spin

In the case of Egypt, Amarna is merely a date-fixer for the chronology outlined in Egyptian epigraphy. One can build back from Amarna to the earlier kingdoms once it is fixed, as it is with the chronology of Assyria through the correspondence of Ashur-uballit I.

We can also construct backwards through Mesopotamia and its relations with Hatti, and earlier with its internal conflicts.

It's a progression of fixing points in chronology and building backwards.

The Ebla tablets are not too useful for chronology, though they do provide a little synchronism with Mari.


spin

YHWHtruth

Dave,

We all have our beliefs, and our views will of course influence what we write and the evidence we select. Very few historians and scientists would accept what the Bible say about a worldwide flood around 2400 BCE. I have not defended this directly in this thread, but in the past I have pointed to surprising data that accords with a worldwide flood, and that will of course *indirectly* defend the Bible. My main point, however, has been to attack traditional thinking where the consensus of historians almost is viewed as the voice of God.

All those working with chronology know the difference between an absolute and a relative chronology. The oldest astronomical diary listed in A.J. Sachs, H. Hunger,1988, "Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babyulonia", is one from year 16 of Samashsumukin. Thus an *absolute* chronology cannot go back longer than the 7th century BCE. If you are aware of older astronomical data that can be used for an absolute chronology, I will like to know it.

Even if we cannot make an absolute chronology, a relative one can be made. Such a chronology can be quite good, and I do not reject the Assyrian king lists or other king lists, I have just asked why we should trust these lists more than the Biblical chronological lists. And behind such a question is the challenge to demonstrate that either of the lists are right and wrong. So far I have not seen any plausible chronology going back to the third millennium BCE. All I have seen build on several assumptions and axioms and are not better than these. I would like to stress that I do not reject historical reconstructions and chronologies, I just ask that we critically scrutinize their foundations in order to discover circularity and questionable axioms. One such fallacy is to to put age above quality. It is for instance a general consensus among researchers that the creation account in the Bible is taken from a Babylonian ora Sumerian source, and the principal argument is that the Sumerian and Babylonian accounts are older than Biblical manuscripts. I am at present working on a translation of Atrahasis into Norwegian, and I am very familiar with the Gilgamesh Epic and Enuma Elish as well. For me, the great difference of quality between the three on one hand and the Biblical account on the other, is a strong argument against the view that the Bible adopted its text from the others.

I know that you have a very good historical knowledge, so why not show us how it is possible to make a reliable chronology before the last astronomical diary in the 7th century BCE, on the basis of the Assyrian king lists or other information. You need not take the chronology back to Alulim and Alalgar who reigned 28.800 and 36.000 years respectively; it is enough that you make a reliable chronology beyond the year 2400 BCE.

spin

You don't seem to be using these terms in what is considered to be a standard way. A relative chronology is one which gives you the order of things without sufficient evidence to be able to place what is ordered into a chronological matrix. Absolute chronology is one where that described can be placed into fixed times. There is no necessary idea that things must be correlated to astronomical events. Assyrian king and eponym lists supply us with absolute chronological information. You might claim it is wrong, not that it isn't absolute chronological data taken as a whole. Adding up the reigns, working backwards from some acceptable date, such as the fall of Assyria to the Medes, you are given absolute dates. You might want to use Samash-shum-ukin and that's fine. The three major Assyrian king lists along with the eponym lists will give you absolute dates.


spin

DaveDonally

Truth, I'll reply later on your points tonight.


The Assyrian King Lists provide a continuous chronology which includes Ashur-uballit I and takes us down to the Neo-Assyrian period where there can be little doubt. This means that modern chronological analyses of the ANE are no longer based on the unsafe chronologies of Egyptian and biblical sources. (One thing that people like Rohl and James do do is to show that these sources are unsafe, yet their attempts to reconstruct chronology on these same sources must also fail for the same reasons and we have to turn to much more secure means such as the Assyrian continuous king lists.)

YHWHtruth

I think your words below are too optimistic. I will soon publish a part of a chronological study based on information from several thousand dated cuneiform tablets and astronomical tablets. Twenty year ago the geophysicist R. R. Newton published several books where he accused Claudius Ptolemy of being a fraud because he said he made observations when he actually made calculations instead. His "observations" were very close to his astronomical theory but not so close to the real positions of the celestial bodies. Ptolemy's king list, on the other hand, including the Assyrian part, is universally being viewed as accurate. However, his king list is very close to the theoretical (calculated) 18-year Saros cycles/19-year intercalary cycles from the 1st century B.C.E, but the list is contradicted by cuneiform evidence. So the situation is the same with Ptolemy's kings as with his "observations".

