When the kingdoms on the eastern shore of the ancient Mediterranean entered the stage of hegemony, the kingdoms of the Fertile Crescent, the Peninsula of Asia Minor, and the Iranian Plateau sang and appeared, but the ancient Egyptian kingdom, which occupied the plains of the lower Nile in the southwest, has been "obscenely developing". In addition to exporting technology and culture by sea, which ripened the Aegean civilization of Crete in Europe, Egypt did not move north along the West Asian Rift Valley and compete with the Two Rivers civilization, but committed to integrating Upper and Lower Egypt and conquering Nubia. It was not until the fall of the ancient Babylonian kingdom established by the Amorites and the invasion of Egypt by the nomadic tribes of Canaanites that the revived Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt began to rush out of Africa and compete with the Hittite and Assyrian empires for hegemony in Western Asia.
Before archaeologists discovered sumerian civilization in the 20th century, the entire Western world had always regarded Egyptian civilization as the source of human civilization. But because Sumer experienced nearly a thousand years of city-state domination, the First Dynasty of Egypt, founded before about 3100 BC, is still the world's earliest kingdom, which is 500 years earlier than the First Dynasty of Your in Sumeria and 1000 years before the Xia Dynasty in China. However, Egypt's influence on the world did not only lie in the opening of the dynastic era, hieroglyphs and monotheism were also gifts from the ancient Egyptian civilization to all mankind, and most of the inhabitants of the earth are still "God's people" to this day.
When you think of God, who do you think of? Is Jehovah, the only true God of Christianity? In fact, God is only the translated name of Jehovah in China, which was deliberately done by European missionaries in the late Ming Dynasty to facilitate the mission in China and to facilitate the understanding and acceptance of ordinary people. In Chinese mythology, God is the Haotian God, referred to as the Heavenly Emperor, God, commonly known as the Lord of Heaven, the supreme god in the traditional Chinese mythological system, and the Jade Emperor is his successor. The name God then became the exclusive name of Jehovah in China, and in this respect Western European missionaries were more successful than their predecessors, the Jingists (Christian Nestorians), who came to China to preach.
Jehovah of Christianity and Yahweh of Judaism and Allah of Islam are actually one God, but because his believers give this one true God a different name, both Christianity and Islam have evolved according to the teachings of Judaism. So who is Yahweh of Judaism? How did Judaism develop? This starts with the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.
The Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (1575 BC - 1308 BC) was the longest-lasting, largest and most powerful of the 31 dynasties of ancient Egypt. It revived Egypt from the fragmentation of the Hyksos invasion, restored its unity, and carried out a massive campaign of external expansion, raiding the invaders' homeland of Canaanite, and at this point the rise of great powers throughout the world was basically the same. His sphere of influence, stretching from the Ethiopian plateau in the south to the peninsula of Asia Minor in the north, for the first time closely linked the civilizations of West Asia and North Africa, so the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt and the later Nineteenth Dynasty (1295 BC - 1189 BC) and the Twentieth Dynasty (1189 BC - 1085 BC) are also known as the Egyptian Empire.
During the 54 years of the reign of egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III, 21 years were ruled by her stepmother, Queen Hatshepsut. This is because of the phenomenon of intermarriage between half-siblings in Egypt, so there were many queens, and the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty that later entered Egypt inherited this habit, and the famous Cleopatra VII married his half-brother and practiced double king co-rule. During the reign of Thutmose III, the rulers of Libya, Assyria, Babylon, Hittites, and Crete paid tribute to him, and historians called him Napoleon of ancient Egypt.
As early as the time of Thutmose III's grandfather, the third king, Thutmose I, Egypt occupied the entire West Asian Rift Zone and expanded to the borders of present-day Turkey. As a result of the counteroffensives of the Hittite and Assyrian Empires, Syria changed hands several times, and the parties formed a tug-of-war in the West Asian Rift Zone. By the time of Thutmose III's grandson, Amenhotep IV, in order to suppress the priestly power internally and unify greater Syria externally, Amenhotep IV carried out the first recorded religious reformation in world history.
