Episode 79: Let My People Go

Thank you for your great work on this history. We are all richer because of it. You mention in this episode you will bring up the Cannaites and the exodus in a “much later” episode. I am a late comer here, and have a lot more listening to do. Now, I’m very curious if you’ve already posted that episode, or if it is still to come. Thank you again for sharing your research with us.

Very rich episode, about a very unpleasant subject.

Amenhotep definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth after these last couple of episodes.

The dumping of hundreds of alive civilians in ditches and setting them on fire, reminds me of the kind of thing you’d hear of the Einsatzgruppen doing.

Then we get to the mass deportations of entire communities, I agree with you the number is likely a considerable exagerration as all the communities he attacked sound like villages.
One walks away with the impression that the whole strike north was less about ‘quieting rebels’ (as many of the villages appear to have already ben quieted’) and more about acquiring slave labour

The mass deportation of entire regional communities, would also qualify as a form of genocide under the modern definition incidentally. As sadly is being reflected in wars at the moment with similar practices.

Regarding the slave labour on plantations, I am unsure if you are connecting the high valued goods produced by the slaves with esteem the slaves themselves are held in? Surely these aren’t necessarily connected, throughout history very valuable commodities like tobacca, sugar, etc. have been produced by those the masters consider inhuman.

I must say I would be struggling to appreciate the beauties and fertility of the delta region if I was witnessing it as a plantation slave deported from my homeland.

Hello, I noticed a possible error in some of the last few episodes (I’m new to this podcast so I don’t know if it had been addressed). You mentioned the Kassites of Babylon being Indo-European. If I remember correctly, that was an older theory that was disproved, and the Kassite language is now considered a language isolated or at least unclassified. This also applies to the Hurrians, although that is far more complicated from what I know. Hurrian is now understood to not be an Indo-European language, but related to Urartian (I can’t find anything to suggest this is debated). However, the Mitanni specifically had a superstrate (I’m not linguistic expert) of Indo-Aryan. I believe a theory put forward is that the royalty or at least an influential part of the upper class may have had Indo-Aryan ancestors who left traces of their culture linguistically and religiously, but probably assimilated early on into the Hurrian population. This is actually a very interesting topic, as Indo-Aryans came from Central Asia, instead of the Pontic-Caspian Steppes to the west, where many other Indo-Europeans migrated from. Most Indo-Aryans migrated to South Asia, but somehow, at some point, another group made it to the Near East. I don’t know if it has been explored as to how or why they came to the future Lands of Mitanni, or modern day Syria and Iraq , but it is definitely interesting.

When my husband and I were discussing the content of this episode, he came up with an interesting idea: Maybe the Syrians and other Asiatics preferred to drink beer through straws to avoid dirtying their beards. That is why the Egyptians did not need straws.