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

Mycenae

In 1896, the tombs at Enkomi, an ancient capital of Cyprus, excavated by A S Murray, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, yielded pottery, porcelain, gems, glass, ivory, bronze, and gold. Yet many of the finds matched finds dated in the fourteenth century Mycenaean era, while others matched finds dated to the Assyria, Phœnicia, and Greece of the ninth to seventh centuries. Vases with dark outlines of the figures accompanied by white dotted lines, giving them a perforated appearance, were found—Mycenaean pottery of the fourteenth century. The same white dotted decoration is found on a seventh century vase from Etruria. Cypriot four sided wheeled stands, supposedly twelfth century, are found in eighth century graves. The same design of stand is found in Sardinia in an eighth century context to judge by Italian parallels.

The silver vases of the Enkomi tombs are Mycenaean in shape yet were found with different styles of silver rings, one with Late Bronze style hieroglyphics and the other engraved with a design of a man dressed in a lion’s skin standing before a seated king, to whom he offers an oblation. The design is distinctly Assyrian in character. Two figures in this costume may be seen on an Assyrian sculpture from Nimrod of the time of Assur-nasirpal (884-860 BC). If these artefacts belong to the same time, the Greek Mycenaean period, the Neo-Assyrian period and the New Kingdom period in Egypt were contemporary. There are ceramics which without Mycenaean pottery in the same stratum are accepted as Iron Age. A banded decorated juglet such as is found at Megiddo is seventh century in the presence of acceptably seventh century pottery but is thirteenth century when found with LB II Mycenaean pottery.

Ivories found at Delos matched others found at Mycenae and at Megiddo, and also matched Syrian ivories dated to the eighth century. They had been found associated with eighth century Greek pottery! Tracing the development of Archaic Greek pottery does not allow it to have begun before about 900 BC, at least 200 years after the Mycenaean age. Did the Greeks not make pottery for over 200 years? Among the Nimrod ivories (850-700 BC) is a pyxide showing a chariot in pursuit of a lion, with a dog running alongside the horses. Virtually the same scene is found on a panel of an ivory gaming box of Cypro-Mycenaean style at Enkomi. Even the harness of the horses is similar. Only the dates differ appreciably—by four centuries!

Montgomery also cites the work of Snodgrass, who observed that tombs of Late Mycenaean heroes became the center of a cult in Archaic Greece.

In nearly every case the tombs are of the Mycenaean age—that is to say, of a period about 500 years earlier than the institution of the cult.

Did the worshippers of the Mycenaean heroes really wait 500 years before they set up shrines for them? It is too bizarre. The chronology is hundreds of years out. Beginning in 750 BC, Athenians began to bury the newly deceased members of the ruling class in heroic style. A warrior buried c 720 BC in a tomb in Euboia, had his own hero-shrine built over it to receive votive offerings. Could a man buried in 720 BC have had any serious claim to have been a warrior of a war that ended 500 years before? In Roman legend, the Trojan hero, Aeneas, fled west after the war to settle with the Latins, and found Rome. It was around 750 BC. Homer wrote about the war in the eighth century.

Palestinian Dates

The dark age extended to the Levant. Palestinian archaeology is confused, though you would never believe it listening to Sunday School teachers. Mycenaean ware is thought to be a product of the pre-Israelite period, whereas actually it denotes the period of Bit Khumri. Sherds of Greek pottery found in Palestine have been used to date Greek pottery in Greece! This is utterly bizarre because the biblicist archaeologists can never agree among themselves about dating the levels in their excavations. Needless to say, the dates are early but no one can get the biblicists to concede that their own dating is 300 years too high. It has to match their biblical preconceptions. In a recent example, a Greek mixing bowl was found at Tel Hadar in Galilee in a level dated by Israeli archaeologists to 1000 BC at the very latest. Greek ceramicists say the vessel cannot be before 900 BC at the very earliest! Stretching credulity as far as it will go leaves a 100 year minimum gap—the real gap will be about 300 years.

The common excuse used incessantly by biblicists is that the material cannot be dated precisely because the ground is “disturbed”. What they mean is that they had rather say that the ground is disturbed than confess that it is they who are disturbed that the evidence does not match the bible. Kenyon found that the disturbed layers at Jericho had been so disturbed, they did not exist at all. In fact, their absence showed that Jericho had not been occupied for a thousand years, right in the period when it should have been conquered by Joshua!

Beth Shan is another example. In the bible, Beth Shan is the Canaanite city in the valley of the Jordan which, during the time of the Judges was not subdued, being defended by chariots of iron. Later, Saul fell fighting the Philistines and his body was carried to Beth Shan and hung on the city wall. In the days of Solomon, it was an administrative center. Beth Shan should have had a clear archaeological pedigree.

