AND when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou per-fect.

2.	And.I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will mul-tiply thee exceedingly.
3.	And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying,

4.	As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee. and thou shalt be a father of many nations.
5.	Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.

6. 7. 8.

And I will make thee exceeding fruitful. and I will make nations of thee. and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my cove-nant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee. and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee. and to thy seed after thee, the land where-in thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan. for an everlasting pos-session; and I will be their God.

9 10	And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant there- fore. thou. and thy seed after thee in their generations. This is my covenant, which ye shall keep. between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man

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11. 12. 13. 14.

child among you shall be circum-cised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a a token of the covenant betwixt me and you And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your genera-tions. he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.

15. 16 17 18 19

And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear? And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee! And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and; thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I estab-lish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year. And he left off talking with him. and God went up from Abra-ham. And Abraham took Ishmael . his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham's house; and circumcised the flesh of their fore- skin in the selfsame day, as God had said unto him. And Abraham was ninety years old and nine, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his fore-skin. And Ishmael his son was thir-teen years old, when he was circum-cised in the flesh of his foreskin. In the selfsame day was Abra-ham circumcised, and Ishmael his son. And all the men of his house, :born in the house, and bought with money of the stranger, were circum-cised with him.

 

 

 

Who would ask of a baby sun is he male  
The Zed Aliz Zed in pursuit of an oblique agenda, shadows certain words 
 GENESIS OF THE GRAIL KINGS
Laurence Gardner 1998
EMPIRE OF THE COVENANT
A Mother of Nations

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With the senior Mesopotamian succession from Ham and Nimrod diverted into Egypt, we are left with Shem and his family to provide the Bible's key patriarchal strain from Noah. The parallel lines from Ham and Japhet progressed into Arabia, Anatolia and Greater Scythia by the Black Sea, then eventually across Europe to Ireland. Japhet was indeed Ham's brother, just as the Bible explains. Hence, he was also a son of Tubal-cain, not a son of Noah as related in Genesis. Ham and Japhet were key ancestors of the Scots Gaels and, as correctly determined by the noted scholar Robert Graves,1 Japhet was known to the Greeks as Iapetus - a traditional style within his Titanic strain. In practice, he was Iapetus II, the great Anu having been Iapetus I.
The cursed descendants of Noah's son Canaan were identified as Canaanites, whose Mediterranean boundary was said to extend from Sidon to Gaza, and inland to Sodom and Gomorrah by the Dead Sea (Genesis 10: 19). These cities were ultimately destroyed by Enlil-Jehovah (see Chapter 12) and the Canaanites were generally perceived as enemies of the Hebrews who emerged in the line from Shem.
Very little is told in Genesis about Shem's immediate family, but they are listed through nine generations (11:10-27) and the more detailed stories of the individual patriarchs begin anew with Abraham and his wife Sarai (Sarah). Once again, confusion surrounds this couple, for although the Hebrew legacy was reckoned to have progressed through them, Sarai is said to have been barren during the early years of her

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marriage (11 :30). This is not an uncommon feature of the biblical accounts of this family: Rebecca, the wife of their eventual son Isaac, was also described as barren (25 :21), as was Rachel, the wife of Isaac and Rebecca's son Jacob (29:31). It was common practice in those days for girls to marry before childbearing age and it is to the infertile periods of their early married lives that the old texts generally refer.2
The story of Sarai is, none the less, a strange one. First we are informed that she cannot conceive, but then within a few verses we learn that her husband, Abraham, is to be the founding patriarch of a great nation (Genesis 12:2). Subsequently, Sarai presents Abraham with her Egyptian companion, Hagar, 'to be his wife' - but when Hagar conceives she is chastized and banished by Sarai (16:1-16), as if the outcome were unexpected. In due course, Ishmael, the first son of Abraham, is born to Hagar, but it is then announced that his inheritance is to be superseded by a forthcoming son of the hitherto barren Sarai - a son who will be named Isaac.
At this stage in the Old Testament account, three further pronounce- ments are made by Jehovah, who is called El Shaddai in the early texts. First, Abraham is renamed from his former name Abram. Second, the rule of circumcision is introduced for the family heirs. Third, Sarai's Mesopotamian name, meaning 'contentious', is changed to Sarah, denoting a 'princess'.3 In the context of Sarai's change of name, El Shaddai further informs Abraham that the newly designated Sarah will be a 'Mother of Nations' and that 'kings of people shall be of her' (Genesis 17: 15-16). Although Abraham's ancestral family had been influential in Mesopotamia, this is the Bible's first mention of future Hebrew kingship - but no reason is given for such an ostensibly im-portant prospect. In fact, this particular covenant was not actually made with Abraham, but with the unborn Isaac: 'I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him' (17:19).
Genesis (15:18) also contains the promise that Isaac's descendants will inherit the Egyptian Empire 'from the river of Egypt, unto the great river, the river Euphrates'. No such promise is made, however, in respect of Abraham's eldest son Ishmael, nor for any of Abraham's other six sons by his additional wife Keturah (25:1-2). Abraham was somewhat bewildered by this and asked about Ishmael's prospects, to which El Shaddai replied that he would 'make him fruitful', but 'my covenant will I establish with Isaac' (17:18-21). This makes it clear that, although Ishmael was the elder of the half-brothers, Isaac was to be recognized as

