Ahmed Osman, an Egyptian scholar working in London, believes the military exploits of King David in the Old Testament were taken from real events in the reign of an Egyptian pharaoh.
"The descriptions of David's wars in the Second Book of Samuel match almost exactly those of Pharaoh Thutmose III on the walls of the Temple of Karnak at Luxor in Egypt," Osman said Friday.He will elaborate his claim in a book due out in London in March called, "The House of the Messiah," which seeks to identify the historical Jesus Christ.
Osman's earlier claims linking the Israelites to the ancient Egyptians aroused controversy. He feels the atmosphere is now more receptive after being invited to address the Sixth International Congress of Egyptologists opening Sunday in Turin, Italy.
Osman will address the 1,400 experts on Wednesday.
For the past 27 years, Osman, 57, has pursued his theory that the origins of Christianity are to be found in ancient Egypt, where there were Hebrew settlements followed by persecutions.
In his 1987 book, "Stranger in the Valley of Kings," he theorized that a mummy in the Cairo Museum known as Yuya was the biblical figure Joseph who led the tribe of Israel into Egypt.
His 1990 book, "Moses: Pharaoh of Egypt" claimed that Moses and the pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamen, were the same man.
The wars of David are described in different ways in chapters eight and 10 of the Second Book of Samuel.
One says that David had 600 followers and fought the Philistines but ran away from his son Absalom. The other calls him a mighty emperor from the Euphrates to the Nile rivers.
"David is believed to have ruled from about 1000 B.C. to 960 B.C. But his biblical military history is identical with that of Thutmose III, the mightiest king of the ancient world, who ruled an empire in western Asia from the Nile to the Euphrates for 54 years from about 1490 B.C.," Osman said.
"No archeological evidence of David has been found in that region for the 10th century B.C. but there is evidence of him in the 15th-century B.C. layer, the same period as Thutmose III," Osman said.
He said the Bible does not use the same names or chronology as the Karnak annals but the events are the same in both and they match at a number of points.
-Both kings had to face hostile kings in the region from Sinai to Asia Minor.
-The battle was outside a Canaanite fortified city which may have been the Megiddo of the Karnak rec-ord and Armageddon in the Bible.
-Thutmose and David followed the same military plan, dividing their armies in two flanks and surprising the enemy who fled from the battlefield leaving vast spoils behind.
-In both versions, the defeated kings entered the fortified city and shut themselves in and a long siege followed.
-The besiegers eventually captured the city and received gifts from the kings of western Asia.
-The northern Syrian leader of the rebellion escaped and was defeated in a later battle.
-The victorious king had a monument put up by the Euphrates recording his victory.