Just as the scientific understanding of human origins has dramatically improved in recent years, so too has the scientific understanding of other branches of the tree of life. I think the pieces are now in place to sketch out the story of how single-celled creatures ultimately gave rise to the complexity of the human mind. Step 1: going from the first cell to something like a lamprey or hagfish.

Farming Fart-Eaters

About 4.5 billion years ago, not long after a protoplanet smashed into the proto-Earth (leading to the formation of the Moon)1, our earliest ancestors — the first cells, or at least the first cells with surviving descendants — came into being. They quickly split into two great families: bacteria and archaeans. By ~1.6 billion years ago2, one group of archaeans had evolved into eukaryotes, whose cells possessed true nuclei3 and, maybe, mitochondria.

About 1.5 billion years ago4, one group of eukaryotes — the archaeplastids — turned cyanobacteria into their domestic servants and thereby gained the ability to photosynthesize. (Present-day archaeplastids include red algae, aquatic green algae, and land plants.) But other eukaryotes had to make a living in a less dignified way: eating bacteria. This is what our ocean-dwelling forebears were up to ~890 million years ago5 when they split off from their closest relatives, the ancestors of present-day choanoflagellates.

Choanoflagellates are unicellular organisms, but several species can also form multicellular colonies that exhibit collective behaviors, like contracting in response to darkness6. It turns out that multicellularity isn’t as special as one might guess: it has emerged independently many times, including in bacteria7. Complex multicellularity, involving differentiated, specialized cell types, seems to have evolved only in eukaryotes, but even that has happened at least five separate times (among red algae, green algae, brown algae, fungi, and — the case at hand — animals)8. So when a group of choanoflagellate-like single-celled organisms began to create larger and more complicated colonies, it wasn’t initially that unusual.

What was the first complexly multicellular animal like? For now, we can only speculate, but here’s my guess: it resembled the bulbous “holdfast” at the bottom of extinct Ediacaran-period (pre-Cambrian) frondose organisms like Akrophyllas:

These Ediacaran biota have long bedeviled paleontologists because they’re hard to classify. There seems to be a soft consensus that they’re more closely related to animals than to any other major clade9, but they don’t look very animal-y. A recent line of research10 suggests that their eye-catching, fractal fronds served to extract oxygen from the water — much like the branching bronchioles of our lungs. But that leaves open the question of how they fed themselves, especially in the deep, dark seafloor areas from which their earliest known fossils originated11.

Following the work of Greg Burzynski12, I think the real action was not in the frond (which may have been a later development13) but in the holdfast that made contact with the sediment. According to Burzynski’s reconstruction, it was hollow, with elaborate interior lobes:

Burzynski has speculated that the holdfast served as something like a bioreactor, providing a favorable environment for the growth of symbiotic bacteria14 that extracted energy from hydrogen sulfide (aka sewer gas or “stink damp”) and methane:

So the bacteria consumed flatulence-like gases, and the ur-animal cultivated the bacteria and periodically ate them15; hence, it farmed fart-eaters.

You’ve Got a Real Smart Mouth

Phylogenetic terminology distinguishes between the concepts of “crown group” and “total group” members of a clade. “Crown group” means, roughly speaking, cousins + their parents + their grandparents; “total group” additionally includes any childless aunts and uncles along the way. I think that the multicellular, bacteria-farming holdfasts were total-group animals, not crown-group animals— lovable spinsters, but not our direct ancestors. Around 830 million years ago16, though, our direct ancestors split off from the holdfasts and began to evolve into something different.

An interesting analogy is carnivory in plants. Carnivorous plants have evolved independently at least five times17 as an adaptation to nutrient-poor habitats. The “snap trap” of the Venus flytrap is especially intricate, with specialized “trigger hairs,” two of which need to be activated over a short time period to close the trap. The decision to close is disseminated in part via action potentials, the same electrical signals used by animal nervous systems18. There’s even a mutant Venus flytrap (called “DYSCALCULIA”) that doesn’t function properly because it fails to integrate these signals: it can’t count19. Carnivorous plants thus offer an existence proof of how natural selection can turn an initially autarkic organism into a (facultative) heterotroph, with sophisticated motor control (as well as extracellular digestion).

We can imagine how something similar could have happened to a holdfast-like creature. Living in a nutrient-poor environment, it developed an upward-facing opening — a mouth — which served to collect bits of detritus — perhaps dead algae drifting down from the photic zone.20 Like a Venus flytrap, this proto–crown-group animal developed ways of detecting when food particles had entered its “trap”, then contracting to create an enclosed cavity to digest the material. Much of the intercellular signaling underlying this system could work fine using broadly diffused molecules like neuropeptides, but, to avoid letting food particles slip away, the management of the mouth had to be faster and more precise. So I think there’s a deep connection between the emergence of the mouth and the advent of the first synapse-forming neurons. Intriguingly, the neurons in ctenophores that most closely resemble on a molecular level the neurons of better-understood animals are those in the mouth region21. The first crown-group animals may have looked like a stripped-down version of the later (but now extinct) ctenophore Xianguangia sinica: a modest (1.5-inch-tall) benthic cup living alongside its bacteria-farming relatives, endowed with a genuine, albeit very basic, nervous system.

Breaking Up the Crown

Around 740 million years ago22, the animal crown group split into two lineages: ctenophores and myriazoans23. I’d guess that this was a case of allopatric speciation: around the same time, at least according to some models, the land mass of present-day South China, where several of the earliest known ctenophore fossils have been found, broke off from the supercontinent Rodinia.24 The proto-ctenophore group, separated from its kin, evolved in its own weird and fascinating direction, ultimately developing a unique version of the nervous system (including a large-scale syncitial nerve net25) and a unique method of locomotion (using “comb plates” each built out of tens of thousands of cilia26).

Meanwhile, the myriazoan lineage changed — evolving a distinct larval life stage that ctenophores lack27 — and diversified. Tempting as it may be to believe that neurons constituted some kind of secret weapon in the evolutionary arms race, it appears that one of the first things that some animals did after getting them was to get rid of them. This was the case for poriferans (sponges), the first major group to branch off after ctenophores. From a distance, early sponges looked similar to the early ctenophores: little cups sitting on the bottom of the ocean. But they developed a different way of life: instead of waiting for bits of algae to show up near their mouths, they actively pumped in water through their porous exteriors, filtering out tiny morsels like bacteria to phagocytose. In this configuration, the ancestral animal mouth became something like a chimney, venting waste water. Fast, precise control over its opening and closing was no longer necessary, so, over time, sponges lost their neurons28.

But the non-sponge myriazoans, called parahoxozoans, retained the old suspension-feeding lifestyle and the basic nervous system that went along with it. They developed more elaborate neuronal control over larger parts of their bodies, using new neurotransmitters like acetylcholine (which explains why nicotine, an acetylcholine-receptor agonist, can induce tentacle contractions29 and maybe peristalsis30 in sea anemones).

Animals managed to scratch out a living during the long “Snowball Earth” glaciations of the Cryogenian period, perhaps benefiting from relatively stable temperatures in the deep ocean31. It was around this time, ~710 million years ago32, that the parahoxozoan group split. One lineage, initially still quite similar to the first crown-group animals, gave rise to present-day cnidarians (sea anemones, corals, jellyfish…) and placozoans. The other lineage ultimately became something very different: bilaterians — motile worms like us.

Not a Cinch

How did a little33 proto-worm emerge from something like a sea anemone? Evidently, it wasn’t easy. One analysis34 identified 157 gene groups that arose in the bilaterian stem lineage. Bilaterians share a whole host of complex, novel adaptations, including the heart, a “through gut” with two openings, a third embryonic germ layer, specific forms of smooth and striated muscle35, primitive eyes of some kind, and the excretory system36. Instead of having neurons scattered throughout their skin (a basiepithelial nerve net), bilaterians developed a segregated, rectangular region of neural tissue situated along the ventral midline — the ur–central nervous system (CNS). Bilaterians’ neurons, unlike their ancestors’, had distinct dendrites and axons (as opposed to generic “processes”), and, for the first time, some of them used monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine37.

How did these profound changes happen? I have a guess. Above, I mentioned in passing that ancestral myriazoans (non-ctenophore crown-group animals) developed a larval life stage. These larvae, which moved around using cilia, had to be at least a little bit smart, analyzing environmental conditions to decide when it was the right time and place to pull the trigger, settle down on the seafloor, and metamorphose into their adult form. In particular, larvae detected and paid attention to various forms of light38. Because larvae were small (and lacked mouths!), they could get by without true neurons, using synapse-less neurosecretory signaling. Meanwhile, their adult forms also had to be at least a little bit smart, but in a different way, using true neurons to control the movement of their mouths and trunks in order to feed. During metamorphosis, the highly light-sensitive, “family planning” intelligence concentrated in the anterior part of the larva disintegrated39, and the more touch-sensitive, feeding-related intelligence concentrated around the mouth took over.

But what if, through a handful of developmental oopsies, the larval intelligence system didn’t go away, and an ectopic adult mouth formed in its vicinity40?

At the end of this transformation, not only was the animal’s body “vermiform” — worm-shaped — but it had, for the first time, a bona fide head. Even at this early stage, its CNS had two parts, which I will call CNS_head41 and CNS_trunk, and CNS_head in turn had two parts: an anterior, light-detecting, “family planning” (metamorphosis- and reproduction-focused) neurosecretory part (homologous to much of the vertebrate hypothalamus42) and a posterior, feeding- and motor-control–focused part,43 which interfaced with CNS_trunk to regulate locomotion. Many aspects of this basic nervous-system design are highly conserved across present-day bilaterians, so (as I will hopefully discuss in further detail one day) a lot of claims about the weirdness and incomprehensibility of, say, insect or octopus cognition are probably off-base: we have much more in common than it might appear. Pace Wittgenstein, if a lion could talk, we could totally understand him.

Despite all the ur-bilaterian’s new capabilities, its lifestyle wasn’t very glamorous. Still residing at the bottom of the deep ocean, it wiggled around among its distant bacteria-farming and suspension-feeding cousins, probably scavenging bits of their corpses when they died44. Close to the onset of the Ediacaran period 635 million years ago45, a bilaterian group split off from its relatives and developed the ability to filter-feed by sucking in water and passing it over ciliated slits on the sides of its throat. Humans descend from this group, the deuterostomes, while things like bugs and mollusks descend from the other bilaterian group, the protostomes. By ~590 million years ago46, the ur-deuterostome had begotten the ur-chordate, a filter-feeder that could swim. (Following a suggestion from Adameyko₂₀₂₃, I’m tempted to think that the characteristic chordate hollow neural tube began as an aid to swimming before being superseded by the notochord.) Not much later, the ur-chordate begat the ur-olfactor, which begat the ur-vertebrate — still a swimming filter-feeder, but now clearly recognizable as a fish. Things about its nervous system changed, of course, but I’m more struck by the similarities to the ancestral bilaterian state than any shared vertebrate innovations.

One thing’s for sure: Gary Larson lied. In an old Far Side strip, God muses that it’s easy to create vermiform organisms:

But consider the real-life timeline. The first cell was already in place 4.5 billion years ago, mere geological moments after the planet took shape — but it took the next 3.8 billion years to achieve the first proto-worm. These things were not a cinch!

Nor were bilaterians — or animals more broadly — an overnight success. Scientists have thus far found no fossils documenting the earliest phases of their evolution, not just, I suspect, because of unfavorable conditions for preservation47, but also because their ecological range remained quite restricted for a long time48. It was only in the late Ediacaran and, more famously, early Cambrian period that animals began to make an impact on a global scale. We come from a long line of late bloomers.

Appendix: The Meaning of the Monoamines

What’s with serotonin, dopamine, and friends? My irresponsible speculation: in the pre-bilaterian nervous system, sensory neurons often signaled using neuropeptides, with each neuropeptide roughly symbolizing that some state of affairs now obtained in the world. But this was a clunky system: to be able to recognize a different state of affairs, a new neuropeptide/receptor pair had to evolve, and, to be able to recognize a composite state, downstream cells had to express receptors for multiple neuropeptides. Monoamine neurotransmitters evolved as “generalized” neuropeptides, signaling more abstract states in a more modular way. (Monoamine receptors are phylogenetically closely related to neuropeptide receptors, and, as Thiel_…2024 points out, neuropeptides often have aromatic amino acids — the raw materials for monoamine neurotransmitters — at their C-terminal ends.)

So what specific states did the different molecules represent in the ancestral bilaterian? I can hazard some guesses:

• Serotonin: the presence of light.

  • Melatonin, synthesized from serotonin: the absence of light.

• Dopamine: the presence of food in the mouth/pharynx (hence the deep role in reinforcement learning). (Note that dysphagia (difficulty swallowing) is common in Parkinson’s disease, which is associated with the death of dopaminergic neurons).

  • Noradrenaline, synthesized from dopamine: the absence of food in the mouth/pharynx (no need to get ready for digestion, go find something to eat).

• Tyramine (lost in vertebrates): food is plentiful, conditions are good, chill out.

  • Octopamine (also lost in vertebrates), synthesized from tyramine: conditions are bad, focus on survival (e.g. shivering in honeybees49, starvation-induced hyperactivity in other insects50).

North and South

When last we left the Israelites, it was around 1190 BCE, and they were encamped a bit to the northeast of the Dead Sea, but some were beginning to venture west, across the Jordan River and into the heart of Canaan.

As the Israelites settled throughout Canaan — taking advantage of looser and then nonexistent Egyptian imperial control, as discussed in Part 1 — they mixed with the narrow- and broad-sense Canaanite peoples already living there and began to speak a form of their language. This new Israelite dialect of Canaanite is what we now call “Hebrew.” (A similar process of language assimilation also unfolded among the Philistines, who went from mostly speaking a Mycenaean-like form of Greek to speaking their own Canaanite dialect.1)

The Israelite expansion probably wasn’t well-organized. Moses and Aaron (and, I would guess, Hur) had died, leaving the group without a clear leader. Two men filled the vacuum: Caleb and Joshua. (The E source doesn’t mention Caleb; the J source doesn’t mention Joshua.)

We don’t know much about Caleb, other than that, supposedly, he was the only one of the scouts dispatched by Moses who was enthusiastic about the prospect of occupying Canaan. According to the story, YHWH rewarded him for his faith with a promise of land:

My servant Caleb, because he was imbued with a different spirit and remained loyal to Me—him will I bring into the land that he entered, and his offspring shall hold it as a possession. (Numbers 14:24 (J))

Caleb and his allies — mainly fellow members of the tribe of Judah, as well as Yahwa/Kenite people related to Moses’ father-in-law2 — crossed the Jordan and went south into what came to be known as the Judean hill country. They did at least a bit of conquering:

The Judahites marched against the Canaanites who dwelt in Hebron, and they defeated Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai. (The name of Hebron was formerly Kiriath-arba.) … They gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had promised… (Judges 1:10, 1:20)3

Elsewhere, too, the J source takes a conspicuous interest in Hebron (most glaringly in the seemingly unnecessary parenthetical “Now Hebron was founded seven years before Zoan of Egypt” (Numbers 13:22)), and I think the reason is simple: the J source was composed in Hebron at the behest of Caleb’s descendants, probably around 1040 BCE.4

Included in Caleb’s southward-traveling band, I think, was the family of Aaron. Aaron was a Yahwa tribesman, so it made sense that his kin went with the other Yahwa. But, while the others ended up going farther south into the Negev, Aaron’s descendants stayed among the Judahites, and at least some of them acted as priests. From a southern Israelite perspective, these were the Levites: Aaron’s people.

Recall that the descendants of “Cain” were said to include not just the first metalworker but also “the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe” (Genesis 4:21 (J)) — an etiology for the Yahwa/Kenites’ musicianship. Miriam, Aaron’s sister, shows up in the Exodus story chanting and shaking a tambourine (Exodus 15:20-21 (E)). This musical tradition was carried on by the southern “Levites” — Yahwa/Kenites who merged into the Children of Israel — well into the later monarchic period:

David spoke to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brethren the singers, with instruments of music, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding aloud and lifting up the voice with joy.5

But this southern/Judah/Caleb/Aaron contingent was only a minority of the Israelite population. Back up north, it was Joshua, the former “attendant” of Moses, who was first among equals, remembered as a great military leader who helped displace Canaan’s previous residents.6 Meanwhile, the “Levite” families of Moses and Hur, not Aaron, took on cultic roles.7 This early split between northern and southern Israelites prefigured the later divided monarchy.

“He Forsook the Tabernacle of Shiloh”

The Israelites set up Yahwist shrines and sanctuaries wherever they went. In Part 1, I characterized the pro-Yahwa agreement between Moses and the elders of Israel as a “conspiracy,” but a more neutral term would be “deal,” “pact,” or “covenant.” In the earliest version of the official story, it was, of course, Yahwa who had made the covenant with the Israelites. But it had nothing to do with moral uprightness broadly construed; it was entirely about loyalty to Yahwa. In large part, it was a covenant about covenants!

So he said: “I hereby make a covenant. Before all your people I will work such wonders as have not been wrought on all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you live shall see how awesome are YHWH’s deeds which I will perform for you. Mark well what I command you this day. I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

Beware of making a covenant with the inhabitants of the land against which you are advancing, lest they be a snare in your midst. No, you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their sacred posts; for you must not worship any other god, because YHWH’s very name is jealous — he is a jealous god.

You must not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for they will lust after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and invite you, and you will eat of their sacrifices. And when you take wives from among their daughters for your sons, their daughters will lust after their gods and will cause your sons to lust after their gods.”

Then YHWH said to Moses: “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I make a covenant with you and with Israel.” And he wrote down the words of the covenant.8

At this stage, there were no fixed rules about which Yahwistic altars were legitimate, but the most prominent ones in the north were at Bethel and Shiloh. The Bible is quite cagey about the fate of Moses’ family, but I speculate that both Bethel and Shiloh were initially presided over by descendants of Moses: the Gershonites.9 Notably, two of the priests associated with Shiloh in the Bible — Hophni and Phinehas, the wicked sons of Eli — had Egyptian names.10

Something bad happened to Shiloh. Around 1060 BCE — about 130 years after the Israelites began to move into the Cis-Jordan — “this settlement came to an end in an exceptionally heavy conflagration, which left destruction debris of over 1 m thick.”11 The culprit is unclear — Philistines? Ammonites?12 — but the casualties included Eli, Hophni, and Phinehas (1 Samuel 4). The line of Moses wasn’t quite snuffed out — Phinehas had at least two sons, Ichabod and Ahitub, who survived — but its prestige was badly damaged. Psalm 78, which might have been composed as early as the reign of King Solomon,13 casts the destruction as a rebuke:

...they defiantly tested God Most High,
and did not observe His decrees.
...
God heard it and was enraged;
He utterly rejected Israel.
He forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh,
the tent He had set among men.
...
He gave His people over to the sword;
He was enraged at His very own. 
Fire consumed their young men,
and their maidens remained unwed. 
Their priests fell by the sword,
and their widows could not weep.

Against this backdrop, there arose within the northern Yahwist tradition an emphasis on inspiration over bloodline. What mattered wasn’t whether Moses was your grandfather or great-grandfather; what mattered was whether Yahwa spoke to you in dreams and visions.

The Footstool of God

In the south, Yahwism evolved differently. Reverence for Aaron’s lineage continued. One of the main Aaronid cultic sites was Kiriath-jearim, where, I believe, the concept of the “Ark” of Yahwa was born.14

An ark — ʾărôn — was just a wooden box. Originally, though, I (and some, but certainly not all, scholars) think, it was a footstool — a place for Yahwa to rest his feet, perhaps so he could avoid directly touching a profane surface. (The E source, arising from a northern Israelite milieu, didn’t mention an ark at all, and I don’t think the original J source did either.15) Yahwa was bigger than any human, so he needed a big footstool — about the size of a desk, apparently. There are echoes of this notion in the Iron Age Syrian temple of Ain Dara, which sports a pair of carved stone indentations about one meter long each, representing divine footprints:

When David, a southerner, became king of (nominally) all Israelites around 1003 BCE16 and then conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, it was the Aaronid talisman of the divine footstool that he seized upon to symbolize his Yahwistic bona fides, relocating it (by force17) from Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem. (I think David also relocated the scroll of the J source from his previous capital of Hebron to Jerusalem. Since David had, during his rise to power, killed the Calebite chieftain and stolen his wife,18 the Caleb veneration in the J source ended up being a dead end.)

But David, seeking to unify the north and south, didn’t abandon the northern Mosaic lineage. Zadok, who claimed descent from Aaron, was only one of David’s official high priests; the other one was Abiathar, the great-great-grandson of the Shiloh casualty Eli. This north/south fusion required a bit of narrative finessing. A new, fanciful official story was invented: the Ark/divine footstool dated all the way back to the time of Moses and the Exodus and had initially resided in Shiloh, but it had been stolen by the Philistines. After Yahwa afflicted them with various plagues (including an outbreak of hemorrhoids (1 Samuel 5:9)), the Philistines meekly sent the Ark back to the Israelites on a driver-less, cow-drawn cart (1 Samuel 6), which just so happened to bring it to the southern land of Judah, where it wound up in Kiriath-jearim before David had it brought to Jerusalem. The point of this tall tale was to transfer Israelite reverence for Shiloh to the new cultic center in Jerusalem without treating northern traditions as illegitimate.

