NORTH SINAI, Egypt - On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt's chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency's latest discovery.
It didn't look like much - some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.
That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites' biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.
"Really, it's a myth," Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.
Egypt is one of the world's primary warehouses of ancient history. People here joke that wherever you stick a shovel in the ground you find antiquities. When workers built a sewage system in the downtown Cairo neighborhood of Dokki, they accidentally scattered shards of Roman pottery. In the middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, tombs have been discovered beneath homes.
But Egypt is also a spiritual center, where for centuries men have searched for the meaning of life. Sometimes the two converge, and sometimes the archaeological record confirms the history of the faithful. Often it does not, however, as Dr. Hawass said with detached certainty.
"If they get upset, I don't care," Dr. Hawass said. "This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem."
The story of the Exodus is celebrated as the pivotal moment in the creation of the Jewish people. As the Bible tells it, Moses was born the son of a Jewish slave, who cast him into the Nile in a basket so the baby could escape being killed by the pharaoh. He was saved by the pharaoh's daughter, raised in the royal court, discovered his Jewish roots and, with divine help, led the Jewish people to freedom. Moses is said to have ascended Mt. Sinai, where God appeared in a burning bush and Moses received the Ten Commandments.
In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.
But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded.
"Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence," Dr. Hawass said, as he led the journalists across a rutted field of stiff and rocky sand.
The site was a two-hour drive from Cairo, over the Mubarak Peace Bridge into the Northern Sinai area called Qantara East. For nearly 10 years, Egyptian archaeologists have scratched away at the soil here, using day laborers from nearby towns to help unearth bits of history. It is a vast expanse of nothingness, a flat desert moonscape. Two human skeletons were recently uncovered, their bones positioned besides pottery and Egyptian scarabs.
As archaeological sites go, it is clearly a stepchild to the more sought-after digs in other parts of the country that have revealed treasures of pharaonic times. A barefoot worker in a track suit tried to press through the crowd to get the officials leading the tour to give him his pay, and tramped off angrily when he was rebuffed.
Recently, diggers found evidence of lava from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 B.C. and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula, officials here said. The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road.
But nothing was showing up that might help prove the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or wandering in the desert. Dr. Hawass said he was not surprised, given the lack of archaeological evidence to date. But even scientists can find room to hold on to beliefs.
Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, the head of the excavation, seemed to sense that such a conclusion might disappoint some. People always have doubts until something is discovered to confirm it, he noted.
Then he offered another theory, one that he said he drew from modern Egypt.
"A pharaoh drowned and a whole army was killed," he said recounting the portion of the story that holds that God parted the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape, then closed the waters on the pursuing army.
"This is a crisis for Egypt, and Egyptians do not document their crises."
There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow. As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”. (Nehemiah 9:21) Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof! “I can’t find it therefore it does not exit!” They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents. And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology. But there is something that has recently come to light on this subject.
The Monastery of St. Paul in the Eastern Desert of Egypt has an interesting tradition about the Exodus of Israel. They say that during the wanderings of Israel that Miriam, the sister of Moses, washed there in a pool of water which they call the "Pool of Miriam". Israel’s next encampment after the Graves of Lust was at Hazeroth (Numbers 33:17), where Miriam was struck with leprosy. It is of interest that this tradition from the Monastery of St. Paul (also from ancient Arab writers) makes no mention of anyone else in the camp of Israel doing this, not even Moses or Joshua or Aaron, but only Miriam, the one person who was struck with leprosy at Hazeroth (Numbers 12:15). And according to the Bible (Leviticus 14:9), she would have been required to wash both her clothes and herself (“Pool of Miriam”) before re-entering the camp.
If this is so then we should find the graves of lust close by which was the encampment just before Hazeroth, and which was the only mass grave recorded during the 40 years of wanderings. About seven miles from the Monastery of St. Paul are 30 catacombs! How did the Israelites die at the encampment of Kibroth-hattaavah “graves of lust,” and Taberah? Both times the “fire” of God burned to death (cremated) multitudes who were there (Numbers 11:1, Psalm 78:20-21). The Egyptians, Arabs and Jews did not cremate; the Romans and Greeks who at one time ruled Egypt and sometimes cremated, had no known towns within 60 miles of these catacombs. The Bedouins call this site Wadi El Khawaja, "Valley of the Foreigner".
It was Sir Wilkinson who found these catacombs and said, “We went into those where the doors were the least obstructed by the sand or decayed rock, and found them to be catacombs; they are well cut, and vary from about eighty to twenty four feet, by five…We sought in vain for inscriptions or hieroglyphics; our curiosity was only rewarded by finding the scattered fragments of vases, bitumen, charcoal, and cloth. It is evident that the bodies were burnt, and the ashes…deposited in the vases, of which innumerable broken remains are seen in every direction; they are earthenware, mostly red, and heart-shaped…” (Sir Wilkinson. Royal Geographical Society, 1832, p.34).
Greeks and Romans did not always cremate, and at no other location in the Eastern Desert have cremated remains been found, even at sites known to have been home to Greeks and Romans! The book “The Red Lands” (2008, about the Eastern Desert of Egypt) said, “Evidence from all eras of antiquity indicates that bodies were inhumed and not cremated.”, also “There would have also been practical reasons for inhuming the dead: the fuel to cremate would have been in very short supply, indeed, in this hyper-arid and relatively treeless region.” (The Red Lands. p. 198) I received a letter (e-mail, Jan 12, 2011) from an archaeologist at the British Museum, in regards to the 30 catacombs, who said, “However, cremation in the Eastern Desert seems to be unknown to archaeologists who work in that region. At present, it seems, the site remains to be explained.”
In Alexandria, Egypt, a catacomb was found for both Greeks and Romans, also with cremated remains. However, their ashes were placed in a different shape of vase than the ones found at this site. They were also painted and many inscribed, not only with the name of the person, but also the date he died. These things: the lack of inscriptions and the plain unpainted vases, point to a mass funeral, as the Graves of Lust witnessed. For had this burial site been used for years, then certainly these vases would have been decorated as were those found at other sites! Israel had the time to make these catacombs as they were at Kibroth-hattaavah for at least 30 days (Numbers 11:20). Normally a catacomb will have only a couple of entrances, and is lengthened as the need for more room is required. But in order to dig out a catacomb, because of the distance between the walls (about six feet), only two or three men at a time could work the front of it. If someone had the manpower and wanted to make many catacombs in a short time (as required for the "graves of lust") he could split the men up into groups, with each group digging out a different catacomb. Here we have 30 entrances for 30 short catacombs, again pointing to them all being made at the same time. The most that the other routes could show you would be a few piles of rocks on the ground. To see pictures of these catacombs and the vases see = [Link]