SoA Forums

As promised, herewith an outline of the revised chronology for the Ancient Near East.

Because the chronology of the ancient world depends heavily, and in some cases entirely, on Egyptian chronology, it is necessary first to correct the chronology of Egypt.  Briefly, this requires:

No substantive changes prior to 1800 BC and the end of the 12th Dynasty, except to note the arrival of Jacob's family in the reign of Senusert I, c.2,000 BC.

13th Dynasty: c.1800-1629 BC (latter date coincides with Hebrew Exodus).

1628-c.1100 BC: Hyksos period (XV and XVI Hyksos Dynasties contemporary with XIV and XVII Egyptian Dynasties - the latter hold only parts of the country).  [Hammurabi and Zimri-lim at start of period; Hebrews under Judges and/or Philistines]

c.1100-819 BC: 18th Dynasty [contemporary with Mycenaean Greece, Kingdom of Israel (and Judaea) and Assyria from Tiglath-pileser I to Shamshi-adad V]

819-c.720 BC: Libyan ('22nd') Dynasty (includes Horemheb). [Trojan War c.817-807 BC]

c.720-663 BC: Libyan ('23rd' Dynasty) kinglets and Ethiopian ('25th Dynasty') invasions

663-525 BC: 19th Dynasty [contemporary with Ashurbanipal and last Assyrian kings and subsequently Neo-Babylonian/Chaldean Empire]

525-c.390 BC: Persian conquest (so-called '21st Dynasty' theocrats governed for Persians, cf. similar arrangement in Judaea with Ezra) and occasional revolts.

c.390-343 BC: 20th Dynasty inaugurated by Acoris (Ushikhaure Setnakht); repels Persian invasions until 343 BC

Thereafter Hellenistic/Ptolemaic, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and present periods without substantive change.

Please observe: '26th Dynasty' is repetition of 19th Dynasty from material in Greek and Hebrew sources.  '30th Dynasty' is similar repetition of 20th Dynasty.


Implications (inter alia):

1) Mycenaean Greece flourishes c.1100-800 BC and directly abuts geometric and colonies period.

2) Assyrian history c.1200-900 BC substantially revised, particularly to identify successors of Tiglath-pileser I as being kinglets ruling simultaneously (Amenhotep II brings seven of them to Egypt c.920 BC).

3) 'Hittite' Empire belongs to 19th Dynasty (663-525 BC) dating period and flourishes c.610-550 BC with Syrian 'neo-Hittite' city-state cultures actually being 'proto-Hittite'.  8th century 'Haldians' appear to be Chaldean precursor state.

4) So-called 'Sea peoples' are 7th century Greek, Lydian and Carian mercenaries (19th Dynasty) and Greek mercenaries and Asia Minor subjects of Persia (20th Dynasty) and have nothing to do with the Bronze Age.

5) There was no 'general collapse of civilisation' c.1200 BC: this is simply the result of misdating Egyptian dynasties.

6) Presence of 'Hittite' (Neo-Babylonian) stratum above Assyrian-Phrygian stratum at Gordium, Kanesh etc. does not need bizzare excuses or redating to explain.

7) Biblical account actually meshes with Egyptian history at several useful points (e.g. Exodus, Queen of Sheba, Amarna period) allowing re-evaluation of reliability of Hebrew historical sources.

etc.

Please ask any questions that occur/request any necessary clarifications.  If wondering who first misnumbered the dynasties, the answer is Manetho (3rd century BC).

Patrick

Fascinating stuff.  How does your new chronology fit with the scientific dating e.g. radiocarbon?  Do you need to propose a new calibration curve for C14?

Actually for the most part it seems to fit quite well, at least from the few snippets I can find, e.g. a rush mat from Tutankhamun's tomb dating to c.820 BC (with the usual plus/minus for this far back).  This, like the other fits, was a comparatively early test, before 'recalibration' became the rage and the earlier results were dismissed as resulting from 'contamination'.  Even with 'recalibration' a fair number of 18th Dynasty period readings seem to end up in the 1000-900 BC bracket, so daters have taken to 'smoothing' with various statistical models in an attempt to suppress the 'anomalous' readings.

There was a bit of discussion of this on Ancmed last year, noting the sources.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 16, 2012, 12:08:07 PM4) So-called 'Sea peoples' are 7th century Greek, Lydian and Carian mercenaries (19th Dynasty) and Greek mercenaries and Asia Minor subjects of Persia (20th Dynasty) and have nothing to do with the Bronze Age.

That's the bit that always makes me laugh. Almost the only explicit sources we have for the Sea Peoples are the Egyptian victory monuments, and the soldiers on those look absolutely nothing like any Greeks or Achaemenid-era Anatolians.

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 16, 2012, 08:11:47 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 16, 2012, 12:08:07 PM4) So-called 'Sea peoples' are 7th century Greek, Lydian and Carian mercenaries (19th Dynasty) and Greek mercenaries and Asia Minor subjects of Persia (20th Dynasty) and have nothing to do with the Bronze Age.

That's the bit that always makes me laugh. Almost the only explicit sources we have for the Sea Peoples are the Egyptian victory monuments, and the soldiers on those look absolutely nothing like any Greeks or Achaemenid-era Anatolians.

This is the bit that got me in our last discussion.
One answer is that the Egyptians used 'recycled' enemies. But so far I've never been told who the enemies were who were 'recycled'

Even more telling to me, is that the ships look nothing like the ships of the Achaemenid era

Jim

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 16, 2012, 07:50:38 PM
This, like the other fits, was a comparatively early test, before 'recalibration' became the rage and the earlier results were dismissed as resulting from 'contamination'. 
Patrick

Contamination is a major problem with older museum samples.  You really need to be looking at dates of freshly excavated stuff - either fresh at the time of the result or fresh now.  As I understand it, there are a lot more radiocarbon and other scientific dates from the Near East and Greece.  How do they fit?

Quote from: Erpingham on September 17, 2012, 08:59:13 AM
Contamination is a major problem with older museum samples.  You really need to be looking at dates of freshly excavated stuff - either fresh at the time of the result or fresh now.  As I understand it, there are a lot more radiocarbon and other scientific dates from the Near East and Greece.  How do they fit?

Question 1: how do we know that 'contamination is a major problem with older museum samples'?  Some of them appear to give dates acceptable to present chronology despite their presumed 'contamination'.

Question 2: does 'How do they fit?' refer to before or after statistical model 'recalibration' of the data?

I think if we are to take this further we shall have to dive into specifics.

Patrick

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 17, 2012, 07:19:49 AM

Even more telling to me, is that the ships look nothing like the ships of the Achaemenid era

Jim

You mean nothing like this: http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif (http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif)?  [Note the ship next to the burning fortress.]

Patrick

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 16, 2012, 08:11:47 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 16, 2012, 12:08:07 PM4) So-called 'Sea peoples' are 7th century Greek, Lydian and Carian mercenaries (19th Dynasty) and Greek mercenaries and Asia Minor subjects of Persia (20th Dynasty) and have nothing to do with the Bronze Age.

That's the bit that always makes me laugh. Almost the only explicit sources we have for the Sea Peoples are the Egyptian victory monuments, and the soldiers on those look absolutely nothing like any Greeks or Achaemenid-era Anatolians.

But they are kitted out in Phoenician equipment (cf. the Enkomi ivories), so that is not a problem.  I would be interested in a somewhat wider view of the chronology as a whole.

Patrick

To get back to the original reason for beginning this thread (Andreas' suggestion), part of the revised chronology system identifies the so-called 'Hittite Empire' with its capital at Boghazkoi as the northern half of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nabopolassar, Nergilissar, Labash-Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar (Nabu-kudurri-usur), Amel-Marduk ('Evil-Merodach') and Nabonidus.

Nabopolassar is identified as the 'Mursilis' of the archives
Nergilissar is 'Nergil', brother of Hattusilis
Labash-Marduk is 'Kadashman Enlil', ruler of Babylon, son of Nergil and nephew of Hattusilis
Nebuchadnezzar is 'Hattusilis'
Amel-Marduk is 'Tudhaliyas'
Nabonidus is 'Arnuwandas'.

Dates are as per accepted conventional dates for Neo-Babylonian rulers, with a question-mark over Nergilissar and Labash-Marduk, who appear to have preceded Nebuchadnezzar (and a Nergilissar II and Labash-Marduk II who may have followed, albeit briefly).

7th-6th century contemporaries are also mentioned in the archives.  Croesus ('Attarissiyas') I have referred to.  Also present are Alyattes ('Ahhiya/Ahhiyawa') and his Greek tyrant allies Thrasybulus of Miletus ('Tawagalawas of Milwata') and Periander ('Piyamaradus') of Corinth.  At least one Midas ('Madduwattas') is also mentioned, as ruler of or pretender to the throne of Phrygia ('Arzawa').

Stratigraphy, e.g. at Gordium, where the 'Hittite' layer was found above the 8th century 'Phrygian' layer, also places the 'Hittite Empire' in the 7th-6th centuries.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:35:51 AM

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 17, 2012, 07:19:49 AM

Even more telling to me, is that the ships look nothing like the ships of the Achaemenid era

Jim

You mean nothing like this: http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif (http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif)?  [Note the ship next to the burning fortress.]

Patrick

Where's the coin from. The ships don't look a lot like those at Medinet Habu
The total lack of a ram should be worrying

Jim

The Achaemenid coins I know have real galleys on them:

eg:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pharnabazos_fish_sign_coin.jpg
http://www.allempires.com/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30714

nothing like the much earlier ships on the Medinet Habu stuff. (and there is a little more evidence for Sea Peoples, mostly Egyptian).  Though even Minoan ships are more advanced than the Medinet Habu ones - but close enough to support a more traditional chronology..

For those lacking Google fingers Andrea Salimbeti's Greek Age of Bronze website has most of the relevant Sea People and Minoan source illustrations, and it's an ok site.

http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/index.htm

Tom..

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:39:52 AM

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 16, 2012, 08:11:47 PM
That's the bit that always makes me laugh. Almost the only explicit sources we have for the Sea Peoples are the Egyptian victory monuments, and the soldiers on those look absolutely nothing like any Greeks or Achaemenid-era Anatolians.

But they are kitted out in Phoenician equipment (cf. the Enkomi ivories), so that is not a problem.

First you say they're Greeks and Anatolians, then because they don't look remotely like Greeks or Anatolians (of the C6-4 BC, at any rate) you suggest they are in Phoenician equipment. Why would they be? Particularly the C7th Saitic-mercenary Greeks, when the whole point of hiring them was their own equipment.

And to make them Phoenician, you have to redate the Enkomi ivories as well.... No, sorry, we have quite a bit of Phoenician stuff from the Achaemenid era and the preceding century or three, and it's nothing like these ivories, nor like the Sea Peoples on the Egyptian monuments.

