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Old August 26th, 2007 #3
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Default Aryan Egypt

Thera, Tin, and the Aryan Invasion by Tom Slattery

by Tom Slattery

http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/uc_slattery_tin.htm

Three history-making events appear to have happened around 1500 B.C., and all three may be closely related.

One: The Greek volcanic island of Thera in the Mediterranean exploded around then. It may have been the largest volcanic event to occur in human history.

Two: The great Aryan Invasion originating out of central Asia and continuing down into northern India was in progress. While there is some argument that it was not a genuine invasion, a movement of people does appear to have taken place down through Iran (which derives its present name from the event), and this movement, as preserved in the Rig Veda, does appear to have been at least partly a military conquest. An important offshoot of this invasion, the Mitanni of biblical Haran, played an important part in Western history.

Three: The Late Bronze Age began. The Late Bronze Age is the true Bronze Age. The Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age used a different metal, an alloy of arsenic and copper. Only in the Late Bronze Age do we see the real bronze alloy of tin and copper.
The largest and most easily mined deposits of rare tin ore were scattered in a curving geological line that runs from just east of the great salt lake called Issyk Kul in Khirghizia to just east of the present city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan. On Map 4 in his book Tin in Antiquity, R. D. Pennhallurick names the mine locations, Sarszhas, Sarybulak, Aktyuz, Uchkoshkon, Maikhoura, Changhalli, Kochkarli, and Karnab. And during the Bronze Age these were some of a very few places in the Old World that were known to have tin ore, and this was largest lode of easily mined tin ore.
And the Aryan Invasion appears to have swept south from this area. There is something quite telling about the Aryan Invasion in this regard. The "ar" sound in Aryan appears to have the same Indo-European root as words for "ore" in various Indo-European-derived languages, "ore" in English, "erz" in German, for instance.

They were thus the "Ore People." Apparently they did not differentiate between "ore" and its product, "metal." So they may have called themselves the "Metal People." This comes in contention with the commonly held opinion that the "Aryan" name meant "noble," or "superior." I would guess that this nomenclature came after the fact. The Aryans dominated other peoples and became superior in the social stratigraphy, and they were thus able to be noble. It is hard to dismiss the idea of "Ore People" as perhaps having been their original designation for themselves.

Following their initial successes, the Aryans may have maintained exclusive control over tin ore sources, trading not only cash-credits for it, but political-military influence as well. One is led to suspect something like this happened in the case of the Aryan Mitanni who settled in upper Mesopotamia. They came to play a strange large role in distant Egyptian history. Might this have been due to imperial Egyptian need for tin to make bronze?

A first note of possible Aryan Invasion influence in Egyptian history comes with the Hyksos (literally "People Under Foreign Rulers") takeover of northern Egypt for a century between about 1650 to 1550 B.C. Introduction of war chariots into Egypt occurs then. Then come the Mitanni - preserved in biblical text with Abraham's sojourn in the country of the Mitanni called Haran - who several times "married" into the Egyptian royal family. And this may be a glimpse at a larger picture behind the success of the Aryan Invasion.

The Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Tuthmosis IV (1398 BC to 1388 BC) "married," as his primary wife, a Mitanni princess, breaking ancient Egyptian tradition of matrilineal succession. Their kid, half-Mitanni pharaoh Amenhotep III, continued this break by "marrying" the daughter of his father's prime minister, a clearly foreign man named Yuya whom Ahmed Osman believes may have been the biblical Joseph (of Genesis).

Their kid, Amenhotep IV, initiated a new pseudo-monotheism worshipping an aspect of the sun called the Aten, changed his name to Akhn-Aten to reflect it, and tossed out the old religion and its old familiar pantheon. And it is interesting to note that this Aten's name was Shu, the Aryan-Mitanni god of the sun.

So beginning with the Hyksos and mostly ending with the end of Eighteenth Dynasty, there appears to have been a possible Aryan connection. The first seems to have been the Hyksos. The second is the definitely Aryan-Mitanni influence in Egyptian history growing out of several marriages to Mitanni princesses and resulting in a monumental change in the state religion initiating worship of an apparent Aryan deity. And all of this may have been due to an interest by the Egyptian ruling class in the most vital strategic mineral of the Bronze Age, tin.

And it may interesting to note that the ancient Egyptian word for "tin" seems to have been dm, sometimes written d)m, apparently for an unknown Egyptian aspiration or vowel. This does not sound like the Indo-European derived word we hear in Greek as kassiteros. The ancient Egyptian word seems remarkably like our modern English word "tin," or the German "zinn."

Might we still be using the ancient Egyptian word? Might this be because tin once played a far more important role in a European history connected with ancient Egypt than we have so far discovered? The only large sources of tin outside of central Asia known anywhere in the West in the Bronze Age were in Cornwall-Brittany and on the present German-Czech border. And since it was the vital strategic mineral of the Bronze Age, Egypt would have gotten at least some tin from there.
A volcanic island named Thera exploded circa 1550 B.C. The Aryan Invasion, which included an offshoot called the Mitanni, is centered around that time. The Late Bronze Age, the true Bronze Age, that used an alloy made from tin and copper rather than the earlier alloy made from arsenic and copper, began about then. They seem at first sight to be intimately related to one another. And if this is true, we are what we are today because of it, more than has previously been suspected.
Mythical or Historical? The Figure of Abraham

The Mitanni tablets demonstrate some historical patterns that are also in the Abraham story in Genesis
The Historical Figure of Abraham

Research By Kerry A. Shirts

These are musings concerning the scholars' attitudes on the historical Abraham. It is not very complete, and I'll add to it as I can, but there is enough here to indicate that the case against Abraham ever existing is not an open and shut one. This is of interest to students of the Book of Abraham.

Genesis 12 - 17 is the main biblical information we have concerning the Covenant of Abraham. Abraham is essentially promised that his posterity will be as innumerable as the stars. Through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. G. Ernest Wright noted that "God's law in the covenant was not conceived as a penal burden to be borne. It was God's gracious gift to Israel that the nation... Totalitarianism was lifted from the earthly to the heavenly sphere. The law thus envisaged a security and a freedom for the individual, who was not to be unrighteously oppressed by human power."[1] He further noted that "...the relationship of God to man was conceived under these forms of covenant as possessing an eternal and universal character." In fact, "Covenant created the community which gave meaning to the individual,"[2] a concept not missed by Eugene England's recent sharp insightful book, Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.[3]

Various biblical scholars used to postulate that the items in these chapters, Genesis 12-17, were the invention of later writers, and added into the narrative much later than the actual occurrences were supposed to have happened.[4] Many scholars claimed that Abraham is merely an historical myth with no basis in reality. While Anton Jirku acknowledges that Abraham is neither pure poem (Dichtung) nor pure truth (Wahrheit), Walter Beltz simply dismisses him as fictional myth (eine mythische Person... Die Gestalt Abrahams ist eine mythische Schopfung.)[5] Other scholars have not argued so much against his historicity as to the fact that the biblical account of his life "is an inextricable tangle of history and myth."[6] We will assume, for the sake of this paper, as well as the evidence of the Book of Abraham itself, that Abraham was a real historical person in an authentic historical time, though even his dating has proven difficult.[7] Many historians and Bible scholars today, as opposed to many in the 1960's, admit that historical situations and peoples are really what the ancient authors were trying to portray or remember, rather than merely inventing them for didactic purposes.[8]