Regarding the post from Anders and Torsten
> > The allies of Priam also included Ethiopians under Memnon;14 the
> > Ethiopian allies of Priam must date in all probability to the
> period
> > when the Ethiopians were one of the most honored nations, highly
> > regarded for their military prowess.
There is another possibility that must be considered.
The Greek Memnon was the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III, the
Magnificent. This was the pinacle of Egyptian power in the Middle
East. Two great statues of this Pharaoh were called by the Greeks,
the Collossi of Memnon, and were damaged by an earthquake roughly at
the time of the fall of Troy. Greeks claimed that it was damage done
by Poseidon in grief over what happened. For centuries after, one of
the statues would utter a strange call as the rising son of the
morning heated the air within. Eventually (I think it was during
Roman times), the statue was repaired, and it greeted the sun no more.
Amenhotep fought campaigns against the Medjay in Nubia, who were
subsequently incorporated as troops into the Egyptian army. "King's
Son of Cush" or "Pi Nehesy" was the name given to the Egyptian crown
prince (a little like "Prince of Wales" is the title of the English
Crown Prince), and the Nubian regiments were placed under his
control. This title travelled into the Bible as "Phineas" (today the
Jewish surname Pincus).
Redford demonstrates that under Amenhotep III a periplus of the
Eastern Mediterranean was translated into hieroglyphics, and the
names Knossos, Amnissos, Pylos and Mycenae were translated into
Egyptian. The Amarna letters speak of the king of Mycenae as one of
the "Great Kings". Amenhotep III is an interesting king, as his
mother Mutemwiya, was daughter of the King of the Hurrians, who also
exerted significant power in the Hittite Kingdom at that time. This
system of international alliances, that was strengthened after the
Battle of Kadesh, brought peace and security to the whole Middle East.
At the same time, Lukku, Sharden, Danuana and Meshwesh, the "People
of the Sea" who made such trouble for Egypt later, are first
mentioned in the reign of Amenhotep III. The Danuana are the Homeric
Danaos, the men of Argos under Diomedes who took such a prominant
place in the seige of Troy. There are memories in Greece of a
post "Trojan" expedition against Egypt (supposedly to recover Helen
who had really been "protected" in Egypt during the course of the
Trojan war by the Pharaoh of that country, a monarch
called "Proteus"). TRWS ("Tarusha", or "Troas" people were amongst
the "Peoples of the Sea" under the reign of Pharaoh Merenptah.
It has been suggested that the Trojan War contains a memory of an
Achaean campaign against the Hittite dependency of Wilusa, just
before the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the hands of the Peoples
of the Sea, and their Gasga and Phrygian allies. It is quite
possible that Memnon and his Ethiopians also contains distorted
memories of these events.
Regards
John