Duke Leto

Since we've got you here, David, could you go over the refutations to the criticisms of your interpretations of the Royal Cache and the San tombs, and briefly explain what the current thoughts are on the Assyrian and Hittite Chronologies and the Philistine problem?

I'm rereading Lords of Avaris anyway to make sure I'm up to speed on things, but as I said getting access to Newgrosh's book is going to be pretty difficult, so my responses have been necessarily limited.

spin

Life must be dull if you've come slumming it here.

You're a bit slow here. As you'll notice earlier I put it down to a brain fart. Happens to the best of us. Why not get off your roll and catch up?

This is a sad attempt to force Ugaritic into your notions of how a language should be.

The strange reading is forcing the text into the idea of early evening, so you've jumped the gun there bit.

Let's just forget about the verb here, meaning simply, "to enter, to go in" in the context of the noun "gate". Of course it can imply "sunset", but then there would be nothing for the day to be "put to shame" over.

Try Amos 8:9 there, buddy. hb)ty h:$m$ b:chrym ("c" = tsade) -- the sun going in at noon. Would you like to have it mean "set"??

Perhaps you can give an ancient source that finds it necessary to supply both ywm and xd$ in the same phrase along with the name of the month!

Haven't you got better to do than bleed? A tour or something?

You're not sufficiently in the know, are you there bro?

Hebrew supplies a Hebrew etymology for the name "Moses". Live with it.

Why are you going in the wrong direction? Your claim regards Egyptian to Hebrew. Ashkelon is irrelevant for your trajectory, my good fellow.

Perhaps you can supply a few Akkadian texts in the Israeli archaeological record to help your case.

(I suppose if it were true, being a disciple of Kitchen is eminently more reasonable than being a disciple of Velikovsky.)

Whoa there, matey. Because we can't distinguish the two allophones of the one letter in early Hebrew doesn't mean that the Hebrews couldn't. All you are trying to do is confuse them. The Hebrews clearly distinguished between the Egyptian /s/ and "sh". Did words like Phinehas get written with a sin? Of course not.

The "in other words" should indicate a complex but sufficient case being made rather than trying to pull the wool over the unsuspecting reader's eyes.

As there are so very few exemplars of proto-Hebrew to illustrate your point, it should be easy to cite the exact evidence here.

If you check 1 Kings 14:25 (Ketiv), the name is $W$Q, yup, a waw, a more difficult reading suggesting it was in fact the original. The later Hebrew's apparently been influenced through Greek, Seswnxos, etc. Shoshenq is simply a better fit for $W$K. There is no convoluted special pleading for the shin. The original waw is a better fit. Sorry, but your alternative is a dud.

You don't have to worry here about your feelings of inadequacy over your qualifications. The rule here ostensibly is evidence.

But can you cite any scholars who are not card carrying members of NC?

I love the analogy, but you need to be in a hindsight position which sadly you are not. You are just selling spin.

Could you provide citations for this claim so that I can see just who said what?

Schliemann did find something.

I think, in this specific case, your are both kidding yourselves. You both assume there was an exodus, converting Hebrew legend into fact. For Kitchen it is a given, but in the fieldthe exodus is not considered veracious. Continuous occupation of the land as seen in hundreds of sites in Israel indicates that an exodus is simply questionable.

You are not setting any record straight by accusing me of lying through my teeth when you have no evidence that I personally was in fact lying. You are confusing content with intent. I may have been wrong, which hasn't been established, but cut the stupid accusations.

This seems to be an indication that Kitchen was totally misrepresented.

Thank you for your clarification regarding Kitchen's treatment in the interview. I read it with interest. I'm sure you can understand his public reaction.


spin

spin

Talking about brain farts!


spin

Toto

This thread is under discussion by the moderation staff. In the meantime, please abide by the rules of this forum and try to avoid insults and unproductive sniping.

Use the report post button if you think a post is in violation, rather than responding in kind.

Thanks for your attention to this.

JoeWallack

JW:
Hi Spin. Of course Rohl is getting off to a bad start here accusing you of being a specific amateur and disciple of Kitchen and on these unholy boards you are the one with the reputation. But as you so often say, the evidence still speaks for itself.

Regarding the above, for the benefit of those of us who never studied, it seems that Rohl has to use the minority/questionable translation to arrive at the Pharoah in his theory? If so, is he than saying that his theory is possible or probable?

