An archeologist and historian of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, Pritchard taught his students that neither Moses nor the great Israelite exodus from Egypt was mentioned anywhere in the contemporary literature of the region—not by the Persians, the Hittites, the Sumerians, or the Egyptians themselves. Pritchard’s conclusion, which he shared with four or five of the other leading Western scholars in the field, was that Moses was an uncorroborated historical figure, quite possibly a legendary one, and that the Exodus itself was probably a much smaller and more symbolic event than the one
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