JoeWallack

JW:
The Shroud is a favorite hobby of mine because it is an excellent example of modern Christianity manufacturing evidence for a supposed historical event. Regarding Villarreal's supposed discrediting of the carbon dating results of The Shroud, here is the chronology:

1) 1973 - The Church authorizes the Raes sample to be tested.

2) 1978 - The Church creates STURP to analyze The Shroud. Ray Rogers and Walter McCrone are members.

3) 1988 - STURP convinces the Vatican that The Shroud is authentic so the Vatican agrees to carbon dating:

1 - One month was spent studying where to cut the samples

2 - Mons. Dardozzi (Vatican Academy of Science), Prof. Testore (Turin University professor of textile technology), Prof. Vial (Director of the Lyon Ancient Textiles Museum), Profs. Hall and Hedges (heads of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory) and Prof. Tite (head of the British Museum research laboratory) did the studying.

3 - Detailed photographs of the cut area show no evidence of patching.

4 - There is no known patching near the cut area.

4) 1999 - McCrone writes Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin (or via: amazon.co.uk) proving that the Shroud is 14th century and impeaching Rogers' credibility:

1 - There is no blood on it.

2 - There is pigment on it.

3 - The Shroud is recreated with a 14th century technique

4 - The provenance of The Shroud is 14th century

5) 2005 - Rogers writes a paper claiming that the C14 sample was a patched area:

1 - Rogers provides a detailed calculation supposedly based on the carbon dating results and his determination of the mixture of original and later material in the sample which he shows yields a dating of 1st century!

2 - Rogers confesses that he has samples of all areas of The Shroud in his inventory.

3 - Rogers claims that Luigi Gonella, who cut the sample for the C14 testing, gave him a piece from that cut in 2003, which is otherwise unknown. Gonella was 75 in 2005, died in 2007, and did not publicly comment on this assertion. Gonella always maintained that the carbon dating was accurate.

4 - Rogers gives one thread from this supposed cut to Villareal, tells him it was from the dating sample and dies.

5 - After the related deaths of Rogers and Gonella, who both suspiciously die after handling the suspicious cut, JoeWallack gets brilliant idea for sequel to the classic starring Sean Connery The Name of the Rose, The Name of the Ruse starring Herschel Shanks.

6) 2008 - Villareal also receives two supposed threads from John Brown who claims they are from the Raes cut which shared a border with the C14 cut.

1 - Note that the Raes sample was analyzed by Shroudies from 1973 to 1988 and subject to testing more overdeveloped than Arnold Swarzenegger's muscles and smile. Exponentially more testing than Villareal did on it. There was never any claim by the Shroudies that it contained patches.

Perhaps more mysterious than The Shroud itself is how a 14th century person could have patched The Shroud in an undetectable way to multiple 20th century textile experts with modern photography equipment. The ironic conclusion is that the sample used for the carbon dating was carefully controlled while the sample used by Villareal claiming to dispute the carbon dating results was subject to no controls whatsoever.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

matthijs

David, the calibration curve is correct. The dendro data is robust, and the curve corresponds with curves constructed from other data sets. The deviation between the dendro curve and the standard decay curve has been explained by the experts, whom, and this really saddens me, you're already aware of. I was searching for citations to give you, and inadvertently stumbled across a quote from your Appendix C to A Test of Time. You're already aware of the relevant literature, since you cited it. And you've clearly misunderstood it, since everything you cited disagrees with you.

A cursory search of the forums for terms like "wiggle match," or indeed for your own name, will turn up some thorough dissection of your assault on dendro-calibration. I've yet to read from top-to-bottom all 6 or so papers I've found on radiocarbon age calibration, but I don't hold out much hope for them agreeing with you in the fine-print. I'll refrain from accusing you of purposefully misrepresenting Yamaguchi & co., but dear lord they couldn't agree with you any less, they just couldn't.

With that said, I have a question, if I may. What would it take for you to be satisfied that your chronology has been falsified? If spin is right about your linguistics, is your theory falsified? If c14 dating is reliable for dating artifacts prior to 500BCE, is your theory falsified? What is the silver bullet that would kill your chronology? To borrow an analogy, how many legs need to be chopped off your stool?

Elske.

David Rohl

I would just like to point out that all the Amarna Letters were sent TO EGYPT and not FROM EGYPT to the city-states in Syro-Palestine. For some inexplicable reason spin seems to be under the impression that the local rulers were having scribes read out letters from Pharaoh addressed to them and that the vocalisation of names would not have been that important to them. The fact is the letters were written to Pharaoh by the scribes of the local rulers. Therefore it was they (the local scribes in Palestine) who were the ones who wrote in Akkadian using Sh instead of Egyptian S when writing the names of Egyptian officials. He says that the Akkadian lingua franca 'in no way directly reflects the local language spoken around Jerusalem'. But we are not talking about the local language spoken by illiterate villagers. The lingua franca of the royal scribes of the kings of the region was Akkadian and not Hebrew or Canaanite - and it was these same scribes who would have recorded the annals of those kingdoms. Their archive of writings would have been the original source for any later historical records of the kings of Israel, worked into Hebrew and then used to compile the books of Kings and Chronicles. It was not the camp-fire sing-songs of the local yokels which formed the basis of the biblical texts.

I find it absolutely amazing that spin does not know that the world's most famous ancient archive is a source of letters from Palestine (including Jerusalem) to Egypt and not the other way around. What does that say about his expertise in this area?

