Duke Leto

...and I'd be perfectly willing to defend myself in this thread although not in a formal debate.

I emphatically do not rate the biblical narratives at face value, I agree with Wellhausen's source model, and the theological axe I have to grind, such that it is, is restoring the atrocities of Numbers and Joshua to the historical record. I see the biblical narrative as a secondary source like Herodotus, albeit a far less reliable one.

I am not an archaeologist by training, but I do have on my resume that designed the Biblical Archaeology Society's web archive, basarchive.org, and helped with the editorial work of getting the content in place, so I have a pretty decent background on the scholarship.

I agree with Rohl's general thesis on the Third Intermediary Period's inflation, as corroborated by Peter James. I certainly won't defend Rohl's habit of grandstanding showmanship, or his fundie-baiting.

OK, lay into me, I'll do my best to defend my position honestly.

Diogenes the Cynic

Exactly what events from Joshua or Numbers do you assert to be historical, and what is the archaeological evidence?

Ben C Smith

Hi, Duke.

I imagine your best bet in this forum is to hope that spin stumbles onto this thread and chooses to respond.

Short of that contingency, perhaps you could briefly summarize the New Chronology (and what you take to be the strongest evidence for that position). IIRC (not my area of expertise at all), Rohl retains the date of the battle of Actium but adjusts the other three main (and previous) dating hooks from antiquity (such as the Sothic cycle), right? The overall effect of his schema is (again IIRC) to identify the Shishak in the OT with some pharoah other than the usual Egyptian candidate, to make the Amarna letters apply to the time of (and indeed mention) Saul and David, and to actually find the patriarch Joseph in Egyptian archaeology, right?

Ben.

spin

Let me start by saying Rohl is a money-grubber with an audience of willing dupes (in conservative christians who are willing to believe this crap rather than face the implications of archaeology), while Peter James should really know better.

All of Rohl's Egyptian antics have been responded to by Kenneth Kitchen (for example in the forward to his monumental work on the TIP. But if you really want to apply Rohl and ignore the obviously correct analysis by Kitchen the result is like taking a four-legged stool and chopping off a large section of one of the legs and hoping the result is stable enough to sit on, for if you chop off a length of Egyptian history, you also have to chop off sections of the various near east histories and archaeological sequences.

If you feel like you want to go through the repetitive stress of explaining away

1. Assyrian king lists that function happily with current Egyptian chronology, or
2. the implications of a pre-destruction Karchemish period treaty between the Hittites and Ramses II being pushed into post-destruction times of the "neo-Hittite" states, or
3. Rohl's inane use of the Ugaritic eclipse tablet, or
4. his ignorance over the state of Palestine at the time of the Amarna letters, or
5. the stratigraphical implications of finding various Egyptian artefacts in the Levant in datable strata into which Philistine artefacts are also inserted (a stratigraphy that doesn't bend),

you might in each case like to present functional means of making each of the implied chronologies work so that they agree with Rohl's revisionist Egyptian chronology (not with James's which contradicts, not corroborates, Rohl's).


spin

Duke Leto

OK, let me start by saying that I do not aprove of Rohl's fundie baiting, and I do not like the people he allows to run his Yahoo Groups. I understand why he does it though. For better or worse he is locked out of most conventional academic sources of income, so he has to make his own by promoting interest in his books. That means not actively contradicting the worst of Christian apologist misinterpretations of his ideas, such as the million man Exodus as opposed to a much more limited outflow of at most a few thousand. From what I have read of Rohl's other writing, his criticism of that genuine imbecile Graham Hancock for example, he doesn't have a lot of time for supernatural explanations of events himself.

I'm not going to defend the way he goes about promoting his ideas, since they are the major stumbling block to the academic acceptance thereof.

OK then, here's the basic skinny on the Rohl-James-Bimson view of Bronze Age chronology for those out of the know, spin is right that Rohl and James disagree on the details of where the new synchronization points ought to be, but they agree with each other MORE than either agrees with the conventional datings:

1) Egyptian chronology is artificially inflated by between 200 and 300 years owing primarily to the identifications of Ramesses II with the time of Moses and Shoshenq I with Shishak. Rohl equates Shishak with Ramesses II, and James identifies him with Ramesses III using identical linguistic arguments.

