TEL AVIV – The claim that the Pharaoh mentioned during the Passover holiday’s retelling of the Exodus story was Egyptian is a lie made up by Jews, a senior Egyptian archaeologist declared.
In an interview with the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabih, the director-general of Luxor’s Antiquities, Mustafa Waziri, argued that the Exodus Pharaoh belonged to the foreign Hyksos dynasty that invaded Egypt in the 15th century BCE and ruled northern Egypt.
“King Pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the epoch of our prophet Moses was not one of the kings who reigned in ancient Egypt as we tend to believe. He belonged to the Beduin Jabarin dynasty, which is called Hyksos,” Waziri said.
“This foreign dynasty ruled only in a part of Egypt. One of its last kings was a dictator named Pharaoh, to whom Moses was sent by Allah to demand that he allow the sons of Israel to leave Egypt,” he explained.
The archaeologist added that “the prevailing thesis according to which the kings of ancient Egypt were named Pharaohs is a false thesis promoted by the Jews to stick false accusations on ancient Egyptians.”
“Due to his oppressive rule, the Jews have succeeded in transforming his name to a formal title of all Egyptian kings, which enables them to damage us by saying that we have raped women and slaughtered children. However, the Pharaoh title was never used to describe Egyptians, but was always attached to boorish people,” Waziri said.
As evidence of his thesis, Waziri says that the Koran never uses the word “Pharaoh” to describe Egypt or Egyptians and it is only used in reference to individuals.