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To: wildbill; SunkenCiv; yarddog; All

Wow, there is some heavy disagreement here.

I have a book on Thera which I have not yet had time to read. Will post something after I have. Regarding the lack of information from Egypt, this was a time of chaos with the Hyksos invasion. Perhaps scribes in hiding, killed, or unemployed. I have read of several other times of trouble and evidence being lacking because of disruption.

Regarding the time of Pharoah Ahkenaten, the 3 or 4 sources I have seen all point to 1350 BC, plus or minus a few decades, not the 9th Century.

Regarding the Queen of Sheba. I just looked up ancient Ethiopan history. She was part of their legendary history, and the article points out that the upland Ethiopians were early migrants from southern Arabia (Yemen?).

At any rate, even if we do not agree, we have fun. Happy new year to all seekers of knowledge.


34 posted on 01/10/2010 12:37:14 PM PST by gleeaikin
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To: gleeaikin

The dating of the New Kingdom is screwed up; almost any book you pick up will say 14th c BC for Akhenaten, but 9th c BC is correct. The UluBurun II wreck had a chunk of lumber that was RC dated to circa 1316 BC, which was hailed as a dating verification (a scarab with the name of Nefertiti had been found on the wreck, but that was the around date that the rings were alive, IOW, the tree was around for some time thereafter before being cut into lumber (we don’t build with saplings), so these results, while accepted and published, actually undercut the conventional pseudochronology for the late 18th dynasty (which isn’t surprising at all). Therefore it was decided that this piece of lumber was a random log.

What that means is, the ship went down, and centuries later a log just happened to sink (?) and land on the wreck. Before the significance of the RC dating was realized, no one had any doubt that the wreck and lumber went down at the same time. :’) Obviously the lumber of the wreck itself should be tested. The current fallback position is, the scarab was already centuries old when the ship went down, and that it was just scrap metal on the way to the recycler.

The Minoan art seen in the Bietak dig (and it wasn’t Avaris, location is wrong, but anyway), if from the New Kingdom (Theban / 18th Dynasty or later) is no older than circa 3000 years. I’d like to see cosmic ray exposure dating done to the big statues of Ramses II, the ones at Abu Simbel which were moved to higher ground when Lake Nasser started to form. That would be fun to watch, when the date comes back over 700 years too young.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1774343/posts


35 posted on 01/10/2010 9:09:55 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Happy New Year! Freedom is Priceless.)
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