the excitement in his voice.

“And I’m serious too.”  His voice had lost its playful tone.  “Now, you listen to me.  If you value your career so much, you will stop pressing this affair with Heliopolis.  You know full well that I have much more expertise in such things than you could ever hope to have, and I tell you that you are beginning to annoy some powerful figures.  Figures who aren’t all that enamored of an upstart Habiru in the first place.  The surest way to put the lie to your dreams and visions is to continue this foolish crusade.  Keep bothering these people, Ahmose, and instead of directing Pharaoh’s gangs you’ll find yourself in one of them, at the mercy of some overseer who remembers that you’re the uppity sand rambler.”

“But I have clear evidence of theft!”  He held up two sheets of papyrus.  “Look at these invoices.  Here, this one shows that thirty-two limestone blocks left the Tura quarry, but I received only twenty-six, together with this manifest from Heliopolis listing only twenty-six.  The priests clearly stole six blocks from the shipment.  That’s the only way to understand this.”

Suddenly interested, Merab examined the two documents.  “Do you have any more like these?”

“No,” answered Ahmose as he selected more sheets.  “Invoices from the suppliers go directly to Heliopolis.  The gods delivered this one to me – it was stuck to the temple manifest.  But look at these.  My copy of an order for six granite slabs from Elephantine and the manifest of the actual delivery.  It contains only five.  And this: my order for thirty jars of beer, but only twenty-seven were received and sent on to me according to Heliopolis.  And so on and so on.  More than half of all shipments of all materials are short by a tenth or more.  The temple claims that’s what was sent, but they won’t show me the invoices.”

“And the suppliers bounce your inquiries back to Heliopolis, right?”  Merab asked, unfolding one of his legs and pouring himself more wine.

“Yes.  I don’t have the authority and the temple is not about to give it to me.  They of course won’t show me anything, and my complaints to the Overseer of the Granaries get no response, despite evidence of major corruption.  What is wrong in Pi-Ramessu?”

“Nothing but business as usual in the Beloved Land.  First of all, Ahmose, keep your perspective straight: nothing connected with this little project could be considered “major.”  Second, apart from this one shipment” – he waved the two sheets – “all your evidence is circumstantial.”

“The teeth of the Eater, Merab!  It’s as obvious as the river!  The only materials that haven’t turned up short are the bricks, which I control completely.  And the damn fools suggest it’s my workers who are doing the stealing!”

He suddenly pounded the mat with his fist, startling Merab.  “It’s an outrage to Pharaoh and to ma’at, and no one seems to be concerned.  How can Ramses permit this?”

“Get serious, Ahmose.  Do you really think Pharaoh is aware of every little building project in Egypt?”

“The Overseer of Granaries told…”

“You are a constant wonder to me, Ahmose.  How did you manage to survive to adulthood?”  He tucked his leg back under him and leaned forward slightly.  “Look.  Pharaoh is the guarantor of the balance in the Two Lands, but you know as well as I do that evil exists and sometimes it goes unpunished.  Maybe even the gods have limits.  Or maybe we just can’t comprehend what they do.  Whatever the reason, the fact is ma’at does not lie perfectly upon the land.”

“Then it is even more our obligation to work to see that it does.  Remember the teachings of Ptahhotep: ‘Ma’at is good and its worth is lasting, and it hath not been disturbed since the day of its creator, whereas he that transgresseth its ordinances is punished.’”

“And how effective an instrument of ma’at do you suppose you’ll be as a quarry slave?  The advice of Anii is more appropriate here: ‘Speak not much, be silent, that thou mayest be happy.’”

Surprised, Ahmose hesitated a moment.  Merab seemed hardly the type to be studying the wisdom literature.  There were apparently aspects of the man he was unaware of.

“Anii the scribe did not mean for the good man to remain silent in the face of injustice,” he countered.  “But that the wise man speaks only when he has something to say.  This is clear from Ptahhotep: ‘Be silent – this is better than flowers.  Speak only if thou knowest that thou canst unravel the difficulty.’  Well, this man, wise or not, certainly has something important to say.  This corruption eats away at the Beloved Land.  It is an outrage to me and to Pharaoh and to the balance of Creation itself.”

“Really, Ahmose.  Keep your grip on the world.  This sort of thing goes on all the time.  If anything, it’s part of Creation.  The gods created men the way they are, and more often than not there’s just nothing you can do about it.  You don’t have to fight every battle.  Osiris will know the ones you do fight, and your heart will witness your devotion to ma’at.

“So the priests of Heliopolis and others are making a little money on the side.  Don’t you believe they’ll pay when they stand in the hall of judgment?  Meanwhile, how do they hurt you?  Judged by average standards, your project is way ahead of schedule, despite the shortages.  Which, incidentally, are always blamed on the people at the site.  Your reputation is established.  Don’t undermine it by causing trouble.”

He looked around into the glare of the door.  “Where’s that lunch?  I can’t wait here all day.”

“They do hurt me,” asserted Ahmose, ignoring the question, voice growing louder.  “They hurt me and they hurt you and they hurt Pharaoh and everyone else with their violation of ma’at.  There is nothing I can do about incompetence in Pi-Ramessu or empty-headed officials like the nomarch.  Maybe there’s nothing I can do about the corruption in Heliopolis.  But this is my project, and I’m damn well going to cause trouble!”

