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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:07:02 GMT -5
Despite his great renown in the Bible, there isn't one shred of historical evidence that a King Solomon ever existed in the land that is now the Israel of the 21st Century. His fame is such that like other biblical names, it is a translation or substitution hiding his real identity. However when we relocate the search to Egypt, there is so much that cannot be ignored. In fact there can be no doubt at all that King Solomon was the Pharaoh Amenhotep III AND in some biblical verses his son Amenhotep IV who was also known as Akhenaten. There is so much evidence to support this, that this thread will extend to several parts to give the reader time to absorb and hopefully check for him or her that this is the truth of the matter. To begin, let us take a good look at this great King and see how he might well present himself to us were he living today. This engraving on a memorial stone shows him as a young man. Attachments:
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:09:20 GMT -5
This is a cartouche which reads YMN HTP. The first three glyphs read YMN and this is more fully explained in my page to come -THE GOD AMEN. The bottom three glyphs spell out HTP - The horizontal line with upright 'loaf' is a three consonant glyph for the whole three letters HTP and the hemisphere and rectangle glyphs are simply emphatic glyphs reminding us of the last two letters. As we have seen in the thread ISRAEL IN EGYPT the people of Lower Egypt were Hebrews who had their own language. They did not use the word 'Hotep' for 'Peace', 'Content', or 'Offering'. They were no less Egyptians then, just as the Jews of America, Britain, Australia, etc. are no less nationals of these countries today who retain Hebrew as their religious language. THEY KNEW THEIR KING AS 'SALIM YMN' , since 'Salim' was the Hebrew translation of 'Hotep'. The Greeks however stuck to a Hellenic version of the Egyptian, and called him, AMENOPHIS. The fact that the god name went to the end in Hebrew speech is not unusual. We see it frequently with the names of other kings whose God Name is written first, but in speech is reversed and at the end of the name. However in the Greek Septuagint he became - 'Salomon'. Attachments:
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:15:15 GMT -5
Compare the glyphs as shown in an Egyptian vocabulary with those in the carved Cartouche. Attachments:
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:17:57 GMT -5
1 Kings 5:15 - Solomon also had seventy thousand burden-bearers and EIGHTY THOUSAND HEWERS OF STONE in the hill country, 16. besides Solomon's three thousand three hundred chief officers who were over the work, who had charge of the people who carried on the work. 17. At the King's command, they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. 18. So Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders and the men of Gebal did the hewing and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house." (Revised Standard Version)
The Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived circa 350BCE, wrote: ""Thus it came about that 80,000 unclean individuals were rounded up and dispatched to the stone quarries, which are on the east side of the Nile, where they worked segregated from the rest of the Egyptian population. Among their number were some learned priests that were polluted with the leprosy."
Here we have an exact match. Even if bible scribes were copying from Manetho, or he miraculously had access to the Hebrew Bible, it still shows that they were both well aware of the Temple being in Egypt.
The 'unclean individuals' is a typical term for those who were of another faith. Such a situation was most unlikely before Akhenaten split the nation with his brand of Atenism. Therefore in this case it appears that he was the ruling Pharaoh and that he was still known by his former name of Amenhotep IV.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:24:09 GMT -5
1 Kings 11:3 -"And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines...”Seven hundred wives have to be only in the wild imagination of the biblical scribe. Concubines are numbered separately, so the wives cannot be just ladies of his Harem, unless there was some kind of grading within that part of his palace. Just imagine the continual marriage ceremonies. Since his reign lasted almost 40 years that would be nearly 18 marriages for every years of his rule. We do know the names of some wives; especially his number one wife, Queen Etiye and we'll have a look at these in a moment. The concubines are easily found in historical fact, so we'll deal with these first. A total of Five Commemorative Scarabs have been found that mention Marriages of Ymn Htp III with foreign princesses. This one found at Tel Beath Shean in modern day Israel describes the '300 concubines of 1 Kings 11:3, as '317 ladies-in-waiting'Egyptian numerals were rather simple. They can be seen in the bottom row of glyphs at the extreme left - above. One vertical stroke was 'one' and this was repeated for numbers up to 9. A 'croquet hoop' glyph was used to count out 'tens', and something like a large inverted comma represented 'hundreds'. 1 Kings 11:19 -"...the king gave his sister-in-law, the sister of Queen Tahpenes, to Hadad in marriage."A letter on a stone tablet found in the ruins of Akhetaten, modern day Amarna, refers to one of Amenhotep III's wives, Taduheba. When the Greek rulers of Egypt Hellenised names of towns and people they changed this to Taduhepenes. 