Judaism
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History I.1
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
Historical Dating
Though schoolbooks and popular history gives the impression that historians and archaeologists know the historical record like the backs of their hands, the truth is that dating historical events and archaeological finds is still the hardest part of writing history and is far from perfect. It is made particularly difficult in the Near East because the biblicists, so-called historians and archaeologists that spend more time with their noses in the Jewish scriptures than honestly seeking the truth, have decided already on the events that they expect to find and when they will find them. The result is that the whole of the many links in archaeology between different near eastern sites are forced into the biblical jug. That, of course, would offer no problems, if the biblical jug had the correct shape. It has not.
Careful archaeology of a site can reveal the relative order of events on that site and therefore yield a relative chronology. But it can only be linked to an absolute chronology when something on the site can be tied to an event of known absolute date. Broadly, good absolute dates come from the well documented times of recent history and ancient history back to about the eighth century BC in the Near East, using Assyrian records.
Assyrian chronology is the most solidly established of any in the ANE.Prof John E Morby, from The Cambridge Ancient History
Regrettably, Assyrian chronology was not developed until the 1940s, after Egyptian chronology had been set in stone. When a site can be dated by reference to particular Assyrian kings or officials, the Egyptian dates can be ignored, and artefacts on the site can be best dated. The same artefacts found elsewhere can then also be firmly dated. Objects dated in this way are often found to be two or three centuries out younger than the dates that the biblicists have already given them! The biblicists then claim they are right because they have the authority of God, through the bible, on their side, and, even more important, they have the authority of the most widely accepted chronology of ancient time—that of Egypt.
The biblicists date objects by reference to the reigns of pharaohs, and even the Assyrian lists are dated with respect to pharaohs for the kings of Assyria before about the ninth century, when Assyrian records begin to get confused. Assyriologists fudged by offering three variant schemes, the high, middle and low schemes, and, for example, Hammurabi is conventionally dated 1792-1750 BC on the basis of the middle scheme, artefacts dating to Hammurabi having been found in tombs in Byblos alongside tombs of the twelfth dynasty in Egypt 1991-1778 BC, and so this scheme suits Egyptologists. But some give Hammurabi an ultra low date of 1696-1654 BC because Old Babylonian dynasty cylinder seals have been found at Nuzi and Arrapha in Mesopotamia in strata as late as the fifteenth century.
Ancient records often tail into mythology rather than sticking to history. The later Assyrians had an excellent record (lim-mu lists) based on officials who held office each year so that the year could be dated by their name (eponymy). The reliable lists of eponyms are from 911 to the end of the reign of Ashurbanipal (627 BC). The lists of kings gave a grander framework for the dating of the lesser officials so that a complete record exists back to the start of the neo-Assyrian empire. A solar eclipse mentioned in the list of eponyms of the reign of Ashur-dan III dates his tenth year to 763 BC, the earliest absolute date. The chronology of ancient Egypt rests on a host of unproven assumptions. That the literary sources of the anchor dates of Egyptian chronology are late and fragmentary does not help—the conquest of Thebes by the Assyrians in 664 BC begins the reliable dating of Egypt. Before Taharqa (690 BC), it is unreliable, whatever the experts claim.
Before then, the tendency for people, especially newly successful people, to exaggerate their claims to fame by magnifying their history prevailed. Besides that, Assyria seems sure to have split into lesser kingdoms in a federation in the early part of the first millennium BC and yet the separate kings are all listed consecutively instead of concurrently. We do not know which kings overlapped, and yet the length of Assyrian history is thereby extended by an unknown number of years. The Babylonian king Adad-shuma-usur (1216-1187 BC) addressed a letter to two kings of Assyria! If four kingdoms co-existed for 100 years then the history of Assyria is extended by 300 years. Such problems lead to spurious “dark ages” when the culture and the activity of a nation disappears from the documentary and archaeological record.