“A Faithful Priest”

But David’s ecumenical co-priesthood approach didn’t last long. His son Adonijah expected to succeed him to throne, and Abiathar, the priest from the Mosaic lineage, supported Adonijah. But Zadok, the Aaronid, supported a different claimant: Solomon.19 When Solomon defeated Adonijah, his first act of business was purging his enemies, including Abiathar:

To the priest Abiathar, the king said, “Go to your estate at Anathoth! You deserve to die, but I shall not put you to death at this time, because you carried the Ark of my Lord YHWH before my father David and because you shared all the hardships that my father endured.”

So Solomon dismissed Abiathar from his office of priest of YHWH… (1 Kings 2:26-27)

The invented story of the Ark’s time at Shiloh was revised to fit the new dispensation. Now the official line was that old Eli’s sons had been sinful “scoundrels,” and Eli was complicit in their crimes, so “YHWH was resolved that they should die” (1 Samuel 2:25) and that their descendants should lose their high status:

A man of God came to Eli and said to him, “Thus said YHWH: Lo, I revealed Myself to your father’s house in Egypt when they were subject to the House of Pharaoh, and I chose them from among all the tribes of Israel to be My priests—to ascend My altar, to burn incense, [and] to carry an ephod before Me—and I assigned to your father’s house all offerings by fire of the Israelites.

Why, then, do you maliciously trample upon the sacrifices and offerings that I have commanded? You have honored your sons more than Me, feeding on the first portions of every offering of My people Israel.

Assuredly—declares YHWH, the God of Israel—I intended for you and your father’s house to remain in My service forever. But now—declares YHWH—far be it from Me! For I honor those who honor Me, but those who spurn Me shall be dishonored.

A time is coming when I will break your power and that of your father’s house, and there shall be no elder in your house.

You will gaze grudgingly at all the bounty that will be bestowed on Israel, but there shall never be an elder in your house.

I shall not cut off all your offspring from My altar; [but,] to make your eyes pine and your spirit languish, all the increase in your house shall die as [ordinary] men.

And this shall be a sign for you: The fate of your two sons Hophni and Phinehas—they shall both die on the same day.

And I will raise up for Myself a faithful priest, who will act in accordance with My wishes and My purposes. I will build for him an enduring house, and he shall walk before My anointed evermore.

And all the survivors of your house shall come and bow low to him for the sake of a money fee and a loaf of bread, and shall say, ‘Please, assign me to one of the priestly duties, that I may have a morsel of bread to eat.’”

Thus Solomon’s dismissal of Abiathar was presented as “fulfilling what YHWH had spoken at Shiloh regarding the house of Eli” (1 Kings 2:27). Though the text (at least in its surviving form) doesn’t explicitly say which “father’s house” was being cast down and which “faithful priests”’s house was being raised up, I think it’s really about Moses’ descendants being subordinated to Aaron’s. The petty final line about how the survivors of Moses’ house would beg to be assigned some priestly duty in order to obtain even “a morsel of bread” was borne out in the later P (for “priestly”) source, which says that, among the Levites, it was the Gershonites who would carry the least holy items for Yahwa’s Dwelling Place, receive the fewest oxen and carts to help them,20 and stand in the least prominent position near the divine Meeting Tent (behind it21). To rub salt in the wound, in P, it is only the Gershonites, among the Levite subgroups, about whom it is explicitly said, “All [their]…labor and carrying duties should be done at the instruction of Aaron and his sons” (Numbers 4:27 (P)). The house of Moses would never live down the firing of Abiathar.

Over time, the sons of Zadok weren’t satisfied just having an exclusive claim to the high priesthood; they also wanted to rewrite history. Aaron would no longer be just Moses’ Yahwa/Kenite translator; he was now to be remembered as Moses’ brother — older brother, no less! Moses’ son Eliezer became Aaron’s son Eleazar (a difference of just one letter in consonantal Hebrew:  ʾ-L-Y-ʿ-Z-R vs.  ʾ-L-ʿ-Z-R), while Aaron’s real sons, Nadab and Abihu (depicted as perfectly legitimate heirs in the older J source), were retconned as having been divinely incinerated in the desert for some petty offense. Moses was far too central to Israelite culture to delete entirely, but he could be cordoned off. In the words of the scholar Liane Feldman,

in the priestly narrative Moses is presented as a singular figure—an anomaly in the larger systems created in the narrative. He is not a priest, but at times he offers sacrifices. He is not ordained or consecrated, yet he is allowed to repeatedly enter spaces that only consecrated individuals are allowed to enter. He alone is allowed to see Yahweh. Perhaps because of his unique status in the story, Moses also never marries, and he has no children.22

Yahwa may have stopped short of fully exterminating the house of Moses, but, within the influential fictions of the P source, priestly authors could go all the way.

The Temple, the Molten Sea, and the Oxen

Soon (around 967 BCE) King Solomon began to create something the Israelites had never had: an official temple building. The Bible contains a detailed, though at times confusing, description of this temple, which resembles several other ancient Near Eastern temples later uncovered by archaeologists. As far as I know, the most academically respectable reconstruction of what the Temple of Solomon looked like comes from Yosef Garfinkel and Madeleine Mumcuoglu, who collaborated with the architect Roy Albag:23

Inside the inner sanctum or “Holy of Holies” — which was a ~30x30x30-ft cube —Solomon’s priests positioned the Ark, flanked by two huge statues: “cherubim of olive wood, each 10 cubits [≈ 15 ft] high…overlaid…with gold” (1 Kings 6:23 and 6:28). What exactly these “cherubim” were is unclear. Liane Feldman asserts that they were “fearsome-looking animal statues, typically containing the parts of more than one type of animal,” not “chubby infants with wings”24; Raanan Eichler, though, argues that they actually were “winged humans” after all.25

Below is my own crude cartoon of the layout of the Holy of Holies, with Yahwa imagined as a big invisible guy sitting on an invisible throne, his feet protected by the holy Ark from touching the insufficiently holy floor. (The sphinxes pictured are from the 18th century CE, so don’t take them too literally.)

This setup resembles an image carved on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, a Phoenician king from roughly the same period:26

Based on my diagram, I estimate that Yahwa was around 16 feet tall. Good to know! There’s something quite appealing about a god who’s just a Really Big Guy — but not, like, cosmically big.

Even aside from the giant cherubim, the Temple was extravagant, perhaps even tacky. There were carvings of gourds and palm trees all over, and every surface of the inner sanctuary was “overlaid with gold” (1 Kings 6).27

The area just outside the Temple was also extravagant. In front of the entrance was the “Molten Sea” (yam mutsaq)28 (1 Kings 7:23), a huge bronze basin — 8 ft tall and 16 ft across — with no clear purpose other than decoration.

[The Molten Sea] stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east; and the sea was set upon them above, and all their hinder parts were inward. (1 Kings 7:25)

These oxen were probably also made of bronze and presumably symbolized the 12 tribes of Israel. Below is a reasonable reconstruction, though, in the absence of any concrete information in the biblical account, the size and stance of the oxen are just guesses:

In front of the bronze oxen and the Molten Sea was a bronze altar, on which Solomon presented and burned abundant sacrificial offerings of animals, grain, and fat (1 Kings 8:64). On the day of the Temple’s dedication alone, he “offered 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep as sacrifices of well-being” (1 Kings 8:63). In such sacrifices, only the suet was burned, and most of the meat could be eaten — “so Solomon and all Israel with him…observed the Feast at that time before YHWH our God, seven days and again seven days, fourteen days in all” (1 Kings 8:65).

None of this came cheap. In addition to extracting taxes and tribute, Solomon “imposed forced labor on all Israel” to carry out his many construction projects (1 Kings 5:27). These displays of wealth and power redounded to the glory of not just the king but also his Aaronid high priest, Zadok. Not everyone, though, was on board.

The Tale of the Molten Calf

Solomon’s depredations were very unpopular. Beyond the practical reasons, some Yahwists, especially in the north, felt that the gaudy new temple violated the true spirit of their cult. Worship of Yahwa was supposed to be simple and austere — according, at least, to the E source, the earliest form of which was, I think, composed around this time:

YHWH said to Moses:
Thus shall you say to the Israelites: You yourselves saw that I spoke to you from the very heavens:

With Me, therefore, you shall not make any gods of silver, nor shall you make for yourselves any gods of gold.

Make for Me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being, your sheep and your oxen; in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you.

And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them. (Exodus 20:19-23 (E))

The E-source authors rejected the idea of a centralized, privileged cultic site like the Temple: “in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you,” not just in some fancy new building in Jerusalem. And they also cast doubt on a centralized, privileged priesthood. What was so great about descending from Aaron anyway? He was just a follower of Moses, no better than Hur — quite possibly worse. The E-source authors created a story to dramatize their contempt for the sons of Aaron and their unholy bling:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.”

Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

And all the people took off the gold rings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.

This he took from them and cast in a mold, and made it into a molten calf.29 …30

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron announced: “Tomorrow shall be a festival of YHWH!”

Early next day, the people offered up burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; they sat down to eat and drink, and then rose to dance. (Exodus 32:1-6)

Of course, this infuriates Yahwa and Moses. Moses burns the calf31 and commands the “Levites” — conceived here, I think, as the sword-wielding people of Hur — to kill a bunch of people (Exodus 32:26-36:29 (E, I think, though it’s controversial)).

To me, this is a pretty clear polemic against the Aaronid priesthood, the Temple, and the decadent celebration that commemorated its completion. The single cast-metal calf in the story is a scaled-down version of the twelve large bronze oxen in front of the Temple; just as Aaron builds an altar in front of the calf, the actual Temple altar stood in front of the bronze oxen. I don’t think there ever really was a cult of the golden calf in ancient Israel; it was always just a fable.32

Elders and Prophets

In addition to criticizing the Temple and the state-sponsored priests for straying from proper Yahwism, the E narrative seems to criticize political centralization: Moses, realizing that he couldn’t address all the Israelites’ problems by himself, “chose capable men out of all Israel, and appointed them heads over the people…and they judged the people at all times: the difficult matters they would bring to Moses, and all the minor matters they would decide themselves” (Exodus 18:25-26 (E)). Yahwa even invests these tribal elders with some of Moses’ “spirit” — and not just them but also a couple of uncredentialled prophets:

Then YHWH said to Moses, “Gather for Me seventy of Israel’s elders of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you.

I will come down and speak with you there, and I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone. (Numbers 11:16-17)

…Two men, one named Eldad and the other Medad, had remained in camp; yet the spirit rested upon them…and they spoke in ecstasy in the camp.

A youth ran out and told Moses, saying, “Eldad and Medad are acting the prophet in the camp!”

And Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ attendant from his youth, spoke up and said, “My lord Moses, restrain them!”

But Moses said to him, “Are you wrought up on my account? Would that all YHWH’s people were prophets, that YHWH put His spirit upon them!” (Numbers 11:26-29)

The moral of these stories was that there were legitimate political and spiritual authorities that Solomon’s high-handed regime was disrespecting.

(The pro-prophet attitude, along with other clues, suggests to me that the E source emerged in the northern cultic center of Bethel, where, according the northern story of Elijah (set in the 800s BCE), there dwelt prophets important enough to have “disciples” (2 Kings 2:3).)

North and South Redux

The north/south conflict over legitimacy came to a head after Solomon died. The northern Israelites lobbied his successor, Rehoboam, to cut down on the taxes and forced labor; he refused; so, in 930 BCE, they seceded, ultimately forming the confusingly named Kingdom of Israel and leaving behind a rump Kingdom of Judah.

Judah was the less important and powerful of the two. This was vividly illustrated some 150 years later, early in the 8th century BCE, when King Amaziah of Judah, puffed up after defeating the Edomites, threatened King Jehoash of Israel. Bad idea:

King Jehoash of Israel captured King Amaziah…of Judah at Beth-shemesh. He marched on Jerusalem, and he made a breach of four hundred cubits in the wall of Jerusalem, from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate.

He carried off all the gold and silver and all the vessels that there were in the House of YHWH and in the treasuries of the royal palace, as well as hostages. (2 Kings 14:13-14)

The Bible doesn’t explicitly say so, but I think that the “gold and silver” objects stolen by the northern kingdom included the huge gold-covered cherubim statutes in the Temple’s inner sanctuary, which, after Solomon commissioned them, were never mentioned again.

The Ark of the What?

Without the cherubim around it, the modest wooden footstool of God must have looked rather pathetic. This forced a rethink. Solomon’s reign had been a high-water mark of Jerusalem-centered grandeur; the Kingdom of Judah couldn’t afford to operate on the same scale. So the replacement cherubim were radically downsized, built into the top of the Ark instead of being freestanding statues:

At some point, the Ark’s function was also reconceived. It was no longer a royal footstool, since God was imagined less and less as a Really Big Guy. Instead, it was just a special container. But what was supposed to be inside it? That’s harder to answer than one might guess, as Liane Feldman says:

There are some Hebrew terms in the priestly narrative about the meaning of which we simply cannot be exactly sure; it is therefore nearly impossible to translate them into English. … One of the most significant examples of this comes in the story of Moses on Mount Sinai. When he descends from the mountain, he brings with him something called the edut. Later in the story, this edut is placed inside the ark that is itself placed in the inner sanctuary of the Dwelling Place.33

…Traditionally, it has been conflated with the tablets that Moses brings down from Sinai in the nonpriestly [E, but not J] story in the Pentateuch, but there is no evidence whatsoever in the priestly narrative that this should be understood as tablets. There are no laws given on Sinai in this story, and thus nothing to inscribe on tablets.

Feldman notes that “the Hebrew root behind this word means something like ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’”; Raanan Eichler argues that it probably means “pact” or “treaty,” as do multiple non-Hebrew Semitic words that seem to be its cognates.34 My guess is that, at first, the edut was supposed to be the scroll on which Moses wrote Yahwa’s loyalty-focused covenant in the J narrative, but, as the priestly ideology evolved further, the scroll fell out of the story and the edut became mysterious.

The Indignities Continue

Later in the 700s BCE, Solomon’s legacy took another hit. King Ahaz of Judah became a vassal of the Neo-Assyrian state; as part of his tribute obligations, he “removed the tank from the bronze oxen that supported it and set it on a stone pavement — on account of the king of Assyria” (2 Kings 16:17-18). So the 12 bronze oxen that had inspired the molten-calf story were now gone, either melted down for metal value or kept as trophies in Assyria.

At least the kings of Judah could be grateful that they weren’t the kings of Israel. In 723 BCE, the Assyrians captured their capital city, Samaria, and turned their territory into the province of Samerina. The kingdom of Israel was no more.

Ahaz’s successor as king of Judah, King Hezekiah, hoped to capitalize on the northern kingdom’s fall to boost Jerusalem’s prestige. He officially invited everyone to Jerusalem for Passover:

The couriers went out with the letters from the king and his officers through all Israel and Judah, by order of the king, proclaiming, “O you Israelites! Return to YHWH, God of your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and He will return to the remnant of you who escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria.” (2 Chronicles 30:6)

But this campaign was at best a partial success:

As the couriers passed from town to town in the land of Ephraim and Manasseh till they reached Zebulun, they were laughed at and mocked.

Some of the people of Asher and Manasseh and Zebulun, however, were contrite, and came to Jerusalem. (2 Chronicles 30:10-11)

Hezekiah’s outreach program also had a more militant side. As I discussed in Part 1, he was responsible for the destruction of Nehushtan, the bronze snake that Moses had made. Though the text isn’t explicit, I think that Nehushtan was probably kept at Bethel, just across the border in Assyrian Samerina.

He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18:4)

In the Book of Kings, the Hebrew term used here for “Israelites,” vᵉnei-yisraʾel, usually refers to the people of the northern kingdom and occasionally to pre-monarchic Israelites in general — but never to the people of the Kingdom of Judah alone. (I went through and checked.) So I think it’s implausible that Nehushtan was in the Jerusalem Temple. It was a northern artifact, consistent with its presence in the E source and absence in the J and P sources.

But wouldn’t it have been a little aggressive for Hezekiah to cross the border into Assyrian territory, even if only to destroy a Yahwist relic? Yes. That’s why I suspect that it happened soon after the death of Assyria’s Sargon II, when many Assyrian vassals rebelled. Unfortunately for them, Sargon II’s son, Sennacherib, managed to consolidate his power and put them down:

After waging war against Babylonia, Sennacherib finally campaigned against the Levant in his fourth regnal year (701 BCE), entitled in his inscriptions his third campaign. According to these inscriptions, the submissive rulers of Phoenicia, Philistia, and Transjordan paid him tribute. He then conquered the rebellious kingdom of Sidon (and Tyre) and replaced its king, Luli, who fled to Cyprus. Sennacherib then marched south, conquered Ashkelon, and deported its king; he slew the officials and nobles of Ekron who had instigated the rebellion and reinstated Padi as its king; he defeated the Egyptian and Kushite forces in a pitched battle. Finally, after devastating most of the kingdom of Judah, its king, Hezekiah, capitulated and paid a huge penalty and tribute. Vast regions in the Judean Shephelah were stripped from the territory of Judah and given to the loyal Philistine kingdoms.35

There’s a lesson here: don’t mess with Nehushtan!

“I Have Found a Scroll of the Teaching”

Judah’s Assyrian vassaldom lasted around 100 years. After that, the kingdom had a new master: Egypt. Nadav Naʾaman has argued that this switch was part of an explicit deal between Assyria and Egypt: territory in the Levant “in exchange for military aid” against Babylonia.36 King Josiah of Judah exploited the dislocation to take back some of what Assyria had grabbed and even expand a little to the north and east, including into Bethel.37

It was then, I think, that the Judahite elite first encountered the E source — and it came as a shock. Beyond its unflattering depiction of Aaron in the molten-calf and other stories, the E source painted a picture of what Yahwa expected from the Israelites that was far different from what the southern tradition led people to believe. In the J source, Yahwa’s demands were simple: don’t obey other gods, and don’t make covenants with the non-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan. The whole explanation took four sentences.

In the E source, in contrast, there was a lengthy, detailed “covenant code,” covering many different aspects of life: violence, slavery, sex, witchcraft, and cultic practice, among other things. All these laws had, according to the E source, been written by Yahwa himself upon stone tablets held up by Moses.38

The Judahites may have been tempted to disbelieve what the E source said, but it seemed authentically ancient, because it was: if, as I suggested above, its earliest version dated to around the end of Solomon’s reign, then it was, at the time that King Josiah’s men came across it, 300 years old.

But there were some parts of E’s philosophy that the kingdom of Judah couldn’t accept. The idea that Yahwa looked kindly upon any old earthen altar didn’t sit well with the southern state’s ambition of centralizing all Yahwist worship at the Jerusalem Temple. And, though taking the Aaronid priesthood down a peg or two could enhance the king’s relative status, going too far down this path was dangerous. So the stories and laws of the E source were incorporated into the southern tradition in re-written, distilled, and toned-down form. This was the origin of the D source, which constitutes the bulk of the Pentateuchal Book of Deuteronomy. It was the D source that introduced the newfangled idea of the Ten Commandments — some 600 years after the time of Moses. (And now the Ark could take its final form: in the D source, instead of containing the mysterious edut, it holds the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.)

The official story didn’t say that the E source was discovered during the Judahite conquest of Bethel. Instead, the D source — or, more likely, an earlier and shorter version of it, the Valediction of Moses aka the V source39 — was basically lying between the couch cushions:

In the eighteenth year of King Josiah, the king sent the scribe Shaphan son of Azaliah son of Meshullam to the House of YHWH, saying, “Go to the high priest Hilkiah and let him weigh the silver that has been deposited in the House of YHWH, which the guards of the threshold have collected from the people. And let it be delivered to the overseers of the work who are in charge at the House of YHWH, that they in turn may pay it out to the workmen that are in the House of YHWH, for the repair of the House…”

Then the high priest Hilkiah said to the scribe Shaphan, “I have found a scroll of the Teaching in the House of YHWH.” And Hilkiah gave the scroll to Shaphan, who read it.

The scribe Shaphan then went to the king and reported to the king: “Your servants have melted down the silver that was deposited in the House, and they have delivered it to the overseers of the work who are in charge at the House of YHWH.”

The scribe Shaphan also told the king, “The high priest Hilkiah has given me a scroll”; and Shaphan read it to the king.

When the king heard the words of the scroll of the Teaching, he rent his clothes.

And the king gave orders to the priest Hilkiah, and to Ahikam son of Shaphan, Achbor son of Michaiah, the scribe Shaphan, and Asaiah the king’s minister:

“Go, inquire of YHWH on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all Judah, concerning the words of this scroll that has been found. For great indeed must be the wrath of YHWH that has been kindled against us, because our fathers did not obey the words of this scroll to do all that has been prescribed for us.” (2 Kings 22:3-13)

Generations of skeptical readers have understandably viewed this scene as phony — what, they just happened to find the scroll in some dark corner of the Temple during spring cleaning? Wasn’t this just King Josiah’s pretext for imposing reforms he already wanted? Perhaps, but I suspect that the original freak-out over the E source (as opposed to the staged freak-out over the V source) was genuine. King Josiah didn’t need to take things as far as he did; I think he really did fear Yahwa’s wrath:

At the king’s summons, all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem assembled before him.

