Judaism
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History I.2
Abstract
If an excavator believes from the scriptures that an ancient mound must contain buildings from Solomon’s reign, it is almost certain that sooner or later he will find structures that fit the bill. The spurious air of biblical authority given to such a discovery can then make the identification stick, despite any evidence to the contrary. In the meantime a small tourist industry may even have grown up around this “confirmation” of the Bible.Peter James
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, May 22, 2001
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Radiocarbon Dating
Before radiocarbon dating, archaeologists would use Egyptian dynastic records and Manetho’s king lists to establish the succession of stylistic changes in Egyptian statuary, building, and pottery. They then established a chronology for Mycenaean Greece and Crete by dating Egyptian trade goods, found in Greek and Cretan excavations. Lastly, they linked Greece and Crete to cultures in other parts of Europe. Dating in this way assumes the Egyptian dates are right, and everything is dated from them. One might have thought that radiocarbon dating and other such scientific methods would at least be useful objective checks, and in most places they are, but the Egyptologists remain attached to their chronology and refuse to let go for a silly carbon-14 test! Radiocarbon dating, they said, was uncertain. They were certain!
Radiocarbon Dating as proposed by Willard Libby required the level of radioactive carbon in the environment to be constant—specifically the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 is assumed constant. It is not. It varies slightly from year to year, and so C-14 levels are not solely dependent on age. There is a natural variation. The technique has to be calibrated by tree ring counting (dendrochronology) and that requires many samples of wood felled in long sequences, in the rough locality, to be valid. In desert areas this might simply not be possible. Alternatively anchor point dating allows corrections to be made, but anchor points have to be certain, not just assumed certain. Egyptologists are certain about the whole of Egyptian chronology, but think a special radiocarbon correction is needed in the in the ancient near east, because C-14 dates are usually too low for their guesses based on Manetho. Rainer Berger, a UCLA radio chronologist who worked with Willard Libby, writes in a 1983 paper that “long term variation” results in ages being too recent by up to a thousand years, and this “has been checked against the historical chronology of the Egyptian dynasties, the oldest and most reliable known”. So, Egyptian chronology was old and reliable and so should be used to calibrate the C-14 physical tests! Berger goes on to say:
As a result, early dynastic samples of known age are far more accurately dated when tree ring calibration is used.
Samples of known age are assumed, so they are not being dated but used to find what methods most agree with the Egyptologists’ preconceptions. This waffle and confusion is simply to hide the fact that C-14 gives progressively lower dates for the Egyptian dynasties. Curiously, no similar specific systematic adjustments have been found necessary in other regions, and Berger himself, in the same paper, admits that the submarine conditions of samples such as shells “obscure” the variation. In short, C-14 dating works fine.
Many mainstream Egyptologists refuse to use radiocarbon dating as a hostage to fortune. A prominent US Egyptologist has said that if C-14 dating is done at all, Egyptologists will quote it in the main part of a “scholarly” paper only when it suits them. Otherwise, it will, at best, find its way into a footnote or, more likely, when the method is used and does not give the expected answers, when it seriously challenges convention, the results are deemed erratic and are not published—they are suppressed. Tests are only published when they agree expectations, but radiocarbon dating is accepted for the start of Egyptian chronology with Meni, dated to 3100 by C-14. It is only low late dates they do not like—dates that have biblical implications!
Two C-14 dates of material from the tomb of Tutankhamun were never published by the British Museum, and only reached the light of day when the laboratory released the results because the authorities would not. They were never published. They gave low dates of 846 and 899 BC that fitted Palestinian history—shorn of Jewish myths—much better with Egyptian history. The experts wanted dates 450 years earlier. The Merneptah stele then matched the time when Omri founded Samaria. Valuable evidence was suppressed.
This is the antithesis of science. C-14 works everywhere except when the date does not confirm Egyptian chronology. That alone is sufficient to show that it is the Egyptian chronology that is faulty. When a method is successful, but yields unusual results in certain instances, something needs investigating. The results are not just suppressed. Science depends on erratic results to provide new leads, and to correct methods if they are yielding systematically wrong results, something that itself needs investigating. But Egyptologists are not generally scientists. They are often classically or biblically trained, and sometimes are amateurs, but rarely are they trained in scientific method. Many chronology revisers are no less scientifically illiterate, or are utterly biased against science, and are proud of it.
