Archaeology Pt. 2

Modern Archaeology

As discussed previously the relative chronology of Palestine was developed through the use of the principle of stratigraphy. This is not true for the chronology of Egypt. In the land of Egypt there are no cities which may be excavated to determine the relative chronology. At the time the chronology of Egypt was developed all excavations were conducted in the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt. The temples of the gods, and the tombs of the pharaohs were built to last for eternity. Unfortunately their homes were not. These were usually constructed to last for a single generation. Thus there were no layers stacked up in a tell to establish precedence for the pharaohs of Egypt. As a consequence the chronology of Egypt had to be built using another method.

Egyptian chronology is based upon other sources. The most important of these are the “king lists”. The most useful of these lists was composed in the third century AD by the Egyptian priest, Manetho. He divided the history of Egypt into a series of thirty dynasties or families of rulers. Scientists still use these thirty dynasties today to simplify Egyptian history. The first of these thirty dynasties begins at the time of the unification of the country under Menes, the first king of all Egypt, and ended with the conquest of Egypt in 332 BC by Alexander the Great. “Curiously, although great reliance is placed on Manetho, no full text of his work survives” (Clayton, 1994, p. 9). Instead we have copies of parts of his lists which had been copied by other writers.

For convenience these thirty dynasties have been assembled into groups. These groups of dynasties are based upon similarities in the political situation and material culture which prevailed during the time. Of course, Egyptian history did not begin with the unification of the country. The time before it was unified is now known as the pre-dynastic period, or the time before Manetho’s thirty dynasties. The unification of the country occurred about the time the Egyptians began to use bronze as an important building material. Thus the change from the pre-dynastic period to the beginning of the thirty dynasties also marks the change from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age in Egypt.

The first three dynasties make up the period known as the Archaic Period. Not much is known about this time in Egyptian history and the hieroglyphs from this period are difficult to translate and understand. It is a time of transition from the Stone Age to the ancient Egypt we are more familiar with. This is when the first pyramids were constructed, and the first canals to redirect the waters of the Nile were dug. The famous step pyramid of Saqqara, the first pyramid and the first building constructed entirely of stone, was built during the third dynasty by Imhotep, vizier to the pharaoh Djoser.

The next three dynasties, numbered four through six, make up the period known as the Old Kingdom. This is the time of the pyramid builders. The great pyramid at Giza was considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It is the only one of the seven ancient wonders that survives today. It is one of a group of three pyramids that stand on the Giza plateau. These pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the fourth dynasty Khufu, his son Khafre, and his son Menkaure. During the Old Kingdom, Egypt was united and her people were secure. Isolated from most of the ancient world by desert, Egypt had no large standing army but was a peaceful and powerful kingdom. The power and authority of the pharaohs as demonstrated by the pyramids was absolute.

The authority of the pharaohs and the central government collapsed at the end of the Old Kingdom and the country descended into chaos. Rival dynasties sprang up in different parts of Egypt and they are known as dynasties seven through eleven. This time of chaos is called the First Intermediate Period today. Records from this period are scarce and it is uncertain how long this period lasted.

Eventually the pharaohs of the eleventh dynasty reunited the land and established the Middle Kingdom. This kingdom was ruled by the pharaohs of dynasties twelve and thirteen. Order was restored and the country began to prosper again, though they continued to look upon the Old Kingdom time as a “golden age”, or what we today think of as the “good old days”. This period saw some of the greatest artistic achievements from ancient Egypt. At the end of the thirteenth dynasty the country was overrun by foreigners from Asia. Manetho called these foreigners Hyksos, and once again Egypt descended into chaos.

This second period of chaos is called the Second Intermediate Period, and covers the span of dynasties fourteen through seventeen. As in the First Intermediate Period, these dynasties overlapped with one dynasty ruling part of Egypt at the same time that another dynasty ruled a different area of the country.

Eventually the pharaohs of the seventeenth dynasty defeated the foreign invaders and expelled them from the land. The king who finished this war of liberation is the first king of the eighteenth dynasty even though he is from the same family which comprised the seventeenth dynasty. The time of the next four dynasties, numbered eighteen through twenty-one, is known as the New Kingdom. It was a time of great military success on the part of Egypt. Several of these pharaohs led their armies far south into Kush, west into Libya, and northeast into Palestine and Syria. The eighteenth dynasty is the time of Thothmes III, Egypt’s greatest conqueror. It is the time of Akhenaten, Egypt’s heretic king. It is also the time of the famous eighteenth dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamen, whose intact tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter.

The nineteenth dynasty was the time of the pharaoh Ramses II, called Ramses the Great. He was the pharaoh who built the famous temple at Abu Simbel, and is believed by many to be the pharaoh at the time of the Israelite exodus. Ramses II was the pharaoh who fought the Hittites at the famous battle of Kadesh. This period in history witnessed the apex of ancient Egyptian military might.

The twentieth dynasty is best known as the time of Pharaoh Ramses III. This pharaoh saved Egypt from an invasion by the “sea peoples”, but was later killed by one of his wives in a harem conspiracy. The twenty-first dynasty was the last of the New Kingdom dynasties and by this time the power and prestige of Egypt were on the decline.

The conquests of the earlier New Kingdom pharaohs brought many foreigners within the borders of the country. After the twenty-first dynasty one of these groups of foreigners from within the empire seized the throne and established their own dynasty, the twenty-second Libyan dynasty. Other groups of Libyans established dynasties twenty-three through twenty-four. Then a group of Nubians seized the throne and ruled as dynasty twenty-five. The time of these foreign pharaohs is called the Third Intermediate Period. During this time it is believed that each of the dynasties ruled in sequence not concurrently as in the two previous times of chaos.

After this period of foreign rule, a local ruler arose and united the country under a native Egyptian dynasty. This was the twenty-sixth dynasty and a brief period of independence followed. This period of independence came to an end with the conquest of Egypt by the Persians. These Persian rulers comprise the twenty-seventh dynasty.   Several native rulers revolted from Persian rule and established their own short-lived dynasties, numbered twenty-eight through thirty. This period of the last five dynasties, numbered twenty-six through thirty, is known collectively as the Late Period.

Egypt was then “liberated” by Alexander the Great, and although they were not included in Manetho’s list, the Macedonian rulers of Egypt are sometimes called the thirty-first dynasty. This dynasty was established by Ptolemy, a general in Alexander’s army, and was the family that produced the famous Cleopatra. It ended with the death of Cleopatra when Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire.

If the list compiled by Manetho were complete, if the copies all agreed on the lengths of reign and the order of succession of the kings, and if the dynasties were all sequential, this list would be invaluable in reconstructing the history of Ancient Egypt. Furthermore, if this list agreed with the information found inscribed on the monuments of Egypt, then we would have a reliable record on which we could safely date the history of the ancient world. Unfortunately, none of these things are true. None of the copies contains a complete list. The various lengths of reign given to us by the copyists disagree one with another. We know that some of the dynasties overlapped with one reigning in one area of Egypt at the same time in which another dynasty was reigning in a different area. And most damaging of all, when the monuments were read, they were found to record reign lengths for certain pharaohs that were different from the lengths given by Manetho. The monuments even listed the reigns of some of the pharaohs in different orders. This has made the list compiled by Manetho of less worth than it otherwise would be. Nevertheless, wherever there is no contradictory evidence, the list compiled by Manetho is accepted as accurate.