The king went up to the House of YHWH, together with all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and prophets—all the people, young and old. And he read to them the entire text of the covenant scroll which had been found in the House of YHWH

The king…solemnized the covenant before YHWH: that they would follow YHWH and observe His commandments, His injunctions, and His laws with all their heart and soul; that they would fulfill all the terms of this covenant as inscribed upon the scroll. And all the people entered into the covenant.

Then the king ordered the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second rank, and the guards of the threshold to bring out of the Temple of YHWH all the objects made for Baal and Asherah and all the host of heaven. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and he removed the ashes to Bethel.

He suppressed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed to make offerings at the shrines in the towns of Judah and in the environs of Jerusalem, and those who made offerings to Baal, to the sun and moon and constellations—all the host of heaven.

He brought out the [image of] Asherah from the House of YHWH to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem, and burned it in the Kidron Valley; he beat it to dust and scattered its dust over the burial ground of the common people.

He tore down the cubicles of the male prostitutes in the House of YHWH, at the place where the women wove coverings for Asherah.

He brought all the priests from the towns of Judah [to Jerusalem] and defiled the shrines where the priests had been making offerings—from Geba to Beer-sheba. He also demolished the shrines of the gates, which were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the city prefect—which were on a person’s left [as he entered] the city gate.

The priests of the shrines, however, did not ascend the altar of YHWH in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread along with their kinsmen.

He also defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of Ben-hinnom, so that no one might consign his son or daughter to the fire of Molech.

He did away with the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance of the House of YHWH, near the chamber of the eunuch Nathan-melech, which was in the precincts. He burned the chariots of the sun.

And the king tore down the altars made by the kings of Judah on the roof by the upper chamber of Ahaz, and the altars made by Manasseh in the two courts of the House of the LORD. He removed them quickly from there and scattered their rubble in the Kidron Valley.

The king also defiled the shrines facing Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of the Destroyer, which King Solomon of Israel had built for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, the detestable thing of the Ammonites.

He shattered their pillars and cut down their sacred posts and covered their sites with human bones. (2 Kings 23:1-14)

Of course, one of the fascinating things about these verses is the way that they reveal, in passing, how many unorthodox practices had been going on all along. An image of Asherah (Mrs. God) in the Temple? Cubicles for male prostitutes in the Temple? Chariots of the sun? Eunuchs? Alas, the Bible doesn’t have much more to say about such matters.

The great irony, if my theory about the molten calf is correct, is that what began as a northern critique of the southern cult transformed into a southern critique of the northern cult — and a just-so story to explain the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom. The authors of the E source had been mad about the extravagance of the Solomonic Jerusalem cult, with its golden cherubim and bronze oxen, made possible by oppressive taxation and corvée. But, by the 600s BCE, the cherubim and oxen were long gone, and the Jerusalem authorities no longer recognized the calf fable as an attack on them. Instead, they claimed that it was the old northern kingdom, starting under its first king, Jeroboam I, that had worshipped bovine statues at the cities of Bethel and Dan and had ultimately paid the price. When Deuteronomistic scribes in Judah wrote the history of their northern brethren, they blamed everything bad on a calf cult that never actually existed.

Anti-Climax Redux

With Yahwism back on firm footing, purged of unorthodoxy by the great King Josiah, Judah had a bright future ahead of it, right? No. Under murky circumstances, Josiah was killed by the Egyptian pharaoh, perhaps for being an uppity vassal. Not longer after that, in 586 BCE, the Babylonian army swept through and destroyed the Temple and the Judahite state. Many Judahites were taken into exile. The era of Israelite monarchies was over.

Babylon appointed as governor of “Yehud” a man named Gedaliah, who happened to be the grandson of Shaphan the scribe — the same Shaphan who had brought the “scroll of the Teaching” to King Josiah.40 This little accident of Babylonian imperial administration is probably why we have the Bible today. Gedaliah, scion of a great family of scribes, was uniquely positioned to preserve the J, E, P, and D sources, even as many of his fellow Judahite elites languished in exile.

In another lucky break, the exile ended pretty quickly. In 539 BCE, the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and assumed control of its empire, including Yehud. The Persians had a lighter touch than the Assyrians or Babylonians. Many exiles returned, and a new temple was constructed in Jerusalem.

It was under the Persian governorship of Nehemiah, I think, around 430 BCE, that scribes decided to fuse J, E, P, and D into a single chronologically organized text: the Pentateuch.41 We can, perhaps, sympathize with their motivations. Having four different independent but heavily overlapping accounts of history up till the time of Moses (and a little bit beyond, since I think J, E, and P all extended into parts of what became the books of Joshua and Judges) was confusing and unwieldy. Unfortunately, when those four accounts were combined, the result was also confusing and unwieldy — unreadable, one might say,42 notwithstanding the odd fact that it’s probably the most read text of all time. But the compilers of the Pentateuch were so conservative in their approach — attempting, whenever possible, to use the exact words of their sources43 — that, more than 2,000 years later, we can undo their hard work.

Once formed in the southern province of Yehud, the Pentateuch spread to the northern province of Samaria via intra-imperial politicking. Sanballat, the governor of Samaria (and thorn in the side of Nehemiah), had his daughter marry Manasseh, the son of the high priest of the rebuilt Jerusalem temple, and made Manasseh the high priest of a new, rival temple on Mt. Gerizim.44 Manasseh must have brought the proto-Pentateuch with him, which explains the origins of the Samaritan Pentateuch. (Samaritans, unlike Jews, don’t regard the non-Pentateuchal parts of the Bible as canonical. They’ve tweaked the text of the Pentateuch a little bit but mostly copied it faithfully — in a few cases, more faithfully than the Jewish Masoretic Text.45)

And then, in 332 BCE, Alexander the Great gained control of the Levant, inaugurating the Hellenistic era there. Before long, the Pentateuch was translated into Greek: the Septuagint.

Thus, after a 600-year period of gestation — from around 1040 BCE, when the J source started taking shape, to around 430 BCE, when the four sources merged — the Pentateuch became canonical quite quickly, in the form in which it still survives. It’s an extraordinarily strange beast. But now I can see more clearly how it managed to capture the attention of so many intellectuals for so long. At every turn, it almost makes sense, but not quite; it almost coheres, but then doesn’t. Figuring out how and why it has this character is, for a certain kind of person, an irresistible puzzle.

21

See Feldman 2023, The Consuming Fire, Figure 1:

As a lifelong atheist, I come to the Bible as an outsider, but, when I first learned about the documentary hypothesis — the idea that the Pentateuch (comprising the first five books of the Bible) was stitched together out of four originally standalone source documents, known as J, E, P, and D — I was fascinated both by the modern scholarly work that created the theory and by the ancient scholarly work that created the Bible itself. Recently my interest in the topic was rekindled when I was pointed toward the writings of Richard Elliott Friedman, a Bible scholar who has argued that — contra those who harp on the lack of physical evidence for a real, historical Exodus — there really was a migration from Egypt to the land of Canaan. The twist: the migration involved only the Levites, just one of the twelve tribes of Israel, who were assimilated by the original 11 tribes and who brought with them the worship of a god named Yahweh. There’s a short version of Friedman’s case at TheTorah.com, but I couldn’t resist getting my hands on his book The Exodus, along with his earlier The Bible with Sources Revealed (which presents the text of the Pentateuch using different formatting for each theorized underlying source document) and The Hidden Book in the Bible (which aims to present just the J source, which, according to Friedman, also extends beyond the Pentateuch into parts of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings).

Having spent a lot of time with Friedman’s and other scholars’ work (and having indulged in a lengthy detour into the related topic of the Sea Peoples), I have come to a somewhat different view of the real Exodus and its aftermath. In some ways, it’s closer to a straightforward reading of the Bible (or at least the J source, which is generally regarded as the oldest one); in other ways, it’s weirder. Here (and in part 2) I’ll present my best-guess historical scenario, covering roughly the two millennia from Abraham to Alexander.

The Age of Amorites

The story of the Bible is a story of the Northwest Semitic ethnolinguistic group, which crystallized around 2450 BCE,1 when it parted ways with the ancestors of, among others, the speakers of Proto-Arabic. The Proto–Northwest Semites were scattered throughout the Eastern Mediterranean ecoregion but also occupied the adjacent Syrian xeric grasslands (aka the Middle East steppe), where a subgroup herded sheep and goats and bred the prestigious ass hybrids called kungas. But when the climate turned dramatically drier around 2200 BCE, this lifestyle became untenable, driving many of the pastoralists to become “mercenaries and merchants”2 who led and guarded donkey caravans. Sumerians3 referred to these people as something like “Amurru,” basically meaning “westerners,” and the name stuck: they are remembered as the Amorites.

The details aren’t well understood, but, gradually, various Amorite strongmen established enclaves and took power all over the place. The upshot was that, in the words of Aaron Burke, “By the end of the nineteenth century [BC], Amorite dynasties were established across the breadth of the Fertile Crescent to such an extent that the ensuing late [Middle Bronze Age] (ca. 1800–1550 BC) can arguably be identified as the ‘Age of Amorites.’”4

As the map above indicates, one of the areas of Amorite dominance was the Levantine coast, a key node in the trade network of Egypt. The Amorite rulers of Byblos (in present-day Lebanon) developed an especially close relationship with the Egyptian elite, adopting Egyptian styles5 and collaborating on a complex joint venture in which Byblos supplied cedar lumber to build ships6 to transport turquoise out of an Egyptian-controlled mine in the Sinai Peninsula.7 In fact, I think that it was scribes working for the Byblian state, c. 1850 BCE,8 who adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs for use with the Amorites’ Northwest Semitic language, creating both a dead-end syllabic script (which remains undeciphered) and, more consequentially, the alphabet.9 (I have a separate post outlining where the alphabet went from there.)

Pharaoh and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat

Amorites became a large part of the population in one particular place in the eastern Nile Delta, a city called Hut-waret by the Egyptians but now remembered as Avaris: “a cosmopolitan harbour town with a large Levantine community involved in trade, sea travel and boat production.”10 Egyptians referred to Amorites as “Aamu” (conventionally translated into English as “Asiatics”), possibly derived from the Amorite word for “people” (or even the word “Amurru”/Amorite itself, but probably not).11

Egyptian visual representations of the Amorites featured unusual clothing: Amorite men wore “multi-coloured, detailed” kilts and other garments, while Amorite women sported dresses that were likewise “often detailed with red, blue and white designs,” sometimes accessorized with boots that “appear[ed] to be painted yellow or red.”12

Around 1710 BCE,13 under unknown circumstances, the power of the Egyptian state broke down, and an Amorite — perhaps a local bigwig in Avaris — set himself up as ruler of the Nile Delta, founding the 15th Dynasty. Outside the Delta, rival (non-Amorite) pharaohs sprang up. Egypt would eventually be reunified under a single pharaoh, but it would take around 140 years.

During that time (known as the Second Intermediate Period), around 1610 BCE,14 a man in Egypt purchased a 17-year-old15 slave from the southern Levant. Surprisingly, the slave ended up rising through the ranks of Egyptian society, eventually working for the Pharaoh himself (Apepi, if I had to guess). The slave’s name was Joseph, whose “coat of many colors” may have been a memento of Egypto-Amorite court fashion16 (and not a gift from his father, as later stories claimed). But Joseph himself was not an Amorite. So what was he?

“Blessed Is Abram to El the Highest”

The Amorites constituted just one of the branches of the Northwest Semitic “family”; I’ll refer to the other main branch as the ʿIvri people or ʿIvrim. While Amorite elites vied for geopolitical power, their ʿIvri cousins farmed and herded in the usual unglamorous way, speaking closely related dialects throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Only later, around 1500 BCE, did regional differences harden enough to create distinct Aramaic (north) and Canaanite (south) language groups within the ʿIvri clade.17

The life of “Abram the ʿIvri” (Genesis 14:13 (J18)) illustrates the earlier fluidity. Born in ~1780 BCE,19 he grew up in Haran,20 at the far northern end of the Eastern Mediterranean in present-day Turkey, but meandered all the way to Hebron in present-day Israel/Palestine, where he “tent[ed] among the oaks of Mamre the Amorite” (Genesis 14:13 (J)).21 Abram’s one brush with fame came around 1760 BCE. At that time, Elam, a polity centered in southwestern Iran, exerted influence over a wide area. When faced with rebellion from its vassals in the vicinity of the Dead Sea (ruling over the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, Adamah, Zeboiim, and Bela), Elam dispatched a coalition of other vassal kings to inflict punishment.22 In a raid on Sodom, they took property and captives, including Lot, Abram’s nephew, who lived there. But Abram and his Amorite buddies chased after the raiders and managed to get back what was taken. The king of Sodom thanked Abram personally, and King Melchizedek of Salem (aka Jerusalem23), a “priest of El the Highest,” supplied bread, wine, and a blessing:24

Blessed is Abram to El the Highest, creator of skies and earth. And blessed is El the Highest, who delivered your foes into your hand. (Genesis 14:19-20 (J))25

El was a Northwest Semitic god, worshipped by Amorites and ʿIvrim alike. (“El” could also simply mean “god” in a generic sense.) El was regarded as the father of various other gods, including the storm god Baʿal Haddu (“Baʿal” just meant “lord”) and Jeru/salem’s namesake, Šalem. And El had a consort, named Asherah, though I prefer to think of her as Mrs. God.

The Rise and Fall of the House of Israel

Abram begat Isaac, who begat Israel,26 who begat, among other sons, Joseph, who was taken by Arab27 traders on their way to Egypt and sold into slavery, alongside other, more valuable commodities (like botanical gums from Gilead28). Somehow,29 though, Joseph gained the favor of the Amorite pharaoh. It probably helped that they had similar ethnolinguistic backgrounds: the Amorite and ʿIvri languages had parted ways only ~450 years before,30 in the same ballpark as the divergence between, say, present-day Spanish and Portuguese, which are almost mutually intelligible.31

Joseph shared his good fortune, inviting his shepherd brothers and other relatives to bring their families and livestock to the outskirts of the Egypto-Amorite capital of Avaris. Some 70 households made the trip.32

For a little while, life was good. The ʿIvri population in Egypt grew. Despite close ties with Egyptian society, Joseph’s kinsmen preserved their sense of distinctiveness, taking pride in their descent from salt-of-the-earth Israel. They continued to worship El, not the gods of Egypt. (“Israel” (yisraʾel) was, in fact, a theophoric name, probably meaning “El protected.”33)

The good times didn’t last long. “Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation…A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:6, 8 (J)). Worse than a new king, it was a whole new dynasty:34 around 1570 BCE, the Amorite ruling family was toppled by the “indigenous” Ahmose I, who put the pieces of Egypt back together under unified rule. Not just in Egypt but throughout the Near East, the Age of Amorites was coming to a close.

Later pharaonic propaganda reminded Egyptians that it was Ahmose’s dynasty that had brought an end to the dark time when “Asiatics [= Amorites] were in the midst of the Delta (at) Avaris, while nomads in their midst were destroying what had been made.” As Danielle Candelora has pointed out, “A careful reading of this passage suggests that it was not the Asiatic population of Avaris, but specifically the nomads in their midst who were remembered later as destructive.”35 Perhaps Joseph and his hick relatives really rubbed the sophisticates of Egypt the wrong way. (As Joseph himself warned his brothers, “all shepherds are abhorrent to Egyptians” (Genesis 46:34 (J)).)

With their royal connections now worthless, the Children of Israel lost their special status and were put to work by the state. They would remain in Egypt, doing menial labor, for about 400 years.36 The Bible contains almost no details about this long period, aside from the (plausible) claim that the Children of Israel worked on building the cities of Pithom and Pi-Ramesses, in the same broad region of the eastern Nile Delta where they had lived under Amorite rule.37 What’s clear is that the Children of Israel continued to stand apart, preserving the language and stories of their ʿIvri ancestors. They did, however, borrow at least a handful of Egyptian words at this early stage, including words for “ship,” “ebony,” “hand-span” (a unit of measure), “ink,” and “a rush or reed plant.”38

The Princess of Egypt and Her Wayward Son

Ramesses II acceded to the throne in ~1296 BCE.39 As Toby Wilkinson points out, he’s the one and only pharaoh who’s been “accorded the epithet ‘the Great’ by modern Egyptologists.”40 One thing that was great about him was his complement of offspring: he “sired at least forty-five sons and more than fifty daughters. Surviving records are incomplete, so he likely fathered more than a hundred” children in total.41

One of his many daughters gave birth to a son: Moses. “Moses” (or rather, in its original form, something like Ma-see) seems to be an authentically Egyptian name, as has been noted by, among others, the Egyptologist Donald Redford:

…the [personal name] “Moses” (Hebrew Mōše[h]) enjoys excellent credentials as an Egyptian name…The verbal affix -mose…turns up in such well-known names as Thutmose, Amenmose, and Ptahmose...42

Taken literally, such a name meant something like “[Thoth/Amun/Ptah/other god] is born,” from the Egyptian root mśy, “to be born.” But an abbreviated version using just the “Mose” part was perfectly normal. For instance, a recent study of New Kingdom tombs from Memphis identified three different people named Mose, including a steward and a scribe.

The story that Moses was actually an ʿIvri child from the Children of Israel whom the pharaoh’s daughter just happened to discover “among the reeds by the bank of the Nile” (Exodus 2:3 (E)) was a later invention, designed to downplay Moses’ Egyptianness. But I’m tempted to believe that Moses really was raised by an ʿIvri wet-nurse, as described in Exodus 2:7-10 (E), which may have given him a lifelong soft spot for the ʿIvrim. (I would say that Freud would have a field day, but, though Freud actually did write a book about Moses (contending, like me, that he was actually Egyptian), Freud doesn’t seem to have pondered the wet-nurse psychology — an uncharacteristic oversight!)

Moses grew up and quickly got himself in trouble. One day, having come upon an Egyptian man beating an ʿIvri laborer, Moses “turned this way and that and, seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2:12 (J)). He thought he had gotten away with the murder, but he was wrong. “When Pharaoh learned of the matter, he sought to kill Moses” — so Moses decided to run away. He headed to “the land of Midian” (Exodus 2:15 (J)).

The Land of Midian

It wasn’t easy to escape the pharaoh’s grasp. Even far south along the Nile, the land of Kush was under Egypt’s imperial control; so too was much of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the province of Canaan, administered from the city of Gaza. The harsh deserts of the Sinai Peninsula were less well surveilled but were dangerous in their own way for the inexperienced traveler.

Recently, though — under Ramesses II, if not a bit earlier43 — the Egyptian state had blazed a trail far east to the copper-rich Timna Valley, south of the Dead Sea on the edge of northwest Arabia (in or near the region that the Bible calls Midian44). A series of later Ramesside rock inscriptions marked the official route for such mining and trading expeditions, going from the Nile Delta across the Sinai to Timna and beyond:

At least by the time of Ramesses III, nervous Egyptian travelers departing on this route from the vicinity of Memphis could feel reassured by “a prophylactic statue of the king, represented alongside the goddess Hathor”:

According to the formulae inscribed on the statue, the [statue] was intended to protect the travellers against snakebites and scorpion stings. The presence of such a monument at the entrance of a desert trail is not surprising, for we know that a “remover of scorpions” had sometimes accompanied that kind of expedition…and that Hathor protected mining expeditions to the deserts in general and in Sinai in particular.45

Hathor also appeared all the way at the other end of this ancient desert trail, in Timna, where Egyptians created a modest “chapel” or “kiosk” for the goddess, complete with a statue of her. In the vicinity of the chapel, archaeologists discovered a “small, beautiful” bronze snake, probably a votive offering (perhaps also reflecting worries about snakebites):46

Interestingly, the Egyptian chapel in Timna stood right next to a pre-existing shrine that had been built by local nomads and included an altar, basins for blood and water, and standing stones. The archaeologist Uzi Avner has argued that this sanctuary-sharing was one of several indications that, in this setting, Egypt relied more on cooperation than coercion:

An agreement with the local population was essential. The presumed interest of the Egyptians in such an agreement with the local population finds support in their general policy in Canaan; namely, minimal friction and focusing on securing the main international roads.

…The agreement could have worked as follows: Before each mining season (winter) Egyptian officials met with the chiefs of the desert tribes to negotiate the amount of copper to be produced by the locals for the Egyptians during the season. Whatever the locals produced beyond the agreed amount was their own profit.…Following the signing of the agreement, the Egyptians sent expeditions…similar to those described on the stelae of Serabit al-Khadem [the turquoise mine in the Sinai Peninsula], including several high officials, scribes and others, and an army unit.47

When Moses ran away from Egypt, I speculate that he took along with him a personal bodyguard, Hur,48 who, I speculate further, had served in the Egyptian army and may even have gone on mining expeditions to Timna. At any rate, lacking a better option, Moses (and Hur?) headed eastward across the Sinai, toward Timna and the land of Midian, away from the direct authority of the pharaoh.

But who were the people who called these eastern lands home? They were an obscure bunch, but they came to be associated with a notorious legendary ancestor: the world’s first murderer, Cain.