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the ancestor of the future kings. Why, then, did Abraham later concede to slay Isaac with a knife upon the altar at Moriag (22:9)? And why, when putting a stop to the slaying, did the angel refer to Isaac as Abraham's 'only son' (22:11), when we know that he had previously fathered Ishmael?
In considering these two questions, it is of interest to note that the Koran, while relating the same story of the near-sacrifice, does not name the son concerned. Indeed, many Islamic scholars conclude that the intended victim was not Isaac, but Ishmael, the son of Hagar,4 who is described in the Book of Adam as the daughter of a pharaoh in descent from Nimrod.
Researchers have long debated and pondered upon the ambiguity of this whole sequence of events, with particular wonder over why the Empire of Egypt should be the kingdom promised to the successors of Isaac. Historically, this would make sense only if the compilers of Genesis knew that a line of descent from Isaac had become pharaohs of Egypt. 5 Also, another anomaly which has long baftled historians is the introduction of circumcision at this particularly early stage of the Hebrew saga (Genesis 17:10-14).
Herodotus, the Greek cultural writer and Father of Historians, who visited Egypt in about 450 BC, recorded that circumcision (a custom 'inherited' by the Hebrews) was originally performed only in ancient Egypt, as has been confirmed from examinations of excavated mummies,6 and by a bas-relief at Kamak which details the surgical procedure.? This being the case, then not only did Isaac's covenant of kingship promise future Egyptian dominion (from the Nile to the Euphrates), but the covenant of circumcision implemented a hitherto unique Egyptian custom into the Hebrew culture from the days of Abraham.8 Why? What was the nature of the Egyptian influence upon the family at that particular time?
The only Egyptian connection that we are told about is Sarai's entry into the household of the pharaoh who wanted her for his wife, at which point Abraham denied that Sarai was his own wife and claimed instead that she was his sister (Genesis 12:12-15). Then, a little later, we are informed that Abraham and Sarai were both offspring of Terah, and Abraham explains, 'She is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife' (Genesis 20: 12). .
In the Ethiopian chronicle Nazum al-jawahir ('The String of Gems') Terah's wives are given as Tohwait (mother of Sarai) and Yawnu