Other lists have been discovered in Egypt. The Palermo Stone, so named because the largest part of it recovered now resides in a museum in Palermo, Italy, contains a list of the kings from before the first dynasty down to the middle of the fifth dynasty along with the lengths of their reigns. Unfortunately only a portion of this list is still intact, most of the original stone was broken off and has been lost. Only five fragments of the original stone have been found. “Much research has been devoted to this important monument, but the conclusions arrived at by the various authorities are conflicting and no entirely satisfactory reconstruction even of its general design has been achieved” (Emery, 1961, p. 23). Another problem with the stone is that the first kings have impossibly long reigns, stretching back approximately 30,000 years. This throws doubt on the credibility of the entire record. It is known this record begins in fiction. It is believed to end in fact, but where exactly is the transition?

There are several other lists that have been discovered. The Royal List of Karnak names the rulers of Egypt, with a few exceptions, from the first king down to the reign of Thothmes III of the eighteenth dynasty. The Royal list of Saqqara lists the names of rulers from the first dynasty to the nineteenth, but omits the rulers of the thirteenth through seventeenth dynasties. The Royal List of Abydos lists the rulers from the first king to Seti I of the nineteenth dynasty but it also omits the rulers of the thirteenth through seventeenth dynasties as well as the rulers at the end of the eighteenth dynasty. The Abydos king list is a damaged copy of the Royal list of Abydos. None of these lists are complete, and none of them cover a period in Egyptian history beyond the beginning of the nineteenth dynasty.

Although inaccurate and incomplete, these lists could be very valuable in filling in the gaps if a few known points could be established upon which these lists could be anchored. The first such date is 332 BC. This is the year in which Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. This ended the thirty dynasties of Manetho and the ensuing dynasty of Macedonian rulers has been labeled the thirty-first by modern historians. This date was known from the Greek historians and is well documented. One firm anchor for Egyptian chronology has thus been established. We know with relative certainty when the thirty dynasty period came to its end.

The second fixed date in Egyptian history is 664 BC. This was the year in which Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, invaded Egypt, crushed a revolt and sacked Thebes. This date has been established using Assyrian and Greek accounts. Herodotus, a Greek historian considered the father of history, tells us that the Assyrian conquest ended the twenty fifth dynasty killing the pharaoh Taharqa. With these two dates set, the intervening dynasties were then dated by the reign lengths as found in Manetho’s list, modified by the information read from the ancient texts and monuments. A second anchor had now been established.

A third date was set by a reference found in the Bible.

2 And it came to pass, that in the fifth year of Rehoboam Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, because they had transgressed against the Lord.

3 With twelve hundred chariots, and threescore thousand horsemen: and the people were without number that came with him out of Egypt; the Lubims, the Sukkims, and the Ethiopians.

4 And he took the fenced cities which pertained to Judah, and came to Jerusalem.

9 So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house; he took all: he carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made.

2 Chronicles 12: 2-4, 9

The chronology of the Bible was established by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century. He had dated the death of Solomon and the accession of Rehoboam to the throne of Judah to the year 975 BC (see the table included in part one). Thus the fifth year of Rehoboam would be the year 971 BC. If the identity of the pharaoh Shishak could be determined then a new fixed date could be set.

Using the list of Manetho, assuming that dynasties twenty five through twenty two were sequential, and counting back 307 years (971 - 664 equals 307) from the end of the twenty-fifth dynasty puts us around the time of the twenty-second dynasty. Three rulers in the twenty-second dynasty were known by the name of Shoshenq. This name sounds very much like the name Shishak as found in the Bible. One of these, Shoshenq I left an account of a military expedition into Palestine carved on the walls of the temple of Amun at Karnak. Although the list never mentions Jerusalem as one of the cities taken, and most of the campaign was in the area of Edom and Israel, not Judah, the coincidence was too great. Another date was now established setting Shoshenq I and thus the twenty-second dynasty in the early tenth century BC. Later there was shown to be a forty year discrepancy between the chronology given in the Bible and the records of the Assyrians. This led to a lessening of the date of Solomon and thus Shoshenq I by forty years, and he now is dated to 945 BC. Although not as secure as the first two, a third anchor had been established and the reign lengths from Manetho’s king list were used to fill in the time from the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth dynasties.

Another date was established through another biblical synchronism. In the Book of Genesis we read:

39 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art:

40 Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou.

41 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt.

GENESIS 41: 39-41

In the highly race conscious nineteenth century, it was assumed that no native Egyptian pharaoh would make an Israelite the ruler of Egypt. They decided that it must have been a foreign pharaoh. Using the biblical date of 1715 BC for the rise of Joseph to the rule of Egypt, they postulated that this must be the time of the Asiatic fifteenth or sixteenth dynasties. These dynasties were also known by the name of the Hyksos, a name which Manetho translated as “shepherd kings” but which most modern scholars translate as “desert princes”. These kings came from Asia and were more closely related to the Israelites than the Egyptians. Thus the fifteenth or sixteenth dynasty was now placed in the late eighteenth century BC. Another anchor, this time based entirely upon conjecture, for Egyptian chronology had been established.

From this point, the earlier dynasties were dated by the reign lengths given in the lists and Egyptian chronology was established. There is one other synchronism between the Bible and Egyptian chronology that seems to confirm this chronology.

40 Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.

EXODUS 12: 40

            If Joseph became the ruler of Egypt in 1715 BC, and his family entered Egypt nine years later, then the sojourn of the children of Israel began in 1706 BC. If it lasted 430 years, then the Exodus occurred in 1276 BC. This would be during the nineteenth dynasty. This led to another synchronism between the Bible and Egyptian chronology. In the Bible we read:

8 Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.

9 And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we:

10 Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.

11 Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.

EXODUS 1: 8-11

The nineteenth dynasty is the time of one of the most famous pharaohs of ancient Egypt. This is the pharaoh Ramses II, sometimes called Ramses the Great. Ramses II built himself a new capital city on the ruins of the Hyksos capital of Avaris. He called this new city Per-Ramses, the house of Ramses. Since the Bible tells us that the Israelites built the city of Raamses, and Ramses the Great built the city of Per-Ramses, scholars assumed they must be one and the same. This identification is problematical. The Bible tells us that the Israelites built their cities out of mud-bricks. The city of Per-Ramses was built of stone. Nevertheless this discrepancy was ignored and Ramses II was chosen as the pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. By comparing the lengths of reign from the lists of Manetho, the Hyksos fifteenth to the twenty-second dynasty were roughly placed. The 430 years from Joseph to the exodus fit nicely with the time from the fifteenth to the nineteenth dynasty.

There is another method of setting the chronology of Ancient Egypt which must be discussed. This is the Sothic dating system. It is based upon the first annual appearance of the Star SPDT (Sothis), believed to be the star we know as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky of the northern hemisphere. Due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the star Sirius is not seen for a time each summer. Its position in the sky is too close to the sun for us to see it. It makes its first annual appearance, called a heliacal rising, at the exact same time each year.

The theory of Sothic dating is based upon the difference between a calendar year of 365 days and the actual year of 365 1/4 days. If a calendar of 365 days were used throughout the time of ancient Egypt, then eventually the seasons would change. For example, if the first day of summer were on New Years’ Day in the year one, then it would get earlier by one day every four years. In our own perspective, if we were to use a 365 day calendar (eliminating the leap year) and we were to begin our calendar on December 21st, the shortest day of the year, we would notice that it was winter when the year begins. In 365 years, however, our descendants would be celebrating New Years Day on the autumnal equinox, and in 730 years people would be celebrating the New Year on mid-summer’s day!

