A pottery piece from a palace of Pharoah Akhenaten. He is the first known exponent of the 'one universal god' idea. He was the Pharoah for whom the group known now as the Hebrews worked. In a hurry he built not in stone, but with mud bricks for which he refused straw as a local termite type chewed such bricks, threatening the buildings (the evidence is still there). The Hebrews went to their promised land with various other notions. One is the sun god disc symbol, now called a halo. Another is to utter the god's name at the end of a prayer: Amen. Personally, I feel the one god idea goes much further back, perhaps to panentheist Druidry 30k years ago as evidenced by, perhaps,the first religious burial known anywhere, that of the Red Lady of Gower. My fragment connects me to the spiritual universe.
Symbol of the first universal god.
Contributed by togolo
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- Location
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Akhenaten's ruined Nile palace
- Culture
- Period
- Theme
- Size
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- H:
- 4cm
- W:
- 4cm
- D:
- 3cm
- Colour
- Material
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Comments
At last! The loadstone of the collection. And a courageous curator to give it voice. The termite story is a nice aside but the implications are truly enormous. It doesn?t take much imagination to work out who or whose was the ?God? who promised The Land to the Hebrew servants does it. And given that Mose was a common titular name in Egypt as in Merrymose it presumably should come as no surprise that having engineered a guerrilla fighting force into position and perpetrated a revenge by upon the peoples supporting her traditional enemies from the east the leader of the force conveniently disappears without trace.
Should one suspect that had not the tide turned and the land been re-taken by Nebuchadnezzar the Bible, which may very well have been re-constructed in support of the new captor, would have told a very different story?
Political acuity, perhaps, has always been the defining forte of the Hebrew has it not?
What a pity the Celt proved less savvy when Rome set about inflicting her revenge. A revenge which in great part seems to have involved pasting a questionable religious history containing a set of deliberately constructed laws on a similarly devastated peoples.
There is certainly something shockingly Ashokan about our history one might say? No wonder the first zealous act out of Christian Rome was the annihilation of all Egyptian knowledge on the subject. ?Oh what lies we weave when first we set out to deceive?. Ajivika would doubtless have had something to say on the subject of Karma.