Letters to Sarah, November 2015

By Tom Slattery
On PBS stations in northern Ohio on Tuesday, November 3, 2015, the "Secrets of the
Dead" television series showed a remarkably good two-hour program titled "Ultimate
Tut" on the life and death of Egyptian New Kingdom pharaoh Tutankhamen.
This led to a short off-the-cuff series of folksy letters to my friend Sarah outlining some
of my observations and theories on ancient Egypt. Taken together the emails form a
folksy essay. I have removed extraneous personal text and slightly edited the following
emails, but I kept them in their original letter form.
For those who may not recognize it, some of the ideas come from Immanuel Velikovsky's
1960 book "Oedipus and Akhnaten." Another book that influenced some of the ideas is
Ahmed Osman's 1987 book "Stranger in the Valley of the Kings." And let me add my
own year 2000 book "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age," which can be read for free in
its adapted documentary screenplay form on the Scribd website.
Before reading this there is one important fact that we cannot overlook. Between 1200
BC and 1100 BC a catastrophe of unparalleled proportions in civilized human history
struck the Old World. Some say that the resulting loss of population may have been
seventy-five percent. This loss of population and collapse of civilization led to the longest
and deepest dark age in human history.
It lasted at least 400 years until the time that Homer used the new Greek alphabet to
record ancient oral ballads, and at that time Jewish writers were beginning to use the new
Hebrew alphabet to record some of the oral story material that would become the Old
Testament. But some say that it lasted 800 years, that is until the classical Greek dramas
were written. These long centuries of dark age erected a centuries-long barrier between
early civilization and the re-emerging later civilization.
My theory is that the initial smallpox pandemic did this damage across the Old World and
I explain it in my nonfiction book "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age." But even if I
may be wrong about a smallpox pandemic, the long and deep dark age is real and the
search may go on as to what caused it.
The first email in the following series of emails is from the night of November 4 and
November 5, 2015, but it gets its November 5 date from being emailed after midnight for
its automatic timestamp software.
November 5, 2015
Sarah.
The reason that I was so fascinated with the two-hour program on Tutankhamen the other
night was my longtime interest in an odd theory that combines 18th Dynasty Egypt (1550
BC to 1292 BC) and much later classical Greek literature and texts of biblical literature

(around 500 BC). The technical stuff in the TV program "The Ultimate Tut" that turned
you off was exactly the stuff I had been trying for years to find out. And then there it was,
a whole program of it. That's why I was so enthusiastic.
For instance, there was a wealth of new information and discoveries that fit that theory
and its linking of the Oedipus cycle dramas to real ancient Egyptian history.
You know the Greek drama "Oedipus Rex," where Oedipus ends up killing his father
King Laius and marrying his mother Queen Jocasta, made famous by Freud if nothing
else.
In Greek dramas -- largely plays by Aeschylus (died 406 BC) and Sophocles (died 456
BC) -- that were written about 800 years after the real Egyptian historical events, Jocasta
and Oedipus had four children. The Greek playwrights and the Greek audiences did not
know any of their real names so they gave them names from their physical of personality
attributes.
So the four offspring of incest of Oedipus and Jocasta are called:
1. their son Polynices (in Greek means "varieties of strife");
2. their other son Eteocles (in Greek means "truly glorious");
3. their daughter Antigone (in Greek means "in place of one's parents" or maybe "worthy
of one's parents.");
4. their other daughter Ismene (in Greek means "she knows").
In the above mentioned theory of real Egyptian history, these people had real Egyptian
names and acted in real Egyptian history.
1. is Tutankhamen;
2. is his brother Sminkhakhare;
3. is Meritaten; and
4. is Ankhpasenaten.
They seem to have been real people whose lives played out in ancient Egypt in ways
similar to those dramatized in the Greek plays.
The TV program only offered additional clues to bolster the theory.
November 5 (answering)
Sarah,
I can understand your lack of interest. But you're right. I was utterly fascinated. The
Egyptian 18th Dynasty was important to world history. And it was especially influential to
our present religious history. In the middle of the 18th Dynasty we can see the beginnings
of monotheism. A century later, Moses, rather clearly to those of us who freely think
about it, would use that fledgling monotheism to found a religion that evolved into the

