Pappy Jack

And Smyth arbitarily chose, what, 11-13 sources to average? At RDF I pointed you towards a French contemporary of Smyth's who reckoned there were around 140 (I think) different esitimates for the Flood with a range of something like 3500 years. What makes Smyth's limited choice so special and how can averaging the dates be meaningful in any sense of the word?

Also, your postulated growth rate is meaningless as it's a figure you've chosen to allow you to produce figures for Dynastic Egypt that, for some arbitrary reason, you think reasonable while bearing no relation whatsover to archaeological evidence for population growth rates in the periods in question. I'd be interested to see the evidence you claim exists.

Pappy Jack

And again at RDF I pointed you towards Dr Kate Spence's astronomical dating of the Great Pyramid to around 2467BC, using 'marker' stars whose relative positions also help to accurately explain the slight N/S misalignments of other pyramids dating to before and after the GP. Also, my sources suggest Herschel calculated 2800BC for the GP's date. Neither of these dates fit comfortably with your proposed Flood date and do much to cast doubt upon its reliability.

linwood

Why would other cultures even have stories of a global flood from a local perspective if the Biblical flood is truth?

Everybody died right?
Who is left to tell the story?

The only story they could have would be passed down from the humans on the ark from an entirely different perspective than the culture they eventually built.

Why would they have their own stories at all?

Sorry, the thought just occurred to me.

Pappy Jack

Good point, linwood. One could also ask why the monotheistic builders of Babel, having lost the ability to speak with each other, dispersed across the globe and immediately founded a whole bunch of pantheistic and animistic religions.

According to afdave's version of events, within about a century of Babel whoever trudged their way to Egypt had founded the pharaohonic dynasties along with a belief-system based on more gods than you could shake a stick at. Interestingly, their flood legends bare little relationship to the Noachian flood legend and the various creation myths each cult propounded have little similarity with Genesis. Also, they seem to have forgotten all about Babel. Makes you marvel at their short memories.

Dean Anderson

This is simply wrong on both counts.

Firstly, your star alignments are completely out of date. You are (or to be more precise: Proctor is) using measurements that are over 100 years old.

With the modern measurements available to people like NASA, we can date the time of Alpha Draconis's stint as pole star more precisely. It was aligned with the Pyramid in (approx) 2700BCE, not 2170BCE as Proctor suggests. In 2170BCE the star would have been 6-7 degrees away from true north. See here and here for NASA's webpages about precession and Alpha Draconis respectively.



Secondly, the Bible is very explicit (giving exact ages of fathers when their sons were born, and giving exact lengths of reigns for kings and so on) about dates, and unambiguously places the Flood 1,898 years before the Exile. We know from Babylonian and other records that the Exile occurred in 597BCE, which means that - according to the Bible - the Flood must have occurred in 2495BCE. See here for details of how these dates are derived, with exact chapter and verse for each of the 90 referencing dates between the two events.

Now I'm not arguing that the Pyramid of Khufu was built in 2700BCE when the star alignment was at its strongest. It could have been built within a couple of hundred years either side of that - indeed, modern Egyptology places Khufu's reign circa 2570 BCE and I am not in a position to dispute that.

However, this still means that the Pyramid is older than the Flood - and that after building the Pyramid the Egyptians continued with their civilisation unabated and completely failed to notice the fact that they all died.

Interestingly, at the time when the Flood happened (according to the Bible), the 4th Dynasty of Pharaohs was just leading into the 5th Dynasty. The Egyptian noble Netry-nesut-pu lived through that time and his tomb records the names of the seven Pharaohs whose reigns he served under, from boyhood to old age. Right through the time when the Flood was supposed to have happened and killed everyone.

His tomb fails to record this event.

RED DAVE

Where is praxeus now that we need him?

RED DAVE

Pappy Jack

Very informative post. Thanks for the links. From previous experience, though, AFD will continue to argue that the accepted dating for Dynastic Egypt is off by several centuries. You will also have noted that AFD often places great value in out-of-date sources (e.g., Piazzi Smyth) despite the overwhelming weight of evidence that they were completely wrong in their assessments.

Dave Hawkins

Dean ... I see that I have not been clear and have confused this issue. I wrote that "Alpha Draconis could have been used with the pole star" when I should have written "Alpha Draconis could have been used with the celestial north pole." My source from which I was attempting to convey this information is Tompkins, who relates that Arab historians assert that the GP had been originally designed as an astronomical observatory. So I'm quite sure NASA is correct, but I assume that the 3 deg. 43 min. figure given above is correct also. What I have not read is Proctor's work, The Great Pyramid, Observatory, Tomb, and Temple to find out why Alpha Draconis fits his theory "adroitly."

As for your Flood date, I will examine your link. My first thought is that it seems quite possible that genealogical tables might not include every person in the line. I am not in a position to support that notion firmly, but I think I could be if I took the time.

As for Egyptian Chronology, I am very intrigued with David Rohl's work. I am reviewing his "Pharoahs and Kings" on my blog right now.

