New analysis on problems between archaeology and pharaonic chronology, based on radiocarbon dating

American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev ^ | June 17, 2010 | Unknown

[decimon]

Article by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev professor published in Science magazine

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL June 17, 2010 -- In a just published article in Science magazine (June 18, 2010), Prof. Hendrik J. Bruins of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev presents novel implications related to new developments in the radiocarbon dating of Pharaonic Egypt.

The article reports that, for the first time, it is possible to relate the Minoan Santorini eruption with Egyptian Historical Chronology solely on the basis of radiocarbon dates. Thus, it appears that the eruption preceded the 18th Dynasty and occurred during the Hyksos Period. Moreover, conventional association of Egyptian history with archaeological phases at Tell el-Dab'a, the ancient capital of the Hyksos, located in the northeastern region of the Nile delta, do not fit in terms of radiocarbon dating.

Bruins is a researcher in the University's Department of Man in the Desert at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and is affiliated with the Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. His research focuses on the 2nd millennium B.C.

"Major problems exist here in relation to the Santorini eruption between archaeological dating, radiocarbon dating and association between archaeological strata in the field and Egyptian Historical Chronology," said Bruins.

In 2006, Bruins received the Dutch Royal Award – Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau – in the name of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix for achievements in policy-oriented studies on drought, hazard assessment and contingency planning in drylands, geo-archaeological desert research and innovative chronological studies about the ancient Near East.

He first came to Ben-Gurion University in 1976 as an instructor in the Department of Geography, then worked in the early 1980s for the Israel Antiquities Authority in the framework of the Negev Emergency Archaeological Survey. Bruins developed novel geo-archaeological research techniques, pioneered excavations in ancient agricultural terraces in the Negev highlands and discovered extensive tsunami deposits in Crete (Palaikastro), related to the Minoan Santorini eruption.

He also carried out research at the Ein el-Qudeirat oasis of northeastern Sinai, associated by some scholars with biblical Kadesh-Barnea. There, he became aware of the vital need to measure time in both archaeological and environmental studies with the same methodology: radiocarbon dating. This was the beginning of innovative research in cooperation with one of the best radiocarbon labs in the world situated at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Several major archaeological sites in Israel are currently under investigation, as well as rural desert sites in the Negev.

###

For more information, contact Prof. Hendrik Bruins, hjbruins@bgu.ac.il; office: 972-8-6596863; cell: 972-52-3930392

About American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU) plays a vital role in sustaining David Ben-Gurion's vision, creating a world-class institution of education and research in the Israeli desert, nurturing the Negev community and sharing the University's expertise locally and around the globe. With some 20,000 students on campuses in Beer-Sheva, Sede Boqer and Eilat in Israel's southern desert, BGU is a university with a conscience, where the highest academic standards are integrated with community involvement, committed to sustainable development of the Negev. For more information, please visit www.aabgu.org.

[decimon]

Time after time ping.

[Hegewisch Dupa]

did you just ping Cyndi Laupner? That’s so unusual...

[mjp]

Constraining the Reign of Ancient Egypt: Radiocarbon Dating Helps to Nail Down the Chronology of Kings, Researchers Say                                                                  

[razorback-bert]

Geology vs Egyptian Historical Chronology

Egyptian Historical Chronology loses again.

[SunkenCiv]

The article reports that, for the first time, it is possible to relate the Minoan Santorini eruption with Egyptian Historical Chronology solely on the basis of radiocarbon dates. Thus, it appears that the eruption preceded the 18th Dynasty and occurred during the Hyksos Period. Moreover, conventional association of Egyptian history with archaeological phases at Tell el-Dab'a, the ancient capital of the Hyksos, located in the northeastern region of the Nile delta, do not fit in terms of radiocarbon dating.

Well, I have to tell ya, the headline had me pretty optimistic, but the story is a huge letdown. Here's an example of radiocarbon dating kicking the ass of the conventional pseudochronology:

• Human Remains In Ancient Jar A Mystery -- For over 100 years, four blue-glazed jars bearing the nametag of Rameses II (1302-1213 B.C.) were believed to contain the Egyptian pharaoh's bodily organs. But analysis of organic residues scraped from the jars has determined one actually contained an aromatic salve, while a second jar held the organs of an entirely different person who lived around 760 years later... The mystery concerning the jars began in 1905, when they were brought to Paris' Louvre Museum, where they are still housed. Shortly after that time, researchers cut into a packet inside one of the jars and plucked out a piece of heart. The packet is now lost, but from that point on, the containers were labeled as "the canopic jars of Rameses II."

related:

• Biblical plagues really happened say scientists [ Thera, global warming, yada yada yada ] -- "These coffins were found in the tombs of senior officials of the 18th and 19th dynasties," near Saqqara, Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Thursday. "Some coloured unopened coffins dating back to the sixth century BC were found as well as some coffins dating back to the time of Ramses II," who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BC, he said... The Saqqara burial grounds which date back to 2,700 BC and are dominated by the massive bulk of King Zoser's step pyramid -- the first ever built -- were in continuous use until the Roman period, three millenniums later.

dead link, but easily found with The Wayback Machine (not RC):

Did Joshua Destroy Canaanite Hatzor?
by Clarence H. Wagner, Jr.

