Transcription
Hello there, guys. Last year, I made a video discussing in depth the possibility that two very different historical figures, the prophet Abraham and the infamous copper merchant Anasier, could have met in the murky past. And if you watched that video, you would have discovered that it was more plausible than you would think, even if it was still incredibly unlikely. At the very least, it was a fun thought experiment that allowed me to explore just how historians determine when and where a person may or may not have lived in the rare instances where these dates and locations seem to overlap.
Ever since that project, I've been searching for another example, but for the longest time, couldn't think of any that were particularly compelling. That was until I recently rewatched the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments. The movie depicts the biblical Exodus story in which the prophet Moses leads the Jewish people, enslaved by the tyrannical Pharaoh Ramses, out of Egypt into the promised land of Canaan. At one point in the movie, there's a scene where emissaries from various parts of the ancient world pay homage to the pharaoh. One of them, wearing stereotypical Greek hoplite armor, is said to be an ambassador from King Priam of Troy, who gifts Ramses a fabulous fabric. For the zoomers out there, this is an Easter egg referencing a little-known book called the Iliad, an ancient poem that recounts the legendary war between the Achaeans of mainland Greece and the Trojans of Troy. It involved many battles between famous heroes like Achilles, Hector, and Paris. Its sequel, The Odyssey, recounts the troubled return home of one of these heroes, Odysseus, and the many trials and adventures he encounters along the way. This scene in the film seems to imply that the events of the Exodus occurred just before or at the same time as the Trojan War in the Iliad. While Moses is demanding Pharaoh let his people go, Achilles might be sulking in his tent, or Menelaus preparing for his wedding. And it got me wondering, is this true? Were these events really happening around the same time? And if so, could Moses have theoretically met famous Greek heroes like Odysseus? Well, let's dig into our sources and really find out.
Just like Abraham in the last video, the prophet Moses probably doesn't need much of an introduction. He serves as a major figure in the three dominant Abrahamic religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to the biblical book of Exodus, Moses was born into a troubled period of Jewish history. During his infancy, the Israelites had been enslaved in the land of Egypt for centuries. Moses, however, was secretly adopted by one of the ruling Pharaoh's daughters and raised at the royal court as an Egyptian noble. Eventually, he learns his true heritage, and with the assistance of the Jewish god, Yahweh, Moses frees his people from slavery and leads them across the Sinai Peninsula in a long, meandering journey that lasts 40 years. During this time, he obtains the famous Ten Commandments. Moses dies just as the Israelites arrive in the land of Canaan. And well, as they say, the rest is history.
Our other ancient celebrity is by no means less significant. The legendary Greek hero Odysseus, or Ulysses, is still well-known even today. He's even going to be a movie star pretty soon. His life is mostly recounted in the epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, said to have been composed by the blind poet Homer during the Greek Dark Ages. Odysseus was the crafty trickster king of Ithaca. He participated in and proved to be a decisive strategist in the war the Greeks waged against the city of Troy, famously constructing and hiding inside the wooden horse. After this war, Odysseus's return home was notoriously delayed for 10 long years due to constant distractions and misfortunes. During this time, he traveled to the ends of the earth and continued to prove his wit and skill against fantastical obstacles like man-eating cyclopses, witches, and sirens. In the end, he manages to return home to Ithaca in the nick of time to embrace his loving son, father, and wife. But enough gassing them up. We want to know when these two guys existed, if they existed at all.
First up, let's talk about Moses. What time period did Moses live in exactly? Well, it might surprise you to learn that this is a very difficult question to answer. Ancient Egypt, you might say. Isn't that obvious? The problem is that ancient Egypt represents 3,000 years of history, over 30 dynasties, and close to 300 different pharaohs. Which one did Moses live under? Correlating events that occur in the book of Exodus to our modern historical timeline has been a thorn in the side of biblical scholarship for hundreds of years. Biblical scholars have combed through the entire Bible in search of details that might enlighten us on when Moses would have lived. First Kings 6:1, for example, claims that the construction of King Solomon's temple was exactly 480 years after Israel's release from slavery. This temple's construction is typically dated to 966 BC. And therefore, this would place the Exodus around 1446 BC in what we would call the Bronze Age. This date seems to be confirmed by the genealogy provided by 1st Chronicles 6:33-37, which claims that there were 18 generations separating Korah, a man contemporary with Moses, from Heman, a man living during King David's reign. The math works out to this being about 25 years per generation if we use that 1446 BC date, a totally realistic average. Furthermore, Judges 11:26 also claims that there were 300 years separating Jephthah, living around 1100 BC, from Israel arriving in the promised land. Meaning they must have settled in the region around 1400 BC, allowing 40 years of wandering in the desert of Sinai. This more or less works out with the 1446 BC date derived from First Kings. Sounds good so far, right? According to Kings, Chronicles, and Judges, the Israelites left Egypt around 1446 BC and arrived in Canaan around 1400 BC, anchoring Moses's lifespan around this time as well.