**************************************
RED DAVE...My view is that the Biblical Flood cannot be explained away as modern geologists have done. This in my opinion is a huge mistake. Leading geologists have lately become catastrophists (multiple) and it is my opinion that they will soon return to the pre-Lyellian acceptance of the historicity of the Noachian Deluge (single catastrophe). So to me, this is Fact #1. Now Fact #2, I think, is that the Pyramids had to be built post-Flood. Fact #3 is that you need a lot of bodies to build pyramids. How many? I don't know. But a lot. However, you do NOT need many hundreds of years for cultural evolution to occur. Noah's group would have carried their pre-Flood knowledge of civilization and technology with them and immediately applied this knowledge to rebuilding their civilization in the post-Flood world, as manpower allowed. And I believe it is not unreasonable at all to believe that early post-Flood families were a) vigorous physically and b) probably had large families. Note the great ages recorded for early post-Flood patriarchs in Genesis. Also note that the work of leading modern population geneticists implies that the farther back in time we go, the more free of deleterious mutations is the human race. J.F. Crow (1997) was explicit about this. Early post-Flood life would have been in many ways similar to the pioneer days in American West where families had many children in part to help with the many chores of pioneer life.

So it is my somewhat informed conjecture that Noah and his family and their immediate descendants had lots of kids per family and rebuilt a very sophisticated civilization rather quickly after the Flood. I do believe 600 years is more than adequate to supply the manpower necessary to build the GP.

Dave Hawkins

Pappy Jack ... if you disparage the integrity of my sources, I would ask that you support your disparagement. Smyth's measurements were in fact vindicated by Davidson, whose work I am examining now. At RD.net, you claimed that Smyth had been discredited by Petrie, but you did not even mention Davidson. Why not? Have you read Davidson? Now it is fine with me if you do read Davidson, find some flaws, and then dismiss Smyth on the basis of these flaws, but until you do that, you have no basis for criticising Smyth. Remember ... Petrie himself was fully convinced of Smyth's work and only rejected parts of it ... and those, only because he failed to account for the "hollowing in" effect, which Davidson later accounted for.

And let me reiterate ... I have NO interest in Davidson's prophetic inferences ... only his measurements and his reconciliation of Smyth's and Petrie's work.

Dean Anderson

That doesn't make it any more correct.

No. The 3deg 43min figure is not correct. If you trust the NASA figures (rather than those that your quote identifies as being from Smyth and others) then the figure is between 6 and 7 degrees.

Besides, your quote doesn't support any case for the Pyramid being built in the 22nd century BCE. If the builders are going to align their north against a star that is not over the pole by looking at it at it's culmination, they can do this with any star at any time - in fact it is easier to do with a star that is further away from the pole than with one that is closer to the pole; since a star that is further away will have more pronounced movement.

So there is absolutely nothing in your quoted material that supports any kind of construction date for the Pyramid that is as late as the one you suggest.

Yes. I hear that apologetic a lot. It is completely irrelevant though. When the Bible says that person A was 74 years old when person B was born and person B was 35 years old when person C was born, it doesn't matter in the slightest if there were other unmentioned people between them. It still unambiguously places person C's birth 109 years after person A's birth, regardless of whether person A was person C's grandfather or whether person A was person C's great-great-great-grandfather and the Bible authors neglected to mention three generations of the family in between them.

Are you qualified to assess whether Rohl's theories are better supported than those of mainstream archaeology, or do you merely support Rohl because his reduced timescale suits your purposes better than the mainstream timescale?

These are not facts, despite your labeling of them as such. They are assertions that you have provided absolutely zero evidence for other than that you need them to be true to support your faith-based theology.

Which civilisation? According to the Bible, Noah's entourage consisted of eight people, all from the same local area.

If they split up and "rebuilt" all the world's civilisations, how come all those civilisations aren't clones of the civilisation that they were from?

How come the new Egyptian civilisation was identical to the pre-flood Egyptian civilisation? and the new Babylonian civilisation was identical to the pre-flood Babylonian civilisation? And the new tribes inhabiting Australia re-established a uniquely Australian civilisation?

How come they aren't all mirrors of the single civilisation that the only eight people in the world came from?

How come these new civilisations all had completely different levels of technology from each other, too? Yet these levels of technology exactly match the technology that was in their regions before the flood?

How come most of these new civilisations didn't have the boat-building skills that Noah's family possessed?

Your incredibly ill-informed conjecture is nothing more than wild speculation, and it goes completely against historical and archaeological records (and that is not to mention that geological and palaeontological records also completely contradict the flood in the first place).

Besides, you do not have 600 years - since your late date for the Pyramid is completely fanciful and unsupported.

And even if you did have 600 years, your ad-hoc calculation given earlier assumes that the entire population of the world at that time was in Egypt building the Pyramids. Even if you could demonstrate that the pyramids were build 600 years after the date you assign for the flood, you would need a far higher (and even less realistic) population growth rate in order to populate Egypt and all the foreign nations that the pyramid builders traded with (not to mention the other great nations that were around at the time, such as China).