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(mother of Abraham). Tohwait is also recorded in the Syriac M'arath Gaze as Naharyath, who is to be identified with Nfry-ta-Tjewnen, the former wife of Pharaoh Amenemhet I. Her son by this marriage was the succeeding Pharaoh Senusret I - the very pharaoh who claimed Sarai for his wife (see Chart: Egypt and the Tribes of Israel, p:254). This is not surprising, since Sarai was Senusret's maternal half-sister (as well as being Abraham's paternal half-sister) and it was common practice for Egyptian pharaohs to marry their sisters in order to progress the king- ship through the female line. With this in mind, could it be, perhaps, that Isaac was not the son of Abraham after all, but the son of Sarai and the Pharaoh? Let us look again at the sequence concerning Abraham and Sarai in Egypt.
The English translation of Genesis (12:19) quotes the Pharaoh as saying to Abraham, 'Why saidst thou, She is my sister, so I might have taken her to me to wife?' But this is not what the Hebrew Bible says. The same entry translated directly from the Hebrew states, 'Why did you say, She is my sister, so that I took her for my wife?'9 There is a distinct difference here, and the Hebrew writers were emphatic about the fact that Sarai and the Pharaoh were actually married for a time. In contrast to this, both the Hebrew and English texts - when relating to the later period of Sarai's time with King Abimalech of Gerar (Genesis 20:1-6) - make the point that 'Abimalech had not come near her'. But no such statement is made in respect. of her relationship with the Pharaoh.
If Isaac was the son of Pharaoh Senusret, then the seemingly enigmatic details of the covenant would fall very neatly into place. We could then readily understand Sarai's change of name to Sarah (Princess). Similarly, the introduction of the Egyptian custom of circumcision would make sense, as would the prospect of future dynas- tic kingship in the Egyptian domain. It would even explain the relevance of the mysterious 'birthright' that was eventually sold by Isaac's son Esau to his brother Jacob (Genesis 25:30-34).
What we have here is very compelling evidence that Isaac might well have been the son of the Pharaoh and not the son of Abraham. However, the evidence, though convincing and thoroughly rational, is largely cir-cumstantial. Perhaps one day further information will be unearthed which will prove the case one way or the other. Meanwhile, Isaac remains the son of Abraham in accordance with longstanding tradition.
The Genesis story of Isaac and his search for a wife (Genesis 24) paints a rather different picture of Abraham than has hitherto been

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portrayed. Quite suddenly, Abraham appears not as an everyday nomad, but as a wealthy ruler with gold, silver, camels, herds and a large house- hold of servants. This fits rather better with his earlier brief portrayal as a military commander (Genesis 14) who defeated the armies of four kings to rescue his nephew Lot, and it is more in keeping with his fam- ily's original high station in the Chaldean city of Ur. It is also significant that with Isaac's prospect of fathering a kingly race, his wife was not selected from the women of Canaan. She was specially chosen by Abraham's emissary from his own family in Mesopotamia, and when Isaac married his cousin Rebecca of Haran, she was bedecked with jew-els and attended by her handmaids in the manner of a noble wedding.
Their twin sons were Esau and Jacob, the latter of whom was later renamed Israel. Like his father before him, Jacob also married into the Haran family of Rebecca, electing to wed his first cousin Rachel. But on their wedding night, Rachel's father Laban secreted Rachel's elder sister Leah into Jacob's bed so that she might be married first in accordance with custom. So it was that Jacob ended up with two wives (Genesis 29:28), by whom he had numerous offspring. Not content with this, Jacob also had children by his wives' handmaidens Bilhah and Zilpah. The net product was that from his wealth of sons by four different women sprang the twelve tribes of Israel.
In the Abraham section of the Qumran Genesis Apocryphon, Abraham perceives himself in a dream as a 'cedar tree', with his wife Sarah as a 'palm tree'.10 His fear was that the Pharaoh might cut down the cedar in his pursuit of the palm - which is to say that Abraham recognized a significant threat to his life for having married Sarah, who was the right-ful sister-wife of King Senusret. In the most ancient of Sumerian liturgies, and on royal seals, the fallen cedar tree was the symbol of a dead god; the goddess Ishtar was said to have 'raised up the noble cedar' when she resurrected her beloved husband Dumu-zi. Strangely, though, there were no cedars in Sumer, where the only tree of any size was the date-palm.11 Cedars grew only in the mountainous region of northern Mesopotamia.
The distinction of the royal palm tree was essentially Arabic and appears to have evolved in a line from Tubal-cain's son Ham. The great palm oasis south-east of Sinai, beyond Aqaba, was called Tehama (Teima or Tema) from the vehement heat of the region's sand, 12 and from this root derived the Hebrew name Tamar which became so important to the Messianic line. The original biblical Tamar was the daughter-in-law of Isaac's grandson Judah and there is a very strange story in Genesis

