Nearly forgot the Teresh.
They might be from the region of Troy and later have settled in Italy… Etruria.
The Roman claim of being decendants of the Troyan hero Aeneas, might have truth in it, albeit that they nicked it off the Etruscans, whose subjects they had been for some time.
I shy away from the “pirates” view of them simply because they never turned on each other in the age of Sea People…ing. If you got routed by Egypt, for instance, well there was a tantalizing spot that they just settled (which is when they’d be at their weakest) in the Levant or on that island over there. Why not just take one of those instead of going home?
My point was that the Sea Peoples were organized in some fashion and that there wasn’t evidence of a similar Indo-Aryan organized presence that could cast it’s power across the ocean in a similar way to create the numbers needed to gain political traction (or form a competing kingdom in the Delta) and bloodlessly usurp the Egyptian throne. Egypt did hire mercenaries, but they tended to be kept at arm’s length and they weren’t really a single cultural background.
The bloodless option needs a lot of buildup time, on the order of a few generations if not more. You don’t just show up with 1,000 friends and ten years later become king. If it did, those people on Facebook with 100,000 friends will be our kings in a few short years. 
Now if we can find evidence that Egypt was conquered by a military force, well that changes everything. It suddenly becomes very feasible for a large number of scenarios.
Sufficed to say, there’s a lot of room for debate.
Well, Hyksos is the Greek translation of the Egyptian for “Foreign King”. It wasn’t a cultural moniker. While we use cultural/racial names to designate where we are from, Egyptians thought more in terms of Us vs Them. “These kings are foreigners” was that in a manifest way. Any kings/rules of Egypt that were not Egyptian would have been tagged this way.
It’s possible that they suddenly got away from using indigenous people for important military postings, but that would be against policy both before and after the Hyksos era, so I find it an odd circumstance (But not impossible). I would also think that any action out of character with that office/position would have been immediately jumped upon by those that were left from the indigenous military.
Too early. I was just getting my first cup of coffee when I read your post and I thought you said “demonic diffusionist” and I was both quite confused and worried for my immortal soul for a moment.
Want to go digging? The pay is non-existent, the working conditions are terrible, but you get a nice tent to sleep in! And you can bring home all the sand you can carry!
I’m sorry, but I can’t make out what you’re trying to say.
Who didn’t turn on who? and they did ‘colonise’ large areas of the mediteranean.
Once you realise that the Sea-peoples are the Mycenians who are the spreading Greeks, a lot of the bronze-age mediterranean period seems to fall into place.
With “Pirates/raiders” I didn’t mean something like Carribean Pirates, just seizing ships.
More like Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking raiders. Who also first plundered easy targets and later colonised those areas.
Okay, the Sea-peoples is a bit of a sidetrack we just don’t know who the Hyksos were. I agree with mr Dibble that they have the feel of an IE origin.
Could be a branch that just simply left no other trace in the written records.
The connotation of “pirates” outside of the strict “I steal your ship and women” sense is that they are loosely defined and in constant friction with one another. I was addressing that point of view.
I’m saying that the Indo-Aryans predate the interim period of Hyksos in Dynasty 17, which was roughly 1590 - 1550 BCE. The Myceneans (Sea Peoples) weren’t as aggressively pursuing the greater Mediterranean as their playground in the form of roving bands of colonizers, yet. The Mycenean culture was established in roughly 1600 BCE, and was formed/forming contemporary to Dynasty 17. They colonized a few island locations close to home and colonized a few pieces of Italy, but didn’t begin the “Sea Peoples” phase of their existence until after Dynasty 17 had fallen to the Thebian Pharaohs of Dynasty 18.
For reference: Sea People’s currently understood timeline (to me) looks like this:
1600 - 1550 BCE - Primarily local, some contact with Italy, and major influence from Crete.