Amenhotep IV abolished the Egyptian sun gods Ra, Amun and two thousand other gods, as well as the various gods of Greater Syria under Egyptian rule. The image of the sun, Aton, was deified as the supreme god and the only god in all the regions under the rule of the Egyptian Empire, while cutting off the right of all people to communicate with the gods, and only Pharaoh could communicate with the gods. Amenhotep IV himself changed his name to Ekhnaton, meaning the light of the sun god Aden, who, unlike the other gods, took the form of a radiant sun, and moved the capital from Thebes to his new city of Echtatton. But this seriously damaged the interests of the priestly community, and soon after his death, various gods such as Amun began to be re-worshipped throughout Egypt, and the Reformation failed.
However, in the countdown of the priestly counterattack, there was a tribe in Egypt that still regarded the god Aton as the only true god, and as the tribes in Egypt converted to the god Amun, this tribe had difficulty gaining a foothold in Egypt, so this tribe escaped from Egypt with the Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt, which is the well-known story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt. Wasn't Moses an Israelite? In fact, the name Moses is an Egyptian name, and during the Arab Spring a few years ago, Egypt's defense minister was called Sisi. Israel was enslaved in Egypt because Assyria and Hittites fought with Egypt in Syria, and since population was the main resource at the time, the Egyptian pharaoh simply took all the Israelites from Canaan into captivity in Egypt. At this time, in order to escape the religious persecution of the Egyptian pharaohs, Moses fled Egypt with his men and marched towards the land of Canaan.
When Amenhotep IV founded the Cult of Arden, it was intended to create a universal one true God, to unify ideas and facilitate his rule over Egypt and Syria. This is somewhat similar to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty's "deposing a hundred families and respecting Confucianism alone", and it was also for this consideration that Constantine the Great of the Roman Empire established Christianity with the only true God Jehovah as the state religion. However, in the face of the harsh reality, Moses could only change the original universal Atonism to a closed and exclusive Judaism, because all the people under the Egyptian Empire restored the traditional gods, and the Judaism born from the Aton Theology went to the other extreme, treating the Israelites as the only chosen people of the God of Aton (Yahvi)!
The Egyptian Moses reformed the Aton religion to create Judaism, the Jewish Jesus borrowed from Judaism to create Christianity, and the Arab Muhammad borrowed from Judaism and Christianity to establish Islam, all of which had an important impact on world civilization. Egypt, the birthplace of monotheism, after Moses led the people out of Egypt, completely restored the polytheistic faith, until Constantine the Great established Christianity as the state religion, and the Egyptian provinces under the Roman Empire finally ended the polytheistic faith.
Since the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt chased the Hyksos of West Asia into the great power struggle, the two dynasties that succeeded them have not broken their territory. Egypt's territory stretched from the Anatolian Plateau in the north to the Ethiopian Plateau in the south, and the country reached its peak.
Although the external expansion of the Egyptian Empire added luster to Egyptian civilization, it also brought disaster. Egypt was caught up in years of war with the Hittite Empire and the Assyrian Neo-Babylonian Empire, and unlike the nomadic Hyksos tribes of Nubia, Libya, Ethiopia and West Asia, who conquered Egypt, they would also be assimilated by Egypt, and these extraterritorial powers were economically developed, militarily powerful, and culturally prosperous, and it was difficult to assimilate by Egypt.
The Assyrian Empire that conquered Babylon and hitch finally invaded Africa in the middle of the seventh century BC and destroyed the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt, and the "superpower" Persian Empire that rose up later invaded Egypt twice, destroying the Twenty-sixth and Thirtieth Dynasties of Egypt, the Twenty-seventh Dynasty of Egypt and the Thirty-first Dynasty of the last dynasty written by historian Maneto, which was actually just a province of the Persian Empire. Later Egypt was even more miserable than ancient India, caught up in more than two thousand years of foreign domination, and never established a state of its own nation.
The Persian Empire, alexander empire, Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, Roman empire, Arab empire, Central Asian Mamluk slave dynasty, Ottoman empire, British empire and other forces from outside Africa have successively ruled Egypt, resulting in the complete collapse of ancient Egyptian civilization and many major changes in population. In the first half of the 19th century, The Egyptian Pasha Mohammed. During Ali's reign, Egypt returned to the light and restored the territory of the ancient Egyptian Empire, and twice besieged the Ottoman capital Istanbul, almost overthrowing the Ottoman Empire. Later, under the suppression of the British and other European powers, it gradually became a British colony, and it was not until 1952 that it got rid of British colonial rule and became an independent country.
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