Von Soden (The Ancient Orient ) confirms that the kings of Old Babylon and Assyria were simply listed even when they ruled simultaneously. It was just that there was no easy way of doing anything clearer. Uncertainties like this give the Assyriologist a choice of chronologies varying by an unknown amount, guessed at 150 years at the time of Hammurabi, and longer before. The low chronology is von Soden’s choice, matching best the fate of the Hittite kingdom, and putting the reigns of Yahdam-Lim and Zimri-Lim of Mari after the Egyptian twelfth dynasty. The Mari texts do not mention Egypt, so it seems inconceivable that they could have been written during the powerful twelfth dynasty. The chaotic second intermediate period followed. The outcome is that about 50 years should be taken off the reigns of kings like Shulgi of the third dynasty of Ur, compared with the standards of the Cambridge Ancient History.
Thus the earlier Assyrian kings are dated by reference to the Egyptian chronology using diplomatic correspondence or more generally monumental inscriptions that describe battles, naming the enemy king. Some of the links are not so direct, being based on the discovery of mutual references in a third place. Discoveries in Crete of a mutual reference to Hammurabi and the Egyptian Middle Kingdom led to a revision of the dates of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, from 2400 to 1792 BC, an adjustment bigger than the length of the Amorite dynasty of which Hammurabi was a part. Other changes have been more gross still. Sargon of Agade is reassigned from 3800 BC to 2300 BC. The early pharaohs have been reassigned from about 5000 BC to about 3000 BC.
Such large adjustments cannot be expected to happen continually. We ought to be converging towards the correct dates as more information is discovered, but biblicists and Egyptologists deliberately block the process with their insistence that all possible adjustments have already been made. Since the Egyptian chronology is the yardstick for Ancient Near Eastern dating, certainly before the first millennium and to some extent in the first part even of the first millennium, what is its basis, for being so widely accepted?
Egyptian Chronology
The Egyptians had no fixed date from which others were measured, like the supposed date of the foundation of Rome, or the supposed date of the birth of Christ. Each pharaoh recorded dates within his reign from his accession, but, if the date when the reign started is not known, the chronology of each reign is of limited value. Dead kings do not erect monuments to commemorate their death. Sometimes a son or successor will, but they are not common. A monument erected by a king boasting of his exploits can help to sequence the reign when they can be identified with known events.
Precise dates of death and accession might still not be known even though the kings can be placed in relative order, so chronology is still not absolute. The process is also complicated when a king rules with his son as a regent, a practice that was not unusual because it helped train the younger monarch. The son might record his reign from the time he shared the throne with his father or from the time he became the sole monarch. Sometimes a young prince sharing the throne with his father might die before the father, yet he will be recorded as having been a ruler.
Dynastic quarrels and splits can lead to rival dynasties, each recording its own dates, yet both will be listed as having ruled, and will appear in king lists as if they were consecutive. Later, historians will be inclined to take the lists as truly representative, knowing no better. Sometimes the order of dynasties will be unclear, and cannot be resolved without external references. Even these might not help when pharaohs have the same name.
The ancient authors of the king lists cannot be assumed to have been reliable. National or dynastic pride led to faithful scribes falsely extending the history of the nation or dynasty. Kenneth Kitchen has observed that Kapes, the wife of Shoshenq I, died 74 years after her husband. She lived longer than her great-grandson Osorkon II! Alan Montgomery notes that this is barely credible even if she were much younger than her husband, and a likelier explanation is that someone’s reigns are much too long. Scribes also might use legendary sources to extend the king lists backwards in time, yet leave out unpopular monarchs. The Babylonian historian under the Greek Seleucid kings, Berosus, wrote the history of Babylon on a scale that went back 36,000 years. Plato wrote the story of Atlantis to suggest that Athens was a world power 11,000 years before.
Manetho
Chronology revisionists, like John Crowe, unquestioningly accepting the false antiquity of the bible, seem to think ancient kings wanted to have an ancient history because the Jews had. In fact, the Jews were a young race given a pseudo-history to match those of their neighbours. The Ptolemies, who supported the Jewish temple state, supposedly asked the Jewish priests for their holy books to translate into Greek, and Egyptian scholars were assigned to help. The outcome was the Septuagint. Crowe thinks the only history that long predated the Septuagint in Egypt and Greece was the “OT written by the Hebrews”. They have no idea, other than what the Jewish scriptures claim, how long they predated the Septuagint. No one knew anything about any Jewish scriptures until the publication of the Septuagint, and the evidence therefore is that the Septuagint is the first time the Jewish scriptures ever saw the light of day. Herodotus had never heard of them, despite his thorough examination of everything to do with the world at the time of the Persian wars with the Greeks. If they existed before the Septuagint, the scriptures were most likely written by the Persians about Herodotus’s time, and Egyptian slavery referred therein was Egyptian colonization of Palestine.
