Free The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim by Scott Alan Roberts Page B

bear children who could overthrow him. In an attempt to solidify his claim to the throne with no other royal candidates rising to challenge him, Amulius forced Rhea Silvia to perpetual virginity as a Vestal priestess. This didn’t end up working, as she bore children anyway. According to the legend, Mars, the god of war, seduced Silvia and impregnated her. In other accounts, it was Hercules or even Amulius himself who impregnated his niece. Under confinement by Amulius, she gives birth to twin boys of remarkable beauty, upon which her uncle ordered all of their deaths. Rhea was buried alive, and Amulius ordered the death of the twins by exposure; both means would avoid his direct blood-guilt.
     

     
    “She-Wolf Suckles Romulus and Remus.”
Capitoline Wolf,
traditionally believed to be Etruscan, fifth century BC , with figures of Romulus and Remus added in the 15th century by Antonio Pollaiuolo
.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:She-wold_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg
).
     
    Amulius charged a servant with the deed of killing the twins, but the servant could not follow through with the act. Instead he placed them in a basket and left it on the banks of the Tiber River, which flooded and carried the twins downstream, unharmed. The river deity Tiberinus made the basket catch in the roots of a fig tree that grew in the Velabrum swamp at the base of the Palatine Hill. The twins were found and suckled by a she-wolf, Lupa, and fed by a woodpecker, Picus. A shepherd named Faustulus discovered the twin boys and took them to his hut, where he and his wife Acca Larentia raised them as their own children. Romulus went on to found the city of Rome.
     
Hatshepsut
     
    This remarkable woman was the daughter of Thutmoses I, born in or around 1535 BCE . She went on to marry her half-brother Thutmoses II, fathered by Thutmoses I and to a “lesser” wife. He was weak and somewhat sickly in his reign, and she loathed the man. When he died, she became co-regent of Egypt with her stepson, Thutmoses III (from, yet again, a lesser wife), and eventually deposed him and took over the monarchy as ruler herself. Thutmoses III learned to hate his stepmother,and when she died, he had all Hatshepsut’s imagery stricken from every painting, obelisk, and relief, eradicating her from Egyptian history and the afterlife. Thutmoses III went on to bring Egypt’s United Kingdom during the 18th Dynasty to its golden pinnacle.
     
    In 1526, Hatshepsut would have been a mere child of about 7 to 10 years of age. When she found the baby Moses in a basket, floating into her bathing pool off the Nile; she claimed him and named him, but had no way to care for him on her own. It was then that Miriam emerged from the bulrushes and offered to help, taking the child back to his mother to have him cared for until the royal princess was old enough to legitimately adopt him, which she did a few years later.
     

     
    This remarkable woman, who reigned in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, is most probably the stepmother of the biblical Moses, whom she found floating in the Nile in a basket made of bulrushes
.
     
    Photo courtesy of the author. Copyright 2011.
     
    It can be speculated that a man named Senmut, very close to Hatshepsut and the tutor to her daughter, was none other than Moses himself. Though the evidence is only circumstantial, one must read a bit between the lines and hail to Egyptian mythology to make the connections.
     
    Senmut was very close to Hatshepsut and was her strongest ally, advisor, and friend, a lowly born man who rose to power with Hatshepsut. It is speculated that his lowly birth was as a Hebrew slave, and his close stepson relationship to Hatshepsut was nothing short of the love between mother and son, and the nepotism that came along with it. The name Senmut itself means
“mother’s brother.”
     
    To understand the significance of this mother’s brother title, it is necessary to look, briefly, at Egyptian