1 Kings 11:1 -"But King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites."Osman - 'Out of Egypt' -"He (Amenhotep) also furthered the cause of Peace by a series of judicious marriages - two princesses from Syria, Mitanni and Babylonia, and one from Arzawa in south-western Asia Minor." 1 Kings 7:8 -"Solomon made also an house for Pharaoh's daughter, whom he had taken to wife."Amenhotep III did indeed marry his father's daughter, Sitamun. A King of Israel could not have married the daughter of a Pharaoh. The Amarna letters tell us that Egyptian Kings did not give their daughters in marriage to foreign rulers. But there is no doubt that Amenhotep III's favourite wife was the Queen Etiye. She is always shown by Egyptologists as 'Tiye'. There was no letter 'E' in Egyptian, so dropping the initial 'E' is excusable. However we know from the Kebra Nagast that there was an initial 'E', since Solomon's Son's Mother was, we are told, 'Eteye Azeb'. Could Azeb be Asheb or Sheba? If so then Solomon did marry the Queen of Sheba. Attachments:
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:31:46 GMT -5
Koran - The Chapter of The Ant - 27 Mecca - (E H Palmer translation) "And it was said to her, 'Enter the court;' and when she saw it, she reckoned it to be an abyss of water, and she uncovered her legs. Said he, 'Verily, it is a court paved with glass!' “Now this is a very strong piece of evidence - ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE FOUND FRAGMENTS OF GLAZED TILES THAT REPRESENTED WATER AND SOME WITH PICTURES OF SWIMMING DUCKS AND FISH. WALL AND CEILING MURALS SHOWED BIRDS FLYING. BUT ONLY IN THE RUINS OF THE PALACE OF YMNHTP III AT MALQATA ON THE WEST BANK OF THE NILE FROM LUXOR 1 Kings 7:7 - The Throne Room, also called the Hall of Judgement, where Solomon decided cases, had cedar panels from the floor to the rafters." (Good News Version).The Throne Room of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes (Luxor west bank) has been described as follows: "The reception quarters consist of a large squarish hall with many rows of columns in wood and throne dais set along the axis of the entrance corridor, a second smaller hypostyle (columned) hall with a throne dais near it, a throne room and a bedroom. 1 Kings 7:1 - "Solomon also built a palace for himself and it took him thirteen years."The King's Palace in West Thebes was "the oldest and most important building, occupying the south-east quarter of the great complex and adjoined on the east by its kitchens, offices and store-rooms. It had also a section for the king's harem and was connected with a smaller palace, the residence of Queen Etiye, daughter of the king's high official, Yuya (Joseph). 1 Kings 7:8 - "Solomon's own quarters, in another court behind the Hall of Judgement, were made like other buildings. He also built the same kind of house for his wife, the daughter of the king of Egypt."Amenhotep III did indeed marry his own sister, the Princes Sitamun, "the daughter of Tuthmosis IV, in order to gain his right to the throne, which was the Egyptian custom. William C. Hayes, the American scholar, commented in an article in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1951: …'the great North Palace…appears to have been the residence of an extremely important royal lady, quite possibly Queen Sitamun.' 1 Kings 7:6 (KJV) - "And he made a porch of pillars; the length thereof was fifty cubits, and the breadth thereof thirty cubits: and the porch was before them: and the other pillars and the thick beam were before them.
1 Kings 7:6 (Good News Bible 2nd Edition) - "The Hall of Columns was 22.5 metres long and 13.5 metres wide. It had A COVERED PORCH, SUPPORTED BY COLUMNS." We can actually check these measurements against a plan of the ruins of Amenhotep III's Palace at Malqata on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor. Just check it for yourself. Go to the web page Malqata Palace. Identification can be made easier by increasing the size of the plan and scale until the scale of 40 metres is 4 centimetres long. One can do this by right clicking on computer mouse, and then 'Save Picture As...’ Open the image in a Photo, Browser or Word programme, and then drag a corner until the whole image increases to the desired size. The topmost hall in the plan only shows where 4 columns once stood, but in the Hall next to it, there is a double line of 8 columns, making 16 in all. Now measure with a ruler the length and width of this Hall. You should get a result of something close to 23.7 metres long and 13.7 metres wide. This is slightly over the Bible figures, but there would have been some panelling, and we do not know what cubit the ancients were using. The Good News Bible figures though indicate that the Akkadian or Ugarit cubit of 44.5 centimetres has been used Hayes described the Royal Audience Pavilion - "its floor elevated above the surrounding terrain, its northern façade provided with A BALCONY-LIKE PROJECTION JUTTING OUT INTO A DEEP, COLONNADED COURTYARD'. 