Two-and-a-half thousand miles away in Scotland, a computer-generated replica of another ancient skull — perhaps 40 or 50 years younger than the first, and reassembled from shattered fragments — is being examined by Professor Sue Black, head of anatomy and forensic anthropology at Dundee University. She is rigorous, methodical, calculating. Unlike some of those who wait upon her verdict, she is also unexcitable and uninfected by wishful thinking (she has not been told the subject's identity). First things first: the skull is human, she says, and it is male. On the evidence of the teeth, their enamel sandblasted into premature old age by gritty Egyptian bread, and on the condition of the cranial sutures, she puts him in his thirties or early forties at the time of death. Her attention moves to an oval depression on the left side, where the bone has evidently suffered a heavy blow. We hold our breath. Is it him, or is it not?
If the theory is right, then the owner of Cairo's royal beak was the progenitor of Dundee's head case. Between them they recall in bone and mummified tissue one of the most important episodes of the Old Testament, the Koran and the Torah. They knew Moses personally. They suffered the 10 plagues of Egypt (or nine in the case of the younger man, who perished in the 10th). The older one not only witnessed the Exodus but was the cause of it. His was the army that drowned when it pursued the children of Israel through the Red Sea. In the unravelling of these men's stories may lie clues to ancient mysteries and synchronicities that will hook myth to fact. Are biblical texts compatible with archeological evidence, or are they locked in eternal opposition — thrust and counter-thrust of faith against science?
The elder man — tall, long-headed, with thinning red hair faded to yellow — was, if nothing else, a giant of Egyptian history, the pharaoh's pharaoh, Rameses II, known as the Great. His reign in the 13th century BC lasted for 67 years until his death at the age of 90 — more than double the average life expectancy for the 19th dynasty. Anyone who believes in the mythological connection between great noses and great potency will find here a prime example. Rameses serviced a rotating fleet of wives and concubines (the wives including at least two of his own daughters), who are believed to have given him some 170 babies. His reign was said by contemporary chroniclers to have been a period of military conquest, monumental buildings (the two large temples at Abu Simbel alone would ensure his immortality) and unfailing prosperity.
Or that is what they hoped we would believe. Ancient Egypt spun its politics as ruthlessly as the Blairite court would do 3,000 years later, but with the difference that there was no BBC to expose the dodgy dossier. The official account, in hieroglyphs, paintings and carvings, is a testament of infallibility. Only victories are noted. There are no famines to weaken the land of plenty; no defeats in battle; no dissenting voices; no revolting Hebrew slaves. The Nile never turns to blood. There is no mention of frogs or flies or boils. And yet, if scholars are right, the desiccated body in the Cairo museum — ironically missing its genitals — is the pharaoh of the Exodus, challenged by Moses for his exploitation of the Hebrews, spectacularly punished by God and improbably morphed into Yul Brynner for Cecil B DeMille's epic of 1956, The Ten Commandments.
The Old Testament writers do not name him, but Rameses's identification as the Exodus pharaoh is now widely accepted by historians, who cite evidence both chronological and circumstantial. There were people from Canaan in Egypt during his reign, when a great royal city was built by slave labourers in the Eastern Delta. That comfortably fits the biblical picture (Exodus I, v 11: "And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.") There is persuasive evidence of a cult of monotheism, heretical in Egypt, being spread by migration at about the same time, and the first recorded mention of Israel as a nation occurs during the reign of his immediate successor, Mernaptah. That fits too. For these and other reasons, Rameses II is not so much the strongest candidate as the only one. But if there was an Exodus, were there also 10 plagues and a parting of the Red Sea? Oddly, the easiest phenomenon to explain is the one that seems the most implausible. We all know the Sunday school/Cecil B DeMille version. The Red Sea opens to allow safe passage for the refugees, then closes again over the pursuing Egyptian army. The Bible is quite explicit (Exodus XIV, v 21: "And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided." When the children of Israel moved forward, "the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left").
Scholars now argue that this is all the result of a simple misreading of Hebrew text. For Red Sea, read "reed sea". Moses was relying on his wits, not on a miraculous suspension of physics. The Sea of Reeds was an area of marshland in Sinai. Whereas the fugitives on foot could have passed with ease, the Egyptian chariots would have sunk to their axles.
The deeper question is whether the Exodus happened at all and, if so, whether it was led by the man we know as Moses. Unsurprisingly, given the selectivity of the Egyptian record and the scant survival of papyri, Moses is historically untraceable. The story was not written down until hundreds of years after it was supposed to have happened, and there are many examples in mythology of foundlings rising to become national leaders. It is not possible to know if the story of Moses grew out of these myths or has a nucleus of historical truth (for even myths need sources). The only safe bet is that he would not have looked like Charlton Heston.
But the question remains. If Moses did exist and was raised in the Egyptian court, then the postmortem now taking place in Dundee could reveal a man in whose death he conspired with God. The search for the man's identity, involving world leaders in archeology, theology, anthropology, anatomy and disease, is the subject of a new film by the London-based programme maker Atlantic Productions. In more ways than one, the story is a long one.
In 1825 an Englishman, James Burton, burrowed through what looked like the entrance of a buried tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Finding nothing inside but rubble, he swiftly moved on. Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun, did much the same a century later, penetrating no more than a metre inside before declaring the tomb to be devoid of interest. Worse — when he disinterred the treasures of Tutankhamun, he dumped all the spoil on top of the abandoned tomb and ensured its disappearance for another 60 years.
It was not until 1989 that Kent Weeks, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, arrived at the same spot with a trowel in his hand. Since 1978, Weeks had been director of the Theban Mapping Project, an ambitious scheme to plot the exact positions of tombs and temples on the west bank of the Nile. In 1989, he and his team reached the area where the neglected Burton-Carter tomb was thought to lie buried, and where the Egyptian Department of Antiquities now wanted to widen the roadway for tour buses.
In the event, it took only two days to find the entrance, and that might have been that. The intention was only to mark its position on the map. A preliminary inspection revealed what had deterred Burton and Carter — crawling through a narrow passage on top of the debris, all around and below them they could see nothing but rubble. It was only as they turned to leave that one of Weeks's students spotted what Burton and Carter had missed — a wall fragment bearing hieroglyphic texts, from which, when they cleared a space, a name stood out as starkly as if it had been flashed in neon: Amun-her-khepeshef, eldest son of Rameses the Great. He was depicted walking into the tomb behind his father to be introduced to the gods in the afterlife. The implication was obvious: in all probability, somewhere nearby lay the body of the pharaoh's first-born son, supposedly killed by God in the 10th plague of Egypt. What a find that would be!
The plagues are a big problem for rationalists. If you cannot accept the literalness of the biblical account — that God punished Egypt with a catalogue of worsening disasters after Rameses refused Moses's demand for the release of the slaves — then what are you left with? How can such events be accounted for? First the water turns to blood; then Egypt is overrun in turn by frogs, lice and flies; its sheep and cattle all die; the people suffer a plague of boils, followed by the worst hailstorm in the country's history, a plague of locusts and three days of unbroken darkness. Finally, God kills all of Egypt's first-born children, and the first-born of every domestic animal. To sceptics, it is pure fable.