It was Merab’s turn to be surprised.  Rarely had he seen such overt anger expressed by his friend.  Ahmose seemed to realize this as well, and he paused a moment, eyes closed and lips moving in a silent prayer.  Composed, he continued in a lower tone.

“Merab, I know you think it’s self-destructive, but I have to pursue this.  It isn’t the insult to me or even so much the delays to the construction.  It’s just the outrage of it.  It’s the arrogance, the assumption that no one will complain while Pharaoh’s wealth is stolen almost openly.  It just isn’t right.”

He began gathering up the papyrus sheets.  “I’m taking this stuff to Pi-Ramessu.  They can hardly ignore me if I’m banging on their doors.  It’s only a question of getting Pharaoh’s attention.”

“You wouldn’t even get into the palace, Ahmose.  How much time do you think Pharaoh has to visit with his subjects?  Do you suppose his task of insuring the presence of ma’at in Egypt runs to listening to complaints about petty corruption?  What do you plan to say to the wall of officials around him?  ‘I’m here to see the Horus; Thoth sent me’?”

Ahmose looked up, cold eyes locking onto Merab.

“I’m sorry, Ahmose.  That was an unfair punch.  It’s just that you drive me up the wall sometimes.  Look, I’m your friend and I know you, and you can still annoy the hell out of me with your righteousness.  So how do you think the pompous fools in Pi-Ramessu will react when you rush in with accusations aimed at their friends in Heliopolis?

“The world is filled with people who are bad and even more with people who are stupid.  Surely you know that from running your gangs.  Why is it so hard to accept that this is true for the people at the top too?  Can’t you see that Pharaoh may be as ill served by his people as you often are by your overseers?  Face it, Ahmose.  Apparently even a god-king can’t hope to control all his servants.”

Merab’s words were interrupted by a sudden yell from outside, which he took to be the long-awaited announcement of lunch.  Rising quickly, he grimaced and began stepping from one foot to the other, driving life back into his rubbery legs.

“But I know you lack the patience and the wisdom of a god-king,” he continued before Ahmose could object.  “And I know you’re going to stick your hand in the crocodile’s mouth no matter what I say.  So let’s see if we can limit just how much gets bitten off.  Let me have the rest of those documents.”

Ahmose was caught by the sudden collapse of Merab’s resistance, but was not that surprised.  One of the things he admired in the older man was his decisiveness in abandoning an untenable position and seizing upon a new course of action.  Handing him the stack of papyrus, he rose and fetched a leather document case from one of the chests.  Merab took the case and rolled up and inserted the sheaf of documents.

“I’ll see that these get into the hands of sympathetic people in Pi-Ramessu, but I can’t promise anything, Ahmose.  The temples are very powerful, especially Amon-Re, and the court is very complex.  And very dangerous.  I have other information pertaining to Heliopolis…”  He caught the look on Ahmose’s face.  “No, I’m not going to tell you anything.  The priests are angry enough, and the last thing you need now is the suspicion that you’re prying into things beyond your own project.  Leave this to me, all right?”

“So this isn’t just ‘business as usual’ then?” exclaimed Ahmose, a note of minor triumph in his voice.

“Unfortunately, it is,” Merab sighed.  “And you’re going to have to learn to live with it if you want to continue building.  Your sense of justice is a fine thing, Ahmose, but the world doesn’t much appreciate fine sensibilities.”  He threw his arm around the younger man’s shoulders.  “Forget about Heliopolis and finish your temple.  Everybody who matters knows how things work, and if you can just avoid branding yourself a troublemaker, they’ll see your talent.  Maybe reluctantly, because of your background and because you are so damn good at what you do, but they’ll see it.  But you have to play the game.”

Allowing Ahmose no chance to reply, he steered him out the door.  “Enough of this.  Let’s get on to something important.  I expect the meal will live up to the promise of the smell.  Darkies tend to be unruly, but they sure seem to have a way with food, don’t you think?”

Ahmose was hardly in a mind to think about the culinary talents of Nubians, but he knew Merab well enough to understand the serious discussion was over.  He could only let matters run the course Merab had determined, exasperating though that might be.  At least the burden was off his back and he could indeed concentrate on completing the project.  In fact, he felt a surprising sense of relief begin to slide over him.  Before he could put any of this into words, however, he was jerked to a halt just short of the stairway.

“Wait,” said Merab, looking up towards the tree-shaded roof.  “Is the roof of this flimsy hovel going to hold us?”

The image of his ample friend plunging through the plaster and timber brought a smile to Ahmose’s face.  He pulled himself up straighter and puffed out his chest.

“I am Ahmose the Master Builder, remember?  The man with so damn much talent nobody could fail to notice.”  He bowed and swept an arm towards the stairs.  “After you, Secretary to the Great Head.”




Hear, O Israel!

(I am considering shelving my current project, a scholarly book on Marathon; the twenty years of missed bibliography are overwhelming me and I am having doubts about humanity’s need for another classical tome.  I contemplate returning to a novel of Moses I began over twenty years ago, abandoned because an academic work appeared more important and because of the mounting evidence against the historicity of the Exodus itself.  Well, it is fiction and most people will certainly not rush to abandon a story so important to all the Abramic religions, so what the hell.  But writing fiction is not the same as writing history [well, usually not] and this could all be crap.  So, I will post some of what I have written and invite you to let me know if it works.  This week I offer the Preface [I just can not get away from being an historian] and the Prologue.)