1 Kings 7:2/3 - "The Hall of the Forest of Lebanon was 44 metres long, 22 metres wide, and 13.5 metres high. It had three rows of cedar pillars, fifteen in each row, with cedar beams resting on them. The ceiling was of cedar, extending over store-rooms which were supported by the pillars."Hayes described a 'Festival Hall, prepared for the celebration of Amenhotep III's second sed festival,' and wrote "a big colonnaded building that extended at the very north of the palace complex. The complex also included houses for other members of the royal family as well as court officials and servants. Exactly as the Bible says, all the pillars were of cedar wood imported from Lebanon." Alexander Badawy, an Egyptian scholar, gives a detailed description of the hall in his book, 'A History of Egyptian Architecture: 'Ceilings were of timber rafters, covered beneath with lath and plaster and painted with a series of protecting Nekhbet vultures in the official halls and in the bedroom of the Pharaoh, or with vines within a frame of rosettes and chequered pattern, spirals and bulls' heads, similar to Aegean ornament. Floors were decorated in the same technique to represent a pool with papyrus, lotus and fowl." * * * * * * Kings-1 7:10 And the foundation [was of] costly stones, even great stones, stones of ten cubits, and stones of eight cubits. Kings-1 7:11 And above [were] costly stones, after the measures of hewed stones, and cedars.In the Good News Bible, they have kindly converted the cubits into metric - "some of them 3600 millimetres long and others 4500 millimetres long. From "Ancient Egypt" magazine June/July 2009: "Another significant find is a large sandstone architrave. It was found broken in several pieces, which are now being cleaned and are to be joined and restored. It is 4.42 metres long and 1.7 metres wide. The architrave is inscribed on two sides with a hieroglyphic text in sunken relief, comprising the dedication text of the temple, which was called the 'House of Millions of Years' by Amenhotep III. [Malcolm - Salim Amen or Solomon]. There is however a discrepancy. The Bible states that the palace was built with stones, and whilst this is true to some extent, as is proven by the architrave and foundation stones, it is thought that Malqata Palace was built with mud bricks which would have been much cooler in the hot summer months. The theory then goes on to say that the mud bricks have deteriorated and vanished over the thousands of years. Isn't it just as likely that local villagers pillage stones they could move and use for their own homes? After all they did this elsewhere and removed most of the limestone slabs that once covered the Pyramids. Attachments:
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:40:02 GMT -5
1 Kings 11:42 -"He was king in Jerusalem over all Israel for forty years."
Amenhotep III was King of both Egypt and the land that became Israel. It is now generally accepted that his reign lasted from 1382 BCE to 1344BCE, and according to the historian Manetho, his rule lasted for 38 years and 7 months.
But why stress 'Jerusalem'. Why not just 'king over all Israel'? It is like saying that the Elizabeth is Queen in London over all Australia which is true, but it wouldn't sound right if the record also said that she was Queen in London over all England. Again true, but unlikely to be put this way.
If however Israel at the time was an appellation referring not to a nation but to a people who were highly concentrated in the capital province that was known as 'The City founded on Peace', i.e. 'Uru Salim', at least three hundred years before the supposed biblical account and before the Exodus then it makes more sense.
Furthermore Amenhotep III's son Akhenaten was a Co-Regent with his seat of power in his new city of Akhetaten. Thus the verse could very well be disassociating Israel from the new heretic cult of the Aten. The priests of Amen, who still exist to this very day, were it is well known trying to regain power and Amenhotep III could have been in dispute over this with his son.
A possible scenario therefore is that Horemheb expelled Akhenaten (believed to be Moses), who left Egypt with his followers and ended up in Qumran, hence his name in The Copper Scroll. Subsequently Rameses I expels the Heprw people who have reverted to the God, Amen. Horemheb was the last Pharaoh to have the Heprw Sign in his Throne name, until Seti II in 1200 BCE. But this is only conjecture and one of many possibilities.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:42:59 GMT -5
1 Kings 4:7 -1 Kings 4:7 -"Solomon appointed twelve men as district governors in Israel. They were to provide food from their districts for the king and his household, each man being responsible for one month out of the year." (Good News Version).
Osman - 'Out of Egypt' - "The sudden appearance of such a supposed administration in Israelite tribal society during the 'United Monarchy of David and Solomon' in the 10th century BC, without any roots in the nation's previous history and followed by its sudden disappearance after Solomon's death, has been a source of puzzlement to scholars.
The apparent contradiction is resolved, however, once identification of the historical David (Tuthmosis III) and Solomon (Amenhotep III) makes it clear that the sophisticated administration described in the Old Testament is the administration established by these two monarchs in the 15th and 14th centuries BC to deal with the day-to-day task of ruling Egypt and its empire.
During the empire period - and particularly during the time of Tuthmosis III (David) - the administrative system was reorganized to suit the needs of the age, and later further developed by Amenhotep III. It was then that, for the purposes of taxation, the empire was arranged in 12 administrative sections, an arrangement that the biblical narrator drew on for his account of the king the world now knows as Solomon.
Almost all scholars agree (for example the German scholar Otto Eissfeldt) that the taxation system that the Bible says was introduced by Solomon matches precisely the system that was used in Egypt after Tuthmosis III had established the new Egyptian empire.