The only Egyptian event that has any resemblance with the exodus is the expulsion of the Asian rulers of Egypt called the Hyksos, and this is surely the basis of the biblical myth. Egyptians also expelled lepers, and some works contemporary with the Septuagint say the Jews were expelled lepers, with Moses their leader. However, leper is a derogatory word as well as a description of someone with a frightful illness and was so used, just as spastic has been distatefully used in more modern times. The Egyptians could expel lepers who were undesirable, and thus called lepers, as well as people who were undesirable because they had leprosy. The same confusion occurs in the New Testament. Jesus cured lepers, but did he cure them of leprosy or of being undesirable as apostates? The answer is the latter, but Christians prefer the former, the myth, as they always do.
Among those involved in the Septuagint project seems to have been Manetho, a priest and scribe of Heliopolis, who flourished under Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 BC), and wrote a history of the Egyptians, the Aegyptiaca. There seems little doubt that Egyptian priests like Manetho under the Ptolemies actually wrote the myth of Moses based on the expulsion of the Hyksos when the Septuagint was published. Crowe is quite unable to think objectively, but thinks like a believer in the sacred texts.
The rivals of the Egyptian Greeks were the Syrian Greeks, the Seleucids, whose king was Antiochus II, and he too commissioned a history of Babylon, the Chaldaika, compiled by Berosus, a priest of Belus. This history is grossly wrong and ignored as myth by modern historians, but the histories of Manetho, which served the same purpose for the Egyptian kings, were accepted by modern scholars as the basis of Egyptian history and dating, and, of course, the contemporary histories of the Jews are accepted as having been written by God! The works of Berosus and Manetho expressed the rivalry between Ptolemy and Antiochus, each seeking to proclaim their civilisation the most ancient. The order of Egyptian kings and the basis of Egyptian chronology is still to this day taken from the Ptolemaic—third century BC—historian of Egypt, Manetho! Yet, as Manetho was the rival of Berosus, he will have done the same sort of thing even if less flamboyantly. He wanted to prove the kingdom of the Ptolemies was superior to Greece or Babylon.
Eratosthenes (c 275-194 BC), head of the great library of Alexandria some decades after Manetho, derived a date for the Trojan War of c 1190 BC, because 17 Spartan kings had reigned successively from the return of the Heraclidae to Thermopylae, and each had reigned almost forty years on average! Greek aristocrats, who traced their familes back to the Trojan War, thought the war had ended after 900 BC, about three generations before the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. The contrary views were rationalized, according to Pausanias, by the contrivance of having the games starting twice, 400 years apart, the basis of the later notion of the dark age.
Isaac Newton showed that Eratosthenes, Manetho and Berosus all exaggerated dates. The Trojan war was about 900 BC, not 1200 BC. There was no Greek dark age. Genealogies of several rulers from the Trojan War up to the classical period of ancient Greece fully account for the period with no break.
The original works of both Manetho and Berosus are now lost, but several synopses of Manetho’s list of kings have been preserved centuries later by Josephus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius and Syncellus, and they differ significantly. All of these except Josephus were Christians, yet even Eusebius had warned that Manetho’s king lists were not a single sequence, some of his dynasties being concurrent. It is impossible to believe that Manetho had a faultless list of Egyptian rulers quite apart from the errors introduced by the bias and errors of copyists. Manetho did not even know the identity of the pharaoh who expelled the Hyksos. Nor did the author of the biblical exodus which was certainly meant to be the same event. Egyptian texts found some 50 years ago name him as Ahmose, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, and describe the war against the Hyksos that led to their expulsion. But Manetho as quoted by Josephus thought this was achieved by “Tethmosis”, elsewhere called “Misphragmuthosis”, or Tuthmoses III.