This novel is historical fiction, but only in the sense that it takes place far in the past.  The society and environment of thirteenth century Egypt depicted in it are real, but except for the Pharaohs all the characters and events are fictional, including Moses and the Exodus itself.

Nothing is known about the historical Moses, and even his existence is now seriously doubted.  The stories about him found in Philo, Jospehus and the Midrash and Talmud have long been recognized as secondary and unhistorical, and our sole “primary” source for the leader of the Exodus is the Old Testament, which is itself derivative.  The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch or Torah, are manifestly not historical documents, but rather the final version of an oral and written tradition that constantly revised stories handed down through perhaps thirty generations.  Biblical scholars have discerned four major “authors” or strands interwoven in the text of the Pentateuch: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly and the Deuteronomist; and these sources were themselves assembled and edited into the finished product by a group of compilers, collectively known as the Redactor.  The oldest of these sources, the Yahwist, is dated to the tenth century, already two to three centuries after the putative date of the Exodus, and the editing of the texts continued into the sixth and fifth centuries and later; even as late as the time of Jesus there still existed no accepted canon for the Hebrew texts that made up the Biblical tradition.


Much more fundamental, the historicity of the Exodus and the Conquest are now seriously doubted.  There is absolutely no non-Biblical evidence, textual or archaeological, for the Exodus, and the last forty years of excavations in Palestine have produced no evidence whatsoever of an outside conquest of the area in the later second millennium.  Rather, the archaeological remains are constantly at odds with the Biblical stories, especially regarding towns, many of which simply did not exist during the periods to which they are assigned by the Bible.  The evidence instead strongly supports the proposition that the people who became the Hebrews were ultimately indigenous to the area and came west from the Transjordan at the end of the end of the thirteenth century.  Less certain, but still more credible and better supported by the evidence than the Biblical account, is the suggestion that the traditions of a flight from Egypt and a violent conquest of Canaan, as well as much of the Biblical history of Israel and Judah, were in fact assembled for political reasons in the late seventh century under King Josiah of Judah.

That the Old Testament is a sacred text for millions of Hebrews, Christians and Muslims ought not to obscure this historical reality of its composition and nature, and as an historical source such a work must be approached very cautiously.  Certainly, the details found in the Biblical account of the Exodus cannot bear the weight of the conclusions that have been laid upon them.  Using, for example, clues in the text to locate Mt. Sinai is an utterly futile exercise, since all those clues date from a later age that itself had not the vaguest idea where Sinai was, and the very existence of the mountain is in fact doubted by most scholars.  Most important, the god portrayed in the Pentateuch is a historical mishmash, revealing elements of the primitive henotheistic tribal deity of the age of Moses, the institutionalized national god of the states of Israel and Judah and the more perfectly monotheistic universal lord of the later prophets.  From this hodgepodge of stories and images of god believers, ancient and modern, (and Hollywood) have taken what they will, inevitably creating a Moses and an Exodus that reflect the society and values of the interpreter, rather than what might conceivably have actually existed some three thousand years ago.  Moses and his god are a work in progress, constantly being reinvented, from the time of King Josiah to that of Cecil B. DeMille

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many scholars still entertain some notion of an escape from Egypt, arguing that the Bondage is too unlikely and the Exodus too compelling and central to the Hebrew tradition to be pure inventions.  They consequently accept from the sweeping narrative of the Pentateuch the bare fact that sometime during the history of New Kingdom Egypt, possible in the thirteenth century BC, a group of west Semites left the Nile delta.  Rejected, however, are all the Biblical details and scale of the event, which after all went completely unnoticed by one of the most meticulous record-keeping civilizations in history.  Since names are very persistent in oral tradition, the group may well have been led by a man named Moses, but if so, it is nevertheless impossible to know anything about him and what role, if any, he played in bringing the god Yahweh to these people.

There is a problem on the Egyptian side as well.  While Egyptian history and society, especially during the New Kingdom, are well documented and we have a good appreciation of the nature of that society and its beliefs, we can never truly understand what went on in the heart and mind of the average Egyptian.  Like all the other pre-Greek inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean world, including the early Hebrews, the Egyptians were mythopoeic, seeing life and will in all the phenomena of nature.  Egyptian, Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian religious texts allow us to construct an intellectual approximation of this mythic universe, but we do not know exactly what this meant in the life of an individual.  It is clear that in their daily lives the ancient Egyptians, who were after all human beings living in an agriculturally-based urban society, had a great deal in common with us, but it is also clear that they viewed the world around them in a way that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to comprehend fully.

The dangers, then, for a novelist seeking to produce a historically credible Exodus are manifold, not the least of which is that the Exodus itself is not historically credible.  And even assuming the event took place, not only do we know absolutely nothing about it and the man who may or may not have inspired it, but also any attempt to create characters a modern reader can understand and relate to emotionally risks distorting the seriously alien nature of pre-classical society.  Moreover, we know that the evolution of Yahweh from a petty desert god to the universal deity of mature Judaism took more than a millennium, suggesting that one should be careful of placing too much responsibility on the shoulders of a single man, which of course is exactly what the Biblical tradition does to Moses.  On the other hand, religion is also an area of human endeavor where it is quite clear that a single individual in a single lifetime can have a tremendous historical impact, and it is perhaps possible that Moses, if indeed he existed, may have played such a role.

