Zarathustra77

Was just reading through this post about things that I have pretty much no background in, but found interesting nonetheless. Just felt I had to chime in about the shroud story though, especially the parts I bolded.

If you now have TWO pieces that were spliced together it would indicate that ONE piece was the repair material (cotton) and ONE piece was the original material (linen). Why can't you just test the linen piece as it was obvious they tested one of the pieces since they confirmed results with the other experiments. Did they use the eeny meeny method to figure out which half they would test? :banghead: Every other scientist in the room just looked the other way and they threw out the linen half? :banghead: I would assume that the church sent a representative along with each sample to insure there was no tampering with the holy relic? Wouldn't they have noticed something like this happening and reported it right away? :banghead: How did these scientists that did the original experiments (I assume they were retired) still have access to parts of the shroud? Weren't they either fully consumed or given back to the church (they are after all still considered "holy" and part of the church right?)? :constern01: Not only did he get one sample, he got 2! Then he waited until they were dead to conduct his own experiments... :constern01:

Solo

Yup, that's about it, Huon !

Wiki quotes the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia :

Mind boggles at the gullibility of people placing their trust in carbon dating of the shroud samples. It appears no science here is possible, because if there is a result that confirms the Church authorities verdict in the 14th century, i.e. it's a fake, it will immediately be challenged by some idiocy such as the singeing of the relic by a fire in the abbey where it was kept, or argument that the dated sample was cut of a piece of medieval cloth which was woven into the shroud later.

Jiri

David Rohl

DR: Wow Ben, didn't know you could do this. Thank you, that's brilliant. Now I can show you what I mean.

Here are three slides from a lecture I recently gave to the Sussex Egyptology Society.

Slide A shows the Izbet Sartah ostracon with an enlarged box framing the two virtually identical signs written side by side. The box is located immediately above the context of the signs. The abcedary runs left to right because, at this time (10th century), the direction of writing was not fixed.



Slide B shows the Lachish VI ostracon found by David Ussishkin. The yellow boxes show the sign for waw as it was written in the 10th century. Note that the text runs left to right on the upper line and right to left on the lower line, bustrophedon fashion ('as the ox ploughs'). On the left side of the slide are the two signs for waw and qoph as they appeared at this time.



Slide C shows how the names Sysw and Shyshk would have been written in the 10th century using the Palaeo-Hebrew script. You read left to right as the direction could be either way. So here it is displayed the same as English for convenience.



Would you be able to tell the difference?

David Rohl

DR: The Hittite Empire is dated by its synchronisms with Egypt (Amarna Letters, Battle of Kadesh, Hittite Peace Treaty). It has no independent dating criteria. Hittite links to Assyria are not secure because the small number of surviving letters do not have the names of the two correspondents and the rulers have to be assumed from the historical context (in other words the chronology). When you lower the dates of Egypt, you lower the dates of Hatti - and Mycenaean Greece, and the Trojan War. So lowering the dates of the Hittite Empire removes the Neo Hittite dark age in Anatolia. Lowering the dates for the Greek Bronze Age removes the Greek dark age. Lowering the date of the Trojan War brings the event within a generation or so of Homer and is consistent with the Greek genealogies.

Hope this helps.

Ben C Smith

(I see that I wrote yod for waw. My mistake, of course.)

Thanks for the slides. I had noticed the two virtually identical figures at the end of that line, but was unsure that they were what you were talking about, since (A) my knowledge of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet is almost nonexistent and (B) both figures appear toward the end of the list, whereas in the alphabetic order I am familiar with the waw appears in the first half of the alphabet and the qoph in the last half. Is this particular alphabetic order, with waw and qoph appearing side by side, attested elsewhere?

Also, I know that you gave spin a list of many words in Egyptian that have an s in them where the corresponding Hebrew word has a shin (instead of a samek), but I am wondering about the (potential) difference between cognates and loanwords or words that have been taken directly over (transcribed instead of translated) from the other language. It seems to me to be one thing to notice that the German Gott is cognate with the English God (the t and the d having diverged sometime in the past), but quite another to suggest that German loanwords in the present day normally switch from t to d in English. Do you see a potential difference there? In other words, even if Egyptian and Hebrew share linguistic roots in the distant past (and I think it clear that they do) that give them cognates which have diverged, is that the same thing as Hebrew scribes transcribing the Egyptian name of a pharoah in their own day, long after the languages separated?

Thanks.

Ben.

aa5874

The Shroud of Turin is another perfect example of the problems faced by the Church in the claim that Jesus was both God and man, divine and human at the same time.

If Jesus did exist he could only have been human.

If the Shroud is actually from the human Jesus, then it is confirmed that all the authors and church writers wrote complete fiction about Jesus.

The Shroud if genuine is a hostile "witness" to the Church and makes the stolen body story as found in gMatthew likely to be true.

The disciples did steal the body of Jesus, they had the Shroud in their possesion ever since the day he was placed in the tomb and basically lied to the world about his resurrection.

But there is another problem for the Church, Jesus could not have been born, based on their own conception story.

I would admonish the Church to burn the Shroud of Turin since it is evidence of the fraudulent history of the Church.

Not even fools tell people that they are in possession of evidence to show their guilt without doubt.