2) This inflation of the antiquity of the Egyptian New Kingdom has caused a sympathetic gap to open up in the archaeological horizons of the entire Middle East and Mediterranean worlds at the end of the Bronze Age, characterized by very thin on the ground findings for the period known as the Greek Dark Age, a discontinuity between the Hittite and Neo-Hittite kingdoms of centuries, and similar 200 year dry patches in the archaeological records of Italy, Sardinia and most other areas. (I do not have access to James' work, and can not give a definitive list from memory.) It has also decontextualized the stratigraphic record of Israel's early monarchy from the Late Bronze age Milieu to the Early Iron Age owing to the somewhat firmer chronology of Chronicles conflicting with the unreliable Egyptian one.

3) Kitchen's work on TIP IS the problem, not the refutation. Kitchen had the thankless task of filling up the confused period after the collapse of Ramesses III's empire up to the apogee of psamtek that the abovementioned disputed mandated must be nearly 300 years. He did the best that he could, but excavation evidence gives the lie to the notion that dynasties 21 and 22 followed each other sequentially. He is the recognized expert on the period, and the whole edifice rests on his work. The reason Kitchen goes after Rohl with such vindictiveness is that if Rohl and James are correct than Kitchen's academic reputation is ruined.

That's the broad sweep. For me Rohl's presentation on the three TIP sites forced me to agree that the primary source evidence points to dynasties 21 and 22 being rival dynasties in a divided kingdom and not sequential dynasties of a single kingdom. Of these three sites, the Royal Cache and the San tomb complex are the more convincing.

You all may be aware that the Mummies of the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom were gathered up by the Egyptian Preists and hidden in a single tomb to protect them from robbers. This Royal Cache can be dated by Papyrus inscriptions to have been made into a pre-existing tomb in year 10 of Pharaoh Siamun of the 21st dynasty. The mummies were packed in to the gills in the entry corridoors of the tomb. The problem is that a minor preist who is atttributed to Shoshenq I, founder of the 22nd dynasty is buried in the main tomb chamber. Siamun would have reigned about 970 BCE and Shoshenq around 935 BCE according to the standard chronology. Now the problem is that there is no way to get the 22nd Dynasty priest's sarcophogus down into the main tomb when the corridoors were blocked by the sarcophoguses. The burial party would have had to extract all or most of the 30 odd mummies before buriying their preist in the main tomb, and then put them all back. The logical inference is that the preist and thus Shoshenq I predated Siamun, presumably by some time.

The San tombs are a similar setup The tomb of Psusennes I (circa 990 BCE conventionally) has a vestibule that juts into the wall of the adjacent tomb of Osorkon II (circa 850 BCE conventionally) which had to be partly demolished to make room for it. There's more wiggle room in this anomaly, but the conclusion is the same. 22nd Dynasty Osorkon II must have predated Psusennes I.

The way Rohl then reconstructs the Palestinian Syncronisms with Egypt is to posit Ramesses II as Shishak and place a much more modest Exodus at the end of the 13th Dynasty in the Second Intermediary Period. He places the events of Samuel in the context of the El Amarna correspondence and attributes the destruction of Middle Bronze Age Jericho to Joshua. His subseequent books detail his hypothetical identifications of the Genesis Legends and a detailed discussion on Troy and the Helladic influence throughout the Mediterranean.

Now, let me try and respond to spin's criticisms as best I can.

1) You have me at a loss on the problem of the Middle Assyrian King List, since both Rohl and James try to paper it over without Assyrialogical expertise. The Rohl Yahoo discussion group had a scholar interested in the question who had some workarounds in the offing, but I unsubscribed from that group in disgust when I realized that the moderator was a British Israelist promoting the laughable notion that the English speaking people are the "real Israelites" and the Jews are imposters. Bernard Newgrosh appears to have taken up the task, but I'd need to look at his studies in detail to determine whether they fix the Assyrian problem. I have to concede you that point.

2) Rohl's 2007 book makes it pretty clear that he palces the treaty within the Hittite Empire, and has the Neo-Hittite period following it immediately thereafter. I am not sure I am clear on your objections vis a vis Carchemish. Could you be more specific?

3) I need more info on how the use of the Ugarit tables was inane to properly agree with or confute your assertion there.

4) I am not sure that ignorance of the state of Palestine in Amarna times is an admissible criticism since the entire purpose of his discussion is to suggest that our view of the state Palestine in the Amarna period is incorrect. If you can, again be a bit more specific.

5) I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with respect to the Philistines and Egyptians. I think the gist is that since the Philistines of the time when the Penteteuh Oral Traditions were coalesced into the OT narrative we all love and hate, and the Philistines were first identified as Sea Peoples by Ramasses III, any mention of Philistines living in Palestine prior to the arrival of these Late Helladic migrants must be an anachronism. Well then so what? That just means that Rohl's Davidic Philistines were not the same people culturally that lived in the same area centuries later when David's descendants wrote about them, and they anachronistically applied the current name for the country to its former inhabitants. It's not like the writers of the OT were particularly scholarly.