The Children of Cain

Let’s review the Northwest Semitic family tree and fill in some gaps:

Around 2050 BCE, the proto-Northwest Semites begat the Amorites and the ʿIvrim. Around 1600 BCE, one group of ʿIvrim — Joseph and his relatives, the Children of Israel — left the Levant and went to Egypt, where they remained for 400 years. Back in the Levant, though, life went on. Around 1500 BCE, the difference between the northern ʿIvrim and the southern ʿIvrim became stark enough to beget distinct Aramaic and “Canaanite” languages.

Unfortunately, the term “Canaanite,” like most such designations in the ancient world, is vague. In the broad sense, Canaan could include a large chunk of the Eastern Mediterranean; in the narrow sense, it was confined to just the area west of the Jordan River and Dead Sea with a Mediterranean-forest biome. As time passed, the Canaanites (in the broad sense) differentiated into smaller groups with somewhat different dialects and cultures, including Phoenicians along the northern coast, Canaanites (in the narrow sense) in the “Cis-Jordan,” and several regional clusters to the east in the “Trans-Jordan”: Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and — I propose — Kenites in the far south, around Timna and the Gulf of Aqaba. “Kenites” is the usual English rendering of a Biblical Hebrew word that can be transliterated as qeni,49 but the Bible also refers to the same group with the collective singular name qayin — exactly the same as the name of the guy who slew Abel.50

The red areas in the map above represent ecoregions with Mediterranean-forest biomes; yellow, grasslands; and unpleasant dark pink, deserts. (I’m following the official color scheme!) So one can understand why the nomadic Kenites, relegated to harsher environments than their Canaanite brethren, felt cursed — but also took pride in their toughness and adaptability (Genesis 4:10-15, 4:19-22 (J)):

…YHWH said, “What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.”

Cain said to YHWH, “My punishment is too great to bear! Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth—anyone who meets me may kill me!”

YHWH said to him, “I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.”51…

[Cain’s descendant] Lamech took to himself two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah.

Adah bore Jabal; he was the ancestor of those who dwell in tents and amidst herds.

And the name of his brother was Jubal; he was the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe.

As for Zillah, she bore Tubal-cain, who forged all implements of copper and iron.

…And Lamech said to his wives… “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, / Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

The link between metal-working (“Tubal-cain, who forged all implements of copper…”) and an ancestor named “Cain” is probably something of a pun: as John Day has noted, “The name [qayin] is most naturally to be seen as cognate with Arabic qayn as well as Aramaic qyny’, [meaning] ‘smith.’”52 It was these wandering tent-dwellers, some of whom collaborated with Egypt on copper-mining in the Timna Valley, whom Moses (and Hur?) encountered at the edge of the land of Midian. And it was love at first sight (Exodus 2:15-21 (J)):

[Moses] arrived in the land of Midian, and sat down beside a well.

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock; but shepherds came and drove them off. Moses rose to their defense, and he watered their flock.

When they returned to their father Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come back so soon today?”

They answered, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds; he even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

He said to his daughters, “Where is he then? Why did you leave the man? Ask him in to break bread.”

Moses consented to stay with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah as wife.

So Moses married into the family of Reuel,53 “priest of Midian,” who was a Kenite,54 part of the broader Canaanite and even broader ʿIvri families.

But the term “Kenite” might be an anachronism here. Under Ramesses II, the Egyptian/nomad copper operation was still new. It was only later, closer to 1000 BCE,55 that Timna mining output hit its peak; at this much earlier stage, would the people involved have already acquired an ethnonym meaning something like “the smiths”?56 But if the Kenites were not yet called “Kenites” when Moses met them, what were they called? And what god was Reuel a priest of?

(The) Yahwa

Egypt had a long history of imperial activity in the Levant, and, though it had the most dealings with the settled people of narrow-sense Canaan, it also crossed paths with what it called “Shasu,” derived from an Egyptian word meaning “to wander”: nomads.57 There were many little subtypes of Shasu in different regions, each with its own group identity and tribal name. An Egyptian inscription dating from nearly a century before the reign of Ramesses II preserved some of these tribal names (albeit in hieroglyphic writing that didn’t explicitly represent vowels): there were the Trbr, the Smt, the Pyspys, and — drumroll — the Yhwꜣ, probably pronounced “Yahwa.”58 (The last letter there, ꜣ, is “Egyptological alef,” also written as ȝ.)

As Daniel Fleming says in his recent book, this is “the oldest evidence by far for the name Yahweh, albeit in a form still not clearly identified with the deity.” The same Yhwꜣ also appears in a Ramesses II–era variant of the same list of tribal names, seemingly under the heading of “Seir,”59 referring to a mountain and/or territory south of Edom — the same rough area labeled as Kenite in my map above. Fleming emphasizes that, in these Egyptian texts, Yhwꜣ seems to identify a group or a people, not a god; if we didn’t already know that “Yahweh” was regarded as a divine name, we wouldn’t assume that the Yhwꜣ of the inscriptions was. So I think that, before the Kenites were the Kenites, around 1400 BCE till at least 1200 BCE, they were the Yahwa.

How did “Yahwa” go from the name of a group to the name of a god? I can only guess. Like other broad-sense Canaanites, the Yahwa probably started out worshipping El and other members of the Northwest Semitic pantheon, but then something changed. The best analogue I know of is Ashur/Assur, the first Assyrian capital city but also the Assyrian chief deity. The East Semitic-speaking Assyrians were only distantly related to the Northwest Semitic-speaking Yahwa, having diverged some 2,500 years before the time of Moses, so I doubt that there was direct influence. But much of what Stefan M. Maul says in his 2017 overview of Assyrian religion maps well onto Yahwism:

Even the name of the most Assyrian of all gods escapes our understanding. We cannot etymologize it, and we do not know whether Assur (Aššur) bears the name of his city or the city the name of its god.

…Unlike all of the other great gods of the ancient Near East, Assur was originally an independent and solitary god who was conceived as entirely without family and without involvement in divine communities and hierarchies. For him, neither father nor mother is envisioned, nor does he have a wife and children.

…His character is difficult to capture. He is the city and its power; no further attributes can be identified.

…Assur is called “the maker of (all) the creatures of heaven and earth, fashioner of the mountains”, but aside from this reference to his role as a primeval god of creation, allusions to more specific deeds are missing. Assur appears without attributes, he is simply god. So it is not surprising that, particularly in the Old Assyrian period, he is often mentioned not with his name but rather is just called ilum “god.” Somewhat ironically, it was exactly this absence of any particular character traits that permitted the unprecedented rise of Assur, for it allowed the recognition of an all‐encompassing divinity in him, which could easily absorb deities venerated in other regions.

Assur was the deified personification of a city, and Yahwa was the deified personification of a tribe of nomads — the tribe that welcomed the pharaoh’s grandson, who quickly went native. With the zeal of a convert, he became more Yahwa than the Yahwa.

Yahwa, God of the ʿIvrim?

Moses realized that, despite their differences, the Yahwa and the Children of Israel back in Egypt and the narrow-sense Canaanites living in the Egyptian province of Canaan all had a lot in common; they were all ʿIvrim or, as it’s usually translated, Hebrews. (Subtle differences in their languages would have been lost on Moses, who grew up speaking Egyptian and only learned the broad-sense Canaanite language, probably badly, as an adult.) Maybe Yahwa was the god and protector not just of the Yahwa nomads but of all ʿIvrim.

As long as Moses still faced a murder rap in Egypt, such thoughts were idle musings. But then, “a long time after [Moses settled down with Zipporah]…the king of Egypt died” (Exodus 2:23 (J)). Thus, around 1230 BCE,60 Ramesses II was succeeded by his thirteenth son, Merenptah, not a young man at over 60 years old; the three previous crown princes had all died before reaching the throne.61 It was then that Moses began to hear the voice of Yahwa, telling him, “Go back to Egypt, for all the men who sought to kill you are dead” (Exodus 4:19 (J)). With a new pharaoh in place, Moses expected to get away with murder.

But he also had grander visions. The peculiarity of the famous burning-bush image strikes me as genuine, so I’d guess that Moses really did experience divine hallucinations. He thought that Yahwa wanted him to liberate the ʿIvrim of Egypt and take them to live among their kinsmen in Canaan:

[YHWH said,] “I have come down to rescue them from the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk62 and honey…” (Exodus 3:8 (J))

But how could this be done, with the might of the Egyptian state set against it? Moses’ audacious plan (received, he said, from Yahwa) was to employ treachery:

“…[Y]ou shall go with the elders of Israel to the king of Egypt and you shall say to him, ‘YHWH, the God of the Hebrews, manifested Himself to us. Now therefore, let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to YHWH our God.’” (Genesis 3:18 (J))

(In the Bible, the phrase “God of the ʿIvrim” [ʾelohei haʿivriyyim] only appears in the early part of Exodus.63 Pan-ʿIvricanism was a concept that mattered a lot to Moses but later lost salience.)

Since the Egyptians wanted to maintain good relations with the eastern nomads who helped keep the copper flowing, it was not crazy to think that they would grant this request for a modest ʿIvri pilgrimage. But then, instead of actually taking a quick trip to the desert and back, Moses and the Children of Israel would — so the plant went — suddenly veer north, toward the Mediterranean coast. After sneaking past a series of forts, they would take the Way of Horus — the most important road in and out of Egypt — all the way to Canaan.64 (Moses may have intended to rely on his Egyptian bodyguard, Hur, for navigation.) With the blood of pharaohs flowing through his veins and the voice of the god of the ʿIvrim resounding in his head, Moses was confident it would all work out.

I’m Putting Together a Team…

The biblical account is oddly unclear about who accompanied Moses on his journey back to Egypt, with multiple characters popping up in the middle of (different versions of) the story without ever getting proper introductions — and then disappearing just as mysteriously. But I think it was a small crew. He brought his wife, Zipporah, and his two young sons, Gershom and Eliezer,65 “mounted…on an ass” (Exodus 4:20 (J)). I think he also brought Hur, though the Bible doesn’t actually say so. This little quintet — Moses, Zipporah, Gershom, Eliezer, and Hur — might have traveled amidst a larger group of Yahwa pastoralists, including Reuel’s son (and thus Moses’ brother-in-law) Hobab,66 who were just going to Egypt to water their flocks, not to liberate the Children of Israel. This may have been part of the compensation in the tribal copper deal: access to scarce water. There’s actually direct evidence of Shasu groups being allowed to use Egyptian water in exactly this period, in a letter written by an Egyptian official to his boss during the reign of Merenptah:

We have finished passing the tribes of the Shasu of Edom through the Fortress of Merneptah-Hotephirma, L.P.H. in Theku, to the pools of Pithom…in order to sustain them and their herds in the domain of Pharaoh…67

But, if Hobab & co. were just there for the water and weren’t planning to help Moses free the Children of Israel, then there was a problem: Moses wasn’t fluent in ʿIvri. How could he convince “the elders of Israel” to follow him if he could speak to them only clumsily? I think this is the historical reality behind the claim that Moses was “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10 (J)). He didn’t have a speech impediment; he just needed ʿIvri as a Second Language classes.

Luckily for him, Moses managed to recruit two other Yahwa travelers on the way: Aaron and his sister Miriam, “the prophetess” (Exodus 15:20 (J)). (A later retcon, perpetrated by Aaron’s descendants — don’t worry; we’ll get there — would claim that Aaron and Miriam were Moses’ siblings, but they weren’t.68) It’s unclear how exactly he found them. The story just says:

YHWH said to Aaron, “Go to meet Moses in the wilderness.” He went and met him at the mountain of God, and he kissed him. Moses told Aaron about all the things that YHWH had committed to him… (Exodus 4:27-28 (J))

“The mountain of God” is usually interpreted as Mt. Sinai, but the text doesn’t actually say this, and I don’t think it makes sense narratively or logistically.69 Instead, “the mountain of God” here probably refers to somewhere in the Eilat Mountains, adjacent to the Timna Valley and more or less on the way from the “Kenite” zone to Egypt along the road shown above. Presumably this “mountain of God” was considered sacred to Yahwa, though it was later superseded within the Moses cult by the more important Mt. Sinai.

Anyway, Moses must have been quite charismatic. Aaron (and apparently Miriam) agreed to be part of his mad scheme. Aaron’s main job was to translate Moses’ broken ʿIvri:

YHWH…said, “…You [Moses] shall speak to him [Aaron] and put the words in his mouth…and he shall speak for you to the people. Thus he shall serve as your spokesman, with you playing the role of God to him.” (Exodus 4:15-16 (J))

Moses’ core team was now assembled: two lieutenants (Aaron the translator and Hur the bodyguard) and some (almost entirely overlooked) women and children (Zipporah, Gershom, Eliezer, and Miriam — and probably also Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, and his wife, Elisheba70).

A later story, which I don’t think actually happened, clearly aims to show that Aaron and Hur were originally equal in status, notwithstanding Hur’s eventual quasi-erasure. During a battle between the freed Children of Israel and the hated Amalek people,

Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of [a] hill. Then, whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; but whenever he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands grew heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur, one on each side, supported his hands; thus his hands remained steady until the sun set. (Exodus 17:10-12 (E))

There are many artistic depictions of this scene, but my favorite is this one from a Children’s Bible Lessons blog post:

The Not-So-Great Escape, and the Non-Parting of the Non-Red Sea

So Moses and his small band of followers went to Egypt. “Then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the Children of Israel. Aaron repeated all the words that YHWH had spoken to Moses…and the people were convinced. When they heard that YHWH had taken note of the Children of Israel and that He had seen their plight, they bowed low in homage” (Exodus 4:29-31 (J)). Again, Moses must have been quite charismatic!

Traditionally, the Children of Israel had worshipped El — it was right there in yisraʾel — but that might not have been much of a barrier. Conceivably, Yahwa himself had evolved out of El, and both were creator gods without much personality. El already had a variety of manifestations and epithets — the Bible includes “El the Highest” and “Helpful El”71 — so it was easy to regard Yahwa as just one more. (The J creation story in Genesis 2 has it both ways and calls him “YHWH God,” YHWH Elohim.)

I have a hard time believing that Moses and Aaron were actually given an audience with Pharaoh Merenptah himself, or that multiple successive plagues forced the recalcitrant pharaoh to give in.72 But, one way or another, “Pharaoh’s taskmasters” (Exodus 5:14 (J)) stood aside to let the Children of Israel and all their “flocks and herds” (Exodus 12:32 (J)) go three days’ journey into the desert to worship Yahwa — and then come back. (In the story, the Egyptians had been suspicious about the request to bring along all the animals — that made it look like an escape attempt, not a short religious pilgrimage! — but Moses pretended that they were necessary for “sacrifices and burnt offerings,” and one couldn’t know which individual animals Yahwa wanted till the last minute (Exodus 10:25 (J)).)

I don’t have a good sense for how large the group of escapees was, but my low-confidence guess is on the order of a thousand people. A “naïve” reading would suggest something ludicrous like two million including women and children — “about six hundred thousand men on foot, aside from children” (Exodus 12:37 (J)); “All the Israelite males, aged twenty years and over…came to 603,550” (Numbers 1:45-6 (P)) — though various efforts at reinterpretation whittle that down to maybe ten thousand.73 My wild guess: the J source originally said “about six hundred men on foot, aside form children,” but later that was viewed as insufficiently impressive, so “thousand” was slipped in, and a few centuries later the P source just went with it.

Anyway, it was time for them to execute the getaway plan. Moses led the Children of Israel right up to “the edge of the wilderness” (Numbers 33:6 (P)), consistent with the permitted pilgrimage route, but then “turn[ed] back” (Exodus 14:2 (P)), away from the desert and toward the road to Canaan. They “encamp[ed] before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, before Baal-zephon” (Exodus 14:1 (P)). Making sense of these obscure place names and prepositional phrases (and how they relate to the rest of the Exodus story) has consumed untold quantities of scholarly life-force over the centuries; here I’ll just skip to what I think is the bottom line, based largely on the work of James K. Hoffmeier and Stephen O. Moshier, who used computer modeling to reconstruct what the Eastern Nile Delta used to look like. Basically, there was a big zone of now vanished lakes (called the Ballah Lakes), and this is what yam suph — traditionally translated as “Red Sea,” but more literally meaning “Reed Sea” — refers to, and broadly where Moses and his followers initially encamped:

But this was a dangerous gamble. To actually make it onto the road to Canaan, the group would have to get past a string of Egyptian fortifications (most of the red dots in the upper right corner of the map above) undetected. But they failed. They were spotted from a distance, and the Egyptian army began to mobilize to stop them — and they had chariots.

Understandably, the Children of Israel, now reversing course in a desperate attempt to evade capture, openly regretted ever having listened to Moses. But then they got lucky: a strong, prolonged wind from the east temporarily exposed portions of the bottom of the Reed Sea, making their escape route more passable. When the wind died down, the water returned to its former position, hindering the Egyptians in their pursuit. The runaways escaped.

The account of this episode in the J source doesn’t actually say that Moses himself parted the sea or even that the sea was parted at all (a later embellishment):

YHWH drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground. At the morning watch, YHWH looked down upon the Egyptian army from a pillar of fire and cloud, and threw the Egyptian army into panic. He locked the wheels of their chariots so that they moved forward with difficulty. And the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for YHWH is fighting for them against Egypt.”

At daybreak the sea returned to its normal state, and the Egyptians fled at its approach. But YHWH hurled the Egyptians into the sea. Thus YHWH delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the wondrous power which YHWH had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared YHWH; they had faith in YHWH and His servant Moses.74

Could the wind really have done this? It doesn’t seem that implausible. Such things do happen:

Wind setdown occurs in shallow coastal areas when strong winds blow offshore. When wind stress acts for several hours on a body of water, the free water surface acquires a low-angle tilt. This tilt causes the water on the upwind side to recede from the original shoreline, leaving exposed mud flats on the bottom. Wind setdown is opposite to storm surge and comparable in vertical displacement, although wind setdown is less well known because it usually poses no danger to lives and property. Wind setdown events on the order of 2 m were recorded by measuring stations at the western end of Lake Erie on December 1–2, 2006, and January 30–31, 2008. … Cedar Key Harbor in Florida, USA, experienced a 1.0 m drop in water level on September 6, 2004 as Hurricane Frances passed through, then rose to 1.5 m above sea level 9 hours later.75

A British army officer actually observed such an event in Egypt in 1882:

a gale of wind from the eastward set in and became so strong that I had to cease work. Next morning on going out I found that Lake Menzaleh, which is situated on the west side of the [Suez] Canal, had totally disappeared, the effect of the high wind on the shallow water having actually driven it away beyond the horizon, and the natives were walking about on the mud where the day before the fishing-boats, now aground, had been floating.76

So the Children of Israel were out of danger for the time being. But where could they go now? The only option was the desert. The feint had become a reality. Even worse, they couldn’t safely use the straightforward trans-Sinai route that Moses had taken, because Egyptian soldiers and officials might be there. They had to go off the beaten path (though not entirely — the Sinai was crisscrossed with many smaller ancient trails). And the prospect of ever getting to Canaan seemed more remote with each passing day.

Overall, the whole thing was a debacle, but later tradition tried to put a positive spin on it. It was all, of course, part of God’s plan. (In the quotation below, the J source uses the anachronistic term “Way of the Land of the Philistines” — there were no Philistines there yet — to refer to what the Egyptians called the Way of Horus and the Romans would later call the Via Maris.)

Now when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, “The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt.” So God led the people round about, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds. (Exodus 13:17-18 (J77))

What’s Biblical Hebrew for “cope”?

“Israel Is Laid Waste”

From the perspective of the Egyptian state, the fact that a bunch of ʿIvri forced laborers had run off was annoying but not a very big deal. At least they’d been successfully diverted into the desert, where they probably wouldn’t survive for long. Anyway, these ʿIvrim always seemed to be starting trouble for the Empire; little rebellions also kept cropping up in the province of Canaan, but the pharaoh kept putting them down.

Merenptah had bigger fish to fry. In his fifth regnal year — around 1225 BCE — the Libyans in the western desert mounted a large-scale attack, but Merenptah’s forces beat them. He commemorated his victory with an inscribed stele. Toward the end of the text, which was mostly about his defeat of the Libyans, he included a few lines about how various eastern nuisances had also been subdued:78

The princes are prostrate, saying “Mercy!”
Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Desolation is for Tehenu; Hatti is pacified;
Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made as that which does not exist;
Israel is laid waste; his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow of Egypt!
All lands together, they are pacified.

(“The Nine Bows” was a traditional collective term for Egypt’s enemies; “Tehenu” referred to Libyans; “Hatti” referred to the Hittite state; Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam were rebellious cities in Canaan; and “Hurru” was a synonym for Canaan.) This is the earliest known extra-biblical reference to “Israel” (ysrỉꜣr).

One interesting aspect of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is its use of special symbols called determinatives that indicate what semantic category a word falls under. In the Merenptah Victory Stele, as Patrick Mazani has written,

The word Canaan appears with a determinative that indicates that it is a country. After the mention of Canaan comes Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam, all three appearing with a city determinative. By contrast, the determinative with Israel refers to a people.79

The correct interpretation of this stele is much debated, but I think it aligns with the scenario I’ve been sketching out. To Egypt, “Israel” meant the people I’ve been calling “the Children of Israel.” They didn’t have their own country or city; as the marginalized descendants of ʿIvri migrants from centuries past, they didn’t count as fully Egyptian, but they were nonetheless under Egypt’s authority, like the narrow-sense Canaanites. They tried to resist that authority and paid the price. As far as the Egyptian state knew, that was the end of the story: “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not” (that is, “his” seed is no more). And, at first, it looked much the same way to Israel: “the people grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us up from Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” (Exodus 17:3 (J)).

