Mesopotamian Deluges and the Thera Catastrophe of 1628 BC

By Tom Slattery
What would it be like if the Exodus had never happened? What would have happened to
Moses and monotheism?

Would the first books of the Bible, the Torah, said to have been written by Moses, have
been written? Would the story of Noah, the Ark, and the great flood have been written?

Well, who knows? We'll get back to that.

The Noah flood story is widely known. But that's not the whole story of ancient gigantic
earth-drowning flood stories.

We all know about average mundane floods so we can identify with them. Humans and
proto-humans since before the invention of writing have understood floods from rain and
snow.

But those kinds of floods only give a feel for floods and are not what the Noah flood
story is about. The Noah flood story is first of all a story. So this is about stories of
floods. More to the point, this is about the Big Bad Floods in ancient written stories.

Not surprisingly, the initial written Big Bad Flood story comes at the dawn of writing.
The story of the flood of Zeusudra probably stems from a real event in ancient Sumer and
southern Mesopotamia in about 2900 BC.

A king in an ancient king list named Zeusudra reigned at about that date, and radiocarbon
dating of a remarkable thick layer of flood debris in southern Mesopotamia also gives the
date 2900 BC.

What's the story? Well, you could call it "Zeusudra and the Ark." Going way back to
2900 BC, the story has overwhelming similarity to the later "Noah and the Ark" story.

Whatever caused that terrible flood of 2900 BC -- that is to say it may have resulted from
a tsunami, an ice dam or natural dam failure, or a remarkable weather pattern -- it was
apparently appreciated by the newly literate ancient Sumerians of Zeusudra's time as
different from a normal-but-bad flood.

And perhaps a few generations after the real flood dried up and no real memories
remained, it was the stuff of fiction, even, one might say, science fiction. They put it
down in writing as perhaps the very first story in a five-thousand-year-long line of a
literary genre that we might now call apocalyptic science fiction. As poignant stories do,
it gained its own following and was told and retold, written and rewritten, read and
reread, and never seems to have gone away.

A thousand years after the 2900 BC story of "Zeusudra and the Ark," in the timeframe of
1900 BC, the same story was recast a short distance north in Mesopotamia. This version
was written in Akkadian language. The chief character in the story underwent a name
change from Zeusudra to Atrahasis.

The Akkadian story of the Atrahasis flood is not greatly different from the earlier
Zeusudra flood story. You could call it "Atrahasis and the Ark."

We humans are constantly rewriting old stories to make them understandable in the many
changing contexts of new times. I have done it with a couple stories myself. There is no
larcenous heart of plagiarism here. They simply updated the story.

And to that point, almost another thousand years later the Atrahasis flood story was recast
in Babylonian language and written down. This time the Big Bad Flood story became a
chapter in the Gilgamesh novel, probably the first novel ever written.

In the Gilgamesh novel, in Babylonian language, a literary character named Utnapishtim

builds an ark and survives a worldwide deluge. This flood-and-ark story incorporated
within the main story of the Gilgamesh novel could be called "Utnapishtim and the Ark."
Utnapishtim is the guy who builds the ark.

This Babylonian-language story of a great flood is not the final chapter in the ongoing
writing and rewriting of storied floods. The all-devastating deluge story is a good story
and it will go on and on. They liked it back then. We like it now. In our time the story
involves building spaceships to escape our environmental catastrophes, possibly ignoring
the fact that we are all here on an endangered ark called Spaceship Earth with all of the
other life forms.

By the time of the Utnapishtim version, the story had evolved a subtext of humans
aspiring to be something more than animal flesh in human shape amid the plethora of
animal natures pulling at their frail humanity.

So far, the writing and rewriting of that story of a deluge and an ark had been evolving
and adapting to changing society, technology, and values for 1700 years, from 2900 BC
to maybe 1200 BC.

But in the seventeenth century BC, toward the end of those 1700 years, came a new real
massive flood event. It was a flood to beat all known floods. To those who survived and
may have heard of the Mesopotamian story of a great flood and ark, it must have seemed
close enough to the story to make them wonder.

This seventeenth century BC flood was an unusual, remarkable flood, a flood like none
other experienced by civilized humanity. It happened in the eastern Mediterranean and
Aegean, and it was caused by a massive tsunami to beat all tsunamis resulting from a
colossal volcanic explosion of an island. (I use a plural "s" with "tsunami" to make
English-language reading easier.)
At the time that the volcanic island exploded, the Utnapishtim flood story probably had
not yet been set down in final form. The final form of the Utnapishtim flood-and-ark
story in Gilgamesh was found by archaeologists in the ruins of the Assyrian library of
King Ashurbanipal who reigned between about 668 and 627 BC, nine hundred years after
the volcanic island explosion.

