Dating the Ancient Minoan Eruption of Thera Using Tree Rings

University of Arizona ^ | Wednesday, August15, 2018 | Mari N. Jensen

[SunkenCiv]

...by resolving discrepancies between archeological and radiocarbon methods of dating the eruption, according to new University of Arizona-led research... "It's about tying together a timeline of ancient Egypt, Greece, Turkey and the rest of the Mediterranean at this critical point in the ancient world -- that's what dating Thera can do," said lead author Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research...

Archeologists have estimated the eruption as occurring sometime between 1570 and 1500 BC by using human artifacts such as written records from Egypt and pottery retrieved from digs. Other researchers estimated the date of the eruption to about 1600 BC using measurements of radiocarbon, sometimes called carbon-14, from bits of trees, grains and legumes found just below the layer of volcanic ash.

By using radiocarbon measurements from the annual rings of trees that lived at the time of the eruption, the UA-led team dates the eruption to someplace between 1600 and 1525, a time period which overlaps with the 1570-1500 date range from the archeological evidence...

Co-author Gregory Hodgins, director of the UA AMS lab, said, "Charlotte's redoing the calibration curve at an annual scale. What fell out of that was that the old calibration curve wasn't precisely correct during this time frame."

...Her other UA co-authors are Peter Brewer, Timothy Jull, Todd Lange and Matthew Salzer. Other co-authors are David Brown of Queen's University in Belfast, UK, and Timothy Heaton of University of Sheffield, UK...

Other research teams are also finding discrepancies between their radiocarbon measurements using annual tree rings and the current radiocarbon calibration curve, he said.

Pearson... hopes future research can nail the eruption down to a particular year.

[SunkenCiv]

I bought this book in May 2004. Zangger discusses the long history (circa 1885, much earlier than I'd thought) of the "Thera was Atlantis" idea, and beginning on page 44 cuts it to ribbons. It should be noted that Zangger has his own book about what was and wasn't Atlantis. ;') Check out pp 48-49 for a summary of the problems with the idea, and an amusing catalog of other things attributed to the eruption.

"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.

The Future of the Past Archaeology in the 21st Century by Eberhard Zangger

[crusher2013]

What other candidate for the Atlantis myth could their be?

[MUDDOG]

Two or three hundred years before the Sea Peoples.

[SunkenCiv]

King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times... belonged to the First BabyIonian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works -- theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia and another in Anatolia, a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos. Until a few decades ago, the reign of Hammurabi was dated to around the year 2100 before the present era... At Platanos on Crete, a seal of the Hammurabi type was discovered in a tomb together with Middle Minoan pottery of a kind associated at other sites with objects of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, more exactly, of its earlier part. This is regarded as proof that these two dynasties were contemporaneous... however... At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari "proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria"... The Khorsabad list ends in the tenth year of Assur-Nerari V, which is computed to have been -745... the first year of Shamshi-Adad is calculated to have been -1726 and his last year -1694... it reduced the time of Hammurabi from the twenty-first century to the beginning of the seventeenth century... "a puzzling chronological discrepancy", which could only be resolved by making Hammurabi later than Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad -- but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty -- then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired.

[Immanuel Velikovsky, Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology]

[SunkenCiv]

There have only been just two candidates -- either outside the mouth of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, or Plato's imagination.

[SunkenCiv]

The Sea Peoples are largely a modern invention, so they fit nicely with an imaginary supereruption.

[SunkenCiv]

One of *those* topics. Pushing back the date (this ssdd study agrees with earlier work in placing it mid-17 c BC) destroys the connection between the end of the Neopalatial civilization of the Minoans, ironically destroying the pretext for dreaming up the supereruption in the first place. [and this note of mine from 2001, different forum] Since the end of Akrotiri corresponds to Thutmose III (based on pottery forms common in the Aegean during his reign in Egypt), accepting the 17th c date for the eruption means rejection of Rohl's chronology (he puts Thutmose III's reign end in the 12th c). :') Peter James puts the eruption in the 14th c, and rejects the pottery evidence. Velikovsky paid no attention to the dating of Thera because it is a sideshow, but as Edwin Schorr pointed out, V accepted the conventional 16th c dating without much comment, but that it would have to be much later than that.

---

join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe

---

[SunkenCiv]

[yarddog]

Ancient Crete is both fascinating and intriguing.

Ancient Greeks considered them a great power, much greater than artifacts, etc. indicate.