This novel presumes that there was an Exodus and offers a possible Moses, one who fits what we know about the historical development of the Hebrew religion and the practices of the time.  The tale may lose the sweep and majesty of the Pentateuch and its cinematic realization in The Ten Commandments, but what remains is something closer to historical possibility.

* * * * * * * * * *

Transliterated from hieroglyphics into Latin characters, Egyptian names come in a wide variety of spellings; I have attempted to use the most common versions.  Place names can be even more confusing, since a site will have an Egyptian name, an Arabic name, often a Greek name and sometimes a Biblical name.  The ancient Egyptian town of Iunu, for example, was known to the Greeks as Heliopolis, to the Bible as On and is today Tell Hisn.  In dealing with this I have followed a policy of enlightened inconsistency, generally employing the Egyptian name, except where the Greek is more familiar (e.g., Memphis rather than Mennufer).

The Egyptian cubit was composed of seven palms and equaled approximately .523 meters; 20,000 cubits equaled an atour, about 10.46 kilometers.  Ten kite equaled one deben, which was about 91 grams.

Richard M. Berthold

Albuquerque, New Mexico



(The chronology of Moses’ life is conjectural.

All dates are B.C.)


c. 1450 Hebrew tribes at Kadesh and in northern Canaan

1427-1401 AMENHOTEP II

1401-1391 THUTMOSE IV

c. 1400 Hebrew tribes active in central Canaan



c. 1345 Yanhamu (Joseph) into Egypt

1336-1334 SMENKHKARE


c. 1335 Hebrew elements enter Egypt

1325-1321 AY

1321-1292 HAREMHAB

1292-1290 RAMSES I

1290-1279 SETI I

1279-1213 RAMSES II                

1265 Moses born

1237 Moses leaves Egypt

1228 Moses returns to Egypt

1227 Exodus; arrival in Kadesh

1213-1203 MERNEPTAH               

1203-1199 AMENMESSE?

1199 Moses dies

1199-1193 SETI II                    




And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set

thee over all the land of Egypt.

Genesis 41:41

The sun hung low over the western desert as Yanhamu emerged onto the broad roof of his house, a tall, almost spectral figure draped in a robe of fine white linen.  Curly hair gone gray and a swarthy face seamed with lines betrayed long years, but the gaunt body was unbent, the narrow head held steady.  Sharp eyes scanned the surrounding world.

The valley and the river were already in shadows, but the parched hills rising from the east bank were momentarily afire, bathed in oranges and pinks by the departing sun.  To the northwest the great man-made mountains of Khufu and Khefren were barely visible in the evening haze, but through the date palms that lined the walls of his estate Yanhamu could easily make out a half dozen pyramids to the south.  His location in the far northern suburbs of Memphis, on high ground hard up against the margin of the Red Land, actually placed him slightly to the west of the tombs that lined the western escarpment for as far south as he could see.  From this vantage point the pyramids were temporary beacons marking the boundary between desert and cultivated field, as the white limestone casing blocks of their western faces blazed with the last rays of the setting sun.

Though he had lived in Egypt for over four decades, Yanhamu was still awed and still a little mystified by these monuments to long dead kings and the Egyptian mania for the next life.  According to the priests, the pyramids were already ancient when the kings of Ur ruled the eastern lands.  And apparently already emptied by robbers of the treasure and bodies they were meant to protect through eternity, an irony that delighted Yanhamu.  Tens of thousands had labored for years to erect these immense piles, yet the body of the poor peasant, lying with a simple clay pot or favorite utensil in an unmarked desert grave and preserved by the dry sands, long outlasted those royal corpses.  The Pharaohs of Egypt were perhaps more cautious now; they were hiding their sarcophagi away in rock-cut tombs, especially in the high cliffs opposite distant Thebes.  But they still filled those tombs with staggering amounts of wealth, guaranteeing, in Yanhamu’s opinion, that their owners would rest undisturbed not for eternity, but only until authority broke down in the next time of troubles.

Of course, thought Yanhamu as he watched the sun slip below the horizon, extinguishing the royal tombs, most Egyptians simply refuse to believe that Pharaoh’s authority could break down, despite the evidence of the recent past.  The trouble that followed the death of Akhenaton some thirty years ago is already being forgotten, swallowed by the timelessness that pervades this land.

From his study of temple records he knew that the land had in fact suffered great upsets in the past, times when the god-king had been unable to insure that ma’at – justice and right – lay upon the kingdom of the Two Lands.  Egypt had even endured the humiliation of foreign rule under the Hyksos.  But few outside a small circle of priests were aware of Egypt’s history or that Egypt even had a history.  History implied change, and the Egyptian resolutely refused to recognize that there had been any significant change since the Creation.  Even death was only a sort of transition to another world where life would go on exactly as it had here.  And so the tremendous urge to preserve the body, to keep it as unchanging as the desert, river and sky that constituted the universe of the average Egyptian.  The very human fear that things would not be as they had always been, perhaps that was the real meaning of the vast necropolis that covered the western plateau from the delta to Thebes and beyond.

Soon enough I will be taking up residence in that silent city, mused Yanhamu, trying in vain to locate in the darkening desert the site of his own modest tomb.  And there I will wait with kings for the robbers, who to their surprise will find in the tomb of Yanhamu son of Sabtah nothing more than his body.