In the final Utnapishtim story found in Gilgamesh in the Assyrian library there is a hint of
knowledge of the distantly historic tsunami-caused flood. In this version, humans are
"turned to stone," not impossibly from being covered by volcanic ash and appearing like
stone. Or possibly "turned to stone" was ancient idiomatic for "stopped dead in their
tracks," as when a person perishes suddenly and is caught in a final movement of life.
Could this be a variation on Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt? Anyway,
something different from your usual everyday Big Bad Flood happened.

The final version of the Mesopotamian flood-and-ark story in Ashurbanipal's Assyrian

library appears to archaeologists to have been copied from earlier versions, possibly
going back to the Old Babylonian period that ended roughly 1600 BC.

The Old Babylonian period ended, coincidentally, at roughly the time of the volcanic
explosion and tsunami catastrophe far off in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. In other
words, at any time in the thousand years between the explosion of the volcanic island and
resulting tsunamis and the writing of the final edition found in the Assyrian library,
changes could have been made.

Ancient writers in Assyria and Babylonia were far from the core of the catastrophe and
therefore probably had no grasp of the dimensions of the disaster. But commercial,
military, and diplomatic outposts on the far-western fringes of these empires may have
experienced it directly. News would have traveled back to Mesopotamia.

Like any writer, an ancient clay-tablet writer of apocalyptic flood stories would have
wanted to keep current with the latest events affecting the genre. A good writer would
have incorporated them into the story.

But before we go to that new and catastrophic flood, let's look at what is arguably yet one
more version of the original Mesopotamian flood-and-ark story.

This would appear to be a fourth version. As noted, the story continues to evolve in
modern science fiction, but the long line of ancient Mesopotamian flood-and-ark
literature going back to circa 2900 BC seems to come to an end with this last version.

This apparent fourth modification translated into yet a fourth language should be familiar
to most of us. It is the beloved biblical story commonly called "Noah and the Ark."

The Mesopotamian origins of the Book of Genesis in which the story of Noah and the
Ark is found are clear. Take Abraham and Sarah.
Whether one views the Abraham and Sarah story personalities as biographical or
eponymous, they came out of Mesopotamia. Thus one can assume that the Noah story
also came out of Mesopotamia.

The root Mesopotamian flood-and-ark stories would have been familiar to real
biographical Abraham and Sarah or, alternatively, to the members of tribes represented
by their story characters.

And there is another Mesopotamian influence. It would have entered the Noah story as a
result of the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, and
the Babylonian conquest of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah and subsequent exile
of 598 BC. These brought a large Jewish population away from proximity with the
Mediterranean Sea and into renewed direct Mesopotamian cultural influence.

Between 598 BC and about 540 BC -- a time covering about three generations -- the
upper class and intellectual elite of Judah were held captive in Babylonian Mesopotamia
and then were able to return to what is present Israel-Palestine.

During this time, and even later, modifications may have been made to an earlier story
"Noah and the Ark" to fit the ancient Mesopotamian story line. In short the story is part
of the Mesopotamian tradition.

But there is another, functionally different story of a great world-destroying flood and an
ark. It is from Greek mythology.

It is a story of a great deluge that seems separate from the line of Mesopotamian flood-
and-ark stories. For one thing it largely involves and is told from the viewpoint of
supernatural characters, gods rather than humans. And locations of the story are in
ancient Greece and the Aegean.

It is the ancient Greek flood story of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. You could call it
"Deucalion and the Ark." But the Deucalion "ark" was a box.

And there are other differences from the successive Mesopotamian flood-and-ark stories
that suggest differences in origin. It would seem that both the real flood origins and the
story material inventions of the two story lines came from two different sources and
traditions.

But people who were familiar with one story would have come across people who were
familiar with the other story. These flood-and-ark stories sometimes sound a little like
multi-nationality sailor stories told in beer-and-wine bars lining the quays of ancient
ports. A little literary borrowing would surely have taken place in the telling and then the
occasional writing of the similar but different stories.

And this may be the reason that the Deucalion flood story of ancient Greek mythology
and the Noah flood story share, among other things, a common name, Iaptus (Greek) and
Japheth or Yapheth (Hebrew). For some reason the English-language "J" is used for the
Hebrew "Y." The Greek "us" ending in the name merely denotes a male personality in
Greek language. Even using modern English language and Roman-letter phonetics, both
versions, "Iapth" and "Yapheth," can be seen as the same name.