foundation of religion that you and I and most of the world believes in and practices
today.
And less obvious, but loosely demonstrable, the 18th Dynasty influenced the beginnings
and foundations of our literary history. The Greek "Theban Dramas" and some other
classical Greek literature appear to have been taken from 18th and 19th dynasty Egyptian
events and legends that were saved across the enormous time-barrier of the 800-year-long
dark age in hand-me-down oral tales and ballads that entertained and educated people
before television. So as scientists and historians find out more about this time and its
personalities, we find out more about how we became what we are.
I missed the first few minutes because my Cox cable service abruptly failed and I was on
the phone with them to get it restarted, which they quickly did.
Tom
November 6 (answering)
Sarah,
The Greek-Egyptian connections are Emmanuel Velikovsky's idea. I just added new
information since his book. Ancient Greek literature -- that has so profoundly influenced
European literature -- had ancient Egyptian origins. Anti-African racism blinded 18th
century AD, 19th century AD, and 20th century AD European/American scholars to this
fact. Even today academic scholars fight against new discoveries and interpretations by
amateurs that counter these prejudices.
Tom
November 7
Sarah,
If my theory is correct and there was an initial smallpox pandemic throughout the Old
World between 1200 BC and 1100 BC, the pandemic brought on the longest and deepest
dark age that anyone in human history ever knew. Seventy-five percent (I believe I've
heard up to 90% in some places) of the Old World's population perished within very short
time spans (like weeks). This left a gaping hole in civilization not unlike a modern
nuclear war would. The resulting dark age lasted up to 800 years.
I am, of course, convinced of my own theory. So sudden and great had been the loss of
educated and trained people in the cataclysm that some of the old alphabets -- like Linear
A for instance -- remain undecipherable to this day despite efforts to use the finest
military code-breaking technology to decipher them.
But whatever had brought on the cataclysm, I was interested in links between its onset in
the twelfth century BC and its waning days by about the sixth and fifth centuries BC. I
began to look at the time period of around 500 BC. By this time new alphabets that had
been re-invented from scratch had been in daily use for a century or two or three,

including a new Hebrew alphabet and a new Greek alphabet, both of which are still in use
today.
Although distorted by time, the stories about the world before the pandemic had remained
alive through ballads as well as through less structured homespun oral storytelling. As the
new alphabets came out, the faithfully remembered precious stories were finally written
down in forms familiar to us today.
These stories from across the 800-year-time-barrier are at the roots of a significant part of
the Old Testament and much of classical Greek literature. So archaeologists and other
scholars have been able to reconstruct fragments of the way the world was before the
great catastrophe. I find studying and reflecting on these for nuances of meanings both
fun and intellectually challenging.
Tom
November 8
Sarah,
Yes, I played the game "Telephone" a couple times at kids' birthday parties when I was
very young, and yes, that is basically what I meant about oral information changing.
But beyond that, the genius of the ancient Greek dramatists was their writing believable
stories that could make their audiences -- even to this day 2500 years later -- suspend
their disbelief and get involved with the outrageously barely believable story material.
They are well structured and well told stories, quite apart from the real historical
Egyptian events that fed the imaginations of the later Greek authors.
Tom
November 9
Sarah,
In a later Greek play in the Oedipus Rex series, Sophocles tells us a tragedy about a
daughter of the incestuous marriage of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta named Antigone.
In a nutshell the story is about Antigone being condemned to a horrible death under the
orders of Creon. Since the Greek dramatists no longer knew his real name, they gave him
a drama character name meaning "prince" in Greek.
Creon, the new king of Thebes following the tragedy of King Oedipus, condemns
Antigone for defying his orders and symbolically burying her brother Polynices, one of
two brothers who fought over who should have the throne. Creon had her other brother,
Eteocles, properly buried with high honors.
For defying the kings orders, Antigone is walled into a cave to die of thirst and/or hunger.