And yeah, that would work out very nicely if not for details within the book of Exodus itself. The book is somewhat infamous for the vagueness of its date. Notably, the evil pharaoh of the story is left unnamed by the author as "Pharaoh." So, it is difficult to correlate him with any known pharaoh from Egyptian records. However, one detail in the text has provided scholars with a very specific time frame. In chapter 1:11, the enslaved Israelites were said to have been forced to build for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses. This treasure city of Raamses is of particular importance. It later serves as the departure point for the Jews. Archaeologists have long understood that this Raamses is none other than the Egyptian city of Pi-Ramesses, built under its 19th dynasty. Hebrew sources must have omitted the Egyptian "Pi" prefix, which means "house of Ramses." In any case, this detail really messes with the previous 1446 BC dating. From inscriptions, we know that the construction of the city was started during the reign of Pharaoh Seti I, circa 1290 BC, and completed under his son Ramses II, circa 1250 BC. This would place the Exodus and Moses firmly in the 13th century BC, in the Late Bronze Age, 200 years after the date given by First Kings and other biblical books. In fact, the Exodus's mention of Raamses is particularly jarring because there was not a single pharaoh going by the name Ramses until 1320 BC. For a modern comparison, it's like claiming there was a building called JFK International Airport centuries before JFK was even born. The book of Genesis actually makes a similar mistake when it refers to Egypt as the land of "Ramses" during the time of Joseph, which was hundreds of years before even the Exodus. In any case, this verse clearly suggests Moses existed in or after the reign of Ramses II in the mid-1200s BC. This apparent contradiction between biblical sources has led to two different competing theories on the Exodus date: one around 1446 BC and one in the Late Bronze Age around 1260 BC, with a gap of about 200 years separating them.
Modern archaeology has unfortunately thrown a wrench into this as well. The truth is that very little of the Exodus can be corroborated by evidence outside the Bible. The first mention of Israelites by any surviving ancient source is the famous Merneptah Stele, dated to 1207 BC. On the monument, the pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Ramses II, recounts his victories over various foreign peoples during a military campaign to the land of Canaan. Among his list of boasts is Merneptah's claim that "Israel is laid waste. Its seed is not." Ignoring the fact that Merneptah clearly failed in this endeavor, it shows us that the Israelites were already living and established in the land of Canaan by 1207 BC. The Exodus must have already happened a good deal of time before this. However, no Egyptian source mentions Israel or Israelites before this date. Nor have archaeologists discovered any Hebrew inscriptions or artifacts in Egypt. This has not been from want of trying. Egypt is one of the best understood and heavily excavated regions in all of archaeology. Thousands of archaeologists for hundreds of years have combed the whole country from north to south attempting to find any evidence of Jews during the two periods we've discussed. And sadly, they always come back empty-handed. Religious apologetics have attempted to explain this lack of evidence by theorizing that the Egyptians must have destroyed any records that would have existed. But this just doesn't seem likely considering the sheer scale of the Jewish population described by the Exodus: at least 600,000 men, which probably amounted to over 2 million people, including women and children. And keep in mind that this was hundreds of thousands of people living in Egypt generation after generation since the time of Joseph, and yet somehow not leaving a single trace behind.