Did he get this wrong because the temple records were so poor, because he simply did not know and was just guessing, or because he was deliberately trying to mislead his readers. Did Egyptians have complete and continuous records of all their kings? Removing temple records from conquered countries was a common practice of suzerains. In the century before Manetho complied his history of Egypt, the ancient Egyptian temple records were taken away by the Persian king Artaxerxes III Ochus, when he re-conquered Egypt after defeating a pharaoh Nectanebos, c 340 BC, according to both Manetho and Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus says these records were returned to Egypt on payment of a large bribe. We have no idea what other conquerors like the Hyksos, the Assyrians and the Babylonians did, but Egyptian records were probably destroyed during the Hyksos era, and perhaps when Assyrians smashed temples and tombs looking for booty.
What is also vitally important and is never considered is that the Persians were fond of interfering in the records of the countries they conquered in the interest of their foreign policy. Egyptian records were rationalized by Cambyses and then by Darius II. Cambyses removed Egyptian temple records when the Persians first conquered Egypt in 525 BC. Who knows whether they were returned, but Darius spent a long time helping the Egyptians codify their laws and archives, and perhaps his entrée to do this was a promise to return the books taken by Cambysis. What is more important is that the codification was almost certain to have been an alteration. The Persians will have been changing things to suit their own administration. Whatever Manetho had was unlikely to have been complete or reliable. Moreover, the genealogical papyri carefully pondered by scholars like Kitchen can hardly be assumed to have been unadulterated. Genealogy was important legally, as the long genealogies in Nehemiah and Ezra show. Kings and nobles will have made sure they showed what they wanted to be shown, and so too would the Persian conquerers.
Isaac Newton complained that Manetho listed kings in the wrong order, corrupted their names, sometimes repeating them again and again under different names, and he included as kings great men, viceroys or secretaries of state, or some who were only relatives of the king. Manetho also stretched out into successive dynasties for the whole of Egypt some contemporary local kings whose domains never extended beyond a single city. No one will deny that Egypt began as many small city states in the delta and up the Nile. Newton believed that Manetho’s kings reigned in several parts in earlier times when Egypt was divided up into several small kingdoms. Priests collected together the king lists of the most important cities and set them in succession to give a spurious antiquity to the country. The diversity of Egyptians gods is accepted as a sign of this multiplicity of small kingdoms, but Egyptologists have convinced themselves that these were all united by the time written history began. Many of Manetho’s kings will have been concurrently kings of small kingdoms.
The practice of separating pharaohs into dynasties was Manetho’s and is still used. The best known dynasties, from their own copious records, are the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, and they discredit Manetho fully. Yet even though some dynasties have left no noticeable trace, they are still listed because Manetho listed them. The seventh to tenth dynasties are poorly documented and have left little trace on the ground but are still faithfully reproduced from Manetho. They stand for 34 pharaohs over a supposed period of 200 years. Eusebius gives 49 years for the twenty second dynasty which now has 234 (946-712 BC)! Perhaps Eusebius had tried to eliminate what he considered spurious kings, because Julius Africanus lists over 500 kings while Eusebius lists less than 400 in a slightly shorter time. That might not be so bad, if the names they present can be identified with pharaohs known from other sources but often they cannot. Flinders Petrie took no notice and dated the first dynasty before 5000 BC because he assumed Manetho’s kings reigned solely and consecutively over all of Egypt.
Manetho’s figures for length of reign are scarcely bothered with by Egyptologists, they are considered so unreliable, yet the lists themselves are taken on trust. Rameses III left a rich corpus of monuments, so he is well known, but does not appear in Manetho, or did under an unrecognisable name. Africanus and Eusebius did not give any names for the twentieth dynasty, and so Rameses III was assigned to it as filling a gap and being in a suitable place after Rameses II. Yet, the list Georgius Syncellus, a Byzantine monk, made from Manetho, did include the names of the twentieth dynasty. Rameses III was not among them! He could have been a pharaoh any time from the twentieth dynasty on, and much suggests that he is a late king, but he now is a fixture in the twentieth and the succession of later Ramesides follow him.