As usual this thought brought a smile to his face, and as usual he wondered if his wife and sons would actually keep their promise to inter him in an empty tomb.  For all their years of marriage and his distinctly un-Egyptian influence on her, Asenatis remained at heart an Egyptian, and the tomb was mostly a concession to her sensibilities.  What happened to the empty shell that had carried his life mattered little to Yanhamu, an attitude that set him apart from not only his wife, but virtually everyone he met.

And it was not just this, he knew.  His whole approach to the world about him was different.  He did not look at things in the way most men did, be they Egyptians or Canaanites or Hittites or Nubians.  They saw life and consciousness in everything in nature, in the weather, the rivers, the plants and animals, even the rocks of the earth.  Each and every thing in the universe possessed a unique personality that must be dealt with, just as one dealt with fellow humans.  Yanhamu did not for a moment doubt the existence of the gods, of powers that directed the great natural forces, and he believed that his spirit would survive the death of his body.  But from earliest adolescence he had been unable to accept the seemingly universal notion that the reeds in the river or the stones in his garden or the salt in his cupboard were companion beings, little different from the boatman or the gardener or his wife.

Addressing the inanimate could only strike Yanhamu as foolish, but such was the belief of virtually every person he met.  Even Haremhab, a hard-bitten military man and his close friend, had defended this world view, amazed that Yanhamu should question such an obvious fact of nature.  In his younger days Yanhamu had often wondered about the soundness of his own mind, so pervasive was this belief he could not share, but he had come to realize that whether he or the rest of mankind was right, it made little difference to his ability to get through life successfully.  It left an unbridgeable gulf between him and his fellow man, but as a Canaanite living in Egypt he would in any case have found a divide between himself and most he met, the native Egyptians.  His alienation from the common understanding of the nature of the world was more profound, relegating him to a universe in which conscious life was the oddity rather than the common denominator, but like the inbred Egyptian contempt for outsiders there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He rubbed his hands together.  The joints were swollen and painful again and the salve the physician had given him seemed to be losing its effectiveness.  Relegating the pain to the back of his mind, something he had learned in the hard days of his youth, he crossed to the eastern parapet of the roof.  Spread out below was the estate’s formal garden, which Yanhamu counted as Egypt’s greatest gift to civilization.  The arrangement was traditional: a rectangular pool filled with fish and lotus, surrounded by orderly rows of oleanders, chrysanthemums, jasmine and other flowers.  Further out, hiding the wall and the outside world, were sycamores, tamarisks, pomegranates, acacias and an unbroken line of palms.  Paths of crushed rock meandered about the garden, and all was in perfect order, maintained by an overseer who ruled over this tiny kingdom with as iron a hand as any Pharaoh.

Savoring the smells of the spring blossoms below, Yanhamu looked out towards the river, now at almost its lowest point.  In little more than two months akhit, the Season of Inundation, and the summer flood would begin, and once more the fields would return to the river, turning the villages and estates into little islands.  This was the blessing of Egypt, the annual flood that renewed the farmland with a thick carpet of silt and made this desert country perhaps the most bountiful in the world.  It was hardly surprising that Pharaoh spent so much time in ceremonies connected with the well-being of the river.

Yanhamu hoped that this akhit would not bring a “red” Nile.  There was the occasional year when the flood carried an extra burden of reddish-brown silt, providing the fields with an added measure of renewed fertility.  The peasants welcomed this “blood of Hapi,” a gift of the Nile god who in his cave far to the south poured out the life-giving waters, but like most not intimately involved with agriculture Yanhamu greeted the phenomenon with far less enthusiasm.  For whatever reason, a “red” Nile almost always heralded the imminent arrival of armies of frogs and clouds of insects.  The frogs he could live with, even though their irresistible invasion of every corner of the household meant doing exactly that.  But the flies!  The buzzing, biting, inescapable swarms of tiny flying creatures had more than once brought him to the desperate consideration of the existence of malevolent deities whose attention was focused on him alone.

For the moment, however, it was a scene of complete tranquility that confronted Yanhamu.  The land was soft in the twilight and the haze created by thousands of cooking fires, and the cool stillness of the evening was broken only by the barking of dogs and the occasional quacking of the ducks found on every estate.  Work in the fields, the endless toil of bringing water to the crops, had mostly ceased, and even Memphis, the bustling northern capital, was shutting down for the night.  This was the peace that Yanhamu – and every other old man in the world, he suspected – relished.  The revolutionary years of Akhenaton’s reign had been filled with excitement and were an experience he would not have missed, but that was for eager young men.  Old bones found comfort in traditional Egypt, quiet and unexciting, undisturbed in its dream of eternal sameness.

General Haremhab had done his job well, restoring ma’at to a land that had reached the brink of civil war.  Actually, it was Pharaoh Haremhab now, and his old friend’s elevation to the throne confirmed for Yanhamu the nonsense of dynastic succession.  Haremhab was an old army man, lacking even the vaguest connection with the royal family, and yet his performance as the most recent incarnation of the god Horus was magnificent compared to that of his pathetic royal predecessors.  The official line emanating from the temple of Amon-Re was even now styling him the first legitimate king since Amenhotep III.  So much for bloodlines.