QuoteI would be interested in a somewhat wider view of the chronology as a whole.

Mine is that it's not even convincing enough to discuss.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:21:14 AM

Question 1: how do we know that 'contamination is a major problem with older museum samples'?  Some of them appear to give dates acceptable to present chronology despite their presumed 'contamination'.

Question 2: does 'How do they fit?' refer to before or after statistical model 'recalibration' of the data?

Patrick

1. Well, one way is to look at some of the analyses of the material.  I've read (I can't remember where now) that some Egyptian material shows traces of nicotine and cocaine, which are unlikely to be original - though this is likely to be an extreme case:)  Acceptable dates - the obvious answer is the level of contamination varies.  It is easier to contaminate with younger material for radiocarbon (takes very little "hot" stuff to have an impact).

2. Either.  Does your model fit consistently and well without the need for statistical fiddling?  If so, we might be tempted by Occams Razor to say you may have a point.  If your model is less convincing or even requires as much statistical massaging, we are less likely to see a pressing need to shift the chronology.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 17, 2012, 01:56:53 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:35:51 AM

You mean nothing like this: http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif (http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif)?  [Note the ship next to the burning fortress.]

Patrick

Where's the coin from. The ships don't look a lot like those at Medinet Habu
The total lack of a ram should be worrying

Jim

The coin is Sidonian, considered to be 5th century BC.  Curiously, it seems to be a 3/4 view rather than a profile, and the characteristic bent sternpost (or stempost if intended as a towards-viewer orientation) is the salient feature.  One may remember that the ships carrying the Pereset lacked a bow ram, but had this kind of bent post at bow and stern.

Patrick

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 17, 2012, 03:43:33 PM

First you say they're Greeks and Anatolians, then because they don't look remotely like Greeks or Anatolians (of the C6-4 BC, at any rate) you suggest they are in Phoenician equipment. Why would they be? Particularly the C7th Saitic-mercenary Greeks, when the whole point of hiring them was their own equipment.

I had the impression that the so-called 'Sea Peoples' being depicted by Ramses III at Medinet Habu were being referred to.  Pharnabazus' expedition of 374 BC was based at Acco for the best part of a year, and it would seem equipped there.

The point of hiring mercenary Greeks was not their own equipment but their own highly effective fighting skills.

The dating of the Enkomi ivories, incidentally, depends entirely and utterly on the date of Ramses III, and moves with him.  It is not a separate or additional adjustment.

Patrick

Quote from: Erpingham on September 17, 2012, 06:36:14 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:21:14 AM

Question 1: how do we know that 'contamination is a major problem with older museum samples'?  Some of them appear to give dates acceptable to present chronology despite their presumed 'contamination'.

Question 2: does 'How do they fit?' refer to before or after statistical model 'recalibration' of the data?

Patrick

1. Well, one way is to look at some of the analyses of the material.  I've read (I can't remember where now) that some Egyptian material shows traces of nicotine and cocaine, which are unlikely to be original - though this is likely to be an extreme case:)  Acceptable dates - the obvious answer is the level of contamination varies.  It is easier to contaminate with younger material for radiocarbon (takes very little "hot" stuff to have an impact).

2. Either.  Does your model fit consistently and well without the need for statistical fiddling?  If so, we might be tempted by Occams Razor to say you may have a point.  If your model is less convincing or even requires as much statistical massaging, we are less likely to see a pressing need to shift the chronology.

The plain fact is that, overall, I do not know.  There seem to be enough fits to look interesting but also far too many results where it is difficult or impossible to relate the datum points on the graphs in the published material to the individual samples and their provenance (one of the effects of statistical approaches is that items tend to be considered collectively rather than individually), so I am not in a position to say whether the pattern holds up overall.

What is evident is that the radiocarbon data sometimes has quite a wide scatter even for material assigned to the same dynasty*, and seems to require heavy massaging to support the current chronology.  We may recall in the earlier Ancmed discussion reference to an article claiming that radiocarbon dating 'proved' conventional chronology, but looking deeper it emerged that radiocarbon readings had been 'calibrated' on 'known' conventional dating, and subsequent radiocarbon readings adjusted by this same 'calibration' had been used to 'prove' that self-same conventional dating, a somewhat circular justification.

*Quite a lot of material identified as 18th Dynasty showed up around 900 BC pre-'calibration'; other material identified as 18th Dynasty gave raw dates much earlier, c.1200-1400.  Naturally, 'contamination' was invoked to explain the c.900 BC results, despite the stringent anti-contamination methodology.

Why, I ask, if the conventional chronology is in fact correct, does its 'supporting' radiocarbon data need such heavy special treatment?  Something is assuredly wrong there: my answer may not necessarily be the 'right' one, but it does fit remarkably well on balance with period historical records, which to my mind is a stronger indicator than picking up the radiocarbon crumbs that fall from the rich institutions' tables.

Ultimately, I am not sure that radiocarbon dating will give a definite answer.

Patrick

Quote from: tadamson on September 17, 2012, 02:46:18 PM

The Achaemenid coins I know have real galleys on them:

Tom..

Yes, but the Medinet Habu reliefs have Achaemenid transports, not Achaemenid galleys.  Looking at the pictures on the Salimbeti site will reveal the absence of oars in the ships carrying the Pereset.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 07:15:02 PM

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 17, 2012, 01:56:53 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:35:51 AM

You mean nothing like this: http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif (http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif)?  [Note the ship next to the burning fortress.]

Patrick

Where's the coin from. The ships don't look a lot like those at Medinet Habu
The total lack of a ram should be worrying

Jim

The coin is Sidonian, considered to be 5th century BC.  Curiously, it seems to be a 3/4 view rather than a profile, and the characteristic bent sternpost (or stempost if intended as a towards-viewer orientation) is the salient feature.  One may remember that the ships carrying the Pereset lacked a bow ram, but had this kind of bent post at bow and stern.

Patrick

assuming the bow is to the left, I thought I could see a ram on that one. I copied it and blew it up and there is a light patch which could be the top of the ram
(it's in front of the tower)

Jim

I did the same and think you are right: it would also be more usual to have a galley on a coin rather than a sail-only transport.  The bent 'sea peoples' bow post is the salient feature, and it is interesting to see it on a 5th century Sidonian vessel, especially as the Sidonians are considered to have built the original transports for the Achaemenids (source: http://uk.ask.com/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire#Navy (http://uk.ask.com/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire#Navy)).

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 07:24:48 PM

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 17, 2012, 03:43:33 PM

First you say they're Greeks and Anatolians, then because they don't look remotely like Greeks or Anatolians (of the C6-4 BC, at any rate) you suggest they are in Phoenician equipment. Why would they be? Particularly the C7th Saitic-mercenary Greeks, when the whole point of hiring them was their own equipment.

I had the impression that the so-called 'Sea Peoples' being depicted by Ramses III at Medinet Habu were being referred to.

You yourself referred to SeaP's of both XIX and XX dynasties, relating the earlier ones to the C7th Saitic mercs. I was just following your example.

QuotePharnabazus' expedition of 374 BC was based at Acco for the best part of a year, and it would seem equipped there.

Diodoros says that Pharnabazus "prepared large supplies of war material" at Ake, but that hardly implies re-equipping satrapal and mercenary troops in local styles with which they were not familiar, especially when we know that normal Achaemenid practice was to equip troops in their native styles, when they were raised. 

QuoteThe point of hiring mercenary Greeks was not their own equipment but their own highly effective fighting skills.

That's why they were called "men of the highly effective phalanx", rather than, say "men of bronze". The two go together.

This gets less, rather than more, convincing as you go on.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 07:45:35 PM

Quote from: tadamson on September 17, 2012, 02:46:18 PM

The Achaemenid coins I know have real galleys on them:

Tom..

Yes, but the Medinet Habu reliefs have Achaemenid transports, not Achaemenid galleys.  Looking at the pictures on the Salimbeti site will reveal the absence of oars in the ships carrying the Pereset.

Patrick

No they don't.   The Sea People ships, are very closely related to lots of other late bronze age  (c.1100 BCE and earlier) ship images from all round the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea  and not at all like Archaemenid period transports.


By the way, I meant to ask:  Patrick, is this your own 'new chronology' or is it one of the previously published ones? I looked back but didn't see any messages that mentioned.

Tom..

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 07:15:02 PM

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 17, 2012, 01:56:53 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 17, 2012, 11:35:51 AM

You mean nothing like this: http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif (http://www.archaeological-center.com/images/m6a.gif)?  [Note the ship next to the burning fortress.]

Patrick

Where's the coin from. The ships don't look a lot like those at Medinet Habu
The total lack of a ram should be worrying

Jim

The coin is Sidonian, considered to be 5th century BC.  Curiously, it seems to be a 3/4 view rather than a profile, and the characteristic bent sternpost (or stempost if intended as a towards-viewer orientation) is the salient feature.  One may remember that the ships carrying the Pereset lacked a bow ram, but had this kind of bent post at bow and stern.

Patrick

The coin is a 1/16 Shekle,  the sternpost is a roll over like a galley (not like MH)  the 'bent' stempost is the front mast projecting over the bow.

There are other similar contemporary coins eg http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/37815.php  same outline, more clearly a galley nothing like MH ships.

Tom.. 

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 04:37:54 PM


By the way, I meant to ask:  Patrick, is this your own 'new chronology' or is it one of the previously published ones? I looked back but didn't see any messages that mentioned.

Tom..

I started out attempting to validate or disprove Dr Immanuel Velikovsky's revised chronology (Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, Peoples of the Sea).  While it is easy to pick holes in trivialities, it is also surprisingly easy to find significant confirmatory evidence, which I was attempting to start airing for Andreas before we became sidetracked over pictures of ships.

The methodology is simple enough: if conventional chronology is right, what would we expect to find at a given date and place?  Conversely, if Dr Velikovsky's chronlogy is right, what would we expect (and for that matter need) to find?  So far, in Herodotus, in the Boghazkoi archives, in the records of Thutmose III and Tiglath-pileser I and in the Amarna letters, the score is Velikovsky 4, conventional dating nil - and I have deliberately picked subjects Velikovsky did not touch upon or completely overlooked, thinking these would have more validity than just re-examining his own evidence.  I have also extended Velikovsky's scheme back by simple deduction (if the Exodus occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom, then there needs to be some evidence of their entry into Egypt during the Middle Kingdom and of their presence during that time - as it happens, there is plenty).  It fits.

Now if a rank amateur like myself can find such evidence just by looking, it suggests something about the validity of the scheme as a whole.  I feel we should be looking at that rather than limiting ourselves to interpretation of pictures, although everyone is of course free to discuss what interests him.

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 05:02:53 PM

The coin is a 1/16 Shekle ... the 'bent' stempost is the front mast projecting over the bow.

