The Forum

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Don’t Glorify Drug Use!

Let’s hope Archaeology Odyssey will balance the article on opium by Robert S. Merrillees (“How the Ancients Got High,” AO 02:01) with future items showing the horrible effects of the widespread use of opiates.

The sentence that starts “Not only does opium remove inhibitions…” should have ended with “but it also suppresses the conscience and engenders severe depression, paranoia and addiction.”

There is nothing wrong with loading the term “opiate” with pejorative connotations. Merrillees writes that “opium is regarded in the Judeo-Christian ethic as immoral, whereas other religions and cultures are less hide-bound.” This is a tremendous point in favor of the Judeo-Christian ethic and an indictment of “other religions and cultures.”

The Ancients came to the same conclusion and wrote it in the Bible (any version). It could be that we are right about this.

Odyssey Tours, Inc.

While in Athens over Christmas, my wife and I decided to spend our last week (of three) in Corfu. I had read your article on Butrint, Albania (Judith Harris, Destinations, AO 01:02), so I knew that one departs from Corfu to visit this splendid site.

Most people I met told me not to enter Albania. But from the moment I decided to go, everything fell into place. Going into Albania was a high point in my life as a 67-year-old retired psychiatrist.

I took a ship from Corfu to Saranda, Albania. There I met a tour guide, who kindly showed me through the town and pointed out the road to Butrint. I then strolled into the ancient city—perhaps an even greater experience than seeing the Acropolis, Delphi or Olympus.

A Dream Deferred

I too once yearned to swim the Hellespont (see Susan Heuck Allen, Destinations, AO 02:01). My dream was inspired by the adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton (The Royal Road to Romance, 1925). To a girl in a small Oregon farming town, Halliburton opened the possibility of the world. But although I was a good swimmer, I took one look at the swirling waters of the Hellespont and knew it was not for me.

Last heard of, Halliburton was lost at sea while attempting a Kon Tiki-type crossing on a sailboat.

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“Once More into the Breach”

Archaeology Odyssey readers may remember my article “In Pharaoh’s Footsteps: History Repeats Itself in General Allenby’s 1918 March on Megiddo,” AO 01:02—about two battles that took place in present-day northern Israel.

In 1479 B.C. Pharaoh Thutmose III, against the advice of his generals, captured ancient Megiddo by charging up the narrow, treacherous Musmus Pass—though he could have taken safer routes to the north or south. Some 3,500 years later, toward the end of World War I, the British general Edmund Allenby attacked Turkish-controlled Megiddo by following the same perilous route, taking the city by surprise.

I ended the article with a question: Was this merely a historical coincidence? Or did Allenby knew about Thutmose’s tactics and replicate them?

Allenby’s biographers suggest that the general read about the Thutmose battle in one of his favorite books, George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land (originally published in 1896), which mentions a number of battles fought at Megiddo. Smith’s book, however, did not describe Thutmose’s battle at Megiddo until its 25th edition (1931), 13 years after Allenby’s campaign. So if Allenby did know about Thutmose’s daring tactics at Megiddo, Smith wasn’t his source.

But there is another possibility, which I casually suggested in my article. Sir William Flinders Petrie and James Henry Breasted, two of the foremost Egyptologists of Allenby’s day, had both published books between 1896 and 1906 in which they translated Thutmose III’s Annals and documented his battle tactics of 1479 B.C. Was Allenby familiar with their books, especially since he was based in Cairo for a brief period in 1917?

Now I can give the answer, “Yes.” Allenby knew about Thutmose’s battle at Megiddo, and he probably deliberately mirrored the pharaoh’s tactics. The confirmation came from an unexpected source.

Last November, several months after my article appeared, I lectured on “The Battles of Armageddon” at the University of Akron. (In a book with the same title, forthcoming from the University of Michigan, I document some 21 battles fought at Megiddo or in the nearby Jezreel Valley in ancient and modern times.) At the end of my talk, I posed the same question with which I had concluded my article in Archaeology Odyssey, Did Allenby know about Thutmose’s daring raid on Megiddo? Had he read Breasted’s or Petrie’s books, or had he met one of these men in Cairo?

After the lecture, my host, Professor Gary Oller of the Classics Department at the University of Akron, cut through a lot of thickets with a simple suggestion: Since my reading about Allenby had led nowhere, he said, perhaps I should take a different tack. Maybe Breasted or Petrie mentioned the good general.

Why not look?