Parker and Dubberstein (1956), who build on Ptolemy, is the chronological Bible. Curiously enough, it seems that nobody has ever critically examined the data basis for P&D, at least no such study is published, to the best of my knowledge. I have checked their sources, and I found that the work is selective, material that contradicted the author's theory were left out, and 51 % of their intercalary months from the Persian empire lack foundation. I started my chronological studies 20 years ago with the view that the absolute chronology which was based on astronomical diaries and lunar/planetary tablets was unimpeachable. I have revised that view on the basis of three finds, 1) Positions of the heavenly bodies are very often calculated and not observed, 2) There are contradictions among astronomical tablets, and 3) many dated business tablets contradict the accepted absolute chronology. As to the New- Assyrian chronology, it is also to a great degree based upon Ptolemy And remember, the only anchoring point of this chronology is the eclipse of Bur Sagale, and the date of this eclipse is fixed on the basis of Ptolemy. The reigns of the last 20 years of the Assyrian empire are in confusion as far as chronology is concerned, so we get little help in calculating backwards, in otder to establish a chronology that way. In my view the accepted Persian, New Babylonian, and Assyrian chronologies are less sure today than previously, and are in need of revisions.

DaveDonally

>We all have our beliefs, and our views will of course influence what we
>write and the evidence we select. Very few historians and scientists would
>accept what the Bible say about a worldwide flood around 2400 BCE. I have
>not defended this directly in this thread, but I have pointed to surprising
>data that accords with a worldwide flood, and that will of course
>*indirectly* defend the Bible. My main point, however, has been to attack
>traditional thinking where the consensus of historians almost is viewed as
>the voice of God.
>
>All those working with chronology know the difference between an absolute
>and a relative chronology. The oldest astronomical diary listed in A.J.
>Sachs, H. Hunger,1988, "Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from
>Babyulonia", is one from year 16 of Samashsumukin. Thus an *absolute*
>chronology cannot go back longer than the 7th century BCE. If you are aware
>of older astronomical data that can be used for an absolute chronology, I
>will like to know it.

Dear TRUTH,

I don't think it is relevant to attempt to tie the notion of absolute chronology to astronomical (or other observable) phenomena. It is sufficient to have consecutive lengths of reigns, one of which can be associated to a fixed date. A relative chronology is one in which we know the order of events and perhaps the dates with in the chronology but that chronology cannot be tied to a fixed date. This is at least my understanding of how John Brinkman uses the terminology in his works on the reconstruction of Babylonian chronology. See for example "A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia 1158-722 BC," Chapter II, "Chronology".

(Year 16 of the reign of Shamash-shum-ukin is sixteen years after Ashur-banipal sat on the Babylonian throne for a year. We then have a continuous series of reigns back from his period to the time of Shamshi-Adad. Brinkman takes the twenty synchronisms between Babylon and Assyria in the Post-Kassite era to provide the basis for an absolute chronology.)

>Even if we cannot make an absolute chronology, a relative one can be made.
>Such a chronology can be quite good, and I do not reject the Assyrian king
>lists or other king lists, I have just asked why we should trust these
>lists more than the Biblical chronological lists. And behind such a
>question is the challenge to demonstrate that either of the lists are right
>and wrong.

I cannot hope to show that the Biblical chronological information is "right"; it doesn't figure as primary historical information (due to its late date) nor does the information it contains receive support -- except in a very cursory manner. I would however argue that, without ancient collusion to defraud posterity amongst the various realms of the ancient near east, there is enough cross-cultural primary and secondary historical evidence to say that the Assyrian King Lists are essentially historically correct.

>So far I have not seen any plausible chronology going back to
>the third millennium BCE. All I have seen build on several assumptions and
>axioms and are not better than these. I would like to stress that I do not
>reject historical reconstructions and chronologies, I just ask that we
>critically scrutinize their foundations in order to discover circularity
>and questionable axioms. One such fallacy is to to put age above quality.
>It is for instance a general consensus among researchers that the creation
>account in the Bible is taken from a Babylonian ora Sumerian source, and
>the principal argument is that the Sumerian and Babylonian accounts are
>older than Biblical manuscripts. I am at present working on a translation
>of Atrahasis into Norwegian, and I am very familiar with the Gilgamesh Epic
>and Enuma Elish as well. For me, the great difference of quality between
>the three on one hand and the Biblical account on the other, is a strong
>argument against the view that the Bible adopted its text from the others.