(It’s not too surprising that the Merenptah stele didn’t mention the role of Moses, Aaron, Hur, or the Yahwa (not important), let alone the possible loss of some soldiers to freak weather at the Reed Sea (embarrassing).)

Incidentally, assuming that Moses and his followers fled after the start of Merenptah’s reign but before or during its fifth year, we can use radiocarbon data to pin down the beginning of the Exodus to a 95.4% credible interval of [1241, 1214] BCE — call it 1228 BCE ±13 years.80

Manna and Quail

Of course, for Team Moses and the Children of Israel, the flight from Egypt wasn’t the end of the story. Their main task now was to get out of the desert. They did have some resources — “very much livestock, both flocks and herds,” plus “unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt” (Exodus 12:38-39 (J)) — but finding enough water would be a constant struggle.

As they traveled deeper into the Sinai Peninsula, though, the desert offered up a pleasant surprise or two. First, there was “bread…from the sky” (Exodus 16:4 (J)): manna.

Now the manna was like coriander seed, and in color it was like bdellium.

The people would go about and gather it, grind it between millstones or pound it in a mortar, boil it in a pot, and make it into cakes. It tasted like rich cream.

When the dew fell on the camp at night, the manna would fall upon it. (Numbers 11:7-9 (J))

Mysterious food particles that show up near the ground in the Sinai actually do exist. The funny thing is that they’re bug poop. Wikipedia:

Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids, some scale insects, and many other true bugs and some other insects as they feed on plant sap. When their mouthpart penetrates the phloem, the sugary, high-pressure liquid is forced out of the anus of the insects, allowing them to rapidly process the large volume of sap required to extract essential nutrients present at low concentrations.

An Israeli botanist published this photo in 1972:

His observations seem even-handed:81

An area [in the Sinai Peninsula]…is quite densely covered by [the desert shrub Hammada salicornica, since renamed Haloxylon salicornicum]…In July 1968 I found sweet white drops on Hammada stems at Wadi Feiran [in the Sinai], while in May, 1969, which was a rainy year, hundreds of the shrubs in the sandy plain at Dabet el Qerai…were covered with similar drops 4 to 10 mm long…It is not yet clear what caused the secretion, but near every drop was the skin of an insect 1 mm long. Although the species of insect has not yet been determined, it is clear that they are infecting young vigorously growing shoots.…

Many authors have reported sweet secretions on plants in Sinai and I have found them on the following species, besides the Hammada: Anabasis setifera, Tamarix nilotica…, Acacia raddiana, Capparis cartilaginea, C. spinosa var. aravensis, Astragalus echinus, Pyrethrum santolinoides and Gomphocarpus sinaicus. All of them are regarded by the Bedouin as kinds of manna.

Bodenheimer (1947)…thought that the main source of manna was the honey-dew excretion of scale insects (Trabutina mannipara and Najacoccus serpentina [now Trabutina serpentina]) on tamarisk shoots. This excretion crystallises in dry air as a pure white substance. … Unfortunately, tamarisk trees…are infrequent in Sinai. There are, however, several concentrations in large wadis…It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that not one [plant] species was the source of manna but any or all of those listed above, with Hammada salicornica as the main source in view of its relative abundance.

The quail that the Children of Israel fed upon (Numbers 11:31-35 (J)) were likely also real. Quail migrate from Africa to Europe, and a 2017 study82 notes that quail bones were found in multiple very old cultic and burial sites in the Sinai:

The quail (Coturnix coturnix) is a migrant species, found in Sinai and in [the] Eilat region primarily in the spring and autumn…Traditionally the Bedouin exploited this annual migration by catching the birds in vertically erected nets. The presence of quail bones in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B habitations of Wadi Tbeik in Sinai indicates that the migration of this species has been an annual event in the desert region for many millennia.

So, though the Pentateuch in its canonical form surely does exaggerate the quantities (e.g. “The Israelites ate the manna for 40 years” (Exodus 16:35 (P)), it’s plausible that fortuitously-appearing honeydew and quail did supply the desperate wanderers with some badly needed calories, which surely would have bolstered Moses’ claims of a personal connection with the god of the ʿIvrim.83

“To Your Tents, O Israel!”

The Yahwa were nomads accustomed to harsh environments, but the Children of Israel weren’t: they had mostly lived in a relatively benign part of the eastern Nile Delta. Nor were they accustomed to traveling together in a big group. To survive, they needed organization and discipline. And they got it, I think, from Hur, Moses’ Egyptian bodyguard. That’s why, as Michael Homan pointed out, the description of the Sinai wanderers’ camp in the P source closely resembles “the military camp of Rameses II at Qedesh” (where his army battled the Hittites):84

The four reliefs and corresponding written sources of the battle of Qedesh portray a 2:1 rectangular camp, the entrance of which is in the middle of the short wall. Directly in the camp’s middle lies the entrance to a 3:1 long-room tent, composed of a 2:1 reception tent leading to the square throne tent of the pharaoh. Furthermore, we learn from the Abu Simbel relief that the height of Rameses's tent corresponds to its width. All of this matches the description of the Tabernacle and its camp in Exodus 25-27. Moreover, Rameses’s tent is oriented eastward.…The campaigning Egyptian army is divided into four units, as Israel encamps and marches by four standards according to Numbers 2. In sum, the military tent and camp of Rameses II at Qedesh constitute the best parallel to the Tabernacle known to date.

…The rectangular shape shared by Rameses’s camp and the Tabernacle is extraordinary; most military camps are elliptical.

At the center of the pharaoh’s camp was the pharaoh; at the center of the Exodus camp were Moses, his family, and his two lieutenants, Aaron and Hur, all surrounded by the Children of Israel.

It’s even possible that the supernatural-sounding pillar(s) of cloud and fire that guided the Children of Israel through the desert had some basis in fact. William Propp argued that this concept “recalls a military practice attested from ancient Greece and modern Arabia, but not yet from the ancient Near East. Quintus Curtius records that a beacon was borne atop a pole before Alexander’s army, ignis noctu fumus interdiu ‘fire by night, smoke by day.’ Until recently, Arab caravans, including the ḥajj, were preceded by a signal brazier. If ancient Israel knew such a custom, it might partly explain the symbol of the fiery-cloudy pillar.”85

What Happens on Sinai Stays on Sinai

According to the P source, three months passed between the “departure from Egypt” and the arrival in “the wilderness of Sinai” (Exodus 19:1). Then, on Mt. Sinai — or Mt. Horeb, as the E source (and, following it, the D source) calls it — something happened, maybe. But what?

The oldest version of the story that has survived, from the J source, is quite bare-bones.86 The hopeless, exhausted Children of Israel are increasingly skeptical of Moses’ divine sponsorship, asking, “Is YHWH present among us or not?” So YHWH decides to silence the haters by making a personal appearance:

YHWH said to Moses, “Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be ready for the third day; for on the third day YHWH will come down, in the sight of all the people, on Mount Sinai.

But the rank and file aren’t allowed to get a close look. (“Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death.”) Only “Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu [Aaron’s sons], and the seventy elders of Israel” go up Mt. Sinai.

…and they saw the God of Israel: under his feet there was the likeness of a pavement of lapis lazuli,87 like the very sky for purity. Yet he did not raise his hand against the leaders of the Israelites — they beheld God.

No thunder and lightning, no smoke, no horn-blast, no stone tablets — all of that comes from the later E source.

Reading between the lines, I think that what we have here is a bit of a conspiracy. The escape from Egypt had gone so badly that the Children of Israel couldn’t help but begin to distrust Moses and regard his authority as illegitimate. But, for better or for worse, Moses was the only leader they had; there were too many elders for any one of them to command the loyalties of the whole group. Disunited, they would never make it out of the desert alive. So Moses prevailed upon the elders to go along with the Yahwa story. They all went up a mountain out of view together and then came back saying, “Wow, yeah, we totally saw Yahwa. He was standing on a blue thing. It was amazing. Moses is telling the truth, and we should all keep following him.” Maybe it looked contrived, but the Children of Israel preferred not to start fights with their elders, so they went along with it. And now it was harder for the elders to turn on Moses, or at least on Yahwa: they had staked their own reputations on the new cult.

Onward to Canaan, or Not

According to the P source, Team Moses and the Children of Israel spent around a year in the “wilderness of Sinai” (Numbers 10:11-12).88 Then, relying on the navigational guidance of Moses’ nomad brother-in-law Hobab (Numbers 10:29-33 (J)89), the group headed from Sinai toward Cis-Jordanian Canaan. That was the original destination, after all: “a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

According to the official story — which I find quite strange — Moses paused just south of Canaan and sent a handful of spies to scope out the Negev and beyond. They got at least as far as the city of Hebron. But they were scared of what they saw:

This is what they told [Moses]: “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey…However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large…” (Numbers 13:27-28)

Only Caleb, son of Jephunneh, had a positive attitude. So Moses threw up his hands and gave in to the wimps. Instead of heading straight into Canaan, they would retreat back into the wilderness.

All of that almost makes sense, but then, instead of feeling relieved that they wouldn’t have to confront powerful people and fortified cities, “the people were overcome by grief. Early next morning they set out toward the crest of the hill country, saying, ‘We are prepared to go up to the place that YHWH has spoken of, for we were wrong’” (Numbers 14:39-40 (J)). Wait, why are they suddenly so gung ho? And why does Moses now oppose their plan (Numbers 14:41-43 (J))?

But Moses said, “This will not succeed. Do not go up, lest you be routed by your enemies, for YHWH is not in your midst. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites will be there to face you, and you will fall by the sword…

Huh? Moses was just telling them to go to Canaan five seconds before! He was mad that they didn’t want to! Why the change of heart?

My guess is that it was Moses, not the spies, who got cold feet at the last minute. He (correctly) predicted that his little group was too vulnerable to stand up to possible Canaanite opposition. But some of the Children of Israel, sick of all the wilderness wandering, broke away and tried their luck with the direct approach. Before long, they were captured or killed.

At Last…Nehushtan!

For the rest of the group, the slog continued. They went southeast toward the Gulf of Aqaba, passing through the copper-rich region of the Timna Valley that formed part of the Yahwa/Kenite territory discussed above. I suspect that around here90 is where Moses obtained a very special artifact: the bronze snake known as Nehushtan.

Recall that, at both the western and eastern ends of the Egyptian route to Midian and Arabia, there were statues of the goddess Hathor, who was supposed to protect travelers against snakebites. The 5-inch-long bronze snake found at the Timna shrine has been interpreted as a votive offering — that is, a gift to the goddess, intended to gain her favor. There was a long-lived Egyptian tradition of such votive offerings, especially to Hathor, and they could take the form of a range of smallish objects, including ceramic baboons and little naked-lady figurines, often made in official temple workshops91 and presumably purchased by worshippers. There was also a tradition of purposely breaking these offerings.92

I speculate that Moses encountered a Hathor shrine around Timna, got his hands on a copper-snake votive object, and intended to use it to cure snakebites if necessary, perhaps by ritually destroying it.93 Sure, he was Yahwa’s servant, but he was still an Egyptian!

Here’s how the official story goes in the Pentateuch:

…the people grew restive on the journey, and the people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why did you make us leave Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread and no water, and we have come to loathe this miserable food.”

YHWH sent seraph serpents against the people. They bit the people and many of the Israelites died.

The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned by speaking against YHWH and against you. Intercede with YHWH to take away the serpents from us!” And Moses interceded for the people.

Then YHWH said to Moses, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.”

Moses made a copper94 serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover. (Numbers 21:4-9 (E))

(What the heck are “seraph serpents”? It’s not totally clear, but probably cobras or cobra-like snakes of various sorts.95)

I think we can be fairly confident that Moses’ bronze snake was a real thing, because, some 500 years later, it was destroyed at the behest of King Hezekiah of Judah, as part of his campaign against unorthodox worship (2 Kings 18:4):

He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan.

(Nᵉḥushtan is probably wordplay of some sort — naḥash is Hebrew for snake; nᵉḥoshet is Hebrew for copper/bronze.)

Strikingly, Nehushtan is never mentioned in the J or P sources. The southern Yahwist tradition that they represent tried hard to de-Egyptianize the story of the Exodus. According to this tradition, Moses was just a regular Child of Israel, not connected to the pharaonic line at all; there was no Hur; there was no bronze snake associated with Hathor. But the northern tradition, represented by the E source, was far less shy about Egyptian associations, for reasons we will eventually get to, so, fortunately, the story of Nehushtan was preserved.

Anti-Climax

In the P source (expanding on an idea already present in the earlier J source (Numbers 14:20-24)), YHWH, incensed that the wimpy Children of Israel refuse to go directly into Cis-Jordanian Canaan, decrees a harsh punishment:

Your children who, you said, would be carried off—these will I allow to enter; they shall know the land that you have rejected.

But your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, while your children roam the wilderness for forty years, suffering for your faithlessness, until the last of your carcasses is down in the wilderness.

You shall bear your punishment for forty years, corresponding to the number of days—forty days—that you scouted the land: a year for each day. Thus you shall know what it means to thwart Me.

I, YHWH, have spoken: Thus will I do to all that wicked band that has banded together against Me: in this very wilderness they shall die to the last man. (Numbers 14:31-35 (P))

The figure of 40 years was thus engineered to provide enough time for the first generation of Egypt escapees to fully die off. Again, there’s a bit of a conspiracy afoot. In the event that post-Exodus skeptics ask their leaders if any of them actually saw Yahwa themselves, there’s a readymade answer: no, because everyone who did died before getting to the Promised Land.

…None of the men who have seen My Presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness…shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers… (Numbers 14:22-23 (J))

How convenient!

It’s implausible that the group spent 40 years wandering in the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, but the text of the early sources doesn’t really require this; the large majority of that time was probably spent in the less forbidding regions to the south and east of the Dead Sea (Moab, Edom, and Seir).

This period was probably depressing. Presumably many of those who had left Egypt really did die. We’re told that Miriam died in Kadesh (Numbers 20:1 (E)), and Aaron died on Mt. Hor (Numbers 20:28-29 (P)). There was plenty of grumbling:

The people quarreled with Moses, saying, “If only we had perished when our brothers perished at the instance of YHWH! Why have you brought YHWH’s congregation into this wilderness for us and our beasts to die there? Why did you make us leave Egypt to bring us to this wretched place, a place with no grain or figs or vines or pomegranates? There is not even water to drink!” (Numbers 20:3-5)

And then, in the plains of Moab, northeast of the Dead Sea, Moses died too. Many excuses would be made for why Yahwa’s right-hand man never succeeded in his mission of uniting all the ʿIvrim in “a land flowing with milk and honey,” but, from an outside view, it sure looked like proof that Moses was not divinely inspired, just a strange, ambitious man whose reach exceeded his grasp.

The New Twelve Tribes of Israel

From an inside view, though, the sheer fact that (some of) the Children of Israel had managed to survive so many harrowing experiences — eluding the Egyptian army, living in the desert, getting within less than a day’s journey of Cis-Jordanian Canaan — seemed miraculous. They were not about to give up on Team Moses so easily. If nothing else, it would have been embarrassing. Having gone through so much together, the Children of Israel and the families of Moses, Aaron, and Hur were now a single people.

At some point, back in Egypt, the Children of Israel had come to see themselves as divided into twelve clans, each tracing its roots back to a venerated namesake ancestor: Asher, Naphtali, Zebulun, Issachar, Manasseh, Ephraim, Dan, Gad, Reuben, Benjamin, Simeon, and Judah. The families of Moses, Aaron, and Hur were now regarded as constituting a new Israelite clan, tacked on — attached — to the old ones. And that was the source of their clan name: the Levites, or “attached people.” Here I am drawing on a case made by William Propp:96

There is a large literature on the etymology of lēwî…Among the proposals are “Attached one,” i.e., to God…To my knowledge, no one has suggested that lewî indeed means “attached person” in the sense of “sojourner, resident alien.” Thus lēwî would be quasi-synonymous with gēr; cf. Isa 14:1: wənilwâ haggēr ʿălêhem wənispəḥû ʿal-bêt yaʿăqōb ‘the sojourner will be joined (lwy) to them and they will be attached to Jacob’s House.’

There was just one little problem. For whatever reason, the Children of Israel saw 12 as the right and proper number of ethnic subdivisions; the Ishmaelites, too, they said, had “twelve chieftains of as many tribes” (Genesis 25:16 (P)). So when they added the Levites as a new tribe, an old tribe would have to go. The solution was a simple, if inelegant, hack: recharacterizing Ephraim and Manasseh as “half-tribes” making up a single whole tribe of Joseph.

Over time, just as, say, the Judahites were seen as descendants of Judah, so too were the Levites seen as descendants of a son of Israel named Levi, who was created out of whole cloth. But the traditional three-part division of the Levites into Gershonites, Merarites, and Kohathites betrayed the true origins of this synthetic tribe. I propose that the Gershonites were the descendants of Moses, whose elder son was named Gershom; the Merarites were the descendants of Hur, perhaps named after his (postulated by me but not attested in the Bible) son Merari (notably, an Egyptian name meaning “beloved of Ra”97); and the Kohathites were the descendants of Aaron, though I don’t know where the name came from. (As we will see, Aaron’s lineage would rewrite a lot of history.)

A Stroke of Good Luck

If the 40-ish year duration of the Exodus is to be believed, then it was around 1190 BCE that some of the Israelites — a term I have tried to reserve for the fusion of the old Children of Israel with the families of Moses and his lieutenants — began to venture west of the Jordan River. The timing is quite interesting and, for the Israelites, lucky. Ramesses III — the pharaoh who fended off the Sea Peoples — sat on the Egyptian throne. It was during his reign that Egypt, faced with economic and military challenges at home, began to let its imperial possessions in the Levant gradually slip away. The resulting power vacuum made it easier for interlopers like the Israelites to horn in on territory that had once been part of the Egyptian sphere of influence.

But the luck wasn’t all good. Starting at perhaps the exact same time — 1173 BCE ±17 years98 — the same opportunity also began to be exploited by an offshoot of the Sea Peoples: the Philistines. The Philistines, I have argued, were mainly Greek-speaking (at first) and mainly hailed from Crete. They had taken up residence on the southwestern coast of Anatolia, but, as Egypt gave up on the Levant, the Philistines established a foothold on the coast of Canaan. The presence of the Philistines would insure that the initial Israelite expansion would be confined to the less desirable hill country.

But, like the compiler of the Pentateuch, I’ll stop here, right after the death of Moses.

To be continued. You won’t want to miss the next installment — I’ll tell you how tall God is!

44

The use of “Midian” in the Pentateuch is a bit confusing. I suspect that, in J, “Midian” is a geographical term referring fuzzily to the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula. But “Midianite” came to also mean ethnically North Arabian/Arab-like, since Arab-like peoples lived in Midian. So the “Midianite” traders of Genesis 37:29 (E) may be the same as the “Ishmaelites” of Genesis 37:25 (J) after all. (Jethro (the E name for Reuel) is called “priest of Midian” in E, but Baden 2023, “Despoiling the Egyptians,” contends that this phrase “should probably be seen as secondary.”)

So I wonder if the story in P about an Israelite having sex with a Midianite woman, leading to a war against the Midianites, was actually intended to be about North Arabians, not Kenites. If so, then there’s no implied polemic against Reuel/Jethro; he just gets silently omitted from the P narrative. While I’m on the topic, I must admit that this image of Phinehas killing the Midianite woman and her Israelite lover always makes me giggle:

As I discuss further in my post on Moses and the Bible, the Amorites were a branch of the Northwest Semitic ethnolinguistic family (the other branch being the Aramaeo-Canaanites). Amorite rulers were the top dogs in the Fertile Crescent during the Middle Bronze Age (~1900-1600 BCE), and one little Amorite dynasty in particular, ruling from the coastal city of Byblos, formed a close bond with the Egyptian state. These Amorites adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs for use with with their Northwest Semitic language, creating the earliest form of the alphabet (called Early Alphabetic or Proto-Sinaitic). This 27-letter alphabet, which represented only consonants, spread throughout the Amorite petty kingdoms of the Levant. I speculate that it made its way from Amorite-ruled Damascus down the King’s Highway and into the Arabian peninsula, where it gave rise to the Ancient North Arabian and Ancient South Arabian script families.1

I was surprised to learn that, at this point in history, there existed two “alphabetical” orders. One started with ʾ-B-G-D, the ancestor of our familiar A-B-C-D. (The ʾ symbol represents a glottal stop.) The other started with H-L-Ḥ-M. (Ḥ represents the “voiceless pharyngeal fricative,” or so I’m told.) As late as the 1400s BCE, both alphabetical orders were apparently still considered valid and worth learning in the Levant.2 The Ancient North Arabian script family (now extinct) also preserved both orders,3 but Ancient South Arabian settled on H-L-Ḥ-M alone. To this day, the Horn of Africa’s Geʽez and Amharic scripts (derived from Ancient South Arabian) still use “Halaḥam” order!