Tom..

Sorry, Tom, I really cannot see that as a mast.  Please have another look at the pic and the webpage it comes from http://www.archaeological-center.com/en/monographs/m6/ (http://www.archaeological-center.com/en/monographs/m6/) and while there have a peek at the lower Abd-astarte coin and the galley on it, which seems very reminiscent of the Egyptian type at Medinet Habu (not identical, but similarly low, monoremic and with a not dissimilar type of projecting ram).

Patrick

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 03:14:15 PM

QuotePharnabazus' expedition of 374 BC was based at Acco for the best part of a year, and it would seem equipped there.

Diodoros says that Pharnabazus "prepared large supplies of war material" at Ake, but that hardly implies re-equipping satrapal and mercenary troops in local styles with which they were not familiar, especially when we know that normal Achaemenid practice was to equip troops in their native styles, when they were raised.

But it by no means excludes it.  An invasion of Egypt might have been considered to require special preparation.  Iphicrates might have given specific and particular advice.  Sadly we lack a Xenophon from the army of Ramses III, so have no visual description of the Persian troops involved in the invasion of Egypt, and do not know what was 'normal practice' for such attempts.

Conversely, uniformed 'tribal' invaders from the presumed close of the Mycenaean era would be very hard to explain.  Very hard indeed.  Much harder than a force raised and equipped by a rich and well-resourced empire.

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 03:14:15 PM
This gets less, rather than more, convincing as you go on.

Then perhaps we do need to expand the subject matter involved.  :)

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 18, 2012, 07:54:22 PM

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 03:14:15 PM
Diodoros says that Pharnabazus "prepared large supplies of war material" at Ake, but that hardly implies re-equipping satrapal and mercenary troops in local styles with which they were not familiar, especially when we know that normal Achaemenid practice was to equip troops in their native styles, when they were raised.

But it by no means excludes it.

That's getting a bit weak.

QuoteAn invasion of Egypt might have been considered to require special preparation.  Iphicrates might have given specific and particular advice.  Sadly we lack a Xenophon from the army of Ramses III, so have no visual description of the Persian troops involved in the invasion of Egypt, and do not know what was 'normal practice' for such attempts.

We do know quite lot about what was "normal practice" for the Achaemenid army in general, though. And this isn't it.

QuoteConversely, uniformed 'tribal' invaders from the presumed close of the Mycenaean era would be very hard to explain.  Very hard indeed.  Much harder than a force raised and equipped by a rich and well-resourced empire.

It might be, if they were indeed uniformed. Although we don't really know enough about the Sea Peoples to be sure that they were "tribal". But depicting the enemy in a single stereotyped style of equipment doesn't necessarily mean that they were uniformed in reality - Ramses III's SeaP's are no more "uniform" than, say, Naram-Suen's Lullubi.

Quote from: Patrick, earlier
The dating of the Enkomi ivories, incidentally, depends entirely and utterly on the date of Ramses III, and moves with him.  It is not a separate or additional adjustment.

Since Patrick regards these ivories as depictions of "fourth-century" "Phoenician" equipment, he presumably thinks that they, like the Medinet Habu SeaPersons in similar gear,

Quotehave nothing to do with the Bronze Age

It is curious, therefore, that all the weapons in the tombs these ivories come from are made of...  bronze.

Quote

Quote
This gets less, rather than more, convincing as you go on.

Then perhaps we do need to expand the subject matter involved.  :)

BA/EIA chronology isn't my thing, sorry. I'm only commenting on this point because it's funny, in an absurd sort of way.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 18, 2012, 07:43:55 PM

... Dr Immanuel Velikovsky's revised chronology (Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, Peoples of the Sea).   ...

Oh dear........

The man was an out and out nutter...
His chronology have been repeatedly and comprehensively deconstructed.  His scheme involved changes in planetary dynamics, breaking fundamental engineering principle, outright lies, false data and mistranslations of ancient sources. 

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 05:02:53 PM

The coin is a 1/16 Shekle ... the 'bent' stempost is the front mast projecting over the bow.

Tom..

Sorry, Tom, I really cannot see that as a mast.  Please have another look at the pic and the webpage it comes from http://www.archaeological-center.com/en/monographs/m6/ (http://www.archaeological-center.com/en/monographs/m6/) and while there have a peek at the lower Abd-astarte coin and the galley on it, which seems very reminiscent of the Egyptian type at Medinet Habu (not identical, but similarly low, monoremic and with a not dissimilar type of projecting ram).

Patrick

??? ALL the galleys have roll over stemposts, VERY different from the MH and other Late Bronze Age ships.

As a final point  you might also want to look at the dendrochronology dating for the Egyptian ship timbers and fortresses that have been dug up over the last two decades or so.  All very strong support for the traditional dating.

Time to give it up.......

Tom..

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 10:52:37 PM
Since Patrick regards these ivories as depictions of "fourth-century" "Phoenician" equipment, he presumably thinks that they, like the Medinet Habu SeaPersons in similar gear,

Quotehave nothing to do with the Bronze Age

It is curious, therefore, that all the weapons in the tombs these ivories come from are made of...  bronze.

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 10:52:37 PM
BA/EIA chronology isn't my thing, sorry.

Nobody's perfect.  ;)  But bronze weaponry remained in use well into the iron age - and bronze armour and helmets well into the classical period.  The idea of a division between 'bronze' and 'iron' ages is something of a simplification.

In any case, nothing changes the absolute reliance of Enkomi dating on Egyptian chronology.

Patrick

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 11:42:13 PM
Oh dear........

The man was an out and out nutter...
His chronology have been repeatedly and comprehensively deconstructed.  His scheme involved changes in planetary dynamics, breaking fundamental engineering principle, outright lies, false data and mistranslations of ancient sources. 

Playing the man not the ball ... I would rather see posts confined to substantive matter of an evidential nature, though I shall quote the above once.

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 11:42:13 PM
??? ALL the galleys have roll over stemposts, VERY different from the MH and other Late Bronze Age ships.

But not a 'front mast projecting over the bow'?

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 11:42:13 PM
As a final point  you might also want to look at the dendrochronology dating for the Egyptian ship timbers and fortresses that have been dug up over the last two decades or so.  All very strong support for the traditional dating.

Alas not, see (for example) http://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf?oo=0 (http://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf?oo=0)

"The following notes, presented in diary form, document why the Uluburun date is
dubious in the extreme and how its status as a "scientific" date has gradually
unravelled."

Apologists for the conventional chronology are now so desperate that they appear to be employing, and I quote, "outright lies, false data and mistranslations of ancient sources".  ;)

Time to give it up.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 19, 2012, 10:41:04 AM

Quote from: tadamson on September 18, 2012, 11:42:13 PM
As a final point  you might also want to look at the dendrochronology dating for the Egyptian ship timbers and fortresses that have been dug up over the last two decades or so.  All very strong support for the traditional dating.

Alas not, see (for example) http://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf?oo=0 (http://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf?oo=0)

"The following notes, presented in diary form, document why the Uluburun date is
dubious in the extreme and how its status as a "scientific" date has gradually
unravelled."

Apologists for the conventional chronology are now so desperate that they appear to be employing, and I quote, "outright lies, false data and mistranslations of ancient sources".  ;)

Time to give it up.

Patrick

Uluburun isn't Egyptian, so hardly a response to Tom's point. Now who's "employing ... false data"?

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 19, 2012, 10:39:32 AM

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 18, 2012, 10:52:37 PM
It is curious, therefore, that all the weapons in the tombs these ivories come from are made of...  bronze.

But bronze weaponry remained in use well into the iron age - and bronze armour and helmets well into the classical period.  The idea of a division between 'bronze' and 'iron' ages is something of a simplification.

The idea that an Achaemenid-era site would produce plentiful bronze weaponry and no iron is an absurdity. (Helmets and armour are an irrelevancy, this is spearheads, knives, and so on.)

Quote
In any case, nothing changes the absolute reliance of Enkomi dating on Egyptian chronology.

The Enkomi tombs are dated in the first instance by the local pottery (LCII-III). The pots may have originally been dated by reference to an Egyptian chronology, I really don't know, but there are plenty of radiocarbon dates for the LC sequence now.

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 19, 2012, 10:52:57 AM
Uluburun isn't Egyptian, so hardly a response to Tom's point. Now who's "employing ... false data"?

Uluburun is still being used as a key dendrochronological confirmatory plank, if one may use the word, for the framework of conventional chronology in general and Egyptian in particular.  It also has the merit of being readily available online whereas the studies Tom alludes to do not appear to be.

Why, incidentally, are participants in this thread concentrating on peripheral incidentals and not seeking to address the basic evidence of written sources?  Is it in hope of finding some obscure falsus in unum which will then be used to proclaim falsus in omnibus?

And yes, the Enkomi materials depend directly upon Egyptian dating.  I checked this point with staff at the British Museum.

Patrick

Hi Patrick,

First an apology,  I do not intend to disparage you personally, or any attempt to reconcile chronology (and there are several more recent attempts in print).

I am serious that starting with Velikovsky is not a good plan (and unlike many scientists I have read all his books). His basic concepts (eg Venus errupting out of Jupiter) are wrong on so many levels that it's impossible for scientist to take anything he says as valid. Though his biggest 'sin' was for the New York literati to push him as a new prophet. 

I also think that the "Sea Peoples were actually Persian mercenaries" bit was probably the worst example possible to try and support the chronology.  As Duncan and I have tried to point out the ships, dress and equipment at MH is very clearly Late Bronze Age and not Archamenid. 

As for access to sources, my primary, and by far best, is through the Open University library site (I am a perpetual student).  I will try to get you anything specific that you are interested in and can't get though.
AWOL http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html is another very useful access portal.

It's hard to see written sources as 'basic', the vast majority for the period are untranslated (particularly non Egyptian stuff).  Plus translation is an art not a science, we tend to miss a LOT when we don't have the appropriate cultural background.

Tom..

Thanks, Tom.  Very decent of you.  :)

I quite happily agree that Velikovsky had some unusual ideas, and some worked out better than others while some did not work at all.  A bit like the rest of us in that respect ... at least he was not afraid to try them out.

However I am interested in checking out the chronology scheme rather than the man, so if we avoid mention of the V-word and just look at the timescale and historical side of things, would that be OK?

On the subject of Ramses III and all that, like your good self and Duncan I have looked through examples of 'Bronze Age' ships and Medinet Habu vessels but do not quite see the close correspondence claimed; it seems to me more like the assumption that there are various common themes (e.g. the famous Mycenaean two-duck-head motifs, which are interesting in themselves but which we do not as far as I know see on Mycenaean ships) and that these common themes indicate cultural identity, which to my mind does not necessarily quite pan out.  Same with the troops' equipment etc. - one can see vague resemblances here and there, but nothing like the precise match with the Enkomi ivories.  There also seem to be cases (though not in this discussion) of creating a typology of weapons from the Medinet Habu reliefs, classifying them as Bronze Age, and then using them to insist that the Medinet Habu reliefs are Bronze Age because they show Bronze Age weapons.  But enough of my gripes.