A report in 1979 of an Egyptian sample tested by the Pennsylvania, British Museum and Uppsala labs gave divergent results, the dates from the first two approximating conventional chronology but those from Uppsala being consistently lower and closer to the revized chronology. Uppsala were noted for their care in removing contaminants. Timbers from three successive Mycenaean-period levels at As-siros in Macedonia were dated to 1130-850 BC, 1310-1020 BC and 1300-930 BC, when the excavator expected dates of about 1350 BC, 1450 BC and 1500 BC respectively about three centuries before the radiocarbon results. Unwanted results are easily blamed on contamination especially by fungal blooms, the excuse preferred by the believers in the Turin Shroud when radiocarbon dating showed it was medieval.
In all honesty, such tests, if done, should be published to stimulate other work to confirm or deny the original finding. It shows that these mainly classically trained people simply do not have a proper scientific outlook. They are all defending a view and refuse to consider alternatives with proper objectivity. The result, of course, is that the published radiocarbon dates seem to uphold conventional dating. Students first entering the field get additional confidence in it from this “science” and will be more inclined to join the in-crowd of the orthodox believers in standard chronology. They too will begin to suppress contrary results and the whole rotten edifice continues.
Equally bad is that archaeologists often submit unsuitable samples—randomly selected charcoal, for example. A sample like this that came from a large piece of timber destroyed by fire will often give a high date (it will be older than the fire) by several hundred years, if the tree was felled years earlier and it was a mature tree when felled. Or the timber might have been old timber re-used from an earlier structure. It might not be clear from randomly swept up charcoal that this is the case, but the date might then seem to confirm the excessively high dates that the experts prefer.
An astonishing example of this is given by P Kuhniholm who found a well-preserved juniper post, painted blue with modern door hinges being used in a modern village house. Suspecting that it was old timber, the scientist tried to date it by tree rings—unsuccessfully—so sent a sample to Heidelberg for radiocarbon dating. The date was 2000-2200 BC. So, if this village were incinerated today and that charred door post C-14 dated by an unwary scholar, the village would be declared to be Late Bronze Age! The youngest radiocarbon dates from a site should be taken, not the older ones that seem to fit current chronologies.
The dates in a crucial period of ancient near eastern history have to be checked directly by dendrochronology, where suitable samples exist. This is because the radiocarbon calibration curve wriggles around a single date for four hundred years corresponding to about 800 to 400 BC. So any radiocarbon date for carbon originating in this period will give essentially the same answer (something between 400 to 600 BC) making discrimination over these years impossible. Dates after this are too young and have to be lengthened by about 100 years, according to the calibration curve, so it is important for the researchers to say whether the date is calibrated or not. The importance of this is that the youngest dates yielded by a site are to be preferred because most of the combustible material on a site will be older than the site. So long as the technicians can count out more recent contamination, making the sample useless, the youngest dates must be chosen.
An extensive and detailed project of tree ring counting across the Ancient Near East is needed to give a sound calibration for radiocarbon dating, and then a full radiocarbon survey of dateable material from key deposits should be undertaken. None of the great endowed theological departments in US universities seem willing to do it, and would we trust them, if they did? Dr Henry Michael, of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Archaeology, who helped prepare a calibration curve from 3000 bristlecone pine dendro dates in 1972, confirmed the ages of the Egyptian pyramids of Meidum and Dashur by coring the cedar wood tenons that secure their huge blocks. In 1965, he and archaeologist Bryant Bannister cored the cedars of Lebanon, the supposedly 2,000-year old trees said to have shaded Jesus. They were only 800 years old. If anything more serious than this were to happen, no one would know a thing about it.
Ignorant revisionists incoherently try to denigrate science as well as dating, probably because they are believers themselves, believers in unscientific fancies that planets can willy-nilly begin suddenly to careen about the inner solar system for a few years causing havoc—though not as much as they would do if anything like it happened in reality—then settle down as if nothing had happened. It is a more fantastic idea than the biblical flood, and far more impossible than that dark ages happen! So, they denigrate C-14 dating, which has the advantage of being an objective method. They say, according to John Crowe, that carbon 14 dates are useless, because only those that fit conventional dating appear in archaeological reports, and Egyptologists admit it. These revisionists think it is not the Egyptologists who are at fault, but the method, and Crowe says, “Were all the analysed results published, C-14 dating would be well and truly discredited”, something of a non sequitur. He cites J Dayton who gave a range of C-14 dates from nine samples of grain in a sealed storage jar found at Thera as 2037, 1850, 1420, 1394, 1350, 1300, 1110, 960, and 900. The data do not look good but no context or commentary is give and yet is needed.