Each of the 12 areas was the responsibility of a high official and was expected to contribute sufficient tax to cover the country's needs for one month of the year."
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:44:59 GMT -5
1Kings 10:26 -"And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen: and he had a thousand and four hundred chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen, whom he bestowed in the cities for chariots, and with the king at Jerusalem."
Osman - 'Out of Egypt' - "These figures are far beyond the scope of a minor kingdom that Israel may have been at that time. They could only have been mustered by Egypt. Amenhotep III organized his Chariotry into a separate Unit early in his reign and his father-in-law Yuya (Yu-Zaph or Joseph), as the first minister to bear the title 'Deputy of His Majesty in the Chariotry."
1Kings 10:28/29 "The King's agents controlled the export of chariots from Egypt"
This is absolute proof that Solomon was a King of Egypt as well as head of his people whom he called 'Israel'. Only the King of Egypt's own agents could control the export of what was then equivalent to the nuclear power of the 14th century BC.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 18:59:40 GMT -5
1Kings 11:4 - "….his wives turned away his heart after other gods…"
Amenhotep's name tells us that he worshipped the god 'Amen'.
Towards the end of his reign it appears that he turned to the god of his wife Queen Tiye's father, Yuya (Joseph), the Aten.
The events described by Graham Phillips in his book "Act of God" may have been the trigger. - "For someone so completely devoted to Amun-Re, Amonhotep does something very strange towards the end of his independent reign: he erects literally hundreds of statues to another deity - the goddess Sekhmet. At Asher, half a kilometre to the south of the Temple of Amun, Amonhotep was in the process of rebuilding a temple to the chief goddess Mut, when he suddenly reconsecrated it as a temple to Sekhmet."
We have to be talking about Egypt here. 1 Kings 11:4 His wives turned his head over other gods.
If Solomon was devoted to one God, who were all these other gods? In the case of YmnHtp III we do know that he went along with his son Akhenaten with the worship of the one God, the Aten, and the Lord. So this may be what was meant.
Aten is Egyptian for Adhonai or Greek 'Adonis'. It means 'The Lord'.
We know from Joseph's Cartouche that he was a worshipper of the God YW, i.e. YAHWEH, since he has the God Name Glyphs for that god preceding his name - Two Water Reed Glyphs.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 21, 2012 19:02:35 GMT -5
There are two theories behind the name of Jerusalem.
Osman suggests that it derives from the words 'Uru' and 'Salim'. 'Uru' comes from the verb 'yarah', meaning to found or establish. 'Salim' means peace. Thus Uru-Salim was the City founded on Peace. In view of Amenhotep III's long reign of peace, this is quite possible, and in this case it would have to have been Thebes.
On the other hand, according to Massey, "There were already two Jerusalem’s from the time when Judea and Palestine were appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalem’s were recognized by Paul, one terrestrial, one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem or fields of peace, equivalent to Aarru-hetep or Sekhet-hetep, the fields of peace in Egyptian.
Jerusalem below was the localized representative of Jerusalem above, the Aarru-salem or Aarru-hetep on the mount of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars."
If this is the true origin, then Hebrew migrants may have named their new city after the celestial one. On the other hand, if author Tony Bushby is right in surmising that King Solomon's Temple is the complex recently discovered beneath the Pyramids and Sphinx, then the immediate vicinity may have been the first 'fields of peace' or Jerusalem.
There is, I believe, a more logical explanation. We must remember that the biblical King David was Djayhwt III and that it was this king who built the first great temple in Waset (Thebes/Luxor) followed by his great grandson SalimAmen III who added to the Temple complex. Therefore we know for certain that Luxor was King David's City.
The Egyptians embellished people and places with several names besides the ones that we recognise today. It is therefore quite possible that they not only called Waset the 'Many Gated City', *** but also knew it as IAH RE SALIM - (The Peace or Rest of the Moon God Yah and the Sun God Reh).
Wherever we find a name beginning with 'Y' in Egyptian or Hebrew, then English has a tendency to transliterate this into a 'J'.
Similarly Akhetaten's (Moses) new city of Akhetaten was very likely known as IAH RE KA - (The Spirit of Yah and Re). Horemheb aka Djoser Setepenre (Joshua) was a general who became King and he did knock down the city walls of Akhetaten, and in fact tried to expunge every memory of this city and the King who built it. So this was the original Jericho.
*** The Koran says that Joseph's brothers entered the city by different gates. This is also in Jewish traditions. (Midrash bereshith Rabbah 89). Thebes was known around the ancient world as ‘The city with many gates'. Homer mentioned it circa 8th century BC as the hundred-gated city. Waset (Greek named Thebes) was full of whacking great Pylon gates - ceremonial and part of the Temple complex.
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