You have been trying to point out to me with diligent patience that Achaemenid vessels have roll-over sterns while Medinet Habu ships do not.  This is indeed true, at least for Achaemenid galleys.  I appreciate your offer to source materials for me and would be interested to see some examples of Achaemenid (particularly Sidonian) transports with such sterns, as the 'Pereset' ships at Medinet Habu do appear to be transports and not galleys - at least they have sails up and are not using oars in the middle of a naval action, so if they are galleys they have been fairly comprehensively surprised.  Also against their being galleys is that even when the ships are overturned there is not an oar in sight. http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg)

While you are prefectly correct that translation can never convey the sense and feel of the original, and may miss out or mistake elements of the original meaning, the existing translated sources are quite copious and do seem to provide the scholarly world with their basic historical scheme to which art, epigraphy and indeed archaeology itself are just adjuncts.  I think we can go at least 75% of the way with original source texts (perhaps a bit less with translations) and they will always be the backbone of any chronological scheme - conventional, Rohl, James or anyone else.  The really important ones (at least in the eyes of the original 19th-early 20th century scholars) were royal inscriptions and various steles, tablets and papyri - and it seems to me that arguments tend to centre not so much on what the source says as when they said it (cf. Gardiner's Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, aka Papyrus Ipuwer).

When we get to Greek sources (and yes, there is an element of argument over some of the things they say but not when they said it) we can be reasonably sure of the broad translation, less so of the finer points, and a look back at the original Greek can be illuminating when it comes to details.  It is a pity that there is no Perseus Project for Assyrian, Babylonian, Neshili/Hattili and Egyptian sources, but maybe the next generation will be better provided for.

All of which really intends to say that the historical sources I have seen (admittedly a fraction of those extant, but quite a useful fraction as it includes those on which chronology is largely based) do provide a surprising amount of support for the chronology I have been examining (avoiding reference to a certain individual).  To keep this from being an overlong post one instance only will be mentioned: Herodotus and the pharaohs of Egypt.  The revised chronology (as I shall call it) was drawn up without reliance upon Herodotus (his account was touched upon a few times, but only peripherally).  Yet Herodotus (in Book II) holds the key to Egyptian chronology, and his sequence of 18th Dynasty-Libyan-Ethiopian-19th Dynasty-Persian corroborates the revised chronology in all its essentials.  To say this was a surprising discovery was an understatement.

That is one of the reasons I stay with the revised chronology.  There are several others.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 19, 2012, 08:37:49 PM
Thanks, Tom.  Very decent of you.  :)

I quite happily agree that Velikovsky had some unusual ideas, and some worked out better than others while some did not work at all.  A bit like the rest of us in that respect ... at least he was not afraid to try them out.

Quote
Sadly much of it is absolute nonsense. He looked at myths (good), he derived some theories (good), then he made up absolutely impossible stuff (really stupid, totally blew his credibility)

Quote
However I am interested in checking out the chronology scheme rather than the man, so if we avoid mention of the V-word and just look at the timescale and historical side of things, would that be OK?

Yes BUT there needs to be a reason for suggesting changes.

Quote
On the subject of Ramses III and all that, like your good self and Duncan I have looked through examples of 'Bronze Age' ships and Medinet Habu vessels but do not quite see the close correspondence claimed; it seems to me more like the assumption that there are various common themes (e.g. the famous Mycenaean two-duck-head motifs, which are interesting in themselves but which we do not as far as I know see on Mycenaean ships) and that these common themes indicate cultural identity, which to my mind does not necessarily quite pan out.  Same with the troops' equipment etc. - one can see vague resemblances here and there, but nothing like the precise match with the Enkomi ivories.  There also seem to be cases (though not in this discussion) of creating a typology of weapons from the Medinet Habu reliefs, classifying them as Bronze Age, and then using them to insist that the Medinet Habu reliefs are Bronze Age because they show Bronze Age weapons.  But enough of my gripes.

You really need to go back and look at stuff, the MH ships are VERY SIMILAR to other Late Bronze Age non galleys. NOTHI|NG like Archaemenid transports.

Quote
You have been trying to point out to me with diligent patience that Achaemenid vessels have roll-over sterns while Medinet Habu ships do not.  This is indeed true, at least for Achaemenid galleys.  I appreciate your offer to source materials for me and would be interested to see some examples of Achaemenid (particularly Sidonian) transports with such sterns, as the 'Pereset' ships at Medinet Habu do appear to be transports and not galleys - at least they have sails up and are not using oars in the middle of a naval action, so if they are galleys they have been fairly comprehensively surprised.  Also against their being galleys is that even when the ships are overturned there is not an oar in sight. http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg)

Agreed transports are not galleys. Archaemenid transports are identical to Greek merchants.  No ram, no hog back tie, different front and back, no 'duck head' posts, VERY different from the MH ships.

Many of the features in the MH ships are replicated in other Late Bronze Age transports, many of which are dated very closely (ie within 20 years).

Quote
While you are prefectly correct that translation can never convey the sense and feel of the original, and may miss out or mistake elements of the original meaning, the existing translated sources are quite copious and do seem to provide the scholarly world with their basic historical scheme to which art, epigraphy and indeed archaeology itself are just adjuncts.  I think we can go at least 75% of the way with original source texts (perhaps a bit less with translations) and they will always be the backbone of any chronological scheme - conventional, Rohl, James or anyone else.  The really important ones (at least in the eyes of the original 19th-early 20th century scholars) were royal inscriptions and various steles, tablets and papyri - and it seems to me that arguments tend to centre not so much on what the source says as when they said it (cf. Gardiner's Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, aka Papyrus Ipuwer).

Yoy really need to look at some of these rather than what's reported in V and others.

Quote

When we get to Greek sources (and yes, there is an element of argument over some of the things they say but not when they said it) we can be reasonably sure of the broad translation, less so of the finer points, and a look back at the original Greek can be illuminating when it comes to details.  It is a pity that there is no Perseus Project for Assyrian, Babylonian, Neshili/Hattili and Egyptian sources, but maybe the next generation will be better provided for.
{/quote]

I read Greek, ancent, classical and modern. You are very, very optamistic :-)

Quote
All of which really intends to say that the historical sources I have seen (admittedly a fraction of those extant, but quite a useful fraction as it includes those on which chronology is largely based) do provide a surprising amount of support for the chronology I have been examining (avoiding reference to a certain individual).  To keep this from being an overlong post one instance only will be mentioned: Herodotus and the pharaohs of Egypt.  The revised chronology (as I shall call it) was drawn up without reliance upon Herodotus (his account was touched upon a few times, but only peripherally).  Yet Herodotus (in Book II) holds the key to Egyptian chronology, and his sequence of 18th Dynasty-Libyan-Ethiopian-19th Dynasty-Persian corroborates the revised chronology in all its essentials.  To say this was a surprising discovery was an understatement.

You need to look at the Greek.

Quote
That is one of the reasons I stay with the revised chronology.  There are several others.

Patrick

Quote from: Duncan Head on September 19, 2012, 11:10:25 AM
The idea that an Achaemenid-era site would produce plentiful bronze weaponry and no iron is an absurdity. (Helmets and armour are an irrelevancy, this is spearheads, knives, and so on.)

The Enkomi tombs are dated in the first instance by the local pottery (LCII-III). The pots may have originally been dated by reference to an Egyptian chronology, I really don't know, but there are plenty of radiocarbon dates for the LC sequence now.

Actually Enkomi has produced traces of iron weaponry, e.g.: "Iron was scarce in the Cypro–Mycenaean graves of Enkomi. A small knife with a carved handle had left traces of an iron blade." (source: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lang/andrew/homer/chapter9.html (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lang/andrew/homer/chapter9.html)) While one swallow does not necessarily make a summer, it does at least suggest that other iron blades may have been present, but did not survive.

The dating by pottery scheme ultimately relies upon the chronology of Egypt.

Patrick

OK, points in order:

Quote from: tadamson on September 20, 2012, 12:32:34 AM
Yes BUT there needs to be a reason for suggesting changes.

Two reasons, in fact: 1) the original version fails to satisfy and 2) the replacement version does, or at least appears to.

Quote from: tadamson on September 20, 2012, 12:32:34 AM
You really need to go back and look at stuff, the MH ships are VERY SIMILAR to other Late Bronze Age non galleys. NOTHI|NG like Archaemenid transports.

I did, but am still trying to find pics of Achaemenid (particularly Sidonian) transports before any conclusions can be drawn.  ;)

Quote from: tadamson on September 20, 2012, 12:32:34 AM
Archaemenid transports are identical to Greek merchants.  No ram, no hog back tie, different front and back, no 'duck head' posts, VERY different from the MH ships.

Were they really identical to Greek merchants?  I have doubts, given the Persian reliance on Phoenician navies, besides which I get the impression you are mixing in descriptions of the Medinet Habu Egyptian galleys.  I am looking at straight comparisons with the Pereset sail-only ships.

Quote from: tadamson on September 20, 2012, 12:32:34 AM
Yoy really need to look at some of these rather than what's reported in V and others.

I do: Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt; Luckenbill's Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (despite the title he only does Assyria), such Amarna letters and Boghazkoi tablets as are available outside academic circles, and where possible a look at the original hieroglyphic texts (my cuneiform is not up to reading original tablets).  The point is to look at aspects of history that V did not cover in his books or unpublished essays and see how they pan out - that, to my mind, is the real test.

Quote from: tadamson on September 20, 2012, 12:32:34 AM
You need to look at the Greek.

Guess what ...  ;)

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 20, 2012, 10:26:10 AM

The dating by pottery scheme ultimately relies upon the chronology of Egypt.

Patrick

Actually, it is more complicated that that.  With the usual caveat that this is not my period, I have read/seen enough to say that there are an interlocking set of artefact series which provide the dating sequences in the Ancient Near East.  The problem with this "take an isolated example" approach is it fails to allow for this.  You cannot just decide that the Enkomi material dates to the 4th century BC because there is no hard dating, so it could date to anywhen.  You have to consider how it relates to elsewhere and can you redate all of those sites, which may involve other artefact series and so on in widening ripples, some of which may have more scientifically derived dates (I know you don't like scientific dating because it can be vague.  I don't like the fact we don't have enough in many cases to tightly date periods, so we have lengthy debates on shifting things about).

I'm also not sure where in one of your earlier posts you say that bronze age weapon typology (I'm guessing you mean swords mainly) relies on the MH reliefs.  From what I've seen it uses a lot of excavated weapons, plus artistic representations, across a swathe of the mediterranean and into Europe.  Would you care to explain, as this is rather on topic about Ancient Warfare?  Is it just a variant of your contention all dating derives from Egypt?