And while this apparently identical name is associated with both the Deucalion flood
story and the Noah flood story, there is a slight problem. The Greek mythological Iaptus,
grandfather of Deucalion, is a story character two generations before the great flood. And
the Hebrew Japheth, son of Noah, is a story character a generation after the flood.

But there are other similarities. In both flood stories the character Iaptus/Japheth seems
eponymous, a character meant to represent a whole people or nation, apparently in both
stories the early Indo-European Greek people. But it could mean the ancient people of
Crete. Also in both flood stories, the hero-rescuers of animals, Noah and Deucalion, are
involved with wine making and the wine business.

And there would seem a curious link to the possibly idiomatic "turned to stone" phrase in
the above-mentioned Utnapishtim Babylonian flood story. In the Deucalion story
Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha repopulate the earth by throwing bones of their mother
over their shoulders. Their "mother" is Mother Earth. The "bones" are stones from the
earth. In one story humans are "turned to stone" in the process of perishing. It the other
humans are brought to life after the flood from stones.

As Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha throw stones over their shoulders, human forms
struggle out of the mud, come alive, and repopulate the earth. Might there be a remnant
memory of real survivors of a great flood who were thought to have perished but manage
to struggle up out of the mud and debris? It's a stretch, but it might be something to look
into.

Same names of the Iaptus/Japheth characters and same wine-connected vocations for
commanders of arks in two different flood stories from two different nationalities and
language groups could, of course, be coincidence. But if it is not coincidence what might
the reasoning be?

It would be this. A great historical flood catastrophe did occur, and it would have affected
both the Achaean-era pre-Greeks and the proto-Hebrews.

That historical flood catastrophe would be the colossal explosion of the volcanic Aegean
island Thera, (also called Santorini), and the resultant repeated tsunamis, some of which
have been estimated at forty to fifty meters high.

Thus each tsunami was a single wave that was about 120 to 150 feet high. And it is not
impossible that the waves may have been higher. For those who may have difficulty with
a tsunami forty to fifty meters high, the August 1883 explosion of the volcano Krakatoa
in present Indonesia generated a tsunami thirty-five to forty meters high. The height of
the tsunami generated by the 2004 Banda Aceh earthquake was 35 meters high at the
epicenter.

The tsunami waves from the Thera explosion washed completely or mostly over the
Aegean island of Anaphi directly to the east and Cythera directly to the west. They
flooded into the first bronze-age city of Athens and washed over it, possibly almost to the
top of the small table mountain on which the present Acropolis ruin sits. Everything and
everyone below the Acropolis would have been destroyed and killed.

The northern coast of Crete was totally devastated. And it is possible that in two places
seawater flooded completely across Crete. One could have been from the Gulf of
Mirambelos to Ierapetra, the other, less likely but arguably not impossible, from the coast
around the present city of Heraklion to the Plain of Messara, and then out to sea on the
south side.

At very least, though, all cities and habitations below forty or fifty meters above sea level
along the north coast of Crete would have been washed over and completely destroyed
and their inhabitants killed.

Using overlapping patters of tree-ring chronology an exact year for this volcanic
explosion and tsunami of 1628 BC has been found. Radiocarbon dates of 1650 BC plus-
or-minus 50 years help to confirm this date.

The worst impact of the tsunami was felt on Crete. An initial, possibly 120-foot-high
giant wave would have rushed the coast without warning at the speed of an airplane. No
one would have had time to flee to higher ground.

Only a few illiterate shepherds, berry gatherers, and hardscrabble farmers above 120 feet
would have survived, and many of them would have had no homes to return to. Perhaps
they would have made caves their homes for some long time. I add this because Zeus, the
chief god of Greek mythology and of the same generation as Iaptus, was born in a cave in
Crete two generations before the flood.

The Mediterranean is not usually a ferocious sea. It has bad storms, but no hurricanes like
the Caribbean. Centuries might go by without even small quake-generated or volcano-
generated tsunamis.

So human habitations large and small would have been built not far from the high tide
mark. Since humans and animals had to move everything, warehouses would have been
built near the waterline. To be convenient to these, government offices, religious edifices,
markets, and homes would have been near the sea. All of these would have been totally
destroyed when walls of water after walls of water struck.

Even as far as the coast of the Levant at Tel Aviv-Jaffa, a Thera-generated tsunami has
been estimated at seven meters, or twenty-one feet. This was just slightly more than
height of the 2004 Banda Aceh tsunami after it crossed the Indian Ocean and struck Sri
Lanka and caused extensive deaths and damage.

