Mike: You wrote that I ought to learn historical method before I write on the web. I suggest you learn how to read carefully before you start criticizing.

(King) I gave you the name of the author who said it was a monument not a papyrus. I took the information from the author and if he is wrong, and you claim you know every TIP reference, I suggest you raise it with him. You can then come back to me with one of you proved wrong and I will change what is there.

(Medinet Habu) You are again trying to kill the messenger when you are directing your criticism at the source I quoted, but you evidently cannot understand when someone quotes sources. I clearly said that Velikowsky was considered a crank, but calling people names, even when you think they are ignorant, does not dispose of their arguments. Perhaps to say that the pylons are "identically the same" is over-egging the pudding, and I shall change it, but accepting that you are an expert Egyuptologist, you had better tell me how different temples a thousand years apart can be expected to be. If Velikowsky has made the elementary error you say, I should be glad to correct the page. I am not defending Velikowsky, but you will not have noticed that because you are too clever.

(Peleset) If this is true, you ought to tell a lot of Egyptologists who think they do.

(Rameses III) If I had doubts about you being an idiot, you finally settle them. I repeat I am not defending Velikowsky, but if you had read the synopsis of his arguments that I offered, you would have noticed that he says Rameses III is a throne name adopted by Nectanebo. So there is no such cycle. Nectanebo lived when he lived.

(C-14) Since you know such a lot, how do you explain this, in the next paragraph?

In 1979, at Tell el Daba in the Eastern Delta, M Bitak reported Rameses III remains immediately below the Ptolemaic strata, and in 1980, the linen wrapping of a mummy firmly dated to the reign of Setnakht, the Pharaoh who preceded Rameses III was C-14 dated to 345 BC +/- 75 years, according to a Canadian journal.

Is this too hard for you?

(Method) I repeat to you, that you first learn to read carefully, that you adopt a little humility before going out of your way to prove you are a dunce, and finally, in your own interest, learn it all before you submit and stand before the professors for your Viva Voce. They will make mincemeat out of you, unless, of course, the president is your father’s best friend.

Now, finally, if you are sure what you are criticizing and your arguments are not infantile, then I should be glad to hear them and will be willing to place them on the pages that are relevant.

Mike: (Peleset) Now you will have to explain this to me most carefully because everything I have read hitherto is that PRST and PLST are indistinguishable in Egyptian scripts because the symbol R is used for L. I have never understood anything other than this from several sources until now that you tell me it is wrong. In the Persian and Ptolemaic periods, I understand that the Persians were called PRS or PRSTT. The Canopus decree translates the latter as Persians.

The reliefs show wagonloads of supplies and even the soldiers’ wives following on. The Persians took their wives with them when they went to war. The Phoenicians from up the coast provided them with a navy. The headgear of the Philistines look like feathered head dresses. The Persian ones look the same but were apparently iron scales marked with feathered marks. The PLST were clean shaven but Persians under Darius wore beards, but later Persian soldiers were ordered to shave (except for the senior officers) so as not to offer a grip on their beards by the enemy.

(Tell el Daba) I hope you are not a practical archaeologist because your inclination to be facetious suggests to me you should not be allowed near any excavation. It can teach you nothing. You already know it. Doubtless you have a direct line to God. We do know what bedrock is. Can you distinguish a coprolith from a work of art?

I do not have access to Bitek’s report but any conscientious archaeologist can recognize 800 years of abandonment. It leaves its own mark, because time does not cease. If Bitek has not commented on the signs of a long period of abandonment in the ground, then not even you should assume it. Your explanation sounds like a post hoc rationalization of the proximity of the two layers, that in truth might show a proximity in time.

(C-14) So now you are telling me that every physicist in the world is an idiot but you can pronounce on physical methods of which you know nothing. If it is as bad as you, or your German source makes out, how is it possible to discover that the carbon date and the true date is not linear? Therre is a relationship, even though it is not a straight line, but you, clever one, say there is no relationship at all! The point of the article you began criticizing is that Egyptologists date things by guesswork and justify it by circular reasoning. You then come out and say that C-14 is useless. I suggest you get a job as a bus driver and leave the Egyptology to someone serious about it. If you want to stay in the field, you need to go back to school, my friend.