Anyway, back in the Levant, the Middle Bronze Age Amorite-speaking rulers, probably through some mixture of being defeated in battle and being culturally assimilated, gave way to Late Bronze Age Canaanite-speaking rulers. By the time of the Amarna letters (~1350 BCE), all of Egypt’s Levantine vassal kings, or at least their scribes, seemed to speak Canaanite. The scribes streamlined the Amorite alphabet into a new 22-letter form that suited the Canaanite dialect continuum.4 Byblos remained the most important scribal center,5 but it’s a bit anachronistic to think of this as a “Phoenician” city, as it would later become. The Phoenicians were indeed just a flavor of Canaanite, but the long-distance sea voyages associated with the Phoenician brand were, at this point, still several centuries in the future. So we can more accurately characterize the early 22-consonant alphabet as “Canaanite,” not “Phoenician.”

Unfortunately, not much early alphabetic writing survives, probably because its main substrate was perishable material like papyrus, wood, and leaves. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, at this stage, both the details of the letter forms and even the direction of the writing (right to left, left to right, boustrophedon, vertical…) varied widely across scribes and places.

Non-alphabetic writing systems seem so strange and unwieldy to alphabet lifers like myself that we might imagine that, once the alphabet emerged, it quickly outcompeted other scripts. But this didn’t happen. Writers of Egyptian (and Luwian) kept using hieroglyphs; writers of Akkadian and Hittite kept using cuneiform; writers of Greek kept using Linear B. For roughly 700 years (~1850 to 1150 BCE), the alphabet was limited to the Central Semitic languages of the Levant and Arabia.

That began to change thanks, I think, to our old friends the Sea Peoples (and the Ass Men). I’ve argued that the leaders of the Sea Peoples were Greek-speakers who fled Crete amid the destruction of the Mycenaean state system. That destruction put an end to Linear B. But, when some of the Sea Peoples established the kingdom of Hiyawa6 in the southeastern Anatolian region of Cilicia, they would have remembered the good old days.

Based on later Phoenician-language inscriptions in Hiyawa, it’s clear that the descendants of the Sea Peoples had contact with Phoenicians, but, following Willemijn Waal,7 I suspect that contact with the Canaanite alphabet started early, before the Phoenician variant became standardized. In this scenario, Greek-speaking Hiyawan elites recruited Canaanite scribes, who repurposed signs for non-Greek consonants as signs for vowels (which the Linear B syllabic script had always had but which the Semitic alphabet had heretofore lacked).

Thus the Canaanite consonant letter ʾālep took on the a sound, he took on the e sound, yod took on the i sound, and ʿayin took on the o sound. With u, the situation was a bit more complicated: the Canaanite letter waw represented the w sound, which Greek also used, but which has a phonetic affinity with the u vowel sound. So the scribes duplicated waw, with one copy (modified in shape but keeping the same name) continuing to represent the w sound and the other copy, added at the end of the alphabet, representing the u sound.

By some definitions, an alphabet is only a true alphabet (and not a mere abjad) if it represents both consonants and vowels. So we can say that the first true alphabet was linguistically Greek, in line with conventional wisdom — but it was geographically Anatolian. This helps to explain why the now defunct Phrygian (Ass Man!) alphabet is so similar to the Greek alphabet: both descend from the early 23-letter Hiyawan alphabet, which spread out of Cilicia both northward into central Anatolia (where the Phrygians lived8) and westward along the southern Anatolian coast into the Aegean (where “regular” Greeks lived). In Greece proper, the alphabet fragmented into various “epichoric” forms, one of which was adopted by the Etruscans in Italy and ultimately gave rise to the Latin alphabet on my keyboard.

If the Phoenicians (sensu stricto) didn’t play much of a role in the origin and spread of the alphabet, then why did the ancient Greeks think they did, going back at least as far as Herodotus? Well, not all of them did. I’m persuaded by the case made in a delightful recent article by the aforementioned Willemijn Waal that the Phoenician theory stemmed from a misinterpretation of an inherited term, phoinikeia grammata. Herodotus and others read it as “Phoenician letters” and took it to mean the alphabet, which therefore must have come from the Phoenicians. But it could also be interpreted as palm-leaf writing, and some ancient Greeks did read it this way. (The same Greek word, φοῖνιξ, can mean Phoenician, purple, or date palm, among other things.) “Palm-leaf writing” probably referred to pre-alphabetic, Late Bronze Age texts written in Linear A and Linear B on palm leaves. (There’s a specific species of date palm, Phoenix theophrasti, that grows mainly in Crete, and Linear B, used to write Greek, was adapted from Linear A, used to write the non-Indo-European “Minoan” language, likely by people on Crete.9) Modern scholars call the most common type of Linear B clay tablet the “palm-leaf tablet” because of its shape, which might have harked back to leaf texts that have long since decayed.

In fairness to the Phoenicians, there’s at least one place to which they did bring the alphabet: Iberia. There, the Celtic-speaking Tartessian culture, which traded heavily with the Phoenicians, transformed the Phoenician alphabetic model into the first of the “Paleohispanic” scripts.10 But these scripts didn’t survive Roman conquest — much like the Phoenicians themselves!

Postscript: A Worked Example

So, for example, an Egyptian hieroglyph of a head

became the Early Alphabetic letter

which represented the r sound at the beginning of the Amorite word for “head.” The letter was simplified way down to something like 𐩧 in the proto-Arabian alphabet and something like 𐤓 in its sister Canaanite alphabet. That Canaanite form was transmitted to the Hiyawan alphabet, leading to the Greek letter rho (Ρ), which sprouted a leg in the Latin alphabet and became R. Cute, right?

Despite the appearance over the past 20-some years of at least five major symposia or publications on the Sea Peoples and the “crisis” or “transition” at the end of the Late Bronze Age, together with other related monographs and articles far too numerous to cite here, there continues to be widespread disagreement over most details of what may have happened at the end of the Late Bronze Age: the main agents of change; the sequence or synchronization of all the warnings, battles, and food shortages mentioned in Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Egyptian documents; the correlation—such as is possible—between the archaeological and documentary records; the actual causes (proximate or ultimate) of the crisis.

—A. Bernard Knapp and Sturt W. Manning (2016)

Up until a few years ago, I didn’t know much about pre-modern history. In attempting to catch up on it, I’ve repeatedly had the odd experience of learning about a phenomenon for the very first time by being told something like this: “Back in the bad old days, people thought Phenomenon X was real and important. How silly they were! Of course, now we know that Phenomenon X was an illusion or, at a minimum, was overhyped. To be fair, recent evidence has suggested that something like Phenomenon X may have been real after all — but, even then, it wasn’t really what people once believed it was. Anyway, let’s talk about something else.”

The Late Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples are like that. In my innocence, I don’t think I used to have any concrete beliefs about the events of c. 1200 BCE; then I found out that, at that time, the interconnected civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean abruptly collapsed, but not really, at the hands of the mysterious, marauding “Sea Peoples,” who didn’t really exist, except they kind of did. Huh?

In this case, the murkiness doesn’t arise merely from academic fads and foibles. There are deep problems with the most basic evidence. For one thing, radiocarbon dates from around 1200 BCE happen to suffer from an unlucky “calibration plateau”: an individual radiocarbon measurement can map on to an annoyingly wide range of absolute calendar dates, making it difficult to be confident about the order in which things happened, even with solid scientific data in hand.1 For another thing, the names themselves are controversial:

To begin with, we seem to have terminological and related epistemological problems. The groups that Egyptologists call the Sea Peoples were not called that by ancient Egyptians (…contra [Egyptologist Kenneth] Kitchen 2012…).

—Matić 2022

The Egyptian sources provide the names of at least nine Sea Peoples. With these names the problems of the historian begin, for the Egyptian scripts record only consonants, whereas the contemporary cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia record syllables; from the start, it is difficult to be sure that a name in one script corresponds to a name in another. An additional problem is the lack of a sign regularly denoting the sound ‘l’ in the hieroglyphic script…New Kingdom [Egypt] writing introduces a selection of signs in combinations that appear to echo the syllabic structure of cuneiform, but there remains extensive debate over the vocalization [i.e. imputed vowels] of each name.

—Cline and O’Connor 2003

Nevertheless, here I will try my hand at stitching the narrative together. As usual, the result is a mix of expert consensus and my own speculations.

Was This Even a Thing?

Yes, but it wasn’t that big of a thing. It’s really a Greek and Hittite story, but I sense that, since no one today claims descent from or feels much affinity with the Hittites, popularizers tend to shy away from this angle.

There’s a great, persnickety book by Jesse Millek from 2023 that exhaustively audits claims of Sea Peoples–era “destruction” and finds most of them wanting:

I have uncovered 153 destruction events from 148 sites in the scholarly literature that have been cited as occurring ca. 1200 BCE. … Astoundingly, 94, or 61 percent, of these destructions have either been misdated, are based on loose evidence for destruction, or are simply false citations, and generally there is a fairly even spread among the three categories. … Of the fifty-nine destruction events that did take place ca. 1200 BCE, seventeen were partial destructions, while another nineteen were single-building destructions. … Many of the partial destructions may not even be destructions at all … However, there remain the twenty-three multibuilding and site-wide destructions…

So the crisis has been exaggerated — but not fabricated. (And it’s worth remembering that people can be killed, and polities destroyed, without necessarily leaving a thick layer of ash for later archaeologists to dig up.) I like Millek’s overview of the components of collapse that we can confidently believe in:

[W]ithin [the] fifty-year period [from 1225 to 1175 BCE]:

[1] Linear B, Ugaritic, and writing in much—though not all—of Anatolia and the Levant are abandoned;

[2] most of the major palaces in Greece suffered some kind of destruction, and the palatial system largely dissolved;

[3] the Hittite Empire as it was known in the Late Bronze Age collapsed;

[4] Ugarit was destroyed;

[5] various subregions suffered apparent depopulation;

[6] locally made [Late Helladic] IIIC pottery [which resembles earlier Greek/Aegean pottery] appears throughout the Levant and Cyprus; and

[7] there are of course Merenptah’s and Ramesses III’s infamous run-ins with the Sea Peoples.2

So how do these components fit together?

Spoiler Warning

This is how:

The Coming of the Greeks

But, first, let’s turn back the clock. Beginning around 3000 BCE, people of the Yamnaya culture exploded out of the western steppe and into the forests of Europe, bringing with them an Indo-European language.3 One contingent of the Yamnaya went northward into central Europe; another went south and west into the Balkan mixed forests. This Balkan clade then fragmented into the ethnolinguistic ancestors of Albanians, Armenians, and Greeks, among others.

It’s easy to gloss over — so easy, in fact, that I’m going to do it myself — but it seems to have taken a long time (more than a thousand years) for the pre-Greeks to actually make it from the Balkans into Greece proper. Ancient DNA analysis has detected people with western steppe ancestry in northern Greece by ~2000 BCE,4 but it was only around 1750 BCE5 that they began to dramatically transform culture throughout the Greek mainland and beyond. At the same time, a small (Luwic?) settlement in northwestern Anatolia was turning into the much more formidable, sui generis city that archaeologists call Troy VI, which boasted, for the first time in the site’s history, horses.6 I don’t think it was a coincidence that Greek and Trojan culture began to emerge at the same time: the Trojan elites were likely “para-Greek,” eastern siblings of the western Greeks who were part of the same migration out of the Balkans and into the Aegean.7 (This helps to explain why the Trojans seem so Greek in the Iliad,8 though of course Homer wrote much later, c. 760 BCE.9)

Over time, Greek-speakers (whose genetic ancestry was mainly early-European-farmer–ish,10 even as their warrior culture was predominantly Yamnaya-derived) formed statelets, the most powerful of which was based in Mycenae. Around 1460 BCE,11 Greek-speakers overpowered the old “Minoan” polity in Crete and established a kingdom centered on a palace at Knossos.12 But the kingdom didn’t rule the entire island, and non-Greek Cretans survived and preserved a sense of distinctiveness.13 In the “Cretan Lie” scene in the Odyssey (Book 19), Odysseus, pretending to be from Crete for whatever dumb reason, highlights its ethnic diversity:14

There’s a country called Krētē out in the wine-dark deep,
fine, rich-soiled, and sea-girt; it has in it many people, 
so many they’re countless: they have ninety cities,
and various tongues, one mixed with another—Achaians,
proud native Krētans, Kydōnians, all are established there,
with Dōrians in three settlements, and noble Pelasgians too!

“Pelasgians” (Pelasgoi) was a Greek term for the “indigenous” residents of Greece. There was another form of this word: Pelastoi.15 This is the origin of the Egyptian term “Pelasti” (one of the named Sea Peoples) and the later Hebrew “Pəlištīm”: Philistines.

As for the Kydonians of Crete also mentioned by Homer, their eponymous city, Kydonia, was the center of a kingdom that was probably, at first, a vassal of Knossos.16 But, after Knossos fell for unknown reasons around 1320 BCE,17 Kydonia became the most important Greek-speaking site on Crete, continuing to use the Linear B script and exporting fine pottery as far away as Egypt.18 I think that the (broadly Aegean, but otherwise unlocalized) king “Tawagalawa” mentioned in a 13th-century-BCE Hittite text was the king of Kydonia.19 Scholars have proposed several different Greek mythological names that the Hittite “Tawagalawa” might correspond to: Eteocles, Deucalion (a king of Crete20), even Teukros21 (Twa-ga-la vs. Teu-ka-ro…).

There is a certain allure to the Teukros (usually anglicized to “Teucer”) possibility, strained though it may seem. (To my ear, it’s no worse than “Eteocles,” which seems to be the most popular guess). There were two Greek mythological figures named Teukros. One was from Crete but established a settlement near Troy. The other was from the Greek island of Salamis but established a settlement on Cyprus. Ramesses III’s list of Sea Peoples includes the “Tjeker,” whom (some) scholars have, for many decades, linked to Teucer, and who, as Redford 2017 notes, are presented as closely related to the Pelasti. A synthesis suggests itself: the Tjeker were the ethnically Greek elites of Kydonian Crete, while the Pelasti were their ethnically non-Greek subordinates (perhaps tracing their origins back to mainlanders who had migrated to Crete, rather than the even “more indigenous” (but genetically very similar) “proud native Krētans” (Eteocretans)).

The Hittites and the Lands of Lukka

So that covers the Greeks (and their Cretan offshoots and frenemies). What about the Hittites? The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language from the now-extinct Anatolian family, the first branch to diverge from “Nuclear Indo-European” even before the emergence of Yamnaya culture. (Tellingly, Anatolian languages don’t have the same root word for “wheel” as the other Indo-European languages.22) Proto-Anatolian-speakers split off from their steppe brethren around 3700 BCE,23 moving into the Balkans and then, within a few centuries, crossing the Bosporus into Anatolia.24 There they broke into two main populations: one specialized in the forested interior; the other, the Mediterranean fringes. The first group gave rise to a warrior elite that, by 1650 BCE, had taken power in the central-Anatolian city of Hattusa (and the broader “land of Hatti”) and came to be known as Hittites. Their more Mediterranean-facing cousins in western and southern Anatolia spoke languages from the Luwic family.25 Though some of them built their own kingdoms, these tended to fall under the sway of the Great King of the land of Hatti.

The Hittites called the most distant southern and southwestern coastal regions of Anatolia “the lands of Lukka.” There, beyond the reach of the Hittites and their vassals, the ethnolinguistic ancestors of the later Lycians and Carians (whose languages belonged to a branch of the Luwic family) gained a reputation for lawlessness and piracy. Following Redford 2017, I think that some of the Sea Peoples identified in the inscriptions of Ramesses III were “Lukkans”: the “Washash” were from Iasos, and the “Sakalusa” (aka “Shekelesh”) originated in Sagalassos.

Over the course of the Late Bronze Age, the Hittite empire expanded to include large swathes of northern Syria, overseen by a viceroy based in Carchemish. This put the Hittites at loggerheads with Egypt, which had its own imperial possessions in the Levant. The equilibrium established by the time of the Hittites’ final collapse was that Hittite power extended only as far south as the vassal kingdom of Amurru; beyond that was the Egyptian zone of influence.

Interlude: The Trojan War

Frankly, the Trojan War doesn’t have much to do with the Late Bronze Age collapse or the Sea Peoples, but it’s in the same chronological and cultural ballpark, so I can’t resist weighing in.

Obviously the Homeric version of the Trojan War includes many fanciful events that didn’t happen (like Achilles’s horse talking to him), but I’d bet on the reality of the basic core: a successful Mycenaean-led attack on the city of Troy, resulting in the death of its king “Priam” (perhaps more like “Perramos,” as it was rendered in the Aeolic Greek dialect). And I’m very tempted to accept the astronomical case made by Göran Henriksson that a strange passage in the Iliad, set in the final year of the war, preserves a memory of a total solar eclipse that took place in 1312 BCE. This gels with archaeological analysis showing that Troy VI was destroyed around 1300 BCE, though not necessarily by human hands.26

But the Iliad exaggerates the scale of the destruction. The population of Troy VI was only five to seven thousand people!27 And the city was quickly rebuilt after ~1300 BCE, with Perramos’s son Alexandros (aka Paris) succeeding to the throne.28 In fact, Alexandros became a vassal of the Hittites, as memorialized by a treaty in which Alexandros invoked the divine name of “Appaliunaš” (aka Apollo).29

The Hittites’ relationship with Troy led to tensions with the king of Mycenaean Greece — which the Hittites called “Ahhiyawa” (related to Homer’s “Achaeans”) and people in Egypt and the Levant called “Danuna” (related to Homer’s “Danaans”). (Rostyslav Oreshko suggests that “Danuna” may originally have referred to southern Greece and “Achaea” to central Greece, though that distinction gradually disappeared.) But diplomacy kept Hattusa and Mycenae from coming to blows: a surviving Hittite letter says that “the King of Hatti has persuaded [the king of Ahhiyawa] about the matter of the land of [Troy] concerning which he and I were hostile to one another, and we have made peace.”30

Heart-warming. But, within a century of that letter, both the kingdom of Hatti and the kingdom of Ahhiyawa would be gone forever.

Return of the Heraclids

According to legend, Zeus had wanted his son Heracles to rule in southern Greece, but, through Hera’s trickery, Eurystheus (a grandson of Perseus) took Heracles’s rightful place. Eurystheus was succeeded by Atreus (his maternal uncle, at least in one version of the story), giving rise to the “House of Atreus” dynasty that included the Trojan War leader Agamemnon.

But Heracles’s descendants — the Heraclidae, or Heraclids — knew how to hold a grudge. Failing in their efforts to oust Atreus, they ran off and “made their home among the Dorians,”31 a Greek-speaking group living in the rugged northwest. After many years and several additional failed attempts, the Heraclids and their Dorian allies finally killed Tisamenus, son of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, and put an end to the (at least somewhat) unified Mycenaean kingdom.32 They divvied up the Peloponnese and drew lots to decide who would take which chunk. As a result, the originally northern Doric Greek dialect spread far southward (including into Crete), though it bypassed the mountainous central region of Arcadia, which, surrounded by a sea of Doric, nonetheless continued to use a Mycenaean-like, ancestrally southern dialect.

This is the ancient story of the “return of the Heraclids” or the “Dorian invasion,” and, as with the Trojan War, I think the basic core is true. A 2022 reference work on the Greek language notes that “the traditional concept of Dorian migrations in the twelfth and eleventh centuries is still the best way to explain the isolated position of Arcadian and the specific institutions shared by various Dorian states.”

And the timing of the mythological events — a handful of generations after the Trojan War (different sources give different figures) — roughly lines up with the archaeological record. Around the transition from Late Helladic IIIB1 to IIIB2 (c. 1230 BCE33), “there are signs of major destructions at Mycenae and other Argive sites. The ensuing LH IIIB2, the last stage of the Palatial period, was marked by the most massive building programs that had hitherto been carried out,” likely motivated in part by the need to “take precautions against warfare,” in the words of a recent overview.34 I can’t resist speculating that these are the traces of an initial period of Atreid/Heraclid dynastic struggle, ending with the incumbents weakened but not yet fully defeated. Around this same time, the Hittites seem to have removed the king of Ahhiyawa from their list of “Great Kings,”35 and imports of Mycenaean pottery into the Levant dry up.36

Then, toward the very end of the LH IIIB2 phase, around 1200 BCE, the big, final destructions took place: Midea, Tiryns, Pylos, Gla, Mycenae. Heraclid persistence paid off.

But what about the Mycenaean-affiliated kingdom of Kydonia in Crete? It may not have been destroyed outright,37 but, around this time, the city of Kydonia was “suddenly abandoned…as were most of the other settlements in Crete.”38 I propose that a group of Cretans — both ethnically Greek (“Tjeker” to the Egyptians) and not (“Pelasti”) — along with some Greek mainlanders (“Danuna”/ “Denyen”), managed to escape the Heraclid/Dorian onslaught, forming the nucleus of the Sea Peoples.

Sometimes historians paint the Sea Peoples as refugees, and, in a sense, they were — just not especially sympathetic ones. They were not so much huddled masses yearning to breathe free as thugs who found themselves on the losing side of a squalid civil war.

Where did they go? The one place besides Arcadia where, according to the linguists, a Mycenaean-like southern Greek dialect continued to be spoken after the fall of Mycenae: nearly 500 miles east, in Cyprus.