I checked with Thomas Kiely at the British Museum, and his advice was that the dating of Enkomi ultimately depends upon that of Egypt.

So far we have looked at only the 'Pereset' represented in Enkomi art, but there is, as you rightly observe, much more to be found at and regarding Enkomi.  As usual with East Med and Near Eastern sites, it had schizophrenic scholarly interpretation of what the actual dates should be - Egyptology eventually won out.  http://www.varchive.org/dag/enkomi.htm (http://www.varchive.org/dag/enkomi.htm)

Bronze Age weapon typology does not per se rely on the Medinet Habu reliefs, and I am sorry if I gave that incorrect impression.  I intended to convey that Medinet Habu weaponry had found its way into general Bronze Age weapon typology to the extent that it was being used as a criterion of 'Bronze-Ageishness'.  Actual 'Bronze Age' weaponry (if by this we mean Mycenaean era weaponry) has many branches in its own right, both in the Mediterranean and in Europe.

Patrick

Apologies for intermittent posts [that WORK thing, to inject a four letter word, keeps interrupting].

First problem with dating schemes is that the data is vast and interlocking. When Keily says that Enkomi dating relies on Egypt dates, he means that the artefacts are cross referenced to the, far more common, Egyptian ones, this gives date sequences.  These sequences then tie in with stratification, and some 'scientific' dates (which are mostly ranges). As Patrick points out this whole edifice provides much amusement, entertainment, discussion (feuding is sometimes a better word!) amongst the assorted academics (archaeologists, historians, linguists, chemists, restorers, art historians etc...)

Dendrochronology is the potential 'silver bullet'.  Nothern European archaeology has been revolutionised by the development of complete sequences for common species. This gives a exact date for when a particular piece of wood actually grew. If you can approximate how close that was to the edge of the three when felled, how long it took to be seasoned, and then worked etc you get a very good date for the item.
Timbers from Enkomi are important for Egyptology as they are part of the evidence to build a full sequence for Ceadars in the Levant.  That sequence would date many remnants of ships and buildings very tightly (as masts and spars tended to be from timbers with little more than the bark removed  they would date the ship/building to within a few years).  This work doesn't rely on Enkomi dating (part of the 'silver bullet' appeal of the technology).

There is also an astonishing amount of data yet to be assimilated. The Diyala project is a typical example (http://diyalaproject.uchicago.edu login as guest/guest).  Thousands of objects still waiting to be analysed, potentially enough documentation to give a fairly firm grounding to Mesopotamian chronology (volunteers urgently needed).

As an aside, I'm fairly certain that one of the craters with the MH style ships on it was in a log lined tomb that dated to 1050 BCE or something like that, it was in a paper that discussed pottery dating [I think..  my books and I are still separated, but all in the UK now  :)]       

Tom..

Dendrochronology is indeed useful: the so-called 'year of no growth', currently identified as 1628 BC, allows one to pinpoint the Exodus as occurring in 1629 BC (the year preceding the year of no growth; the Hebrew account mentions vegetation being fairly comprehensively incinerated).

Dating by dendrochronology in the absence of major disasters relies on identifying the relevant species at the site in question and then tying in the ring patterns with the master scheme.  It would be interesting (if possible) to do this for sites like Lacish (sacked at a date determinable from Assyrian and Hebrew records, so leaving Egyptology out of the equation), as this would give a common departure point for dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, which could then be calibrated together rather than against a chronology that may or may not be accurate.

Do we know of anyone who is calibrating radiocarbon dating by dendrochronology?

This is of course getting us some way from the Neo-Babylonian Empire's northern half in Anatolia (the original thread subject), so if I may be permitted to guide the thread back in that direction, we return to historical records.  One of the key features of the revised chronology is the discovery, or claim, that Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty is in fact Pharaoh Necho of the Bible and the Nekos of the Greek histories.

Now why would they call him 'Necho'?  'Ramses' in Eyptian means 'victorious', and 'Nekos' in Greek seems to be derived from 'Nika' (victory), but this may be just a fortunate coincidence.  The actual reason might be the following.

Opening one's copy of Call it Qids (as the easiest source for the majority of members to use), and looking on the first page of Ian Russell Lowell's immaculately researched historical background, one sees that Ramses sets out from his eponymous capital Pi-Ramesse A-nakhtu ("Domain of Ramses-the-Great-of-Victories").  The 't' in 'nakhtu' (plural of 'nakht', great) is by this period practically silent, so to a hearer the word would sound like 'nakhu' - or, as our knowledge of Egyptian vowels is approximate rather than precise, more probably 'nekhu'.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 21, 2012, 08:26:25 PM

Do we know of anyone who is calibrating radiocarbon dating by dendrochronology?

You might find http://www.radiocarbon.com/tree-ring-calibration.htm interesting, looks as if a lot of work is being done

Jim

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 21, 2012, 08:26:25 PM


Do we know of anyone who is calibrating radiocarbon dating by dendrochronology?

The original radio-carbon calibration curves were of course based on dendrochronological sequences from the bristlecone pine.  So dendro and radio carbon have been tied together for a long time.  The big advantage of dendro dates is that they can be much more accurate than even modern C14 dates.  The downside is ideally you need regional sequences - hence the interest in the Lebanon Cedar sequences.  Also possible in the mix is magnetic dating - best for kilns but possibly usable on hordes of baked tablets, if you excavate appropriately.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 20, 2012, 07:13:02 PM
  Actual 'Bronze Age' weaponry (if by this we mean Mycenaean era weaponry) has many branches in its own right, both in the Mediterranean and in Europe.

Patrick

Returning for a moment to weaponry, the Myceneans and MH.  I note you date the Mycenean era as Bronze Age and, indeed, weapons of similar types to those used by the Myceneans turn up further north in the more securely dated European Bronze Age.  Do you have an explanation as to why Bronze Age weapon types endured in the coastal levant, in order to be issued to the Greek mercenaries who are depicted on the MH reliefs?  Or are we assuming a class of weapons keeping the style of Bronze Age weapons developed in this area?

One other check on the Myceneans.  Your dating of the Trojan War puts it post Mycenean era.  This presumably fits with your discounting the Greek Dark Age, seeing a continuity from Mycenean directly into Geometric?  I assume you date thus because Homer clearly refers to two fighting styles for his heroes, so we assume that the war takes place at a time of transition?  Or do you have other sources e.g. Hittite?

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 21, 2012, 10:20:37 PM

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 21, 2012, 08:26:25 PM

Do we know of anyone who is calibrating radiocarbon dating by dendrochronology?

You might find http://www.radiocarbon.com/tree-ring-calibration.htm interesting, looks as if a lot of work is being done

Jim

Thanks for that, Jim: I shall keep an eye on this.

I do wonder why the resultant calibrated radiocarbon dates still need a 'confidence level', though.  The basic idea behind tying in with dendrochronology is to get a reliable set of data - I suppose it is the usual 'plus-minus' thing that somehow seems inseparable from the whole radiocarbon process.

And yes Anthony, quite correct, and we can throw in thermo-luminescence where pottery is involved.  The difficulties seem to arise because these processes do not always give the dates expected.

Re-use of materials can also throw the occasional damp log into the woodpile.

Patrick

Quote from: Erpingham on September 22, 2012, 09:32:10 AM
Returning for a moment to weaponry, the Myceneans and MH.  I note you date the Mycenean era as Bronze Age and, indeed, weapons of similar types to those used by the Myceneans turn up further north in the more securely dated European Bronze Age.  Do you have an explanation as to why Bronze Age weapon types endured in the coastal levant, in order to be issued to the Greek mercenaries who are depicted on the MH reliefs?  Or are we assuming a class of weapons keeping the style of Bronze Age weapons developed in this area?

We can look at Assyrian swords for at least a partial answer to this one.  The basic short-straight Assyrian sword remains substantially unchanged from its earliest to its latest depictions, spanning several hundred years.  Before that, the preferred pattern seems to have been curved like the Egyptian khopesh, such as this example inscribed by Adad-nirari I http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/11.166.1 (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/11.166.1).  The idea seems to be that once a good basic weapon has been found, it is retained.  The Egyptian khopesh similarly seems to have had a centuries long lifespan, and not to have changed substantially during that period.  Conversely, we have some examples of iron Egyptian swords but as far as I know only one in bronze (Ahmose's), despite plenty of references to s-n-n (dagger-type swords, as depicted here: http://tinyurl.com/bo6vmjk (http://tinyurl.com/bo6vmjk)).

But let us look at some of these Mycenaean era weapons.  The classic is the Naue II sword, an example of which, found at Ugarit, is discussed by Jung and Menhofer here: http://tinyurl.com/bvnnyeu (http://tinyurl.com/bvnnyeu).  The weapon is carefully checked under typology, but then a problem emerges.

"One has to rely on indirect dating evidence for the hoard, as no finds are published from the stratum into which the hoard pit was dug, nor do we know anything about the level from which this pit was opened. "

Then it emerges that the Naue II type does not turn up in the Mycenaean era, or at least not in Mycenaean artwork, and not even in Mycenaean sites, until the few straggling examples listed on p.123.  And these seem to be so badly corroded that their shape has to be conjecturally reconstructed.  So at the very best this type is the exception rather than the rule for the Mycenaean period.

The key idea behind the propagation of the Naue II sword is that it spread from west to east with the 'Sea Peoples', but if we lay aside the conjecturally-derived dates for its first appearances in Europe, we might equally suppose that it spread from east to west with migrating Greeks of the tyrants-and-colonies era (8th-7th centuries BC), especially as the Ugarit blade being discussed seems to be at the beginning rather than the end of the development sequence of this sword type.

So if the type was developed in, say, Phoenicia around 800 BC, and was found to be useful, it could still be in use around 374 BC.

Quote from: Erpingham on September 22, 2012, 09:32:10 AM
One other check on the Myceneans.  Your dating of the Trojan War puts it post Mycenean era.  This presumably fits with your discounting the Greek Dark Age, seeing a continuity from Mycenean directly into Geometric?  I assume you date thus because Homer clearly refers to two fighting styles for his heroes, so we assume that the war takes place at a time of transition?  Or do you have other sources e.g. Hittite?

Perceptive.  :)  We may also observe that the Greek royal houses taking part in the Trojan War do not have extensive genealogies preserved in legend; most end within a generation or two, thus associating the Trojan War with the imminent demise of the Mycenaean era.  With the royal families disappearing (often through internal conflicts and rivalries resulting in a mutually assured destruction that would gladden the heart of a kabuki viewer, let alone a Greek tragedy), culturally one would expect Greece to pass directly from crowned heads to tyrants rather than to sink into absolute desolation for several hundred years and then spontaneously revive under tyrants.  This would also be consistent with there being no tradition about anything between the last of the kings and the first of the tyrants.