This is exactly what was happening in ancient Egypt, and in 238 BC, at the city of Canopus, a conclave of priests proposed adding an extra day to the calendar every four years. It is believed they determined the length of the year by viewing the first rising of the star Sirius every year for a period of time. Since it first rises at the same time of the year every year they were able to measure the exact length of the year.

In order to use this as a dating tool we need to know when the star Sothis rose heliacally on the first day of the calendar year. Writing in 238 AD, the Roman writer Censorinus claimed that a new Sothic period had begun in the one hundredth year before. This was in the year 139 AD, the date on which Sothis rose for the first time on the first day of the year. By subtracting 1,461 calendar years from this date scholars were able to determine that the previous Sothic period had begun in 1322 BC. A previous Sothic period had begun in 2783 BC etc.

The ancient Egyptian priests had long watched the stars and kept records of their observations. If scholars could find a record of a time in which they observed this heliacal rising of Sirius, they could obtain a date accurate to within four years. This is because the heliacal rising would occur on the same day for four years before moving to the previous day on the fifth year. It was believed that just such a document had been discovered. This is the Papyrus Berlin 10012.

The Papyrus Berlin 10012 states, “You should know that the going forth of Sopdet will happen on the fourth month of Peret, day 16” (Rohl, 1995, p. 390). This is assumed to be a reference to a heliacal rising of the star Sothis (Sirius). The papyrus was found in a temple in the Faiyum dating from the twelfth dynasty and was dated in year seven. It was found in concert with several other fragments dated to the reigns of Senwosret III and his son and successor Amenemhet III.   Due to the hieroglyphic spelling of the letter, experts decided that it dated to the reign of Senwosret III. The heliacal rising of Sirius on the 16th day of Peret would happen in the years from 1873 to 1870 BC. But which of these years is correct?

At the time of the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians also used a religious calendar based upon the moon. A new moon occurs every 29 ½ days. Since the dates of the new moons are given with the dates from the civil calendar, it was possible to compare these dates with calculated stations of the moon and the best fit was determined to be in the year 1871 BC. Since the heliacal rising was predicted to occur in the seventh year of Senwosret III, his reign would have begun in 1877 BC. Until very recently, this date was considered to be absolute. Known beyond a doubt! Since the reign lengths of most of the pharaohs of this dynasty are also known, the dates for the entire twelfth dynasty were also believed to be absolute. It was believed that a firm anchor had been established at a time early in biblical history. It was this method of Sothic dating that led credence to all the Egyptologists earlier assumptions.

Although the entire chronology was established with the help of this Sothic dating system, many scientists now doubt that they are as accurate as once thought. These early dates are still believed to be very close but are no longer considered to be absolute. Assuming, however, that they are accurate, dates from 1871 BC down to 332 BC may be calculated by knowing the two end dates and the lengths of reign of the pharaohs in between these two dates. The synchronisms in the days of the Hyksos and Ramses II help to keep from getting too far off. Dates earlier than this rely only on the king lists and therefore some error is acknowledged for dates earlier than the beginning of the 12th dynasty. “It is generally accepted that Egyptian chronology is on a firm footing from 664 BC, the beginning of the 26th Dynasty... Margins of error in the dynasties prior to the 26th are variable; whilst in the New Kingdom 20 years might be acceptable, this will increase as earlier periods are reached so that dates around the unification and in the Early Dynastic Period (Dynasties ‘0'-2) could be subject to fluctuations of anything between 50 and 200 years” (Clayton, 1994, p. 13).

Now that the chronology of Egypt had been established and the various periods and dynasties had been assigned dates, it was possible to link the ages in Palestine to the periods in Egyptian history. This allowed Petrie and others to transfer the dates from Egypt to Palestine and thus to date the strata in the tells. The periods in Egypt are roughly contemporary with periods in Palestine. For example the Archaic Period in Egypt is almost the same time as the Early Bronze Age I in Palestine. The Old Kingdom is nearly the same as the Early Bronze II & III. The First Intermediate Period overlaps the Intermediate Bronze (or Early Bronze IV) etc. For a complete picture see table 3.1 below.

By linking the pottery types from sites in Palestine with artifacts of Egyptian origin discovered in the same layers, it had been possible to create a chronology for Palestine based upon the chronology of Egypt. This chronology for the archaeology of Palestine is as accurate as the chronology for Egypt. The relative chronologies for the various sites were then dated and scholars compared the finds with the dates determined from the Bible. Since the biblical account of the patriarchs begins about 2000 BC and continues to about 430 BC, this entire period is contained within the time thought to be accurate to within a few decades at most. Thus the entire period covered by the nation of Israel should be contained within the datable layers in the strata of Palestine. In this manner, archaeologists have compared the biblical narrative with the physical remains. And what do these comparisons tell us? We shall investigate this question further.

EGYPTIAN   DYNASTY DATE   PERIOD IN   EGYPT AGE IN PALESTINE

1 2920-2770 ARCHAIC   EARLY BRONZE I
2 2770-2649
3 2649-2575 OLD KINGDOM   EARLY BRONZE II
4 2575-2465
5 2465-2323 EARLY BRONZE III
6 2323-2150
7 2150-2134 FIRST INTERMEDIATE EARLY BRONZE IV
8    2150-2134
9   2134-2040
10   2134-2040
11 2040-1991 MIDDLE BRONZE I
12 1991-1783 MIDDLE KINGDOM
13 1783-1640 MIDDLE BRONZE IIA
14 1640- SECOND INTERMEDIATE
15
16 -1532 MIDDLE BRONZE IIB/C
17 1640-1550
18 1550-1307 NEW KINGDOM LATE BRONZE
19 1307-1196
20 1196-1070   IRON AGE I
21    1070-945 THIRD INTERMEDIATE IRON AGE IIA
22 945-712
23   828-712   IRON IIB
24   724-712
25   770-657   IRON IIC

26   664-525 LATE PERIOD
27 525-332   PERSIAN
28 404-399
29 399-380
30 380-343

Table 3-1

Earlier I made the claim that if the Bible is historically accurate, there should be physical evidence of the events it describes remaining in the soil of Palestine and the other nations of the Middle East. I also showed that the peoples and nations mentioned in the biblical narrative were real. The nations of Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia really existed. The names of Sargon, king of Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and Cyrus, king of Persia, were names of real kings.   “By the end of the twentieth century, archaeology had shown that there were simply too many material correspondences between the finds in Israel and in the entire Near East and the world described in the Bible to suggest that the Bible was late and fanciful priestly literature, written with no historical basis at all” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 20-21).

Although the Bible contains it own internal chronology the archaeological finds in Palestine do not. I have shown that they were dated by pottery typology and grouped into ‘ages’. I discussed the establishment of the chronology of Egypt and how the ‘ages’ in Palestine were dated by association with Egyptian artifacts. Now in this chapter I will look at what happens when we tie the finds in Palestine to the chronological framework provided by the Egyptologists.

The dates for several periods in biblical history were given in Table 1-1. Let us begin with the story of Noah and the flood. In the chronology given in the Bible it tells us that the flood occurred about 2400 BC. If we compare this date to Table 3-1 we see that the date given for the flood falls in the middle of the Egyptian fifth dynasty. This is also about the time of the transition from Early Bronze II to Early Bronze III in Palestine. There is no evidence in either area of a flood that killed all the people. In fact the very opposite is true. There was no interruption of the material culture of these peoples or the replacement of either of these cultures with another. The evidence is very clear on this point. There was no universal flood during the Old Kingdom or Early Bronze Age.

