Day Seven Revisit Part 1 - Saturday June 12 - Dardanelles Ferry
Today was travel for the first part, then seeing the city of Troy. We got on the bus in Istanbul and traveled for a couple of hours to a rest stop, then back on the bus and another couple of hours till lunch. Lunch was right before we took a ferry across the Dardenelles.
Day 7 teaching from Pastor Wayne was on the bus before Troy, giving us some history background on the people in this area that we are traveling through, covering the period from 2000 BC (time of Abraham) to 1500 BC (time of Moses). The Old Babylonian empire was in decline. The Egytian empire was going strong. These times are called "Heroic" times because there is little hard evidence, but a lot of legends, which are generally based on some truth.
During this time, the Hittite people arose in present-day Turkey, and for a while they controlled the area at Jerusalem. We don't know a lot about them because of lack of records. There was also the Minoan culture on Crete, which apparently had a very strong navy because they did not build walls around their city. We don't know a whole lot about them because they wrote in a language we call Linear Script B, and we have not found a 'Rosetta stone' to allow us to translate it. This time was also a rise of a people groups called Phoenician, which were active in the seas. The Phoenicians gave us the Western alphabet.
In the time around 1500 BC, several of these people groups were on the move. Not sure what the exact reason was, but there was some climate change in what is modern-day Russia, which forced some nomads further south. Some of these were Sea Peoples - Achians, Titker, Philistines who settled in Gaza.They began to attack and raid. We know a little bit about them because they attacked Egypt under Ramses and he repelled them and put together a historical record of his victory.
Also at this time was the Hapiru - the Hebrews. We know this from the Bible. Wayne suspects that Phutmos the 3rd ~1400 BC was probably the pharaoh that God hit with the plagues. We know there was a power vacuum shortly after this time, which was one of the reasons that the Hebrews were able to establish themselves in the Holy Land.
An interesting note: old legends and books almost never make up geography. Sometimes reading fiction reveals the background in tremendous detail - acceptable practices, cultural mores, geography, etc. The story revolves around these items, but if they were too far afield the stories would not catch on and be repeated. This is actually how Troy was discovered, the German Schliemann studied the story of the Illiad closely and mapped out where it would be, then discovered a tel in the right area, and started digging.
Dale'sPics for Day 7 - Dardanelles Ferry: here
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