[Rurudyne]

Dropping several centuries out of the Egyptian timeline has been proposed based on certain physical evidence that suggests that for a time two dynasties may have been in power from different capitols rather than one succeeding the other.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

I mentioned the best known up there, other than Donovan Courville.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3679761/posts?page=7#7

[SunkenCiv]

The Histories
by Herodotus
Book I -- Clio
tr by George Rawlinson

Now, of the above nations the Carians are a race who came into the mainland from the islands. In ancient times they were subjects of king Minos, and went by the name of Leleges, dwelling among the isles, and, so far as I have been able to push my inquiries, never liable to give tribute to any man. They served on board the ships of king Minos whenever he required; and thus, as he was a great conqueror and prospered in his wars, the Carians were in his day the most famous by far of all the nations of the earth. They likewise were the inventors of three things, the use of which was borrowed from them by the Greeks; they were the first to fasten crests on helmets and to put devices on shields, and they also invented handles for shields. In the earlier times shields were without handles, and their wearers managed them by the aid of a leathern thong, by which they were slung round the neck and left shoulder. Long after the time of Minos, the Carians were driven from the islands by the Ionians and Dorians, and so settled upon the mainland. The above is the account which the Cretans give of the Carians: the Carians themselves say very differently. They maintain that they are the aboriginal inhabitants of the part of the mainland where they now dwell, and never had any other name than that which they still bear; and in proof of this they show an ancient temple of Carian Jove in the country of the Mylasians, in which the Mysians and Lydians have the right of worshipping, as brother races to the Carians: for Lydus and Mysus, they say, were brothers of Car. These nations, therefore, have the aforesaid right; but such as are of a different race, even though they have come to use the Carian tongue, are excluded from this temple.

The Caunians, in my judgment, are aboriginals; but by their own account they came from Crete. In their language, either they have approximated to the Carians, or the Carians to them -- on this point I cannot speak with certainty. In their customs, however, they differ greatly from the Carians, and not only so, but from all other men. They think it a most honourable practice for friends or persons of the same age, whether they be men, women, or children, to meet together in large companies, for the purpose of drinking wine. Again, on one occasion they determined that they would no longer make use of the foreign temples which had been long established among them, but would worship their own old ancestral gods alone. Then their whole youth took arms, and striking the air with their spears, marched to the Calyndic frontier, declaring that they were driving out the foreign gods.

[DaxtonBrown]

“Dating the Ancient Minoan Eruption of Thera Using Tree Rings”

I dated an ancient eruption here in Vegas once, but I didn’t need tree rings to figure it out.

[SunkenCiv]

:^D

[Ancesthntr]

I’d love to see an evidence-based attempt to tie together the chronology of the ancient Middle East, including the Exodus. I think that a lot of people have the screwed-up idea that Ramses II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus (and “The Ten Commandments” hasn’t helped that), where there is evidence that he was not. Egypt’s power was destroyed by the plagues and by the loss of the cream of the crop of his army in the sea (Sea of Reeds, not the Red Sea)...and there is even some evidence that the Pharaoh died in that latter incident.

FYI, here is an interesting article, suggesting that the Pharaoh of the Oppression was (the monotheistic heretic) Akhenaten, while his son-in-law - King Tutankhamun, yeah King Tut - was the Pharaoh of the Exodus (Exodus in -1330):

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Who-was-the-pharaoh-of-the-Exodus-395885

Here’s another article claiming that it was Thutmose III (Exodus in -1446): http://www.bible.ca/archeology/bible-archeology-exodus-date-1440bc.htm

IMHO, the biggest problem with fixing dates for a wide variety of events throughout the Middle East for many centuries is the flawed Egyptian dynastic chronology. I don’t pretend to know what it really was, but the fact that it is severely flawed is pretty much beyond debate. Since so much of the history of the surrounding areas is based upon Egypt and its own history, the flaws carry through.

[wildbill]

There may not have been a “real” Atlantis, but surely there are many myths that may overlap with the absolutely certain story of Thera.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ancesthntr.

Both Akhenaten and Thutmose III postdate Moses by centuries.

[SunkenCiv]

We have one (just one) account of an eruption on Thera, and the dating of that eruption works out to about 200 BC. Herodotus writes quite a bit about the island, and doesn't mention it -- but he lived before that eruption, so no surprise there. And Plato was earlier than Herodotus.

[crusher2013]

Why not Thera, its a perfect fit.

Nothing in the Atlantic comes close,except the name of course.

[central_va]

Minoan chicks were tough. They leaped bulls bareback and bare chested.