Table 1-1 lists the birth of Abraham as 1996 BC. By comparing this date to the chronology developed above and listed in Table 3-1 we can see that the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob took place during the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine, which is dated from 2000-1550 BC. The death of Jacob is given as 1689 BC, so the entire story of the patriarchs falls during the Middle Bronze Age. And how well do they fit this period?

Abraham and his nephew Lot were shepherds and herdsmen.

16 And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.

GENESIS 12: 16

5 And Lot also, which went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents.

6 And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.

GENESIS 13: 5-6

They had so many animals that they were forced to separate. Isaac and Jacob were also herdsmen. Abraham moved throughout the land of Canaan with his flocks and herds. The setting is one of a pastoral society, with flocks and herds wandering the land in search of pasturage and even having disputes over water rights (GENESIS 21: 22-32).

And what was the land of Canaan like during the Middle Bronze Age? “In the centuries between 2300 and 2000, Palestine was largely home to pastoral nomads, but during the twentieth century BCE, a revival of the region’s urban life led to the reoccupation of most of the old Early Bronze Age cities and the founding of several new ones” (Pitard, 1998, p. 55). Although the land of Canaan hundreds of years earlier may fit the picture of the Promised Land during the time of Abraham, the Middle Bronze Age does not. Let us take a look at three of these Middle Bronze Age cities.

The Lord commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

GENESIS 22: 2

Mount Moriah is in Jerusalem. It is the mount upon which Solomon later built the temple.   At the time of Abraham it appears to be deserted.

Isaac sent Jacob to Padan-aram to find a wife. On the way he stopped at a place that had been the city of Luz. It is apparently in ruins as Jacob used the stones of the city as a pillow. It was here that his name was changed to Israel. In consequence of this vision he renamed the place Beth-el (the house of God). Thus during the time of the patriarchs Beth-el was still the ruins of an earlier city called Luz (GENESIS 28).

Upon his return to Canaan, Israel and his family camped near the city of Shalem in the land of Shechem. Here his daughter Dinah was raped by Shechem, the son of Hamor, ruler of the city. After tricking the males of Shalem into circumcising themselves, Simeon and Levi, two of Dinah’s brothers took their swords and slew every male in the city in a single night (GENESIS 34). Thus Shechem was the designation for the area and Shalem was the capital city. It is obvious from the account that it was a small city.

We have examined the biblical account of the patriarchs for evidence of cities in the land of Canaan. We have examined the description of three of these cities, Jerusalem, Beth-el and Shechem. One was a mountain that would later become a city. Another was a ruin of a former city that was renamed by Jacob. The last was not a city but a land in which there was another apparently small city. How does this compare to the findings of archaeology about these sites? “Shechem (as a city) is not there, nor are Bethel and Jerusalem – all three were massive Middle Bronze strongholds” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 323).

So what conclusion can be reached?   “The biblical story of the patriarchs is clearly not the story of Middle Bronze Canaan” (Finklelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 323).   Some scholars have attempted to locate the patriarchs by moving them later in time to the Late Bronze or even Iron Age. “Yet the search for the historical patriarchs was ultimately unsuccessful, since none of the periods around the biblically suggested date provided a completely compatible background to the biblical stories” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 35).

Let us turn our attention to the exodus from Egypt. What do the finds of archaeology say about this critical event in the history of ancient Israel? The biblical chronology gives the date of the exodus as 1491 BC.   This is at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in Palestine, which is dated from 1550 to 1200 BC. Most modern scholars, however, date the exodus to ca. 1290 BC. This is because Ramses II is believed to be the pharaoh who enslaved Israel. “The identification of Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus came as the result of modern scholarly assumptions based on the identification of the place-name Pi-Ramesses with Raamses” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 65).

The book of Exodus contains the story of how Moses freed the children of Israel from captivity in Egypt. It tells us that before Pharaoh would agree to let the Israelites go the land of Egypt was devastated by ten plagues. In these plagues the Egyptians lost their food supplies. All their domesticated animals were killed and their crops were destroyed. The first-born child in every family was killed and the entire army along with the pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea (EXODUS 5-14).   “Needless to say, none of these events are corroborated by ancient Egyptian records since the Exodus was a minor affair in Egyptian annals” (Clayton, 1994, p. 151). The scene described in the Bible is of a devastated country, yet archaeologists describe it as a “minor affair”. Why do they refer to it as a minor affair? Because they have found no record of the exodus in the New Kingdom nor is there any evidence to suggest that the country was devastated anytime during this period. In fact this is the time at which Egypt reached the very pinnacle of her military might and international prestige!

What of the period of Wandering? The Bible tells us that the Israelites wandered through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years.   “The conclusion – that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (Numbers 33) and where some archaeological indication – if present – would almost certainly be found” (Clayton, 1994, p. 63). Archaeologists have found the remains of settlements in these areas of the wilderness. The problem is with the dates of these settlements. “At the same time, however, none of the ancient settlements in the area date to a period that might relate to an Israelite Exodus from Egypt: they are too early (Early Bronze Age) or too late (Iron Age)” (Redmount, 1998, p. 92).

Just before beginning the conquest of the land of Canaan, the Israelites were attacked by the Amorites under their king Sihon.   The Israelites destroyed the Amorites and occupied their lands and cities. Later they also fought against Og the king of Bashan and his people. These people were also destroyed and the Israelites occupied these lands and cities as well (NUMBERS 21: 21-35). All of these lands were on the west of the river Jordan. Using a date of 1290 BC for the exodus the conquest would have begun about 1250 BC. This means the war against Sihon and the Amorites would have occurred during the twentieth dynasty and at the time of the transition of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in Palestine. “None of the Transjordanian settlements mentioned in the conquest of Sihon’s “Amorite” kingdom by the Israelites (Num. 21) has Late Bronze Age occupation” (Stager, 1998, p. 131). Here we have the story of a conquest of cities which didn’t exist at the time they were supposedly conquered.

How about the conquest of Canaan?   “As with the Exodus story, archaeology has uncovered a dramatic discrepancy between the Bible and the situation within Canaan at the suggested date of the conquest, between 1230 and 1220 BCE” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 76).   This suggested date is at the end of the Late Bronze Age. It is interesting to note, however, that this date was suggested by historians not the Bible. The date “suggested” by the Bible was 1450 to 1440 BC. These dates were rejected because there was no evidence of any conquest of Canaan at that earlier date.

The conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua began with the conquest of the walled city of Jericho. “In the case of Jericho, there was no trace of a settlement of any kind in the thirteenth century BCE” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 81-82).   Following the conquest of Jericho the Israelites moved up to and destroyed the city of Ai. “But here again archaeology demonstrates that a tall tale is being told. Ai, whose name means the “ruin,” had not been occupied during the second millennium” (Stager, 1998, p. 129). Ai had been a major city in the Early Bronze Age but by the time of the conquest it no longer existed. It was destroyed at the end of the Early Bronze Age and was never rebuilt.