The next day (Friday the 13th!) I did exactly that. Before settling down to watch the movie Armageddon, I began leafing through three books: Petrie’s autobiography, Seventy Years in Archaeology (1932), Margaret Drower’s biography of Petrie, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (1985), and a biography of Breasted written by his son, Charles Breasted, entitled Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist (1943).

It soon became clear to me that Allenby probably had not met Petrie or Breasted until after the war.

But then I came across an entry 011from Breasted’s journal, dated November 10, 1919. In it Breasted recounts that the Allenbys were visiting Chicago and had invited him and some others to a dinner. At the dinner, Breasted spoke at length with Allenby; the following conversation, taken from the journal entry, is published in Charles Breasted’s biography of his father:

When the Allenbys arrived from England, they invited me to a dinner at the Residency. It was very pleasant, not a bit stiff or formal, despite the numerous important official personages present…After dinner, Allenby to my great surprise led me to a chair apart from the company, and seating himself, began to take up a remark I had made…He continued to talk to me for the rest of the evening, without interruption or addressing a single word to his other guests.

Only a few months ago Allenby dealt the final annihilating blow to the leading oriental Empire [Turkey], which had ruled the Near East for about six centuries…The quiet, matter-of-fact way in which he spoke of the momentous events wherein he played so great a part, his directness and unquestionable sincerity, made a profound impression on me, the more so because the simplicity of his manner at first quite veiled the greatness of the man…

I cannot now recall what shifted our conversation at this point to the battle of Megiddo, but Allenby evidently took pleasure in talking of it.

[Allenby] “When they gave me a peerage, they wanted me to add ‘Armageddon’ to the title, but I refused to do that. It was much too sensational, and would have given endless opportunity to all the cranks in Christendom. So I merely took Megiddo.”

[Breasted] “Probably only the Orientalists know that it is identical with Armageddon, and the public will never discover the identity.”

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[Allenby] “Quite true…and if such titles are to be used at all, Megiddo has had its appropriateness…You know, I went straight through the Pass of Megiddo, and at the crest I sent the infantry through to make a hole for the cavalry. They found a few battalions of Turks in possession of the height, killed thirty or forty of them, and captured all the rest. The cavalry got through the hole, and went forward with orders not to do any fighting, but to ride across the Plain of Megiddo and get astride of every road leading north, along which the enemy could retreat…Curious, wasn’t it, that we should have had exactly old Thutmose’s experience in meeting an outpost of the enemy and disposing of them at the top of the Pass leading to Megiddo! You see, I had been reading your book and [George] Adam Smith [Historical Geography of the Holy Land] and I knew what had taken place there.”

[Breasted] “Unfortunately we have too few in America who know the Near East or realize the obligation of the civilized world to keep order there.”

Since we know that the edition of Smith’s book available to Allenby did not contain a discussion of Thutmose III’s battle at Megiddo, it must have been from Breasted’s volume that Allenby learned the details of Thutmose III’s tactics. Of course, Allenby may have read Petrie’s book, too. If so, he graciously refrained from commenting on it while conversing with Breasted.

This matter is now settled once and for all: Allenby did indeed walk in pharaoh’s footsteps. Before his 1918 march on Megiddo, Allenby had studied James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Records of Egypt; he knew that Thutmose had gambled by following a dangerous attack route in order to capture the enemy unawares. Allenby deliberately borrowed Thutmose’s strategy and, in an uncanny redramatization of a historical circumstance, took the Turks by storm.

Oops

Your Winter 1999 piece with an excerpt from Horace’s Satires (“From Rome to Brindisi,” Past Perfect, AO 02:01) was a delight, but the numismatic illustration of Horace was amiss. The object is not a late-first-century B.C. Roman coin; it is a medallion dating around 390 A.D. The Terme Museum in Rome has a good number of these interesting pieces that celebrate a number of ancient literary and philosophic figures.

A Twice-Told Tale

A letter in your Fall 1998 issue (see The Forum, AO 01:04), “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” compares the status of the Elgin Marbles to the sale of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The writer notes that the manuscript’s return to England was only enabled by the efforts of British schoolchildren, who raised the funds necessary to repurchase it from an American collector.

In fact, the manuscript was donated to the British Library by its original purchasers, Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, and his close friend Lessing J. Rosenwald. The two purchased the Alice manuscript from the estate of Eldridge Johnson—the Camden, New Jersey, collector to whom Dr. Rosenbach earlier had sold the manuscript. In 1947 the two bibliophiles, acting through the Library of Congress, presented the manuscript to the British Library as a gift of the American people in recognition of British solidarity in World War II.

