So is the consensus that RC dating works everywhere except Egypt where it is often off by 600 years more or less?
:’) The Egyptian dates, when too low, are rejected as the consequence of whatever magically delicious (but always unspecified) property has supposedly scrambled the results. I’d like to see cosmic ray exposure dating on the Ramesseum (the big temple that got cut out of the cliff and moved to save it from the waters rising behind the Aswan high dam), because there’s good reason to believe that the heads of those statues were never covered by sand or soil. And when the results come back 700+ years too low, it’ll be said that either the test was done wrong, or that the statues *must have* been covered for seven centuries sometime during their existence. ;’)
The Testimony of Radiocarbon Dating
http://www.varchive.org/ce/tc14.htm
...
[Dr. John Iles of Ontario, actually did succeed in one such an endeavor. In 1977 N. B. Millet, curator of the Egyptian Department of the Royal Ontario Museum, described the historical background of the mummy of Nakht, which the Canadian Medical Association was analyzing. According to Millet Nakht was “invariably described as the weaver of the kny temple” of King Setnakht, the first ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty and father of Ramses III. Millet wrote about Nakht’s mummy that there was “unusually clear evidence of its date.”(17)
Upon reading the report, Dr. Iles wrote a letter to the Canadian Medical Association’s Journal, asking that a Carbon 14 test be performed.(18)
The death of King Setnakht, the first ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty, is conventionally dated at -1198.
On Dr. Iles’ initiative, the Royal Ontario Museum submitted linen wrappings from the mummy of Nakht to Dalhousie University for radiocarbon testing. On November 9, 1979, W. C. Hart of Dalhousie University wrote to Dr. Iles: “The date on linen wrappings from the mummy of Nakht is: DAL-350 2295 +/- 75 years before the present (1950),” meaning -345 +/- 75. Dr. Iles reported these results in a letter to the association’s journal. (March 8, 1980).
The radiocarbon date for this well-documented sample,(19) -345 +/- 75 corresponds almost precisely with the revised date for Ramses III but differs from the conventional date by ca. 800 years. — JNS]