(Medinet Habu) I have no other reason here to dispute what you say. You are the expert, but your arguments are always far from foolproof. In conventional terms, the Ramessides after Rameses II reigned for 100 years and the Ptolemies for 300. Their styles remained unchanged over these periods? I repeat again that I am not defending Velikowsky, although I suspect he was cleverer than you are, but the utter lack of scientific rigour that so-called Egyptologists like you show. You simply dismiss what you do not like and stick to dates that were made before the hieroglyphs were even deciphered. Art historians know more. Fashion designers probably.

(Ramses III) Wallis Budge gives Nectanebo (Nekht-a-neb) as one of the Horus names of Rameses III. By throne name, I meant an honorific title like Caesar and Augustus and Ptolemy. The hypothesis is that the title Rameses was adopted after the fame of the last great Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, in the hope of emulating his success, but it was a long time afterwards.

(Ramses III=Nectanébo) What you say might be true if we have to follow the chronological sequence as it is presently set out, but Velikowsky rightly points out that the Ramessides from IV to X are nearly all shadowy figures with little monumental evidence for them, just filling in a conventional gap. Some of them were no more than Persian functionaries in Velikowsky’s idea.

(Aggressive) Aggressive you can be, but smug never. You are smug. The point of my three pages on dating is to highlight the issue that conventional dating is intended to fit the bible, and I use evidence provided by others. Mainly Velikowsky is not among it, but I cite him to show that a case can be made out for extremely serious misdating of some Egyptian kings, and Rameses III and IV are the main ones.

Your argument must be that Manetho’s list was right all along, yet it does not even mention Rameses III. He was arbitrarily assigned to the 20th dynasty before anyone knew anything about Egypt and it seems by some incredible luck or preternatural knowledge, his assignment was correct, because it has never since been challenged and the chronology of his sons have followed it down into the TIP which even Egyptologists--until they invented Kenneth Kitchen--agreed was a mess.

To a scientist like me, hard evidence not guesswork is needed. You disdain C-14, so you had better start working on dendrochronology, or something else, or have you got a reason for rejecting those too? My guess is that you Egyptologists disparage objective methods of dating because you are scared they will make you look as idiotic as you sound, if a systematic dating of Egyptian artifacts were undertaken. If you were really sure you were right you would welcome it fearlessly, in the certainty that it would prove you right. You blandly refuse it. We draw our own conclusions.

Whether you like it or not, the truth will eventually emerge, so you would be better off being on the side of science rather than amateurism and tomfoolery.

If you can make out a good case that conventional dating is right, or if you can refute by argument and not assertion and factiousness that what is on my pages is false, I should be glad to add what you say. I will add this correspondence anyway, and let people make up their own mind.

Mike: You wrote twice with interesting and comprehensive comments. First I want to remind you again that I am the messenger not the messiah. I sought to suggest that all was not as hunky-dory in Egyptian chronology as you make out, and reported the evidence provided by others. What interests you particularly seems to be the least important of it, namely Velikowsky’s attempt to identify Rameses III with Nectanebo. I offered this with no conviction of my own that 800 years could have been mislaid but that there are reasons to think that even such a large discrepancy could be argued, and was not impossible.

(Kitchen) What you give me above all is documentary evidence much of which has been carefully laid out by Kenneth Kitchen, a Christian fanatic, whose normally unstated agenda is to prove the infallibility of the bible. Documents are the easiest thing to forge and the bible is proof of it. Some prominent experts still believe that Moses was historical, and some even accept that Abraham was. If they can believe that characters of ANE mythology are historical after 2000 years of careful study, then they can be fooled by ancient wealthy families intent on setting up genealogical connexions that did not exist in reality, but were invented to puff some noble house or person. The genealogies of the bible were invented for a similar reason.

(Houses of Life) My guess is that Persian kings, from Cambyses on, deliberately interfered with the documents in the Houses of Life, just (Jewish History) as they did to Jewish history. They were intent on moulding religion to suit their imperial policies. That is why documents above all have to be carefully dated by the objective methods that you, at one stage utterly disparaged.