In contrast, R Dale Guthrie, who has holocene mammoths from St Paul’s island, Alaska, variously dated in C-14 labs, reports an accuracy even at 8000 years bp of +-100 and +-85 years for a split sample dated at the NSF-Arizona laboratory, and +-40 years for a repeated run of the same fossil dated at the Oxford ORAU laboratory, all by accelerator mass spectometry. C-13 was checked also to show that marine contamination was negligible. Accuracy should be better at dates closer to the half life, so supposed second millennium dates like those of king Tut should not be much less accurate. He does not say whether any “calibration” was needed or done. As a general point, uncalibrated dates should always be given, even if a calibration factor is then applied, so that like can always be compared with like by later scientists reconsidering the data.
Just quoting an apparently poor set of data to discredit a method you have irrationally decided you do not like is hardly scientific. Here the items dated are grain which all must have been of the same year, or not more than a few years out, even if some grain had been left in the jar from earlier. What did the testers attribute the range to? What was the condition of the samples? What was the method used, and was it recent or old. Rather than carping about objective methods wrongly applied, revisionists ought to be demanding that samples are collected by qualified unprejudiced scientists, several samples should be collected from each location, and all the results should be published as uncorrected data which will give the broad order of events, if not absolute dates. Where an anchor point is agreed, even more samples should be taken to nail the events down to within a few decades objectively. That is the scientific way, but Velikovskyites do not like science.
Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology offers the best chance of getting precise dates. Suggestive results are beginning to come in. The Cornell University tree-ring dendrochronology sequence for ancient Turkey came up with a surprising result for the timbers used to build a gateway in a Late Bronze Age Hittite military installation. The last phase of construction of the Tille Höyük Gateway on the Euphrates was dated to 1101 BC. This was an Imperial Hittite outpost, dated conventionally about 1300 BC, and supposedly destroyed c 1190 BC. Field workers must be more ready to publish all results, not just the “right” ones. That is not science!
Unfortunately the leading dendrochronologist in the UK does not give any confidence that he is even balanced let alone capable of judging important issues. Professor Mike Baillie of Queens University, Belfast, has written a book, Exodus to Arthur, in which he identifies several dates from extreme tree ring events and then searches the literature to find correspondences. The major climatic abnormalities happened around 2350 BC, 1625 BC, 1145 BC, 205 BC and 540 AD. A correspondence seems to be any event that could be associated with the marker dates within a century or too. The sources might be historical but he shows a penchant for biblical and Irish mythology—and anything else suitably vague. In this way, he builds up temporal ley lines that point to bombardment by comets!
Who knows that it is not true? But meanwhile, Baillie should be locked up with his charts and mythologies in some suitable anchorage while somebody with a better awareness of the problems of historical chronology is given his professorship. Thus Baillie has the nerve to write that those who question current chronology, like Peter James and David Rohl, “suppress information to sustain their arguments” when one of their main arguments is that conventional chronologers themselves have suppressed information or given misinformation for a hundred years! He has nothing to say here about the wholesale suppression of carbon-14 dates that do not tally with expectations. On the contrary, Baillie says, but does not justify it in a repetitive book, that a revized chronology conflicts with “calibrated radiocarbon chronology and indeed dendrochronology itself”.
It seems Baillie is satisfied with conventional chronology, but in a 270 page book gives us no confirmation of it except for a cursory discussion of the eruption of Thera in relation to Egyptian chronology. As snow falls on to permanently frozen glaciers like those in Greenland, it forms layers which can be retrieved in ice cores. The snow traps impurities from the air, including dust from violent volcanic explosions. Thera was believed to have been the only volcanic eruption that could account for a high sulphuric acid anomaly in Greenland ice cores and dated to 1628 BC, but further analysis of the ice cores has yielded similar anomalies at 1594, 1454, 1327 and 1284 BC, and Baillie offers a climatic anomaly at 1145 BC, either of the last two of which would eliminate the mysterious dark ages.