Flight to Cyprus

The following map, from Mountjoy and Mommsen 2019, had a big impact on my thinking, so I sure hope it’s correct. As a landlubber, I claim no personal knowledge of currents or winds, but I do have personal experience picking up Mountjoy’s two-volume Decorated Pottery in Cyprus and Philistia in the 12th Century BC: Cypriot IIIC and Philistine IIIC (2018), and it’s very heavy, so I trust her.

What the map suggests is that travel in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean had certain “natural” pathways, including “counterclockwise” from Egypt up the Levant and along the southern Anatolian coast, as well as west to east from Crete to Cyprus (“A direct route from Crete is important, as there is a long history of contact between the two islands”).

Around 1200 BCE,39 there appeared in southwestern Cyprus a “fortified settlement founded atop the narrow promontory at the locality of Palaeokastro in the area of Maa…[which] has intrigued scholars with its impressive wealth of architectural and moveable finds, its far-reaching external contacts, and its exceptionally limited occupation span,” lasting only a couple of generations.40 I think this highly defensible site served as the Cretan Sea Peoples’ initial base of operations. (A similar theory was once espoused by Cypriot archaeologists but is now seemingly out of fashion.41)

Cyprus, known then as Alashiya, hosted a kingdom centered on Enkomi that was, by this point, a Hittite vassal state. It was often in contact with nearby (across the Mediterranean) states in the northern Levant that were also Hittite vassals, like Ugarit and Amurru. The people of the island spoke a language that was relatively closely related to Minoan; the “Cypro-Minoan” script evolved out of Minoan Linear A.42 (Maybe the Pelasti acted as interpreters for their Greek captains when dealing with the locals.)

It’s easy to imagine the remnants of Mycenaean Crete, holed up in Maa-Palaeokastro, flouting the authority of the king of Alashiya and striking out periodically for coastal raids. Scholars over the years have tried to link a number of Late Bronze Age Ugaritic documents depicting troubles in Cyprus and the northern Levant to the Sea Peoples.43 But these fragmentary texts usually lack clear names and chronological anchors; I suspect that in many cases they come from a slightly earlier period and speak of other groups of troublemakers. At any rate, though raids were no fun, they didn’t seriously threaten state power. If things got really bad, vassals could call in the military might of the Hittite empire, which had a 500-year track record.

But then the Hittites got unlucky.

The Drought

Yes, many claims about connections between climate change and historical events have relied on sloppy reasoning. One of the sharpest critics of this sloppy reasoning has been Sturt Manning, “Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classical Archaeology” at Cornell. So when I saw that Manning was the lead author on the 2023 Nature paper “Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC,” I decided that it was probably legit. Using tree-ring data from central Anatolia as a proxy for rainfall, Manning et al. concluded:

Between around 1270 and 1135 BC there is only one interval in these 135 years—1198–1196 BC—with two or more consecutive years in the lowest 6.25% of values…Further, in the 12-year period from 1198 to 1187 BC, there were between 6 and 8 years…in the lowest 20% of values…[T]he period around this time represents either the driest or second-driest multi-year interval between 1400 and 1000 BC. This extremely dry interval stands out as a probably substantial climate challenge to food production and subsistence in central Anatolia that may have defeated normal strategies and storage provision in the Hittite administrative core. The dates—approximately 1198–1196 BC—are compatible with the historically derived timeframe of Hittite collapse and reorientation, and lend an historical specificity that is usually lacking in general low-frequency arguments suggesting linkages between climate and history.

The Hittites may have been able to weather the initial few-year shock, but as the dry spell dragged on, the heartland of Hatti must have grown weaker, less able to exercise power over its west Anatolian and north Syrian imperial periphery. The Cretans on Cyprus happened to be in the right place at the right time to exploit Hittite misfortune.

1191 ±1 B.C.

A bit shamefully, I haven’t actually read much of Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, a book that covers a lot of this same territory from the perspective of an academic writing for a popular audience. I was going to read it, but then I got far enough in my own research that I didn’t want to be unduly influenced by Cline’s interpretations. (When you’re a dilettante, they let you do it.)

And yet I can’t help noticing that I disagree with Cline on the titular date, which refers to the eighth year of Pharaoh Ramesses III’s reign, when, according to inscriptions at his mortuary temple, he vanquished the groups we now call the Sea Peoples. These inscriptions are pretty much the primary source for the whole Sea Peoples concept. I don’t think Cline makes a big deal about 1177 in particular being the exactly correct date; specialists realize, though I was initially surprised by, how confusing and uncertain the chronology of this period can be.

Where did I get my date of 1191 ±1? I went slightly overboard, downloaded a beautiful little piece of software called ChronoLog created by Eythan Levy, Frédéric Pluquet, and Gilles Geeraerts and explained in a 2021 paper, loaded it up with all the Bayesian radiocarbon chronologies and astronomically grounded Mesopotamian king lists and reliable historical synchronisms I could find, and looked at the output. I won’t bother with more of the details here, though I’d be very happy to discuss them with anyone interested. The upshot: Ramesses’s eighth year was somewhere in [1193, 1187], and Ugarit’s final year was in [1192, 1190], nested inside the eighth-regnal-year interval just as it probably should be. So: the big year was 1191 ±1. (Manning et al. 2023 supports ~1187, not far off.)

The Denouement: “Our Plans Will Succeed!”

So what actually happened in 1191 BCE? Here’s my reconstruction.

Emboldened by prolonged Hittite weakness, the Cretan refugees on Cyprus toppled the Alashiyan king, insuring, in the longer run, that the “Arcadocypriot” dialect of Greek would take hold in the island at the expense of the Eteocypriot language. Interestingly, according to legend, the city of Salamis on Cyprus — located very close to the old Alashiya capital of Enkomi and probably built as its replacement — was founded by Teucer.

Some of the Cretans then crossed over the sea to attack the northern Levantine coast, probably first taking up residence in the Hittite vassal kingdom of Amurru, then pushing north along the “counterclockwise” coastal route into Ugarit, which they destroyed, and then the southeast corner of Anatolia, later known as “Plain Cilicia,” which had once been the independent kingdom of Kizzuwatna but was by this point a province of Hatti, ruled directly by the Hittite king.44

Facing little resistance, the Cretans went even further, to the pirate coasts of southern and western Anatolia: the hazily defined lands of Lukka, which were out of reach of Hittite power even in the empire’s better days, and the land of Arzawa further west.45 There they recruited — probably by force — some of the ethnolinguistically Lycian/Carian locals. In the eastern part of this region, the city of Olba later recounted a story about itself:

According to a legend told by the Greek geographer Strabo, the original temple of Zeus Olbius had been founded by Ajax [brother of Teucer], one of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War. The priests belonged to the Teucrid dynasty: every man of this family was called either Ajax or Teucer.

Teucer again!

All of this happened very quickly, mostly along the coast. Inland Hittite vassals in Syria, including the viceroy in Carchemish, tried to repel the attack but lost.

But then the Sea Peoples got greedy. The Amurru contingent, butting up against the Egyptian sphere of influence in the southern part of the Levant, pushed a little too far and provoked an Egyptian response. It may have been the Egyptians who destroyed the physical infrastructure of Sumur (Tell Kazel), the Amurru capital turned Sea Peoples base, as a show of strength.

Perhaps in retaliation, perhaps just in hopes of acquiring booty, the Sea Peoples soon launched an attack from the Lukka coast aimed right at the eastern Nile Delta. (The Mountjoy and Mommsen map above suggests that this wasn’t intrinsically crazy: the prevailing winds would have favored sea travel along this route.) Again, the Sea Peoples, led by Ramesses III, were defeated. Egypt emerged unscathed. The end?

Here’s how (part of) the story was recorded in Ramesses III’s mortuary temple (in Donald B. Redford’s 2017 translation). The text is often confusing, and even basic elements, like how many separate battles there were and where they took place, continue to elicit scholarly disagreement. Nevertheless, I persisted.

The foreign countries made a šdt(t) [pact?] in their islands, migrating and scattering simultaneously through the war of the lands. Not one land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Karkemish, Arzawa to Alashiya, cut off […. ] A camp was [set up] at one spot within Amurru, devastating his people and his land as though they had never existed. They came on, with fire prepared in their van, straight against Egypt. Their main strength lay in the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh—lands united! They had laid hands on countries as far as the limit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’

(But) lo! The will of this god, the Lord of the Gods, was ready and prepared to snare them like birds! He granted me power so that my plans succeeded…

So what do all these names refer to? We’ve covered some already, but:

Not one land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Karkemish, Arzawa to Alashiya…

(Millek 2021 has pointed out an awkward problem with this list: it doesn’t include Ugarit, which indisputably was destroyed around this time, but it does include Carchemish, which wasn’t. I think a possible solution is that the pharaoh is speaking mainly about defeated armies. Little Ugarit didn’t have much of an army of its own, instead leaning on other allied kingdoms for defense.)

• Khatte: Hatti, the country of the Hittites. This identification is uncontroversial, but I think here it might more specifically allude to the Plain Cilicia/Kizzuwatna southeastern bit of Anatolia, as opposed to the heartland of central Anatolia. Both would have been included in the “Khatte” political unit.

• Qode: part of northern Syria, though there’s no clear consensus about precisely which part.46 I’d bet on Mukish, which controlled a port on the mouth of the Orontes River and was ruled by the Hittites.47

• Karkemish: the seat of the Hittite viceroy in the eastern Mediterranean, who was second only to the king. He was supposed to foil attacks like the Sea Peoples’. (Even as Hatti crumbled, Carchemish lived on into the later “Neo-Hittite” era, ruled over (initially at least) by a branch of the old Hittite royal family.48)

• Arzawa: western Anatolia, especially the “troublesome” southwestern coastal region, which, Oreshko 2019 suggests, hosted “a network of Hittite garrison fortresses.”

• Alashiya: Cyprus, the first land to fall to the Sea Peoples (and a Hittite vassal).

What we can see is that, despite the sweeping rhetoric about “countries as far as the limit of the earth,” every place on the list was directly or indirectly under the power of the Hittites.

Their main strength lay in the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh—lands united!

• Peleset: ethnically non-Greek people originally from Crete.

• Tjeker: ethnically Greek people originally from Crete — the big bosses. (Teucer!)

• Shekelesh: Lycian recruits.

• Denyen: ethnically Greek people originally from mainland Greece.

• Weshesh: Carian recruits.

As I said, it’s really a Greek and Hittite story.

The Aftermath: Hiyawa and the Philistines

Though Egypt kept its borders intact in ~1191, the Sea Peoples continued to inhabit pockets of the Hittite Mediterranean. In the southeast, one group established a kingdom about which not much is known beyond some very intriguing names. According to inscriptions, the ruling dynasty claimed descent from someone named Moxos/Mopsus, a name that, in later Greek legend, referred to (quoting Wikipedia) a “seer and diviner…venerated as founder in several cities of Pamphylia [part of the southern Anatolian coast] and the Cilician plain, among them Mopsuestia…At Mopsucrene, the ‘spring of Mopsus’, he had an oracular site.” The country ruled by Mopsus was called Hiyawa, derived from the old “Ahhiyawa” (or, in Phoenician, “Danuna”): basically, a New Greece in southeastern Anatolia,49 though, over time, it seems to have largely been assimilated into local Luwian culture.

Meanwhile, further west in the lands of Lukka, another group of Sea Peoples was likely responsible for the “deep structural influence of Greek on [the local Luwic language of] Lycian,” according to an argument made by Rostyslav Oreshko (who, the attentive reader will notice, is one of my favorite scholars in this area).

Like the Hiyawans, the Lycian Sea Peoples were also assimilated — with one interesting exception, which takes us back to Egypt. Egypt may have been strong enough to beat the Sea Peoples in the Levant and the Nile Delta, but, in the confusingly named “Upper” Egypt to the south, the pharaoh had many headaches. This is Millek 2018’s overview:

[R]epeated attacks by the Libyans…taxed the Egyptian army, perhaps causing them to keep troops closer to home rather that in southern Levant, which was in direction exact oppositely that from which the armed threats against Egypt were coming.

Aside from the border issues Ramesses [III] faced, he also had to contend with a number of internal administrative and economic crises. The price of grain soared, hitting its peak in the mid-20th Dynasty. The inflation in the price of grain caused difficulties in Ramesses’ ability to provide grain for the workmen at Deir el-Medina, which helped bring about the first recorded organized strike in his 29th year. He faced the shifting of power away from the state to the priesthood of Amun and financial corruption, along with a harem conspiracy led by a lesser queen, Tiy, in an attempt to put her son, Pentaweret, on the throne, perhaps resulting in the death of Ramesses III and calling into question ma’at itself. All of this was followed by dynastic struggles for the throne and internal administrative and economic crises that continued into the reigns of Ramesses IV and VI.

So the Egyptian state “quiet quit” in the southern Levant, directing its attention elsewhere and gradually letting its old imperial possessions slip through its fingers.

The Sea Peoples weren’t really to blame, but they did take advantage of the opportunity. Around 1170 BCE, according to recent radiocarbon studies,50 “Philistine” pottery began to appear in the area later known as Philistia in the southern Levant. Archaeologists and historians have long suspected that the Philistines were migrants with Aegean roots, and the Bible itself says so. (See e.g. Hitchcock 2018: “a specifically Cretan connection to the Philistines is preserved in biblical tradition and is preserved archaeologically in possible links with Linear A, particular artistic motifs and designs, plaster technology, architectural design, administrative practices, and symbolic ritual practices of offerings, destruction and curation.”)

There are also tantalizing onomastic links. Besides Pelastoi/Pelasti/Pəlištīm, there is “Achish,” the king of the Philistines who has dealings with David in the Bible. The same name has been found in an ancient inscription in the Philistine city of Ekron. I like Bible scholar Carl S. Ehrlich’s 2021 take:51

While the most popular theory regarding the derivation of this name has been that it was derived from the Greek Anchises…it is now clear that the Masoretes mispointed the name, whose correct vocalization [is] Achayush…Hence, the name is most probably to be derived from the Greek word Achaios and means Achaean. In its import, it may be compared with the name Iamani, meaning ‘the Greek’…, the usurper king of Ashdod [another Philistine city] during the reign of Sargon II in the late eighth century BCE. It is unclear whether the names Achayush/Achayus and Iamani were truly personal names or nicknames. Whichever they were, the use of these names indicates an identification with the Aegean world…

In other words, King “Achish” was basically “King Greek Guy.”

What about the most famous Philistine, Goliath? In 2012, Mariona Vernet Pons linked the name to the Carian personal name Wljat/Wliat, derived from a root that may have meant “to be strong.” (The proposed shift from initial “w” to initial “g” is reminiscent of English/French doublets like “William”/“Guillaume” and “warden”/“guardian.”) Phicol, another biblical Philistine, may also have had a Carian name. So all the Sea Peoples were represented in Philistia: Greeks, Cretans, and Lyco-Carians.

Ancient DNA from the Philistine city of Ashkelon has confirmed this basic story. The genetic ancestry of early Iron Age Philistines can be well modeled as ~43% Bronze Age Cretan and 57% pre-Philistine Levantine. One of the Philistine individuals analyzed also carried the R1 Y chromosome associated with ancient western-steppe males.52 Amazingly, a 2022 study showed that, among all ancient samples generated to date, the single most genetically Mycenean-like person known outside of Greece is an Iron Age Philistine from Ashkelon.53 Within a few generations, though, outmarriage had greatly attenuated Philistine genetic and cultural distinctiveness — similar to what happened in Hiyawa and Lycia.

From the River to the Sea…

The Philistines also seem to have established a somewhat later northern “colony,” which wasn’t fully appreciated until recently. Around 1120 BCE, at the site of Tell Tayinat (ancient Kunulua) in the northern Levant, there was a cultural shift, exemplified by the appearance of the same type of “Aegeanizing ceramics” that are linked to the Philistines.54 By the mid-11th century BCE, a state had emerged, founded by King Taita I. The name of the kingdom, notwithstanding the doubts of some scholars, was Palastina.55

It’s a bit odd that Palastina was not contiguous with Philistia but rather hundred of miles to the north. Perhaps the Phoenicians in between were too powerful or useful to mess with. I don’t think researchers have uncovered the full picture yet. Once again, though, Palastina was pretty quickly “Syro-Anatolianized”: later kings used the Luwian language and took old Hittite royal names like Suppiluliuma. And that’s all the excuse I need to include this image of a statue of Palastina’s Suppiluliuma:

Behold, then, the last son, maybe, of the Sea Peoples.

Epilogue: The Assman Cometh

To recap the narrative: with their heartland stricken by drought, the Hittites could no longer hold on to their Mediterranean periphery, leaving it open to exploitation by the Mycenaean Cretans and their entourage. But what happened to the non-Mediterranean central and northern parts of Anatolia?

The Hittite capital of Hattusa was abandoned, but the power vacuum was quickly filled by a group I haven’t mentioned yet: the Masa. (Here, again, I’m relying mostly on Oreshko.) You can think of them as “the Land People,” a counterpoint to the Sea Peoples. The Masa could trace their origins back to the Indo-European-speaking Thracians (Moesi) from the European side of the Bosporus. At some point (the mid-second millennium BCE?) a group of Thracians crossed over into Anatolia and managed to wedge themselves between the Hittites to the east and the Trojans to the west, giving birth to the Masa, whose name may have come from a word for “horse.” I think that the family tree of this ancestrally Balkan clade of Indo-European looked something like this:

To the Hittites, the Masa were an irritant, seemingly never submitting to Hittite suzerainty, unlike most other groups in western Anatolia. I suspect that, after the big drought hit, it was the Masa who took over Troy (during the later VIIb phase) and made its material culture Balkan-like (complete with “barbarian ware”).56 And, in the east, it was the Masa who swept through central Anatolia, pursuing a pastoralist lifestyle that was better suited to the newly arid climate than traditional Hittite farming.57

As these eastern Masa lost touch with their western brethren, they developed their own identity as Muška or, as the Greeks called them, Phrygians (the most famous of whom was King Midas). Oreshko argues that both names for this group derive from words for non-horse equines: “Muška” from mules, “Phrygians” from donkeys. There was even some kind of traditional Phrygian “donkey dance.” This sounds a bit goofy to the modern ear, though Oreshko tries to justify it by pointing to the wild onager, which perhaps seems more prestigious than its domesticated cousins. His piece on the Masa/Phrygian link is entitled “The Onager Kings of Anatolia.”

But when I double-checked the phylogenetic evidence, I came to doubt that “onager king” is an accurate moniker. Judging from a 2023 preprint, the onager belongs to an eastern branch of the Eurasian wild ass family, which expanded out of Africa and into Iran and East Asia, while it was the western branch (Equus hydruntinus, now extinct) that colonized Anatolia and Europe. “The Hydruntine Kings of Anatolia” would be all right, I guess, but I’d rather just call them the Ass Men.

Is There a Bigger Lesson Here?

Probably not. It’s tempting to wax poetic about “complex systems” and environmental vulnerabilities and antifragility or whatever, but I think the overriding brute fact is that, without science, engineering, and industry, civilizations were bound to hit bottlenecks and ceilings sooner or later. The Mycenaean era in Greece didn’t last that long in the scheme of things and probably wasn’t that important, except in retrospect as a cosplay backdrop for much later Greeks. (If Homer’s writings had been lost, would anyone care what “Ahhiyawa” or “Wilusa” meant?) The Hittites were dealt a bad hand, but it’s not like they were about to discover electricity or invent the printing press; they were just a bunch of jerks like every other warrior elite. If the Sea Peoples hadn’t smashed up the Hittites’ empire, Assyria or Persia or someone else would have, eventually.

But that’s okay. Sometimes there’s no lesson, and we just want to know what actually happened.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the less intuitive branches of my tree from part 1.

Return of the Siberian clade

The linguist Michael Fortescue once argued for a Uralo-Siberian language family that included Uralic, Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut (aka Eskaleut), and Chukotko-Kamchatkan, but he later expelled Chukotko-Kamchatkan.1 I’m bringing it back and throwing in Turkic as a bonus (but discarding Eskaleut, which I think is just a northern Native American language, reflecting proto-Eskaleuts’ origins in the Ocean Bay culture of Kodiak Island and the Alaskan Peninsula — a topic for another day, maybe).

The recent preprints Zeng et al. 2023 and Gill et al. 2023, along with a Tabin et al. 2023 poster, helped to clarify the previously murky picture of Siberian ethnolinguistic history. Here’s what I think happened:

• More than 8,000 years ago, a group of people from the northern part of the Central East Asia subrealm, belonging to the (initially) East Asian Y-chromosomal haplogroup N, moved into the taiga region east of Lake Baikal and mixed with Northeast Asians, creating the Transbaikal_EMN cluster.

• Mixing further with the “Asian Americans” of the Syalakh-Belkachi culture in the taiga, they created the Yakutia_LNBA cluster, initially centered on Lake Baikal but soon venturing out into a wide swathe of the taiga. To the far east, they gave rise to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages of western Beringia (on top of an Asian American substrate). Heading west, ultimately as far as Scandinavia, they gave rise to the Uralic languages.

• Back home near Lake Baikal, though, they were caught up in the influx of Scythian people and culture during the Iron Age. Somehow — helped along by having that dog in them, no doubt— their male lineages survived contact with the horse nomads. In fact, it seems like they married into the Scythian world, creating the Sargat culture2 to the west (a forerunner, I suspect, of the Bulgar/Chuvash branch of the Turkic language family) and the “nuclear Turkic” languages to the east.3 One branch of nuclear Turkic then spread far and wide with the Göktürk Khaganate.