However, when Ben-Tor began his excavations in 1990 he came upon a palace near Yadin's which he dated, by means of its ceramics, to a few hundred years later - that is, to the last half of the second millennium or Late Bronze (LB) period... "We had taken it for granted that there were two palaces," he says. "I now think Yadin erred and that the palace whose corner he excavated may perhaps be part of the same Late Bronze palace we've been excavating, not an earlier palace from the Middle Bronze period. It will take another two weeks of digging next season to prove it, one way or the other."

Heh, and I'll forgo quoting something about the Nefertiti artifact taken off the Ulu Burun wreck -- suffice to say the RC dating of the wreck was saddled on immediately as being a fabulous verification of the entire dendrochronological series of the e Med, and a verification of the conventional pseudochronology, but as the ramification of the RC date dawned on the handful of brighter ones, the RC dating was itself thrown out and repudiated as irrelevant. It was cool.

Thanks decimon!

One of *those* topics.

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[SunkenCiv]

"Even when, during the respective Thera Conferences, individual scientists had pointed out that the magnitude and significance of the Thera eruption must be estimated as less than previously thought, the conferences acted to strengthen the original hypothesis. The individual experts believed that the arguments advanced by their colleagues were sound, and that the facts of a natural catastrophe were not in doubt... All three factors reflect a fantasy world rather than cool detachment, which is why it so difficult to refute the theory with rational arguments." -- Eberhard Zangger, "The Future of the Past: Archaeology in the 21st Century", pp 49-50.

[SunkenCiv]

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[maine-iac7]

http://xmb.stuffucanuse.com/xmb/viewthread.php?tid=3820

science catches up. Again. (Actually, the link between Santorini and the Exodus has been pretty well established for decades...I remember a study by Woods Hole scholars back in the late ‘60’s. Let me GOOGLE

Yep - 1967

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS305US305&q=Woods+Hole+Santorini

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks mjp for that link.

Bronk Ramsey and his colleagues also found some discrepancies in the radiocarbon levels of the Nile Valley, but they suggest that these are due to ancient Egypt's unusual growing season, which is concentrated in the winter months. For the most part, the new chronology simply narrows down the various historical scenarios that researchers have been considering for ancient Egypt.

Wow, so, IOW, nothing has changed -- when radiocarbon dates DON'T prop up the pseudochronology, it's attributed to some unexplained, unspecified problem with Egypt; but regardless, such things are only good for narrowing down the dates, which we're already sure of. Hogwash!

[marron]

a second jar held the organs of an entirely different person who lived around 760 years later

So is the consensus that RC dating works everywhere except Egypt where it is often off by 600 years more or less?

[decimon]

Heh, and I'll forgo quoting something about the Nefertiti artifact taken off the Ulu Burun wreck...

Aw, please? ;-)

[SunkenCiv]

• The Trowel vs. the Text: How the Amarna letters challenge archaeology
• Smenkhkhare, the Hittite Pharaoh
• Unearthed: The Humble Origins Of World Diplomacy (Hittites)

[maine-iac7]

Imagine an eruption that blows up a mountain and leaves a ‘lake’ this size?

http://santorini-eruption.org.uk/biblio.htm

[SunkenCiv]

:’) 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]

[SunkenCiv]

Those last three links (up there a little bit), uh, let's see, the Smenkhkhare one, has a pic of the Nefertiti scarab, and unfortunately not much else about that (just one paragraph about the wreck itself, I think). Here's more excerpt from the UluBurun thing I posted over there.

In the hope of obtaining an absolute date for the ship, seven wood samples taken from the keel-plank, planking, and cedar logs were submitted to Peter Kuniholm of Comell University for dendrochronological dating. While some samples did not have a sufficient number of tree rings to match the established master sequence, others with more rings appeared not to match at all. A large log-like piece of undetermined purpose, but with its outer layers trimmed, yielded a date of 1441 B.C. ±37 years, the uncertainty factor arising from the carbon dating of samples constituting the floating master conifer-ring sequence.

Imagine -- the tree ring sequence matches something else entirely, but the EXPECTED date range doesn't include this sequence, so we give up. :') To quote my own bad self,

The biggest mystery is, if the (at the time) 100 year old piece of log was part of the wreck, how is it that the rings tested from "the keel-plank, planking, and cedar logs... didn't match at all"? IMHO, the reason is obvious -- the ship doesn't date from that time, so the dendrochronological wiggle-match wouldn't work, or rather, yielded a date incompatible with other features of the wreck. The rings which didn't match at all instead matched a series of years such that the trees themselves hadn't grown when the ship went down. ;')

Something else from the files, probably posted it on FR before, dunno though:

Dendrochronological Dating, Results And Open Problems
by Mark Baillie

In 1984 Val LaMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck pointed out a severe frost ring in their Californian bristlecone pine tree-ring record relating to the calendar year 1627 BC. Their suggestion that this frost event might have been due to the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the Aegean is still a source of active debate. Their work stimulated the observation of a series of narrowest-ring events in an Irish oak chronology at dates 3195 BC, 2345 BC, 1159 BC, 207 BC and AD 540. These dates, it turns out, fall in the vicinity of several possibly traumatic environmental events marked in human records by such phenomena as dynastic changes, Dark Ages and plagues (Baillie 1995).