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(38:1-30) of how she conceived of her father-in-law who did not recognize her. Some not very convincing excuses are made for Judah's action but, as a titular 'Palm Tree' of the Hamite succession, Tamar would have been an obvious choice as a founding matriarch of the kingly line promised to Isaac's descendants. Judah had therefore selected her to be the wife of his firstborn son Er, but when Er died unexpectedly (Genesis 38:7) Tamar was passed to Er's younger brother Onan, who was also prematurely slain. The writers attributed both these deaths to the will of Jehovah and then told of how Tamar was accosted by Judah, who seemingly mistook her for a harlot, pledging a kid from his flock in payment. No reason is given for Tamar's failure to announce her identity, but in due time she gave birth to Pharez and the Hebrew line towards King David was under way.
Whatever the truth of Judah's illicit liaison with his widowed daughter-in-law, it is plain that, within a culture that held kingship to be a matrilinear inheritance, this Tamar was significant to the succession, just as had been the erstwhile Tamar (Palm Tree), Abraham's wife Sarah. The facts of the matter were corrupted, however, by the later Bible writers at a time when the concept of a patrilinear dynasty was being promoted in a male-dominated Hebrew environment. Because of this, the hereditary importance of Tamar was lost. Also, by virtue of Tamar's illegal conception, the line from Judah was strictly illegitimate and it was not until a later time that a lawful marriage cemented a proper link with the Cainite royal strain.
Another Tamar turns up as the daughter of King David (2 Samuel 13) and there is a very similar tale of how she too was duped into sleeping with her brother Ammon. Then Absalom, another of David's sons, had a daughter called Tamar (2 Samuel 14:27), as did the later King Zedekiah,
and also Jesus himself. 13 The stories of individual family males finding it necessary to sleep with Tamars are each wrapped in blankets of weird explanation, but these females were of eminent station, conducive to perpetuating the true sovereignty of the line as it progressed from the time of Isaac in parallel with the main Egyptian succession.  

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Esau, the son of Isaac and Rebecca, was the elder twin brother of Jacob-Israel, who, as related in Genesis (25:30-34), purchased Esau's birthright for 'a mess of red pottage'.14 From the original word used to

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denote 'red' (i.e. adom), Esau (who was said to have been red when born (25:25)) acquired the alternative name Edom,15 by which definition his descendant Edomites became known.
Esau was additionally said to be hairy (Genesis 27:11) - and this is reminiscent of Enkidu, the 'man of nature', in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.16 Some writers have suggested that the word se'ar, which was translated to 'hairy' in respect of Esau, should perhaps have been seir, a synonym for edom meaning 'red',17 but such an error by the early writers is unlikely, particularly since the 'hairy' definition was also applied in Arabian and Jewish lore to other characters, such as Ham, Lilith and the Queen of Sheba. When the Constitution of Ethiopia was drawn up in 1955, Emperor Haile Selassie was detailed as having descended from Solomon and Sheba's offspring King Menelek, who featured in the thirteenth-century Kebra Nagast - the' Book of the Glory of the Kings'.18 Menelek's queen was Makeda, who was also described as 'hairy', but in this context the translated word is better explained as 'hairy in the likeness of a bright comet - a hirsute wandering star'. The wandering stars were, of course, the biblical race of Cain and his wife Luluwa, and the 'hairy.' definition was often used to denote prominent dynasts of Luluwa's succession from the Anunnaki King Nergal and his queen, Eresh-kigal (see Chart: The Descents to Cain and Seth, pp. 240-41).
Esau's name, E-sa-um, has been found on tablets discovered in 1975 at Tel Mardikh (the ancient city of Elba) in Syria, along with references to other biblical names such as Ab-ra-rnu (Abraham), Is-ra-ilu (Israel) and Ib-num (Eber),19 thereby confirming the nominal entries in Genesis. But what Genesis does not make clear is the precise nature of the birthright granted by Esau to Jacob. As far as we are made aware, there was no sovereign or titular entitlement to consider, and since both were the sons of Isaac, the only obvious birthright would be that of senior succession to their father, from whom it had been said that a race of kings would ensue (Genesis 17: 16). The Bible relates that, in due time, King David of Israel and his dynasty sprang from the line of Judah, a son of Esau's brother Jacob, but under the original scheme of things, had the birthright not been sold, the kingly descent would rightly have been from Esau.
Before following the lines of descent from Jacob, it is worth consider-ing the legacy of Esau, whose descendants carried an immediate Dragon heritage by way of his wife Bashemath, the daughter of Abraham's son Ishmael and his wife Mahalath of Egypt}21 Mahalath was also known as