Both he and Haremhab had gotten their start under the “heretic” Akhenaton.  Yanhamu had followed the example of generations of his Canaanite countrymen and fled local trouble and family problems by migrating to Egypt.  Rather than sinking like most into the food-producing masses, however, he parlayed his contacts in Canaan into a minor government job, where a talent for economic administration quickly appeared.  He was also fortunate enough to enter Egypt during Akhenaton’s revolution, a time when the traditional rigid patterns and xenophobia of Egyptian society were temporarily shelved, at least among the court circles.  Learning to speak and read Egyptian, he had rapidly advanced in power and by the time of Akhenaton’s death was virtually managing the national economy.

Those had been heady days of freedom indeed, as Akhenaton turned Egypt on its head with his religious revolution.  His aim of course was not the shattering of the tight molds of Egyptian culture; that was incidental to his real purpose.  Those close to the king knew him to be purely and simply a religious fanatic, consumed with the cause of his new god, the Aton.  Changing his name from Amenhotep, “Amon-Is-Content,” to Akhenaton, “It-Goes-Well-with-the-Aton,” he moved the court out of Thebes and built a new capital, Akhetaton, halfway down the river to Memphis.  From there he directed a campaign against the other gods of Egypt, especially the powerful Amon-Re, dispatching stonecutters to chisel the name of the “Hidden One” off monuments and walls.  Henceforth only two gods would matter in the Two Lands: the Aton and his incarnate son, Akhenaton.

Ironically, the Aton had reminded Yanhamu of the traditional gods of the desert dwellers.  Ironically, because one could hardly find a people more culturally distant from the Egyptian king than the nomadic herdsmen and sometime farmers of southern and eastern Canaan.  Yet, Akhenaton’s understanding of divinity was in many ways similar to that of the tribes wandering the fringes of the desert.  Each of the clans had a single, often nameless god with whom its members had made a sort of contract: you specifically watch over us and we will ignore other gods and worship only you.  These were family gods for people whose widest political horizon was the family, and their appellations revealed that fact: the god of Noath, the god of Cabor or simply the God.  And Akhenaton’s sun god was like that, a sort of family deity with whom the Pharaoh had an exclusive relationship.  Like the desert clans the king did not deny the existence of other gods, but only attempted to elevate the Aton as the sole important god of Egypt besides Pharaoh.

Yanhamu smiled.  Only?  Only demoting gods that had been with the Egyptians for thousands of years, a task not even a god-king might hope to accomplish.  Akhenaton’s misfortune had in fact been that he was not some desert clan chief, but Pharaoh, and his family numbered not in the hundreds, but in the millions, all of them following their own notions of heaven.  Nor was Akhenaton acting only against the religious convictions of his people.  Amon-Re, chief among the old gods, had powerful earthly defenders, and his temple, with its immense financial resources, was already a challenge to the government and army long before Akhenaton was born.  The priesthood of Amon-Re were not about to surrender their god, and more importantly their wealth and power, without a fight.

There, Yanhamu knew, was the real struggle.  The army and parts of the government initially supported the Pharaoh, but not because they were transported by his religious vision.  For the hard headed men who dealt with Egypt’s concerns here on earth Akhenaton’s revolution was the opportunity to check the swelling power of the temple of Amon and reassert the independence of the throne.  The Pharaoh must have been at least vaguely aware of this more mundane conflict, but if so, he never showed the slightest interest.  Instead, he remained shut away in Akhetaton, surrounded by the converted and seemingly converted, directing his war against the name of Amon-Re and dreaming of the triumph of the Aton.

It was only a dream. Akhenaton’s ideas were too radical, his assault on Egyptian tradition too blatant.  The priesthood of Amon held the support of the people and had little trouble depicting the Pharaoh as a heretic and perverter of ma’at and discrediting all those who followed his cause.  The sensible and the ambitious among the king’s supporters soon saw the inevitable outcome of the struggle and were deserting him even before his early death.  His short-lived successors, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamon and Ay, though members of his family, were all tools of the temple, and now Haremhab, ever the realist, was working diligently to restore order to the land and power and glory to the name of Amon-Re.  The Aton was forgotten, vanished from the consciousness of Egypt, as the walls of Akhenaton’s abandoned city were now vanishing beneath the desert sand.

Yanhamu was startled out of his reverie by sounds behind him.  He turned and saw the cleanly shaved head of his household steward, Kasa, emerge from the stairwell.  With painful slowness a thin and stooped body followed.

Here is something else that was already old when the kings of Ur ruled, thought Yanhamu, watching the ancient servant creep across the roof towards him.

“Your evening drink, Master,” announced Kasa in a reedy voice.  He held out a blue faience goblet decorated with scenes of Pharaoh smashing the enemies of Egypt.

“Thank you, Kasa, but you know it isn’t necessary for you to climb those stairs.  Next time get one of the house boys to do it.”

The bent back straightened slightly.  “It is my duty to attend the Master of the house.”

Receiving the expected solemn pronouncement, Yanhamu shrugged and took the drink.  As ever, his sense of mischief was tweaked by Kasa’s seriousness.

“Tell me, Kasa, what do you remember of Akhenaton?”

The old servant’s eyes went wide and darted to either side, searching for any temple agents who might be hiding on the roof.

“I do not recognize the name, Master,” he said in almost a whisper.

“Is your memory failing so rapidly, Kasa, that you forget our younger days, when you joined this house?  Who was it who then ruled over the Two Lands?”

“Pharaoh has always watched over the land, and Amon has always been his strength.”

