Rick,

TO save all the quotes and such, you are hyperreductionizing my hyperreduction.

What I'm saying is that we must be very, very careful in what we push backwards. If we don't have evidence, then it is just a speculation. Speculations cannot be the foundation for theories.

And pushing back "attached" elements of various verses based on archaic content of the verse is a speculation. As such, I challenge the "bedrock foundation" methodology, as you've called it. Foundations are what is created first. The PTs are a thousand years into the evolution. I think the PTs are more of a guidepost... a milemarker. They are most definitely not the foundation, though. Nor can they be seen as indicative of any earlier beliefs, without evidence from earlier times to corroborate it.

Let me put it in a bit more "modern" context: Could Atenism, and the entire Amarna episode, ever have been predicted by looking at evidence from only the 20th and 17th Dynastic records?

That's my only point. As we found evidence for the Amarna period, we had to revise the "monolithic" model dramatically. If we had buried our heads in the sand and said, "nope... no deviations, ever", then we'd have all this weird art and a whole city that just didn't "fit". We don't know that elements of other dynasties are not attributable to such cultural deviations, so we can't write off the anomalies or oddities as categorical "complexities" of the same old same old.

Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.