03x01 - Moses Vs. Akhenaton

[bunniefuu]

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- What does it all mean?

This is where the archeology has been found.

Oh hi, how are you?

Look at that.

I need a planter.

♪ From the mountain tops ♪

A shrine to a belly button.

This is a rock of salt.

♪ He digs for clues ♪

Look at that!

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

No one gets into this place?

- No one.

- Let's, whoa, don't take me too far.

Now that's naked archeology.

♪ For his archeology ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪

You wouldn't think that in a wine store,

you can actually come up with a biblical mystery.

To everyone else, this is just a cigar.

To me, it's a bit of archeology.

The guy who came up with the idea,

Sigmund Freud, that this thing isn't just a cigar.

- Well, this is not exactly a cigar.

- He also had an idea about Moses, you know Moses?

Who parted the sea, who led the Israelites out of Egypt.

He says that Moses, isn't the big sh*t

that the Bible says he is.

He said, no, Moses, wasn't a follower of God.

He was a follower of a Pharaoh named Akhenaten.

When Akhenaten got kicked out,

Moses took all the slaves, ran out

and he was really setting up Atenism,

Akhenatenism, not Judaism.

- It's all so complicated. - Is it?

- He wrote the whole thing

in a book called "Moses and Monotheism".

Basically, what he's saying is Moses

is a sidekick, not an originator.

But what's the truth?

Didn't Moses introduce monotheism,

or was it Akhenaten and what can archeology tell us

about the birth of our belief in one God?

(bell rings)

- [Announcer] There's the bell!

Man, oh man, what a fight this is going to be!

- [Narrator] For the longest time, no one had ever heard

of Akhenaten or his legacy.

- What an imagination!

- [Narrator] But then, in the late th century,

archeologists digging the Egyptian ruin of Amarna,

discovered the massive coverup.

- I'm sure of that.

- [Narrator] Someone had tried to bury Akhenaten

in the sands of history forever.

Why?

Because back in the th century BCE,

Akhenaten his wife Nefertiti tried to switch Egypt

from polytheism to the belief in one God.

- Together, we bring Egypt to all of its glory.

- [Narrator] This discovery has caused many scholars

to say that Akhenaten's religion

was the real inspiration for the Bible.

And if Moses existed at all,

he was just one of Akhenaten's followers.

- But why, why does it matter? - For several reasons, look.

- [Narrator] If Moses was a follower

of Akhenaten's religion,

then that means Muslims, Jews and Christians

are just backdoor followers of Akhenaten.

- Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

- [Narrator] Historians agree

that Akhenaten inherited the throne in BCE.

- I know my duty, I promise.

- [Narrator] Around the same time

he married his first cousin, the legendary beauty Nefertiti.

- You mean everything to me.

- But then, five years into his reign,

Akhenaten and Nefertiti converted Egypt

to the belief in the sun god named Aten

which was represented by a circular golden disk.

But what did the Aten symbol stand for?

To find out more, I'm meeting with Michelle Moran.

So whenever I hear the word action, I will start.

Who has written several books on Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

We don't know that much about what

this religion was all about.

There's a song, there's an inscription

that seems to be very close.

- There is a hymn to Aten and in the hymn,

it talks about Aten as being the mother and father

of all creation, a male and female deity,

which wasn't represented by either male or female,

but just a disk of a sun.

- [Narrator] It's believed that Akhenaten wrote

the hymn himself.

And it's remarkably similar to Psalm in the Bible.

- And speaking of the book,

it wouldn't hurt you to use one some time

and check up on any point that you're not sure of.

- [Narrator] In it, he praises Aten

for being the sole creator of the world

and the creator of all creatures, including humankind.

In fact, there seems to be many similarities

between Aten and the God of Israel.

Both Aten and the Biblical God are singular gods

that combine both male and female energies into one.

Both are credited with creating light

and just like Moses taught the Israelites

that their God was the only God,

Akhenaten also told the Egyptians

that Aten was the only God.

- In your name, I bring peace and justice.

- [Narrator] You see, the pharaohs of Egypt

had always been allowed to choose a god

that represented them.

But they would've never suggested

that any of the gods in the Egyptian pantheon

were false idols.

But five years into his reign,

Akhenaten made a move that enraged the priest

of the Amun Cult.

- Betrayers!

- [Narrator] The most powerful group in ancient Egypt.

- Tell us, say what you told me!

- This was a huge and sweeping revolution

that changed the people's lives entirely.

Not only did they displace Egypt's old gods,

but they actually moved the capital,

the entire capital, to a place called Akhetaten

and which archeologists call Amarna

and create their entire city there dedicated to Aten.