The truth is that Beth Shan was an Egyptian colony from about 1500 BC to about 1200 BC in conventional chronology, from Thutmose III to Ramses II. Thick layers of debris in this period are categorical. After that a thin unproductive layer is found, one fifth of the thickness of a single layer attributed to the time of Seti. The absence of the Israelite periods of Judges and Kings is explained:

The disturbance of the upper levels has made it scarcely possible to distinguish any stratification. We shall therefore, in respect of the pottery from above the Rameses II floor-level, confine ourselves to indicating such pieces as are obviously of Hellenistic or later date.

The missing layers are “disturbed!” They are so disturbed that again they do not exist until Hellenistic times, so anything found above the layer of Rameses II is Hellenistic. What then when something unusual is found in a house of the time of Rameses? Should it be assigned to the time of Rameses?

The presence of the Cypriote bottle number 27 is sufficient by itself to rebut any such assumption, as this type is, apparently, not earlier than the eighth century.

An eighth century pot is found in thirteenth century deposits but nothing should be deduced from it. Plainly, Beth Shan existed only as an Egyptian city, and thereafter was scarcely occupied until Greek times, so that few remains are found assignable to the intermediate period. That is unacceptable to biblicists, so the layers that do not exist from 1200 to 300 are called disturbed! The presence of Cypriote ware on the floor of a house of Rameses II, suggests that the two were contemporaneous. If the site was deserted except for a few passing shepherds for 900 years, why should an expensive pot have been buried there? When Archaic Greek pottery is found in Palestine in stratified layers, it should be used to date the Palestinian layers, not the other way round.

If the ground is manifestly not disturbed then the biblicists disturb it, or move the finds to places where the ground is disturbed, thereby doing God’s work.

The biblicist, W F Albright, had dated ivories found at Megiddo in Palestine as twelfth century. At Nimrud, capital of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, the British archaeologist, David Oates, found three large rooms full of ivories were found. Many were like those made in Egypt in the Amarna era in the fourteenth century BC. Shalmaneser III is firmly dated by Assyrian chronology to the ninth century BC. The ivories were therefore ninth century forgeries! Such hordes are more usually booty, and Nimrud was a military base. Five female figurines found at the Dipylon Gate at Athens are identical in style to Nimrud and Megiddo ivories considered because of Albright of a Mycenaean type.

The closing together of the Amarna age and the age of Assyrian conquest would explain the facts better than an ancient swindle, and would tie in with a longer period of occupation of Egypt, or part of it by Assyria. Perhaps the part of it occupied was Palestine, but a Palestine that had been so long colonized by Egypt that it was effectively an outlying province, whence the presence of Amarna ivories at Megiddo. This then was the Egyptian slavery of the Israelites. They were slaves in their own country, and the Exodus was not a physical move but a liberation. That would explain why there has been not the slightest evidence in the whole of Sinai of 2 million people wandering there fore forty years, or encamped there for forty years, either of which must have left plenty of detritus to be found still.

Albright had also dated the Carmona Ivories, found in a treasure horde in Spain, to the twelfth century because they too resembled the Megiddo ivories, yet they show influence of the Greeks and the Phœnicians, neither of whom were in Spain in the twelfth century BC, though they were doubtless made by Phœnician colonists at a later period. The earliest possible time would have been about the eighth century, and so the Megiddo ivories, that Albright wanted to be in the “time of Solomon”, are actually about the time of the Assyrian conquests. The story that Tartessos in Spain was Solomon’s Tarshish is belied by the scriptures themselves—the goods brought back after the three year trip were African and Oriental not Spanish. Sixteenth century Spaniards made the claim for the usual reason that history is altered—to boost their national pride.

Cadiz was founded, according to dates based on Trojan legends, in 1110 BC, but nothing Phœnician has been dug up in Cadiz before the eighth century. No Phœnicians traded in the western Mediterranean before the eighth century when Carthage was founded. The Carthaginians were in Spain about the year 600 BC, A Schulten tells us, but S Gsell says that nothing certain is known about the Carthaginians being in Spain before the fourth century BC. The Phœnicians controlled most of Spain before then, and it is probably the fall of Phœnicia with the Persian empire to the Greeks that allowed the Carthaginians a free hand to take over the Phœnician colonies in Spain.

Albright recognized the similarity of unquestionably eighth century Carthaginian ware with supposed tenth century pottery from Megiddo. It was, he said, because the Carthaginians continued to make pots in an old fashioned style for another 200 years after production had stopped in Megiddo. The natural explanation that the Megiddo pots were eighth century spoiled the biblicist idea that they proved the finery of the Solomonic Age.