Apropos of your original article on the Elgin Marbles AO 01:02, I think you will agree that the actual story is a much more compelling tale of generosity.

A New Sea People?

Ingrid D. Rowland suggests a possible link between the Etruscans (or Tyrrhenians) and the Sea People group called the Tursha (“The Etruscans—Mastering the Delicate Art of Living,” AO 01:03). I realize that the author saw this as merely a “tempting” connection, with evidence “too slim to rely on.” It certainly tempts me.

I have always understood that the dominant theory for the Sea People’s migration was their being pushed out of their homes by other migrant groups. By linking the Etruscans with the Sea Peoples, the author is suggesting a completely different scenario. Is it possible that some of the Sea Peoples were not looking for new lands to settle, but were only interested in gaining wealth as mercenaries? Perhaps Archaeology Odyssey could devote some space to this topic in a later issue.

The Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World

I have always wondered what the most beautiful building in Egypt looked like. Many thanks for the wonderful photo of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri (Gay Robins, “The Enigma of Hatshepsut,” AO 02:01).

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This mortuary temple is a striking departure from previous Egyptian temple architecture (with the possible exception of the funerary complex attributed to Nebhepetra Mentuhotep II [2010–1998 B.C.], also at Deir el-Bahri), with its colonnaded terraces cut by a grand stairway. Clearly, Hatshepsut’s temple reflects foreign influence, as suggested by Queen Hatshepsut’s own statement that she had “built a Punt,” an adaptation of a temple she had seen in Punt, in the Divine (God’s) Land.

The problem is the correct location of Punt and the identity of the king who could trump Hatshepsut’s gifts with even more wondrous presents of gold, silver (rare in Egypt at the time), panthers, monkeys and the exotic myrrh trees she planted on her terraces at Deir el-Bahri.

Dating Trouble

In “Recent Finds” of your Fall 1998 issue (Field Notes, AO 01:04), Seti I is dated 1306–1290 B.C. A few pages later, in the fine article on the Tale of Sinuhe (Anson F. Rainey, “This is the Taste of Death,” AO 01:04), Ramesses II (son and successor of Seti I) is dated 1279–1213 B.C. Something is wrong.

I have heard rumors of different dating systems, and I assume this is 060to blame. It would seem that different systems are in use by different scholars. Are they all equally defensible, or is one system better than others?

Also, Rainey claims that around 1900 B.C. an organized society existed in Canaan that maintained diplomatic contact with Egypt. But he seems to admit that there is a total lack of archaeological evidence of contact with Egypt (in terms of pottery and scarabs). Is it not possible that the Tale of Sinuhe was written at some later point in the 12th dynasty (hence the desire to praise Senuseret) and that the more advanced society of the author’s day was retrojected back on what was a simple pastoral society? This seems a reasonable way of reconciling the conflicting claims.

Anson F. Rainey replies:

It is a pleasure to respond to an alert reader like Mr. Nilsson. There are three systems on the table for dating the pharaohs, mainly based on astronomical observations recorded in texts dated to the reigns of certain kings. Since Egypt is a very stretched-out country, it is important to know whether those observations were made at Elephantine (near Aswan) in the south, at No-Amon (Luxor) farther north, or at Memphis (a bit south of Cairo). The system that seems to be the most trustworthy of the three assumes that the main document listing those observations records sightings made at No-Amon. The key dates are: Ramesses II at 1279 B.C. and Thutmose III at 1479 B.C. The most concise discussion of this problem is Kenneth A. Kitchen’s “The Basics of Egyptian Chronology in Relation to the Bronze Age” (in High, Middle or Low, ed. Paul Âström [Gothenberg: Paul Âströms Förlag, 1987 and 1989]).

In the third edition (1993) of the Macmillan Bible Atlas, I adopted the higher of these chronologies for Thutmose III, dating the beginning of his reign to 1504 B.C. However, I noted in the introductory remarks that there was a good possibility that the 1479 B.C. date was to be preferred.

As for Sinuhe, in the “pastoralist” period (Early Bronze Age IV or Middle Bronze Age I or Intermediate Bronze Age, according to the different terminologies in vogue), there certainly was no contact with Egypt. There were no cities and no long-term agriculture. For that reason, I oppose the dating of Sinuhe’s adventure to that period. Sinuhe was in Retenu (Canaan) during the next period (Middle Bronze Age IIA or Middle Bronze Age I), sometime after 2000 B.C. His tale may well be placed in the mid-20th century B.C., when there were connections with Egypt—as evidenced by archaeological finds in both Canaan/Syria and Egypt.

Don’t Glorify Drug Use!