Urban legend

David Rohl is a maverick Egyptologist, pop musician, organizer of adventure tours and popular writer. His "New Chronology" attempts to synchronize the Biblical stories with archaeological finds in both Egypt and the Holy Land.

Naturally, Rohl's books have become cult classics, especially "A Test of Time" (called "Pharaohs and Kings" in the United States). Mainstream archaeologists and historians have been less amused, and Rohl has a longstanding conflict with Egyptologist Überprofessor Kenneth Kitchen. This is richly ironic, since both men want to prove the Bible - Kitchen because he is a Christian, Rohl because he likes the action. Unfortunately for Rohl, Kitchen happens to be the leading authority on the Third Intermediate Period in ancient Egyptian history, precisely the period Rohl wants to dispense with in his revised chronology of ancient history...

Personally, I'm an unofficial fan of "A Test of Time" (at least the first half of the book), but I strongly dislike "Legend", in which Rohl attempts to prove the entire Old Testament, including the Garden of Eden, the Flood and the migrations afterwards. The book is too wildly speculative, and peddles the unfortunate "Dynastic Race theory" of Egyptian origins, a colonial construct with obviously racist implications.

In Rohl's version, the Old Testament (so-called) isn't a history of all humanity, but rather a mythologized historical narrative of the Semitic peoples and some of their closest ethnic relatives. The Garden of Eden was an actual location in the Zagros mountains in western Iran. The "expulsion" from Eden was a migration from Zagros to southern Mesopotamia, where the migrants created the Sumerian culture. After a gigantic (but geographically local) flood, the survivors dispersed to various parts of the Middle East and Africa. One group set sail for Egypt, which they conquered and subjugated after a daring military expedition. Thus, Egyptian high culture wasn't an indigenous achievement. Rather, it was imposed from without by a Mesopotamian foreign elite.

The political implications for the Black Athena debate are obvious, since the native Egyptians were presumably African, while the foreign conquerors "R" Us. Rohl is at pains to disassociate himself from the racism of the Dynastic Race theory, and quite rightly so, but the implications are still there. In the context of the Biblical narratives, Semites are seen as honorary White Europeans by the Western readership. In some other contexts, even Hamites have this status. (In real life, nobody likes Arabs or Ethiopians, and Jews are suffered only because Israel is pro-Western.) Thus, a book about "the genesis of civilization" claiming that a Semitic-Hamitic dynastic race conquered and civilized Egypt, will invariably be seen as yet another proof that "we" created civilization, in contradistinction to the primitive coloured races. The same subconscious Euro-centrism shines through at one point in "A Test of Time", as well, when Rohl waxes eloquent about how the Hebrew slave boy Joseph saved the Egyptians from famine and chaos by reorganizing their entire state administration, as if the Egyptians couldn't have come up with that themselves (Egyptians, nota bene, who were supposedly descendants of the dynastic race!) Joseph, of course, is the audience surrogate, so once again the alien races are saved by one of our kind (or at least by a honorary goy).

Now, somebody might argue that we should boldly follow the evidence no matter where it might lead, and deal with the "implications" later. True, but the evidence points in the opposite direction. As Toby Wilkinson points out in his book "The Genesis of the Pharaohs", the roots of Egyptian civilization go all the way back to the Nakada I culture, which flourished long before Mesopotamia. The Nakada II culture was a later outgrowth of Nakada I, not a foreign imposition from out of the blue. Even apart from this, the entire structure of ancient Egyptian society was very different from Semitic ditto. The curious combination of hierarchy and quasi-matriarchy strikes me as typically African, not Semitic. What exactly is the foreign elite supposed to have imposed on the natives, anyway? Falconeering?

The shoe is fundamentally on the other foot, it seems: it's our Euro-centrists who should deal with the evidence for the unmistakably African "genesis of civilization".

But even apart from this, I have to say that "Legend" is just too speculative. Rohl has even located the real place of the landing of the Ark! Come again? Every legendary figure from Mesopotamian history or the Biblical stories simply *must* have a real equivalent, which - somewhat ironically - makes "Legend" feel constrained and claustrophobic, rather than freethinking. Some of Rohl's speculations are non sequiturs. Nobody denies that some Biblical legends hail from Mesopotamia, but so what? That's pretty old hat and doesn't prove that the Hebrews were descendants from a people that really experienced an expulsion from Eden or a gigantic flood. A more parsimonious explanation is cultural diffusion, or that the ancient Semites made it all up...

I'm afraid these urban legends are only worth two stars.