  • The Avars, I suspect, were the ethnolinguistic “brother” clade of the proto-Turkic speakers, although, like other steppe confederations, they were genetically mixed. (Scrutinizing a PCA plot from Maróti et al. 2022, it looks like the modern-day groups most similar to “Avar_Asian_Core” — presumably the Avar elites — are the Turkic-speaking Yakut. Ancient Avar samples also share their specific N Y-chromosome haplogroups with Turks and Kazakhs, among others (see Ilumäe et al. 2016).)

    • This helps to make sense of a strange historical anecdote: supposedly, Göktürk representatives told the Eastern Romans circa 600 CE that the self-styled Avars weren’t really Avars but rather “escaped slaves of the Turks.” The Göktürks weren’t lying. It seems that what we call the Rourans of the Rouran Khaganate “most likely called themselves Avars” (Gnecchi-Ruscone 2022) — but these true Avars were Mongolic-like, not Turkic-like. Sorry, Pseudo-Avars: our Northeast Asian culture is not your prom dress!

Stop trying to make Altaic happen

If the Turkic language family is ultimately ethnolinguistically Central East Asian, as argued above, then the notion of uniting it with the Northeast Asian Mongolic and Tungusic language families in an Altaic macro-family is probably dead on arrival. (This view aligns with the conclusion of Okamoto 2021: “Mongolic is likely related to Tungusic or Turkic, but not both.”) But, as a consolation prize, I think that the Mongolic/Tungusic mini-family should be supplemented with the language “isolate” Nivkh, spoken on the island of Sakhalin and the lower Amur River in the Russian Far East. Nivkh has been linked instead to Chukotko-Kamchatkan, but this is probably because the proto-Nivkh absorbed some Chukotko-Kamchatkan speakers during the spread of the Okhotsk culture. But, like (male) Mongolic and Tungusic speakers, the Nivkh retained their Northeast Asian C2a1 Y-chromosomal lineages and, I assume, their Northeast Asian language.

The Upper Tigris macro-family (and friends)

While ancient-DNA analyses have shown that the earliest agriculturists in Iran (more specifically, the northwestern Zagros), Anatolia, and the Levant derived most of their ancestry from local hunter-gatherers in their respective homelands, I think that the first bits of data from ancient Mesopotamia (Lazaridis et al. 2022, Altınışık et al. 2022) paint a somewhat different ethnolinguistic picture. My best guess: The goat domesticators of the northwestern Zagros mixed with Anatolians in the vicinity of the Upper Tigris, in roughly 2:1 proportions, and created famous early monumental-ish sites like Boncuklu Tarla and Göbekli Tepe. As one branch of this Upper Tigris group spread further west into Anatolia (and ultimately, beyond that, into Europe), the distinctive Upper Tigris ancestry became heavily diluted by Anatolian hunter-gatherer ancestry — yet culturally and linguistically these were still Upper Tigris people, whose descendants spoke Hattic/Hattian. Back in the east, the Upper Tigris people spread north toward Armenia (where Hurro-Urartian formed) and beyond that into the Caucasus (already occupied by Kartvelian speakers4), giving rise to the Shomu-Shulaveri culture and ultimately the North Caucasian language families. Meanwhile, down south, the Upper Tigris people colonized Mesopotamia and created the Sumerian civilization. All powered, initially, by goats.

I first came across the concept that all these language families were linked in a 2017 blog post written by, I think, another amateur history and language enthusiast. He pointed out that a suspicious number of putatively unrelated Near Eastern languages are “ergative” — a linguistic property that has something to do with the treatment of transitive and intransitive verbs. This Wikipedia diagram apparently explains it, but I’ve never had the patience to really make sense of it:

Academic discourse also contains hints of (parts of) an Upper Tigris macro-family: there are apparent affinities between Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian; between Hattic, Minoan, and Sumerian; and between Hattic and Hurro-Urartian. None of these ideas seems to command anything like a scholarly consensus, but sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire. I would bet that an ergative proto-language spread with animal domestication and that something like Mesopotamia_PPN ancestry can function as a tracer dye to reconstruct its migration.

In praise of Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay

There’s already a soft consensus, I think, that the people of the Indus Valley Civilization spoke a Dravidian-like language, though it doesn’t seem to be treated as established fact. But let me take a moment to celebrate the work of one Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, who is, as far as I can tell, an independent hobbyist researcher living in India. In my eyes, at least, his 2021 paper established, in amazing, obsessive detail, based on the etymology of various words for “elephant” and “toothbrush tree” and “tooth,” that the Indus Valley Civilization did indeed speak Dravidian. It sounds crazy, but it works.

But the Indus Valley Civilization was ethnolinguistically Iranian (on top of an Anadaman-like “substrate”). So I endorse the “Elamo-Dravidian” theory: people from the Southern Zagros, whose descendants included the Elamites, migrated across the Iranian plateau some 9,000 years ago, built Mehrgarh, and then crossed into South Asia and built Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Native South Asian hunter-gatherer languages were basically wiped out, maybe even before the Aryans showed up much later. I’m also tempted by another fun “independent researcher” argument: that Brahui, conventionally classified as a Dravidian language but spoken natively only in Pakistan (fairly far away from “core” Dravidian), should actually be regarded as “Modern Colloquial Eastern Elamite.”

Rise of the snail boys

This last bit is probably the most dubious part of my tree, but I’ve talked myself into the following scenario. Around the end of the Ice Age, a group of people from the Levant spread into north Africa all the way to Morocco, bringing with them the Iberomaurusian lithic industry. They also liked eating snails:

Only after Heinrich Event 1, with the climatic ameliorations of the Greenland Interstadial (GI) 1 (around 16-15 ka cal BP), the amount of data increases throughout northwest Africa. During this warmer and moister phase, substantial changes occurred in many aspects of human behaviour and settlement dynamics. One of these is represented by the rapid accumulation of massive midden deposits composed of high proportions of land-snail shells (so-called escargotières) that seems to document an important change in subsistence strategy.

( There’s actually an argument that snails should be considered the first domesticated animal (“heliciculture”)), which I find too beautiful to ruin with closer scrutiny.)

Genetically, these snail boys were something like 60% Natufian-like (pre-Neolithic Levantine), 40% Hadza-like (East African hunter-gatherer),5 but their Y chromosomes seemed to be solely Levantine (nested firmly inside haplogroup E) — another apparent instance of male-dominated takeover.

Then, during the Green Sahara period, the Iberomaurusian snail boys moved south, toward the Sahel and Senegambia, where they again “mixed” with the locals in male-dominated fashion. A recent preprint shows that the ancestry of the present-day Fulani ethnic group can be modeled as a mixture of ancient West Africans and ancient Iberomaurusians.

While the scholarly understanding of the exact internal structure of the Niger-Congo language family remains unsettled, there’s a credible argument from linguist Jack Merrill that Niger-Congo originated on the Atlantic coast of West Africa and that Fulani might have been the first sub-family to branch off:

I think this all coheres fairly well: an early Levantine migration into North Africa managed to extend into the Green Sahara, take root in West Africa, and ultimately give rise to the later massive Bantu expansion. Examining Wikipedia’s list of Y-DNA haplogroups in populations of Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s clear that there’s a strong association between haplogroup E and Niger-Congo, with e.g. Niger-Congo-speaking Wolof and Fon males falling almost entirely under E and Nilo-Saharan-speaking Dinka males falling mainly under the more ancient African haplogroups A and B. Perusing the trees on YFull (painstakingly but non-rigorously), I was struck by how lineages would flip from Levantine/Arabian to African. For instance, E-M78 is found in Neolithic Jordan, Hellenistic Lebanon, and Pharaoh Ramesses III himself — but its brother clade, E-V2729, from which E-M78 split ~19,000 years ago (at the end of the Ice Age), is found in modern-day Fulani and Mandinka people in Gambia. After millennia of admixture with a wide variety of peoples, the Niger-Congo speakers of Africa are nearly entirely African in ancestry, but in my “ethnolinguistic” sense they are descendants of the ancient Levant.

Tantalizingly, the researchers’ methods managed to automatically pick up on well known language families like Indo-European and Afroasiatic (which includes Semitic). But, in properly sober academic fashion, the paper warned that the tree should not be taken at face value: in addition to including some glaring anomalies (e.g. the language of the Sioux is grouped with Southeast Asian languages), it conflates similarities arising merely from intergroup contact with similarities arising from true common descent. Elsewhere, Jäger and his collaborators have acknowledged that “automated methods for cognate detection” still underperform old-fashioned expert judgment, at least as of 2018.

Nonetheless, I was intrigued. I knew that past attempts at constructing broad families of language families (Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Altaic, Transeurasian…) were regarded by many linguists with deep suspicion, if not outright disdain. For whatever reason, this topic attracts almost as many cranks as the topic of my next essay: the historical accuracy of the Bible. But, as an ancient-DNA fanboy, I also knew that science had made great strides in recent years toward understanding human genetic history. While ancestry and language do not, of course, always line up, it is still the case that — especially in the time before mass media, formalized schooling, and fast telecommunications — the main way for people to learn a language has been to hear one or both of their parents speak it.

So I thought it might be feasible to manually smoosh together historical linguistics and ancient DNA into one big phylogeny — at least outside of Africa. The problem with Africa is that human history runs so deep there (660,000 years for Homo sapiens,1 at least three million years if you count all known stone-tool makers2) that it seems less obvious to me that all the languages are even related. Over a few million years, is it possible for language itself to have been independently invented multiple times by widely dispersed small groups? Maybe? In contrast, the out-of-Africa migration that gave rise to present-day non-Africans was a single discrete event, perhaps involving just a couple thousand people.3 I have to think that they all spoke the same language and that all the languages spoken by their cultural descendants across the world trace back to this same Proto-Out-of-Africa tongue.

What I didn’t fully appreciate was that, although the big picture of human genetic history seems well understood, some of the fussier medium-scale details that might be relevant to language-family relationships are still in the midst of being worked out. Also, as an amazing 2023 paper demonstrated, the complex admixture graphs that appear in many ancient-DNA studies are probably unreliable or at least shouldn’t be taken literally. The space of possible admixture graphs is so vast that it’s usually possible to find multiple graphs that fit the data well, but simulations suggest that these are often overfitted and inaccurate.

Unable to grab a comprehensive family tree off the shelf, I made my own by hand. And since it is my own, be warned that it’s a medley of longstanding consensus ideas, aggressive interpretations of recent papers and preprints, and a few idiosyncratic theories that made sense to me.

I’m calling this an “ethnolinguistic” family tree to try to convey that it’s genetic-ish but not exactly genetic. Genetically, human groups don’t form a “clean” tree structure: they’ve repeatedly mixed, diverged, and mixed again. Cultures blend; languages borrow words and acquire areal features. Nonetheless, I think it’s meaningful to say that, for instance, the United States is, overall, an ethnolinguistic descendant of Great Britain, even if British ancestry no longer represents the bulk of the gene pool and even if non-British cultural influences have also mattered.

Below I’ll present the tree. Then I’ll discuss some of the thinking behind it. I’ll leave the actual reconstruction of the Proto-Out-of-Africa language, or proof that such reconstruction is impossible, as an exercise for the reader.

In praise of ecoregions

Before I get into the details of the phylogeny, I want to offer thanks to the creators of the “ecoregion” concept, which I think goes back to a 2001 paper:

We define ecoregions as relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species, with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land-use change.

You can view these ecoregions (as slightly redefined in 2017) overlaid on Google Maps, but, as a typically geographically ignorant American, I usually find it easier to think in terms of the 52 larger, simpler “subrealms” defined by the One Earth Bioregions 2023 framework:

While I haven’t bothered trying to analyze this rigorously, I’ve been struck by how often ancient human groups seem to match up with subrealms and ecoregions — which makes sense if you assume that hunter-gatherers and farmers will tend to specialize in plants and animals that may not cross the borders of such regions. Anyway, if I refer to something like the “Central East Asian Forests” subrealm below, that’s what I’m talking about.

Rise of the rhino boys

Once upon a time, 83,000 years ago,4 in the Sub-Saharan Afrotropic subrealm, a group of Homo sapiens crossed the Nile and headed toward the Horn of Africa. Some 19,000 years later — i.e. around 64,000 years ago5 — a small group of the descendants of these East Africans crossed the Red Sea at the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb (“the Gate of Grief”!) and took up residence in southern Arabia.6 This was not the first Homo sapiens out-of-Africa migration, but it was the one that had by far the biggest long-term impact (especially if you were part of the megafauna community).

By 58,000 years ago, some of these out-of-Africa people expanded north into the Levant, where they encountered and “mixed” with Neanderthals.7 An early foray out of the Levant and into Anatolia and then Europe mostly fizzled out,8 but the next one stuck, creating the first major split in the out-of-Africa family tree. On one side was the western branch that (initially) stayed home in the Near East; on the other side was the eastern branch that colonized the lands beyond. Around 54,000 years ago,9 the eastern vanguard moved beyond the Urals into East Asia and then, amazingly quickly, into Southeast Asia (Sunda), Wallacea, and Greater Australia (Sahul) — all within a few millennia.10 Overall, the route looked something like this:11

But then something weird happened: perhaps 37,000 years ago,12 a group of ancient Southeast Asians (genetically more akin to today’s Andaman Islanders than, say, today’s Vietnamese people, most of whose forebears only showed up later) broke off and headed back north. Some of these people, I suspect, ended up turning west into the Himalayas, becoming the ancestors of the Kusunda, a tiny hunter-gatherer group in Nepal that speaks a “language isolate” (that is, a language with no well established relatives, although what I’m trying to claim here is that it actually does have relatives).13 But those who didn’t turn into the Kusunda kept going north. Somewhere around the Altai-Sayan region in southern Siberia they encountered some of their long-lost western cousins, who had started to make their own forays past the Urals and into Asia. The resulting fusion of eastern and western ancestry created what researchers call the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE). One recent model put their western ancestry at 76% of the total,14 but — in a preview of things to come — it looks like all the surviving male lineages were eastern, falling into the Q and R Y-chromosomal haplogroups. I have to guess that this was more of a patriarchal conquest than a pleasant potluck. Though the ANE seemed to have settled on the Altai-Sayan region, from Denisova Cave to Lake Baikal, as their home base, a breakaway group actually went as far north as the Arctic Ocean. They had, as the kids say, that dog in them.

Why did the pre-proto-ANE make this strange journey from Southeast Asia to the Arctic? I have a guess: rhinoceroses. They were rhino hunters. The Arctic ANE archaeological site is, in fact, known as the “Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site.” Today, Sumatran, Javan, and Indian rhinoceroses live in Southeast Asia and at the foot of the Himalayas, but, not so long ago, various rhinoceros species occupied a much wider area, with the now extinct wooly rhinoceros and Merck’s rhinoceros (close relatives of the Sumatran rhinoceros15) roaming across most of Eurasia. And don’t forget the Siberian unicorn. Because this macho lineage was, perhaps, chasing after rhinos, I have come to think of them as the rhino boys. (No one else calls them this.)

Ice Age, Collision Course

But then, from 26.5 to 19 thousand years ago, it got really cold. Pedants call it the Last Glacial Maximum, not the Ice Age, because technically Earth has gone through many different “ice ages,” but at least one paper with David Reich listed as the final author just calls it “the Ice Age” anyway, and that’s good enough for me.

During the Ice Age, the ANE continued to hole up in the Altai-Sayan region. But by the time it ended, they had fragmented into two groups. One eventually went west, toward Eastern Europe; their descendants contributed the bulk of what came to be known as Eastern (European) Hunter-Gatherer (or Sidelkino) ancestry, which in turn contributed about half of the gene pool (and nearly all of the Y chromosomes) of the Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya on the western steppe. And not just them: I think the the western ANE also moved into the Tian Shan mountains and from there to what is now Pakistan, giving rise to the Burusho people, whose Burushaski language is regarded as an isolate. Many Burusho males carry Y chromosomes from the relatively rare rare R2 haplogroup, signaling their link to the rhino-boy ancestors.

The other ANE group went east, toward what was then a single land mass north of Honshu, Japan: the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kuril (PSHK) peninsula. There (or maybe on the way), the eastern ANE “mixed” extensively with Northeast Asians, but once again nearly all the male lineages that emerged were rhino-boy lineages, not Northeast Asian ones.16 In turn, these PSHK people, perhaps under pressure from incipient Jomon expansion into Japan, split into two groups. To the east, probably hugging the Pacific coast and not spending much time on the Beringian land bridge itself, some PSHKers made it all the way to the Americas and became Native Americans. To the west, other PSHKers stayed in Asia but spread both into the taiga and back toward the old Altai-Sayan homeland.17 The ancient-DNA literature usually calls these people “Ancient Paleosiberians,” but I will (a bit cheekily) call these closest Asian relatives of Native Americans “Asian Americans.”

Thus, by the onset of the Holocene epoch, the descendants of the rhino boys had spread all across the globe — before the Yamnaya were even a twinkle in a Sidelkino eye. The later explosive expansion of Indo-European-speaking peoples was, in a way, part of a 30,000-year-old tradition.

This explains why there are so many intriguing historical-linguistic hints of a special bond between, for example, the Na-Dene Native American language family and the Yeniseian language family (represented today by the Kets, who are “Asian American” in my sense18), and between Burushaski and Indo-European,19 and between Yeniseian and Burushaski,20 and between Na-Dene, Yeniseian, Burushaski, and Kusunda.21 All these language families are in fact genealogically related; it’s just that so much time has passed since they diverged from each other that the evidence of that relationship has been greatly attenuated.

Oddly, if this theory is correct, then the most widely accepted of those linguistic relationships — between Na-Dene and Yeniseian — is real but somewhat misleading. Yeniseian would be the sister of the common ancestor of all Native American languages, not just Na-Dene, which might simply be unusually conservative in its evolution.22

As I pondered all this, I realized that that the defining conflict of the Western genre — cowboys vs. “Indians” — pitted long-lost ethnolinguistic cousins against each other: the cowboys could trace their male ancestors back to the Corded Ware and, before that, the Yamnaya and the Sidelkino and the western ANE; the “Indians” could trace their male ancestors back to the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kuril peninsula and the eastern ANE. Why can’t rhino boys just get along?!

Even stranger, the Wild West was not the first time and place that cowboys confronted “Indians”: it also happened in the Late Bronze Age, at the eastern edge of the Kazakh steppe. Around 1300 BCE, Iranian speakers who could trace their male ancestors back to the Indo-European Corded Ware and Sintashta cultures, and who rode horses and herded cattle (🤠), expanded east into the Altai-Sayan and “mixed” with the Asian Americans there, creating the demographic core of the Iron Age’s Scythians.23 It appears that the highest elite of the later Xiongnu and Huns were also primarily derived, on their fathers’ sides at least, from Scythians (suggesting, incidentally, that they spoke an Eastern Iranian language), though some Asian American males did marry into the upper echelons.24 The first great steppe empire: see what cowboys and Indians can accomplish when they work together?

Next time, probably: Turks, snails, and Mesopotamians. [See Part 2]

What’s with the name “Glunker Stew”?

In a little remembered 1969 Dr. Seuss book, there is a story called “The Glunk that Got Thunk.” The narrator — apparently the original endpapers make explicit that he’s the Cat in the Hat’s young son, though the story itself only implies this — says that his sister likes to “use her Thinker-Upper” to “think[] up friendly little things / With smiles and fuzzy fur.” But she gets bored with the friendly little things and decides instead to push her Thinker-Upper to its limit. This is a mistake:

Then, BLUNK! Her Thinker-Upper thunked
A double klunker-klunk.
My sister's eyes flew open
And she saw she'd thunked a Glunk!

He was greenish.
Not too cleanish.
And he sort of had bad breath.
"Good gracious!" gasped my sister.
"I have thunked up quite a meth!"

At first, the Glunk doesn’t seem dangerous, but he is rude and condescending, and he jeopardizes the Cat-in-the-Hat family’s financial security by recklessly making an expensive long-distance phone call to his beloved mother, to whom he painstakingly explains the complicated recipe for Glunker Stew, which includes a “hunk of chuck-a-luck” and “[t]hree dozen kinds of berries.”

The summoner of the Glunk tries to “Un-thunk” him, but, on her own, she fails. Finally, though, her brother shows up.

Could she Un-thunk the Glunk alone?...
It's very doubtful whether.
So I turned on MY Un-thinker.
We Un-thunk the Glunk together.

Then I gave her
Quite a talking to
About her Thinker-Upper.
NOW...
She only
Thinks up fuzzy things
In the evening, after supper.

There are lots of things I like about this silly little story — the sense of both the power and danger of reification, the unexpected role of telecom-related practicalities, the way that it pits sibling collaboration against ostentatious filial piety — but I’ll leave a full explication as an exercise for the reader. At any rate, that’s the agenda here: thinking up fuzzy things in the evening, after supper. And oh yeah, there won’t be a paywall. This is a hobby, not a business:

"Money?...Pooh!" The Glunk just laughed.
"Don't think of things like that."
Then he said, "Now, darling mother,
Let me see. Where was I at?"