Where’s a maverick pharaoh when you need one? A monotheist and worshiper of the sun god Aten, Akhenaten created a religious revolution. Was he an idealist, a reformer, a visionary, or a megalomaniac? …If we fast forward, the so called liberating Spring of 2010 has given way to Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and an army no longer in power. Are a gang of church burning terrorists now in command of the second largest army in the Middle East? Should President Obama be giving them advanced weaponry in this new war on terror in the Sinai? Is a thirty year peace treaty with Israel about to be torn up? …
Imagine a museum wall lined with royal portraits in the formal, traditional manner of Vandyke or Velasquez- and right in the center a portrait that looks as if it had been done by Picasso or Rouault. Imagine a wall lined with old fashioned, ceremonious court scenes, a king in full regalia seated in majesty on his throne, graciously receiving courtiers, or solemnly leading a procession- and right in the center, a picture of him munching on a chop or cooing over a baby. This is the effect of the portraits and court scenes of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, to use the name he preferred, who ruled Egypt from about 1378 to 1362 B.C. None of his predecessors had ever commissioned their like;no successor ever would.
—Major jolt to Egypt’s political echelons: A government spokesman said Sunday that Egypt’s president has ordered the defense minister and chief of staff to retire and has canceled the military-declared constitutional amendments that gave top generals wide powers.
President Mohammed Morsi also issued a new constitutional declaration that grants him many presidential powers that were restricted by the army in June, al-Ahram news site reported….He will replace Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who headed the military council that ruled Egypt for 17 months after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011. Tantawi was defense minister for nearly two decades under Mubarak.
The military council’s No. 2, Chief of Staff Sami Annan, was also ordered to retire. Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4267633,00.html image:http://doctormacro.com/Movie%20Star%20Pages/Bara,%20Theda-Annex.htm
He belonged to the Eighteenth Dynasty, a family of vigorous and able rulers who took over the throne in about 1600 B.C. and made Egypt into a might empire with boundaries that extended deep into the Sudan on the south and almost as far as Asia Minor to the north. His great-grandfather, Thutmose III, warrior par excellence, had founded the empire; his great-grandfather, Amenhotep II, stalwart athlete and army commander, had consolidated it; and his own father, Amenhotep III, enjoyed all its fruits in a lush, splendid court. But one glance at the son’s portraits clearly shows that the path he chose to follow was none of these.
Behind the Middle Ages, besides a few narratives, was an age that offered neither narratives nor documents, except for a fitful gleam here and there in early books of the Old Testament. The darkness was almost total. The situation began to brighten in the opening decades of the nineteenth century when Jean Francois Champollion first deciphered the hieroglyphic code, unlocked the door to what the archaeologists had found, and let the first light into the history of ancient Egypt.
—MK Israel Hasson (Kadima), who formerly served as deputy chief of the Shin Bet, said that what happened in Egypt “was what the military council was afraid of. In my opinion Morsi is rising against the army and he’s doing it in a very short period of time.”
Asked whether the move will affect Israel, MK Hasson said that “at this point, the move is not supposed to carry any consequences here. It will only matter if we see that Morsi also changes the type dialogue with us.—Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4267725,00.html image:http://www.squidoo.com/rudolph-valentino-silent-screen-legend
But the rays, as it turns out, have hardly been dazzling. Since most Egyptian writing of historical significance occurs on the walls of tombs, palaces and temples, or on certain public monuments, the sum total of what has been found no extensive unified corpus but instead a skimpy and utterly haphazard miscellany. As much or more light is often shed by the plentiful pictures portraying pharaohs and their officials. Reconstructing Egypt’s past from such materials is not so much composing history as putting together a jigsaw puzzle, the majority of whose pieces have been lost, and those preserved mostly bent or broken or worn beyond recognition. Even today, after almost two centuries of Egyptological blood, sweat and tears, are are sure of little beyond a skeletal outline of events and the general trend of Egyptian thought.
—Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has accused Jews living in Judea and Samaria of training wild boars to uproot Arabs’ trees. The fantastic claim is included in a quote from Abbas that appears in an official presentation on PA incitement presented Sunday to the Israeli cabinet.
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“The occupation and its actions, this is the nightmare that weighs down upon us,” Abbas said. “…Attacks by settlers that find their expression in uprooting trees, burning mosques and even training dogs to attack us and sending wild boars to spread corruption on the face of the earth.”
Abbas continued: “The settlers deal with us in three ways: when they run across someone they attack him; they have trained the dogs well for this, and the boars, too, for uprooting trees.”—Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/158827#.UChi1PVb76M image:http://unitcrit.blogspot.ca/2010/11/115-lecture-amy-kaplan-exodus-and.html
As a result, there are discouragingly few aspects of Egyptian history that are well known or understood. Except that of the pharaohs since the ancient Egyptians were a nation dedicated to the proposition that their pharaoh was a colleague of the multitudinous deities this god loving people worshiped, and directly responsible for the welfare of themselves and their land. So, the pharaoh appears with the features, poses and gestures appropriate to a monarch whose rule was absolute, and whose being was divine.
All pharaohs, that is, except Akhenaten. He had himself depicted not as a traditional pharaoh but almost as a caricature of one. As if to underline his almost feminine depictions, his nude statues actually show him without genitalia. Why the sudden switch from heroic god-man to downright anti-hero? What lay behind such flouting of Egypt’s time-honored ways? …. ( to be continued)
—CAIRO (AP).- The DNA tests that revealed how the famed boy-king Tutankhamun most likely died solved another of ancient Egypt’s enduring mysteries — the fate of controversial Pharaoh Akhenaten’s mummy. The discovery could help fill out the picture of a fascinating era more than 3,300 years ago when Akhenaten embarked on history’s first attempt at monotheism. During his 17-year rule, Akhenaten sought to overturn more than a millennium of Egyptian religion and art to establish the worship of a single sun god. In the end, his bold experiment failed and he was eventually succeeded by his son, the young Tutankhamun, who rolled back his reforms and restored the old religion.
No one ever knew what became of the heretic pharaoh, whose tomb in the capital he built at Amarna was unfinished and whose name was stricken from the official list of kings. Unlike the animal and man-shaped deities of Egypt, Akhenaten’s cult took a step toward worshipping something more abstract. —Read More:http://www.artknowledgen
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