David Rohl

DR: I like your spirit Elske! The number of times I have uttered those last words when having to climb out of bed at five in the morning to trudge onto the excavation site at Tell Nebi Mend (ancient Kadesh-on-the-Orontes) in Syria during the Institute of Archaeology, London's expeditions!

But I don't really agree with you when you say that the date of the Theran eruption as proposed by calibrated C14 isn't relevant to archaeology. The Aegean/Minoan town of Akrotiri was buried in ash from the final eruption and there is a huge and heated debate about when this happened. There have been three major congresses dedicated to this subject. So they have an interest in the C14 date and are entitled to require the proof that the C14 method works because it directly impinges on their discipline.

I said: 'Show me that calibrated C14 dates for Thera are proven by anything other than C14' and you said that you would be able to do this. Here is your 'proof'.

DR: (1 & 2) How many occurrences of two adjacent narrow rings in the dendro sequence do you think there may be in 3,500 years? (2) If you are saying that the acid peaks in the Ice Cores, which appear to coincide with the frost rings in the trees, contain the fingerprint of Thera, then you are completely wrong. Chemical analysis of the ash shards proves that the sulphuric acid peak in the Greenland ice comes from Aniakchack in the Aleution Islands and not Thera. So the calibrated C14 date for Thera is not supported by the Ice Cores and (if you want to argue that the dendrochronology is accurate) the frost signature narrow rings in the dendro sequence most likely reflects the massive blow out of Aniakchack and not Thera. In other words you have no independent scientific support (circumstancial or otherwise) for the calibrated C14 dates provided for Thera.

DR: I am not claiming a conspiracy, just that the process of confirmation of scientific claims requires publication of the data in order for others to check and replicate the results. Otherwise the science cannot be proven. The fact is that Belfast has not published its data after 20 years, so their dendrochronology is unverified.

DR: I have not looked at this material for more than a decade so I am a bit rusty, but what I remember is that Yamaguchi (a statistician) showed that the computer programme used to find matches in the ring sequence was producing low T-values and complacent results. He demonstrated that the tree-ring matches - which were the basis of the dendro process itself - being able to overlap trees to develop the long chronology in Europe - could be made with the same or higher T-values in several other places in the chronology. He was even able to predict matches in trees that hadn't even grown yet! What determined which match the dendro boys should choose as the correct one in the sequence? You guessed it - C14 dating the tree-rings in question. So ignore the higher T-values of the matches later in the chronological sequence in favour of the ones that C14 suggests are correct. This is not only a circularity (C14 setting the criteria for the calibration method for C14) but will tend to give older results, therefore pushing the archaeological dates in the BC era backwards.

Do you know about Pearson's Peril? Imagine a three-hundred-year-old tree, the outer rings of which give the same C14 date as the inner rings. Result? A 300-year leap backwards in the dendro calibration at around 600 BC where the calibration curve flattens out and from which point the calibration curve digresses from the C14 curve until, by the pyramid age, it is about 600 years out from the uncalibrated C14 curve. Due to increased levels of C14 in the atmosphere? Or a wrong methodology for overlapping tree sequences? Or the 'Old Carbon Effect' (from local volcanic venting, major eruptions or old carbon release from the Black Sea - all current proposals)?

Have you proved that C14 using dendro calibration is proven and secure as you claim? No. Have I proved it is wrong? No. But thank you for the civilised and friendly debate.

spin

I was just about to respond to more of the same from David Rohl when I noticed this:
The interpretation given by Rohl is plainly wrong. Just think about this: the bottom line is an alphabet. We have a qof followed by a letter we need to distinguish then there's a shin and a taw. Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what Hebrew letter comes after a qof and is followed by a shin? Yes, exactly, a resh. As this is a student work, the resh was not done accurately, as the downward stroke should have been more to the left of the loop to look somewhat like a "p" (or more correctly like a triangular pennant). But there is no hope in hell that someone who knew what they were talking about could make the gross blunder exhibited here by Rohl. Indeed.


spin

Casper

I like the student origin comment, and I don't know but I'm curious of whether a few more things might be commented on?

Does an Ayin have a dot in it normally? We can see it is not an out-of-place Tet because the Tet is further upstream.

Is the Pe supposed to be directional or can it go either way? Or is that a Pe?

Would an Ayin come before or after Pe? Regional variant or something?

Is the little mark a Yod? Is that too out of place?

Looks like the pointy characters are more stylized and rounded (see the Bet) and many are "reversed" (the Alef and He for instance).

Being that this is supposed to be 10th century, is this really hebrew? Is the region and culture that obvious to those educated in this (not me)? I guess that is a fairly hebrew-esque Tsadi, but the Samekh looks Phoenecian (again, to my untrained eye).

spin

I think what you're referring to is a zayin.

Missed this. The pe is directional, but it's the bustrophedon -- see below.

Normally before but this order isn't unknown.

The yod seems to be a much longer symbol to the right of the tet here, so I don't know what the small mark is.

David Rohl is correct when he mentions bustrophedon, which features alternate lines in opposite directions, and that means letters turned around.

(Probably no more untrained than mine.)

I think they should be out to lunch on this one. I fear these early texts are called Hebrew more for political reasons than due to evidence.


spin