1550 - 1500 BCE - Started contacting non-Italy/Greek islands for trade with some “Proto-Sea-Peoples” (conquer and colonize behaviour) taking place
1500 - 1450 BCE - Conquered Crete
1400 - 1350 BCE - Began what we modernly recognize as “Sea Peoples” campaigns
1250 - 1200 BCE - Sea Peoples settled into the Levant as Philistines/Phoenicians (depending which era you’re talking about)
I’ll say that while it’s very possible that we have an unrecorded thrust to take over Egypt from Mycenae/Sea Peoples, I think that if it were the Mycenae/Se Peoples, we would have seen not only a good-sized war (As they weren’t around long enough to become “Friendly Neighbors”) to take the throne but also a greater push back to the Thebian Pharoahs’ war for power from Greece itself, instead of the Dynasty 17’s fall and 18 pursuing them over-land to Canaan. (Granted, this could have been the easiest route to take to GTFO)
I would also like to note that I previously said that the Hyksos came between Dynasty 17 and 18, but I was wrong. The Hyksos are regarded as Dynasty 17. I apologize for this misinformation.
The story of Noah saving the animals is demonstrably false using any number of ways. It might be true that there was a huge (but local) flood, and a guy might have built an ark and saved a lot of animals, but this as a significant event it contradicts the distribution of species on the planet.
Admittedly, a global flood would have left evidence, and there is none.
Many other miracles might not have left evidence, or might have left evidence we can’t feel confident we would have seen. Regarding the miracles themselves (rather than the evidence after the fact), we can’t falsify, by definition.
Assume there are miracles. They would contradict the laws of physics. Therefore, we can’t use the laws of physics to prove that miracles couldnt have happened; we can use science only to show that evidence they should have left was not left.
Take for example the sun standing still in the sky. (That was a hot topic for Galileo, but for a different reason than it’s of interest here.) Of course, according to our understanding of astronomy, it’s ridiculous – unless you admit the possibility of God contravening the laws of physics. Then it’s fine, and the question that remains is, would that have left any evidence?
That’s a case where we have no idea what kind of evidence it would have left. Clearly momentum wouldn’t be preserved: stopping the sun in the sky already contravenes that; presumably it’s no harder to apply the miracle to everything on and inside the planet as to the planet itself. (When you’re omnipotent, all things are equally easy!)
On the other hand, we can list all the miracles that would have left evidence, and see which of those we can find evidence for.
Creation of the universe, in the order specified? Nope, and this covers quite a list of miracles.
Global flood? Nope. The evidence shows that this did not happen.
No doubt the list could be extended.
It seems to me that if God wrought miracles, we’d have the evidence by now. So far, the two most miraculous things are (1) the existance of anything at all, and (2) the existance of Life. Both are amazing, and science isn’t beyond the hypothesis stage on either, but they’re not evidence for miracles unless we try to explain everything we don’t know using miracles.
Essentially, the Bible is demonstratably false in every case where it claims miracles - those can be dismissed out of hand on the basis that miracles are impossible.
It is not necessarily demonstratably false when it chronicles purely historical matters, but it is obviously subject to much mythologizing. There are quite legitimate arguments about the extent to which the ‘historical’ chronicles are pure myth, and to what extent they have a basis in reality.
For example, until the last couple of decades it was thought by many historians that King David was purely mythical. Now, it is thought, based on the discovery of a single historical inscription referencing the ‘House of David’ by an enemy of the Hebrews, that he was in point of fact a real historical king, albeit a minor one - the glittering empire of the Hebrews is still thought to be myth, as there is no evidence of it.
Anything earlier that the founding of the monarchy, and you are in the realm of pure legend; there may or may not be some historical basis for some of it, but it is unlikely to be provable, and is almost certainly jumbled up with legends of various sorts. Giant floods and the like are of course pure legend, and in that case probably very ancient at that (a variant of the same story crops up in Sumeria, for example).
(snipped for brevity and bolded by me)
The default assumption is that Miracles ‘do not’ happen - not in the sense of ‘supernaturally inspired’ miracles - ‘miracles’ (things we cannot readily explain) certainly do happen in medical environments every day (people survive things that most do not).
Isn’t this begging the question?
And “falsifiable” does not mean “demonstrably false.”