(Genealogical Chains) Much of what you say in your reply, I have to accept because you have the expertise and the sources, but interlocked chains have only to be wrong in one place to be wrong all together. Plainly you are like Kitchen, convinced that the links in the genealogical chains and the dating of the documents are all sound. I suggest there needs to be more work. Hammurabi was redated overnight by 400 years. Such a thing might not be possible in the TIP, but, until Kenneth Kitchen, it was classified as an IP because it was confused, but you and he now tell us with utter conviction that it no longer is. Perhaps you are right, but pride comes before a fall, and I remain unconvinced until I see not just odd C-14 dates here and there, when you archaeologists publish them because they match your preconceptions, but others that do not match, and I am led to believe that many C-14 dates are unpublished for that very reason. The one I quoted, you instantly disnmissed by saying the method can give any result at all. That means your ship of Akhenaton is not evidence at all, so ought not to be cited. Of course, I accept it as evidence, but I am aware like you that C-14 is fraught with problems and would like to see other determinations to validate or refute the original one. Dendrochronology might be better, but even that field has its crack-pots. Anyway, I cannot answer your detailed points, and so accept them, though I would like to know what someone more skeptical than you might say about them. I will comment in-line where I can.

(Peleset) I understood that, in the Canopus decree, TT was in fact added to PRS meaning Persian yielding peresetet, a word which matches its use in keftet and retenutet, all words used to describe lands or people.

(Ramses III) If the hypothesis under dicussion were true, then Herodotus could have known nothing about it. He was 100 years too early.

(Ramses III-XI) The point is, so far as I can tell, that rulers of Egypt in the late Persian period took on to themselves the titles of king. They might have been rebelious satraps or rebellious Egyptian nobles, or whatever, but they claimed royalty and altered the relevant documents to prove it. That is why dating of the documents, paper and inks, is so important to this analysis. Even C-14 ought to be able to distinguish between 1100 and 300 BC. The example that you disdained was in the fourth century. You dismissed it. Is that by science or astrology?

(C-14) I have referred above to this single example which is often quoted. I have a section on my pages devoted to C-14, which gives the calibration curve for C-14, so I do not need telling it is perfect, and rather you indicate that you have not read the pages too thouroughly before you launched against them. I write among other things:

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.

(Tell el Daba) Frederic, you are being ridiculous. You are doing what you strangely uncurious types always do to ignore what you do not like. You set up a straw man to knock over. Especially near a large city, earth could have been removed for countless reasons. It could even have been eroded away naturally. The point is that these are exceptions. If the earth has been left to the elements for 800 years, and there is no reason to suspect any peculiar influence going on, then there should be an 800 year deep layer of windblown sand, growth of scrub, flood layers or whatever, depending upon the situation. 800 years, in short, leaves its mark, just as occupation does. If you are telling me that the 800 year layer is there in the earth proving that Ptolemy is not laying immediately above Rameses, then fine. I accept what you say. What I read was that the two layers, Ptolemy and Rameses were adjacent! If they were, it has to be explained, because the 800 years is absent!

(Ramses III) Now you get into detail that gives you the advantage. My general argument, I have given above. In particular, are the documents dated? Can deliberate self-glorification (forgery, if you like) be left out? Are these precise relationships like ’great-grandson’ actually stated or are they deduced? You are a profession of people that like circular reasoning. You date pottery from Egypt, then before long you are dating Egypt from the pottery. The same can happen with relationships unless objective methods can provide anchors.

(Functionaries) Again I cannot dispute any of this and do not want to. Others might be able to. What I have done is put on one of my pages an example of the functionary lists that you speak of. The list is of Southern Viziers between 21 and 25 dynasties, beginning with Herihor. I comment:

With some accepted overlap, the Pharaohs reigned 18 years on average while the viziers held office typically for 12 years, but Amenhirpamesha was in office for 80 years! Is this true? The figures suggest there is something wrong with the lists.

(Medinet Habu) If there is no dissent on what you say, it seems a good argument. Egypt was indeed conservative, but does that count out deliberate tampering? People read Greek and say it is ancient because it is Dorian, but Dorian was used deliberately to confer an impression of antiquity. We do the same today by using seventeenth century English for the same reasons. Perhaps you do the same in France. But no scholar seems to think ancient people understood this trick. If Persian period upstarts wanted to give themselves a history, can deliberate fraud be ruled out? It has been proved to have happened since, so why not then? We are returning to the point of the pages you began with.

(Bible) Quite. The Jewish bible was a deliberate invention of Darius to control the people of the province of Abarnahara. Did the same happen in Egypt?

(Research) Your English here is not quite right, though it is good on the whole. I think you mean you do not just believe but research the evidence first. That is the scientific approach, but you have no right just to dismiss what you do not like. It is the anomalies that reveal new information, not confirmatory evidence. Anomalies in natural science are always examined, and often lead to new facts or theories. Not in Egyptology though. They are brushed underneath the carpet.

