pStanding at the very foundation of monotheism, and so of Western culture, Moses is a figure not of history, but of memory. As such, he is the quintessential subject for the innovative historiography Jan Assmann both defines and practices in this work, the study of historical memory--a study, in this case, of the ways in which factual and fictional events and characters are stored in religious beliefs and transformed in their philosophical justification, literary reinterpretation, philological restitution or falsification, and psychoanalytic demystification. pTo account for the complexities of the foundational event through which monotheism was established, iMoses the Egyptiani goes back to the short-lived monotheistic revolution of the Egyptian king Akhenaten 1360-1340 B.C.E.. Assmann traces the monotheism of Moses to this source, then shows how his followers denied the Egyptians any part in the origin of their beliefs and condemned them as polytheistic idolaters. Thus began the cycle