Wishful thinking

Just FYI, this is the fifth post I've started in recent months (on entirely different topics, BTW. Hopefully I will post them eventually). I have an interest in still updating the blog, but I can't find the time to finish posts. Fifth time's the charm, I guess...

Sometime ago I got my hands on a copy of Rabbi Ahron Marcus's commentary on the Medieval book of responsa Shu"t Min Ha'Shamayim, which is a collection of questions and answers, where the questions were posed by the author, Rabbi Yaakov of Marvège, France (ca. 13th century CE), to the Heavenly Court, and he received mystical responses which he interpreted based on a specific kabbalistic method. Rabbi Ahron Marcus, who lived in the 19th-20th centuries, was a prolific author and knowledgeable in many fields, and I've been a huge fan of his writings for several years now (especially his book on the Hebrew language Barzilai, which was fortunately translated into Hebrew [most of what he wrote was in German]). In the introduction, Rabbi Marcus mentioned that a certain ancient Egyptian mural featured Judean captives from King Yoshiyahu's failed battle against Pharaoh Necho II (where Yoshiyahu was defeated and killed), and that these captives had clothes that included tzitziyot. That caught my eye. It sounded like a cool discovery which I'd never heard of. But it took only a short Google search and a couple of AI conversations to make it clear that no such mural of Necho exists, and that Rabbi Marcus had clearly misinterpreted another mural.

This would not be the first time that he had made a mistake, and it was understandable for two reasons: 1. He lived during the early period of modern scholarship. Monumental new discoveries were still being uncovered by the camel-load every year, and opinions shifted rapidly. 2. He was an extremely busy man and probably did not have anyone to assist him in double-checking his sources, verifying claims and generally editing his works. In my opinion, he wrote whatever flowed out of his heart, much like Rabbi A. I. Kook, and that resulted in mistakes creeping into his works. Rav Kook had extremely dedicated students to edit his work; Rabbi Marcus did not (to my knowledge).

However, there still remained the thorny question of what mural did Rabbi Marcus refer to, and what did it actually depict? Well, that was a rabbit-hole. I had tried several times over the past year or so to find the mural in question, every time to no avail. AI did not have helpful suggestions. But today it occurred to me there might be info in another book by Rabbi Marcus, Judische Chronologie. And lo and behold, indeed there was. Rabbi Marcus mentioned this mural again, but this time referred to there being "four Jewish princes" depicted in the mural. I crosschecked this with AI, and this time I hit the jackpot. Turns out some early to mid-19th century scholars did propose such an identification to some figures that appear in what is now identified as Seti I's tomb. The tomb includes, among other things, murals of men from four different races - Egyptians, Asiatics, Africans and Libyans. The Asiatics, it turns out, do indeed have long tassels at the edge of the their kilt-skirts.

(image taken from Wikipedia)

Why was this 13th century BCE tomb related to the much later Necho II? Well, that harkens back to the early days of Egyptology. In the beginning, there were rival Egyptologists trying to decipher hieroglyphics. Jean-François Champollion eventually managed to decipher the Rosetta Stone, which paved the way for modern Egyptology and hieroglyphic studies. But one of his rivals, Thomas Young, worked with the discoverer of Seti's tomb, Giovanni Battista Belzoni. Young misinterpreted the names Belzoni found and copied from the tomb, and believed they referred to Necho II and his son Psammitic. Based on the Tanachic story of the battle of Yoshiyahu and Necho, Belzoni interpreted the murals as depicting various nations captured by Necho, including Judeans from Judah (now understood to be Asiatics; people from Asia, but not necessarily Judeans/Israelites). Thus, the tassels on their clothes were understood to be tzitziyot. While Champollion's decipherment was published not long after and pretty quickly became a consensus in hieroglyphic studies, Belzoni's interpretation of the tomb remained somewhat popular for several decades after, which likely explains why Rabbi Marcus, in the late 19th century, followed in Belzoni's footsteps in this case.

In short, it was wishful thinking to believe that there was an ancient Egyptian mural somewhere out there depicting Judeans with tzitzit. There may actually be one in existence, but it seems to have yet to be discovered. We can only hope, I suppose.

P. S. Aamu are sometimes identified as a Canaanite or Canaanite-adjacent ethnicity. Given that there's a good likelihood that Seti lived after the Israelite Conquest of Canaan, it's not impossible that this Aamu actually represented an Israelite; i.e., the Egyptian conflated the two groups. Who knows.