Ramses: Temple of a Million Years, by Christian Jacq

Historical fiction differs from ordinary fiction in that it is presenting the past, history, in a novelistic format, with characters who ellicit sympathy or antipathy, in the context of a story that ought to be plausible against the known historical record. Monsieur Jacq is an Egyptologist. I can't begin to hold a candle to his knowledge of the reign of Ramses II. But one thing I do know is that the Egyptian evidence is mostly elicited from archaeological evidence, hieroglyphics on walls, papyrus, and from whatever contacts they had with other civilizations.

That being the case, I could understand M. Jacq claiming that: 1. Helen committed suicide rather than go back to Sparta with Menelaus, despite the fact that in Homer's Odyssey, Book IV, Telemachus, Odysseus' son, visits Menelaus and Helen, reconciled and happily married once more in Sparta; and 2. The ancient Hebrews were never enslaved by the Pharaohs, and were happy Egyptian citizens making bricks with ample, almost French-style benefits and job security until Moses came along, had an epiphany and ruined everything, despite the clear Biblical and Midrashic accounts of their abject enslavement. I could understand these outlandish claims, if there were some Egyptian record to back it up. But I suspect that there is no Egyptian papyrus anywhere that spells out Hebrew brickworkers' rights and conditions, and I seriously doubt that Homer, assuming he really existed, wrote the Iliad before the events in his Odyssey were finished unfolding, or that he wrote it under Ramses II's patronage while in Egypt. This is pure literary whimsy by the author, and as such his work cannot be taken as a scholarly effort to reconstruct the past and breath life into it.

While we are on the subject of the ancient Hebrews, however, I have to note a very disturbing trend among politicians, religious leaders, and now even novelists, to deny the plain facts of Jewish history, both ancient and modern. In addition to the Holocaust deniers that continue to blight the earth with their sophistries, the Grand Waqf of Jerusalem is now in the habit of denying that Solomon's and Herod's Temples ever existed on the Temple Mount, and is busilly doing all he can to destroy any archaeological evidence within his jurisdiction that he can find to the contrary, and denying access to the Mount to any archaeologists interested in revealing the truth. He accuses them of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the two mosques occupying the site by digging holes underneath them to destroy them.

Waqfs will be Waqfs, and some allowance can be made for his professed mission to help believers take over the world by force and at times by deception, and convert everyone to Islaam. Holocaust deniers have been with us for a while, and a great many of them are now prominent demagogues with a similar desire for world conquest.

But Christian, pour quois? Seeing what odious company you would keep as a historical revisionist, can't you at least recognize that the ancient Hebrews were in fact enslaved? You could write a perfectly passable novel about an otherwise humane, energetic Pharaoh who had this one moral blind spot towards slavery that in the end brought his country to ruin. Or at the very least, show me some evidence that the Bible is just a prolonged malcontent whine against kind ol' massa' Ramses by some ungrateful former employees who refused to finish their job.