As I said upthread, I don’t see how the possibility of miracles could be falsifiable (in this sense).
There was a “golden age” of the Israeli state turning from a loose confederation of related “tribes” into a monarchy, but it was during a period from sometime before Sauls’ reign to the end of Solomon’s reign when the other (major) empires were either navel-gazing, destroyed, or pursuing conquests in other areas away from the Levant.
Israel was (from what we can tell) the most powerful state in it’s immediate area, but this power did not extend far past it’s borders. It never went and conquered the neighbor’s neighbors, for instance. This “golden age” lasted for at most 150 years. (3 kings and some nebulous transition time before Saul came to power).
The precise date of this is hard to know with the evidence we have, now, but the Merneptah Stella was the oldest record of Israelites yet found, from between 1213 BCE and 1203 BCE. It also referred to them not as a “State” as it did Canaan and other entries, but as a “People”. Some interpret this to mean that the Israeli peoples were idealogically distinct from Canaanites by this time but not yet a state. The monarchy would have come later than this. There are a wide variety of guesses, but not much evidence as to when Jerusalem went from “Fortified Religious Center” to “Head of State” and surrounding peoples didn’t mention Isreal in their texts until the 9th century BCE.
Internal rifts then split the Israeli state in half, and multiple conquerors came through. They retained “individuality” as a precinct/province/daughter state/whatever you want to call it of more powerful empires for a lot of those years, but it was never free (or probably even capable) to enforce it’s own will on the area.
Well, what about the injunction against “adultery”? That is at best debatable and at worst rather bad advice.
I’m not misdirecting or misleading anyone. I’m simply and straightforwardly saying that miracles do not happen, by definition. Therefore, stories containing miracles must be untrue, and can be safely dismissed out of hand as legend, or at least, a misunderstanding of the facts.
I dunno whether that’s an informal fallacy or not, but it seems a pretty safe bet when reading accounts claiming to be historical.
I know that. I was responding to the post immediately above mine, which used the term “demonstratably false”.
Miracles are non-falsifiable; rather, stories claiming miracles are false.
It was nothing personal against Jericho. It was the standard policy laid out in Deuteronomy 20 —
a) when attacking distant cities, if they immediately surrender, enslave them. If they fight back, kill all the men, and take the women.
b) for cities in the “Promised Land,” kill everything that breathes.
Matthew 5:7, “blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy”, yeah, that whole beatitude business is supremely unsupportable.
The Hyksos had the buildup time - they were a presence in the Delta from at least the 11th Dynasty (1800s BCE)
This is incorrect - the Hyksos are regarded as Dynasty 15. It’s confusing because they are co-temporal with the Theban-based native 16th and 17th Dynasties.
Philistines, maybe, but the Phoenecians don’t seem to be anything but Canaanite. They spoke a Hamito-Semitic language, worshiped gods like El, Astarte, and the various baals, had the same material culture, and so on. So if there was a Sea People component, they didn’t leave a mark. One theory, though, is that the Sea People incursion weakened the Egyptians and Hittites enough that Canaanite cities were able to become independently powerful to full the vacuum.
Doesn’t sound like a merciful, just, or loving being to me. If a being is so powerful, why not create a land of milk and honey for his favorite people and let the others live in peace? Of course I know this is the work and words of other humans so take it with a grain of salt
! Nice to have a God who is so caring for his favorites but so eager to kill or have the others of his own creation be killed. It seems this god can work all kinds of miracles when he chooses but takes the hard way when dealing with others. Just doesn’t add up to me!
On second thought, maybe he took the other’s to heaven and let the favorites live to suffer? Either way it makes no sense!
You are right. I incorrectly associated Phoenician with “Philistine” but it’s actually the Greek term for Canaanite. I offer my apologies.
No chance of that. Yahweh made it very clear that the reason they had to die was that they worshipped the wrong gods, i.e., not him.
BTW, not to continue a hijack, but just because I think it’s pretty comprehensive about available sources for info, I like this site about the Sea Peoples. Lots of pics of original source material (some pretty funky helmets those guys were rocking!)