- So this is like the president of United States

saying no more Washington, we're movin'-

- To Arizona. - Yeah.

- I can imagine there were a lot of people not best pleased.

- [Narrator] Amarna was built in the middle of Egypt

and to get there, I have to travel by ferry,

south along the Nile where the world doesn't look

like it's changed all that much from Akhenaten's time.

Inside the tombs at Amarna, I can't help

but notice how the art and architecture are different

from what I'd normally expect from Ancient Egypt.

Whereas most other Egyptian art

includes fantastical creatures

and idyllic representations of the pharaohs,

there's something very human

about the way Akhenaten and Nefertiti are depicted.

- The sculptor named Bek who's portraying the couples

as they really were.

So you have, for example,

an image of Nefertiti chowing down on a huge haunch of ribs,

or you have her having one

of her six children playing on her lap and playing with some

of the streamers coming from her crown.

- So what you're saying is

that they revolutionized religion,

they revolutionized art,

they revolutionized family relationships.

They changed everything.

- Absolutely everything.

- But maybe they went too fast.

- Anyone who tries to have a revolution too quickly

is gonna drown under the waters.

They were definitely remembered as heretics.

They are considered the heretic king and queen.

- [Narrator] Within years of their reign,

Akhenaten and Nefertiti were overthrown

by the powerful Amun Cult

and possibly even m*rder*d.

- You'll pay now, just as I said, with your heads!

- [Narrator] In fact,

when the Amun Priests took over control,

they rotated all the bricks in Akhenaten's temples

and painted the walls with tributes to their old gods

so as to wipe the royal couple

from the history books forever.

(trumpets tooting)

- Forwards!

- [Narrator] But now their story has prompted scholars

to believe the Bible was inspired by Akhenaten

and that Moses was just a priest in Akhenaten's temple.

- That's impossible.

No, please.

- [Narrator] According to this theory,

when the Cult of Amun m*rder*d Akhenaten and Nefertiti,

Moses decided to lead an army of true believers

into the Sinai Desert,

taking with him all of Akhenaten's best ideas.

To find out who influenced who,

I'm going to have to figure out who came first,

Moses, or Akhenaten.

- [Announcer] It won't be long now, folks!

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- [Narrator] I'm looking for evidence

that can tell me who was the first to introduce

the organized belief in one God.

- [Announcer] And a left and a right,

he's waitin' for a chance at that famous right hook.

Look out!

- So far, I found out that Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti

championed the monotheistic religion in Egypt

back in the th century BCE.

This has caused some scholars to say that Akhenaten

was the original inspiration

for the Biblical story of the Exodus

and the first scholar to suggest this

was none other than Dr. Sigmund Freud.

Freud wrote a very famous book, "Moses and Monotheism",

the idea that Moses was an Akhenaten follower

and when the whole Amarna Period goes down,

Akhenaten, Nefertiti, they're m*rder*d.

Here's this one outta work. - Aten priest, perhaps.

- Aten priest, he says to the slaves, hey guys, follow me!

Goes to the desert, everybody's following.

And essentially Judaism is Atenism revised, right?

And of course, out of that flows Christianity,

Islam, and everything else,

- I feel that there's certainly a connection

between Moses and the monotheism

as it was practiced by Akhenaten and Aten worshiping.

Did that influence Moses?

Did that influence Judaism, Christianity?

It all depends on the date.

- Who's first is influencing the other guy.

- Yes.

- [Narrator] If Freud's right,

that would mean Moses led an Exodus out

of Egypt exactly when Akhenaten was overthrown in BCE.

But I don't buy Freud's theory at all.

- Let's look at it this way.

- [Narrator] My reading of the Book of Kings

clearly dates the Exodus to BC,

years before the first temple in Jerusalem was built

and exactly years before Akhenaten's reign.

But what's interesting is that the Bible says

that it took Moses and his followers exactly years

to cross through the Sinai Desert

and another hundred years to start gaining control

of the Land of Canaan, modern day Israel.

So if the Biblical timeline is right,

then I should be able to find some evidence

of a conquest of Canaan going on exactly

at the time of Akhenaten's reign.

And it just so happens that evidence exists.

(horn toots)

They're called the Amarna Letters,

stone tablets that were sent to Akhenaten

by desperate Canaanite kings, begging him to send them help

to defend against an attacking army of nomads.

- Your men ransack our homes and they are never punished.

- [Narrator] Now I want to find out what

these Amarna Letters really say.

So I'm on my way to The British Museum in London

to meet with curator, Dr. Irving Finkel.

- I've brought you, in this tray,

a selection of our Amarna Tablets,

because I know that's what you're interested in.

- [Simcha] And these are them?