Further, I'm not sure that it can be stated catagorically that just because the Philistines took part in the Sea Peoples invasion that they had not been in the land previously and simply joined in as the Sea Peoples came down the coast. The adaptation of Helladic pottery styles may reflect intrading and cultural crossover with the Sea Peoples rather than a total takeover.

That's more than grist for debate for one night.

Keith&Co.

Okay. If it's okay to 'not actively contradict...Christian apologists' because it improves his cash flow, wouldn't it make more fiscal sense to actually pander to the apologists? Tell them what they want to hear to sell even more books?
I mean, if we accept that a 'Truth' takes the back seat to something like book sales, how do you evaluate exactly where he draws the line?

Duke Leto

Allowing British Israelists to run your fan club counts as an ethical compromise in my book.

He runs tours, but does not, to the best of my knowledge, lecture at Christian venues. The compromise Rohl has made with scholarly integrity is basically the same one Hershel Shanks of BAS has made. He tends to overstate the case for biblical agreement with archaeology to catch the popular imagination.

spin

100 years is not a detail. They mutually exclude each other. (And Bimson is a well-educated religious nutter.)

Rohl is ignorant about the linguistics. How come the /s/ in Ramses ends up a "sh" in Hebrew? As Kitchen points out (p.44 of the preface to his TIP) there is no trouble transliterating the Egyptian /s/ in Pi(r)-Baste -> Pi-Beseth or Panehasi -> Pinehas. Why should (Ram)ses -> Shishaq? No reason at all. Besides Shoshenq is a much better candidate linguistically. Rohl is just wrong.

For some reason there must be a continuity between the Hittite power which succumbed to the Sea-People just before Karchemish was destroyed and the so-called neo-Hittite realms to the south-east?? Hattusis was destroyed and the Hittite power never again returned there. However, Hittites did rule in Karchemish and we have indications of them ruling there for several generations before the destruction of that city which was rebuilt and many generations of that dynasty and successive dynasties are on record. The Hittites fell and never recovered. The Mushki took over their lands.

The reason why Kitchen went after Rohl is because he was a prick, doctoring Kitchen's interview making him say through selective editing things that he didn't say.

Rohl has not attempted to deal rationally with Kitchen's TIP. He merely plays a modern Velikovsky, selectively picking data and using outmoded analyses.

I'd recommend you actually pay the money and buy Kitchen rather than getting it bastardized by Rohl. You might start to understand just how much Kitchen knows about the period and just what evidence is available.

We know when the Ramessids were eventually thrown out of Palestine: it was the Sea-Peoples. You know the Philistines who were in Palestine well before the period attributed to David. The fascinating thing about the Philistines is that the biblical writers didn't know that they were new arrivals on the Levantine coast, ie the writers didn't have a tradition that went that far back to the arrival of the Philistines (who threw out the Ramessids). The biblical material is post-Philistine, therefore post-Ramses IV (perhaps even Ramses VIII) therefore a few hundred years after Ramses II. According to Amihai Mazar (Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Doubleday 1992) late Ramessid scarabs were found in Iron 1A/1B tombs in Palestine. Interesting, isn't it?

If I understand the reference to the Royal Cache, it doesn't take into consideration the notion of reuse of tombs. Read Kitchen's preface pp.43-4. Also read the same preface p.44 for the impossibility of the overlap.

See the above references to Kitchen.

(The linguistic buffoon)



...By dismissing the kinglists which if accepted falsify the who crock of shite. Then of course there are synchronisms that work very nicely between Assyria and Hatti, which cannot work in the Rohl rot. Middle Assyrian potentates are mentioned in Hittite texts, making the Hittite texts contemporary with Middle Assyria, helping to demonstrate that the Asshur-uballit of the Amarna letters at the time of Akhnaten was in fact the Middle Assyrian king. Rohl R.I.P.

Then you should accept just here that Rohl is crap.

Karchemish was destroyed by the Sea peoples who apparently destroyed Hatti, Ugarit, coastal cities of Palestine and then went on to be stopped by Ramses III. This series of destructions marks a synchronism. Before Karchemish was destroyed the Hittites were already on their way out, being propped up after famines by Egyptian grain. I've mentioned after the renewal of Karchemish there was a long line of kings down to the early New Assyrian period. And in territory which was once under the dominion of Hatti (all of northern Syria, there were many Aramaean fiefdoms as well. The world had long changed since the time of the Hittites. Karchemish was now just one of many competing states. The chronology of post-destruction kings of Karchemish lead down to the New Assyrian period so that the Hittite period was well before.