Site after site the story remains the same. There is either no evidence that there was a city at the time historians assign to the conquest, or the city wasn’t destroyed. In fact, for the cities listed as conquered by Joshua only two fit the picture. “Bethel was put to the sword (Judg. 1), and archaeology has confirmed its destruction in the thirteenth century” (Stager, 1998, p. 130). In fact, it was the excavation of Bethel that prompted archaeologists to assign the conquest to this date rather than the biblical date. The other site which matches the biblical story is Hazor, though it is argued that it was not destroyed at the same time as Bethel. Lachish was also destroyed during the Late Bronze Age at a different time from Bethel and Hazor but it was not repopulated by Israelites. So were any of these cities destroyed during the Late Bronze Age by invading Israelites? “As for the destruction of Bethel, Lachish, Hazor, and other Canaanite cities, evidence from other parts of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean suggests that the destroyers were not necessarily Israelites” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 83).

The dates for the conquest were moved from the fifteenth century BC, to the thirteenth century by modern scholars because there was no evidence of any conquest in the fifteenth century, and because of the destruction of a single site (Bethel) in the thirteenth century. Although there were some sites destroyed during the thirteenth century, there is evidence that the destroyers weren’t Israelites. Why the confusion? “A destruction layer, for example, typically provides graphic evidence in the form of black ash, charred material, and red-baked soil and brick, but it rarely supplies indisputable evidence of exactly how, why, or by whom the havoc was wreaked” (Redmount, 1998, p. 104). The time of the conquest was established based on the destruction of Bethel, but it is not known for sure who destroyed this city.

The Bible tells us that the Israelites conquered Canaan and supplanted Canaanite culture with their own. Archaeologists who have studied the changes in settlement patterns and material culture from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age see no traces of this replacement of one culture by another. They see instead a continuation into the Iron Age of the same material culture which prevailed during the Late Bronze Age. This has led them to some interesting conclusions. “There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people – the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were – irony of ironies – themselves originally Canaanites!” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 118).

What about the time of King David? The biblical chronological table lists his death in 1015 BC, and he is believed to have reigned for about forty years. According to the Bible, this was a time when Israel was the paramount nation in the region. A reign from ca. 1055 to 1015 BC puts David in the period known as the Iron Age IIA. But finding evidence of David and Solomon has been easier said than done. “...no trace of the Solomonic Temple and palace in Jerusalem has ever been identified” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 135). This may be explained by the fact that it was destroyed by the Babylonians and another temple was later built upon the same site. But there is also the problem of finding any evidence of David and Solomon. In fact, until recently no undisputed evidence of the very existence of David had ever been found.

In 1993 part of a basalt monument was discovered with an inscription in Aramaic. This block had been removed from its original setting, so no strata could be dated by its inscription. Written on the monument was the name of Ahaziah king of Judah. In the inscription, however, he is called the king of the house of David. “The fact that Judah (or perhaps its capital, Jerusalem) is referred to with only a mention of its ruling house is clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 129). In other words, David was a historical King of Judah!

Having established the existence of King David, let us look at the area of Judah during the Iron Age IIA. “As far as we can see on the basis of the archaeological surveys, Judah remained relatively empty of permanent population, quite isolated, and very marginal right up to and past the presumed time of David and Solomon, with no major urban centers and with no pronounced hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 132). The archaeology of the Iron Age IIA differs greatly from the description of David’s kingdom as given in the Bible. Just how devoid of population does archaeology tell us that Judah was? “That would have left about five thousand people scattered among Jerusalem, Hebron, and about twenty small villages in Judah, with additional groups probably continuing as pastoralists” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 143).

And what about the great riches brought by the ships of Tarshish into Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon? “David and Solomon’s homeland of Judah was conspicuously undeveloped – and there is no evidence whatever of the wealth of a great empire flowing back to it” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 140). In fact, excavations in the city of David reveal that during the Iron Age IIA, Jerusalem may not have been occupied at all. “Surprisingly, as Tel Aviv University archaeologist David Ussishkin pointed out, fieldwork there and in other parts of biblical Jerusalem failed to provide significant evidence for a tenth century occupation” (Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001, p. 133). Although archaeological finds have proven the existence of David, they have failed to show that his capital was even occupied during the Iron Age IIA period.

The discrepancies between the biblical record and the finds of archaeology continue through the period of the divided kingdoms.   The Bible tells us that:

23 In the thirty and first year of Asa king of Judah began Omri to reign over Israel, twelve years: six years reigned he in Tirzah.

24 And he bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver, and built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, owner of the hill, Samaria.

1 KINGS 16: 23-24

  “...archaeology reveals that Omri built the first structures of a citadel on the remains of a preceding establishment” (Campbell, 1998, p. 288). The Bible tells us that Omri built a city on a virgin site, a hill. Omri is dated 929-918 BC, during the Iron Age IIB period. Archaeologists have discovered an Iron Age IIB city at the site they have identified as Samaria. They discovered that this city, however, was built upon the ruins of another earlier city, not an unoccupied hill.

The discrepancies between the archaeological record and the Bible do not end with the divided monarchy. We now look at the Iron Age IIC, the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar.    The Bible tells us that Jerusalem was destroyed, the palace of the kings and the temple were burnt to the ground and the majority of the people were taken captive into Babylon (2 KINGS 25). What have the archaeological surveys revealed? “...numerous sites, especially north of Jerusalem, bear evidence of continuous settlement during the sixth century, with Israelite culture remaining intact until the Persian period. Judah was neither totally devastated nor depopulated, as some biblical writers would have us believe” (Cogan, 1998, p. 356).

The final archaeological age covered by the Old Testament record is the Persian I age. This is the time of the return of the Jews from Babylon down to the time of Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets.   What do the finds tell us about this age? “Actual Persian presence in Syria-Palestine is difficult to pinpoint in the archaeological record” (Leith, 1998, p. 382). Despite the fact that the Persians ruled Palestine for over two centuries, there are no strata that can be assigned to this period. If it were not for the records of the Greeks and Persians themselves, it would be tempting to say that the period of Persian rule didn’t occur as recorded in the Bible either. Fortunately, in this case we know better, but not as a result of excavations in Palestine.

Although the biblical narrative was set in the real world, it has become difficult to prove any of the events as recorded in the Bible through archaeological means. It seems to be accurate in its descriptions of Persian, Assyrian and Babylonian events but not in the events associated with Palestine itself. Why is this? Are the accounts of biblical persons and events merely stories set in the real world, but describing imaginary events to illustrate religious purposes? Or is it more than that? Is it possible that the Bible is accurate and the conclusions of the archaeologists are wrong? Are there any reasons to believe that perhaps the chronology we have imposed on Palestine from Egypt is in error? I will discus this last question in the next two chapters.

In Table 4-1 below, I have combined the Palestinian and Egyptian chronology shown in Table 3-1 with the dates for the biblical periods contained in Table 1-1. This table shows how the Egyptian periods and archaeological ages in Palestine fit with the time periods from the Bible.

Date Egyptian Period   Archaeological Age   Biblical Period

4000-2920   Pre-Dynastic Stone Age Ante-Diluvian

2920-2575 Archaic Early Bronze I Ante-Diluvian

2575-2400 Old Kingdom Early Bronze II Ante-Diluvian

2400-2150 Old Kingdom Early Bronze III Pre-Patriarchal

2150-1991 First Intermediate Early Bronze IV Pre-Patriarchal

1991-1640 Middle Kingdom Middle Bronze I Patriarchal

1640-1550 Second Intermediate Middle Bronze II Captivity

1550-1196 New Kingdom Late Bronze Captivity

Exodus

Wandering

Conquest

Judges

1196-945 New Kingdom Iron Age I Judges

Iron Age IIA United Israel

1070-828 Third Intermediate Iron Age IIB Divided Monarchy

Judah

664-525 Late Period Iron Age IIC Judah

Captivity

525-430 Persian Period Persian Age Return

We have seen how the finds of archaeologists seem to contradict the Bible on almost all historical points. This has led many archaeologists to conclude that the Bible is simply not a reliable historical source. “They may, of course be right. The difficulty with the argument is that it assumes almost everything in the Bible is unreliable and that scholarly interpretations of archaeological data and non-Biblical sources are essentially sound. Yet archaeology is far from an exact science” (Farrington, 2003, p. 188.). The archaeologists who discount the historicity of the Bible believe themselves so wise and so learned that they know better than the ancient writers what happened in the ancient Middle East.