Further problems arise when you realize there is simply not a good time anywhere in Egyptian history for the Exodus to have occurred. Both of the dates favored by scholars, the Tutmosid and Ramesside dynasties, represent Egypt at its height. The pharaohs had firm control over the land of Canaan and ruled it with forts and regional governors. In fact, the Exodus references one of them, Migdol, built under Seti I, but strangely doesn't describe the Egyptian garrison that must have been stationed there. Ramses II's reign was particularly strong. We know that during his dynasty, the borders between Canaan and Egypt were highly regulated. The Jews couldn't exactly flee the Egyptians by traveling to lands that were still under Egyptian control at the time. And still other details in the text show us that the Exodus author doesn't have a firm grasp on what the ancient world was like in the 15th or 13th centuries. The main reason given for the Israelites avoiding the coast and instead traveling inland through Sinai during their departure was the presence of Philistines along the Mediterranean. These Philistines were people who had much later become Israel's biggest rivals. Think Goliath and King David. The problem is that this is clearly an anachronism by the Exodus author. Regardless of which date you favor, Philistines can't be living in this region yet. Philistines themselves were the descendants of the Peleset tribe, a Greek people originally from Crete that were part of the warlike confederacy known today as the Sea Peoples. The Peleset only settled in the land of Canaan after they were defeated by an army led by Pharaoh Ramses III at the Battle of the Nile, circa 1177 BC. Ramses III forced them to resettle in the neighboring region, and thus they became Israel's enemies. It's an Iron Age detail inaccurately being projected backwards into the Bronze Age. So, as you can see, the Exodus contains bits and pieces from various points in Egyptian history, creating a hazy composite time period that never actually existed. This causes it to be set simultaneously at various points in the 15th, 13th, and 12th centuries BC. All of this has led to the troubling conclusion that the Exodus as described in the Bible likely did not happen, which means that Moses himself is of dubious existence as far as historians are concerned.
Still, some fringe scholars have doggedly insisted that there may have been a kernel of historical truth to the Exodus narrative and that there must have been a real man or men who served as the inspiration for Moses. Several candidates for this "real Moses" have been put forth from many different eras in Egyptian history, with pros and cons being argued for each of them. So, keeping all that in mind, amongst the people who, despite all the problems, still believe that a real historical Moses existed, there is seemingly a clear split between Christian and secular sources. From my research, Christians tend to favor the earlier 15th-century dating. Precept Ministries International Bible dates the Exodus to 1445 BC and the life of Moses from 1525 to 1405 BC. They also clearly identify Amenhotep II as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, seemingly based on nothing more than the dates of his reign. The ever-reliable Answers in Genesis actually provides us with two contradictory dates for the Exodus. Their official "History of Israel" timeline strangely dates the start of the Exodus to 1491 BC and the Jews arriving in the promised land and Moses dying in 1451 BC. However, elsewhere on their website, they follow the more traditional 1446 date. Meaning, according to Answers in Genesis themselves, Moses was somehow leading the Jews out of Egypt for a second time 5 years after he died. You never disappoint, Answers in Genesis. I can always rely on you guys for giving me two different dates for the same thing.
By contrast, secular, non-religious sources like my old AP World History textbook favor the later date, often giving a vague 1300 to 1200 BC date clearly derived from the biblical reference to Pi-Ramesses. Movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt fall under this category. Amongst these sources, Pharaoh Ramses II is a clear favorite identification for the unnamed Exodus Pharaoh. He's also the preferred choice for Islamic sources, but strangely not for the reasons we already covered. Look, I fell down the rabbit hole of Islamic TikToks and discovered that there's this kind of urban legend trying to claim that the mummy of Ramses II was miraculously washed up from the Red Sea in the 1920s. >> It washed up around the 20s. >> And this confirmed a verse in the Quran. Unfortunately, this is not true. Ramses II's mummy was discovered from the Theban Necropolis inside a tomb, not washed up from the Red Sea. And no, he did not drown to death pursuing Israelites. We know from his mummy, Ramses II died peacefully of old age, about 90 years old. >> Could this be a coincidence, guys? >> By the way, these TikTokers often use photos of Seti I's mummy, not Ramses II's. So, I'm not entirely sure they even know which pharaoh they're talking about here.
Okay, wrapping it all up. The life of Moses is very difficult to pin down in the historical record. Depending on who you ask, an argument can be made for two distinct eras: an early 1525-1400 BC date or a later 1300 to 1207 BC date. At the very latest, however, everyone seems to agree that Moses must have already been dead by 1207 BC, based on the Merneptah Stele. Keeping this in mind, let us see if either of these dates overlap with the life of Odysseus.
Similar to the Exodus and Moses, the dating of the Trojan War and consequently the life of Odysseus has been a subject of scholarly debate since antiquity. The Trojan War, in which Odysseus took part, was understood as taking place at the very end of the Greek heroic age: a murky period of time in which heroes like Heracles, Jason, and Perseus lived and made their names hunting treasures and slaying monsters. The Trojan War effectively marked the end of this period. Magic and monsters began to disappear from the world, and the gods no longer interfered as directly in the affairs of mortals. Ancient Greek sources gave various dates for this 10-year war. Herodotus, one of our oldest surviving sources, stated that the Trojan War took place about 800 years before his time, placing it around 1250 BC. Eratosthenes dated it to 1194 to 1184 BC. The Parian Marble, an ancient monument listing dates important to Greek history, placed the war from 1218 to 1208 BC. This means that generally, the Trojan War was said to have taken place sometime vaguely between 1250 and 1180 BC.