"Antigone" is a curious choice of names. It means either "worthy of one's parents" or "in
place of one's parents." I take it to mean that she was close to her parents ideals and
values.
800 years earlier in Egypt, the death of Akhnaten (who had been born Amenhotep IV and
changed his name to promote his new monotheistic state religion of Egypt) had caused a
succession problem. Like Eteocles and Polynices in Sophocles' play, Tutankhaten (who
later changed his name to Tutankhamen) and Smenkhakhare had agreed to a powersharing one year on and one year off arrangement.
But it fell apart, and the two brothers -- both in the play and in real life -- went to war
with large armies on each side. Smenkhakhare's mummy has never been found. The
mummy of Tutankhamen shows battle wounds, including having been run over by a war
chariot as a cause of death.
Velikovsky points to a pit grave of a young woman near a group of tombs that includes
Tutankhamen's. The young woman died of thirst or starvation in a pit that had been
purposely dug and capped with wooden or metal bars to make a cage. She had left one
clue, a crude indication made from whatever scraps that she could find in her clothes and
in the pit, that she was Meritaten, daughter of Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Meritaten thus
might be considered a Christ-like female who was forced to die an agonizing death at the
hand of the all-powerful state for a principle.
Thus in this play the Greek character Antigone seems to have been drawn from the real
Egyptian princess Meritaten. Egyptian history records her as Meritaten. But as her
husband clearly did, she would have had to change her name to meet the demands of the
return to the old politics and religion. The pharaoh Tutankhaten changed his name to
Tutankhamen, the name we know him by. So Merit-aten would have changed her name to
Merit-amen.
To fill this out, Antigone's brother Polynices (the brother that she buried) would be the
Egyptian prince Smenkhakhare; her other brother Eteocles would be Tutankhamen; her
sister Ismene would be the Egyptian princess Ankhesenpaaten, and the Greek play's cruel
ruler Creon would be the real Egyptian pharaoh Ai.
In both the Old Testament and the New Testament there are outstanding women with
something like a loose pronunciation of the name "Mary" in their names. The first woman
with a Mary-sounding name is Moses and Aaron's sister Miriam. This gives a clue.
Miriam has a number of spellings in various renderings of the Old Testament in living
and dead languages across the Middle East. It looks suspiciously like "Miriam" could
have been Merit-am, or more fully, Merit-amen.
The following may have some significance to Jews, Christians, and Moslems.
It would have been sacrilege for Jews to put the names of gods other than their own
Yahweh in their sacred books. Take, for instance, the case of Moses. The name (even as

Moshe) was clearly derived from an Egyptian name like Tuth-moses or Ah-moses. The
early Hebrew scribes completely omitted the part of the name like Tuth, the Egyptian god
of wisdom. This left the inoffensive partial name fragment "Moses" as it comes down to
us today.
But the name Miriam seems to have presented the scribes with a more complex problem.
They could not drop the foreign god's name. The original word that became Miriam had
to be treated differently.
Let's say that originally the name of Moses and Aaron's sister Miriam was meant to honor
the memory and agonizing sacrifice of Meritaten who changed her name to Meritamen.
So as not to offend Yahweh the name, as with that of Moses, had to drop the foreign god.
But a syllable of the Egyptian god's name had to be kept to show which side of the
simmering Egyptian civil-religious conflict her name was preserving and honoring, the
monotheistic Aten-ists or the polytheistic worshippers of Amen-re, the old time religion
before Akhnaten and Nefertiti's religious revolution.
In order to give Old Testament readers Meritaten/Meritamen's political-religious
affiliation in what may still have been a simmering civil conflict as well as to preserve the
sacred self-sacrifice origins of the biblical Miriam's name, an identifying syllable had to
be retained. So we get Merit-am. And that would rather easily have become Miriam.
In order to preserve Egyptian political affiliations, strict religious rules had to be bent to
allow a syllable of the Egyptian god Amen's name to stay as an identifier. So Merit-amen
became Merit-am (as opposed to Merit-at, the other side in the still simmering civil war),
which comes down to us in English as "Miriam."
In other words, Miriam is Merit-amen who had her brother Smnkhakhare Polynices
symbolically buried -- probably meaning properly mummified as fits a pharaoh -- and
was cruelly put to an agonizing death by the state, almost a female Christ, for her
defiance of the Pharaoh Ay who was acting for the interests and power of the state.
Attesting the popularity and historical importance of story and the name, there is not only
Moses' sister Miriam but no less than three additional "Marys" in the account of Jesus'
life and agonizing death by crucifixion.
The Greek drama "Antigone," written in a new Greek alphabet, preserves a fragment of a
story. In parallel, 800 years later a Jewish memory of Merit-amen was written in a new
Hebrew alphabet, but written minus a syllable so as not to offend the Jewish god with the
name of a foreign god in the same sacred writings.
So the Greek dramatic character Antigone, drawn from the real historical Egyptian
woman Meritaten/Meritamen, is a female Jesus, anticipating the male Jesus and his
similar and equally compelling story by 1300 years for the real person's biography and
almost 500 years for the dramatic character's story.