The dates of the dynasties were also decided long before any significant archaeology had been done in Egypt, and even before the hieroglyphs had been deciphered by Champollion. The latter depended on the Rosetta stone found by Napoleon’s army in Egypt in 1799 AD. It was written in three scripts including Greek and allowed Champillion to decipher the hieroglyphs. Another three-scripted document, the Canopus Degree, vindicated Champillion in 1866 AD. Without the benefit of these discoveries, already in 1819 AD, the Scot, J C Pritchard dated the reign of Rameses III to 1147 BC, apparently as an educated guess because no justification of it has ever been presented. In 1841, Rosselini arbitrarily changed this to 1477 BC, and even Champillion’s brother in 1839 AD dated this pharaoh at 1279 BC, again with no apparent reason.
Oddly, when the hieroglyphs of the temple of Medinet Habu, attributed to Rameses III, were read, they showed that the pharaoh had fought the Peleset, or Philistines, and this fitted in with the period of the Exodus and Conquest of the scriptures. These therefore are dates the biblicists do not want to lose.
The Sothic Cycle
Sothic Dating was added to Egyptological pseudo-science though there was never any evidence for its use in Egypt. John Crowe cites an assistant curator from the Egyptology Department of the British Museum as admitting cynically that Sothic dates are still cited as evidence of conventional dates because they fit, though Sothic dating such as that of the Ebers Papyrus Sothic date in the early eighteenth dynasty, is discredited. Crowe calls it circular reasoning, but it is simply fraud, and utterly unscientific. These people are not, of course, scientists, in the main.
The Egyptian year was 365 days consisting of 360 days plus 5 intercalated holy days for the birthdays of the gods. The story is that the priests wanted to stick to this length of year even though it was short by approximately ¼ day, the reason why we intercalate a leap year every fourth year. Now the river Nile flooded regularly at a particular time of the year that was considered the start of the civic year. Yet because the calendar was out, the celebrations held, when the Nile flooded, slipped back each year, eventually travelling round the seasons until they coincided once more with the flooding of the Nile. The civic and holy years were hardly ever in synchronization.
At a rate of loss of ¼ day every year it took 4 x 365 = 1460 years for it to happen. This came to be called the Sothic year because its progress was judged astronomically by the heliacal rising of the Dog Star (Sirius) that the Egyptians called Sothis. A heliacal rising is when a star rises just before the sun, and so is briefly seen before the sun’s brightness expunges it. Every fourth year the heliacal rising of Sirius slipped by a day from the Inundation Festival, so the number of years into a Sothic cycle of 1460 years can be calculated for any year that someone mentions the date of the heliacal rising of Sothis. It only remains to know when a Sothic cycle begins to have an absolute dating system.
It happens that a Sothic cycle is said to have ended in 139 AD, and so it must have started in 1322 BC, 1460 years before. Another manuscript puts the start of a Sothic cycle in the reign of a pharaoh Menophres. Identifying a Pharaoh with this name that coincided with one of the possible beginnings of the Sothic cycles could give us an anchor for Egyptian chronology. The scholars decided this pharaoh was Rameses I whose throne name was Men-Pehty-Re, and who, fortunately, only reigned for one year, so there was absolutely no doubt for Egyptologists (who are impressed by simple calculations and take them to give the stamp of scientific authority to their work) that Rameses I reigned in 1322 BC.
Another reference to the rising of the Dog Star gave a date in the seventh year of a pharaoh thought to have been Sewosret III in the Middle kingdom, who was therefore dated 1878 BC. The order of the other kings of the twelfth dynasty could therefore be inserted into the chronology. Lunar calculations based on the New Moon ceremonies allow a few choices of dates for Thutmose III and Rameses II, and the most appropriate ones are agreed by the scholars—1504 BC or 1479 BC for Thutmose III and 1290 BC or 1279 BC for Rameses II.
Peter James (Centuries of Darkness, London 1991) adds that in respect of these two key references to the rising of the star Sothis, that provide the lynchpins for the conventional chronology of the Egyptian Middle and New Kingdoms respectively, “have been scotched.” Egyptologist W Helck (1989) pointed out that the Ebers Papyrus, which supposedly provides the Sothic fixed point (traditionally 1517 BC) for the New Kingdom, does not contain a calendar date. L Rose (1994) has shown that the Middle Kingdom fixed point (traditionally 1872 BC) from the Illahun Papyri faces the problem that the lunar data in it cannot fit a date in the nineteenth century BC.