The tsunamis radiating from the volcanic explosion of Thera and then in addition from
the collapse of much of the island into its emptied caldera not only wiped out northern
Crete. They would have washed completely over low lying areas of Aegean islands,
killing everyone and destroying everything.

The shorelines of larger islands like Rhodes would have met exactly the same fate as
northern Crete. The Peloponnesian peninsula, especially the eastern side, would have
fared exactly the same as northern Crete. Nobody and nothing below forty or fifty meters
above sea level had any chance of surviving.

The southern coast of what is now Turkey would have been wiped out. And floods of
successive tsunami-generated waves would have wiped out coastal Greek cities and
habitations all over the Aegean. For Greece, the Aegean Islands, Crete, and western
Turkey it would have been a bronze-age equivalent of a nuclear war in terms of
casualties, destruction, and economic collapse.

Tsunami-generated waves would have been large and sudden enough to do near total
destruction to low lying coastal areas and their cities all over the eastern Mediterranean,
including the Levant and the coast of the Nile Delta.

Ships that had been docked would have been thrown inland and probably fractured and
broken. Most people near the shore of the eastern Mediterranean would have been killed
in their last moments of total astonishment. Those who had been far enough away from
the shore to survive would have found stores of food and commercial distribution
systems obliterated, as we have seen recently in Haiti, and hunger and chaos would have
quickly set in.

So in the summer of 1628 BC came a flood the likes of which had never been
contemplated, let alone had ever been experienced. No one living then could have
concocted a fantasy story like the one that happened.

The event was so terrible as to be singly memorable. But it could only be told as reality
until living memories vanished. After that the story increasingly would have been told as
fiction and myth. As generation after generation replaced those who had experienced or
had been told about it by elders, it became mythological, difficult to imagine as real. By
1550 BC it would have been just a story like out of science fiction.

The Minoan civilization of Crete, and probably of the Aegean Islands, too, had been at
the height of its power and influence when Thera blew up. That civilization was so
powerful and influential that Minoan cities on Crete and on Aegean islands needed no
fortifications for protection.
It was clearly a sophisticated maritime commercial empire, and it apparently had an
unequalled navy for protection. From excavated Minoan ruins that had been covered by
deep volcanic ash on the volcanic island of Thera itself one can see a subtle and beautiful
civilization.

Art is sophisticated beyond anything seen anywhere else in the world at the time, maybe
even our own time. They also had flush toilets and the upper class, at least, slept on beds
not unlike modern ones.

In Crete itself, a palace at Knossos, Crete, possibly a ceremonial site of lesser importance
than palaces and ceremonial sites that had been obliterated on the coasts of Crete, some
of the bronze-age magnificence of Crete has been preserved. Marvelous mosaics with a
distinct Minoan style betray a magnificent civilization.

Hints of the reach and power of this civilization can be found in the Nile Delta. Mosaics
that seem to be of similar style have been found there in the Hyksos capital of Avaris on
the Pelusiac Branch in the Nile Delta.

Early scholars thought Hyksos had been invaders of Egypt from Asia where Bedouin
tribes roamed. In this light they were called "Shepherd Kings" by a pre-Christian
Egyptian historian named Manetho (c 300 BC) whose accounts of the Hyksos were all
that historians and archaeologists had to go on until very recent times.

Recent studies have made the Hyksos out to be something like Egyptian branch executive
officers of bronze-age multi-national corporations. The Egyptian term "Hyksos" comes
from heqa khasewet, meaning people under "foreign rulers." One might guess that these
multi-national trading corporations included proto investment banking houses for
shipping, early versions of shipping insurance businesses, and the whole range of
businesses built around trade.

They would have had their own security forces and in addition, they would have had
tough armed sailors who knew how to fight pirates at sea and protect goods in port. All
around them the Egyptian government appears to have been disintegrating into strife and
chaos. Something had to be done.

The Hyksos appear to have collectively seized control of the Nile Delta region of
northern Egypt when the Egyptian government collapsed into civil strife and chaos.
Native Egyptians and foreign traders would probably have welcomed restoration of order.

In a text about the Hyksos (Asiatics) by the legitimate pharaoh in the south of Egypt,
Kamose, there is a hint that these branch executives of multi-national trading
corporations were from different countries and spoke different languages. Kamose says
about the Hyksos, whom he calls Asiatics, on the waters of the Egyptian Nile:

…as far as Kos it is Asiatic water, and they have drawn out their tongues of one
accord…
(taken from a web search; translation apparently by Donald Redford, in a piece
apparently by Professor Alison Futrell, U. of Arizona)

One might even wonder if a contract arrangement for the succession of self-styled
pharaohs was drawn up so that a different nationality group took over leadership and the
office of pharaoh after some agreed time.