A small shrine at Tanit is built on hardcore that contains pots dateable to the latter half of the eighth century by comparison with Greek pottery. Since it is built in the earliest layers of a Phœnician Tophet, a depository for the urns of infant sons offered in sacrifice to the gods, it is secure evidence of it having been founded early—tophets were particularly sacred to the Phœnicians, and were set up at the start of every city founded. Pottery found there is also found in Tyre dated to the late eighth century.

The tradition that Carthage was founded about a hundred years earlier is either the exaggeration typical of early history already noted or is because Carthage is the Phœnician for “New Town”. As the Phœnicians expanded they founded more than one New Town but those nearer home had their names changed later in history or disappeared. Carthage is the one that became famous but was not the first. Kition in Cyprus was earlier founded as a Carthage, and the classical tradition might have transferred from this to the famous Carthage.

Everywhere, the conspiracy goes on, through cowardice more than anything else. At Hazor, a Late Bronze LB IIB palace was found with nothing built above it until the ninth century. A prime site in the center of a great city was left unused for half a millennium, these archaeologists think! Alan Montgomery reckons, “It is frankly impossible.” It is, though, necessary to make the evidence fit Egyptian chronology. North of the palace was a chambered city gate claimed to be of Solomon’s time and dated therefore in the tenth century. It was built over a temple destroyed in the thirteenth century, but with no sign of any layer representing the 300 year gap. Now, the “Solomonic” gates have been dated to the eighth century and the sterile gap has become 500 years!

In the archaeology of Hazor, two cuneiform tablets written in Old-Babylonian Akkadian and two more written in the Akkadian of the Amarna era were found in the upper Persian layers of the site. This is interesting because it might support the idea that the Persians were interested in ancient codes to fool people by rendering their own aims as ancient ones. They were labelled as heirlooms. A clay jar inscribed in Old-Akkadian was found in the Hyksos layer—an heirloom. Textbook schemes separate by enormous time spans what is found in parallel stratigraphical locations, of similar cultures.

The excavator of Tell Brak points out the problems of chronology his discoveries offered, cuneiform tablets of the Mitannian Kings Artashumara and Tushratta, authors of some Amarna letters having been found, but each time he deferred to the Egyptologists. Pottery designated as Middle Assyrian I of the fourteenth or thirteenth centuries is contested by the world’s leading expert on Middle Assyrian pottery who dates it to Middle Assyrian III (eleventh to ninth century). A Neo-Assyrian geometric pattern bowl, never dated before the ninth century is in the same strata as the Amarna kings! No one will challenge the conventional dating of Akhenaten.

The range of dates offered for the conquest of Israel by different biblical experts is 2300 BC to 1150 BC. This is not history and it is not science. It shows that the choices are entirely arbitrary—they have nothing substantial enough to support them. They are foolish attempts to find historical roots in biblical myth.

There is nothing sacrosanct in a date, so it beggars belief that supposed scientists will defy all evidence and logic and will blatantly lie and deceive to maintain an accepted set of dates. It is not the dates that are sacrosanct, it is the implication for the truth of the bible itself that is at stake. Abandoning the biblicists’ absurdly high dates for Palestine would get rid of the whole spurious period when early Israelite history—the mythical history—supposedly occurs, closing up a nasty dark age in Palestine archaeology. Even the champion of latter-day chronology revisers, Peter James, sneers at the idea of eliminating the empire of Solomon from history and firmly classifying it with Hans Anderson:

The rising school of “minimalists” within biblical scholarship are attempting to scotch the historicity of the Bible, claiming that Saul, David, Solomon and the early kings of Israel are merely fictitious characters.

Quite so. P John Crowe, who has written a useful review of misdating from a catastrophist’s viewpoint, writes:

That Sesostris was Tuthmoses III finds support from Homer, who tells us that Memnon (Amenophis III), was at Troy some 70-90 years after the death of Solomon.

We can take his point, but that a man speaking of false dating can tell us Homer wrote about Solomon does not give us confidence!

Among the most common foreign objects found in Palestine suitable for dating are Egyptian scarabs of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of 1300 to 1100 BC. Adjusted, these dates would be about 1000 to 800 BC, fitting perfectly the time when the small kingdoms of southern Canaan, including Israel, briefly flourished as colonies of Egypt, or independently before being swamped by Assyria. At present, it is the need for this gap to accommodate Moses, Joshua, the Judges, Saul, David and Solomon that perpetuates the faulty and lunatic chronology of the biblical archaeologists. The references in the el-Amarna letters To the country of Jerusalem and its capital city, Salem or bit Shalmi, make more sense in the eleventh century than in the fourteenth, and readily give a basis for the legend of Solomon (Salem, Shalmi).

