Casper

as a side note, I learned what bustophedron or boustophedron refers to. Man I love this board!

spin

Just a note, the -u- is wrong -- I was working from another language there. The -ou- is correct.

ETA:

Eeek, boustrophedon. The pesky word... 'bou-' from bous "ox", -strophe, ie "turn". It's from plowing land, the bull pulling the plow, then turning to go back for the next row.


spin

Casper

Not a problem. Ceaser, Caesar, it all works on the net

spin

The version of the Shishak story in 2 Chr 12 is an interesting aid to this matter. God is reported as saying "my wrath shall not be poured out in Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak". Jerusalem was not destroyed by Shishak, but Jerusalem capitulated: "they shall be his servants". The tradition, which doesn't have Jerusalem destroyed by Shishak, matches Shoshenq's own account of the cities destroyed, ie Jerusalem is not mentioned, but many others are, that feature destruction in the latter part of the tenth century, such as Megiddo, Rehob, Taanach and Gezer. While Shoshenq I is on record as having destroyed these places, I didn't know that Ramses II was. Palestine was so well under the control of Egypt that the Egyptian front was up in Syria, where Ramses fought a battle against Hattusili III the Hittite at Qadesh.

See above. And, while Ramses II had no reason to need to destroy his cities in Palestine, the territory was lost to the Egyptians during the 20th dynasty and Shoshenq I was the first pharaoh to emerge again to rip through Palestine.

There's not much here, other than an oblique reference to Byblos inscriptions. Perhaps this point could be rendered more tangible so it can receive a response.

No problem has been demonstrated as yet. On hold.

The Merneptah Stela features Israel as what should be a tribal group (talking about "its seed"), unlike any of the others. Also, I would have thought that Israel, along with Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam, was a specification of the previous statement that Canaan had been plundered, so, no, it doesn't place Israel on a par with Hatti, Libya or Syria. That's just more wishful thinking.

(And note the northward movement from Ashkelon to Gezer to Yanoam, so we should expect that Israel is a small group of locality status located north of Yanoam.)

Nothing needing comment here. Yurco's opinion is all that's at stake.

How the Hittites represented Ramses is quite irrelevant here. What would be at stake here is the apparently unsupported claim that Sysw was common currency in Syro-Palestine. Perhaps some evidence could be proferred (although I've asked for evidence of Rohl's claims without any success so far). I know about the Shasu, but Rohl is claiming that Ramses was being referred to by his hypocoristic, which seems odd because Ramses II so frequently placed his official names on everything he was responsible for. Is there a confirmed sighting of Ramses' hypocoristic outside Egypt?

It would be good if Rohl could write terms more literally. The etymology of )y$ (alef, yod, shin) is under doubt, but it seems to be related to the Akkadian i$anu (strong). I don't think Rohl is in any position to posit an Egyptian source for )y$.

Kush is an amusing example. If we look at Gen 10:8ff we find Kush the father of Nimrod, who was responsible for the land of Shinar. Obviously, the writer had ka$$u in mind here. (The dynasty that ruled Babylon during the Middle Assyrian period were the Kassites.) The writer has plainly confused ka$$u with Rohl's Kus and ended up with Kush.

As to "Shutu" I have no idea where it is in Hebrew literature. Perhaps David Rohl could provide the reference.

I didn't know that there were any Hebrew texts available from the Late Bronze or early Iron Ages for comparison. Hoch obviously was working not with Hebrew as a source for the Semitic words. But any port in a storm.

So we come back to... if known Egyptian examples of /s/ are samek in Hebrew, why isn't it the case that Shishak was written with a samek?

The claim regarding the Izbet Sartah inscription is wrong and I haven't been able to track down a "Lachish VI ostracon", so I can't comment there, though as it is dated to the 12th c., it seems too early to reflect Hebrew anyway.

This is all rendered mute by the problems noted above.

Numerous clarifications have been asked in this exchange, but very few, if any, have been provided upon request.