And it would seem quite likely that the Hyksos eyed the disorder and turmoil in the south
of Egypt as an opportunity awaiting a proper time to strike. That was clearly the way
things were done back then.

Chronologies for the Hyksos are fragmentary and vary. The first Hyksos "pharaoh"
whom Manetho calls Salitis, apparently the same person as Sheshi, assumed power over
northern Egypt in the Egyptian city of Memphis somewhere between 1674 BC and 1648
BC. Hyksos rule over northern Egypt lasted for about another century.

Both of those dates, 1674 BC and 1648 BC, fall earlier than 1628 BC, and thus probably
before the Thera explosion. The Hyksos apparently were established in power in the
northern Egypt when Thera exploded and generated spectacular tsunamis.

The explosion of Thera and the resultant tsunamis could have taken place during or after
the reign of a Hyksos pharaoh named, interestingly, Yakov-el. His reign fell about in the
middle of the century-long Hyksos era. But this is just a guess, and maybe it was as late
as Khayan, the Hyksos pharaoh before the above-mentioned Hyksos pharaoh Apophis.

Likewise, we can only guess who was the legitimate pharaoh in Thebes when the
volcanic island exploded. Averaging numbers, one might guess that either Antef VI or
Antef VII was the southern legitimate pharaoh in Thebes when the tsunami catastrophe
occurred.

Thebes, far up the Nile, would have felt nothing, would have directly experienced
nothing. No one would have known. And it may have taken months or even years for
news to reach them.

Neither Antef IV nor Antef VII appears to have moved to take advantage of any tsunami-
caused military-political-economic weakness in the Hyksos-controlled Delta. That would
fall to the next three legitimate pharaohs, Tao I, Tao II, and Kamose. And none of these
three succeeded in ousting the Hyksos, and all three seem to have died trying.

Avaris probably did not suffer significant damage from the tsunamis, and the Hyksos
seem to have remained a power to be dealt with. But the commercial world that fed the
300-ship port facilities at Avaris trading goods would have collapsed. Goods and
technically educated service people would not have arrived. Contracts would not have
been fulfilled. The economy would have collapsed.
Early news reaching Thebes of what had happened in the eastern Mediterranean would
have been unreliable hearsay and would have stuck the people and government in Thebes
as exaggerated. More reliable evidence that something terrible had happened would have
come over time from a drying up of trade goods and an increasingly deteriorating Hyksos
economy.

Only after some time would the succession of pharaohs in Thebes have noticed that
foreign economic and military backing for the foreign rulers of northern Egypt had
shriveled to near nothing.

When it became apparent, the legitimate pharaohs may have felt it their sacred duty to
reunite Egypt and moved to liberate their country from the foreigners. The Theban
pharaoh Tao I seems to have made the first move against the Hyksos in 1558 BC. It was
unsuccessful and he was apparently killed in the attempt. After several years Tao II gave
it a try in about 1554. It was also unsuccessful, and he was also killed in the attempt.

Next came the Theban pharaoh Kamose. He tried in 1549 BC. He, too, failed and was
killed in the attempt.

Finally his son, the pharaoh Ahmose, still a boy, succeeded in driving the Hyksos army
out of northern Egypt and into Canaan in about 1535 BC. The expulsion effort had taken
over a quarter of a century.

To sum it up because this is important, it would appear that the Hyksos had originally
been prosperous businessmen who benefited from the rich and powerful Minoan
maritime civilization of Crete and it's era of peace and trade. The Hyksos probably came
to power in northern Egypt to restore order because the Egyptian government was
disintegrating. This appears to have been well before the Thera explosion and tsunamis.

During their time in power in northern Egypt the Hyksos appear to have conspired with
others to conquer the legitimate Egyptian government and maybe would have succeeded
except for economic-military weaknesses caused by the destruction of the tsunamis.

The reign of Kamose is contemporaneous with that of a later Hyksos pharaoh, Apophis.
And their two Egyptian governments had diplomatic relations even though Kamose
fought at least one battle with the Hyksos.

The unreliable timeframe suggests that the several military campaigns of the Theban
pharaohs, as well as some decades of coexistence with the Hyksos prior to these wars,
followed the Thera explosion and tsunamis. At first the Egyptian pharaohs had all they
could do to establish themselves in Thebes and hold off the Nubians to the south.