Read Rohl, who uses a strange reading of the eclipse tablet from Ugarit to try to date it much later. He has to ignore all other dating attempts and use his strange reading.

Umm, he truly tries to read biblical characters into the Amarna letters. Saul, Jesse. It's mindbogglingly silly. He's prepared to destroy Egyptian chronology using the untestable biblical data for a period that many these days accept as legendary.

The Jews didn't know about their arrival, meaning their testimony is useless, though Rohl bases many of his arguments on the reliability of it.

But you'd think they'd know when they were invaded.

You mean they decided to take on burial customs from people they traded with? Or decided to simply stop making wares they'd made for centuries??

Why hadn't the Egyptians talked about the Peleset before Ramses III, given that they had had control over Palestine until it was taken from them by the Philistines?

If Kitchen hadn't buried Rohl, the fact that he tries to reduce time by 300 years, when Assyrian, Babylonian and Hittite records don't allow it and when the archaeological record doesn't allow it, shows that his fudge cannot work. How do you take out 300 years from each of these chronologies other than by hoping the same sort of fudging works in each of them as well.

I think you have enough to bury yourself with now. You can still join Rohl and ignore Kitchen's vast evidence or you can take a deep breath and find out about the big picture.


spin

Duke Leto

OK, let me start by saying that I do not aprove of Rohl's fundie baiting, and I do not like the people he allows to run his Yahoo Groups. I understand why he does it though. For better or worse he is locked out of most conventional academic sources of income, so he has to make his own by promoting interest in his books. That means not actively contradicting the worst of Christian apologist misinterpretations of his ideas, such as the million man Exodus as opposed to a much more limited outflow of at most a few thousand. From what I have read of Rohl's other writing, his criticism of that genuine imbecile Graham Hancock for example, he doesn't have a lot of time for supernatural explanations of events himself.

I'm not going to defend the way he goes about promoting his ideas, since they are the major stumbling block to the academic acceptance thereof.

OK then, here's the basic skinny on the Rohl-James-Bimson view of Bronze Age chronology for those out of the know, spin is right that Rohl and James disagree on the details of where the new synchronization points ought to be, but they agree with each other MORE than either agrees with the conventional datings:

1) Egyptian chronology is artificially inflated by between 200 and 300 years owing primarily to the identifications of Ramesses II with the time of Moses and Shoshenq I with Shishak. Rohl equates Shishak with Ramesses II, and James identifies him with Ramesses III using identical linguistic arguments.

2) This inflation of the antiquity of the Egyptian New Kingdom has caused a sympathetic gap to open up in the archaeological horizons of the entire Middle East and Mediterranean worlds at the end of the Bronze Age, characterized by very thin on the ground findings for the period known as the Greek Dark Age, a discontinuity between the Hittite and Neo-Hittite kingdoms of centuries, and similar 200 year dry patches in the archaeological records of Italy, Sardinia and most other areas. (I do not have access to James' work, and can not give a definitive list from memory.) It has also decontextualized the stratigraphic record of Israel's early monarchy from the Late Bronze age Milieu to the Early Iron Age owing to the somewhat firmer chronology of Chronicles conflicting with the unreliable Egyptian one.

3) Kitchen's work on TIP IS the problem, not the refutation. Kitchen had the thankless task of filling up the confused period after the collapse of Ramesses III's empire up to the apogee of psamtek that the abovementioned disputed mandated must be nearly 300 years. He did the best that he could, but excavation evidence gives the lie to the notion that dynasties 21 and 22 followed each other sequentially. He is the recognized expert on the period, and the whole edifice rests on his work. The reason Kitchen goes after Rohl with such vindictiveness is that if Rohl and James are correct than Kitchen's academic reputation is ruined.

That's the broad sweep. For me Rohl's presentation on the three TIP sites forced me to agree that the primary source evidence points to dynasties 21 and 22 being rival dynasties in a divided kingdom and not sequential dynasties of a single kingdom. Of these three sites, the Royal Cache and the San tomb complex are the more convincing.

