Tanelorn’s Seed
From the Encyclopedia of Heresies
On the surface, it seems like a complete inversion of the Book of Exodus. But is it, really? Even back in the 1st century CE, while expounding on the writings of Manetho, Josephus (himself a Jew by birth) noticed the connection between the words Hyksos and Habiru in ancient Egyptian. One means Foreign Rulers and the other simply foreigners. In the territories of the Akkadians, a similar title was used for a group of armed raiders who beset the country, the Habbatu. Habbatu, Habiru, Hattusa, Hyksos… are they all the same?
Imagine, therefore, that the Semitic monarch Sargon I, with his legend of displacement, his claim of being descended from a “changeling” (whatever that means) and his unknown father, whose people were “lovers of the hills,” might have in fact been born again to a Semitic people who crashed down on the Egyptians only to be driven forth again hundreds of years later, driven into slavery because their greatest leader turned away from his god... or, perhaps, his god turned away from him. Much has been made by many of the similarities between the Pharaoh Akhenaton (formerly Amenhotep IV) and the monotheism of the solar disk Aten and the faith of the Hebrews, led forward from their confinement by Moses and his brother Aaron. So let us consider this scenario. The Hyksos arrive in Egypt from the land between the two rivers, having completed their march through establishing the new Semitic-speaking cultures of Babylon and Assyria as they went. They conquer upper Egypt and establish their desert-dwelling god (perhaps God Agni, who protected their cities in the Indus?) as equivalent with Seth… so equivalent, in fact, that soon, even the Egyptians view Seth as victorious, powerful, and turn to him. Then a masterstroke among the Egyptians, who treated the gods as formulas to be mastered and evoked as much as divine beings to be worshipped: they created a new name for the devourer serpent, calling it Apepi, and at the same time bargained with the Seth who was now the powerful desert wind, the storm god who had become Seth, the fire from the desert, promising him more followers, a seat of respect second only to Ra, defender of the solar barque. They made a deal, and so Seth abandoned his victorious people, allowing them to be either driven from Egypt into climes north or crushed, Avaris recaptured and made part of the reunited Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt, and slaves made of the Habiru remnants.
However, as time passed, Seth was relegated to second fiddle status. Even as the rule of Egypt passed first into the heirs of Khamose and eventually into the Amenhotep dynasty, Seth became less and less important, until Amenhotep IV divested Egypt of all its gods entirely and directed all prayer towards the disc of the sun alone! This was an intolerable turn of affairs for the entity known to the Egyptians as Seth, who had already staged a divine coup merely to get where he was, and now saw himself frozen out of the worship and respect he demanded (and perhaps even needed for plans yet unspoken of)—and if one baby floating down the Euphrates could be made to render all of Mesopotamia subject to those chosen by God Agni, pouring down from the mountains (“the brothers of my father loved the hills”), then perhaps another baby floating down another river could serve to create a new base of power. Perhaps Sargon could live again and lead his people forth from what had become a stagnant, dead land not worth the prayers to be reaped from it… surely any dreams that the building of Amarna could have served a better purpose than Avaris were lost to idle prayers aimed at the disc of the sun, after all.
