View of the remains at Tel Timai. Photo courtesy Robert Littman and Jay Silverstein
Posted on 10/06/2012 9:55:32 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A team of archaeologists and students are excavating a site in the Nile Delta region of Egypt where, set within desert desolation, ruins still bespeak an important port city that flourished by the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. Near the present-day city of El-Mansoura, a clearly human-made rise with visible ruins mark the spot of Tel Timai, what remains of the city of Thmuis, an ancient port city and capital of the Ptolemies...
"Little excavation has been done in Tell El-Timai," reports Littman, "...At the end of the 19th century Edouard Naville discovered what he labeled as a library in a Roman house. Unfortunately, he did not indicate where on the Tell this was located. The papyri were burned, worse than those from Pompeii, according to Naville. He attempted unsuccessfully to preserve and transport the papyri. Unfortunately, only a few have survived, which are administrative records. A number of marble statues and small bronzes, and magnificent Hellenistic and Roman mosaic floors, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, attest to the wealth and importance of the city."
The name Thmuis (Egyptian tamAwy or "new land") was first referenced in the Histories of Herodotus. Having visited Egypt in the middle of the 5th century BC, he enumerated the nomes (districts) from which the military class, called Calasirians, came. Both Mendes (the great nearby ancient city that preceded it as capital) and Thmuis are mentioned, which indicates that both cities flourished independently at this time. Archaeological excavations at Mendes suggest that by the fourth and third centuries BC, the population had diminished considerably. This was paralleled by a rise in the importance of Thmuis, which flourished during Ptolemaic times (4th to 1st century BC) and became the capital of the Mendesian nome.
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
View of the remains at Tel Timai. Photo courtesy Robert Littman and Jay Silverstein
Thmuis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thmuis
http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Thmuis¶ms=30_56_19_N_31_30_59_E_type:city_region:EG
nearby site of Mendes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendes
http://egyptsites.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/tell-el-ruba-mendes/
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Taking all of those sites apart, properly, will take years.
Wouldn’t it be great to find some of the lost books? The lost works of Socrates, Plato? Plays? Histories? Bio of Alexander penned by his friend now lost—lost works of the Bible? Its possible.
Or maybe a citation somewhere that the Jews really were in Israel and left in an exodus.
Ask Nathan Brazil...
There’s a whole book about that in the Bible....
Heaven knows, we’ve already got a Hive Mind. They’re voting for Obama, without being connected to each other...
The dig at nearby Mendes has been going on for at least a couple of decades; it’s an older settlement, going back at least into the Old Kingdom period. One of the finds five or ten years ago was a destruction layer filled with human remains showing signs of violent death (marks on the bones from penetrating weapons, that kind of thing), and signs that it had been a gold processing or gold working center.
I’m betting they’ll find Obama’s college records...
Could you offer a web site? I’m wondering who killed who. The Two Kingdoms? Hittites? Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians?
Of course but the minimalists are never convinced unless it’s found in the the archaeological record (Ninevah, Troy, King David plaque, etc. etc. etc.).
I don’t recall when the destruction layer was laid down; Egypt (contrary to the usual modern claims) hasn’t been a unified country for 5000 years or whatever. Pharaonic Egypt is usually divided into eight periods, PreDynastic, Old Kingdom, 1st Intermediate Period, Middle Kingdom, 2nd Intermediate Period, New Kingdom, and 3rd Intermediate Period. The Late Kingdom includes the Hellenistic Ptolemaic kingdom as well as Roman rule. (but see the provisos below)
The intermediate periods varied in length and were marked by either conquest, or internal divisions, or both. The third of the big Giza pyramids was built for Menkaure (grandson of Khufu) but his son and successor built a relatively modest mastaba elsewhere, and is grouped in the following dynasty as broken down by Manetho. Schismatic kingdoms appear to have been the rule rather than the exception, though there were periods of unity lasting the length of certain dynasties.
Khafre, builder of the second big Giza pyramid, succeeded his elder brother and possibly nephew, and that appears to have been some kind of coup. Thutmose IV left the Dream Stele between the paws of the Sphinx with his mystical supporting myth for having apparently seized the throne.
Anyway, provisos here:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/hammurabi.html
http://www.varchive.org/ce/bethshan.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/joseph.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/tarshish.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/caphtor.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/assuruballit.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/khazars.htm
http://www.varchive.org/tac/index.htm
http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm
Enjoy!
Have you seen the TV program on Discovery about the lady who is using satellite photography to locate previously unknown pyramids, temples and cities in Egypt.
She says she has found and located with GPS thousands of new sites. Probably take thousands of years to investigate them.
King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times... belonged to the First BabyIonian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works -- theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia and another in Anatolia, a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos. Until a few decades ago, the reign of Hammurabi was dated to around the year 2100 before the present era... At Platanos on Crete, a seal of the Hammurabi type was discovered in a tomb together with Middle Minoan pottery of a kind associated at other sites with objects of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, more exactly, of its earlier part. This is regarded as proof that these two dynasties were contemporaneous... however... At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari "proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria"... The Khorsabad list ends in the tenth year of Assur-Nerari V, which is computed to have been -745... the first year of Shamshi-Adad is calculated to have been -1726 and his last year -1694... it reduced the time of Hammurabi from the twenty-first century to the beginning of the seventeenth century... "a puzzling chronological discrepancy", which could only be resolved by making Hammurabi later than Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad -- but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty -- then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired.
[Immanuel Velikovsky, Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology]
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