I don't know what you mean by "quality" here.

>I know that you have a very good historical knowledge, so why not show us
>how it is possible to make a reliable chronology before the last
>astronomical diary in the 7th century BCE, on the basis of the Assyrian
>king lists or other information. You need not take the chronology back to
>Alulim and Alalgar who reigned 28.800 and 36.000 years respectively; it is
>enough that you make a reliable chronology beyond the year 2400 BCE.

To do such a thing seriously, the process would be long, would require recourse to various literatures and archaeological evidence. So, let me only give a few highlights!

In email to you I have already briefly mentioned the 20 synchronisms between Assyria and Babylon between 1158 and 722. These assure the chronological order of the Assyrian regnal order. (One can only dispute the figures provided for the reigns themselves, though I can't see that that would be particularly fruitful.)

I've already mentioned the different king lists also, each of which was compiled in a different reign (Tiglath-Pileser II, Ashur-nirari V, Shalmaneser V), showing that the chronological information provided in the latter parts of these lists are contemporary information and need to contain relatively controllable information for the period they were updated in.

The passage back to 1158 BCE is reasonably well supported, yet we are now back to the time when the Assyrian information receives support from numerous sources. For example the climatic change which is noted in Assyrian literature matches the stratigraphic information from Ugarit and Cyprus, where the stratum covering those archaeological sites is much lighter in colour than those above or below. This layer caused by the climatic change is dated by the references in the Assyrian literature to that change, which is also reflected in numerous other areas around the near east and Europe. (See the Parpola & Neumann article on the subject, JNES 1988 -- from memory. If exact reference is needed I can get it for you.) The importance of this climatic change is that it provides an ad quem date for the destruction of Ugarit, forcing the dating of the Hittite empire to be constrained by it as well, given the numerous synchronisms between these two cultures.

The relationship between Ugarit and Hatti provides a strong synchronism with Egypt as well, supported both by the treaties between Ramses II and Hattusilis III and by the Amarna letters which provide a further synchronism between Egypt and those countries as well as Mitanni, Babylon and Assyria. Thus, returning again to the Assyrian King Lists, we have a further strong support of the veracity of the lists. This list itself considering only back to Shamshi-Adad I, we reach back to 1810 BCE.

We also have the record of Mursili I's raid on Babylon which both brought an end to the dynasty of Hammurabi and the arrival of the Kassites in Babylon. It was under Hammurabi that Mari was annexed by Babylon. The last king of Mari was Zimri-Lim, who was the successor of Yashmakh-Addu, the son of Shamshi-Adad I, a further demonstration of the validity of the Assyrian King Lists.

judge

using the LXX one can arrive at a flood date of 3537 b.c.


According to the LXX version, the Flood occurred 1232 years before in 3537 BC,

from...
http://www.ldolphin.org/barrychron.html

offa

Offa,
John Hyrcanus wiped the Samaritans out in about 120 b.c. He used a flood of water. Samaria was the whole world back then. His technique must have been a dam downstream (Samaria was just a village on a wady). BTW, the RED SEA that Moses parted the waters on was the same wady (little creek).

rlogan

My goodness - what do you mean by this? By what standard would this be an argument for dating, even if it were true?

In the first place, I think we have Gilgamesh tablets and fragments that go back to roughly 2,000 B.C. There would naturally have been an earlier oral tradition. But anyway, you have more than a thousand years of written evidence prior to the written biblical account.

According to the Bible, the Hebrews came from the very land of the Gilgamesh epic myth (Ur in mesopotamia). So you have to argue that there was a Noah myth that preceeded Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia- and that Gilgamesh survived but Noah didn't.

YHWHtruth

Judge,

The first step we have to take when we are going to evaluate the flood information of the Bible, is to find out what the Bible really says and what is does not say. It seems to me that the information given in Genesis 5:1-29;7:6; 11:10-12:4 is quite unambiguous. It gives a little more than 1650 years from Adam to the flood and a little more than 350 years from the flood and to Abraham. I am not able to see there is any room for "gaps" here, so my question is: Do you agree that these verses do not allow for any gaps? In that case, are you aware of any other Biblical expressions which suggest or directly say there were such gaps? I am only speaking about the biblical expressions, and am not comparing them with the accounts of other old nations or with the view of the natural sciences.