You all may be aware that the Mummies of the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom were gathered up by the Egyptian Preists and hidden in a single tomb to protect them from robbers. This Royal Cache can be dated by Papyrus inscriptions to have been made into a pre-existing tomb in year 10 of Pharaoh Siamun of the 21st dynasty. The mummies were packed in to the gills in the entry corridoors of the tomb. The problem is that a minor preist who is atttributed to Shoshenq I, founder of the 22nd dynasty is buried in the main tomb chamber. Siamun would have reigned about 970 BCE and Shoshenq around 935 BCE according to the standard chronology. Now the problem is that there is no way to get the 22nd Dynasty priest's sarcophogus down into the main tomb when the corridoors were blocked by the sarcophoguses. The burial party would have had to extract all or most of the 30 odd mummies before buriying their preist in the main tomb, and then put them all back. The logical inference is that the preist and thus Shoshenq I predated Siamun, presumably by some time.

The San tombs are a similar setup The tomb of Psusennes I (circa 990 BCE conventionally) has a vestibule that juts into the wall of the adjacent tomb of Osorkon II (circa 850 BCE conventionally) which had to be partly demolished to make room for it. There's more wiggle room in this anomaly, but the conclusion is the same. 22nd Dynasty Osorkon II must have predated Psusennes I.

The way Rohl then reconstructs the Palestinian Syncronisms with Egypt is to posit Ramesses II as Shishak and place a much more modest Exodus at the end of the 13th Dynasty in the Second Intermediary Period. He places the events of Samuel in the context of the El Amarna correspondence and attributes the destruction of Middle Bronze Age Jericho to Joshua. His subseequent books detail his hypothetical identifications of the Genesis Legends and a detailed discussion on Troy and the Helladic influence throughout the Mediterranean.

Now, let me try and respond to spin's criticisms as best I can.

1) You have me at a loss on the problem of the Middle Assyrian King List, since both Rohl and James try to paper it over without Assyrialogical expertise. The Rohl Yahoo discussion group had a scholar interested in the question who had some workarounds in the offing, but I unsubscribed from that group in disgust when I realized that the moderator was a British Israelist promoting the laughable notion that the English speaking people are the "real Israelites" and the Jews are imposters. Bernard Newgrosh appears to have taken up the task, but I'd need to look at his studies in detail to determine whether they fix the Assyrian problem. I have to concede you that point.

2) Rohl's 2007 book makes it pretty clear that he palces the treaty within the Hittite Empire, and has the Neo-Hittite period following it immediately thereafter. I am not sure I am clear on your objections vis a vis Carchemish. Could you be more specific?

3) I need more info on how the use of the Ugarit tables was inane to properly agree with or confute your assertion there.

4) I am not sure that ignorance of the state of Palestine in Amarna times is an admissible criticism since the entire purpose of his discussion is to suggest that our view of the state Palestine in the Amarna period is incorrect. If you can, again be a bit more specific.

5) I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with respect to the Philistines and Egyptians. I think the gist is that since the Philistines of the time when the Penteteuh Oral Traditions were coalesced into the OT narrative we all love and hate, and the Philistines were first identified as Sea Peoples by Ramasses III, any mention of Philistines living in Palestine prior to the arrival of these Late Helladic migrants must be an anachronism. Well then so what? That just means that Rohl's Davidic Philistines were not the same people culturally that lived in the same area centuries later when David's descendants wrote about them, and they anachronistically applied the current name for the country to its former inhabitants. It's not like the writers of the OT were particularly scholarly.

Further, I'm not sure that it can be stated catagorically that just because the Philistines took part in the Sea Peoples invasion that they had not been in the land previously and simply joined in as the Sea Peoples came down the coast. The adaptation of Helladic pottery styles may reflect intrading and cultural crossover with the Sea Peoples rather than a total takeover.

That's more than grist for debate for one night.

2nd post:

OK, spin, you are obviously very tired of arguing this position.

Now I'm willing to go to my nearest university library and read through Kitchen (and James again), but I have to ask you, if I go to this effort, and I am NOT 100% convinced by him, and I come back with objections, are you still going to hit me with the same hostility? I don't see how we can have an intelligent discussion if your a priori assumption is that I'm an incompetent.

I'm offering to do what you have asked here, so I don't think I'm being unreasonable to ask for a bit more civility.

Prior to this, let me make a limited response. I'm eschewing quotes to avoid too much more clutter.

Now based on my experience with Kitchen in BAS's publications, he does have a truly impressive knowledge of the source material, but as an evangelical who moonlights for InterVarsity, he also takes on what Tom Thompson would refer to as an "extreme maximalist" position. In "The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?" (BAR 21:02, Mar/Apr 1995) he goes to great lengths to argue in favor of the historicity of the Genesis account of the Patriachs. In one case he sets out a large bar chart indicating the comparative structure of treaties and covenants preserved in surviving Near Eastern records and compares them to the covenants used in Genesis with Abimelech et al to demonstarte that the JPE Oral tradition had preserved this structure intact until the OT was redacted. What strikes me about this argument is that it is just as likely that the stylistic structure was solidified at the time of writing, or that the similarity arose from convergant evolution. Literary structure strikes me as a very tenuous thing to hang a reliable date from.