Dayton adds that only two traces in both ice cores and tree rings can be attributed to the Thera volcanic explosion—1628 BC and 1159 BC, presumably the same as Baillie's 1154 BC event, and the evidence of micron-particle analysis ruled out the 1628 BC date. But defenders of conventional dating have placed much emphasis on the earlier date being the correct one, and have put a lost of resource into proving it, though the later one matches Greek history better by lowering the dates of Late Minoan pottery. An interval after the Thera eruption the Minoan civilisation, which had clear links with Egypt, ended, if 1628 is right, at a peculiarly early date, requiring—the Egyptian experts gloated—the raising of dates by a century. This earlier favoured date means New Kingdom dates do not have to be brought in line with a Greek and Mycenaean history free of dark ages. Curious that those who leapt on it will not even consider the later ones!
Eberhard Zangger, in The Future of the Past, thinks archaeological orthodoxy has it all wrong. Evidence of earthquake damage in the Minoan ruins is slight, and evidence of a tsunami negligible. Did the fallout of volcanic pumice and ash from Thera make life impossible for the Minoans? No. Ash deposits on Crete are less than five millimetres thick, and were deposited only on the eastern tip of the island. Archaeology suggests that the Minoans collected and stored the pumice that fell on them during the eruption, not what someone in a terminal panic would have done. Fire, which can be caused by earthquakes, or plague, might have been the causes of the social collapse.
To this spurious evidence, Baillie adds the opinion of Kenneth Kitchen that Egyptian dating is not more than 11 years adrift. Petrie had assigned 36 years to Osorkon I and this was long accepted, but in 1967 an ancient stele lying in the cellars of University College showed that the reign was only 12 years. In an instant, 24 years were clipped from the chronology of Egypt, yet Kitchen is certain that no more than another 10 could possibly go.
Kitchen accepts that a Psusennes, named as the last pharaoh of the twenty first dynasty, was a contemporary of Shoshenq I, the first twenty second dynasty pharaoh, admitting the that these two dynasties overlapped at least briefly. But Psusennes is made the last pharaoh of the twenty first dynasty because he is contemporary with Shoshenq, the founder of the twenty second dynasty! Since another Psusennes of the twenty first dynasty ruled 80 years before, and the two cannot be distinguished in relation to Shoshenq, a possible overlap could reasonably have been 80 years, or Psusennes II could even have preceded Psusenes I! This would eliminate the time of the wandering of the Israelites in the desert and Joshua’s conquest.
Baillie perhaps recognizes this much in adding his own assertion that the margin of doubt in dating the New Kingdom is less than a century. Since radiocarbon dates are not that accurate they are useless, he maintains. He gives no actual results that might let us judge whether they are giving dates that are 300 years younger, merely telling us what he wants us to know. He cannot wait to hunt through legendary Irish king lists for signs of a cometary impact. Does he do this in his spare time, or is he paid for it? He is so embarrassed he apologizes often, but evidently could not resist a fast buck by writing a potboiler. Doubtless not all dendrochronologists are as irresponsible. Speaking of pots…
Pottery
Archaeology relies on pottery (ware) for dating. Pottery still is the best method of dating. Pottery is long lived and distinctive. Only a small piece (a sherd) is often needed to indicate the type to an expert and the materials can be identified by analytical techniques like neutron activation analysis to discover where they came from. Imported ware gives cross links to contemporary cultures. Regretably the standard excuse used by those defending orthodox dates is that anachronistic ware or other artefacts are heirlooms—items saved sometimes for hundreds of years. With valuable items, the excuse might carry weight but it is used also of pottery—utensils!
Pottery only gives relative dates unless it can be keyed into an absolute date at some point. Associated inscribed architecture, documentation or monumental inscriptions can do this. In the Ancient Near East, the biblicists will not often accept it. The Cypriot black on red ware dated in Cyprus to the eighth century is dated by biblicists to the tenth so that it denotes the work of Solomon. The fact that it was manufactured in Cyprus means nothing here. The Cypriot factories have been wrongly dated!
J J Bimson, has argued that Tuthmoses III was Shishak, and the start of the Iron Age should be 500 years lower. In 1982, he showed that a downdating of 500 years gives an excellent fit with the development of glazing which without it seems curiously sporadic. The crude glazing attempts, the eighteenth dynasty and the Assyrian glazes of Assurnasirpal become contemporary at the beginning of the technique. There is no question of a gap, a regression, or a re-learning. It also puts the Neo-Elamite ware made of Egyptian Blue of the ninth century contemporary with similar Mitannian ware. Nor did Phoenicians stop making glass in the fourteenth century and start again c800 BC. So, Merenptah was eighth century and Seti I was ninth, each linking with evidence from the scriptures and the archaeology of Palestine. Tutmoses is shown with vast wealth being surrendered on his monuments, suggested by revisionists still trying to save the bible as the treasure of Solomon’s temple.