Rohl has avoided the evidence which points to the name in Hebrew actually being $w$q, given the Ketiv reading and the support of the consistent LXX transliteration. As I said, it's a very inconvenient truth. He has to fudge not only the first, third and fourth letters, but also the second.


spin

David Rohl

Spin seems to think that every town/city listed on Egyptian walls as subservient to pharaoh was destroyed. Nowhere do these lists say that the towns were destroyed. How naive can you get? No-one in their right mind would think that Egyptians went around destroying all the cities in their sphere of influence - economic self-mutilation would not be very bright would it?. Did Thutmose III destroy Megiddo or Kadesh - both of which, according to his annals, he beseiged? No. But they nevertheless get listed on his walls with the rest of the vassal towns.

Did Pharaoh Shiskak politely wait outside Jerusalem whilst the priests and officials brought out bits of treasure to pay him off? No. How daft do you think the Egyptians were? It clearly states that the Egyptians 'took' the treasures from the temple and palace. The city was plundered of its wealth. And why doesn't Shoshenk's list include the Judaean fortified settlements which Shishak seized? Nowhere does any Egyptian city-list require the destruction of the towns, only their submission.

Spin is just a very uninformed character with some very wild ideas:

(1) Eclipses cannot take place at the beginning of a lunar month.
(2) The Goshen of the Israelites' Egyptian Sojourn was in Arabia.
(3) Egyptians destroyed every town that they listed on their reliefs.
(4) The name of the Kassites in Mesopotamia is the origin of the name of the Kushites in Sudan.

It's amazing to me how he gets away with his madness - but you all seem to be intimidated by him to such a degree that he rarely gets challenged. Sad.

David Rohl

DR: So we are now quoting God for historical evidence are we?

DR: Produce a single text or piece of evidence to show that Shoshenk destroyed these cities. Then explain why Shoshenk (as Shishak) campaigned against cities which were not in Judah but didn't campaign against cities that were in Judah? To quote God once again, it was Judah upon which he sent the wrath of Egypt not Israel, who's king had been supported by Egypt.

Next give me evidence to link the destructions of Megiddo, Rehob, Taanach and Gezer with Shoshenk. Another fine piece of circular reasoning:

(a) Shoshenk I is Shishak.
(b) Therefore Shoshenk is dated to the 10th century based on the Bible.
(c) The late-10th century destructions in the Kingdom of Israel are therefore the work of Shoshenk.

This whole scenario is based on the original identification and, even though all the evidence is against Shoshenk being Shishak (viz. the campaign relief), he must be responsible for the destructions. There are PhD studies that have shown that Egypt only very rarely destroyed towns in the northern territories (from memory, the only example was the destruction of Sharuhen by Ahmose). Given the down-dating of the archaeology of Megiddo by Finkelstein and Ussishkin (the current excavators), the most likely destroyers of the northern cities were the Aramaean hordes from Syria.

DR: No Shoshenk is not on record as having destroyed these places. That is completely untrue. Stelae of Ramesses II have been found which mention the capture of Gezer and Ashkelon.

Spin should really avoid playing his games in the Egyptological, archaeological and historical playgrounds because he knows next to nothing about these subjects and is just making a fool of himself.

spin

As usual Bro Rohl is perversely packaging information. This at least seems to be something he has a penchant for. One reads in the fertile crescent of towns being reduced to a pile of dust. Destruction. It was a relative thing.

Did Shishak need to wave a stick at Jerusalem?

Says the fellow who seems relatively clueless about linguistics! Not all lollipops are what one wants them to be.

This is desperation when it has already been admitted as a brain fart.

Are you so slow that you still don't understand what is being talked about? Or are you just misrepresenting for inability to do anything better?...

...I guess it has to be misrepresentation.

Another sorry misrepresentation.

The process I described seems difficult for David Rohl to (want to) understand, but an analogy: when an area shared by India and Pakistan where there were five rivers had its name transcribed by the Brits, it came out written Punjab, which many pronounced poon-jab, but "punj" rhymes with "grunge" and means five in Hindi. That of course was lost because the origin of the word was unimportant once a spelling had been established.

Another analogy: we call a collection of letters an alphabet, but that is only really appropriate for the Greek collection. Then we call a written exemplar of an alphabet an "abecedary", coming from the first four letters of the Latin alphabet, which might be inappropriate for a written Hebrew alefbet, but we still use it.

It should be clear from Gen 10:8ff where the name Kush came from, as it is strictly connected with both Mesopotamia and Kus. The origin of the name is unimportant once the form had been established.

