by
Damien F. Mackey
“The first march of Necho-Ramses II toward the Euphrates is related on the obelisk
of Tanis and on the rock inscription of Nahr el Kalb near Beirut, written in his second year. The rock inscriptions of Ramses II are not as old as that of Essarhadon on the same rock”.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky
Thus wrote Dr. Velikovsky in # 211 of his: https://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
THESES FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION
OF ANCIENT HISTORY
OF ANCIENT HISTORY
He, retaining the potent king Esarhaddon in his conventional place following Sennacherib, but dramatically lowering the mighty Ramses II of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty by some 700 years, from his conventional date of c. 1280 BC down to the time of Nebuchednezzar (so-called II), conventionally c. 580 BC, now saw Ramses II as being “not as old as … Essarhadon”.
This was in stark contrast to the conventional structure of things which has Ramses II (1280) ante-dating Esarhaddon (c. 680 BC) by some 600 years:
In the thirteenth century BCE, the Egyptian king Ramesses II left three reliefs on the south bank of the Nahr al-Kalb, north of Berytus, which commemorated the northern campaigns that culminated in the battle of Kadesh (1274 BCE). Several centuries later, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, having forced cities like Tyre into submission, conquered Egypt, and chose to put a memorial of his own opposite the relief of Ramesses. Ever since, armies have left inscription at the Nahr al-Kalb, a custom that was known to the Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus (more).
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In Ramses II and his Time (1978), Velikovsky would develop his connection between pharaoh Ramses II and Nebuchednezzar by identifying the latter as the Hittite emperor, Hattsulis, who famously engaged in a treaty with Ramses II.
What to say about all of this?
I had come to reject it completely, due to Dr. Velikovsky’s archaeologically highly dubious separation of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty away from the Eighteenth in order for Ramses II and his dynasty now to be equated with Egypt’s Twenty-Sixth (Saïte) Dynasty at the approximate time of Nebuchednezzar king of Babylon.
But that earlier estimation of mine must needs be amended, at least to some degree, owing to my more recent identification of Esarhaddon with Nebuchednezzar himself in articles such as:
Esarhaddon a tolerable fit for King Nebuchednezzar
and again:
Aligning Neo-Babylonia with Book of Daniel. Part Two: Merging late neo-Assyrians with Chaldeans
That big turnaround on my part would now lead me to conclude that the reason for the juxtaposition of Ramses II and Esarhaddon on the same rock inscription of Nahr el Kalb was because these two mighty men were contemporaneous.
It would also mean that Dr. Velikovsky was right after all in synchronising Ramses II with Nebuchednezzar.
Whether or not the latter was also the emperor Hattusilis, and Ramses II was also Necho II, are other considerations.
It does not mean however, I still think, that the Nineteenth Dynasty can be dragged right away from the Eighteenth. The necessary crunching in time comes from dragging backwards, so to speak, Nebuchednezzar, to slot into time as Esarhaddon.
In Ramses II and his Time (Chapter 2 Ramses II and Nebuchadnezzar in War and Peace), Velikovsky wrote (with his Nebuchednezzar as Hattusilis):
Treaty Between Ramses II and Nebuchadnezzar
Two giants, Egypt under Ramses II and Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, fought nineteen years for domination over the Middle East. Judea was the victim in this deadly struggle. She was devastated by the troops first of one despot and then of the other, but the lands of the contestants were spared the horrors of the prolonged war.
To secure victory over rebellious Judea, Nebuchadnezzar finally proposed a peace treaty to the pharaoh. Historians take it for granted that during the last siege of Jerusalem a treaty was negotiated between Babylonia and Egypt.22 The pharaoh was glad to insure the integrity of his own country and sacrificed Judea, his ally.
Jerusalem suffered an eighteen months’ siege, followed by destruction. The war between Babylonia and Egypt had terminated, and Egypt did not come to the aid of the besieged. More than this, Egypt and Babylonia pledged loyalty to each other and obligated themselves to extradite political refugees.
The peace treaty is preserved in the Egyptian language, carved on the wall of the Karnak temple of Amon. A text in the Babylonian (Akkadian) language, written on clay in cuneiform and found at the beginning of this century at Boghazkoi, a village of eastern Anatolia, is a draft of the same document. The original of the treaty was written on a silver tablet not extant today. The original language of the treaty was Babylonian, and the Egyptian text is a translation, as some expressions reveal.
The treaty was signed by Usermare Setepnere, son of Menmare, grandson of Menpehtire (the royal name of Ramses II, son of Seti, grandson of Ramses I), and by Khetasar, son of Merosar, grandson of Seplel. The treaty in the Akkadian language was signed by Hattusilis, son of Mursilis, grandson of Subbiluliumas.23
The man whose name was read Khetasar in the Egyptian and Hattusilis in the Boghazkoi text must have been the king whom we know as Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabopolassar. More than fifty times in the Scriptures his name is spelled Nebuchadrezzar; more than thirty times he is called Nebuchadnezzar.24
The adversary of Ramses II is called in the treaty the king of Hatti. Hatti, as can be learned from many cuneiform texts, was a broad ethnographical or territorial designation. In a Babylonian building inscription Nebuchadnezzar wrote: “The princes of the land of Hatti beyond the Euphrates to the westward, over whom I exercised lordship.”25
The treaty has an “oath and curse” clause. Gods of many places were invoked to keep vigilance over the treaty and to punish the one who should violate it. In the list of the gods and goddesses, the goddess of Tyre is followed by the “goddess of Dan.” But in the days before the conquest of Dan by the Danites, in the time of the Judges, that place was called Laish (Judges 18:29), and it was Jeroboam who built there a temple. The name of a place called Dan in a treaty of Ramses II, presumably of the first half of the thirteenth century, sounds like an anachronism.
The purpose of the treaty was to bring about the cessation of hostilities between the two lands. It is obvious from its text that Syria and Palestine no longer belonged to the domain of Egypt.
This is in agreement with the biblical data. The major part of the treaty is given over to the problem of political refugees. The paragraphs are written in a reciprocal manner; it is apparent that it was the great king of Hatti who was interested in the provisions for extradition of the political enemies of the Chaldeans. A special paragraph in the treaty deals with Syrian (Palestinian) fugitives:
Now if subjects of the great chief of Kheta transgress against him ... I will come after their punishment to Ramses-Meriamon, the great ruler of Egypt ... to cause that Usermare-Setepnere, the great ruler of Egypt, shall be silent ... and he shall turn [them] back again to the great chief of Kheta.26
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