Magus55

How sure are we of the dates of the Pyramids? What evidence is used to come up with the dates?

Johnny Skeptic

http://www.aeraweb.org/how_old.asp

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid...re/howold.html

http://starryskies.com/articles/2003/03/pyramids.html

GenesisNemesis

I've read somewhere that there's evidence that the pyramids are 6,000 years old or something like that...

Huon

More seriously :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khufu

Roger Pearse

Also a little more seriously: the relationship of Egyptian dates with AD and BC is not certain. We can date events as occurring in year 5 of king XYZ of the 19th dynasty fine. But when we want to work out what year that was in BC, we have problems.

It's worth considering that there was a time when someone had to do this exercise for the very first time. All he had was a mass of lists of kings and kingdoms, not just for Egypt but for Persia, and also lists of cities and their annual magistrates, plus a heap of 4-yearly Olympiads and events that occurred in those. And he had the bible as well, and Josephus. He didn't even have AD and BC.

The man who did this task sat down, and tried to work out "synchonisms" -- events that happened in all the lists he had -- and then count back years. He tried to find an early date that he could count from. This turned out to be the birth of Abraham, so he set that as year 1. He found that almost all his sources mentioned the Trojan War, so that was a pretty major link point. When kingdom A fought kingdom B, that was a way to get link points.

He then drew up a table. Each line was a year. Each column was a kingdom.
He had no real reference material. Previous writers had never drawn up such a table before, not least because they only had books in roll format, not well suited to page after page of tables. The result was hundreds of pages long. Many lines only had a number.

Then he started to find problems. Kings don't reign for fixed numbers of years of 12 months each; they reign for 5 years and 3 months, and the like. Sometimes kings were suppressed from the lists. Sometimes several kings ruled for less than a year. Discrepancies crept in. He did his best, but sometimes the numbers just didn't fit.

But at the end, he had a table of all this data, more or less fitting together, and was the first man ever to be able to see a unified chronology.

For Egyptian history, he had access to Manetho's now lost work, listing the dynasties, and he incorporated material from that. This means that his work will always have enormous value when trying to do the same exercise.

We have only one kingdom to tie in like this. He had many. Yet, although AD and BC were still not invented when he finished, he had effectively ensured that a universal dating system would come into being, and had integrated into it all previous data.

His name? Eusebius of Caesarea.

Prefaces
Part 1
Part 2

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Sven

I think I heard something about Egyptians reporting solar and lunar eclipses, we computed when those have occured, and thus had a means to date Egyptian chronology. Is this correct?

post tenebras lux

I hope so, cos I'd hate to think that we're relying upon something which has, as just about its opening premise: followed by:

Sarpedon

Building construction produces a lot of debris: broken tools, cracked stones, gravel chippings, dirt used as fill, etc. Waste piles are the archaeologist's treasure trove. A fragment of wood found in a pile of construction debris can be dated with Carbon 14, and the age of the pile can be established.

Whats more: we can study the stones of the pyramid and determine exactly which quarry they came from (being sedimentary, the stones have a unique pattern caused by sediment that can be matched to other stones). Thus, the waste piles at the quarry sites can be positively associated with the pyramid. (many of them were abandoned afterwards, and you can see the pits where the stones were quarried out of) And the age is then determined.

The exact duration of each reign and the length of the dynasties is harder to determine. It is now clear that many pharaohs were crowned while their fathers were still alive, and the two reigned simultaneously. Thus, many older histories that assumed that each king reigned successively have had to be revised.

Sven

Interesting what google returns on 'dating Egypt eclipses':

For many decades, astronomers and Egyptologists have searched hard for ancient Egyptian eclipse records without any real success. More amazingly, no single hieroglyph for eclipse has ever been determined in the Egyptian texts.[from 2001]

http://www.eclipse-chasers.com/akhet.html

About 1920, Forrer discovered on a clay tablet from Boghazkoi, the
description of a solar eclipse observed in the tenth year of King Mursilis
II when he was breaking up a winter camp preparing for a spring campaign
(6). This provides a golden chance to extract a dating of the eclipse and
hence obtain an absolute Hittite chronology for at least the Empire Period
and check it against the Egyptian chronology.

http://www.eclipse-chasers.com/egypt4.htm
Both from the same guy - not sure if he's a crackpot or for real.

Nearly all we know about ancient Egyptian civilization's knowledge of astronomy comes to us from tomb paintings, various temple inscriptions, and a handful of papyrus documents such as the Rhind Papyrus. Unfortunately, the Great Library in Alexandria was burned during the time of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. [snip] The Vienna papyrus which described lunar and solar eclipses and their portent was probably copied by a scribe in the late second century AD, and presents knowledge of astronomy that is regarded as Babylonian in nature.

http://eclipse99.nasa.gov/pages/trad...Calendars.html
NASA should be somewhat reliable.

It also has this on Babylon and Sumeria:

Babylonian clay tablets that have survived since dawn of civilization in the Mesopotamian region record the earliest total solar eclipse seen in Ugarit on May 3, 1375 BC. Like the Chinese, Babylonian astrologers kept careful records about celestial happenings including the motions of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, and the Moon on tablets dating from 1700 to 1681 BC. Later records identified a total solar eclipse on July 31, 1063 BC, that "turned day into night," and the famous eclipse of June 15, 763 BC, recorded by Assyrian observers in Nineveh. Babylonian astronomers are credited with having discovered the 223-month period for lunar eclipses.

So apparently I just mixed up this with the dating of the Babylonian and Sumerian kings - there's apparently nothing similar for Egypt. But I think Egypt can be dated using Babylon dates.

Kosh

Is there an egyptian heiroglyph for "World Wide Flood"?