Obviously David Rohl hasn't been here long enough to have any idea of the dynamics of the forum. He's a little too caught up with his own hobby horse to notice much of the real world.




spin

judge

I wouldn't get too worked up David. This place is merely an amatuer internet forum. Don't take it too seriously. Some people though, are confusing it with the real world.

All the best with your work when you return to it.

David Rohl

DR: You're absolutely right! Time to give this up as a complete waste of time. I have no complaints about everybody else who has contributed to this thread - all of whom have been polite and sensible. However, there is no point whatsoever in arguing with a man who is incapable of normal and reasoned debate. So I will get back to my work and leave this place to him. He is obviously at home here and I would hate to make him feel any more uncomfortable. Will check in occasionally to see how you are all doing.

spin

I guess David Rohl has difficulty perceiving the difference between text and god.

Do you honestly think that Merneptah reduced Yanoam to "non-existence"? Destruction of an ancient city was quite an elastic idea to the propagandists of the powerful. This sort of literalness is of fundy proportions.

During the early Roman empire, do you think that it was only christians who were persecuted? If you read only christians sources, that's all you would hear. Reading Judahite sources will tend to tell you things from the Judahite perspective.

Once again the fundy literalist attitude.

We see pundits here who try to argue circularities with frequency. They do the sort of thing David Rohl does here, ie repackage in order to misrepresent.

Rohl's approach is basically a restatement of arguments from his book. But let's look at the data.

We have a name $w$q, which, if one consults all the Egyptian pharaohs, reflects well Shoshenq's name (needing only the assimilation of the /n/) -- so obviously without any kludges of Rohlian proportions. (It shouldn't be a shin, and the qof is really a waw, and the difficult reading of the waw should be ignored even though it refects all the transliterations of the name into Greek.)

A statue of Shoshenq was reused by king Abibaal of Byblos, father of Hyram (Josephus Contra Apion 1.18). Hyram's coffin has been dated due to the palaeography of the Phoenician inscription on it to the 10th c. BCE, placing Abibaal to the 10th c. and Shoshenq before him. Palaeography is not an exact science so there is some latitude, but we have a good indication of Shoshenq being in the 10th c.

[We could also construct an independent dating for Shoshenq I through the bridging synchronism between Egypt of Akhnaten and Assyria of Ashur-uballit I (from the Amarna letters), the continuous Assyrian chronology of the kinglists (which is well-supported by epigraphy) making this relatively easy. Hanging the relative chronology from Akhnaten (at the time of Ashur-uballit I) requires a length of time close enough to the status quo chronology, which would put Shoshenq where he is at the moment, mid to late 10th c.]

Shoshenq I is a good candidate for the figure mentioned in the Rehoboam story.

Besides the incredulity here of the notion of destruction being flexible, Rohl talks of Finkelstein, who wrote a paper in 2002 called "The Campaign of Shoshenq I to Palestine: A Guide to the 10th Century BCE Polity." He may have changed his views since 2002, but certainly not sufficiently to change his connection of Shoshenq with the archaeological evidence he used in 2002.

If we overlook David Rohl's language fundamentalism, ie a word cannot be used to mean anything other than what is deemed the literal meaning, there's a wall at the temple at Karnak that provides his itinerary and to quote Donald Redford, "it is highly likely that Sheshonq's itinerary can also be construed as a swath of destruction and captured cities". (E.C.&I. p.313.) Did Sheshonq include all the cities taken in the campaign?

I try to avoid matters Egyptological.

My comments have mainly been about Rohl's confused notions of linguistics as seen in his unconvincing connection between Ramses II and the figure we usually call Shishak through a species of argument by vague similarity of appearance, abetting this confusion by incoherent attempts at etymologies of other words, apparently without knowledge of the orthographic issues or any functional methodology behind his phonological dabblings.

At the end we are left with a four letter name, none of the letters of which are found in his hypothesized source and a pack of excuses as to why his candidate should get the nod.

We haven't even started on the crux of the biscuit: how his lopping of several hundred years from Egyptian chronology can survive comparison with the continuous chronology of Assyria. Mr Rohl would be shredded by Occam.


spin