Judaism
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History II.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
Dating Some Pharaohs
They key date in this falsification of the chronologies of ancient Egypt, Israel, and Mesopotamia is the year 925 BC, supposedly the year when Shoshenq I, founder of the Egyptian twenty second dynasty invaded the Judah of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, an event recorded in the bible, the Pharaoh being called Shishak or Sesac. The identification of Shoshenq I as the biblical Shishak was made by Manetho in a document owned by Syncellus. Champollion thought he had confirmed it in 1828 when he read Shoshenq I’s military campaign mural at Karnak, which named conquered Palestinian cities. He thought he could discern “Judah the Kingdom” among the hieroglyphs of subdued cities listed in the inscription. So, Sheshonq was the biblical Pharaoh Shishak. Shoshenq is dated to this time to match the biblical Shishak, and history is being dated from the myth!
Shoshenk’s list of cities were mainly in Israel, and none of the “fenced cities of Judah” mentioned as captured by Shishak in the Jewish scriptures appeared, but then Judah itself did not exist then, so, if they had, it would have been accidental. Judah did not appear for another 200 years when the Assyrians destroyed Israel. The bible is doing what Manetho and Berosus did, extending the history of the minuscule Yehud long before it existed. Perhaps Samaria did, but why an Egyptian king should conquer cites in an Israel ruled by Jeroboam, effectively an Egyptian vassal, is never explained. Shoshenk I’s supposed campaign against Judah can have no archaeological support, but the synchronism has always been tenaciously defended. As the editor of Biblical Archaeology admits:
The calculated beginning of the twenty first dynasty stems from the equating of the twentieth year of Shoshenk I with the fifth year of Rehoboam.
Jeremy Hughes, an Oxford chronologist, confirms it, though he thinks the date was 932 BC:
Egyptian chronologists, without always admitting it, have commonly based their chronology of this period on the biblical synchronism for Shoshenq’s invasion.
A Harvard authority on biblical chronology, William Barnes adds:
Apart from the biblical synchronism with Rehoboam (which remains problematic at best) there is no other external synchronism by which one might date his reign, and the Egyptian chronological data themselves remain too fragmentary to permit chronological precision.
By 1888, Champollion’s “Judah the Kingdom” had been corrected and associated geographically with northern Israel not Judah. Though the link had gone, Shishak remained Sheshonq. From Shoshenq to Psamtik I in 664 BC, Egyptian chronology is almost as imaginary as the bible—it is the remainder of the Third Intermediary Period—invading Nubians, duplicate pharaohs and nonentities. And what are we to make of the curious fact that the name of Shishak in the Septuagint is “Susakim” which means “One of the Susa People”—Persians! The Book of Sothis used by the monk, George Syncellus, and allegedly by Manetho, lists Egyptian pharaohs and corresponding biblical events, including a Susakim who “brought up Libyans, Ethiopians, and Troglodytes before Jerusalem”. Presumably it is the Susakim of the Septuagint. Susakim was taken as Sheshonk I, but though the Book of Sothis is rejected as spurious, confused and unhistorica, the Shishak, Susakim, Shoshenq identity remains because it suits biblicists and Egyptologists alike.
The Ptolemies commissioned and surely wrote chunks of the Jewish scriptures. So, was the Shishak passage propaganda originally written by the Persians but altered by the Ptolemies to remind Jews that people of the east—by then the Seleucids—were their real enemy? Even written as Shishak, the word looks Persian, perhaps a shortening of Shahanshah, King of Kings, but has received a bad connotation to the Jews, being identified with an assaulter, perhaps deliberately from this passage. Conventional chronologists and biblicists both defend Shishak, even though the story is in the unquestionably mythical part of the Jewish scriptures. If it is nevertheless meant to be a king, is it a later one of the five Shoshenks (there are more, these five being normally listed), or someone else altogether, a nickname or an insulting name for some other unknown pharaoh, or a deliberate misname as Egyptian propaganda?
Pharaoh Takelot I, Kenneth Kitchen describes as a “witless nonentity who allowed all real power to slip through his fumbling fingers”, because he is only known through a genealogical note. Yet Kitchen gives him 15 years. Takelot I will have left no monuments or even a cartouche, not because he was witless, but because he died after reigning only a few months or even not at all, being a regent or even just a viceroy. Most of the kings of the twenty second and twenty third dynasties have peculiar non-Egyptian names. Libyans, we are told, yet the names sound Assyrian—Osorkon is Sargon, the Assyrian king who claimed to have brought Egypt under his control, and Takelot is Tiglath—and suddenly these Assyrian names pop up repeatedly over a period of 200 years. Are they viceroys of the Assyrian kings? Victorian Egyptologists thought so.