Then having accomplished this, there was series of wars or skirmishes between the
pharaohs in Thebes and the Hyksos in the north. These wars moved the Egyptian border
farther north into Hyksos territory, perhaps to the edge of Memphis (modern Cairo). But
they did not succeed in ousting the Hyksos.
At the time that the Hyksos seized power in northern Egypt the prevailing commercial
and cultural center of civilization seems to have been the Minoan civilization of Crete.
These heqa khasewet would have been either Minoans themselves or people
commercially and culturally allied with Minoan civilization.

What is interesting about the Hyksos and pertinent to the flood stories is that at least one
of the self-styled pharaohs of the Hyksos capital city of Avaris (Hut-waret) has an almost
biblical name straight out of Genesis.

That Hyksos pharaoh's name was the above-mentioned "Yakov-el." He was a

contemporary of the legitimate pharaoh Kamose who was ruling the independent
southern half of Egypt from Thebes.

Yakov-el may not have been the biblical Jacob himself, but his name nevertheless gives a
strong hint of a cultural connection. And it is not impossible that he was indeed the
biblical Jacob. The name is also rendered Yakov-ur. Ancient Egyptian language, like
modern Chinese, did not differentiate between the "l" sound and the "r" sound.

And an entertaining reciprocal of this possible Hebrew name in Egyptian records is, by a
stretch, a possible Egyptian name in Jewish records. That would be "Rebecca," the
mother of the biblical Jacob.

While "Rebecca" might mean "captivating" in the way we use the word captivating, that
meaning may be an attempt to take the sharp edges off of the translation. Results of web
searches indicate "Rebecca" would be derived from Hebrew-Aramaic "to tie" or "to bind"
or maybe "to snare," an odd name to give nice little girl in our time, but maybe not so odd
in ancient times.

But Rebecca could conceivably be taken from an Egyptian name, Rebekeh. It could mean
in Egyptian "Handmaiden to the Sun God Re." And this is significant because Egyptian
inheritance to the throne was matrilineal, that is, through the mother.

So one may be tempted to ask if this Egyptian name could have been left intact through
centuries of redaction and changes because originally it had meant a legitimization of a
Hyksos claim to the Egyptian throne. (That Rebecca was from Haran may not argue
against an Egyptian name. In the 18th Dynasty, following the expulsion of the Hyksos,
there was at least one marriage between an Egyptian pharaoh and a Haran-Mitanni
princess resulting in a kid who became a pharaoh.)

Other biblical names that may have been derived from Egyptian names appear to drop the
part of the name signifying an Egyptian god, possibly because a foreign god included in a
Jewish name would have been offensive, especially in a holy book.

So we do not now know, for instance, if this vital religious and historical Egyptian native
"Moses," to whom we owe so much, was named Tuthmosis, Ahmosis, or Re-mosis (the
last commonly written "Rameses") or some other god-plus-mosis. It is tempting to say
that Rebecca (r-b-c-a, because ancient Hebrew lacked vowels except "ah," and the second
letter can be pronounced either "b" or "v") is really Egyptian and has remained intact
through the centuries because the name was important to legitimatize a Hyksos pharaoh.

There may, of course, be other reasons for the name remaining intact. But if care were
taken that both the name "Jacob" and the name "Rebecca" were carefully preserved intact
through an exodus, wars, exiles, returns, temple destruction, and voluntary and enforced
diasporas, could there be a good reason?

The terrible catastrophe of the explosion of Thera and the resultant tsunamis struck just
about the time of the reign of the Hyksos pharaoh Yakov-el, either just before it, during
it, or just after it. Chronologies vary and the exact date is hard to pin down. It would sure
be helpful if someone could pin it down.

Going back to before the tsunamis and even prior to the apparently peaceful Hyksos
takeover, the city of Avaris in the Nile Delta would have been an important center in a
Mediterranean commercial empire. It had an ideal location as a Mediterranean port
connecting rich and populous Egypt to the rest of the known world. By the time of the
Hyksos its harbor was capable of handling 300 ships.

The city of Avaris (Hwt Waret, the present ruins of Tell el-Dab'a) was about halfway up
the Pelusiac Branch of the Nile, and this farthest east branch effectively flowed east to the
Mediterranean from there.

Thus Avaris was protected from the full impact of the several tsunamis by the continental
shelf, by reefs, and by barrier islands. And what was left of the height and force of a
tsunami, after crossing the Mediterranean, struck the river channel sideways instead of
directly washing up it.

A modern example of a tsunami affecting a river delta could be the Irrawaddy Delta after
the powerful Bandai Ache earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004. The Irrawaddy
Delta was, very roughly, a similar distance from the Banda Aceh earthquake epicenter as
the Nile Delta was from the volcanic island Thera. And the height of the Banda Aceh
tsunami at its epicenter began at about 35 meters, or about 105 feet.