The almost whisper had changed to an almost shout, and Yanhamu could imagine his neighbors on their rooftops looking up in surprise at this sudden pious proclamation shattering the evening quiet.  He had no doubt that his servant’s mind was as sharp as ever, but he also knew that like most Egyptians Kasa was careful and conservative when it came to political affairs.  And there were matters cautious people simply did not discuss these days, especially people in the household of a foreigner who had found his fortune in the service of the heretic king.

“Quite true, Kasa, quite true.  You may go.”

A perceptibly relieved chief servant bowed slightly and turned to face the long trek to the ground floor, moving a bit more spryly in his eagerness to escape the Master’s dangerous games.  He was utterly loyal to the man who had provided so well for him and his family all these years, but he was no closer now to understanding him than he had been when he entered the household back in the bad days.  The Master only underlined Kasa’s convictions about foreigners: this one had spent his life in Egypt in service to the kingdom, but still remained alien.  The constant questioning of everything, so typical of outsiders, was bearable, but this open disrespect for the gods was an invitation to trouble.  The Master was a good man, but how great was divine tolerance?  Kasa was convinced that only his frequent prayers and offerings stood between the house and disaster.  He had best head directly for the shrine in the alcove of the great room.

Yanhamu watched the retreating back for a moment.  No doubt off to beseech Amon-Re not to send a plague upon the household of the impious one.

He sighed and turned back to the view over the valley.  Details were disappearing rapidly in the deepening dark, and the now dim panorama would soon be replaced with isolated and more intimate images created by the odd lamp and exposed fire.

Why do we need to take ourselves so seriously, he wondered, his fingers idly tracing the carved figures on the goblet.  Is it fear that if we did not act with complete seriousness others might not believe us important?  Or perhaps that we might have trouble believing it ourselves?  Priests were easily the worst of the serious lot, no doubt because what they did was on the face of it pretty absurd when compared to other occupations.  Of course they portrayed it as the proper attitude of respect and awe when dealing with the gods, but Yanhamu suspected it had more to do with convincing themselves and their congregations that activities normally associated with children and the feeble-minded were indeed of the utmost importance.  Otherwise who would listen to grown men who spoke to statuary?  More than most, this society was steeped in religion, but the Egyptian also had a strong sense of humor, and any departure from the utter solemnity maintained by the priests might cause the temples to echo with laughter.

He sipped the beer, cool from evaporation and pleasantly bitter on the tongue.  A fine beverage, which in sufficient quantity could undermine the demeanor of the most solemn priest, something he expected happened often enough when the faithful were not present.  He certainly remembered witnessing drunken priests of Aton during his frequent visits to the court at Akhetaton, though never in the presence of Pharaoh, who was very serious about his god.  Ironically, the revolutionary nature of Akhenaton’s fanaticism created a freer, less serious atmosphere in the royal city, one that encouraged openness and experimentation.  Artists, given the opportunity to break free of thousand-year-old canons, had flocked to Akhetaton to produce works that were almost shocking, at least to the average Egyptian.  Far from following the traditional rigid forms, their depictions of the king actually played upon the abnormalities of his strange, androgynous body, emphasizing the elongated head, narrow shoulders and wide hips.  Many of these creations had struck Yanhamu as grotesque, but the unconventional approaches could also lead to objects of exquisite beauty.  Much to the dismay of Kasa, Yanhamu kept a copy of one of these works, a painted head of Queen Nefertiti, in his sleeping chamber.  He wondered briefly what had happened to the original.  If not destroyed by some servant of Amon, it was probably now sitting in a tomb somewhere.  How typically Egyptian to create beauty and then bury it away.

Setting the goblet down on the parapet, he stretched until the joints in his arms cracked.  As he began massaging his hands again, his ear caught the sound of music and voices in the distance, and he could see off to the left that the gardens of Senmut’s house were a bright island in the darkness.  The walls of the estate hid the party itself, but Yanhamu could imagine the pompous bureaucrat strutting about, constantly reminding his fawning guests of just how important he was to Pharaoh and the government of the land.

Haremhab, my poor friend, he thought.  Sparring with the temple and facing Egypt’s enemies must be a pleasure compared to dealing with puffed-up fools like Senmut.  Is it impossible to form a government that does not immediately fill up with inefficient little men who take themselves too seriously?  The governments of both Akhenaton, the detached fanatic, and Haremhab, the man of action, rested, he knew, on identical foundations of Senmuts, all striving to inflate the importance of their positions by creating unnecessary work and growing piles of reports.  These people seemed to be part of the nature of things, a burden that even an incarnate god could not lift from the kingdom.

On the other hand, he considered, picking up his drink, the Senmuts of the world are the heart of every large organization, and the High Priest of Amon must be as hampered and frustrated as Pharaoh in his efforts to get things done.  Perhaps I underrate you, Senmut.  Perhaps I should see you as another manifestation of the balance the gods have built into the universe.  In that case I salute you and your fellow papyrus eaters.  Kings and priests will come and go, but you will be with us always.  He drained the goblet, only half filled by a servant concerned for his master’s health, and let loose an immensely satisfying belch.