Then there is the matter of Grey Minyan pottery: this style was in use shortly before the end of the Mycenaean era, and is briefly in use when the geometric period (which features the tyrants) begins.  This suggests direct continuity from the one era to the other.

Hittites, however, have no materials to contribute on the Trojan war: the 'Hittite Empire' forms the northern part of the Neo-Babylonan Empire, flourishing c.610-540.  The frequent references to 'Ahhiya' and 'Ahhiyawa' in the Boghazkoi archives refer to a 6th century monarch, Alyattes of Lydia.  There are however references to contemporary Greeks, albeit of the 7th/6th centuries BC: 'Tawagalawas of Milwata' is Thrasybulus of Miletus, while 'Piyamaradus', another ally of Ahhiyawa who turns up with an army and a fleet, is Periander, tyrant of Corinth and builder of a navy that gave him supremacy over the Aegean.  We meet all these characters in Herodotus Book I.

Thank you for showing an interest.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 22, 2012, 11:44:36 AM

I do wonder why the resultant calibrated radiocarbon dates still need a 'confidence level', though.  The basic idea behind tying in with dendrochronology is to get a reliable set of data - I suppose it is the usual 'plus-minus' thing that somehow seems inseparable from the whole radiocarbon process.

C14 decay is a random process, so the result is expressed with a statistical  confidence level.  It's usually a two standard deviation 95% expression IIRC (i.e. the result is 95% likely to fall in the confidence interval).  If you run multiple dates of the same sample material (not the same sample - the sample is destroyed during the dating process) you can tighten the confidence interval.

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 22, 2012, 12:39:20 PM

Quote from: Erpingham on September 22, 2012, 09:32:10 AM


The key idea behind the propagation of the Naue II sword is that it spread from west to east with the 'Sea Peoples', but if we lay aside the conjecturally-derived dates for its first appearances in Europe, we might equally suppose that it spread from east to west with migrating Greeks of the tyrants-and-colonies era (8th-7th centuries BC), especially as the Ugarit blade being discussed seems to be at the beginning rather than the end of the development sequence of this sword type.

So if the type was developed in, say, Phoenicia around 800 BC, and was found to be useful, it could still be in use around 374 BC.

Ex oriente lux - we are taking a trip down memory lane :)  As I understand it, mainly I admit from Google searching, the current understanding is that Naue II swords start off as bronze and are later copied in iron.  Phoenicia in 800BC is in the Iron Age, I presume ?  So, is there an assumption that the iron model is copied by Europeans in bronze? 

On the subject of Naue II swords and Mycenae, I'm not sure the idea that the Myceneans didn't use them would be accepted by everyone.  Take, for example, http://193.146.160.29/gtb/sod/usu/$UBUG/repositorio/10320368_Molloy.pdf which gives details of Naue II swords found with other swords in Mycenean contexts.  This does not, again from Google, seem to be an isolated view.  Would this not make a 800BC origin difficult in your schema, given that the Myceneans have given way to the Geometric by this point?  I accept that both these points can be covered  by 900-950 BC origin within your chronology.

Turning again to the MH reliefs, now that you propose that the weapon types in the images originated at latest in 800BC (and could be earlier), would not the apparent archaicism of the ships and other equipment suggest that this relief would fit earlier in your new timeline? 

Jung and Meinhofer list the Naue II blades found in Mycenaean Greece; there are few of them compared to other types and they do not appear to be the mainstream variety of blade.  This is not to say that they were never used, but they do appear to be both late and peripheral, arguing an entry into Greece late in the era.

You rightly pick up that a putative date of c.800 BC for the origin of the type is not particularly harmonious: my use of it was more to say that it looks as if this may be a first millennium weapon from the end of the 'Bronze Age' rather than a second millennium weapon prevalent throughout the era.  About a century earlier is a much better starting point, but we might be able to refine it further: in the revised chronology Shalmaneser III burns much of Ugarit and expels the Greek (yamanu) part of the population in the mid-9th century BC so one can logically assume the weapon to have been developed prior to that point.  Somewhere in the 900-850 BC bracket (from Amenhotep II up to the reign of Akhenaten) is my best guess for when the weapon would have been developed, and thereafter found to be good (it may have debuted in the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC where Shalmaneser was stalled by a coalition army, but this is pure conjecture).  Iron versions would follow, but not immediately.

While we are indeed getting into the Iron Age chronologically, it would be incorrect to view the transition between the ages as anything other than gradual and progressive: nobody waved a wand so that a world with bronze mirrors, brooches, weapons and accoutrements suddenly woke up the next morning with iron ones.  :)  Iron gradually displaced bronze as the Anatolian mines came on stream (previous iron had been either rare meteroric material or laboriously teased out of ore in isolated locations at inadequate temperatures) and made Midas of Phrygia and his descendants rich in the 9th-8th centuries BC.  Assyria was a major market, and one notes that the last remnants of the Assyrian Empire, under Ashur-uballit, made their final stand (c.604 BC) in eastern Asia Minor, next to the sources of iron: Egypt, with its already extensive bronze industry, had more geographic challenge to obtain, and less immediate incentive to adopt, the new material.

The big technological breakthrough seems to have been not so much the iron itself (although Anatolian chromium could have played a useful part on Midas' metallurgy) as the development of the 'fiery furnace' necessary to achieve the 1,500 C degree temperature necessary for melting iron and in the process burning off many of the impurities, turning it from a brittle metal suitable only for axes to one viable for swords.  (Such furnaces had other uses in the hands of a cruel ruler: Daniel 3.19-23.)

Regarding the dating of the Medinet Habu reliefs, I see the 'archaisms' as more apparent than real: it would be nice if we could find some images of 5th/4th century Sidonian transport ships to compare with them.  There are two ship types represented on the Medinet Habu reliefs, or at least two of which I am aware: one is the Egyptian single-bank galley with a crew of 20-30 rowers and a dozen or so marines; the other is the single-masted, single-sail steering-oar-only (no propulsive oars) vessel carrying the Pereset and their allied or mercenary troops.

I am well aware that there are many who view pictures like this http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship71.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship71.jpg) as equating to ships line this http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship32.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship32.jpg).  May I point out the differences: the Tiryns krater 'bird-boat' has curved stem and stern-posts, it has hull decoration quite unlike the Pereset vessel and it lacks the upper deck and towers, instead having a curious pile of circular objects in the centre.

Another rather hopeful 'similarity' is the Kynos fragment here http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship34.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship34.jpg), which is optimistically (and after a little surgery) compared with a carefully readjusted drawing of the Pereset vessel: http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship74.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/ship74.jpg).  Note how the towers B have been craftily added despite their complete absence in the original and how the 'rowers bulwark' (which looks more like an outrigger in the original) has been equated to the upper deck of the Pereset ship.

Much has previously been made of certain features of Egyptian design being 'archaic', notably the 'hog truss', which served the function of the hypozomata of the Athenians, connecting the bow and stern under tension and so preventing the ship from sagging and stressing the timbers amidships.  Examination of such pictures of the Egyptian galleys on the Medinet Habu reliefs as I can find fails to reveal a single hog truss: it is conceivable that they might be obscured by the numerous prisoners sitting on deck, but one would expect at least a hint of them to be showing, bearing in mind the Egyptian artistic tradition of depicting something of everything that mattered.  This suggests that what we see at Medinet Habu is late-period construction, perhaps even using the hypozomata to provide internal tensioning and resilience (Athens sent a force to aid the 460 BC Egyptian revolt - the ships were stranded when the Persians diverted the Nile and the hypozomata could have become known to the Egyptians at that time).

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 23, 2012, 11:49:19 AM
  This suggests that what we see at Medinet Habu is late-period construction, perhaps even using the hypozomata to provide internal tensioning and resilience (Athens sent a force to aid the 460 BC Egyptian revolt - the ships were stranded when the Persians diverted the Nile and the hypozomata could have become known to the Egyptians at that time).

Patrick

Presumably the Athenian ships were triremes.  Why then did the Egyptians not copy them, rather than using the design lessons to produce the obsolete triaconter?

I would suggest for two reasons.

1) When Egypt revolted against the Persians c.390 BC, it perforce cut itself off from the main Mediterranean supplies of shipbuilding timber, and triremes need a fair amount of wood in their construction whereas lembi-type vessels allow more warships to be built for much less timber, perhaps an important consideration if one little 30-man galley is considered sufficient to defeat a troop transport.

2) Ramses seems to have planned to fight his battle on the River Nile itself.  Small riverine rather than large seagoing galleys might have best answered that need.

Patrick

The trouble with this is that this doesn't explain why the Persians haven't got Triremes, after all, you're the one who reckoned the Persians didn't need much more than triremes to shift an army to Marathon

Jim

And the Athenians used triremes to shift their expeditionary force to Syracuse.

The problem here would be that with Diodorus' 220,000 troops to carry, even the usual Persian allowance of 600 triremes is never going to be able to carry more than half, even at full stretch.  And a good part of the Persian trireme fleet would have been held back in case it was needed to cut down a Greek hegemon ('The Isles' being 'restless' at the time).  Enter the troop transports.

So why not accompany them with some triremes?  This might have been done, but if the triremes were in the van and the Egyptians attacked the transports from the rear, the triremes would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  More likely, the Persian triremes were employed to escort the transports as far as the mouth of the Nile, but not up it for 'administrative reasons' (a trireme would want to beach at the end of each day and facilities for that on the banks of the Nile were rather limited, not to mention alive with bellicose Egyptians, and there is the tactical problem that a trireme needs masts and sails up to travel up the Nile but masts and sails down in order to fight).  It is quite conveivable that maritime - or rather riverine - opposition was not expected or, if it was, it was thought that the troops on the transports could take care of it.  A sturdy sailing vessel with numerous trained infantry should have nothing to fear from puny little galleys about the size of a triakonter.

The novel Egyptian tactics - grappling the top of a mast and then rowing away in order to capsize the target vessel - negated the ability of the troop transports to defend themselves.

Patrick

I'm sorry but this is beginning to look like special pleading. The naval technology the Persians are apparently employing is so massively obsolete that the crews would probably have refused to sail in them
And sending unescorted transports into an assault situation is also hardly the done thing. The idea that the escorts would not be sent up river doesn't win me over, they would be shallower draught than the ships they were escorting.

Similarly a ship with a ram can soon punch a hole in the side of one of these transports, they're not great high sided 'men of war' but barely more than open boats.