(God) Well, my saying that to you might have peeved you, but you can hardly turn it back on me. I do not believe in God and I do believe in scientific method, honestly used, as the means to discovery.

(Other Problems) Generally the gaps generated are meant to be closed up by lowering the older dates. If there were enough evidence like the date of the Nefertiti boat, then I agree, it would not be possible, but the very point I am making is that conventional dating is not convincing because it is mainly intuitive with no hard anchor dates. Physical methods, not just odd ones here and there published because they uphold convention when others are discarded unpublished, but adequately and systematically done, would settle the matter, but you and your profession already know, you refuse to examine anomalies, you dismiss dates you do not like and live in a smug little cocoon. Undertake to date the different items, using experts to collect samples properly and conduct parallel datings in different labs. Use dedrochronology as soon as it becomes possible and where suitable pieces of wood of known provenance exist. You do not do it. You say it is a waste of money and time because you already know!

(Sem-priests) You are speaking above my head again, so I cannot dispute your evidence. Whenever the temple was built and began to operate, it had priests. Can you be certain you have identified them properly, or are you again making unwarranted assumptions or circular arguments. If you are right, I agree with you, but you have only refuted Velikowsky, not the argument about dating in general.

(TIP) If this is true you are right. The hypothesis is that the Ramessides were all misdated beginning with the misdating of Rameses III. The strength of your conventional argument is therefore to what extent these kings are indisputably linked with their successors and predecessors. If Rameses III has adopted the old name of a great Pharaoh to magnify himself, then altered records to show he is a son (descendent, perhaps) of the great man, would such manipulation be readily visible?

(Hieroglyphs) Well, I am happy top leave that to you. There are only a limited number of things anyone can do in a lifetime, and to learn hieroglyphs I would be depending upon the decisions of previous scholars, so would be learning by convention. I just cited the source I had, which was Velikowsky’s source.

Everything you say shows that you like the comfort of certainty about you, whereas the scientist loves uncertainty because that is where truth lies. It means that all endeavour must be made to establish definite facts so that the indefinite ones can be followed to lead us to new knowledge. It does not mean that the status quo should be upheld by fudging inexplicable discrepancies.

Give me more hard evidence, Frederic. What are you afraid of?

Mike: My point all along has been that Egyptology is unscientific and you prove it in your own words. I cannot see why scientific method does not apply to Egyptology, except that Egyptologists do not want to apply it. Scientific method has to begin with skepticism, but you are smug. You are a believer. You have no hypothesis to defend because there are no more hypotheses to be made in Egfyptology. It is all clearly laid out. All that remains is to tidy up a little. The physicists at the end of the nineteenth century were the same, but in a few years their world fell apart with astounding discoveries. Astounding discovereies cannot be made in Egyptology because it is all already known, and what is known is jealously defended by biblicists or their dupes who want to preserve a place in chronology for Joshua, David and Solomon. The identity of Shishak and Shoshenq is essential to this, and so Egyptian dates cannot be changed, even though it has left chronology all over Europe and the near east full of inexplicable holes.

It is also unscientific because you deride physical methods, which are admittedly not free of problems, but have the advantage of not being dependent on the Egyptologists’ culture. That is why you refuse to use them, not because they are not fully accurate.

(Jewish History) You must read my pages, but it is impossible for any open minded person not to conclude that the Persians made the Jewish religion, simply from a knowledge of accepted Jewish and Persian history.

(Cartouches) Cartouches can be forged. I saw a documentary the other day that made out that Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb years before he admitted it, and had been robbing it for all those years for his patron Carnaervon. He hid it by plastering up his entrance and painting it himself in Egyptian style. He admitted that he had been into the tomb before the official opening, but that was supposedly simply to make sure it had something in it so that the opening would be a success, so the main access had also been fraudulently opened and resealed. No Egyptologists detected the fraud until recently, even though they had noted that the quality of the murals were sub-standard. C-14 dating on any carbon in the pigments would have settled the matter. Indeed, unless Carter took care only to use pigments available in antiquity, chemical or neutron activation analysis would have proved they were modern. A great british historian was fooled a few decades ago into thinking forged diaries purportedly by Hitler were real. Frederic, you are too uncurious, you are a believer, you are not a scientist, you are not skeptical, you will discover nothing.

