I'm returning to an earlier discussion of a recent book by Aidan Dodson, AMARNA SUNSET, which concerns the death of Egypt's 18th dynasty. I won't repeat anything that I said in my previous post on the book. Instead, I'll quote something very poignant I found here. The Hittites, a Kingdom in north central Asia Minor, received a message from an Egyptian Queen in the 14th century BC. The document still exists, on a tablet such as one of those in the photo above. The Queen was addressing the Hittite King. "My husband died, and I have no son. But, they say, you have many sons. If you would send me one of your sons, then he would become my husband. I do not want to take a servant of mine and make him my husband. I am afraid!" If I understand Dodson's construal of this letter, if comes from the waning days of the 18th dynasty. Nefertiti was alone. Her husband, the pioneering monotheist Akhenaton, was dead, as was their only son, Tut. She was desperate t...
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My recent reading includes the book AMARNA SUNSET (2018), by Egyptologist Aidan Dodson. It is about the demise of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty, the dynasty famous for the heresies of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gets credit (or blame) for the creation of monotheism. Akhenaten was featured in Sigmund Freud's last book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939). Freud posits that the historical Moses was a devotee of Akhenaten, and that he and the other loyalists were exiled from Egypt after his hero's death, and followers of the older polytheism restored their own power and their gods. That was the origin of Judaism, on this view. There is much more to Freud's theory, and of course he brought psychoanalysis into the picture. He believed that the reason Moses didn't reach the promised land was that he was murdered, as an oppressive father figure, and that after he was murdered the memory of that dark deed was buried in the unconscious of the perpetrated, taking the form of exagg...