Chris Ogilvie-Herald, co-author of Giza, the Truth was poking around the library of the Egypt Exploration Society one day, when he happened upon a copy of Texts, Storms and the Thera Eruption, by Ritner and Foster [see Anistoriton note below]; a booklet concerning the translation of the inscription of a stele of Ahmose I [see Anistoriton note below]. Chris' prime interest was the meteorology of Egypt, but knowing my interest in the Hyksos period he popped a copy in the post to me as well. It was rather fortunate that his eagle eye had spotted the pamphlet, because it was to lead to a whole new avenue of research for me.

The book Jesus, Last of the Pharaohs was primarily a comparison between the Hyksos exodus out of Egypt and the Israelite exodus out of Egypt. To me, the parallel texts were far too close to each other to be the result of coincidence: they had to be one and the same event. The only real problem with the whole thesis, however, was the fact that outside the biblical-type texts, there is little or no historical evidence for the Israelite exodus. Even some Jewish historians have been inclined to regard the biblical exodus as a fable, inspired by ancient myths and some eager scribes.

So, the arrival of the pamphlet from Chris was quite an extraordinary and fortuitous event. My eyes were immediately drawn to a few paragraphs in the translation of the stele, for they were familiar -but why should the long lost scribblings of an ancient Egyptian scribe appear familiar to me? It was, temporarily, a little baffling. Was this quote something I had read about regarding the Hyksos pharaohs in Egypt? Was it from the many Egyptian text books that littered my office? Then the penny began to drop. I had seen these paragraphs before, not in a book of Egyptology but in the Bible.

I was somewhat taken aback, for this biblical quotation detailed events that occurred during the biblical exodus of the Israelites. Here was quite possibly the historical evidence for the exodus that had been sought after by so many people for so long. The Tempest Stele, as it came to be known, had been translated and pored over by Egyptologists and historians alike for over 30 years, yet nobody seems to have noticed the fact that a large section of the text was identical to sections in the Torah, Bible and Koran. It seemed impossible that these people had not spotted it before but, there again, perhaps they were not in the right frame of mind to accept such a finding, even if it were noticed.

The result of this observation was to spawn a new line of enquiry, into the biblical texts, that would bear much fruit. It was to place the biblical texts into their true context; to lay bare the physical realities of the events that initiated the biblical exodus and the writing of the texts that went with this event. Those texts -the Torah, Bible and Koran -have influenced the lives of nearly half the world's population, so it is only right that the followers of these religions are at last able to see the real foundations of their belief systems.

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