> 1.) Romulus and Remus and the Kings of Ancient Rome.
They are said to be descendants of a Trojan War survivor.
Hold on a minute. We need to separate the story of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, from "The Aeneid" by Virgil - the story that connects them back to Aeneus - a prince of Troy.
The first story has all of the halmarks of the ancient local tradition. The second is the Roman sequel to the Iliad -- and is far more likely a product of Roman Helenisation and desire to connect into the Greek cultural tradition.
It is not necessary to believe both -- and in fact, in my opinion, the first is a very likely truthful though mythologized account of the founding of Rome, while the second is the invention of Virgil, possibly at the request of some Senatorial propaganda commitee.
> I know that Troy was a real city and there was evidence of war, but was it just like what Homer described it to be?
The Ilyad was written maybe 800 years after the events described. The stories are of the type "exploits of the great heroes of antiquity". Much like the case of Arthur in England and the Kiev sagas in Russia, it is most likely that the early sagas of the war were overgrown over time with other stories -- including most likely the heroics and betrayals that were realy part of far lesser known military conflicts and feuds of petty kings.
> I know Rome needed to have a founding but being sons of a God?
There is no need to believe in the divinity of the hero to accept the overall story.
Most kings of the ancient world were said to be descended from gods. So is the current emperor of Japan.
Its realy not a big deal at all.
More interesting is the story of the wolf raising them.
Presumably - there is something in that story that would provide great insight if we had enough information for it.
As an analogy - "The Secret History of the Mongols" states that the house of Chingis Khan was started by the mating of a doe and a wolf. Scholars dismiss the actual biological reality of this mating -- but see it as a totemic myth symbolizing real tribal entities that the Chingisids descended from.
> I know Rome had kings before the republic, yet we know SOOOO much more about the republic than we do about the kings. Why is that? Was there a mini dark age before the Roman Kingdom and the founding of the Republic?
"mini dark age" implies that there was a pre-existing known civilization.
My understanding is that Rome didn't realy start being "civilized" until after the time of the kings.
Ofcourse - the other issue with all of the ancient nations -- just because we don't know, does not mean it wasn't there at some point. It seems that a vast amount of ancient documentary knowledge was burned with the library at Alexandria.
> 2.) Was King Ziasudra real?
He is a Sumerian who also had a very similar flood myth to that of Noah's.
Noah, Utnapishtim, and presumably this king you mention (I don't know - I didn't read about him) are just different names for presumably the same mythical hero in the stories of different nationalities.
Certainly Noah in the Jewish Bible was a conceptual "summary hero" - ie: a single individual that represents the group - and represents a set of ideas about reality (in the Hebrew Bible - the story is about the brotherhood of humanity, the ability of humanity to ruin the environment, human responsibility for the planet... etc. etc.)
> 3.) Was King Nebuchenezarr II real?
He sacked Jerusalem and stole the ark of the covenant, and destroyed Solomon's temple.
Yes.
Note - there is no indication that he "stole the ark of the covenant"
> 1.) Was Abraham real? Please provide evidence outside the religious texts if he was real.
I visited his grave this spring.
Problem with "provide evidence outside the religious texts" is that the Christian "holy bible" contains the histories composed by the historians of the ancient Hebrew nation.
Abraham is the originator of the Hebrew people. As with Romulus and Remus above - you don't need to accept the "god" stuff to acknowledge that the clan needed to start somewhere and it is not likely that you will get any better information then that provided by the clan themselves.
> 2.) Israeli Archeologists have examined archeological evidence and determined that the Jews were never in Egypt to begin with.
This is factualy untrue.
This is what realy happened (I was reading the material as current events at the time -- I think it was early 90ies):
(1) An archeologist (I believe not Israeli or in any way Hebrew literate) came up with his own understanding of the Bible's description of the route of the Exodus. He did not compare his own interpretation with any of the materials of the Hebrew tradition.
He proceeded to find that he did not discover sufficient pottery shards along the route that he defined that would in his interpretation be expected for a camp the size of the Jewish camp of the Exodus.