I'm afraid you don't win me over. Whilst it is possible to portray this as a 4th century engagement, it takes too much special pleading and too many exceptional circumstances, Ockham's razor wins out for me in this one. It fits better with the traditional dating or thereabouts.
Similarly the scenes of 'Sea Peoples with their 'carts/chariots' and families fighting on land don't look desperately 4th century either I'm afraid

Jim

Another intermittent visit, some thoughts re dating.

Dating by radioactive decay is, by its very nature, never going to give an exact date. We can reduce the +/- by identifying the changes in atmospheric C12:C14 ratios. This is being done at a global level by testing the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, but there will still be regional variations.  There is also some work going on re isotope analysis of decay products, and chemical mobility analysis can improve the measurement of current C12:C14 ratios, but there will always be the inherent date range for small samples (if we could destroy kilogrammes of organic material you could have tighter dates).

I am, I have to admit, utterly unconvinced by attempts to place the MH illustrations in a 6th C context.

Tom..

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 10:26:31 AM
The naval technology the Persians are apparently employing is so massively obsolete that the crews would probably have refused to sail in them

What is the basis for this statement?  The 'obsolescence', I mean.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 10:26:31 AM
And sending unescorted transports into an assault situation is also hardly the done thing. The idea that the escorts would not be sent up river doesn't win me over, they would be shallower draught than the ships they were escorting.

As far as I can reconstruct they were surprised en route to Memphis, not sent 'into an assault situation'.

Where does draught come into this, by the way?

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 10:26:31 AM
Similarly a ship with a ram can soon punch a hole in the side of one of these transports, they're not great high sided 'men of war' but barely more than open boats.

But none are shown doing so in the reliefs, so I question that statement.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 10:26:31 AM
I'm afraid you don't win me over. Whilst it is possible to portray this as a 4th century engagement, it takes too much special pleading and too many exceptional circumstances, Ockham's razor wins out for me in this one. It fits better with the traditional dating or thereabouts.
Similarly the scenes of 'Sea Peoples with their 'carts/chariots' and families fighting on land don't look desperately 4th century either I'm afraid

Actually they do: take a look at this Sidonan dishekel http://www.ancientcash.info/page-3/phoenicia-title-18.html (http://www.ancientcash.info/page-3/phoenicia-title-18.html) and note the style of vehicle in which the Persian king is riding.  He qualifies for horses and spoked wheels rather than oxen and solid-looking wheels, but the style of the vehicle is remarkably similar.

Or are there some other 4th century vehicles you would like to show?  ;)

Patrick

Quote from: tadamson on September 24, 2012, 02:27:43 PM
Another intermittent visit, some thoughts re dating.

Dating by radioactive decay is, by its very nature, never going to give an exact date. We can reduce the +/- by identifying the changes in atmospheric C12:C14 ratios. This is being done at a global level by testing the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, but there will still be regional variations.  There is also some work going on re isotope analysis of decay products, and chemical mobility analysis can improve the measurement of current C12:C14 ratios, but there will always be the inherent date range for small samples (if we could destroy kilogrammes of organic material you could have tighter dates).

I am, I have to admit, utterly unconvinced by attempts to place the MH illustrations in a 6th C context.

Tom..

That seems a fair assessment of the capabilities and limitations of radiocarbon dating at present.

However a more attentive reader would have noted the Medinet Habu reliefs being identified as belonging to the 4th century BC, not the 6th.  :)

Patrick

Obsolete?
The 'keel' shape for a start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrenia_ship shows a 'near contemporay'

In river battles draught is even more important, and triremes will tend to be lighter draft than merchant ships.

As to the lack of ramming attacks in the reliefs, that is my entire point. There aren't any. Yet the basic design of the Greek warship was to ram. Hence there are no Greek warships here (of Persian warships). And given the circumstances I'd suggest this means there are no Greeks and pesians either.

The coin looks to show a standard heavy wheeled chariot.
I think really you ought to explain why the Persians equipped their Greek mercenaries with funny hats and ox carts :-)
http://www.american-buddha.com/bibleunearth.195e.gif has some pictures.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 08:27:15 PM
Obsolete?
The 'keel' shape for a start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrenia_ship shows a 'near contemporay'

There is a nice 3D reconstruction of the Kyrenia ship here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_E5A00pEuo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_E5A00pEuo).  It is patently a Greek merchant vessel and not a Sidonian troop transport.

I have finally managed to locate some Phoenician ship pictures, and they are interesting.  The source is http://phoenicia.org/ships.html (http://phoenicia.org/ships.html) and the pictures are these:

Merchant: http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships2.jpg (http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships2.jpg)

Warship: http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships6.jpg (http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships6.jpg)

Now the merchant is depicted with oars, which the Medinet Habu ships are not, but the keel line is noteworthy, as is the general layout.  One might also observe that if one added the 'double bird head' motif of the warship stem/stern posts to the merchant, one would have the Medinet Habu transport pretty much to a 'T'.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 08:27:15 PM
In river battles draught is even more important, and triremes will tend to be lighter draft than merchant ships.

I agree entirely here, but what is the point of mentioning this?  The difficulty with taking triremes up a hostile Nile is: how and where do you park them for the night?  How do you put the crews ashore when hostile Egyptians are waiting to swoop?  Can you anchor them against the current?  Can you guard them effectively against fireships (Ramses III refers to a 'wall of flame' being prepared against the invaders).  And so on.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 08:27:15 PM
As to the lack of ramming attacks in the reliefs, that is my entire point. There aren't any. Yet the basic design of the Greek warship was to ram. Hence there are no Greek warships here (of Persian warships). And given the circumstances I'd suggest this means there are no Greeks and pesians either.

But why would any Greek warships be present in a battle fought between Egyptians and a Persian invading force?  The Egyptian galleys have rams, but are not shown using them.

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 24, 2012, 08:27:15 PM
The coin looks to show a standard heavy wheeled chariot.
I think really you ought to explain why the Persians equipped their Greek mercenaries with funny hats and ox carts :-)
http://www.american-buddha.com/bibleunearth.195e.gif has some pictures.

This particular relief seems to depict the annihilation of the Persian garrison of Memphis as it was retiring towards the Egyptian border.  Note that the reliefs show three different campaigns: in the first, Egyptians, Persians and 'Sea Peoples' (Greek/Lydian mercenaries) combat Libyans.  In the second, Egyptians and 'Sea Peoples' (Greeks) fight Persians.  In the third, Ramses scores his naval success against Persians and 'Sea Peoples' (Greeks) together.

The point of the coin is that the 'standard heavy wheeled chariot' is very similar in configuration to the ox cart, unless we are going to assume a generic ox cart that changes little through the millennia, which is perhaps not an unreasonable view but which would remove the evidential value of these vehicles for any sort of cultural association or dating.  Take your pick.

Now for the 'funny hats' - one may note that in the first campaign (against the Libyans) and the second (against the Persians) the helmets in question have horns and discs between the horns.  In the final campaign, the discs between the horns are all gone - every single one of them, and the helmets are Enkomi 'warrior god' pattern.

So do we have one - just one - barbarian tribe with this degree of uniformity?  Not to mention clean-shaven.

I am puzzled why some people seem to cling like leeches to the Medinet Habu reliefs when there is a wider world around them.  Still, it is throwing up material very useful for the revised chronology, so my thanks to those involved.  This thread was actually begun to look at the 6th century BC, and nobody as yet asked: "What about the 26th Dynasty pharaohs?  If Ramses II and the 19th Dynasty are to move to the 663-525 BC slot, what about Psamshek, Nekau and Ahmose II?"

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 25, 2012, 10:26:52 AM

The point of the coin is that the 'standard heavy wheeled chariot' is very similar in configuration to the ox cart, unless we are going to assume a generic ox cart that changes little through the millennia, which is perhaps not an unreasonable view but which would remove the evidential value of these vehicles for any sort of cultural association or dating.  Take your pick.

2 Wheeled ox carts remain virtually unchanged throughout history.  The wheels vary (solid, spoked, steel with rubber tyres) and steel axles have started to appear in the last 150 years.  The central axle, low bent pole, yoke "whip and nose ring" control system are unchanged for thousands of years.  Incidentally the very earlies examples (from the steppes) have spoked wheels.  The heavy chariot has key differences: larger diameter wheels, higher body and pole, a body wider than its length.

Quote
I am puzzled why some people seem to cling like leeches to the Medinet Habu reliefs when there is a wider world around them.  Still, it is throwing up material very useful for the revised chronology, so my thanks to those involved.  This thread was actually begun to look at the 6th century BC, and nobody as yet asked: "What about the 26th Dynasty pharaohs?  If Ramses II and the 19th Dynasty are to move to the 663-525 BC slot, what about Psamshek, Nekau and Ahmose II?"

Patrick

We see you use this as core evidence for your theory and we all see massive problems with this. Not least that Ramses II is clearly fighting Bronze age enemies, not 7th-6th c BCE Persians.

If there is other 'evidence' that you'd like to discuss, remembering that we are primarily military history types ?

Tom..

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 25, 2012, 10:26:52 AM


So do we have one - just one - barbarian tribe with this degree of uniformity?  Not to mention clean-shaven.

Quote

Some of us would perhaps suggest that the relief deals in archetypes, not individuals.

QuoteI am puzzled why some people seem to cling like leeches to the Medinet Habu reliefs when there is a wider world around them.  Still, it is throwing up material very useful for the revised chronology, so my thanks to those involved. 

Patrick

I suggest, firstly, that they are a well known military subject.  Secondly, such a radical re-interpretation is bound to cause interest, images are easy to access and so are information e.g. about Bronze Age weaponry.  Trying to get us to engage with discussions on identifications of characters in Hittite tablets are a bit more obscure and their military links that bit more tenuous.

If you like, we could talk about the Trojan War.  Your redating here is less radical, so you may be more likely to convince, especially as the Greek Dark Age is such a hazy thing.  Please tell us more about the transition from Mycenean to pre-Classical Greece, from kingship to tyranny and what evidence you bring to the Trojan War.

Quote from: tadamson on September 25, 2012, 12:58:20 PM

We see you use this as core evidence for your theory and we all see massive problems with this. Not least that Ramses II is clearly fighting Bronze age enemies, not 7th-6th c BCE Persians.

If there is other 'evidence' that you'd like to discuss, remembering that we are primarily military history types ?

Tom..

OK, fair reason for remaining on what I regard as the peripheries: if we had an online Boghazkoi archive then maybe things could be different.  I rather assumed some people would have a working knowledge of Egyptology, but if that is not present then it is unfair of me to expect it.

Just for clarification, in the revised chronology Ramses II lived in the 7th/6th century (c.610-584 BC) and fought the Neo-Babylonian Empire; Ramses III lived in the 4th century and fought the Persians.

The Medinet Habu ships question we can perhaps leave with our Phoenician merchantman http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships2.jpg (http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships2.jpg) on the catwalk alongside the Pereset ships http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg).  Take off the oars, give it a couple of towers and tweak the ends Phoenician warship-style* and it looks tantalisingly close.