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Nefru-sobek, a daughter of Pharaoh Amenemhet II and granddaughter of Senusret I, the half-brother of Abraham's wife Sarah (see Chart: Egypt and the Tribes of Israel, pp.254-55).
The daughter of Esau and Mahalath was Igrath, whose own daughter by Pharaoh Amenemhet III was Sobeknefru, Dragon Queen of Egypt c.1785-l782 BC. Sobeknefru (Sobekhkare) was the last ruler of Egypt's twelfth dynasty, and her name meant 'Beautiful of the god Sobek'21 Sobek was the mighty crocodile - the very spirit of the Messeh, whose great temple was erected at Kiman Faris by Queen Sobeknefru's father}2
It is generally reported that Sobeknefru had no male heir, and because of this a new thirteenth dynasty began after her death. However, since the Egyptian royal inheritance was held in the female line, new dynasties often sprang from the marriage of an heiress to a male of another family. Such appears to have been the case in this instance, and the thirteenth dynasty saw the continuing reigns of the Sobek pharaohs from Sobekhotep I to Sobekhotep Iy23 Prior to this, Queen Sobeknefru had formalized the Dragon Court of Ankhfn-khonsu (see Chapter 13), establishing a firm base for the priestly pursuits associated with the scientific teachings of Thoth which had prevailed from the second dynasty of Nimrod's grandson King Raneb.

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would have been of a strain related to the early second dynasty - perhaps even to the twelfth dynasty of Queen Sobeknefru. One way or another, they challenged the seventeenth dynasty of Thebes, and in matters of warfare they introduced the horse, the chariot and the compound bow, none of which had formerly been used in Egypt. These things were, however, previously apparent in Troy, from where the Sea Kings (those of Aa-Mu) and their followers spread into the Mediterranean seaboard lands after Troy V was devastated by fall-out from the Mount Santorini eruption in 1624 BC. It is likely, therefore, that the Hyksos (who were also called the 'Foreign Rulers') were of Trojan origin.
Although reference books make much of the fact that Ahmose I succeeded in overthrowing the Hyksos rulers, it is evident that there were marital alliances between the competing houses of Avaris and Thebes. It is generally reckoned that the Hyksos Pharaoh Apepi II (Apophis) was the last hereditary Dragon King in Egypt, but it would appear that the heritage was perpetuated through a female line into the new dynasty. Even the grave of Ahmose's son Amenhotep I contained a preserved vase cartouche of the daughter of Apophis,27 which signifies the enmity was not so great between the houses as is traditionally sup- posed. The Sobek tradition of Apophis (the designated Beloved of Sobek) was continued by the eighteenth-dynasty pharaohs, and it was Tuthmosis III who established the famous alchemical mystery school of the White Brotherhood of the Therapeutate (see Chapter 13), from which an eventual branch established the Essene community at Qumran. This original school was operated by the priests of Ptah, the god of metallurgists, architects and masons. Ptah was regarded as the great Vulcan of Egypt,28 and the High Priest of Ptah was the designated 'Great Master Artificer'.
Notwithstanding the intervention of the Hyksos kings, Egypt had from the outset of its first dynasty (c.3050 BC) been a unified nation comprising the separate Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) kingdoms.29 Each kingdom had its own regalia - a white crown (hedjet) for Upper Egypt and a red crown (deshret) for Lower Egypt, while the double-crown (shmty) incorporated both. Additionally, the lotus and the vulture were symbolic of the white kingdom, while the papyrus plant and the cobra symbolized the red kingdom. More important to our quest, though, is that each of the kingdoms had its own principal stone pillar- a spiritual umbilical cord between the priests and the gods.3O "

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"In the city of Heliopolis (Lower Egypt) was the ancient Pillar of Annu, whose name is reminiscent of the great Sumerian god Anu, father

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of Enki and Enlil. Its counterpart at Thebes (Upper Egypt) was called Iwnu Shema, which means, quite simply, Southern Pillar. These two eastward-facing pillars, which existed at the time of unification, were revered by the Tuthmosis Therapeutate and were the prototypes for the two eastern-porch pillars of Solomon's Temple of Jerusalem some 2000 years after the unification of Egypt. The Jerusalem pillars still feature in modern Freemasonry as Jachin (to establish) and Boaz (in strength) (1 Kings 7:21). In Egypt the pillars were symbols of unity and of a concept known as Ma 'at, which defined a level and just foundation.31 This ideal of righteous judgement was synonymous with divine kingship and with the Hebrew Malkhut, and not surprisingly Ma' at, the goddess of truth and law, was said to be the sister of Thoth. Her weighing of truth in the balance was conducted with a feather,32 and truth was identified with gold, the most noble of metals (see Chapter 13).
When the souls of the early pharaohs passed into the Otherworld (the Afterlife) they were tested by the funerary god Anubis against the judicial feather of Ma'at and, as shown in reliefs of the era, Anubis was directly associated with the conical bread of the white powder - the highward fire-stone of the temple priests. Today's metaphysical studies now maintain that, by way of a superconductive process, the bodies of some Old Kingdom pharaohs could well have been physically trans- ported into another dimension of space-time, where they remain in a suspended state precisely as the ancient texts suggest. There is as yet no final proof of this, but there is proof of the ability to perform such a feat and it would certainly explain the mystery of the undiscovered Gizeh pyramid kings, Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure."