(Genealogies) Doubtless you are right, and if you are wrong I could not show it. I can only reiterate, that you are a harmonizer not a puzzle solver. I cannot believe that there are no major puzzles left in Egyptian history, but you cannot see any. So there cannot be any! I do not believe it, and I would like you and your kind to address the large number of irregularities in the dates of artifacts all over tha place that are swept into dusty drawers in museum basements to keep your world intact.

(Rameses III) I try to argue in general but you keep coming back to what you think is safe ground, and probably is, but you are not being curious again. Since you keep making me defend Velikowsky, all I can do is say what he does. That Arsames had an admistrator of his Egyptian estates in his large satrapy, and the man was called Nekht-hor-heb. Nekht-hor-heb was therefore an important man in Egypt even though he was merely a functionary to Arsames. Arsames addressed him habitually as just Nekht-hor, but a figure studied by Abbe Tresson identified the officer of Arsames as Nekht-hor-heb. The same statuette refers to the king of the north presumably the Persian king, Darius. Persian kings after Darius the Great, I understood had no cartouche but were simply called the king of the north on inscriptions. Velikowsky identifies this man as Nectanebo II.

If Velikowsky’s arguments interest you, you should read them for yourself. I only have what I have, a popular book, but I take it as showing that the Egyptian documents that you say are now well sorted out, do not sound to be according to Velikowsky, and what is missing are reliable anchor dates. Without them, Egyptological argumentation looks like the writhing of a falling cat. It seems to land on its feet eventually, but really has broken its legs.

(Functionaries) Now you deny that the documents are actually complete: “The list are only work of the egyptologists with the documents… etc ” Despite the gaps in the documentation, they make a complete enough story, you say, but we have gaps in history that are quite beyond the bounds of reason, kept there without a murmur to preserve a scheme of dating that would close them if it were adjusted properly. No one except in fairy tales fall asleep for 300 years without noticing. That is what we are expected to believe the Greeks and others did so that Egyptian dates can be preserved.

(Research) “Historical and Natural science are not the same. Our doc is poorer and we can not have first an hypothesis and confront it to the doc, because with the few doc we have you coul always do them saying what you want.” Now there is an admission. Documents are fraught with danger, especially in the context in which you work. History was always being re-written, and I maintain again, that my guess is that the Persians were major re-writers of history to suit themselves, and they created a fashion for it that continued until the present day. The Persians had a ministry of religion. What was it for? All of you historians have followed the biblicists of the nineteenth century in claiming it was some sort of religious charity to preserve impoverished religions in states conquered by the Persians. That is because it suits the Jewish ideology of the return, but it is puerile. The Persians were not that stupid. They preserved religions in the form that suited their imperial administration. That means they changed the religions to suit themselves, under the pretence or restoring them. Judaism is the proof. It was not Judaism until the Persians made it so. It was, in fact, Canaanite religion.

(Sem Priests) You would have to raise all of this with fellow professionals like David Rohl, who has a website of his own.

(Hieroglyphs) Either way, I depend on you people. Perhaps, If I were 18 again, I would chose to do it.

You are right. I do not doubt your command of the sources, and other skills that you have mentioned such as reading the hieroglyphs and hieratic scripts, while I only have a hypothesis. But in a sense you hit on the very point. Your approach to the sources is utterly uncritical. You wrote:

It is not real to say that Kitchen is a Christian fanatic, and even if his opinion does not bear in his work it seems. The egyptian genealogies that I speak aren’t forgery because they are contemporary documents, not to puff some n oble house but to record them when they were in offices.

Kitchen is a Christian and writes like a fanatic, but let us pass him by. You are certain that the documents are not forgeries, yet the royalty of the time were noted for magnifying their achievements, genealogies were regularly forged, not just in Egypt but almost everywhere, to give a spurious descent often from a god to commoners. The Jewish scriptures are full of them and even Jesus has two different ones. The Greeks like Alexander were the same. Not, though, in Egypt, you say. You did however have to concede in the face of evidence that the lists are incomplete and even seemed to suggest that they were very incomplete because a lot more must still rest in the ground to be discovered. There is, though, no gap or hole that spoils the lines of descent you offer.

I am putting this on the page, although it might need a page of its own if it goes on. If you wish, copy it to Rohl, for his comments. I do not know him, but he is an Egyptologist who thinks the dates are not right. He will be able to talk to you on your own level regarding the texts. Let me know if you do.