“But fortunately I don’t have to be with you always, or even briefly,” he said aloud.  Being an ex-minister of the better-to-be-forgotten Pharaoh meant being anathema to career officials, despite his lingering friendship with the man who was now Pharaoh, and Yanhamu expected and received few invitations to social gatherings.  Besides, even had he not been tainted by his association with Akhenaton, he would still be shunned by good society because of his origins.  All his years in Egypt and all his love for the land did not make him an Egyptian; he was and ever would be in their eyes an Asiatic.  Worse, he was from Canaan, a place that Egyptians felt especially demonstrated the innate superiority of their civilization.  And worse still, he came from one of the poor, semi-nomadic tribes of the region, which branded him as Habiru, in Egyptian estimation at best a tramp or migrant worker, at worst a bandit.  As far as class-conscious little men like Senmut were concerned, no amount of wealth or degree of success could overcome that disability.

Asiatics, and in particular the Habiru, Yanhamu certainly knew, had always been treated with contempt, but the situation had worsened considerably in the wake of Akhenaton’s reign.  Lost in his religious vision, the eccentric king had completely neglected Egypt’s foreign affairs, a factor that contributed to the ultimate desertion of the military to the side of Amon.  Lacking any attention from Egypt, the petty princes of Syria began falling away from Pharaoh’s control, aided from the north by the powerful empire of the Hittites.  Emboldened by the realization that Egypt was doing nothing to preserve her empire, the Hittites themselves were soon on the move and easily swallowed Syria and the Phoenician cities.  Disaffection had meanwhile spread throughout Palestine, and one by one the Egyptian garrisons were overwhelmed, their desperate pleas for more troops unanswered.  The surviving forces were finally withdrawn, and the land was abandoned to local rebels and adventurers, like the notorious Yashuia, leading large bands of Habiru.  Overnight the Egyptian empire had vanished, a casualty of Akhenaton’s devotion to the Aton.

Among those creating havoc in Palestine were many tribes known to Yanhamu from his youth, including his own.  While it seemed to him that they spent most of their time in bloody conflict with one another, he also remembered well his father’s hatred and envy of their settled neighbors.  If anything could unite the desert clans, it was their distrust of the town dweller, and any breakdown in the settled power structure was a signal for an assault on the cultivated lands.  Tribes in northern Canaan and around Kadesh in Sinai, he knew, were already stirring up trouble in central Palestine when he forsook his homeland for Egypt.  With the violence escalating in the face of Egyptian indifference, before long he was followed by a growing stream of refugees, many of them Habiru, who settled in the Nile delta, particularly the eastern fringes.  Egypt had been long accustomed to migration from Palestine, but not in such numbers, and the efforts of frontier officials to control the influx were thwarted by Akhenaton’s lax administration.

As he thought of the Habiru immigrants, Yanhamu found himself unconsciously staring off to the northeast, towards the settlements hidden in the distance and darkness.  Living there were many families from his own tribe, as well as large numbers of Simeonites, who had fled to Egypt after their failure to hold the city of Shechem.  Other tribes were represented, but he was not sure of their identities.  It took a desert mind to remember all the names and complex relationships of the Habiru clans; after a half century of dealing with documents Yanhamu no longer had the sharp memory of the illiterate.

Nor the interest, he thought.  These are not my people, whatever the blood connection.  Years before he had visited a Habiru encampment near Tjeku on the frontier and had been surprised and amused to discover that many of the families considered themselves to be of the “tribe of Yanhamu.”  It was pleasant to speak his mother tongue again, but he quickly realized that beyond the language he had little in common with these squabbling herdsmen and their petty tribal affairs.  He could not help comparing them to the hardworking Egyptian farmers and craftsmen.  Egypt had many shortcomings, but it was bringing ideas and beauty into the world.  The warlike Habiru had yet to leave any more sign of their passing than looted towns and animal droppings.

No, Egypt was his home, and if it never fully accepted him, it would accept his children.  They had inherited their mother’s features and language and despite their father’s origins thought of themselves as Egyptians.  Yanhamu had told them as much as he could remember of the tribal traditions he had learned from his father, but the boys had easily sensed the contempt in his words and dismissed them.  He had as little time for the desert gods of the Habiru as he did for their Egyptian counterparts, and apart from a healthy dose of skepticism his sons had consequently received an orthodox Egyptian religious education at the hands of Asenatis and the ardent Kasa.  Both had taken Egyptian wives, and their children were as distant from the Habiru and their culture as any full-blooded Egyptian.

Which is just as well, thought Yanhamu.  It hardly takes a professional fortuneteller to see that the future of the Habiru in the Two Lands is filled with trouble.  Egypt is back on course, and life is going to get hard for strangers.  Especially for strangers being blamed for all the trouble in Palestine and Syria. 

He knew, and Haremhab and the temple of Amon knew, that Egypt’s imperial problems were Akhenaton’s responsibility.  But when did any country willingly blame itself for its failures when there were convenient outsiders at whom to point the finger?  With order returning to the Nile valley popular feeling against the Habiru was growing, supported by the official attitude of the government and temple.  And the reconquest of Palestine could not be that far off, which meant a further increase in hostility towards Canaanites.  Yanhamu himself had no fears; he enjoyed the protection of Pharaoh, and in any case he was an old man.  With his family secure what happened in the next generation was a matter of interest, but not concern to him.

He yawned and stretched again, trying to ease the lower back pain that had come with standing too long.  The evening chill, carried on the rising north wind, was beginning to penetrate his thin gown, and a sudden shudder caught his body.

Time to retire, perhaps for another losing game of Senit with Asenatis, he told himself.  That or suffer Kasa’s reproaches.

Yanhamu looked a final time towards the northeast, then turned towards the stairs.