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"It was a particular tradition of Egyptian kingship that the funerary rites which consecrated the dead as everlasting gods were identical to those which gave the pharaohs a divine status during their lifetimes.33 Among the many royal insignia were the shepherd's crook and the sceptre, just as in ancient Sumer - and although legitimate gods were revered in both countries, the earliest form of ritualistic religion was an enthusiastic belief in the divinity of the kings.34 Prevailing above all, though, was an overriding principle of sovereignty which insisted that 'A man may not become a king without a queen, and a queen must be of the royal blood'.35
Irrespective of the Bible's dismissal of the Egyptian descent from Esau through Queen Sobeknefru, the Old Testament writers did acknowledge the Lilithian heritage of the line to his wife Bashemath
(see Chart: Egypt and the Tribes of Israel, pp.254-55). It is explained

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that Esau's heirs by Bashemath and his other wives became the Dukes of Edom; they are cited in Genesis (36:31) as 'The kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel'.
Scholars of Hebrew literature make the specific point that in listing the legitimate Dukes of Edom (Idumaea), the Genesis compilers defined twelve individual dukedoms, equivalent in number to the twelve tribes of Israel.36 Also, there were twelve 'princes of nations' given as the sons of Abraham's son Ishmael (Genesis 25:13-16). Although the tribes of Israel are generally well known, these other influential groups of twelve have been strategically ignored, albeit the families of Ishmael and Esau were defined as high-bred dukes and princes. The Ishmaelites emerge as the twelve tribes of Syro-Arabia, while the Muslim tradition reveres Ishmael and Abraham as the joint founders of the Holy House at Mecca.37 Esau's Edomites were destined, in turn, to inherit the kingdom of Idumaea as the Dragons (kings) and Owls (queens) of eternity, in accordance with the book of Isaiah (34: 13-17): 'They shall possess it for ever; from generation to generation shall they dwell therein. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose

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"The base structure for today's knowledge of the Egyptian pharaohs comes from the pen of Manetho, a Greco-Egyptian priest of Heliopolis. He was born at Sebennytos in the Egyptian delta and rose to become an adviser to Pharaoh Ptolemy I (c.305-282 BC). In his chronicles, Manetho listed aspects of Egyptian history by way of a series of ruling dynasties, giving a skeleton of chronology from about 3100 BC (when Lower and Upper Egypt were united as one kingdom) to the death of Pharaoh Nectanebo II in 343 BC.l
Unfortunately, no complete version of Manetho's text exists and his work is mainly known to us through the writings of later chroniclers such as Flavius Josephus (first century AD), Julius Africanus (third century AD) and Eusebius of Caesarea (fourth century AD). An additional dilemma is caused because although Manetho clearly had access to the Heliopolis Temple records, he did not have access to specific dates for his pharaonic listing.
Even though inscriptions from before the time of Manetho were dis-covered in later times, these were in the form of ancient hieroglyphs (picture-symbols) and it was not until 1822 that the hieroglyphic code was broken by the French Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion. This decipherment was achieved by way of the now famous Rosetta Stone,2 found near Alexandria in 1799 by Lieutenant Bouchard of the Napoleonic expedition into Egypt. The black basalt stone from about 196 BC carries the same content in three different scripts: Egyptian

