Session 5 - Late Bronze Age Part I

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In this session of the Late Bronze Age, the time period of the biblical Exodus, the time period of Moses and Joshua, 1550 to 1200 BC, we're going to look at different types of writing style. The Egyptians are using hieratic. They're also using a script form, a fast form of writing the Egyptian language. Also the popular colorful form called the hieroglyph. Now when we say hieroglyph, that's not what the Egyptians called their language. That's what the Greeks called the language that the Egyptians were using. Hiero meaning, it means like sacred, sacred glyph, sacred carving. It was on their temples, the sacred carving and in their tombs of the elite of the Egyptian culture. The second type of writing style that we find in the Late Bronze Age is the Akkadian. And Akkadian style comes from Mesopotamia. And what they did is that they actually wrote on mud brick tablets or little round tablets, if you will. And the tablets, once again, are made out of mud. So when I said write, I actually had to kind of like define what I mean. They had little wedges and they put these little wedge shaped designs on the clay. And this is called cuneiform, cune meaning wedge, wedge form. Now let me show you what it looks like. This is a cuneiform tablet. It might be a little bit earlier than the period that we're actually discussing at the moment, the Late Bronze Age. This could go back to the Middle Bronze Age, around 2000 to 1550 BC. But the style is still Akkadian and it's still cuneiform. Why is this important? Because during the mid-19th century, around 1840, there was a selection of 350, 380 tablets found at Tell el-Harmana. And this was the period of King Tut and his father Akhenaten, who is known as the heretic pharaoh. And the period in which they lived at this place called Aten, all right, or Tell el-Harmana was a very short lived period, maybe 40, maybe 60 years. So the artifacts that we find there are, you could say, can be dated very precisely. And what we found in a cuneiform fashion was a series of cuneiform texts that are called the Tell el-Harmana texts, the 350, 360 cuneiform tablets that were written from the Canaanite kings that lived at these Tell sites throughout the trade route in the land of Canaan. And they are complaining to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten that there are rebels in the land that are going and trying to take the city, and they're robbing the city, and that is why we have problems trying to pay your tribute, because the Egyptians were trying to get tribute from those cities in the land of Canaan. Maybe it was an excuse, and the pharaoh was tired of listening to excuses, he just wants his tribute. So the king doesn't really answer these texts, at least that's the way it seems that the story goes. The unanswered text of Tell el-Harmana by king Akhenaten. The second type, or I should say going back to the first type we talked about, was hieroglyphs. And on this one particular style of faience, faience is a glazing compound used by the Egyptians, it's a small faience cup. You see a little cartouche, it looks like a circle, and inside the circle or an oval are some hieroglyphs. And this is the name of Ramses. There were similar types of, you could say, faience vessels that were found in a tomb called KV5. It stands for King's Valley Tomb Number Five, and this is the largest tomb that's ever been uncovered. It was starting to be excavated by an archaeologist by the name of Kent Weeks and his crew during the mid-1990s. They're still excavating it, it's just that huge. Well, what's in that tomb? It's the sons of Ramses. Some scholars suggest that in the biblical tradition of the pharaoh's first born that died during the period of the Passover, that this might be a tomb that is related to that biblical narrative that many sons of the pharaoh died. Now we're not going to say by an academic standing that this is evidence for the exodus because we have to say, did all these sons die at the same time, or was this a tomb that was reused after that event? We don't know. But it is the largest tomb, KV5, in which they found a large selection of faience vessels with hieroglyphs. Now the encirclement on this vessel, which has in the center of it the hieroglyphs, is called a cartouche. It was given that name by Napoleon's men because it looked like the cartridges that they used in their weapons. Napoleon's men found at a place called Rosetta, the very popular Rosetta Stone, and on the Rosetta Stone there were hieroglyphs, there was a cursive demotic writing, and there was also Greek. The Greek writing style was well known, and from the translation of the Greek, and Chapollion, a French Frenchman using a technique of translating and identifying Egyptian words by the Coptic, through the Coptic church, the way they're pronouncing words, he actually was one of the first to break the code of the hieroglyphs. Why is that important for scholars today? Well, think about this. If hieroglyphs were not even beginning to be understood until the beginning of the 19th century, let's say 1820, 1830, remember that our Bible, at least the most popular for many years, was the King James, was written in 1611. So that means there's little, say, words and codes that we could use in the scriptural narrative that would give us clues to the dates and the time periods of the pharaohs and the events that took place. And we wouldn't even have an idea what this would mean until we understood the culture of the Egyptians by reading the hieroglyphs on their temples and tombs, which finally took place in the 1830s.