But as the tsunami rushed north toward the Irrawaddy Delta, a continental shelf, reefs,
and barrier islands protected the Delta city of Yangon, Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma), and
the water level there rose, at worst, less than three meters. It was less than a normal high
tide.

Avaris, a similar distance inland from the Mediterranean shore, might have experienced
the Thera tsunamis the same way. As with Yangon, Avaris was probably far enough
inland so that the brunt of the several tsunamis from the Thera explosion were absorbed
and minimized. Moreover, Avaris would have been planned, built, and added onto with
the annual flooding of the Nile clearly in mind.
The explosion of Thera seems from vegetation under the volcanic ash to have taken place
in the summer, and that is when the Nile floods. The founders and builders of Avaris
would have planned for normal annual summer floods, some of which they would have
known could be more severe than others. Given the above modern Yangon example, the
tsunamis from the Thera explosion may not have been more than negligibly observable
amid measures taken to protect against a severe annual Nile flood.

Still, given the greater height of the series of Thera tsunamis, ships could have been
damaged or destroyed and warehouses inundated. Some damage was probably done.

But the real effect on Avaris would have been long term. The total destruction of most of
the eastern Mediterranean ports and ships, the total collapse of commerce and the
economy, and the disappearance of the policing functions of the Minoan navy would
have compelled the leadership in Avaris to scramble to meet challenges of a completely
new status quo.

Avaris is important to understanding the Noah and Deucalion flood stories, but especially
the Noah flood story, for several reasons. Among them, Avaris is in the biblical Land of
Goshen. And this region of the Nile Delta figures significantly in later parts of the Bible.

Avaris later was rebuilt as the Egyptian capital city of Pi-Rameses toward the end of the
Egyptian dynasty that followed the expulsion of the Hyksos. Pi-Rameses is the city of the
pharaoh that Moses challenged in the Bible.

Pi-Rameses was, of course, built long after the great flood. But its earlier incarnation of
Avaris was the place where people lived who experienced at least the economic effects of
flood of the tsunamis. Those residents of Avaris were alive to hear the tales of horror
from living survivors.

Under the various governments of both the Hyksos and the Egyptians they would take
part in generations of Egyptian life, including being part of the New Kingdom (Egyptian)
empire. Centuries after the Thera tsunamis and centuries after the expulsion of the
Hyksos, many of them would flee with Moses across the Sinai, eventually capture a part
of Canaan, and then, after some centuries, invent the Hebrew alphabet.

Interesting here is the apparent connection between the Hyksos and their capital and
government of the Nile Delta region and the proto-Jewish people, culture, and religion.

The people in the Nile Delta would not have been devastated by the tsunamis near as
much as the Greeks, Minoans, and Aegean Islanders to the north. And due to distance and
lack of modern communication they would have only gradually grasped the enormous
devastation as the few surviving ships brought news that to a normal average mind may
have seemed grossly exaggerated. The enormity of the catastrophe may have been so
unbelievable that it could have taken considerable time to realize that it might be true, let
alone to confirm that it was true.
With no radios, television sets, web sites, cell phones, or satellites, it would have taken
time measured in years, even decades. But reality would have eventually set in when the
goods and people stopped coming. The harbor for three hundred ships would have
become underutilized. And slowly it would have dawned on everyone that the maritime
Minoan cultural and commercial empire had been utterly destroyed.

And if the Minoan Empire had been the economic and military buttress of the Hyksos
government, word would have eventually reached their adversaries, the official Egyptian
government in Thebes, far up the Nile River to the south.

The legitimate pharaoh Seqenre Tao II began his reign in Thebes by one chronology in
circa 1591 BC, maybe four decades after the Thera catastrophe and tsunamis. He
immediately moved against the Hyksos. He failed. But he was only the first. A
succession of pharaohs tried and failed over as much as four more decades.

But by circa 1550 BC, the pharaoh Ahmose, initial pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty,
which began the New Kingdom imperial period, finally captured Avaris and pursued the
last Hyksos into southern Canaan, near present Gaza.

The Hyksos rulers had run northern Egypt for about a century, from roughly 1650 BC to
roughly 1550 BC. Their capital Avaris is a verbal corruption of the Egyptian name Hwt
Waret, which Wikipedia translates as "house of the department," meaning an
administrative capital.

