Following the story of Noah's Ark, the Bible narrates a description of the building of the Tower of Babel. In the Temple of Abu Simbel there are engraved the following words: "The master builder constructed a temple whose summit is as high as the heavens. The sun rises for love of it." A prototypical tower "reaching up to the heavens" certainly existed in ancient Egypt. But the legend of the Tower of Babel goes beyond that simple fact.
Chapter 10 of Genesis lists the generations following Noah, stating that each one claimed land in accordance with his language, tribe, and people.1 The statement that there were several languages comes up again in Genesis 10:20: "These are Ham's [Noah's son's] descendants, by their families, languages, territories, and people." Noah's families, with their multiplicity of languages, were dispersed by the God of the Bible, over the earth's surface after the Flood.
The chapter of the Bible following the Noah's Ark story, relating the story of the Tower of Babel, begins: "The whole world had one language and one dialect." We have just been told in the previous chapter that there was a multiplicity of languages. This Biblical contradiction reminds us of the history of Akhet-Aten, where the mixture of people spoke different languages and finally forged a common language understandable to all.
The Bible tells of the construction of a tower hiding a city built, like Akhet-Aten, of rough bricks instead of heavy stones, within a valley,2 by people speaking the same single language.
They said to each other, "Come, let us make bricks and cure them with fire. " Instead of stones, they used bricks and instead of mortar they
Used tar. Then they said, "Come, let us build a city and a tower that reaches up into the heavens." Adon-Ay came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of man were building. And he said, "Behold, they are now a single people and they are speaking the same language. This is just the beginning of what they can do. From now on, nothing will be impossible for them to accomplish. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language so they cannot understand each other." Adon-Ay scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building. That is why it was called Babel, because Adon-Ay confused the language of the whole world and scattered the people all over the land. (Aramaic Bible, Genesis 11:3-9)
Rashi cites the different languages spoken in Babel (Genesis 11:3), "To each other: one people against the other people, Egyptian to Ethiopian. The Ethiopian to Put, and Put to Canaanite" - all languages spoken in Akhet-Aten before the appearance of the common language, the holy language. "A same language: this was the holy language... they had the advantage of being a single people and of having a single language, and it was thus that they began to commit evil." This language, discovered by the archeologists in the Amarna Letters, was called "Pre-Biblical Hebrew."
Ay was disturbed to see the inhabitants of Akhet-Aten speaking the same language. He saw it as a threat to Egyptian sovereignty. The city, like the city of Babel described in the Bible, was constructed of rough bricks and situated in a valley. Ay made the decision to disperse the inhabitants to other regions of the land and the abandoned city was never rebuilt.
The process of the building of the Tower of Babel is similar to what happened at Akhet-Aten. The workers, artisans, builders, and priests came from all over Egypt, having been brought together previously, during the construction of the temples to Aten in Karnak. Their languages differed, but that did not keep the construction from continuing. During the building of Akhet-Aten, necessity caused the men to "create a new language, that they might understand one another," which leads to the Bible's statement, "They are speaking the same language."
After Akhenaten's death, the Divine Father Ay observed that the population continued to multiply and became more and more powerful. The population of Akhet-Aten could spread the cult of the One God over the rest of the country, exploiting all of Egypt as Aten suppressed the other gods. In Ay's view, the new religion had already done too much damage to the country. So, as the Bible story says, Ay "scattered" the inhabitants over all the land.
The story of Babel demonstrates the concerns of the Divine Father Ay in the face of the population of priests who identified themselves with the One God. Each priest presided over his own sphere of influence. This multiplicity of little One Gods, each one seen by his adherents as the very image of Pharaoh, engendered in Ay the fear of seeing himself dispossessed of his power by the "sons of the Elohim," the Yahuds of Akhet-Aten.
At the beginning of the Book of Exodus, the Biblical scribes describe Pharaoh's profound feeling of anguish and disquiet: "A new king who did not know Joseph came to the throne. He said to his people, 'Behold, the Children of Israel are more numerous and powerful than us. Come, we must deal ruthlessly with them or they will become more numerous still. If war breaks out, they could join the enemy and fight against us and leave the country'"(Hebrew Bible, Exodus 1:8-10).
After Akhenaten's death, a kind of anarchy ruled in his city. The priests, ambitious and avid for power, pressed by their wives, tasted the fruit of the sacred mystical tree, which was reserved only for the God-King. The priests, having defied the original prohibition, could now identify themselves with God and with Pharaoh, destroying the secular myth of ancient Egypt. This attack on the thousand-year tradition demystified and discredited Pharaoh both in the eyes of the priests and of the people. Ay judged the monotheistic priests internally corrupt in their beliefs, and externally corrupt in their comportment, their language, and their sexual relationships. Considering the situation irreversible, the Divine Father decreed that it was urgent to engage in a radical action to save an Egypt already "exhausted" by the centralization and by the loss of its gods and traditions. Only a return to the ancient cults could give the country an ultimate chance to survive. A return to Amun - a return to the ancestral protectors of the pharaohs and the recovery of the equilibrium and prosperity Egypt had previously enjoyed.
This trouble was brewing when Smenkhkare had become pharaoh of Egypt. Smenkhkare was still loyal to the new god Aten. Ay was planning to eliminate the adherents of the new religion. Civil unrest was imminent.
Smenkhkare knew from experience that in a period of internal trouble, it was necessary to assemble the people and the army by focusing them on the great construction projects of Egypt. All the people had to be involved, which explains Smenkhkare's return to Thebes to work out a compromise with the forces seeking a return to the god Amun. Pharaoh ordered the masters of the workforce to proceed with great work projects in the cities of Pitom and Ramesses. By this means, he hoped to reconcile Atenian and Amunian Egypt.
However, Smenkhkare did not know the strategies of the Divine Father. Ay would have no part in reconciling the two conflicting religious views. Nothing would stand in his way to save Egypt against the devastation the new religion had wrought on the holy land. The Divine Father also feared a religious conflict, which could end in his eviction from power.
First, Smenkhkare had to be taken care of. Then, the Yahud priests and their adherents had to be sent far away.
Ay, then, accomplished what Yahwe and the Elohim had done in the Genesis story. He dispersed the inhabitants of Akhet-Aten/Babel; the Yahuds were exiled to a new "Promised Land," the Egyptian province of Canaan.
World History