It is worth noting that the categorisation of eras into stone, bronze and iron by the Dane, Christian Thomsen (1834), nowadays has no implication that the boundaries of these periods represent a transition from say bronze to iron. They rapidly found that it was easier to denote sites by pottery and pottery has come to represent the distinctions between the various phases of the Thomsen categories. Thus, even if the invasion of Israel by the Israelites is given as Iron Age, it does not mean the Israelites were experts in working iron.
Dark Ages
Oscar Montelius, a Swede, gave an accurate relative typology for sites in northern Europe in the nineteenth century and sought to find an absolute key by reference to Greek and Italian historical sources. None of these however go back before the beginning of the eighth century BC. At the turn of the century, Flinders Petrie began to set up an Egyptian chronology. The great discoveries in Troy, Mycenae and Greece yielded up characteristic Late Bronze Mycenaean pottery. Petrie found it in Egypt depicted on the walls of tombs of kings of the eighteenth dynasty and nineteenth dynasties, and among the ruins of Egyptian temples. Petrie had already given dates to his finds based on the Manetho king lists and the Sothic cycle theory and so the Aegean findings were dated from them. He dated the start of the Mycenaean era to the start of the eighteenth dynasty, about 1400 BC.
So the pottery was dated from the tombs and then used to date the archaeology of other countries where they were found, and their artefacts were then likewise used. These dates caused a serious controversy at the time! The Mycenaean era ended when the Dorians invaded southern Greece, dated from Egypt to c 1200 BC. The trouble was that the lowest Egyptian dates were twelfth century, but the highest European dates for the invasion of the Dorians were eighth century, about 400 years too late for Egyptian chronology! It is the dark age of Greece, when civization in Greece went asleep and woke gain in 800 BC as if nothing had happened in between.
What happened to the Greeks between sacking Troy in about 1200 and the appearance of Homer singing about it in about 800 BC? Greeks thought the war had ended only three generations before the start of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. The games had lapsed, the chronologers decided, for the 300 dark age years from the twelfth century to the ninth century—then began again as if nothing had happened! People mysteriously reappeared in their cities and carried on as before. This is well known because it is close enough to us in history to be much better documented in the classical Greek period and in Assyrian archives. Greek and Roman historians never noticed such a gap before their own histories began about 800 BC. Nevertheless, a four century “dark age” had appeared, and has been accepted ever since!
The natural building material in Greece is stone, but the Greeks did not build in stone for 300 years, not even a temple. If the explanation had been a natural disaster like drought, people would have built temples to appease the Gods. They built nothing! Herodotus said the fall of Troy was one generation after the voyage of Jason to Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece. Sir Isaac Newton, a man normally loved by Christians as a scientific genius who held to Christianity, dated this, assuming it to be historic, from the precession of the equinox to 939 BC. Hence the fall of Troy was dated to c 900 BC. Closing the gap gets rid of the mythology in the Jewish scriptures.
The deciphering of Linear B, the Mycenaean script, by Michael Ventris proved that the Mycenaeans were Greeks. Previously they had been thought more likely to have been related to the Cretans who were Semites. The Mycenaeans turned out to have the same pantheon of Gods as the Greeks, the same language and occupied the same space. Conventionally, the Mycenaeans disappeared around 1200 BC, having beaten the Trojans, and Greeks became illiterate and unskilled for four hundred years before producing Homer and Hesiod. These verses were written down in a Canaanite (Phœnician) script supposedly from the fourteenth century! The biblicists want the eighth century to be the fourteenth century to give them lots of time to fit in spurious history!
At the very beginning, in 1896, Cecil Torr saw the anomaly, and suggested in Memphis and Mycenae that the Egyptian dates were wrong. He was one of the historians who, at the turn of the twentieth century, were not impressed by Petrie and were content to let the Mycenaean Greeks run into the Archaic Greeks, dating the end of the Mycenaeans in the ninth century, or even as late as the seventh. Before Petrie, they had dated the pottery of the Late Bronze period to c 1200-800 BC, to allow continuity and even overlap with the Greek Geometric period. Petrie pushed back these dates to 1600-1200 BC without providing anything to fill the Dark Age.
