Over the past four months, this website has featured 15 posts about how using common sense leads to better solutions in ancient Middle Eastern chronology. The following list is a summary of the main points in those posts:
- The ancient Egyptians had multiple calendar systems, invalidating Sothic dates based on the Menophres calendar system before the final decades of the Nineteenth Dynasty. (To be valid, earlier Sothic dates with different calendar systems must have separate and reliable astronomical anchors.)
- Radiocarbon dates can have significant offsets compared with the Radiocarbon International Calibration Curve (IntCal). Although that offset in some locations makes dated materials appear too young, in most cases, they have diminished levels of carbon-14, making them seem older than they are. Two prominent causes are the outgassing of low-carbon-14 CO2 from seawater and tectonic plate boundaries.
- Radiocarbon evidence from Anatolia has slight biases toward excessive ages due to outgassing from the surrounding seas and tectonic plate boundaries. However, they still support the Middle Chronology Venus tablets model, which shows the Assyrian King List has one or more gaps.
- Two sets of ancient Egyptian radiocarbon dates are contradictory. Conventional chronologists embrace those from Upper and Middle Egypt that understate ages by approximately a century. Common sense would suggest that since the Lower Egyptian dates more closely align with those from Thera and Crete, they are likely the ones with regional offsets that resemble the datasets that comprise IntCal.
- The Amarna letters corpus includes only 13 years of correspondence and ends approximately when Amenhotep IV established his new city, Akhet-Aten (Amarna). Tutankhamun transferred the archive from subsequent years to Thebes when he moved his government there.
- An Assyrian king, Aššur-rēša-iši I (AKL #86), adopted a calendar reform that skipped intercalary months (the 13th month). The next king, Tiglath-pileser I (AKL #87), continued this practice into his third decade of rule. Nevertheless, no credible evidence exists that this practice lasted over a few decades.
- Babylonian boundary stones (kudurrus) had complex relief depictions of current astronomical configurations. Their purpose was to prevent counterfeiting of land grants.
- During most of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, cattle counts were not regularly annual or biannual. Instead, the government often skipped tax assessments following unfavorable Nile flood levels.
- We should test divergent chronological records from ancient sources using common sense and other data rather than assuming that the records most consistent with the conventional chronological model are correct.
- The solar eclipse recorded in the Mari Eponym Chronicle and associated with “King Šamši-Adad’s birth” is precisely identifiable. However, that “birth” is idiomatic, figurative, or dialectical and refers to the start of his rule over Assyria.
- Just as the Babylonians had astronomical reliefs on their boundary stones, the Assyrians had many recent celestial configurations depicted on their stone stelae, statues, and wall slabs.
- The dynasties in Manetho’s books and the Turin King List had much more chronological overlapping than conventional chronologists believe.
- Sothic dates cannot help researchers determine the interval between the Egyptian Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasties. The Second Intermediate Period (SIP) was much shorter than Egyptologists believe. Radiocarbon evidence and king list data show that all the SIP and Twelfth Dynasties were partially contemporary.
- An analysis of the three Nile-flooding-based Egyptian seasons compared with the associated pictograms shows that Ꜣḫt, prt, and šmw meant 1) the season of growing crops, 2) the harvest, and 3) the flood season, respectively. Conventional chronologists have these seasons shifted out of place.
- Before the Ptolemaic Era, the Egyptian understanding of the lunar cycle was that it began with the full moon. The transliterated word for a full moon day or Lunar Day One (LD 1) is psdntyw, and it was the day that festivals dedicated to the sun- and full-moon-gods began.
This list illustrates that conventional chronologists have often accepted traditional ideas contrary to common sense rather than following the evidence to better solutions. Moreover, some have stated that considering alternative models is too inconvenient or difficult. For example, they reject the ideas that 1) the Assyrian King List had gaps in it after the Amarna Period and 2) the Egyptians had more than one calendar system because accepting these premises would make ancient chronology too complex!
Who said it was going to be easy? The correct understanding is sometimes difficult to deduce. Nevertheless, evidence-based and common-sense solutions are far better than demonstrably false traditions.