Everybody is welcome to answer except for Harvey Dubish.



Joseph

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

spin

I wouldn't consider the call about Shishak being (Ram)ses II to be a central part of his theory. He would be relying on the specifically Egyptian evidence that bring into question the relationship between the various dynasties of the Third Intermediate Period. The relationship between Shishak and Ramses would come as a consequence. It has to be so for the theory to work.


spin

David Rohl

In reply to Duke Leto:

Thank you for your courteous response which I am happy to reply to. However, given that any attempt at debate/discussion with spin is pointless and a waste of time, I will just ignore his comments from now on. There is simply no point in it and, that way, we can avoid tit for tat abuse.

To get to your points in order:

You wrote: “I don't think your reputation is all that high here (in America). As such my first task in the discussion was to forcibly dissociate myself from that milieu (of fundamentalism) lest I be dismissed out of hand as another one in this series of inerrantist quote miners who are only familiar with your books at one remove.”

In response: I have to live with misquotes and misconceptions and deliberate misrepresentation all the time. It comes with the territory. The sad thing is that people very rarely discuss what you actually said/wrote but rather what other people (usually antagonistic to your thesis) report what they think you said - often received second or third hand. Take spin’s constant reference to Kitchen as an example, where the Liverpudlian professor misrepresents the archaeological evidence on a fairly regular basis and gets away with it through his intimidation of lesser mortals (he has a well deserved reputation for it). But the misrepresentation or colouring of what I say/write is, I agree, a problem on the evangelical Christian side as well. I have no problem in people of any creed arguing their case using my work - so long as they represent it fairly and don’t try to put words into my mouth that I didn’t say.

Even you suggest that I “never explicitly stated” in A Test of Time that I was “not arguing for biblical inerrancy.” Maybe I was not explicit, but I’m not sure if I agree that I did not make it clear what my own beliefs are. In the Introduction to the book I state:

“Of course, if you are a devout Christian, Jew or Muslim you may have no doubts about the historical accuracy of the Old Testament or Tanaakh narratives and the parallel stories found in the Koran. Your weapon against critical biblical scholarship is your absolute faith. If, on the other hand, like me, you are primarily interested in the search for historical truth - it is essential to find archaeological evidence to demonstrate that the events recorded in the Bible actually happened … It is the lack of such evidence which, in essence, lies at the very heart of the academic scepticism now prevalent in some areas of biblical scholarship.” [p. 8]

I think that my non-acceptance of the concept of biblical inerrancy is inherent in this statement. But the following from The Lost Testament surely clarifies the matter further:

“Not every aspect and incident in the biblical narrative has a place in this reworking of the story. Where details are not obviously relevant to the historical narrative, or where I simply have no historical explanation for them (certain ‘miraculous’ events come to mind here), I have chosen to pass them by, leaving the reader to add his own perspective on such matters. My personal views are not important here. I am simply telling the story within a revised chronological and archaeological framework for others to overlay their own belief systems or theological interpretations.” [p.13]

Regarding Nunki.net, you give me an opportunity to clarify and disabuse people of my role in that now defunct web site. Although this was labelled as the ‘official’ David Rohl site at the time, I did not attempt to control the output. It is probably a weakness of mine, but I tend to give people a fairly free rein when they volunteer to work for me or with me. As I said before, I am not a control freak and believe that it is neither proper nor morally right to dictate what others do. So I had an American web master who wrote all the blurb for the site. I contributed the articles and text of published debates which were taken from other publications. So the so-called ‘self promotion’ was not my work but that of the web master. Perhaps I should have suppressed his genuine enthusiasm but, as I said, I tend to be fairly easy going when it comes to my relationships with enthusiasts.

Now, with regard to my writing style/popularist approach, you wrote: “The necessary precondition to academic freedom is the avoidance of outside power interdicting itself in academic practice. In order maintain academic freedom, we have to be sure not to solicit outside, especially governmental, authority to justify our views. The most disasterous possible outcome is when a government or political group endorses a shoddy piece of scholarship as canonical … There is however, no more dangerous power in a democracy than popular opinion. … the mortal sin for a historian is to appeal to authority in preference to peer review. For better or worse, Test of Time looks to many as though it is an appeal to popular authority over academic authority, and you can't expect academic authorities to be pleased about it. That's the real meat of the "grandstanding" accusation and you can take it however you will.