Note how many negatives there are here -- he essentialy proved only that he did not succeed.
(2) Israeli professors, in an attempt to counter Arab propaganda pseudo-history that claimed the Arabs to descend from the Jebusites, focused on proving the point that the Hebrews began in Israel (something that earlier scholarship disregarded for the claim that the Hebrews actualy started in Egypt). This is not antithetical to the Hebrew Bible -- to the contrary - it supported the pre-Egypt narative of the Hebrew Bible.
Popular TV and internet "history" then merged the two claims -- and declared that it had been proven conclusively that the Jews never went to Egypt.
In point of fact - the Egyptian part of the narative is so well supported that for over seventy years prior to the '90ies it was pretty much a given in secular scholarship that the Jews actualy originated in Egypt.
> So was Moses real?
Call him Moses or Hershel -- there was a point at which the Constitution of the Hebrew nation and all of the governmental and social structures that are based upon it was establsihed.
Again -whether you believe in God or see God as a linguisitc cultural metaphore -- the Torah was the basis of the whole national system -- and to reject the overal story you will have to instead believe a conspiracy theory far far greater than any of the whopers of the modern conspiracy theorists.
> Does his record survive in non-religious texts, such as Ancient Egyptian text?
The Ancient Egyptians did not write complete histories.
They wrote things like triumphs. They were also very into destroying any monuments contrary to the politics of the current emperor (see the history of the finding of Akhenaton)
Nevertheless -- in the Greek period there were a couple of Egyptians (Manetho being he most famous of these) who wrote the Egyptian version of the Exodus story - claiming to have done so based on ancient records.
> How could he have possibly split the red sea? Scientific reason please.
"Yam Suf" ("sea of cattails). Much smaller. Read the description in the Bible -- the winds blew and the waters divided.
A geological event whereby a shallow area became more shallow.
Any sailor who has to worry about beaching his boat in the reeds on a shallow river can expain it better than me.
The "anti-Jewish" versions of the Exodus have it that the Jews were thrown into the water to drown, but they managed to swim across.
Perhaps, split the difference -- a shallow swampy area allowed access for the lightly equiped refugees while sucking in the armoured charioteers of the Egyptians.
> when was the exodus dated, and who was the reigning pharaoh during then?
No one said
There is a film on BBC / History channel called "Exodus Decoded" which attempts to provide a detailed non-magical explanation of the ten plagues and dates it to the kingship of Pharaoh Ahmos based on archeological material.
> 3.) Do David and Solomon have any evidence outside of their existence? (Non-religious)
Again -- how do you distinguish "Hebrew national court history" from "religious"
Your premise here is faulty.
For example -- in Europe, as late as the 12th century, the vast majority of historical work was done by monks.
Samuel, Kings, Chronicles were histories written by historians -- and they were also included into the collection of religious texts.
In fact, as Josephus argued -- the governmental and priestly review of the texts for accuracy was a rigorous process of "peer review" that authenticated the work (in contrast to the Greek system -- where works were in no way vetted - and were more valued for their literary turns of phrase than for actual historical factuality).
Still - by now we have the castle ecscavated in Ir David (Jerusalem),
as well as a number of contemporary inscriptions.
Josephus also referenced correspondence between Solomon and the king of Tyre which was easily available at his time (1900 years ago). Presumably, this stuff was burned with the library of Alexandria.
> 5.) And finally, was Mohammed real? (Non-religious evidence only please).
No reason to think that he was not.
1.) Was buddha real?
Probably
> 2.) Some scholars argue that King Arthur was real. He was a Roman who lived in Britain after the fall of the Western Empire.
I think "most scholars" accept the existance of a historical Arthur figure.
I see no reason to dispute this.
> Most of these figures had extraordinary characteristics which defy modern science. What evidence of their existence is there?
Exageration.
Consider -- an early history says that Merlin rigged up great machines to carry across the giant stones into England.
In later sources "Merlin the engineer" transforms completely into "Merlin the son of the devil"