Kitchen claims that his date for Shoshenq I is supported by “the series of known regnal years of his successors, which fill up the interval 924-712 BC almost completely, leaving just 18 years for the one king (Osorkon IV) whose reign is poorly documented in terms of monumental year-dates”. Many of these “known” regnal years are not known, as the aforementioned Takelot I proves, and no one knows that they were all consecutive and none were concurrent. So, Kitchen assigns various kings enough years to fill the spurious gap, and, Lo! he finds the gap filled.
The “Genealogy of the Royal Architects” suggest a date for Shoshenq I sometime in the 9th century BC, a hundred years later than convention. From Phœnician findings, Shoshenq is better dated to the beginning of the eighth century. Abibaal of Byblos reigned just three generations before Tiglath-pileser III, and was a contemporary of Shoshenq I putting Shoshenq about 825 BC. Presents from Shoshenq and his son Osorkon were inscribed by respectively, Abibaal and Elibaal, successive rulers of Byblos. The son of Elibaal, Shipitbaal is known from Assyrian annals to have ruled about 740 BC.
Release Shoshenq from Shishak and he can appear in the eighth instead of the tenth century BC, and Omri can emerge as the true founder of the Israelite state. The Merenptah Stele abuts on to Omri, and might suggest a failed but boasted-about punitive expedition to put the rebel king, or his rebellious predecessors, in his place. It also more closely abuts on to the Mesha of Moab Stone. The adherence of scholars to the bible as true history is a lunacy that they cannot cure easily. Loosing their cherished beliefs in the word of God, they might be able to cope with, but looking utter idiots is unthinkable.
Even Peter James writes disparagingly that it is easy to dismiss the biblical narrative as unbelievable, but says it is “poor methodology”. In fact, it is poor methodology to believe that devotional works are true history when they are written to promote particular religious prejudices. The scientific method is to disbelieve until a sound basis for belief has been established. It is not a sound basis of belief that something is “plausible”, as biblicists tell us the scriptural account is. Gone with the Wind is plausible—but it is not true.
James also writes that the identification of “Apiru”, a name that occurs in diplomatic correspondence, with “Hebrew” can hardly be doubted. That too is poor methodology because it begs the question. It can be doubted. The scientific historian should not make assumptions like this based on the evidence that “it can hardly be doubted”. Reducing ancient dates around 1200 BC by 300 years gives much more credence to the idea that Apiru = Hebrew, but establishing the identity will then become evidence for the need to redate.
Shishak could have been Shoshenq, read by the Persians in the Assyrian annals and translated into a Pharaoh of the time of the legendary Solomon, but this is not history! Alternatively, the revisionists think he could have been a reference to Rameses III, known as Sysw (Shisha) on his own monuments. The added “k” makes the name a pun on the word “assaulter” in Hebrew. A revised chronology would place Sysw in the latter half of the tenth century BC, a few decades before Omri (Khumri) founded the state of Israel. It is therefore in just that period when Solomon was supposed to have lived, but the dates of this Rameses are entirely arbitrary, and there are unexplained signs that he is later still.
David Rohl has found a rare synchronism in the reign of the eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Akhenaten. Shortly after the death of his father Amenhotep III, Akhenaten received a letter from his vassal Abimilku of Tyre saying a fire had destroyed half of the palace of King Nikmaddu II at the city of Ugarit. Archaeologists found, in the remains of the palace, a tablet describing an eclipse of the sun at sunset in the month of “Hiyaru” (mid-April to mid-May). The setting sun (Salem) was divine in the Canaanite pantheon, so its eclipse seemed a bad omen—the reverse of the tablet declared it was. Calculations confirm that thirty minutes before sunset on 9 May 1012 BC an eclipse did occur, the only significant eclipse of the sun, within an hour of sunset, visible in the Levant in the second millennium BC. The combination of circumstances date Akhenaten near the turn of the millennium, not 300 years before!