My response to this interesting point of view requires me to give you a bit of background which is not really public knowledge.

But, first, do I have to remind you that your newly elected President had to reach out directly to popular opinion in order to break the Establishment stranglehold on US politics. Was he wrong to do that?

I began work on the New Chronology thesis back in the late 1970s soon after acquiring Kenneth Kitchen’s book The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt. It was not only me who realised how problematical the conclusions in that book were for the study of ancient chronology. Other young scholars realised that the whole thesis was based on one supposition placed upon another until the lowest levels of supposition had become fact. But the whole edifice had been erected on one fundamental foundation which was totally flawed. Kitchen, a Bible believer, had used a date derived from the Bible to establish the foundation date of the Egyptian 22nd Dynasty and then filled in the subsequent dates and history of the Third Intermediate Period down to 664 BC with the remaining archaeological data. However Kitchen now tries to protest his innocence of this seriously skewed methodology, the evidence is there in black and white in his book.

So I decided to pursue this matter in what I thought was the correct way by going to university in order to equip myself with all the qualifications and research training to tackle the question of Egyptian chronology anew. In my first year at University College London (which established the first chair in Egyptology in the UK) I was already giving seminars on my findings to the postgraduate students and departmental staff, including Professors Harry Smith and Geoffrey Martin. I was then asked by Professor Smith to present my ideas to an open seminar of Egyptologists in the Petrie Museum. It was then that I got my first taste of the academic reaction to someone putting up challenging new proposals when Dr Maurice Bierbrier of the British Museum tried to dismiss the presentation with some arrogant remark or other and was promptly put down by my departmental professors and his sharp-witted postgraduates. The British Museum man departed in a huff. But the signs were writ large on the wall. This was not going to be an easy sell. Indeed, when A Test of Time came out in the UK, the British Museum immediately banned the book from its shops. I later found out that this was on the orders of Vivien Davies, head of the museum’s Egyptology department. Prior to my heretical offering, only Wallis Budge had been privileged to suffer the same fate - and that many decades after his death!

As an undergraduate student I continued to be asked to present my ideas to academic audiences. Professor Nicholas Coldstream (the great authority on Geometric Greece) invited me to put my case for eliminating the Greek Dark Age to his prestigious Mycenaean Seminar in the Institute of Archaeology, London. I also lectured to the Egypt Exploration Society and presented my case to the Archaeology Department at the University of Bristol before Professor Peter Warren and his academic staff and students. So I did go down the proper academic route in promoting my thesis - even though it was exceptional (to say the least) for an undergraduate student to be thrust into the gladiatorial ring in this fashion.

I even established an academic institute called ISIS, devoted to the study of ancient world chronology, with full educational charitable status. ISIS produced a scholarly journal (JACF) with contributions from some of the top scholars and archaeologists whose work impinged upon chronological studies. George Hart of the Educational Department of the British Museum accepted a directorship of the institute and so everything was going very well - that is until Vivien Davies of the BM hauled George Hart into his office to tell him that, if he did not immediately resign from his directorship of ISIS, he would be sacked from his BM post. That’s academia for you.

So, you see, I was getting a pretty clear idea how things were going to turn out. There were lots of academics and postgraduates who were both interested and enthusiastic about this re-examination of ancient world chronology, but there were also others, who did not know me and had not listened to the arguments, who simply dismissed the New Chronology as heresy and tried their damndest to get it snuffed out before it had any chance to succeed. Of course, Kenneth Kitchen was the general in command of all these reactionary forces and I was soon labelled the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and declared ‘100 per cent rubbish’.

It just so happens that the furore reached the ears of a literary agent who attended my public lecture to the Egypt Exploration Society. He approached me and asked if he could represent me. Within weeks I was being offered substantial book deals by several top international publishers and found myself flying to Washington for a meeting with John Ford, Chairman of The Learning Channel and now head of Discovery, having been signed up for a TV series by Channel Four in the UK a few days earlier. The joint UK/American broadcast was premiered in 1995 in the UK and 1996 in the USA under the title Pharaohs and Kings.