Though no trace of Sothic Dating by Egyptians is known, it was accepted by J H Breasted in Ancient Records of Egypt 1906 AD, and has remained unchallenged until recently. The power of the Sothic calculations depends on the authority of two writers. There is no reason for us to think they were intrinsically unreliable people themselves, but they obviously had sources and we do not know the quality of the sources. They might have been by unreliable people or they might have had copying errors.
On top of this, the identity of Menophres is far from certain. Menophres could be a Greek attempt at transliterating Men-Nof-Re, the Egyptian city of Memphis, where the priests probably made their astronomical observations. The original source or someone later in its transmission might have mistaken the name of the city where Sothis was observed for the name of the pharaoh when the cycle began. The basis of the identification of the start of the cycle with some particular pharaoh is therefore baseless!
Even if Menophres is a pharaoh, there are others who could have been identified as Menophres besides Rameses I. The choice is arbitrary. What if it was Mer-Nefer-Re or Mer-Ne-Ptah? The dishonesty of the method is proved in either case because they are rejected as respectively too early and too late. So, it is not an objective or absolute method of dating because it depends upon the presuppositions of the experts, and they are based on Manetho’s inadequate lists. In fact, the ruler, Merneferre, listed in the SIP at 1714-1700 BC, dated by the Sothic method as Menophres ruling in 1321 BC, cuts a neat 400 spurious years from Egyptian chronology, immediately closing gaps and pushing the successful dynasties into classical times. It also pushes the expulsoion of the Hyksos to around 1200 BC, making the exodus myth much more likely to be an expression of the expulsion of the Hyksos. The foundation of Samaria will have happened when the empire of Rameses II faded after his death, and Omri began a kingdom.
Some Egyptologists claim that confirmation of the Sothic Cycle and conventional chronology is a graffito at Deir el-Medina in Western Thebes. It records that workmen saw the Nile inundation at that time and noted its date. It was in the reign of Merenptah (1213-1203 BC), and the season was in phase, showing the Sothic Cycle was near its beginning. It was supposed to have started in 1321 BC. A Merneptah date of c 900 BC would accord with the founding of Samaria by Omri, but would mean the supposed Sothic Cycle was out of phase.
The Theban Graffito is not at Deir el-Medina but overlooks the Valley of the Kings. It is among many crude hieroglyphic texts carved by workmen. David Rohl explains that, in fact, there are two conflicting readings of the date caused by the poor quality of the inscription. Four vertical strokes denote the years and months of the inscription, but careful examination suggests they do not read Year 1 month 3, but Year 2 month 2, an error that arises merely because long separated stokes stand for years and short close ones for months. The correct reading is however confirmed by the month sign appearing only over the short two strokes. The date is therefore Year 2, Month 2 of Merneptah, not Year 1, Month 3. The original interpretation of this script was 2:2 not 1:3, but this reading was dismissed precisely because it did not fit in with the then well held theory of the Sothic cycle. A hundred years later the wrong reading is taken to prove Sothic chronology!
A Nile flood beginning one month earlier (in month 2 not month 3 of Akhet) stands for a 120-year shift in the reign of the king. So far this could be acceptable since Merenptah was 100 years after the start of the Sothic cycle, but besides this the original translators apparently deliberately took a new meaning for the verb meaning to fall, meaning in the context of a flood, the fall in the level of the water. “The great flood began to recede,” is the proper reading, not “return.”
Even as an informal record, this graffito is unusual because the Egyptians put no importance on the start of the flood (as long as it did!) but on when it began to recede. They always recorded the highest level of the flood each year. From then on the flood was receding, and the workers, who were also peasant farmers, could plan the coming planting season. If the graffito recorded the fall away of the flood, not its beginning, it is another month later than the original Sothic interpretation allowed, the extent of the inundation being about a month. The Sothic dating method is flimsy and discredited, but accepting it for the sake of argument in this case, this graffito supports a revision of dating. Merneptah is at least 120 years too early in time, just allowing the passage of a Sothic month. If it is the falling of the flood, he is 240 years too early, and if that month is well advanced, the deficit is higher still. It dates Merenptah conservatively around 950 BC, give or take a half century, acceptably close to Omri!
