Well, finally informed on the Caesars from Julius to Domitian! The most significant thing for Suetonius, who wrote the history around 120 CE, was that upon accession their former persons should attain virtue after the vices of their youths. Benevolence, justice and self-mastery... after all they were gods and should set a good example.
Kindle must have contracts with scholars to write up brief histories about specific individuals, peoples and times. Over the recent past they've built up a selection for the Unlimited option of these texts, so to speak, published under the auspices of Charles River (Cambridge, MA? A little side work for the fellows?) Editions, while rejiggering the pricing of formerly 'free' books with the Kindle monthly fee. It seems that as this inventory has increased the former one in the public domain has gotten less free - they want $.99! Anyway, brief and on point they are and can often be read in one sitting.
Thus it was I found out something I never knew. About the Hyskos! Yes, the guys who ruled between the Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt - about 1600 BCE. They were foreigners, Semites who migrated from Canaan and eventually came to dominate the Nile delta, subsequently attaining suzerainty downriver, but tenuous... their rule only lasted 100 years. The thing of it was that, being Asiatic herders who'd previously migrated from the Steppes, the locus of the horse cultures of the time, they brought into Egypt 'technological' advances like the chariot, the composite bow and well-worked bronze battle axes. Hence they were armed to dominate the settled, agrarian Egyptians who were the mass of the population.
But Egyptian culture was too entrenched and they were absorbed, more or less, until a native dynasty overtook them, adopting the tools noted toward expansion into Asia, establishing the empire of the New Kingdom dynasties more or less contemporaneous to the Hebrew bondage and celebrated liberation. Sort of like the way the Anglo-Saxons overcame Norman dominance; their language and yeoman polity prevailed. Anyway, the key thing, in light of all the controversy adjunct to monuments of Confederate soldiers, was how these histories were recorded at the time. It was done by Egyptian temple priests; of Isis, Osiris, Set, etc. They did not completely approve of the alien Hyskos, but did not destroy their memory, which was a practice sometimes done as one dynasty superseded another under hostile circumstances. They would eradicate that record and smash the monuments. Again, in English history we see that in the iconoclasm of the Puritans destroying images and whitewashing painted church walls, another instance of throwing off alien influence, the scriptural controversies beside the point.
Pictured is Amenhotep IV, circa 1350 BCE, worshiping Aten, the sun god. He, who consequently changed his name to Akhenaten, deemed it the only god to the detriment of the others and the priests were not happy about that! Supposedly the first monotheistic religion, there is conjecture that the ideology is a precursor to Mosaic cosmology. Upon his demise, he was castigated as a heretic and his history was discarded, a return to the traditional 'religion' enforced. Well, you just can't keep up.
There is extant a sort of secular civil religion, the lawyers and journalists the self-annointed keepers of the flame, as it were. They have their catechesis and hagiography; I suppose I'm more dubious of them and their self-interests than I am of the poesy of the Bible. The Hyskos worshipped Baal, the Semitic storm god. The Prophets dispatched that. Between selective memory, a multiplicity of choices and the adverse ignorance thereof, I think we've got a lot on our plate. I hope we work it out.
Kindle must have contracts with scholars to write up brief histories about specific individuals, peoples and times. Over the recent past they've built up a selection for the Unlimited option of these texts, so to speak, published under the auspices of Charles River (Cambridge, MA? A little side work for the fellows?) Editions, while rejiggering the pricing of formerly 'free' books with the Kindle monthly fee. It seems that as this inventory has increased the former one in the public domain has gotten less free - they want $.99! Anyway, brief and on point they are and can often be read in one sitting.
Thus it was I found out something I never knew. About the Hyskos! Yes, the guys who ruled between the Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt - about 1600 BCE. They were foreigners, Semites who migrated from Canaan and eventually came to dominate the Nile delta, subsequently attaining suzerainty downriver, but tenuous... their rule only lasted 100 years. The thing of it was that, being Asiatic herders who'd previously migrated from the Steppes, the locus of the horse cultures of the time, they brought into Egypt 'technological' advances like the chariot, the composite bow and well-worked bronze battle axes. Hence they were armed to dominate the settled, agrarian Egyptians who were the mass of the population.
But Egyptian culture was too entrenched and they were absorbed, more or less, until a native dynasty overtook them, adopting the tools noted toward expansion into Asia, establishing the empire of the New Kingdom dynasties more or less contemporaneous to the Hebrew bondage and celebrated liberation. Sort of like the way the Anglo-Saxons overcame Norman dominance; their language and yeoman polity prevailed. Anyway, the key thing, in light of all the controversy adjunct to monuments of Confederate soldiers, was how these histories were recorded at the time. It was done by Egyptian temple priests; of Isis, Osiris, Set, etc. They did not completely approve of the alien Hyskos, but did not destroy their memory, which was a practice sometimes done as one dynasty superseded another under hostile circumstances. They would eradicate that record and smash the monuments. Again, in English history we see that in the iconoclasm of the Puritans destroying images and whitewashing painted church walls, another instance of throwing off alien influence, the scriptural controversies beside the point.
Pictured is Amenhotep IV, circa 1350 BCE, worshiping Aten, the sun god. He, who consequently changed his name to Akhenaten, deemed it the only god to the detriment of the others and the priests were not happy about that! Supposedly the first monotheistic religion, there is conjecture that the ideology is a precursor to Mosaic cosmology. Upon his demise, he was castigated as a heretic and his history was discarded, a return to the traditional 'religion' enforced. Well, you just can't keep up.
There is extant a sort of secular civil religion, the lawyers and journalists the self-annointed keepers of the flame, as it were. They have their catechesis and hagiography; I suppose I'm more dubious of them and their self-interests than I am of the poesy of the Bible. The Hyskos worshipped Baal, the Semitic storm god. The Prophets dispatched that. Between selective memory, a multiplicity of choices and the adverse ignorance thereof, I think we've got a lot on our plate. I hope we work it out.
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