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hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic (everyday cursive writing) and scribal Greek. Through comparative analysis of these scripts (with the Greek language being readily familiar), the hieroglyphic code was revealed; it was then cross-referenced with pharaonic cartouches (ornamental oval- shaped inscriptions denoting royal names)3 of the Egyptian kings.
Once the hieroglyphs were understood, the content of other ancient records could be decoded. Among them are some which give kingly lists to compare with the records of Manetho. They include the Palermo Stone,4 a black diorite slab which details the last pre-dynastic kings before 3100 BC, followed by the pharaohs through to the fifth-dynasty Neferirkare in about 2490 BC.5 Also now translated are the Royal List of Karnak (Thebes),6 the Royal List of Abydos,7 the Abydos King List,8 the Royal List of Saqqara9 and the Royal Canon of Turin, a papyrus from about 1200 BC.
With all these to hand, it is still difficult to fix absolute years for an Egyptian chronology because the lists bear no dates as such. At best there are given lengths of individual kingly reigns and certain astro-nomical references, along with some information pertaining to Mediterranean countries other than Egypt. But, in the context of these records, there is much debate about whether particular pharaohs, or even whole dynasties, ruled consecutively or simultaneously. As a result, alternative chronologies are currently available, wherein dynastic and regnal dates vary between fifty and two hundred years.
Ultimately, we have a conjectural form of 'standard mean chronology' which is generally used in textbooks today - but this is largely based upon the seventeenth-century biblical dating structure compiled by Archbishop Ussher of Armagh (see Chapter 2). Since the majority of Ussher's reckoning is inaccurate, it follows that the Egyptian dates calculated from his framework are similarly incorrect.
Only from 897 BC through to 586 BC can Palestinian dates be ascertained with any precision, for it was during this period that the northern Mesopotamian records corresponded with the royal succession in Palestine. These records, known as the Assyrian Eponym Canon, were discovered at Nineveh by Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson in 1862. They detail the appointments of the Assyrian eponyms (officers equivalent to Roman consuls), along with the accessions of the succeeding kings.10 The first thoroughly accurate date which ties an Assyrian king to an Israelite king is 853 BC, when Shalmaneser III of Assyria recorded King Ahab of Israel at the Battle of Karkar.
Based on a recalculation from the Assyrian records, David is now said

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to have been king of Israel from 1001 BC (against the Ussher reckoning of 1048 BC) and his son Solomon to have reigned from 968 BC (against1015 BC) - a forty-seven-year difference in each case. Archbishop Ussher had no access to any such original texts in 1650; even if he had had, he was certainly not experienced in translating ancient Assyrian writing. So, having commenced with Ussher's inaccurate dates for the Israelite kings, incorrect dates have consequently been assumed for the parallel Egyptian succession. This has caused a good deal of historical misunderstanding. In recent years, the Egyptologist David M. Rohl has made an in-depth study of this very haphazard form of pharaonic dating 11 and his findings show precisely how certain in- accuracies came about. Champol1ion, who deciphered the ancient hieroglyphs in 1822, identified Pharaoh Sheshonq I with the biblical Shishak who plundered the Temple of Jerusalem in the reign of Solomon's son King Rehoboam of Judah (2 Kings 14:25-26; 1 Chronicles 12:2-9).12 Since Ussher had dated Rehoboam's reign as being 975-957 BC, Sheshonq I of Egypt (founder of the twenty-second dynasty) was accordingly dated to correspond with this, there being no known date for him beforehand. Other pharaohs were then plotted from this base using the recorded lengths of their reigns as a guide. Subsequently, in 1882, Britain's Egypt Exploration Fund was founded with the express purpose of confirming Old Testament information by way of archaeological discoveries in Egypt,13 but what followed was more of the same chronological manipulation to bring Egypt into line with the Bible stories through the arbitrary application of pharaonic dates.
The essential problem with the SheshonqiShishak chronology was that Ussher's date for Rehoboam differed by more than fifty years from that deduced from the Mesopotamian records. So, in recent times, Rehoboam has been re-dated so that the Jerusalem siege is said to have been in 925 BC; and Sheshonq I has also been re-dated to 945-924 BC in order to conform. Even so, there is absolutely nothing outside Champollion's original speculation to prove that Sheshonq and Shishak were actually one and the same person.
A more reliable pharaonic dating relates to the year 664 BC, when it was recorded that King Ashur-banipal of Assyria took his army into Egypt and sacked the city of Thebes. This invasion is confirmed in the Egyptian archives and can be directly attributed to the final year of the twenty-firth-dynasty Pharaoh Taharqa, whose dates are now given in most lists as 690-664 BC. In this book, however, we are not concerned"