A straightforward but non-Egyptian pronunciation Hut Waret by the many foreigners in

and out of the port of Avaris easily gives Ha-Waris, or Avaris. Could a slightly looser
pronunciation by other foreigners from a language-group like modern French that drops
final consonants give you Ha-bari, or Hebrew? One can only wonder.

The Hyksos may have been run out of Egypt, but Hyksos influence seems to have
remained, even flourished. In the middle of the New Kingdom the pharaoh Tuthmosis IV
appointed a prime minister named Yuya.

Yuya appears to have become more powerful and influential than his bosses the
pharaohs. He served two pharaohs, Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep III, and was
grandfather to a third pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhnaten to
reflect the new proto-monotheism he decreed for Egypt.

Prime Minister Yuya's name was certainly foreign. Egyptians had a difficult time
rendering it phonetically with Egyptian characters.

If you take the first syllable of his name and an important syllable from one of his
Egyptian government titles, you get Yu-seph, "Joseph," possibly the Joseph in Genesis.
This is to say that the several connections between the Jews and the Egyptians spelled out
in the Bible probably represent some historical fact. And if the Hyksos were proto-Jews,
proto-Jews appear to have been in Egypt when the Thera explosion and tsunami occurred.

The Hyksos probably had intended at first only to restore order to protect their
businesses. But in doing so they seized control of one of the plushest areas on earth and
one of the best commercial locations in the Mediterranean. Once established as self-
styled pharaohs in the north of Egypt, they appear to have looked south to remove those
other inconvenient pharaohs, legitimize themselves, and control all of Egypt.

The explosion of the volcanic island Thera and resulting massive tsunamis put an end to
their fantasizing.

Nature has affected history throughout history. A typhoon that the Japanese call the Kami
Kaze, God of the Wind, destroyed the Mongol fleet just as the Mongols were attempting
to invade Japan. Invasions of Russia by both Napoleon and Hitler met with severe winter
conditions that affected the outcome.

The Thera explosion and resulting tsunamis eroded Hyksos power and probably led to
their military defeat. This defeat opened the way for the imperial phase of Egyptian
history. This made New Kingdom Egypt the cultural, military, economic, and political
power of an area that stretched from the southern border of modern Turkey to modern
Ethiopia for four hundred years.

Thera was fated to explode, and did. Nothing could have changed that. And if one wants
to believe that it was part of some great plan, there's nothing wrong with that.

But let's entertain a fantasy of what it might be like if Thera had not exploded just when it
did? What might the world be like?

The Hyksos, some might say the "proto-Jews," were in ascendancy when Thera exploded
and forced walls of water across the eastern Mediterranean. If Thera had not exploded
one might guess that the Hyksos, backed by Minoan economic and military power, would
have continued to march south and would have overrun Thebes.

Egypt, at that point, would have become what we might boldly call "Jewish Egypt."
Proto-Jewish Hyksos pharaohs would have ruled both halves of the two lands of Egypt.

But they would have been "proto-Jewish." They would have been the Jews of the time of
the patriarchs who knew elohim, the plural, "gods," not a monotheistic God, Yahweh,
later introduced to them by Moses centuries later.

With "proto-Jews" running ancient Egypt, would there have been persecution of Jews
forced into labor to build a new capital city Pi-Rameses, on the spot where ancient Avaris
once had been? One can guess not.
And without that persecution and terrible labor conditions, would there have been an
Exodus led by Moses? And if Moses had not led all those people out into the desert,
would there have been a lasting worship of a new monotheistic God?

Would these Hyksos "Jews" running rich fertile Egypt have grown comfortable and
powerful and resultantly as oblivious to human suffering as the pharaoh and his
government of elite Egyptians?

And might it have been "Jews" that conquered land as far north as southern Turkey and
as far west as the Euphrates River and as far south as Ethiopia like the New Kingdom
pharaohs did?

More importantly, would there have been an ethical advance of the kind initiated by
Moses, a new world-religion did not worship solely national gods and that was open to
anyone who would follow its religious laws?

And outside of Egypt, would Greek mythology still have included its own unique flood
and ark story of Deucalion and Pyrrha?

Would the Minoans on Crete have continued to develop their already sophisticated
civilization? Would they have advanced naval sciences and ship design well beyond what
they were? Would ocean-going Minoan-Hyksos-Egyptian ships using new ship designs
and new navigation techniques have reached the Americas millennia before Columbus?

Would this have allowed cultural and technological exchanges between the New World
and the Old World peoples and prevented the tragic near annihilation of New World
peoples and cultures?

In short, what would the world have been like? Well, that's the stuff of science fiction.

Tom Slattery
Rocky River
March 2010