*Remember the Sidonian coin with a bent stempost?  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw this: http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships6.jpg (http://phoenicia.org/imgs/ships6.jpg) - a Phoenician warship with the bird-head motif at each end.

I shall follow your and Anthony's suggestions re 'other evidence' for now.  :)

Patrick

With some of the links all I get is

http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=509.new;topicseen 81.155.223.48 /home/phoen44/public_html/badlink.htm phoenicia.org Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB7.4)


Jim

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 25, 2012, 10:28:38 PM
With some of the links all I get is

http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=509.new;topicseen 81.155.223.48 /home/phoen44/public_html/badlink.htm phoenicia.org Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB7.4)


Jim

The image in question appears to be missing from the site. Other images are modern drawings of early two banked ships nothing like the MH ships.

Patrick, the 'tweaks' you mention are major engineering redesigns implying significantly different construction.

Tom..

I am on no side in this debate, I wouldn't claim competence. However, there are two questions that I would like to put to those ku that are carrying it on.
1) aren't  Carians associated with the  Persian invasion of Egypt as 'mean of bronze'? And aren't some peoples in the same area as the Carians  described in the Herodotean army list for the expedition to Greece as having hornedj helmets. I had understood this to be a relic.t Of a Sea People's fashion from the Bronze Age of course.
2) I have always been puzzled by the depiction of Medes in the Assyrian reliefs as wearing long boots and an animal skin that covers the left half of the body. It seems to me that that costume doesn't  fit with the description of Median costume in Herodotus, one of the few costume sources for the early NE that we have corroboration for.
T.o me the MH reliefs look consistently Bronze Age, but, as I encounter so many representations of warriors in the Early Middle Ages that are  likely to be combinations of Roman Art, fantasy and some contemporary reality, I wonder how reliable and photographic the Egyptian and other depictions might be.
I men, do I believe the MH Hittites when they look like nothing Thant is shown at Hattusas?

That should bring down a storm!

Roy

Quote from: aligern on September 26, 2012, 09:15:41 AM

T.o me the MH reliefs look consistently Bronze Age, but, as I encounter so many representations of warriors in the Early Middle Ages that are  likely to be combinations of Roman Art, fantasy and some contemporary reality, I wonder how reliable and photographic the Egyptian and other depictions might be.

I think the general view is that Egyptian art is representational but stylized, with the balance varying according to the fashions of its time but also the quality of the artist, the purpose etc.  We can assume a high technical quality in these reliefs, because they are royal and public, so we are looking at what the artist set out to show us.  We can also see that the design is stylized.  Yet Egyptian art can produce apparently accurate detailed views of people or animals in a stylized composition.  I think we would need a good reason to believe these reliefs show Greeks and Persians in fantasy costumes based on ancient models, rather than reasonably accurate representations in contemporary dress.  As I understand it, even Patrick doesn't believe these are fantasy but rather they wear 4th century BC Sidonian dress (with which the Greeks have been issued) and that the vessels are accurate portrayals of 4th century transports and small warships.

I know it has been suggested that these reliefs are stylised and show 5th century invaders in the same dress as previous invaders.
This is culturally possible, note the Byzantines referring to Scyths etc.
But in the case of the Byzantines we know there were real Scyths to refer back to, so if the 5th century invaders were shown identical to early invaders, there must have been some early invaders. Hence anyone putting forward the theory really has to show who those early invaders were

Jim

Quote from: tadamson on September 26, 2012, 12:14:50 AM

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 25, 2012, 10:28:38 PM
With some of the links all I get is

http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=509.new;topicseen 81.155.223.48 /home/phoen44/public_html/badlink.htm phoenicia.org Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB7.4)


Jim

The image in question appears to be missing from the site. Other images are modern drawings of early two banked ships nothing like the MH ships.

Patrick, the 'tweaks' you mention are major engineering redesigns implying significantly different construction.

Tom..

Yes, there does appear to be a problem with linking the images, and today I cannot even access the site (don't you love it when the internet does this to you?).  Try this page, however http://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/Parliament/2587/ships.html (http://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/Parliament/2587/ships.html): the picture is the Phoenician trade ship 'of about 1500 BC' in the section 'Phoenician Merchant Ships'.  http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/parliament/2587/ships6.jpg (http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/parliament/2587/ships6.jpg)  Note the general layout and the line of the keel.

The warship in question is the first image under 'Phoenician War Ships'.  http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/parliament/2587/ships6.jpg (http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/parliament/2587/ships6.jpg)  The date is given as '1500-1000 BC' (although how this date is derived is not explained).  Observe the avian head motif at each end of the ship and recall the 5th/4th century Sidonian coin depicting a galley with a bent stem post.

One observes a certain self-contradiction in the commentary on the webpage, in that on the one hand a Phoenician warship of 1500-1000 BC has two banks of oars, and on the other the Phoenicians invented the bireme c.700 BC.

Please compare the '1500 BC' Phoenician merchantman with the Pereset sailing vessels on the Medinet Habu relief http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg (http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/images/seapeoples04.jpg) and see how close a match it would be with towers and birds heads added.

Patrick

Ok Patrick,

I see the cached version.  The drawings look like they are from a modern (1960-1990 from the style) book.  The 1500 BCE 'Phoenician trade ship' does look similar to the MH boats, though I can't think of any evidence for oars/paddles on a big round ship like this (though oars would be useful for manoeuvring in harbour and are not entirely unlikely).

?? Isn't this evidence against your dating scheme ??

Tom..

I get the impression from the somewhat vague accompanying text that the drawings of the '1500 BC' ships are from reliefs somewhere, though with true presenter's acumen they do not say where.  It seems we both agree that the merchant type looks not unlike the Medinet Habu transports.

Now for the dating.  :)  The sad fact about Biblical period dating is that dates before c.911 BC and the Assyrian limmu (list of years named after officials) are really conjectures up for grabs.  When a date of '1500 BC' is given, what is meant is: 'either we have related this to an Egyptian relief or text of the 18th Dynasty or we do not think it comes any later than our 700 BC example depicted on an Assyran relief'.  I suspect that they have simply noted that Hatshepsut 'sent five ships of Phoenician style' (an observation that is made on this page http://tinyurl.com/cd3l5tz (http://tinyurl.com/cd3l5tz) albeit not in the original Deir el Bahri relief inscription http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mjn/egyptian/texts/corpus/pdf/HatshepsutPunt.pdf (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mjn/egyptian/texts/corpus/pdf/HatshepsutPunt.pdf)), looked at the ships on the reliefs http://ib205.tripod.com/hatshepsut/deir_el_bahri/image-1.gif (http://ib205.tripod.com/hatshepsut/deir_el_bahri/image-1.gif) and felt they had a match, or at least one close enough for their purposes.

Until I know what sources were used for the depiction of the merchantman and the derivation of the given date, it is impossible to be certain about anything except that a Phoenician merchant type closely matches the Medinet Habu transports.

Given that the closest match to Pereset costume seems to be Phoenician material on Enkomi, that the popular Naue II sword seems to have originated at Ugarit (at least in the opinion of the two co-authors quoted earlier) and that the closest match to Pereset tansports seems to be a Phoenician merchantman of indeterminate date (an actual date of 1500 BC would incidentally sink the 'Sea Peoples' as being 300 years out of period under the present chronology) it looks increasingly as if whomever Ramses III fought against in the unsuccessful invasion of Egypt, they were equipped by Phoenicians.

Patrick

Quote from: Patrick Waterson on September 27, 2012, 10:43:20 AM

it looks increasingly as if whomever Ramses III fought against in the unsuccessful invasion of Egypt, they were equipped by Phoenicians.

Patrick

Are you not in danger of mixing cause and effect here.
If the Pelset became Philistines, then what you see as the influence of Phoenicians on the invaders of Egypt could just as easily be the influence of the Invaders of Egypt on the later Phoencians


Jim

Quote from: Jim Webster on September 27, 2012, 02:05:34 PM

Are you not in danger of mixing cause and effect here.
If the Pelset became Philistines, then what you see as the influence of Phoenicians on the invaders of Egypt could just as easily be the influence of the Invaders of Egypt on the later Phoencians

Jim

But although scholars have tried hard to prove that things happened that way round (boy, how they have tried) results so far have been so discouraging that they seem to be on the point of giving up and looking elsewhere.

This in itself suggests the need for a different explanation.

Patrick

Looks like they're trying to tighten the dendrochronology for you  :)

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept12/DendroNSF.html

By Daniel Aloi
The Department of Classics has received a $200,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating research in the Near East, based at Cornell's Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology.

Lab Director Sturt Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cornell, is co-principal investigator with Timothy Jull, director of the University of Arizona's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory Facility. Together with a postdoctoral scholar, students and other colleagues, they will collect and analyze tree rings from southern Jordan, Europe and North America to establish a high-resolution radiocarbon timeline for archaeological and environmental dating in the eastern Mediterranean.

The research will be critical in determining the correct timeframe for Biblical archaeology and thus early Biblical history, and timeframes and histories of ancient cultures of the region.

As radiocarbon dating has become more precise, Manning said, "there have been active and vigorous debates over key topics like the exact dating of early Israel and the precise timeframe of early Biblical history, among others. These debates have serious implications for how we interpret and understand the early history of these civilizations and have profound effects on a number of fields centered on the history and culture of the world of the Hebrew Bible and its contemporaries."

Using high-resolution accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon analysis, tree-ring samples of a known age from the eastern Mediterranean, precise to the calendar year, will be compared with known-age tree rings from Germany, Ireland and North America. Differences in the growing seasons of plants in different areas -- potentially an important issue in some current scholarly disputes -- will be among the key topics more accurately assessed than in the past, Manning said.

The research findings "will provide the basis for archaeological, early historical and environmental chronologies in the Near East and east Mediterranean to be accurate as well as precise," he said.

The project will develop existing collaborative research on tree rings in Jordan by the Cornell Dendrochronology Laboratory, in partnership with the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan.

Concurrent radiocarbon-based work at the University of Arizona's AMS laboratory "will provide an important opportunity to test and develop the accuracy and precision of this key U.S. facility central to NSF-sponsored, radiocarbon-based work across several fields, from archaeology to a range of the environmental and geological sciences," Manning said.

Manning's lab and the Department of Classics received an NSF award of more than $100,000 in 2009 for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, to study relationships between architecture, social interaction and social change in an early civilization on Cyprus.




Jim

Thanks, Jim.

We can expect some interesting and lively discussions in Near Eastern archaeology if they do manage to get it comprehensively sorted out.

I hope they stick to 1628 BC as the 'Year of No Growth', otherwise I have a bit of rewriting to do ...

Patrick

The picture might say it all
Jim

He he ... very good! :D