This attitude is summed up nicely by William Dever. “This, then, is the actual historical context for the biblical story we know, even though the writers do not tell us that (and, writing centuries later, without the benefit of modern scientific knowledge, could not actually have known it)” (2003, p. 8.). In other words, modern scientific knowledge is considered by these scientists to be far more reliable than first hand accounts given to us by ancient writers. This is especially true if the ancient writers were believers in the Jewish God. But is it possible that modern scholars could have made a mistake? Is there any evidence that they have misinterpreted the results of their work? Are there any problems with the chronology they have constructed? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding yes!

All of the discrepancies between the findings of the archaeologists and the Bible are due to the dating scheme employed by the archaeologists. This dating scheme is dependent upon the chronology developed by the Egyptologists. Here I will examine whether or not the chronology thus developed is really as sound as the Egyptologists claim.

We will begin with one of the most famous groups of mummies ever discovered in Egypt. During the twenty-first dynasty, in the tenth year of the Pharaoh Siamun or 969 BC in the accepted chronology, Pinudjem II, High Priest of Amun, died and was buried. He had obtained a tomb near the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Thebes. He had already buried some family members in this tomb, and it was reopened while he was being mummified to serve as his final resting place.

Tomb robbers had plagued Egypt since the days of the first pharaohs and the time of the twenty-first dynasty was no different. There had been many incursions into the tombs of some of the most illustrious pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties including that of Ramses the Great. During the seventy days of mummification of Pinudjem II, the bodies of many of these pharaohs were gathered and after the funeral were lowered into the tomb along with the body of its owner. The tomb was then sealed and it remained intact for over two thousand years.

But there is more to the story than the successful attempt to hide the bodies of the pharaohs from tomb robbers. One of the bodies buried in the tomb was that of Djedptahhefankh, a priest of the temple of Karnak, whose wrappings indicated that he died during the eleventh year of pharaoh Shoshenq I or 935 BC. This raises an interesting question. If the mummies were entombed in the year 969 BC, how did they include the mummy of an official who died thirty-four years later? The usual explanation is that the tomb was left open and the body of Djedptahhefankh was placed in the tomb after the others. Besides the fact that it defies logic for the ancients to have left a secret tomb where they were hiding the pharaoh’s mummies open for more than three decades, there is a very serious problem with this explanation.

The body of Djedptahhefankh was placed further into the tomb than the body of Seti I, the father of Ramses II. The size of the passage into the tomb is not big enough for the coffin of Djedptahhefankh, to have been taken past the coffin of Seti I, therefore, Seti I would have had to have been removed from the tomb so that the other coffin could be taken in and then it would have had to have been replaced. We know that Seti I was buried in the tenth year of Siamun since it was an inscription on his coffin that gave the date of the burial (Rohl, 1995).

The only reasonable explanation for the bodies being found in the manner they were, is that the eleventh year of Shoshenq I was the same as, or earlier than, the tenth year of Siamun. In other words the twenty second dynasty began sometime before the end of the twenty-first. They were not sequential as almost all Egyptologists have assumed. If dynasties twenty-one and twenty-two were not sequential then the whole structure of Egyptian chronology would collapse. Is there any more evidence that this is the case? The answer again is yes!

Pharaoh Psusennes I of the twenty-first dynasty began to build his tomb between an earlier tomb and the pylon of a temple. After construction had begun, he changed the plan for his tomb adding two secondary burial chambers. Because of the location of the pylon, he was forced to remove part of the existing tomb to make room for his expansion. It is because he was forced to remove part of the existing tomb that we know which tomb was constructed first. The owner of the adjacent tomb, upon which he had intruded, was Osorkon III, a pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty. Psusennes I is dated 1040-992 BC. Osorkon III is dated 883-855 BC. Once again we have a problem. How did a pharaoh who died in 992 BC remove part of the tomb of a pharaoh who didn’t die until 855 BC in order to make room for an addition to his own tomb? Or in other words, how did Osorkon III build his tomb first if he died 137 years after Psusennes I? To be sure, archaeologists have made many attempts to explain how this could have happened. The possible explanations include that perhaps Osorkon III appropriated a tomb built by an earlier pharaoh.   There is absolutely no evidence to support such a theory, and an inscription found in the tomb explicitly states that it was built for Osorkon III by his mother (Rohl, 1995).

The evidence from these two finds is clear. The twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties overlapped for most of the 125 years assigned to the twenty-first dynasty. They were not consecutive dynasties as given in the accepted chronology. The implications for biblical archaeology are staggering. The Bible tells us that:

And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.

1 KINGS 6: 1

In the accepted chronology the building of Solomon’s temple is said to have begun in 974 BC. The date for the Exodus is given as c. 1290 BC. This is a period of only three hundred sixteen years, already far short of the four hundred eighty years given in the Bible. If we reduce the time between Shoshenq I (believed to be the biblical Shishak) and Ramses II (believed to be the pharaoh of the Exodus) by a further 125 years (the length of the twenty-first dynasty) we are left with a period of only one hundred ninety one years. If we subtract the forty years of wandering, the approximately twenty years of the conquest, the twenty year reign of Saul, the forty year reign of David and the four years of Solomon’s reign before he began construction of the temple, we are left with only sixty seven years for the entire period of the judges. This is, of course, of no concern to those who believe the Bible to be a collection of tales and not an accurate historical record. But for those who believe the Bible to be accurate it presents a problem that can only be solved if Ramses II is no longer assumed to be the pharaoh of the exodus..

Other problems surfaced as the mummies removed from the tomb of Pinudjem II were examined. Tuthmosis III of the eighteenth dynasty is credited with a reign of fifty-four years, from 1479-1425 BC. When his mummy was examined it was found that Tuthmosis III died between the ages of thirty-five and forty. It is obviously impossible for a forty year old pharaoh to have reigned for fifty-four years. And now we run across an interesting and oft repeated phenomenon. When evidence like this, which obviously contradicts the established chronology, is discovered, it is left out of nearly all accounts. One must search long and hard to find an author who will mention such a discrepancy in a history of ancient Egypt. Perhaps they believe that if they ignore the problem it will go away.

Another problem came to light when the body of his grandfather Tuthmosis I was examined. Thuthmosis I was not the son of a pharaoh. His inscriptions state that he was a middle aged military leader who married the daughter of the Pharaoh Ahmose I, thus he was the pharaoh’s son-in-law. Ahmose I was succeeded by his son Amenhotep I, but Amenhotep I was not succeeded in turn by a son of his own. Instead he was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Tuthmosis I. In order to insure the succession through his sister and her husband, many Egyptologists believe that Amenhotep I appointed Tuthmosis I to be co-regent during the final years of his reign. After the death of Amenhotep I, Tuthmosis I ruled for a period of twelve years from 1504-1492 BC in his own right. He was a remarkable pharaoh, conquering Nubia and leading an expedition to Syria where he reached the Euphrates and set up a victory stele. His two oldest sons died before he did and so, when he died, he was succeeded by his third son a young man in his teens named Tuthmosis II. The thing that makes Tuthmosis I the most remarkable is that when his body was examined, it was learned that he died sometime before the age of twenty!