And, while we are at it, the written form of Ramesses II's hypocoristicon is not Sesi (which was the short-form for Ramesses III's nomen) - that's just more ignorance. The hypocoristicon of Ramesses II was written S-Y-S-W (as attested in Papyrus Anastasi I and the Serabit el-Khadim faience goblet). This should be vocalised as Sysu or Sysa (the w representing a vowel-marker in Egyptian hieroglyphs) and not Sesi.

andrewcriddle

Hi David

I think we should distinguish.

The tree ring calendar for the Western USA can be assigned absolute dates without any input whatever from radiocarbon. One can then measure the C14 in samples to which an absolute age has been assigned on entirely independent grounds. Although this method might conceivably be wrong it is not in any sense circular. This gives us entirely non-circular evidence that radiocarbon levels were higher than at present in 3000 BCE in the Western USA

Since the tree ring calendar in the Mediterranean cannot currently be given absolute dates without any reference to radiocarbon evidence, things are less straightforward. However I don't think this is really a matter of circular reasoning. What is happening, in effect, is that dates are calculated using the premise that in the Mediterranean radiocarbon levels were similar to those in the Western USA (In the same hemisphere and approximately the same latitude). Again this premise might conceivably be seriously mistaken but it is, at the very least, the obvious default position.

(Under any plausible interpretation of the Mediterranean tree ring calendar, it provides direct (non-circular) evidence that Mediterranean C14 levels varied in the same sort of way as C14 in the Western USA, but this falls short of directly establishing close similarity between the two regions. )

Andrew Criddle

ETA

The current process for radiocarbon calibration is somewhat more complicated than I suggested above. However the discrepancy between David Rohl's dates for the 18th dynasty and those from corrected radiocarbon dating is too large for these complexities to be all that significant.

David Rohl

DR: Show me that calibrated C14 dates for Thera are proven by anything other than C14 and widely accepted by the archaeological fraternity. Then produce the still unpublished data for the dendrochronologies of the region actually under discussion (and not the Pacific coast of the USA). Explain how local climate conditions do not effect growth patterns and how trees from all around the world can be expected to grow the same tree-ring widths (from the snow-covered slopes of the White Mountains to the bogs of Ireland). Show me, using that European dendro data (if you can get it after 20 years without independent scrutiny), that the proposed overlap-matches in the separate tree-ring sequences in the Turkish, German and Belfast dendrochronologies are independent of C14 dating (used to fix the time-period for the overlap search) and explain to me why you think Yamaguchi does not produce good examples of complacency in that matching process of the rings. Do that and science can claim a victory.

David Rohl

I agree Andrew. Sensible position to take with all the caveats that you have included. Basically I would say the jury is out on this until we can get something like Ice Core dating to pinpoint an indisputable eruption - preferably Thera.

spin

I don't know why David Rohl would ever think such an unsupported thing. I have a good collection of Amarna letters on the desk at the moment.

Yup, why would you think otherwise?

This is merely a means of referring to the Hebrew speech community. I think Rohl protesteth a bit much.

There's not really too much in this post that needs consideration.

The desperation of this gripe should raise an eyebrow of amusement.

(You'll note that I attempted to correct the spelling while you were writing and before you posted this complaint.)

We are left with the probability that $w$q was the original form of the name found in the Hebrew bible. This would eliminate his candidate Ramses. We are used to the known Egyptian names in Hebrew featuring a samek for the Egyptian /s/ (as even shown by "Raamses") and Rohl hasn't made much of a dent in the issue. It seems apparent that the situation is unlikely to change. His correlation between Shishak and Ramses II (James argued that it was Ramses III) has a weak chance at best and all his rhetoric doesn't change that fact. What is necessary is some way to render the correlation a hell of a lot more solid. Until then, you're on safer ground with the more realistic correlation of $w$q with Shoshenq.


spin

matthijs

Thank you for making this clear, David. I'll get back to you after I've had some sleep, unless someone beats me to it. Some of the items you've listed, however, are clearly unreasonable and amount to the same kind of demands placed on evolutionary theory by creationists; namely, things that are unprovable and entirely beside the point. I've bolded those portions of your post, and I trust that in the name of sensible discourse you're able to see fit to withdraw them. The portions that I haven't bolded, I believe I can demonstrate quite well.

Elske.

David Rohl

DR: Please don't just make bald statements but at least try to explain.

DR: Please don't just make bald statements but at least try to explain.

DR: Please don't just make bald statements but at least try to explain.

DR: Please don't just make bald statements but at least try to explain.

I have made the effort to contribute a lot of responses here - whether you agree with them or not - but this type of comment is just lazy. If you are going to make accusations like those above, you surely at least owe me some evidence to demonstrate that what you say is true. Otherwise it's just your opinion and no-one can make a judgement on your charges.

matthijs

David, I was hoping you might do some of the leg work on this one, since most of what I'd say has already been said by others, and probably better than I'm able. You might imagine my enthusiasm was sapped when I discovered your appendix, since I'd gone to all the trouble of finding and reading those articles only to discover that none of it would be new to you. I was going to make a case, then cite my sources, but you're already familiar with those sources, and your misunderstanding of them has already been demonstrated.

I can rehash quite happily if that's really what needs to be done, but I can't help but be nagged by the pointless feeling of it. I'd rather not recast the contents of this thread in my own terms, but as I say, I'll do that, and then some, if you're really unconvinced by those arguments. Is that what you need from me? I'll boil the kettle, make my coffee thick and black and rough, and deal to this now if that's what you need. I'll confess, I find the idea of an all-nighter endearing.

Elske.