by
Damien F. Mackey
Because, according to my historical reconstruction, Senenmut of 18th Dynasty Egypt
was King Solomon.
The name ‘Senenmut’ has variations (http://www.ancientegyptonline.
co.uk/senenmut.html):
“Senenmut (literally “mother’s brother” sometimes transliterated as Senemut or Senmut) was one of the most powerful and famous (or infamous) officials of ancient Egypt. At the height of his power he was the Chief Steward of Amun, Tutor to the Princess Neferure and confidant (and possibly lover ) of the pharaoh Hatshepsut. However, both his early career and the circumstances surrounding his death and burial are obscure”.
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In “The House of David” (http://www.specialtyinterests.net/david_abishag.html) I wrote concerning the name and possibly also an Egyptianised King Solomon:
“…. Peter James and David Rohl, British revisionists, have each proposed that an ivory found at Megiddo, one of Solomon’s forts in Israel, “showing a monarch holding court”, may actually be a depiction of Solomon himself and his queen in Egyptian guise.
Megiddo it should be noted was one of Solomon’s great forts in northern Israel, where Solomon had, writes James [2010], built a “monumental palace compound” (1.Kings 9:15). And it was at the site of Megiddo that the “material culture of Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age [Solomon’s era by the revision] is best seen”. The ivory plaque, says James:
… is of particular interest. [The monarch] is seated on a throne decorated with sphinxes. If it was intended to represent a specific rather than an idealized ruler, would it be too much to imagine that in this ivory we actually have a depiction of the Egyptianized King Solomon?
Now Rohl (who has apparently fallen out so badly with James that they no longer refer to each other’s writings) gives his descriptive account of this amazing item [2020], arriving at the same sort of conclusion as had James:
To the right the king arrives in his chariot, driving before him Shasu captives; in the center is an intimate cameo of the same ruler, seated upon his throne with his queen and lyre player standing before him; to the left, behind the king, two courtiers attend to the royal couple’s needs. Now let us pick out what might be interpreted as Egyptian elements in the scene. First, above the chariot horses is a winged sun-disk; second, the queen offers a lotus flower to her husband; and third the king is seated upon a throne, the sides of which are guarded by winged sphinxes (i.e. human-headed lions). Surrounding the monarch we see three doves – a well known motif of peace, Solomon married an Egyptian princess; he had ‘a great ivory throne’ made for him which was protected by ‘lions’ on either side [1.Kings 10:18-20]; his traditional name means ‘peaceful’.
Solomon’s Hebrew name, Shelomoh [שְׁלֹמֹה]- said to derive from shalom (‘peace’) – may indeed be said to mean ‘peaceful’. Dr. Metzler though, in his inimitable fashion, argues that Solomon is partly an Egyptian name, derived from she-El Amon (sounds like a bit of a hybrid).
So far, I have not successfully managed to find any sort of connection between the names Solomon and Senenmut (whom I have nonetheless identified as the one person). The name Senenmut, Egyptian sn-n-mwt …. means:
“Brother of the mother.”
“Brother of the mother” is not a particularly helpful concept, and I can in no way adapt it to the name Solomon. (Although it may pertain to some other name of Solomon’s for he had apparently several names, e.g. he was also known as Jedidiah (2 Samuel 12:25). However, we saw in “Solomon and Sheba” that Senenmut liked to manipulate the Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example creating cryptograms in regard to Hatshepsut’s throne name, Makera (meaning “True is the Heart of Ra”). Perhaps he, as the crafty and intellectual Solomon, had adapted Egyptian names to Hebrew ones in Metzler-ian style. If so, the name Senenmut may be more cryptic than has so far been appreciated. …”.
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However, I would now like to reconsider some of this.
I want to propose that the Egyptian name, Senenmut, especially in its form of Senemut, is very much like the Hebrew name Shelomoth (1 Chronicles 24:22), also derived from ‘peace’ (http://www.truthunity.net/texts/mbd/shelomoth), and therefore basically the same name as Shelomoh (‘Solomon’).
Shelomoth is also considered to be the same name as Shelomith (‘peaceful’); a name given to a grandchild of King Solomon (2 Chronicles 11:20).
The basic difference between the names Senemut and Shelomo[t]h, as far as transliteration goes, is that the first name has an ‘n’ where the second name has an ‘l’ (there is also the ‘S’ and ‘Sh’ difference, which is less significant, see e.g. Judges 12:6, since it can be a dialectical thing). But the letter ‘l’ does not occur in the Egyptian alphabet, for (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language): “In Egyptian … Afroasiatic */l/ merged with Egyptian 〈n〉 …”.
Charles W. Johnson has written on this, in his fascinating (http://earthmatrix.com/linguistic/nahuatl.htm):
Linguistic Correspondence: Nahuatl and Ancient Egyptian
“One very obvious characteristic of the nahuatl language is the extensive use of the letter “l” in most of the words, either as ending to the words or juxtaposed to consonants and vowels within the words. One of the very apparent characteristics of the ancient Egyptian language is the almost total absence of the use of the letter “l” within most of its word-concepts. The letter “l” appears as an ending of words only a handful of times in E.A. Wallis Budge’s work, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. It would appear that this very dissimilar characteristic between these two languages would discourage anyone from considering a comparative analysis of possible linguistic correspondence between these two very apparently distinct idioms. ….”
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Hatshepsut as the Biblical Queen of Sheba 