We have seen that there are serious contradictions between the histories of Egypt as interpreted by modern scholars and the history of Israel as contained in the Bible. We have also seen examples in Egypt itself that indicate that there are many problems with the accepted chronology of Ancient Egypt. What about the other countries of the Middle East? Do their chronologies agree with Egypt, or will we find problems here as well?

North of Israel, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in what is today Lebanon, archaeologists have discovered the ruins of the ancient city of Byblos. This was a major city in Phoenicia in ancient times. It is the port through which the famous cedars of Lebanon were shipped to Egypt providing the pharaohs with the wood to build their palaces and temples. It is also the port through which papyrus was shipped from Egypt to Greece. Our word Bible has its roots in the name of this city.

In an excavation of Byblos in 1922, a tomb belonging to a king Hiram was uncovered. In the tomb there was an inscription, written in Hebrew warning anyone against desecrating the tomb. This script was dated to the ninth century BC. As the excavators proceeded deeper into the tomb they discovered a funerary offering sent to King Hiram by the pharaoh Ramses II. This presented the excavators with a problem. How were they to date the tomb? Ramses II had lived during the thirteenth century BC. One of the excavators proposed the following solution. Perhaps King Hiram was buried during the thirteenth century as the funerary offering would suggest. Then some 400 years later, the tomb was opened and an inscription in Hebrew warning against anyone else entering and desecrating the tomb was added and the tomb resealed. This explanation is rather strained, but how else can anyone explain the presence of a thirteenth century offering in a ninth century tomb? Could it be possible that Ramses II lived at the time the inscription was carved? In any other situation this would be the logical, indeed the only possible conclusion.

Northwest of Egypt, across the Mediterranean Sea lies the country of Greece. The ancient Greeks built a civilization to rival that of any of the ancient empires of the Middle East. The Greek Herodotus is known today as the father of history. He lived during the fifth century BC and composed a history of the wars between the Greeks and Persians. His works, and those of other Greek writers, allows the chronology of the Greek civilization to be dated back to about 600 BC. It is through the Greeks that we know that Alexander the Great invaded and “liberated” Egypt in 332 BC. This was the event which ended the thirty dynasty history compiled by Manetho. For this period of Greek history dates are very well established. There is little doubt about their accuracy. But how accurate are the dates before this time?

Nearly everyone is familiar with the story of the Trojan War. This was a war fought between the Greeks and Trojans over Helen, wife of Menelaos, king of Sparta. Helen left Menelaos and fled to Troy with Paris, a prince of that city. Menelaos was the brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and high king of all the Greeks, or Achaians as they are called in Homer’s Illiad. Agamemnon led the united kings of Greece in a ten year war, and in the end they destroyed the city of Troy after gaining access to the city in the belly of the Trojan horse. Because Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, was the high king of the Greeks, today we call this civilization by the name of Mycenaean. But when was this civilization extant, and when was the Trojan War fought?

As with many of the civilizations of the ancient Middle East, Mycenaean civilization is dated by links with Egypt. In the ruins of el-Amarna, the capital of Egypt under the rule of the eighteenth dynasty heretic king Akhenaton, archaeologists have unearthed several vases built in the Late Mycenaean style. Likewise, in Mycenae, objects bearing the cartouches of pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty have been found. Thus the end of the eighteenth dynasty was shown to have been contemporaneous with the Mycenaean period in Greece. Since the eighteenth dynasty ended in 1307 BC, it is clear that the Mycenaean civilization began during the fourteenth century BC and must have ended sometime later, probably during the thirteenth century BC. So what happened in Greece between 1200 BC and 800 BC? The answer we are given is that Greece descended into a dark age. “Now for some 300 years, the darkness becomes rather uniform. But it is a darkness of our knowledge, not necessarily of life” (Levi, 1990, p. 44). What happened to the people? Did they forget how to write? “We know little of the populations of most of Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans” (Levi, 1990, p. 44).

In Greece there is little physical evidence of this time period. The remains are rather meager for 400 years of civilization. In some accounts, (as above) it is even said to have lasted for only 300 years though the dates given are usually from 1190 BC to 800 BC or a little later. This paucity of remains has led many to speculate that the Dark Age may be too long. Could there be a problem with the chronology of Egypt which has forced this long Dark Age on the history of Greece? In the eighth century BC there were a number of people who claimed that their ancestors only a few generations earlier had fought at Troy. According to the conventional Egyptian chronology these would have been very long generations indeed. In Thessaly, a region in Greece between Macedonia and Athens, traces of Mycenaean civilization have been found right up to the following Classical Age without the evidence of an internening Dark Age at all. This has led some scholars to speculate that in this area, at least, Mycenaean civilization persisted. “If anywhere, they do seem to have survived at Iolkos near modern Volos in Thessaly. In Thessaly, even the old domed tombs continued to be built” (Levi, 1990, p. 44). But did Mycenaean civilization survive in Thessaly while the rest of Greece plunged into a Dark Age, or is the Dark Age a creation of the Egyptian chronology?

And what can we learn from the city of Troy itself? The city and the war were long thought to be merely myths created by Homer, an ancient Greek poet. In 1868, Heinrich Schliemann followed the clues in the Illiad to a small hill called Hislarlik in the northwest corner of Turkey near the Dardanelles straight. He began excavating the site and uncovered the ancient city of Troy. He believed that the second layer in the tell, called Troy II, was the one destroyed during the Trojan war, but modern archaeologists have shown that this layer was destroyed much earlier. Troy II was destroyed at the end of the Early Bronze Age. The layer called Troy VI contains objects of Mycenaean origin but it was destroyed by an earthquake about 1250 BC. Most archaeologists now believe that the city destroyed by the Greeks under Agamemnon was the layer known as Troy VIIb. This layer was destroyed about 1180 BC. The next layer in the tell is Troy VIII dated to the Archaic and Classical Greek period beginning about 700 BC. The problem that archaeologists have uncovered is that there is no identifiable layer to cover the nearly 500 year gap between Troy VIIb and Troy VIII. In fact Troy VIII seems to have been built directly on the ruins of Troy VIIb. Certain aspects of the material culture, including identical pieces of pottery, have been found in both strata even though they are supposed to have been separated by nearly five centuries.

There exists a situation similar to that of Mycenaean Greece in the area of Asia Minor with the people we know today as the Hittites. The archives at el-Amarna contained some letters written by the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I. These letters establish that the Hittite empire was contemporaneous with the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt and the Mycenaean Greeks. Located near the village of Boghazkale, in modern-day Turkey, lie the ruins of the former capital of the Hittite empire, Hattusa. The archives of the Hittites were recovered from this site in 1906-8 by the German, Hugo Winkler. They were deciphered by the Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny. These documents tell the story of the Hittite empire. Though they don’t tell of the Hittite civilization’s destruction, they let us know that it endured for at least 120 years after the death of Suppiluliuma I. This would take it to about 1200 BC, which is around the time that the twentieth dynasty pharaoh Ramses III defeated an invasion by the Sea Peoples. It is also the time given for the fall of Troy and, shortly after, of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece. Since these events all occurred around the same time, it has been theorized that the movement of the Sea Peoples was the event that brought about the downfall of both Mycenae and Hattusa.