The point is that since Kitchen is both an Evangelical and does not hold a doctorate, and is willing to bend over backwards to allow a Biblical literalist (or historicist at any rate) reading within the orthodox chronology... it strikes me as unfair to paint Bimson as a "well-educated religious nutter" when Kitchen displays similar traits. Do you, spin, accept Kitchen's judgements in his 2005 book "On the Reliability of the Old Testament"? (He apparently insists a historical Moses must have had access to primitive writing, in contravention to the Wellhausen source model.) If this is not the case, and he has employed weak arguments in defense of the Biblical historicity he wants to believe in, does it not follow that his work on defending his TIP reconstruction might also be suspect?

I think you're being a little too technically rigorous in insisting Rohl and James are "mutually exclusive". Clearly they disagree on details, but both agree that there is a problem in all Near Eastern/Mediterranean chronologies owing to an inflation of TIP, and both cite the same symptoms.

Now as for Ramesses<>Shishak, let's assume that you are correct and that Egyptian S always transliterated to Hebrew S. Here's a completely ad hoc hypothesis of my own to explain how the Hebrews would come to call Ramesses Shishak: They adapted the nickname from the Hittites.

Assume as follows:

1. Sese was an accepted nickname for "Ramesses" during the period, as shown by Ramesses III.

2. When the Hittites wrote their version of the treaty after Qadesh, they transliterated the s sounds in Ramesses to sh. (Rohl's "Riamashesha" is rendered as Reamesesa in the version of the treaty linked to by Wiki. [Choose your own vowels is naturally par for the course prior to the Greeks...] If this is another of Rohl's "linguistic howlers", feel free to say so.)

3. Suppose that prior to the treaty, Ramesses' Hittite rivals knew of his nickname as Sese, but mispronounced it as Sheshe, as they did with the long form of the name in the treaty.

4. The Hebrews interacted with the Hittites, who in this scenario are fighting Ramesses at Qadesh in broadly the same period as Ramesses is besieging Rehoboam in Jerusalem, and are thus obviously natural allies to them.

5. They picked up the nickname of "Sheshe/Shisha" from the Hittites as a derogatory name for the hated Pharaoh, tacking on the k for a pun as Rohl states.

Assuming that "sh" is the proper Hittite transliteration, then there is nothing inherently implausible about the above scenario.

Vis-a-vis the Royal cache, the tomb reuse hypothesis only makes sense if the sarcophagus of the 22nd Dynasty Preist was reused. It would then be theoretically possible to move the mummy alone down the partially blocked corridoors, but this begs the question: why bother? If the royal cache had already been deposited, why would the 22nd Dynasty preisthood choose to go to the trouble of either shoving their deceased brother past all 30 of the mummy cases to deposit him in the main chamber or removing most of the mummy cases and putting them back afterwards? Why not simply leave him at the front of the tomb in a new sarcophagus?

Now I'll go back to your five points.

1) I'm sorry, but if the TIP reconstruction is wrong, and stratigraphic dark ages have been opened up everywhere BUT Assyria, that leads me to suspect that the Assyrian reconstruction is itself flawed. As I said, I do not have access to to Newgrosh's work and can't make a judgement on its merits or demerits.

We are not talking about a discipline with the evidentiary clarity of the hard sciences here. We're talking about Ancient History, where the evidence is thin on the ground, the written records are scanty and everything is pieced together. The discipline is immensely parochial, with most excavators being experts in and only in their own excavation site and only a very few aggregator historians for each area and period. All opinions are riven through with social and political (and sometimes religious) agendas. Even when there is no paradigmatic reason for scholars in the field to disagree, I've seen them go after eah other for reasons of personal animosity

Nothing I've seen in all of my reading on the subject gives me the confidence that you seem to have that the present reconstruction of Near Eastern pre-Classical History is completely ironclad. We're talking about a King List in Assyria, not an annual chronicle. Even if all the Middle Assyrian-Hittite Synchronisms and the Amarna-Assyrian syncronisms are watertight, the chronology in Assyria between the syncronization points could be in error. The thing was, after all, constructed with reference to Egypt.

For goodness sake, man, there was a completely serious minority opinion in classical Greek arcaheology that the dates of Marathon and Salamis are wrong by as much as 20 years when I was in college!

