Hittites in the 6th century?

[Erpingham]

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

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

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. 

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.

[Patrick Waterson]

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 on the catwalk alongside the Pereset ships 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 - 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

[Jim Webster]

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

[tadamson]

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..

[aligern]

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

[Erpingham]

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.

[Jim Webster]

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

[Patrick Waterson]

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: 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  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  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 and see how close a match it would be with towers and birds heads added.

Patrick

[tadamson]

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..

[Patrick Waterson]

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 albeit not in the original Deir el Bahri relief inscription 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 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

[Jim Webster]

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

[Patrick Waterson]

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

[Jim Webster]

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

[Patrick Waterson]

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

[Jim Webster]

The picture might say it all
Jim