Solomon’s (960-920 BC) stables at Megiddo were ascribed by Kathleen Kenyon to Omri (886-875 BC) who has the advantage for historians as opposed to novelists of being mentioned in history in external records. The Solomonic Gates found at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, were exulted by Yigael Yadin and William Dever as confirmation of the bible (1 Kgs 9:15-17). Israel Finkelstein, an admirable scientist and scholar, conceded that Yadin had nothing to go on in the 1950s except the bible:

The only way for Yadin to establish an absolute chronology was to look at the Bible. There was no other way in the 1950s.

Regrettably, identical gates turned up in Lachish, not said to have been Solomonic in the bible, and even at Ashdod in Philistia. These gateways were questioned by Finkelstein and other archaeologists of Tel Aviv university in the 1980s and redated to about 800, much to Dever’s annoyance.

Dever persists that archaeologists reject these new dates on ceramic typological grounds, but notes also they “have robbed the supposed Solomonic kingdom of much of its architectural basis”. But, for all their fortified gates, these were primitive towns not grand ones as Solomon should have had. None of them have revealed the least sign of opulence—no monuments, statues, art, gold or silver items, or jewels. Solomon’s buddy in Phœnicia, Hiram, was in the same boat—neither had one! There are no grand remains in Phœnicia dateable to the same time either. At the ancient Ph^oelig;nician port of Byblos, a royal tomb of King Ahiram was found in 1922 containing an Egyptian vase with a cartouche of Rameses II on it, conventionally therefore thirteenth century, together with texts in Canaanite writing (Hebrew), and Cypriot pottery dated in the ninth century. The tomb was dated in the tenth century. Possible explanations of the anachronisms are that:

1. the cartouche, the pottery and text are contemporary, but that is unacceptable
2. the cartouche is an heirloom in a ninth century tomb, but a ninth century tomb is unaccepatble
3. a tomb robber entered the tomb 500 years after it had been sealed, and put the pottery inside before resealing the tomb. That’s fine, the experts will buy that one!

The early date prevailed. What then about the text? That is fine. It is dated with the cartouche, creating the remarkable historic fact that supposedly Hebrew writing was in use before Moses had escaped from Egypt, and making a pig’s ear of the history of the alphabet, but suiting the pretences of believers who want God’s people to be the first in the world at everything.

B Rothenburg excavated the site of “Solomon’s Pillars” in the Timna Valley at Wadi Arabah. The consensus was that the site and other copper workings in the area were King Solomon’s Mines—copper mines. Y Aharoni had dated the site from pottery to the “time of Solomon” in the tenth century. Rabbi Nelson Glueck, a well known biblicist of the W F Albright school of credulity, made out that Solomon had a vast industry just east of Eilat. It all turned out to be biblicist fancy. Rothenburg, contrary to his hopes, found the workings were Egyptian, a temple of Sethos I and one of Rameses III.

One cannot but wonder how it comes about that pottery, thus dated in 1962 (to Solomon), is now so unequivocally transferred to the periods of Sethos I and Rameses III.

Donald Harden, Director of the London Museum

After that, the local people used the temple as a shrine but it yielded only one item, the ancient fertility symbol of the Middle East, a tiny moulded copper serpent with a gilded head, calling to mind the “serpent of brass” which the bible admits was the object of veneration of the Israelites, given them by Moses himself (Num 21:9). Thereafter, there is nothing in the ground until the Byzantine period.

Museums have many examples of artefacts of similar styles and manufacturing techniques dated by as much as 1000-1500 years differently. These anachronisms had arisen by archaeologists arbitrarily adding “occupation gaps” of many centuries that increased the age of the lower strata. The justification they offered was to match a biblical date for Abraham contemporary with the Amorite king, Hammurabi. Occupation gaps, remember, are not just gaps—they leave signs of desolation—so this is plain and straightforward dishonesty.

Excuse upon excuse is made for the mismatches in chronology but, like the multitude of excuses that Christians like to find to explain anomalies in the bible, they become utterly unconvincing by their sheer number. In scientific terms, they are contrary to Occam’s Razor or the principle of parsimonious explanation. Like Ptolemy’s epicycles, they will have to be discarded eventually in favour of something better. There was no need to accept the absurd dates in the first place—they were forced on to us by dogma. A simple revision of chronology removes most of the problems. Inevitably new ones will be introduced—nothing is perfect—but the revision will give a better synchronicity with other finds and events than at present.