- [Irving] And these are real specimen.

- Well, I thought they were a much bigger.

I thought you'd be coming in

with like a wheelbarrow or something.

- No, these are small, but perfectly formed,

but all these and about another

were discovered at Amarna by locals.

It was immediately apparent,

even though the script is often sometimes quite difficult,

that they were letters and that they were royal letters

to the king, my lord, to the king, my lord.

The bulk of these letters are to do with money and politics.

This is a typical example of one of these letters.

- You do read this?

- Sure I read it.

(speaking in foreign language)

- So this is amazing, he's reading a ,-year-old letter.

I don't read English that well.

The Amarna Letters clearly show

that Canaan was being att*cked by a group

of nomads called the Habiru

who had come out of the Sinai Desert

and started attacking the Canaanites.

Since the land of Canaan was under Egyptian protection

at the time, it makes complete sense

that the Canaanite Kings would send Akhenaten letters,

pleading for his support.

- Lots of the letters say, I need troops.

I need help.

Please send, please send, please send.

- That's understandable.

Here they are, these Canaanites.

They're being att*cked by these Habiru people.

They've been sucking up to the Egyptians for a long time-

- And they get nothing in return.

And the conventional idea is that Akhenaten

is reclining on his couch,

philosophizing about the structure of the universe

and there's only one God and not being interested

with all this of stuff and probably somebody came in

and said, you know,

there's a very urgent message, Your Highness.

If I read this, it looks like there's gonna be trouble.

Ah, leave me alone or something like this.

- [Narrator] The Amarna Letters prove

that at the time of Akhenaten's reign,

a conquest of Canaan was already underway

by an army of nomads called the Habiru.

- Can't you explain why that is so?

- [Narrator] Habiru, sure sounds like Hebrew.

Could Amarna's Habiru that conquered the promised land

be the Hebrew tribes that Moses led

through the Sinai Desert?

- This has been a very enlightening visit.

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- I wanna find out who spread monotheism first,

Moses or Akhenaten.

I've just seen the Amarna Letters in London

and found out that at the time of Akhenaten's reign,

a conquest of Canaan was happening

that perfectly matches the conquest recorded in the Bible.

The Amarna Letters call the conquers of Canaan Habiru.

Who were they?

I've come to the ancient city of Lachish,

one of the Canaanite cities att*cked by the Habiru

during Akhenaten's reign.

It's here than a meeting with Ahmed Osman,

an expert in both Egyptian and biblical history.

It's mentioned in a Tel Amarna Letters,

the letters that were written to King Akhenaten,

saying, help us, help us, we're being att*cked.

And I thought, well,

Akhenaten, what better place than be in front of the city

which he didn't help.

- Yes, in fact, he didn't help anybody.

I mean, in Jerusalem and other locations in Canaan,

they all wrote letters to King Akhenaten asking him

to help them because they were att*cked

by some strange people called Habiru

and he was not interested to help them.

So he didn't care.

- A lotta people have speculated at these Habiru people

that are mentioned

in the Tel Amarna Letters are actually the Hebrews.

- Yes, I believe they were Hebrews.

Not necessarily meaning Israelites

because the Israelites are one tribe of the Hebrews.

- So not all Hebrews are Israelites,

but all Israelites are Hebrews.

- [Ahmed] That's it.

- If you find like bagels and lox

in his stomach you'll know.

- You will know, yes.

- Ahmed Osman believes that the Habiru nomads

that att*cked Canaan were actually Hebrews

that came out of the Sinai Desert.

This confirms the conquest of the promised land described

in the Bible.

You see, even though the Land of Canaan

had strategic importance for the Egyptians,

during his reign, Akhenaten ignored the Amarna Letters

and he let Canaan fall to the Hebrews.

Begging the question,

if Akhenaten wasn't against the Hebrew conquest,

could it be that he was actually for it?

He's not sending the cavalry.

- He does not send the cavalry.

In fact, he responds with requests for more glassware

for his table.

- Thank you for telling me that you're dying.

Can you send some more glass?

- I really like the gold plate.

- What do you make of that?

- That's a man who is completely self-absorbed.

- Some people speculate that this group is the Hebrews.

- I speculate that in my second book.

There probably is some sort of association between them.

- But if that's the case, if he's before Moses,

how can you have Hebrews of the gates in Canaan?

- That is a good question.

- People haven't figured it out, eh?

- No, they haven't.

- [Narrator] Since I found out that the Habiru nomads

who conquered Canaan were actually Hebrews,

I think I've also figured out why Pharaoh Akhenaten

refused to help the Canaanites.

- I was looking for love.

And I found it.

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

My quest to find out who was the first

to spread. monotheism has taken a turn.

