water for them? Pharaohs were born to be almighty, and they die almighty. The ancient Egyptians believed that after death the pharaohs would continue to reign whether resurrected within their tombs or elsewhere. The bottom line was that a pharaoh could not be anybody but a pharaoh.
But now the new pharaonic CV will state: Born a Pharaoh, died a Pharaoh, reborn/cloned a Nobody: a pharaoh without pharoahness. A cloned pharaoh would be like a tiger that feeds on grass; a lion that bleats; a Mike Tyson who excels only at badminton.
Cloning of humans could even mean the negation of history, the lilliputianisation of those who could once move heaven and earth [could bruise the heel of Achilles]. After all, the clone of a great emperor and builder of Taj Mahal, could only manage to sire a weirdo who caused the fall of the great Mogul Empire. Genetic features such as intellect and physical strength do indeed get passed on to succeeding generations, but not unchanged.
In the surreal world of cloning, the heroes of the past could end up as clowns or at best their own vanquished shadows. A cloned Saladin, a Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington would at best be objects of transient curiosity. We might find a militant Mahatma Gandhi marching in a BJP anti-Muslim rally; the Shah of Iran studying theology in Qum; a gay Freud condemning early 20th century psychology as anti-feminist; Dr. Goebbels a guest of honor at a Holocaust commemoration; James Joyce an illiterate laborer; Arnold Toynbee an office boy; Nietzsche a workshop mechanic. In a Manhattan bookstore Joe McCarthy could be signing his best-selling History of the Capitalist Witch-Hunt of Socialists in America: 1950-54. We might see Rabbi Lenin and Ayatollah Rushdie locked in a struggle to take over Jerusalem, while Karl Marx is making his fortune on Wall Street.
Cloning of humans would turn everything upside down, with the result that the world and the future history of mankind would suffer a total and permanent mutation. If Dr Stephen Hawking is any reliable clue, in the distant future computers will write the history of their preceding species, Homo Sapiens, and wonder why such an advanced species decided to write its own obituary.
Historically, every great scientific advancement has been considered a scientific impossibility until it was brought to fruition. Until early in the present century, most respected scientific authorities spurned the very idea that a human foot would ever touch the soil of the moon. Now, just a few decades later, those nay-sayers enjoy the intellectual respectability of a band of cobblers discussing metaphysics on their lunch hour.
Just because cloning of humans is not taking place at the moment does not mean it can not or will not happen. "Cloning is not yet fully ready for use on human cells" (Scientific American editorial, May 1997) does not mean "A Scientific Impossibility" or "Never!".
The reason the issue of human cloning has invited such wholesale condemnation is because of the deep moral issue it raises. As such, it has become a succes de scandale as offensive as the Freudian Id. But the question is not whether human cloning is possible (the fact that the developed world has imposed a ban is itself deeply significant); the question is: what will be its consequences when it inevitably becomes a reality.  In light of the preceding pages, Revelation 13:3 and Zechariah 5:5-11 take on a whole new meaning,