Not surprisingly, in his abstract Baillie mentions no synchronism in the Irish tree ring sequences to match the supposed mammoth eruption in the 17th c. But there's one in California? Not by a jug o' s-. The 207 BC synch would match the only historical record (Strabo) which survives from ancient literature. The rest correspond to other things, as would the bristlecones, and for that matter, so could the 207 BC squeeze.

I posted this as an FR topic, I believe, I wanna go offline and have some real life stuff tonight.

New Ice-Core Evidence Challenges the 1620s age
for the Santorini (Minoan) Eruption
by Gregory A. Zielinski
and Mark S. Germani
13 July 1997

Determining a reliable calendrical age of the Santorini (Minoan) eruption is necessary to place the impact of the eruption into its proper context within Bronze Age society in the Aegean region. The high-resolution record of the deposition of volcanically produced acids on polar ice sheets, as available in the SO42-time series from ice cores (a direct signal), and the high-resolution record of the climatic impact of past volcanism inferred in tree rings (a secondary signal) have been widely used to assign a 1628/1627 age to the eruption. The layer of ice in the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core corresponding to 1623±36 , which is probably correlative to the 1628/1627 event, not only contains a large volcanic-SO42-spike, but it contains volcanic glass. Composition of this glass does not match the composition of glass from the Santorini eruption, thus severely challenging the 1620sage for the eruption. Similarly, the GISP2 glass does not match the composition of glass from other eruptions (Aniakchak, Mt. St. Helens, Vesuvius) thought to have occurred in the 17th centurynor does it match potential Icelandic sources. These findings suggest that an eruption not documented in the geological record is responsible for the many climate-proxy signals in the late 1620s . Although these findings do not unequivocally discount the 1620s age, we recommend that 1628/1627 no longer be held as the "definitive" age for the Santorini eruption.

ulu burun site:freerepublic.com

Google

[SunkenCiv]

whoops, forgot the fancy stuff: I posted this as an FR topic, I believe, I wanna go offline and have some real life stuff tonight.

New Ice-Core Evidence
Challenges the 1620s
age for the Santorini
(Minoan) Eruption
by Gregory A. Zielinski
and Mark S. Germani
13 July 1997

Determining a reliable calendrical age of the Santorini (Minoan) eruption is necessary to place the impact of the eruption into its proper context within Bronze Age society in the Aegean region. The high-resolution record of the deposition of volcanically produced acids on polar ice sheets, as available in the SO42-time series from ice cores (a direct signal), and the high-resolution record of the climatic impact of past volcanism inferred in tree rings (a secondary signal) have been widely used to assign a 1628/1627 age to the eruption. The layer of ice in the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core corresponding to 1623±36 , which is probably correlative to the 1628/1627 event, not only contains a large volcanic-SO42-spike, but it contains volcanic glass. Composition of this glass does not match the composition of glass from the Santorini eruption, thus severely challenging the 1620s age for the eruption. Similarly, the GISP2 glass does not match the composition of glass from other eruptions (Aniakchak, Mt. St. Helens, Vesuvius) thought to have occurred in the 17th century nor does it match potential Icelandic sources. These findings suggest that an eruption not documented in the geological record is responsible for the many climate-proxy signals in the late 1620s . Although these findings do not unequivocally discount the 1620s age, we recommend that 1628/1627 no longer be held as the "definitive" age for the Santorini eruption.

[SunkenCiv]

• A Storm in Egypt during the Reign of Ahmose [The Tempest Stele]

and one more thing before I head out (famous last words):

Identification of Aniakchak (Alaska) tephra
in Greenland ice core
challenges the 1645 BC date
for Minoan eruption of Santorini
Nicholas J. G. Pearce
John A. Westgate and Shari J. Preece
Warren J. Eastwood
William T. Perkins

Minute shards of volcanic glass recovered from the 1645 ± 4 BC layer in the Greenland GRIP ice core have recently been claimed to originate from the Minoan eruption of Santorini [Hammer et al., 2003]. This is a significant claim because a precise age for the Minoan eruption provides an important time constraint on the evolution of civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. There are however significant differences between the concentrations of SiO2, TiO2, MgO, Ba, Sr, Nb and LREE between the ice core glass and the Minoan eruption, such that they cannot be correlatives. New chemical analyses of tephra from the Late Holocene eruption of the Aniakchak Volcano in Alaska, however, show a remarkable similarity to the ice core glass for all elements, and this eruption is proposed as the most likely source of the glass in the GRIP ice core. This provides a precise date of 1645 BC for the eruption of Aniakchak and is the first firm identification of Alaskan tephra in the Greenland ice cores. The age of the Minoan eruption of Santorini, however, remains unresolved.

[SunkenCiv]

• Virtual archaeologist reconnects fragments of an ancient civilization [ Thera ]