Hundreds of years after the fall of the Hittite empire, according to the accepted chronology, “Assyrians, Urartians, and Hebrews continued to refer to Syria and the Taurus region as ‘the land of Hatti’, and the Bible makes reference to the local Syrian rulers as ‘Kings of the Hittites’” (Bryce, 1998, p. 385). Finally, in 717 BC, the Assyrian ruler Sargon II captured Carchemish. In the archaeological remains of Carchemish it was discovered that the Assyrian period was immediately preceded by the Hittite period. Thus the kingdom around Carchemish has been called a neo-Hittite kingdom. It is conjectured that the Hittite vice-royalty established in Carchemish by Suppiluliuma I endured for over 400 years after the main Hittite kingdom was destroyed, until it too was destroyed by the Assyrians. But in the archives discovered in Carchemish a 250 year gap exists between the Imperial Hittite period and the Neo-Hittite period.

It was not just the area ruled by the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Carchemish that was still called the land of Hatti hundreds of years after the end of the Hittite empire. It was all the area formerly ruled by the Hittite empire in Syria. As in Greece during the Dark Age, there seems to be a remarkably small number of remains left from this 400 year kingdom leading at least one of the excavators to propose a 200 year occupation gap. Could the end of the Hittite Empire have been closer in time to the reign of Sargon II? Once again, the only thing separating them is the chronology of Egypt.

These problems of a very long dark age and remnants of civilizations being discovered hundreds of years after their parent civilizations were destroyed are not limited to just the Greeks and the Hittites. In a conference in London in 1985 a group of scholars discovered a mutual skepticism of the accepted chronology based upon that of Egypt. “Above all, we became increasingly convinced that something was seriously wrong with the conventional picture of a centuries-long Dark Age descending over a vast area at the end of the Late Bronze Age c. 1200 BC. With a background of research in many different but related fields (specifically prehistoric Britain, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, biblical archaeology and Pharaonic Nubia), we pooled our resources and began an in-depth investigation of the archaeological chronology of the entire ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Everything we found confirmed our suspicion that the original spanner in the works was the Egyptian time-scale, and that the ‘centuries of darkness’ inserted into the histories of so many areas between 1200 and 700 BC were largely illusory” (James, 2001, p. xvii-xviii).

Earlier we saw evidence that the twenty-first dynasty was coexistent with most of the twenty-second. This had the effect of reducing the dates of previous dynasties by about 125 years. Then we saw evidence that the internal chronology of the eighteenth dynasty may be too long. Now we have found evidence that perhaps the 400 year Dark Age in the Middle East was not a reality but instead, was created because Egyptian chronology was stretched out.

One of the points upon which the accepted chronology of Egypt is anchored is the invasion of Judah by Shishak mentioned in the Bible. Through similarities in the names, this pharaoh was identified as one of the Sheshonqs of the twenty-second dynasty. When a record of a campaign of Sheshonq I in Palestine was discovered on the walls of the temple of Amun in Karnak, it was determined that this was the Shishak that had invaded Judah in Rehoboam’s fifth year. But there are problems with this identification.

In his book Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest, David Rohl demonstrates that the campaign of Sheshonq I, as described on the temple of Karnak, bears little resemblance to the campaign of Shishak as contained in the Bible (1995). The Bible tells us that Jeroboam, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel, and Pharaoh Shishak were allies.

40 Solomon sought therefore to kill Jeroboam. And Jeroboam arose, and fled into Egypt, unto Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt until the death of Solomon.

1 KINGS 11: 40

Pharaoh Shishak brought his armies out of Egypt against Rehoboam and Judah.
2 And it came to pass, that in the fifth year of king Rehoboam Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, because they had transgressed against the Lord,
3 With twelve hundred chariots, and threescore thousand horsemen: and the people were without number that came with him out of Egypt; the Lubims, the Sukims, and the Ethiopians.
4 and he took the fenced cities which pertained to Judah, and came to Jerusalem.
2 CHRONICLES 12: 2-4

The fenced cities which pertained to Judah are listed in the previous chapter.
5 And Rehoboam dwelt in Jerusalem, and built cities for defence in Judah.
6 He built even Beth-lehem, and Etam, and Tekoa,
7 And Beth-zur, and Shoco, and Adullam,
8 And Gath, and Mareshah, and Ziph,
9 And Adoraim, and Lachish, and Azekah,
10 And Zorah, and Aijalon, and Hebron, which are in Judah and in Benjamin fenced cities.
2 CHRONICLES 11: 5-1

And what does Sheshonq I’s account of his campaign say? The campaign of Sheshonq I was launched into the area controlled by Edom and Israel, not Judah! The only one of the fenced cities of Judah taken by Sheshonq was Aijalon. Only one of the 16 cities mentioned in the biblical account is also included in the account left by Sheshonq I. The only reasonable conclusion is that they are accounts of two separate campaigns.

We already saw in chapter three that there is no evidence for the kingdom of David and Solomon in the Iron Age IIA, the years immediately preceding the time of Shoshenq I. This creates a very interesting puzzle. A biblical synchronism between Rehoboam and Sheshonq I has been used to date the Iron Age IIA as the time of Solomon, yet there is no archaeological evidence that Solomon’s kingdom existed during the Iron Age IIA!

Excavations of sites in southern Spain show that the Phoenicians colonized the area in the seventh century BC. “Further alabaster vases bearing the cartouches of Osorkon II (874-850 BC), Takeloth II (850-825 BC) and Shoshenq III (825-773 BC) come from Spain. They occur as cineary urns in the graves at Laurita (Cerro de San Cristobal near Almunecar) associated with Greek and Phoenician pottery datable to c. 700 BC (James, 2003, p. 252). On the basis of these finds an effort was made to date the cemetery to the ninth century BC, but this was shown to be incorrect. So how were these ninth century objects found in a seventh century graveyard? It was surmised that these items were ‘heirlooms’ kept from the time of their manufacture until used in burials hundreds of years later. Is it not more likely that they were buried with the person who obtained them rather than a descendant? This is the same means by which several other synchronisms have been established. Apparently the rules only apply when they fit expectations.

There is abundant evidence that the chronology of ancient Egypt is seriously in error. Because it has been used to date other civilizations of the ancient Middle East, these civilizations chronologies are also in serious error. It is only the dates in Palestine that present a problem with the historical accuracy of the Bible. “There is also an increasing body of opinion that suggests our understanding of Bronze and Iron Age chronology in the Near East is perhaps questionable and at worst seriously flawed. If we cannot reliably fix dates to known events then much of the evidence we interpret becomes unreliable too” (Farrington, 2003, p. 188.). The chronology used for the Holy Land is indeed “seriously flawed”. In fact it is more seriously flawed than even most revisionists believe.

In the end it is only the astronomically fixed dates for the twelfth dynasty that anchors the whole structure of Egyptian chronology to its present setting. And recently this anchor has been abandoned by Egyptologists. Remove this final anchor and the entire chronological scheme would be cast adrift. If the astronomical dates for the twelfth dynasty are accurate, then any reduction in the dates for the eighteenth through twenty-second dynasties must be made up for by a corresponding increase in the thirteenth through the seventeenth dynasties. Is there any reason to doubt the astronomically fixed dates for the twelfth dynasty or can we trust them?