Even though there's plenty of evidence that Akhenaten

and Nefertiti did start a monotheistic revolution in Egypt.

- I've had great monuments created for honoring you.

- There seems to be evidence

that a Hebrew exodus from Egypt might've influenced them.

You seem Akhenaten's grandfather might be able

to explain everything.

Akhenaten's grandpa was named Yuya

and his sarcophagus is now kept

at the Cairo Museum in Egypt.

Back in , Yuya's mummy was found buried

in the Valley of Kings,

alongside the top pharaohs of Egyptian history.

According to Ahmed Osman, Yuya is a Hebrew name,

not an Egyptian one.

You say, and you called your book

"Stranger in the Valley of the Kings" right?

- Yes.

- Here's this mummy of this guy named Yuya

and he was the grandfather of Akhenaten.

- Yes, in the tomb, they found his name spelled

in different ways,

but all the names have the Y.

- The Ya sound.

- Yes, the Egyptians relate the person's name

to the God he worshiped.

Yu, I mean Yu is a short of Yahweh or Jehovah or...

- Akhenaten named himself after his God, Aten.

Akhenaten's father was named after the Egyptian god Amun,

but Akhenaten's grandfather's name,

represents the God of Israel.

This is the name of the God of Israel built into a name

and it's clearly not Egyptian.

And you're the only guy who says,

here's a guy who doesn't fit in the Valley of Kings.

You're saying this, Yuya guy is not Egyptian.

- He is from the tribe of Jacob who came from Canaan.

And he's an Israelite, of course.

- Okay, now that's controversial, right?

- Okay, look at it, examine it and see

if I have enough evidence or not.

- So you're saying either, you know,

he doesn't look like Egyptian.

- No, if you look at his profile, he's a Semitic.

- Does he got a big nose?

- Yes.

- He's got the Semitic good looks.

- Yes.

- Okay, so bottom line about Yuya,

his name tells you he's a Semite.

His looks tell you he's a Semite.

- Yes.

- My search to find out whether Akhenaten's faith

in one God was influenced by Moses

might've just hit pay dirt.

Not only that the archeology confirm a Hebrew conquest

of the promised land at the time of Akhenaten's reign,

but now there's evidence

that Akhenaten's grandfather was Hebrew too.

The name, Yuya, suggests that both Akhenaten

and Nefertiti supported the conquest of Canaan recorded

in the Biblical books of Joshua and Judges.

The reason they supported a Hebrew conquest

was because they were closet Hebrews.

The patriarch of the family is known as Yuya.

I'm amazed at the utter closed mindedness

of so many Egyptologists.

The Ya sound is the God of Israel.

So if you see these guys

whose very names reflect their belief in an Egyptian way.

Now we can explain why he's not reacting to the Canaanites.

If you have a monotheist pharaoh, right?

He is gonna be supportive of the Habiru.

- Because he doesn't care if it's taken over.

- He doesn't care.

They're his ideological buddies.

- I think it's completely possible.

- So, anyway, that's my theory and I'm stickin' to it.

- It's a good one.

- It's a good one.

- That is, actually, it really is.

- So there it is.

Freud was wrong.

Moses, wasn't the priest of Akhenaten,

Akhenaten was a follower of Moses.

But what might just be the smoking g*n in my theory

is leading me back to Amarna.

You see, when archeologists uncovered the ruins

of Akhenaten's capital,

they also came across the tomb of a man named Merari.

Not only did Merari serve as a high priest

in Akhenaten's temple,

he was also Nefertiti's superintendent

and, as some experts believe,

Akhenaten's royal scribe.

So what does Merari have to do with anything?

Well, Merari is not only the name of one

of the three branches of Levite priests in the Jewish faith,

he's also the cousin of Moses himself.

The Bible specifically says

that the Merarites were priests in the tabernacle of God.

Is it just a coincidence

that Merari is a priest in the Bible

and the priest in Akhenaten's temple?

Or did Akhenaten turn to Moses' family

when he needed a high priest?

For me, when you add up the evidence,

it shows that Akhenaten's monotheism

was influenced by earlier Hebrew ideas.

You know, I gotta say,

the more I learned about this guy, Akhenaten,

the more I like him.

I don't think he was the inspiration for Moses.

I think he was inspired by Moses, but you know what?

He was willing to put his power where his mouth is,

he was willing to sacrifice everything for his beliefs.

He depicted God as light, Madonna would love this guy.

It's Kabbalah, little hands of warmth coming from heaven.

The more I learn about him, the more I like him,

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ From a tall, tall land ♪

♪ He makes no apologies ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ From a tall, tall land ♪

♪ No apologies ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