Paul Flocken

Really?
Could you push me in the right direction for that thread?
By the way, you guys are awesome. (Not you AFDave. Just them.)

shirley knott

And the question remains Dave --
WHERE CAN THIS 1+ mile thick layer of sediment be found ALL OVER THE WORLD?
NO ONE ELSE can see it or find it, and you are [ahem] curiosly silent, when asked just which specific layer, found worldwide, you are speaking of.
Please address this or consider the flood myth refuted out of hand, on the basis of your own concrete assertions in this thread.

no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott

Steviepinhead

Oops, dave! Now those darn anthropologists are getting in on the “conspiracy”:

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19499488/

Double-oops! Now those darn Republican-government-funded cancer researchers are getting in on the conspiracy, too:

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19488771/

Steviepinhead

And, dave, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the PYRAMID thread isn't it? When are you going to get around to telling us what the evidence is for contradicting Herodotus's identification of Philitis/Philiton/Philition as a mere shepherd who happened to be herding his flocks around the Great Pyramid, rather than the prince of Israel, cosmologist, and master builder who designed the pyramid to encode all those mystical measurements.

If the builder wasn't a fairly direct descendant of Noah, someone who--in your view, apparently--had access to the original language and tablets and knowledge of the pre-Flood ancients, then what does it frickin' matter who built the Great Pyramid and when?!?

Just politely askin'...

Pappy Jack

I'm glad you don't find Rohl conclusive, Dave, as his chronology is controversial and disputed with good reason - as you will discover if you follow some of the links I and Calilassea have given you (btw, I miswrote Walter Mattfeld's name in the link I gave you, which you may have noticed if you followed up the suggestion to look at his work; my apologies to Mr Mattfeld). So, if Rohl is not conclusive, I return to my response to the question you asked Red Dave:
As to your bullet points from Rohl's work:
• Shishak/Shoshenq - disputed and unresolved.
• C14 is not the only RM method used for dating the Egyptian chronology. Thermoluminescence is also used. Do you and/or Rohl have problems with this as well?
• Hebrew names in Egyptian papyri? So what? Egypt was both a military and commercial empire with links throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Near and Middle East. What other papyri and other textual sources are there that include non-Egyptian names? What does this lead us to conclude about Egyptian society?
• Egypt was a society with a deep-rooted belief in magic and the power of the gods. How many other pharaohs' reigns saw 'blasts of (the) god(s)' or other supernatural events recorded? If none, Manetho's observation may have some value; if many, then precious little. And are we certain that these are Manetho's own words rather than an interpolation by a later writer seeking to reinforce Biblical 'truth'? This is a pertinent question as Manetho's original work is lost and preserved only in fragmentary translations by Josephus (70 AD), Africanus (early 3rd century AD), Eusebius (early 4th century AD) and Syncellus (800 AD).
• And what is your interpretation of the 'terrible catastrophe' at Avaris? How does this provide 'evidence for Israel's activities'?
• Ditto Garstang and Kenyon's 'work at Jericho'?
• Joseph? Well, here's a comment from Dennis Forbes' review of A Test of Time here:
Regardless of Rohl's work, however, and even if 350 years was to be lopped off the accepted chronology for Dynastic Egypt (unlikely, if you follow the links to the reasoned criticisms of Rohl's work and conclusions), this does nothing to help you provide supporting evidence for Smyth or to explain the existing evidence for Early Dynastic and Predynastic settlement in Egypt that your mythical Flood should have wiped from the face of the Earth.

Pappy Jack

PS to my last post:

Before Dave excitedly accuses me of quote-mining Forbes, I should point out that Forbes also finds some of Rohl's arguments supporting the identification of the (or, at least, an) historical Joseph 'well reasoned'.

Dean Anderson

It appears that Dave's calculation is to assume 2% growth per annum, and to assume that fractional people(!) are included in the growth for the following year.

In other words, he uses a very simplistic compound interest formula, vis:



where = Number of years, = Population after years, = Initial population.

At least, when I use that formula I replicate his value for the population after 600 years.

To recap, Dave's population growth for the first few years is as follows:

8 people
8.16 people after 1 year
8.3232 people after 2 years
8.489664 people after 3 years
8.65945728 people after 4 years
8.8326464256 people after 5 years
9.009299354112 people after 6 years

9.75195535995805704192 people after 10 years

11.887579167826834736284592074267 people after 20 years

21.532704232588843151152698841226 people after 50 years

35.326683641021317949462594176444 people after 75 years

57.957168946018685081245825536255 people after 100 years

419.87917902966907746713355533203 people after 200 years

3,041.8760644922695682260276401483 people after 300 years

22,037.315622828612097256890943759 people after 400 years

159,652.55308362685684453368307336 people after 500 years

1,156,626.2489663722661858832710676 people after 600 years

...and so on.

Of course, such fractional people are completely unrealistic, but due to the nature of Dave's calculation he needs to keep them because those fractions get multiplied up each year. Without all those fractional people counting each time, he would not be able to reach his total.

As you can see, Dave needs to push the building of the pyramid as late as he can, since the simple exponential nature of his unrealistic population algorithm needs all that time to get to any appreciable figure - despite the completely ridiculous and unrealistic nature of having a constant "2% increase" and allowing fractional people when the actual population numbers involved are low integers.

Faid

I would like to know too. Dave never made any mention of ever visiting IIDB...

Faid

"Fractional people"? Do you mean PYGMIES and DWARFS?

Dean Anderson

Additional:

Of course, Dave's figure of 1,156,626 people doesn't fit his other figures.

Despite giving a Flood date of 2750 BCE (255 years before the Bible claims that it happened) and a Pyramid date of 2170 BCE (approximately 390 years after archaeology tells us that it happened), he has still only managed to squeeze himself a 580 year gap, not a 600 year gap.

Significant?

Of course. With a 1.02% annual compound increase, the population increases by about 50% every 20 years.

Using Dave's own formula, after a mere 580 years there would be a world population of 778,376 (and some fractional people), not the 1,156,626 that he claims.

To get that figure, he has had to refer to his 580 years as "approximately 600 years" and then round it up to "actually 600 years" when doing his calculation.

Incompetence, blindness to bias, or deliberate fraud? I would not like to speculate. I leave that to the reader...

Either way, Dave's reported population is nearly 50% higher than that which his "2% annual increase" would actually give in the time period that he has allocated.

And, of course, about a quarter of his 778,376 population would have been born in the last 15 years before the pyramid was (according to him) built - so could also be eliminated as workers since they would be too young.

This gives him a total work-age population of the world (not just of Egypt) of 578,345.

So if Dave's very early Flood date (which contradicts the Bible) were correct, and if Dave's very late Pyramid date (which contradicts archaeology) were correct, and if Dave's very high population growth rate (which contradicts reality) were correct, then he would have just over half a million people of work age available in the entire world.

Remembering that the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japeth each went and made their separate nations in three separate directions, at the most a third of this half a million (Shem's third, to be precise) would have been in Africa.

So rather than having 1,156,626 people in Egypt available to build the Pyramid like Dave implies; Dave's figures actually give us at most 192,781 people in the whole of Africa who were of work age.

And that's assuming that all his figures are correct - and we know that they have all already been pushed beyond the bounds of reasonableness in order to maximise his value.

So Dave, what sort of percentage of the population of Africa do you think were:

a) In Egpyt, as opposed to any of the other nations that we know existed because Egypt traded and warred with them?
b) Fit for work, as opposed to being elderly, infirm, sick or otherwise unfit?
c) Not occupied doing other jobs essential to keep the economy of Egypt running?
d) Not pregnant producing more children?