When the Egyptian dates of Mycenaean pottery were used to date other contemporary pottery in other places, the Greek Dark Age spread everywhere that Late Bronze Greek Mycenaean pottery and its cognates appeared. In Italy, the eighth century Villanovan succeeded the Late Apennine, which ended circa 1075 BC. In Sicily, the Pantalican late eighth century culture succeeded the Thapsos, with apparently thirteenth century Mycenaean pottery. In Sardinia, Middle Nuragic with artefacts linked to the Villanovan in Italy followed the thirteenth century Late Bronze Archaic Nuragic. The same in Malta.
Anatolia also has a 400-year void. Not only no Phrygian but no cultural remains of any sort have been found which belong to the period 1200-800 BC, according to a leading archaeologist of the Turkish peninsula. The famous supposedly thirteenth century Lion Gate of Mycenae has not quite so refined parallels in Phrygia in the eighth century. Since the Phrygians had not arrived on the scene until the ninth century, their lions could not have been older. So, Anatolia was uninhabited for 400 years, then the people returned 400 years later making the same sort of gates as before.
The problem is bad Egyptian chronology. The Late Bronze continued into the ninth or even early eighth century, just as Cecil Torr and the early Greek archaeologists claimed. Plainly, Troy was sacked and then not long afterwards Greek poets sang about it. The Etruscans did not get lost for 400 years after leaving Troy c 1150 BC, then arriving in Tuscany c 750 BC. Classical Greek and Roman writers knew of no dark age. Nor for that matter did the ancient Greek and Roman historians say anything about major civilisations of the past like the Sumerians, Akkadians and Old Babylonians. A latter day suggestion is that Sumerian is the language of the Kassites or Chaldeans. Stretching the timescale to provide for Abraham left holes to be filled and they were filled.
From the classical writers, the date of the sacking of Troy must have been around 900 BC, closing most of the gap, and the “dark age!” One scholar, Walter Burkert, has recently concurred. Petrie was wrong because Manetho had not shown overlapping dynasties, and the Sothic calculations were imaginary. By having the start of the eighteenth dynasty in 1270 BC instead of 1570 BC, he easily saved about 300 years from the Egyptian chronology around the beginning of the first millenium and brought the Mycenaeans and Trojans within touch of Homer. The saving of 300 years got rid of these mysterious “dark ages” that had to be postulated, and brought into line many fruitful synchronizations. Despite Torr, Petrie prevailed, but his dates continued to be challenged, until they set themselves in stone.
To account for the dark age gap, the Mycenaean Greeks are supposed to have collapsed and the Greek population fallen to a tenth of its previous population. Drought is blamed—the Great Mycenaean Drought—followed by social unrest and collapse. But 400 years later the skills that such a collapse should have lost returned miraculously in the very form they had before. Not basic skills either, but the refined skills of making luxury goods such as jewelry, carved ivory and fine woven carpets. The styles were continuous. Doubtless there was a drought, but 400 year old droughts that collapse society to nothing then bring them back to their previous form when there is rain do not happen. A shorter drought might have caused the political and social changes noted at this time but the gap in time is an artefact of chronology.
The excavation of Troy ought to be conclusive. It revealed nine main habitation levels designated by Wilhelm Dorpfeld, Schliemann’s assistant, from the Early Bronze Age (Troy I) to Roman times (Troy IX). Troy VIII had typical Greek ware from c 700 BC. Troy VII and VI both had Mycenaean pottery. Troy VII was short-lived and the houses were not grand, so Dorpfeld thought the grander, walled Troy VII city was that of the Trojan King Priam. The American C Blegen, in the interwar years, refined the seventh level into two sub-levels.
There was a problem. According to convention, the dark age should have been where Troy VII was—conventionally Troy VIIb at Troy was twelfth century but the next level, Troy VIII, was dated about 700 BC, respectively from Mycenaean and Archaic Greek pottery. Troy VIII Grey Minyan ware was obviously developed from local grey ware pots of the Mycenaean Troy VIIb of the same type as seventh to sixth century BC pots of north-western Turkey and Lesbos. A site abandoned for 300 or 400 years reverts to nature and leaves obvious signs of it, a 400 year sterile accumulation of waste from grass and scrub growing in humus and wind-blown dust, cut by wash gunnels. There is no such sign and no trace of any erosion that might have gotten rid of it. And the two levels at Troy display cultural continuity. The Archaic Greek period cannot have been so far removed from the Mycenaean period. There was just the poor short lived town. The site had not been abandoned through disaster, but nor did it last anything like 400 years. The two layers VIIb and VIII are unquestionably adjacent in the ground, and culturally from the artefacts, but in history are 400 years separated! After 28 years, Dörpfeld thought Troy VIII followed immediately Troy VII.