Another idea was that Shishak was Rameses II, whose monuments record campaigns in Palestine, and who was Solomon’s father in law in Jewish legends. Crowe tells us Rameses II was the only king reigning long enough to have sacked Gezer for his daughter’s dowry, and later to have plundered Solomon’s temple after his death. From the el Amarna tablets, Rohl thinks the ethnic and political makeup of Palestine, and the activities of the Apiru correspond with the biblical record. He identifies Saul with a character in the letters called Labayu, and he thinks other events mentioned therein can be matched with the careers of Saul and David. A “Dadua”, the Akkadian version of David, is even mentioned, with no special significance. When biblicists realize that it is a way to save their beloved David, they will become chronology revisers! If the Amarna era was the time of Saul, Rohl thinks the marauding Apiru were Hebrews battling in the Judges period. It gave more time fitting in all the remaining dynasties before the Assyrian invasion of the twenty sixth dynasty. Rohl published his version of it in A Test of Time (1995). Criticisms of it were:
- a lack of evidence for Rameses campaigning against the fenced cities of Judah and Jerusalem, as Shishak was supposed to have done, but then as this was mythical, Rameses need not have done it
- the placement of the wars of Seti I in Palestine and Syria in the middle of Solomon’s age of peace and prosperity, but as Solomon was mythical ditto
- identifying the Habiru with the conquering Hebrews, which finds little archaeological support, and not surprisingly because the name Hebrews was given by the Persians to the people of their satrapy of Abarnahara, and relates only to maurauding habiru in that the term refers to people from “beyond the river” Euphrates.
- no resolution to the dates for the kings of the twentieth to twenty second dynasties.
Velikovsky says no evidence for the biblical deeds of Necho is found in Egyptian records of Nekau I or II, but they match the deeds of of Rameses II especially as glorified in the Poem of Pentaur. He concluded that Rameses was Necho, and the battle of Kadesh was really at Carchemish in 605 BC. A far simpler explanation is that the authors of the Jewish scriptures gave some deeds of Rameses, as expressed in works about him available to them, were given to Necho because they did not have true accounts to meet their needs.
The Hittites
The many tablets found at el Amarna and at Hattusas show that pharaohs and Hittite kings were in correspondence. Rameses II and the Hittite king Hattusilis III are unquestionably contemporary because the peace treaty they made together has been found in both Egypt and Hattusas. Any proper reconstruction of chronology has to begin with irrefutable evidence like this. The point to be settled is their absolute dates. The procedure is just what happens now in scientific dating using C-14 and dendrochronology. Sliding relative dates are assembled but are not nailed down until some anchor presents itself.
Current chronology suggests the Hittites flourished from the fifteenth to the thirteenth century BC, disappearing about 1175 BC. Von Soden (The Ancient Orient ) says that, with the destruction of Hattusas, cuneiform fell out of use in the Hittite world, including in Syria, but it was reintroduced by the Assyrians about 850 BC, when, the Assyrians are found corresponding with Hittites in north Syria who had the same hieroglyphic script and had the same culture but existed from the tenth to the eighth centuries! This looks like the same phony dark age. Assyrian dates are reliable from about 900 BC onwards. Assyrian art, distinctive as it was, influenced the countries subdued and associated with the great empire. These countries closely linked with Assyria can therefore be dated reasonably well by comparisons with Assyria. Earlier than the tenth century, Assyrians mention encountering Hittite soldiers but seem unaware of any great Hittite kingdom in Anatolia.
Excavations at the Syrian town of Carchemish place it entirely in the first millennium BC. Leonard Woolley found sherds of Mycenaean and Cypriot ware on a ninth century pavement. Another link was an apparent reference to pharaoh Rameses II on a mace head. Seventh century layers revealed winged discs identical to specimens from supposed thirteenth century Hattusas. The figures at Carchemish were little gold figures like brooches and the excuse for the discrepancy in the dates is that the small figures were hierlooms—kept for 500 years, apparently.
The city of Malatya has an Assyrian palace built on top of a late Hittite complex built on an earlier (but still late) Hittite structure. The neo-Hittite complex had a lion gate carbon dated by charcoal found beneath it to the early tenth century BC. In style it matches independently dated art at Carchemish. Yet all of these are in the same style as the supposed thirteenth century art of Hattusas in central Anatolia. The neo-Hittite complex is apparently identical in style to the imperial Hittite buildings of 300 years earlier.