2) I still don't see your point. The question of Hittite to Neo-Hittite continuity has never been one of political continuity, the problem has been with the discontinuity in art history, with Hittite art forms suddenly reappearing in the Neo-Hittite milieu centuries after the fall of Hattusa with no link between them. Rohl is completely clear on the fact that the Sea Peoples wiped out the Hittite Empire as a political state. He just compresses the timeframe of the post Hittite world.

3) Alright, I still do not see where you are getting your conclusion that Rohl's reading of the Ugarit tablet is "strange". So I'm going to reproduce it here, and then you can explain what the problems are:

Rohl's plain English translation of the tablet, KTU-1.78:

Front:

"The day of the new moon of Hiyyaru was put to shame (as) the sun (goddess) set, with Rashap as her gate-keeper."

Back:

"Two Livers examined: danger!"

This is interpreted to mean a solar eclipse was observed from Ugarit at sunset on the new moon of the month of Hiyyaru (Springish) from Ugarit, (Located 35°36'N 35°47'E.), and that some celestial entity called Rashap was visible during the Eclipse. (Rohl identifies Mars.) Since the tablet was found in the burned ruin of the city that exotic eclipse must predate the destruction of the city by the Sea Peoples. You can see here all the candidate eclipses yourself at the NASA page. May 9th 1011 BCE is the sole candidate. (Rohl says 1012, possibly someone has a year 0 error.) The generally accepted date for the destruction of the city is 1178 BCE at the latest.

Clearly, this depends a lot on the idiomatic understanding of the text. I do not think it is as much of a slam dunk as Rohl does because even with his reading of the text, it does not compel one to assume it describes a total eclipse. It is a damned impressive coincidence though that can be read to describe a sunset eclipse and one was visible at Ugarit within historical time. They are not common.

Now here is syllabic transliteration of the text and the breakdown of Rohl's reading. spin, you may now explain to everyone why the reading is strange and unsupportable and what the correct reading should be. (For practicality, I am skipping the accents that can't be reproduced in ANSI, please note if they make a major difference):

Front:

btt ym hdt hyr 'rbt sps tgr-h rsp

Back:

kbdm tbkrn skn

btt = was put to shame
ym hdt = (the) day (of the) new moon (of)
hyr = (the month of) Hiyyaru
'rbt sps = (at the) going down (of the) sun (goddess)
kbdm = two livers
tbkrn = they shall be examined
skn = danger

4) Again, I fail to see why the notion is a priori silly that the oral traditions that went into the Pentateuh and the chronicles of the Davidic period might not contain a germ of historical truth. Beowulf is transparently 9 parts out of 10 bullshit, but Beowulf's Geatish King Hygelac can be identified with a historical personage the Franks referred to as Chlochilaicus who was killed in an abortive raid in 515 CE. The poem describes this attack, even though it was written between 300 and 500 years after the fact. The Franks said he was a Dane rather than a Geat BTW. The memory of oral tradition of the Trojan War in the Orthodox chronology is just as long.

5) In 1066, the Normans invaded and conquered Anglo-Saxon England. In spite of this, right on down to the present day, the neighboring Scottish highlanders continue to refer to the Southerners as "Sassenachs" or Saxons. Now the thing about the Sea Peoples was that they were... seafarers. They went inland into Hatti to destroy and loot the city, but other than that they appear to have stuck to the coastline on the way to Egypt. Israel and Judah would have been impoverished highland kingdoms by this point in Rohl's chronology. It's entirely likely they were not invaded. Why should the Sea Peoples have bothered with them? Egypt was the real target.

Now Rohl ids the biblical Philistines with the bichrome ware that entered the area in LBI. He sees them as the descendants of the refugees of the Hyksos dynasties, the latter of which had Aegean antecedants. These Philistines would have been in the area since before the fall o the Hyksos state, since that polity would have controlled the Gaza area. Naturally the Egyptians would not have called them Philistines, they knew exactly who the bastards were, they were the hated Hyksos. Rohl makes a connection between "Plst" Pelesta/Philistine and the Classical Greek "Pelasgian". They had come from the Aegean basin with the original Hyksos invasion.

When the Sea Peoples came through, they would have sacked some Philistine cities, but others would have joined them in the main attack on Egypt. So when Ramesses III defeated and enslaved the invasion force, resettled the entire remanant in Philistine territory, drastically changing its ethnic makeup, causing the new funerary traditions to be adopted by the mixed population. (It is even possible that Ramasses was the one who burned the cities to punish the Philistines for taking part in the invasion.) Now as far as the Hebrews were concerned, since the "New Philisitines" also came from the "Caphtorim" region and spoke a related Indo-European/Pelasgic language, they were just another group of Philistines. "Goyim are goyim" would probably have been the Jewish attitude.