Blegen agreed layers VII and VIII were inseparable, but persuaded himself that the earlier layers had been contaminated with pottery from the seventh century, finding sherds of imported Greek seventh century pottery in the undisturbed Mycenaean sub-stratum of Troy VII. So, the earlier level had been contaminated with later material! It is an admission of poor method. Strata cannot contaminate themselves, and archaeological method can cope with holes being dug through strata by people living above. The simple and obvious fact is that there was no interruption between the levels, and only idiotic dogmatism makes honest scientists have to deny their own findings.
The great city of Troy seems to have been Troy VI, conventionally destroyed by an earthquake in 1300 BC. That was Schliemann’s view but its conventional date is too early for everybody! Scholars like star TV historian, Michael Wood, say it was well built and had fine towers. The Iliad mentions the horses of Troy, and volumes of horse bones were found in Troy VI. Many implements concerned with textiles suggest it was a major textile centre. Troy VI was a “great city,” as Blegen recognized. Michael Wood reports imported Mycenaean pottery and other imported goods throughout Troy VI. Such luxury imports are of such a quantity that trade of this extent implies a direct route between Mycenae and Troy, but trade from Mycenae ceased around 1250 BC on conventional chronology. Troy VIIa was small and shoddy, had a shantytown, but no imported luxuries. Its pots were mainly poor imitations of Myceanaean ware. Wood says the shantytown of Troy VIIa, with its locally made Mycenaean imitations, fell around 1180 BC. The design of Mycenaean tripod stands for vessels did not alter noticeably when they reappeared in Greece in the ninth century despite the 300 year gap. Lowering these dates by several hundred years needs examining.
Alan Montgomery [†]Alan Montgomery is a biblicist but one who wants to show that the conventional idea of the Exodus happening in the reign of Rameses II is absurd. Instead he wants to show that though in actual date it is about the same time in the thirteenth century, because Egyptian chronology is all wrong, it actually falls in the time of a conventionally dated much earlier pharaoh of the Middle Bronze Age. As a result, Alan has collected a lot of data to show that conventional dating is wrong. Though his aims are mistaken, there is nothing wrong with the data he collects, and here we use some of it. A search for Alan Montgomery will reveal his work. has noted that Iron II Minyan pottery at Troy does not sit directly over LB IIB Mycenaean pottery—Bronze Age and Iron Age potteries are mixed in the same stratum. At Delos, Mycenaean ivories were mixed in strata with eighth century geometric pottery. At Laconia, LH IIIB thirteenth century Mycenaean pottery was mixed with protogeometric sherds and succeeded by eighth century geometric. At Delphi, Samos and Pylos, Late Mycenaean (LH IIIC) and seventh century Geometric pottery occur together.
The Amarna correspondence was to Akhenaten (1350-1334 BC) from vassals and allies including letters from the Hittite King, Shuppiluliumas I (1357-1323 BC), who corresponded with Shalmaneser and Tukulti-Ninurta, kings of Assyria. Conventionally, these latter kings are dated 1273-1244 BC and 1243-1207 BC respectively, too late to have received the letters from the Hittite king, for which an 80 year adjustment is needed. Neither Assyrian nor Egyptian dates are certain at this time, Assyria being likely split into rival monarchies. Another Shuppiluliumas who reigned in conventional dates from 1217 to 1200 BC could have corresponded with Tukulti-Ninurta but not with Akhenaten or Shalmaneser. There were other Assyrian rulers with these names accurately dated in the ninth century, Tukulti-Ninurta II (890-884 BC) and Shalmaneser III (858-824 BC). In EA 155 from the king of Tyre, Abimilku had become a vassal of Salmaiati, who from Assyrian annals could only be Shalmaneser III. Confirmation seems to come from the king of Ugarit being Nikmaddu in the Amarna letters and Nikdime in Shalmaneser’s annals, essentially the same name. Shuppiluliumas is dated to match Akhenaten in the Egyptian chronology. If the Assyrian rulers in contact with the Hittite kings were Tukulti-Ninurta II and Shalmaneser III then the dates are seriously incoherent.