Tom
November 15, 2015
Sarah,
In his book "Stranger in the Valley of the Kings," amateur archaeologist Ahmed Osman
makes a credible case that a powerful Egyptian prime minister named Yuya (roughly
1279-1213 BC) who served as prime minister under two different pharaohs, Tuthmosis
IV and Amenhotep III, was the Old Testament's Joseph. (If you take the first syllable of
his name and a syllable from one of his government titles you get Yu-zaph or
Yusef/Joseph).
The long office and government of Yuya hints at a return of Hyksos influence into the
highest levels of Egyptian government in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty, two
centuries after they had been driven out of Egypt into Canaan. This, in turn, hints at a
return of a powerful proto-Jewish military, economic, and political influence in Egypt in
the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
If so, this would tend to loosely corroborate my speculation on Meritaten, Miriam, and
Mary.
Let me backtrack about three centuries from the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty to the
Hyksos. The word Hyksos was derived from the Egyptian language "rulers under foreign
kings." Apparently the Hyksos came to power in northern Egypt peacefully. To resolve
political chaos and economic instability in roughly 1650 BC, a group that we might
characterize as local upper-level management of multi-national trading corporations
seized control of the levers of government of northern Egypt.
Possibly to claim authority in order to preempt unrest after this necessary coup d'etat, the
Hyksos business executives appointed one of their own as a "pharaoh" of northern Egypt.
The ploy worked and a string of these self-styled pharaohs ran northern Egypt in peaceful
times that lasted a century and was registered as the 15th Dynasty.
To leave us with a tantalizing clue as to who they were, at least one of these Hyksos
pharaohs had a Jewish-sounding name of Yakob-el. Whether this was the biblical Jacob
or not, this Hyksos pharaoh had a clearly Jewish name.
After a century of running northern Egypt the Hyksos were overthrown by nationalistic
religious revivalists of the Amen-re cult from Thebes in southern Egypt. After a long
siege the Hyksos abandoned their capital city of Avaris in the Nile Delta and beat a hasty
retreat across the Sinai Desert into Canaan. And that military defeat of the proto-Jewish
Hyksos and military victory of the Egyptian Amen-Re cult launched the unconventional
18th Dynasty.

Early on, the 18th Dynasty had a female pharaoh -- the world's first significant female
ruler of a large and almost modern nation. Her name was Hatshepsut. Being a first female
ever to become pharaoh she had to endure a male title. There was no Egyptian word for
queen so she became the equivalent of "King Hatshepsut" and ruled Egypt for 20 years.
A century-and-a-half later the monarchy broke with tradition, and the pharaoh Tuthmosis
IV married a foreign (Mitanni) princess, Mutemwiya, as his primary wife through whom
the inheritance to the throne would then pass.
Their half-Mitanni and half-Egyptian son Amenhotep III then bent tradition again and
married the non-royal daughter of his (as well as his father's) ultra-powerful and
apparently Jewish prime minister, Yuya. The Egyptian artists rendered her as a
determined-looking young woman. Her name was Tiye.
Tiye and Amenhotep III had at least two boys. The oldest was carefully groomed for the
throne, but he died possibly as the result of a chariot accident. The younger son had been
sent to art school to keep him out of the way. He suddenly found himself next in line for
the throne of the greatest world power. And shortly after that Amenhotep III died,
apparently of disease.
So in 1353 BC this art student became the new pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, ruler of the most
powerful nation on Earth. He quickly married his father's newest wife, the latest addition
to the harem, a radiant and beautiful young woman named Nefertiti. Among their several
children was a daughter named Merit-aten.
Amenhotep IV replaced the traditional Amen-re religion and its large polytheistic
pantheon with a monotheistic religion that worshiped only a single solar-derived deity
named the Aten.
To back his new religion Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akh-n-aten (Akhnaten,
"Effective for Aten"). Clearly this proto-monotheism led two centuries later to the more
all-inclusive monotheism of Moses.
An interesting sidelight on the transmission of knowledge and history by oral tradition in
two different languages and cultures is that Joseph in the Book of Genesis (i.e. Yuya) is
the grandfather of King Oedipus in the ancient Greek dramas (i.e. the pharaoh Akhnaten).
Tom Slattery
Rocky River, Ohio