More remarkably, the kings of Malatya can be linked with the kings of Imperial Hattusas. The so-called kings of Carchemish unearthed by Woolley were apparently local officials treated as vassal “kings”, under the authority of the Great King. A stele from the temple of the storm god at Carchemish confirms that the Great Kings of the Hittites still existed in the ninth century.
The Phrygians arrived in Anatolia in the ninth century, apparently as wild invaders similar to the Cimmerians. But excavations show that at Gordion, where Alexander was to cut the Gordion Knot, Phrygians and Hittites lived together, although the Phrygians gradually displaced the Hittites, until the Cimmerians plundered the city. It suggests a gradual break up of the Hittite kingdom in the latter half of the tenth century, so that Phrygians were able to move in in strength in the ninth.
Cyprus, according to the bible, ruled by Hiram of Tyre in the tenth century BC was not occupied by the Phœnicians until the eighth. The earlier Cypriots had an unusual and still undeciphered script that disappeared about 1200 BC. Old scripts do die out, but this one reappeared again about 900 BC! How can a script be unused for 300 years then resume in use as if it had never stopped? Answer—it cannot.
Divided Monarchy
The “Divided Monarchy” of Israel and Judah begins to to find confirmation in Assyrian archives and suggests that the historical scriptures from this point on show that the authors’ had access to Assyrian diplomatic records and king lists. It does not mean that the content of each king’s reign is anything other than romance meant to show Israelites as perpetual apostates to bring them in line behind the god, Yehouah. It does not even prove that the monarchy was divided—Yehud (Judah) might have been an invention of the Persians and the north Syrian state of Yaudi might have been confused with the later Yehud.
From about the ninth century there seems to have been a kingdom of Israel, but it was destroyed by the Assyrians after a life of less than two centuries and repopulated with people from north Syria, some of whom possibly came from the kingdoms of Yaudi and Samal, others from Haran. Several kings of Israel and some kings of Judah appear in Mesopotamian records but there are no monuments or inscriptions from Palestine that mention these kings. Only the stele of Mesha of Moab mentions an Israelite king—Omri.
Valuable Assyrian glass is sometimes found in Palestine. The tyro archaeologist would take it that the strata containing it should be dated to the Assyrian period. No! They are uniformly dated as preceding the Assyrian period. They were imports, the experts say, yet curiously, the imports ceased when Samaria came within the Assyrian sphere, and the glass became more accessible. Ivories found in Samaria were like ivories found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The biblicists say that ninth century Israelites had artistically revived Egyptian styles obsolete for half a millennium! Why were the Israelites such remarkable art historians at this early age in their history to be able to research and revive ancient Egyptian artistry? It is baloney.
Some seals have been found but they are never found in context! One seal mentions Hezekiah and another Jeroboam (II). The only seal found in context mentions Jehoiachin who was supposed to have ruled briefly in 597 BC, but the context of this seal was pottery from from before the Assyrian conquest, over 100 years before! The implication is that Judah never existed independently of Israel and was brought down with Israel by the Assyrians.
The pottery of Samaria is used as a standard for dating other Palestinian sites. The excavation of Samaria caused problems. It was expected to have been founded in the ninth century, by Omri, and to be built therefore on ground that had tenth century remains. Pottery found in the ground was also found in the casement walls, but whereas the pottery in the ground was mixed with identifiably older material, as would be expected, the walls only contained pottery that must have been contemporaneous with the building, as Kathleen Kenyon realized. The pottery was ninth century, offering no trouble to the date of the building but it was the same pottery that was dated at Hazor and Megiddo by Egyptian chronology to the twelfth century. Kenyon was quite certain that the ground in the pre-Omride period contained only Early Bronze pottery. Biblicists tried to discredit Kenyon, as they have always desperately done to preserve Solomon!
An example of exaggerated dating is possibly the temple at Arad excavated by Y Aharoni. It was not of the type of Solomon’s temple described in the bible, but Aharoni dated its foundation “in Solomon’s reign” (tenth century), and attributed changes to the reforming kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, the latter actually closing it in the seventh century. More recently, critics of Aharoni disagree considerably. The temple was, they think, only founded about the time of Hezekiah, and it is unlikely to have been closed so soon after by Josiah. Closure sometime in the Persian period when worship was centralised in Jerusalem is more likely.