It would be entirely possible to program even a modest computer to accept data about artefacts and fixed points with reasonable error bands and minimize the sum of squared differences between the synchronisms, automatically producing the best fit of the synchronisms to a set timescale based on the evidence. Has anyone attempted such an approach?

Philistines

Archaeologists in Palestine have only twice found the Iron I collared rim jars and Philistine ware in the same strata, one of them the badly conducted and documented Mitzpah excavation. The other site is Megiddo which has been well excavated and recorded, but the two wares actually seem to be separated by the lifetime of a building, the collared rim ware being in its foundations, and the Philistine ware on its floor, and therefore present at its destruction. Really, then, they are separated by a stratum. More recent reports by Tel Aviv University mention no Philistine ware though there were many jars. Philistine ware is never unequivocally associated with Philistines nor with any Israelite or Philistine ruler. Philistine pottery was not found at Beth Shan, even though the Philistines had it in the eleventh century, according to the bible.

Pythian-Adams excavated Ashkelon, identifying some dark red pebble-burnished ware just under the fourth century Hellenistic stratum as belonging to the Babylonian and Persian eras. This red pebble burnished ware overlapped with the crude painted Philistine ware which immediately followed the bichrome and monochrome Philistine ware. So, “Philistine” pottery is eighth century, not eleventh century or before.

In the 1980s, Sy Gitin and Trude Dothan excavated at Tel Miqne-Ekron, thought to have been the site of the city of Ekron, founded by the Philistines. They discovered it was built on a previous Canaanite city that had been destroyed. Cyprus and Canaan could no longer import the Greek pottery called Mycenaean IIIB, and a new similar type of pottery, IIIC1b reflecting the same traditions and skills was made, but neutron activation analysis showed it was local not imported. The “1b” denotes that it was found on Cyprus and the Philistine coast. Archaeologists specializing on Cyprus associate Mycenaean IIIC1b pottery with Achaean refugees fleeing to Cyprus from Greece. At Ashdod and Ekron, this pottery was found directly above the Late Bronze layer. Excavation revealed a gradual change from Mycenaean IIIC1b to the later Philistine pottery called “bichrome” ware having red and black decorations on a white slip. The shapes and designs are Mycenaean. The excavators assign the time to Rameses III.

Rameses III, the great pharaoh of the twentieth dynasty, depicts himself in his reliefs triumphing over the Peleset and their allies. Peleset is translated as Philistines, yet, no artefacts of the twentieth dynasty have been found with Philistine pottery. Egyptians never subsequently mention “Peleset” until Ptolemaic times. Canaanites were all called Retenu.

The ruins of Ekron were of a well-planned city some time after the initial settlement. The quality of the distinctive Philistine artefacts deteriorated at a time that the excavators assign to the eleventh century when the Philistines must have adopted Egyptian and Phœnician designs for their ceramics. Much of this pottery is based on a red slip. One might imagine that a people’s traditions would last rather longer than the archaeologists imply.

The city was then attacked. The directors of the excavation, using the bible and Egyptian records, decided that the attack was by David or the Egyptians. Thereafter, “a lack of material remains” led the archaeologists to decide that the tenth through to the eighth centuries BC were “missing”. The city was assumed to have been abandoned for the next 270 years, to about 700 BC. Curiously, at the end of the eighth century BC, after 270 years of dereliction, the city miraculously recovered to be even more prosperous than before, and grew bigger than its former fifty acres, with a substantial defensive wall. For the next century the city was a centre of olive oil production. The Assyrians controlled Philistia until about 630 BC. So, here is yet another “dark age” necessary for the biblicists’ interpretations.

Excavations at the temple discovered at Ekron link it with Achish, son of Padi, dating it to about 700  BC, and the Assyrian flavour of its architecture would support the idea. Curious then that in the side rooms of the sanctuary, the diggers found a cartouche of Rameses VIII (1127-1126 BC). Such anachronisms are explained away by Egyptologists as heirlooms, but who would want to keep an heirloom of a nonentity of a Pharaoh. Not only that, but, in an adjoining building, the excavators found a carved ivory with the cartouche of Merneptah (1224-1214 BC).

Thirteen four-horned altars uncovered at the site fatuously were said to have been made by Israelite craftsmen for no other reason than that they are mentioned in the bible!

Elsewhere in Palestine, at Shechem, an LB II Amarna era letter was found under an Iron IA wall, conventionally c 1200-1125 BC when the town was no more than a farming village. Any remains in Iron IB and Iron IIA, c 1125-800 BC were “sparse and ambiguous”. The town was rebuilt again in Iron IIB, 800-700“”BC. A 400 year dark age has appeared in the careful archaeology of the Holy Land itself.

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