However, for the longest time, more recent scholars largely dismissed the Trojan War as a fantasy that never actually happened. That was until archaeological evidence was able to prove many aspects described within the Iliad and Odyssey as accurate historical facts about Greece in the Late Bronze Age. Most impressive of all was the discovery that the city of Troy was a real location. Today, it has been conclusively identified with the modern ruins of Hisarlik in western Turkey. In the Bronze Age, this site was once a populous and wealthy city known to the neighboring Hittites as Wilusa, a name that seems to have been corrupted by ancient Greeks into Ilios, and then the Ilios of the Iliad. Excavations of this site have confirmed that there is a destruction layer caused by man-made warfare, called Troy VIIa. And this destruction occurred in Wilusa roughly around the date 1190 to 1180 BC. This date is a bit younger than Herodotus' and the Parian Marble's estimates, but does work well with Eratosthenes'. This seems to confirm that something like the Trojan War recorded by the Iliad must have occurred at this location around 1190 to 1180 BC.
Now, interestingly, this Trojan destruction layer coincides with several others found in notable cities towards the end of the Bronze Age. Around 1200 BC, we know that the capital city of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa, was sacked and destroyed, never to be inhabited again as the empire itself crumbled. The wealthy coastal city of Ugarit was also destroyed around 1190 to 1185 BC. Amongst the ruins, archaeologists have found a clay tablet containing a letter from the last king to the king of Cyprus. It reads, "My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities. They have done harm to the land." The exact date of this letter is unclear, but it is possible that it was penned in the final days of the city, recording a mysterious enemy from the sea in a desperate plea for help that seems to have come too late. This mysterious enemy was later recorded by Egyptian sources who defeated them in the Battle of the Nile, circa 1177 BC. We know them today as the Sea Peoples, a confederation of several tribes who swept across the eastern Mediterranean during a period of great instability known as the Bronze Age collapse. Bringing their entire families, they seem to have embarked on a multi-generational migration going clockwise around the Mediterranean Sea, destroying whole cities and civilizations as they went along. The timing is interesting. All of this was happening roughly around the time of the supposed Trojan War. Were the heroes at Troy part of this Sea People invasion? Were Odysseus or Achilles Sea People themselves? It's hard to say for certain, but it is possible. As we've already discussed, at least one of the Sea People tribes, the Peleset or Philistines, were of Greek origin, not to mention the horned helmets and horsehair crests of Homer's warriors, which sound very reminiscent of artistic depictions of these invaders. I digress. The point is that some kind of invading force, seemingly of Greek origin, did destroy the city of Troy around 1190 to 1180 BC.
Does this mean Odysseus himself was real? Again, that's hard to say. It certainly doesn't sound impossible that a particularly crafty Greek warlord was involved in the Troy VIIa destruction layer, returned home after many adventures, and his story eventually served as an inspiration for the legend. But sadly, it's not that easy. Further archaeological findings have complicated this picture. In a predicament that feels like the complete opposite of the Exodus, we seem to have too much evidence for the Trojan War. The evidence seems to indicate that there was not just one, but multiple Trojan Wars. In addition to the destruction layer, we have the Tawagalawa letter, a Hittite tablet dated to around 1250 BC. In this text, the Hittite king Hattusili III wrote to the king of the Ahhiyawa mentioning something that historians call the Wilusa episode. Apparently, the Ahhiyawa kingdom had some nondescript hostility against Wilusa, aka Troy, that was recently resolved. Scholars believe this Hittite word "Ahhiyawa," which referred to a nation to the west, is a corrupted rendering of "Achaeans," the word Homer used to refer to the Greeks in the Iliad. The letter also names a Tawagalawa, which is likely a Hittite rendering of the Greek name. So, we have records of some hostility occurring between the Greeks and the Trojans around 1250 BC. A date that is too old for the Troy VIIa destruction layer, but correlates pretty well with Herodotus' date for the Trojan War. But that's not all. Another Hittite document records the existence of a man named Alexandu of Wilusa, who ruled the city around 1280 BC. Historians have long pointed out that the name of this king can be linked to the Greek Alexander, a nickname Homer gives to the Trojan Prince Paris, who, according to the Iliad, abducted Helen and started the Trojan War in the first place. This Alexandu's reign was 100 years older than the Troy VIIa destruction layer and about a generation older than the Wilusa episode. So perhaps this Alexandu is not the same Alexander Paris of the Iliad, but an ancestor. And lastly, we hear of an even older event occurring around 1430 BC in which several towns rebelled against Hittite rule in northwestern Anatolia. Wilusa, Troy, among them. The rebellion was defeated, but intriguingly, amongst the items captured from the rebels was a Greek Mycenaean sword, which implies Greeks may have supported the rebels, though it's unclear if they actually sent troops or simply provided weapons. Point being, there is evidence for multiple Trojan Wars, which Greeks seem to have been involved. And although most scholars overwhelmingly favor the 1190 to 1180 date for the Trojan War, the Trojan War of Odysseus, we cannot entirely discount these other candidates.