Now that all sounds a bit fantastic and, indeed, it was. I was literally swept up in a tidal wave of interest from the media. You may say that I should have turned it all down and taken the mugging by the academic establishment like a good little student. Like Galileo, maybe I should have accepted my silencing and avoided the excommunication. But I am a fighter and I decided that, if the knives were out anyway, I might as well publish and be damned. The academic route had been closed to me, so I went down the popular route to get a debate going. And, I think you will agree, I succeeded in that aim at least. If you think that this is grandstanding, then that’s your prerogative - but, in all honesty, I think I had no real choice. Peer review is all well and good - if you believe that academics in all disciplines are fair-minded and forward-thinking. However, there are numerous documented instances of aggressive academic suppression of new ideas. Remember what Max Plank once said:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up which is familiar with it.”

Familiarity may bring contempt from some quarters but, in my case, it was the only avenue left open to me by my opponents who, incidentally, will indeed eventually die. Now that is a scientific truth that nobody can argue with!

I will respond to the specific archaeological questions you raise about the Royal Cache and Tanis Royal Tombs in another post if that’s alright?

spin

And any attempt at David Rohl defending his position.

Hmmm, "constant reference to Kitchen", he says. In my last response to Rohl, I referred to no substantive material regarding Kitchen at all. Constant reference? No, just Rohl's hyperbole.

Let's keep this discussion focused on things that are safe, shall we?


spin

Toto

As I explained in a PM, we do not allow participants in the debate to abuse each other; public figures are fair game. Aside from one early comment before you joined the discussion, all of spin's comments seem fairly on point, and you would ignore them at your disadvantage in the eyes of the lurkers.

This is a strange comment. Our newly elected President was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and has wide spread academic support. He reached out to popular opinion because that's how people get elected in this country. By doing so, he broke the hold of an antintellectual strain in American politics that rejected the so called Establishment views on science and education.

Be careful of your analogies.

Duke Leto

I agree with Toto that the best thing to do would be to respond to spin's points and not lose your temper with him. Frankly, otherwise you'd be no better than Kitchen.

You're also misinformed as to Obama's outsider reputation. We have two, arguably three leftish outside the establishment candidates for President in the US in every election cycle now. They are Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, and Ralph Nader. They never win.

Obama's rise was predicated on his masterful use of the Democratic party's machinery and his innovative use of the system. For example, he targeted primary elections in small states that Clinton ignored to rack up the number of nominiating delegates he needed to win and courted the unelected "Superdelegates" who held the deciding votes in the nomination. Most candidates in the last few years have striven to win nominations by taking the first few state primaries and coasting after that. It also helped that McCain selected his running mate from Monty Python central casting.

I certainly agree that academia, particularly when the social sciences are involved, can be cliquish and can have a noticibly church like conformity, but I still think maintaining academic institutions as a whole are important. The problem with History in general and Ancient History in particular is the small size of the communities involved. Obviously there are tons of general history professors, but by the nature of things there are very few who specialize in a particular period or a particular subject, and those who work in an archaeological context are a small subset. Thus you can get a situation where a fellow like Kitchen can get in as the established authority on a given bit of history and be taken as such by the host of other narrowly focused authorities, who aren't looking at the forest intese interest in the trees. (Then of course if one swings to the other extreme, one ends up with a bunch of nearsighted foresters in dead forest with trees strangled by unnoticed kudzu vines. And an increasingly strained metaphor... And if one cuts down all the trees to leave the devil nothing to hide behind, then Thomas More tells you you ought to have been a teacher.)

The point is the perception of academic integrity is important, even if it doesn't always exist on the ground, much in the same way as the form of democracy and trial by evidence is important even if it is corrupted in practice. If you don't have any institutions, you have anarchy.

I admit that, however, my criticism basically boils down to your not doing enough to avoid being mistaken for a witch in a witch hunt.

At the same time, you're also suffering from guilt by association with Velikovsky, and let's face it the man poisoned the well by trying to make celestial mechanics dance to the tune of ancient history with his game of planetary bar billiards and his confused understanding of physics. Any ideas that are associated with him can with some justification be labeled as the work of a madman.

All that said, I don't necessarily know what I would have done differently given the set of circumstances you set out, other than ignore my advice and strive to ensure that the TV producers were at least happy if Kitchen could not be satisfied. (Actually, I would have ruined my academic career in utero with my cavalier disregard for minutia like grades and class attendance, or the fact that the professor was supposed to be the one giving the lectures.)