I think the above scenario explains all the facts and is not inherently implausible. So what's wrong with it?

spin

Not of arguing it, but repeating it.

Over the last 13 years the only option I've come across regarding people who support Rohl's theories is incompetence. You may prove to be the exception. Take that as you may. If you think it's hostility, when you've admitted that you haven't even read the standard texts on the issue, then you must act as you must.

Would you go to a vet for a tooth extraction?

So fudging is ok? 100 years is basically irrelevant?

What have the Hittites, the people of Hatti, got to do with the Hebrews? When in history did these Hittites ever get further south than Qadesh in Syria? Whatever would make anyone think that an in-house personal name for Ramses II (who has his regnal name plastered over everything he did) would be used outside his closed circle, let alone make it to Hatti ?... and then somehow on to the Hebrews!! This explanation becomes so complex as to make it farcical, when you consider that there exists a far simpler source which is far more credible, Sheshonq.

There is no reason to imagine that the various items in the royal cache were treated the same.

Then why do you think "Rohl is (more or less) right"?

The kinglists specify the lengths of reigns. Much of it fits the epigraphy from the individual reigns. The only lack of support for the kinglists is from a paucity during the two-century long drought. It's not enough to reduce the length of the kinglists, only to allow Rohl's associates to claim that, since not all the links have been verified by epigraphy there must have been confusion about the period and there was a time of divided kingdoms which got placed one after the other rather than contemporaneously. In Assyria and in Babylon. (Sound familiar??)

You haven't read enough. When Brinkman reconstructed a relative chronology of Bablyonian rulers he found a number of strong connections with the Assyrian kinglists, which allowed him to construct a chronology that happily agrees with the length of the Assyrian chronology. Rohl's hacked up Egyptian chronology doesn't fit. The only answer available to his cadre of associates is to repeat the same hopeful hacking there and with the Neo-Hittite data.

So that's an argument in favor of Rohl's stupidity?

Now that was easy and convincing wasn't it? Let's just ignore it by claiming that we can compress it.

First, the understanding of ancient cosmology is wrong. The sun didn't set (or go down) so much as go into a gate or door -- hence the statement regarding Rashap. Second, the reading about shame is nowhere accepted by all readers of the text. It is one reading, whereas another is "on the sixth" (btt). One translation of the front of the tablet is

"On the sixth, the day of the new moon of Hiyaru, the sun went in, her gate(keeper) Rashap."

There is no indication of what time of day the sun was eclipsed. Rohl has simply misunderstood the tablet and forced a reading. The moon covering the sun is what is implied by the sun "going in". So Rohl has no real reason in the world to justify his reading. It's merely forcing a conjecture. The tablet is no help to him at all.

(At the same time, the notion of the new moon at a time of an eclipse is an impossibility. The tablet is just problematical, especially with the livers comment on the other side.)

Oral traditions are notorious for their lack of chronological exactness. I have no problems with oral traditions, but Rohl wants those oral traditions to have a strict dating usage. He also wants to identify characters in those traditions with real people from the Amarna archive for apparently no reason other than that it suits his chronological whims. He might try to shoehorn Saul's family into the data about Labaya, but t hat's only by ignoring most of it.

(And fuck the Trojan war. People have droned on about Schliemann's use of the Iliad for so long without ever knowing what he actually found, just what infotainment programs have said. It's a crock of rubbish to bring it into a serious historical discussion.)

When they settled on the coast they slowly moved inland. Within a few generations they'd reached the Jordan. The simple fact is that the Hebrews don't know about them. Their records aren't of any historical value for the period.

The material remains of the Philistine culture is Greek-, not Egyptian-related. The pottery has strong connections with Greece, the harbor-works are related to certain Greek harbors. The Hyksos were a horse culture. They used horse-drawn chariots. Obviously they had a different culture form the Philistines.

You might like to read about the campaigns that the Egyptians carried out after the Hyksos expulsion, which involved taking possession of the southern Levant and up into Syria. If you want to believe they left any Hyksos on their doorstep, I'll leave you to it.

And, either the Philistines were Greek or they were descendents of the Hyksos, not both.

So we have "old" Philistines and "new" Philistines in order to simplify this crock of shite?

In order to remove three centuries from Egyptian chronology, he has to give a far more complicated explanation. Putting aside his problematical theories, his complexity runs foul of Occam's razor.


spin