Van Soden recognizes that the El Amarna letters from Northern Syria show anachronistic Assyrianisms for the fourteenth century. There should have been no basis for Assyrianisms until the Assyrians began to rampage around conquering people after the beginning of the last millennium BC. In the ninth century, the city of Sumur of the Amarna letters could be Samaria, but not before.
Acceptance of silly dark ages when civization went to sleep for hundreds of years only to wake up and continue, like Sleeping Beauty, as if nothing had happened, requires that the laws of stratigraphy used to justify Egyptian chronology have to be abandoned around a dark age. Similarity in style and material does not mean items are contemporary. Adjacent strata with no intervening layer of scrub deposits cannot be considered to be adjacent in time. They might be 400 years apart! Skills or artistic styles that took centuries to learn could be forgotten for hundreds of years and applied like old masters with no relearning apparently needed! It is hard to believe that scholars are not banding together to sort out the whole mess, but most are deep in some narrow hole of their own and refuse to emerge to consider the whole picture.
The cause of the dark age is popularly famine, the Mycenaean drought, but a huge proportion of the population must have died in it for all activity to cease for 400 years. Then, it is impossible to imagine that civilization went into suspended animation for four centuries then aroused as it was, yet that is what happened, if the dark age is believed to be real. There was a widespread drought around 1200 BC dating it conventionally, but it caused huge movements of peoples, wars for resources and change. It is probably why the Dorians invaded the peninsula, and why the archipelago and island peoples moved out. It was not, in short quiescence but tumult that the drought seemed to cause, and the dark age remains a dating artefact. And surely a dark age would have been reported by contemporary or later chroniclers, yet classical Greek and Roman writers reported nothing of the sort, though it was recent history then. So, after the Mycenaean age, 400 years of strata have to serve for a supposed 800 years of history to fit the false Egyptian chronology. Archaeologists who did not want to lose their reputation had to insert the missing 400 years. Heinsohn, studying archaeological reports from most of the better known sites across Asia Minor, showed how archaeologists artificially increased the age of lower strata by inserting occupation gaps of many centuries to fit faulty chronology.
Archaeology, reasonably interpreted, suggests there could have been no such the Dark Ages. They are artefacts of the false Egyptian chronology, but no one will change because they have nothing better to replace what they have, and what they have is too easy for them to hang on to. The extension of chronology in Palestine allowed time for the Jewish myths of exodus and the Golden Age to be fitted in, and it so happened that having dones so, Moses gets quiet close in time to Akhenaten, the monotheistic Amarna pharaoh. Victorian historians had noticed and suggested that the captive Jews had influenced the pharaoh to be monotheistic. The reverse would not have occurred to them. Sigmund Freud took up the notion in his book Moses and Monotheism (1939).
The trouble is that many revisionists have their own axe to grind. Many of them want to revise dates to make the bible fit their own theories explaining it better. They will accept the largely mythical Jewish scriptures as valid data, and try to find periods in Egyptian history when the Exodus could have happened! Immanuel Velikovsky, another Jewish psychiatrist, aiming to defend the Jewish scriptures as genuine history, claimed Egypt’s ancient chronology was wrong. The scriptures were, of course, right, and it was because the Egyptians never seemed to mention anything of the Jewish scriptures, that Velikovsky thought the Egyptians dates did not tally properly. So, taking pseudo-mythology to extremes, he used his vast scholarship trying to prove the sacred bible to be preternaturally accurate by revising chronology. Unfortunately, in Worlds in Collision (1950), he formulated an absurd hypothesis that completely discredited him because he plainly did not understand anything about science, especially physics. His disciples followed him unquestioningly, as disciples are meant to, and like religious believers still lash out at everybody who refuses to believe their beliefs!
The Velikovsky hypothesis was that planets could and did move from one orbit to another and settle again into stable unwavering orbits in just a few decades while meanwhile skimming past each other and the earth, causing earthquakes and catastrophes, inspiring legends, dispensing manna on the Isrelites and so on, all explaining the bible whose authors had faithfully recorded it all. These revisionists have no better motives than the upholders of Egyptian chronology, which, as we have seen, is based on the dating of the invasion of the Pharaoh Shishak, mentioned in the reign of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, a few years after Solomon’s death. Shishak is no known pharaoh, but is assumed to be Shoshenq I, and this then is a fixed point in Egyptian dating. Both sides are incapable of building carefully and scientifically from what is known to what needs to be known, accepting that not everything is known!