Returning to the question that started this discussion, did the lives of Moses and Odysseus overlap? As you can imagine, the answer is very complicated. In order for Moses and Odysseus to have lived at the same time, we must assume three things: First, we must favor the late dating of the Exodus between 1300 and 1200 BC during the reign of Ramses II. Second, we must favor Herodotus' early dating of the Trojan War to around 1250 BC in the Hittite Wilusa episode. And lastly, we must assume that these stories, the Exodus and Homer, were based on real events and their characters on real historical figures. All three of these assumptions are, well, not the best. We are dealing with two very quasi-historical figures with hazy, contradictory dates attached to them. But you could make it work with a bit of fudging.
Could they have met is a whole another question. In my opinion, the answer is a pretty definitive no. Unfortunately, despite Odysseus being a widely traveled man, his known route avoided Egypt. The majority of his adventures were focused on the western Mediterranean. So even in the unlikely chance they existed at the same time, Moses and Odysseus couldn't have met. But do not despair, we do have some interesting alternatives because the Odyssey does explicitly tell us about two characters who did visit Egypt after the Trojan War. In book four, when Telemachus, Odysseus's son, travels to Sparta to speak with King Menelaus and his wife Helen, the couple tells the boy about their eight-year trip home from Troy, which took them to Cyprus, Phoenicia, and Egypt. During their stay in Egypt, they seemingly traveled as far inland as Thebes and befriended two couples: Polybus, king of Thebes, and his wife Alcmene, and Polyomin and her husband Thonis. From these details, we can actually tell the author of the Odyssey wasn't very familiar with Egypt. As one scholar once put it, "The poet was obviously interested in the land of the Nile, though perhaps not very knowledgeable." All these Egyptian characters, with the exception of Thonis, have distinctly Greek names. And though Thonis appears to be a real Egyptian name, it's the name of a place, not a person. As we've already seen, correlating the chronologies of two different cultures can be difficult. The king of Thebes mentioned by Homer might be a pharaoh, but the name Polybus certainly doesn't match any known ones. If we are favoring the 1250 BC dating, it would have been Ramses II. And that does leave the fascinating possibility that Helen of Troy, Moses, and Ramses II could have all stood in the same room. Alternatively, a much later Egyptian priest named Manetho, commenting on Homer, believed Polybus to be King Thonis, who we now know was not a man, but a woman named Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs who ruled on the eve of the Bronze Age collapse. Again, an incredibly interesting idea. But that's not all. An even more intriguing possibility arises if we favor the later Trojan War dating. The Iliad tells us that the war occurred about a generation or two after the life of the demigod Heracles. Some men who personally knew Heracles, such as Nestor, were still alive. So even if the 1180s date is a bit too late, there is still the possibility that Moses could have met Heracles instead. And at one point, Heracles was said to have visited Egypt while embarking on his 10 labors. According to Greek tradition, during his visit, the Egyptians tried to sacrifice him, but the demigod saw through their tricks and killed their king Busiris. This Busiris, just like Polybus, was probably a Greek invention. But it is funny to imagine him as the same person as the Exodus Pharaoh using our overlapping dates. With this information, you could totally create your own personal headcanon that Heracles got revenge for the Jews. And that is an incredibly funny thought to me.
But yeah, real talk, this probably didn't happen. As we close out, I should stress the fact that Moses, Odysseus, and Heracles probably were not real people. They exist closer to the realm of legend than of history. And if there ever was a kernel of fact to their stories, that kernel has been almost completely lost to time. I always love doing this kind of research and discovering where a myth seems to blur into history. If you're curious to see the possibility of two other historical figures meeting, please comment them below. I'm always hungering for another challenge. Until then, I will be patiently awaiting that dubiously plausible Moses cameo in the upcoming Odyssey movie. Don't disappoint me, Christopher Nolan. Anywho, I've been Trai the Explainer, and thank you so much for watching. I hope to see you next time.