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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Having got them into the theatre, I needed to pin them to their seats.
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Where’s My Dark Age, Bro? November 24, 2024
Relax, it’s coming.
Look at it the other way round. If everyone’s ancient history is gripped in the vice of a faulty Egyptian chronology that has inserted an extraneous five hundred years that never existed
| everyone will be reporting a Dark Age |
But if anyone has a record of normal history, where things proceed relatively smoothly, then the ‘faulty Egyptian chronology’ thesis falls. There really was a Dark Age which affected some places but not others.
By the same token, if nobody escaped this terrible experience, it would be powerful evidence
| it is the chronology that is creating the Dark Ages |
Which is it? We have already ticked the Greece and Troy boxes so now you will be able to open a fresh box, one civilisation a day, to see whether it gets a tick (has a Dark Age, keep reading) or a cross (no Dark Age, M J Harper is out to lunch):
Anatolia
Aramaea
Assyria
Babylonia
Carthage
Cyprus
Egypt
Israel
Italy
Malta
Nubia
Persia
Sardinia
Sicily
Spain
The tension’s killing me and I know the answer!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I assumed the Medium audience had been sufficiently primed to be blasted country-by-country
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The Hittite Gallery is Closed for Repairs November 25, 2024
Everybody’s Dark Age has to be triggered by a different factor than other people’s Dark Ages, if they are being generated by faulty historians’ chronologies, and not the Real Thing. If they are all being triggered by the same cause, say the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe, then it will certainly be argued it was the Real Thing.
Thankfully this does not apply to the ancient Dark Age of c 1200 to c 600 BC. Everyone had their own whiny excuse. Take the Hittites. Though before modern historians got to work, you’d have a hard job doing anything with the Hittites
| Until the late 19th century the Hittites were a truly ‘lost’ civilization. The idea that they had ruled an empire dominating most of Anatolia and northern Syria … was unheard of … the Hittites were known solely from a few oblique references in the Old Testament |
It wasn’t much better in the pantheistic sources
| There seem to be only two references in the whole of classical literature which, with the benefit of hindsight, could conceivably relate to the Hittite Empire |
How could a vast empire sit athwart the Fertile Crescent for six hundred years and not be noticed? Of course, we know why: there is a six hundred year gap in the Egyptian chronology that needed filling, so the historians invented the Hittite Empire to fill it. But that is not the view of the academic world, they have their own sources
| Egyptian records seemed to allude to such an entity — the armies of a people known as the ‘Kheta’ repeatedly confronted 18th and 19th Dynasty Pharaohs campaigning in Syria… Assyrian texts also commonly referred to Syria as the ‘land of Hatti’, a name equivalent to the Egyptian term Kheta |
Kheta = Hatti = Hittites = Bob’s your uncle. Since, in the Egyptological view of history, the 18th and 19th Dynasty are placed six hundred years too early, the Hittites could be given a Greek-style Dark Age to finish them off
| From 1400–1200 BC the Hittites extended their sway over eastern Anatolia and northern Syria. Then, in 1200 BC, beset by economic troubles, the Empire collapsed under pressure from barbarian invaders … plunging Anatolia into a Dark Age of several centuries’ duration. |
But now the historians had the same problem they had run into with the Greeks: they had somehow to join it all up with real history when the Spurious Six Centuries were done and dusted. This produced some honeys even by historians’ standards
| The Empire was forgotten and its capitals abandoned … but in the meantime Hittite civilisation had begun to flourish again in Mesopotamia in a ‘strange afterglow which lasted for no less than five centuries’ |
Afterglow Hittites were soon joined by Hieroglyphic Hittites
| This ‘afterglow’ is so pronounced that most scholars believe that there was a migration of ‘Hieroglyphic Hittites’ (speakers of the Luwian branch of the language) fleeing southern Anatolia after the fall of the Empire |
and neo-Hittites
| Founding ‘Neo-Hittite’ states in areas once ruled by the Empire, they perpetuated Hittite customs, religion, names, hieroglyphic writing and styles in art and architecture until the Assyrian conquest of 750 BC |
Not-existing meant the Hittite historical record was somewhat sparse so it had to be left to the archaeologists to come up with the needful. And they better had because the modern Turkish state was more than a little anxious to establish its legitimacy in an area of the world where long roots count for a lot. The Turks had only arrived as nomadic horsemen in the thirteenth century AD, just the other day by middle eastern standards.
But, according to Turkish-sponsored archaeologists, it was much the same in the thirteenth century BC
| It has to be admitted that thus far Boghazköy [the Turkish name for Hattusa, the notional Hittite capital] has contributed little to the illumination of what we call the Dark Age. Not a single find has turned up which can be attributed safely to the centuries immediately following the fall of the Hittite capital. This could indicate that Central Anatolia at that period was either very thinly populated or occupied by nomad tribes who left no material remains in the dwelling mounds. |
And so we — but nobody else — can bid a fond farewell to the Hittites.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A title wasted on the Medium crowd who would then be deterred by the sub-title.
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Thus sprach Jesus November 26, 2024
Next up on the list is Aramaea (it’s alphabetical).
Did it have a Dark Age and if not, why not?
The language Jesus spoke in everyday life is generally thought to be Aramaic. That’s New Testament and c. 1–33 AD. Aramaea gets Old Testament airplay too because the Aramaean Empire loomed menacingly to the north and east when the Israelite state was getting going, conventionally dated to c. 1000 BC.
Despite this thousand-year history of great topical interest, historians have rather neglected the Aramaeans. I wonder why. It may have something to do with the perplexing chronological challenges Aramaean history presents. Baron Max von Oppenheim was first out of the traps with what might be called ‘the long chronology of the Aramaeans’
| He examined inscriptions from their chief city and placed them in the third millennium BC because of apparent Sumerian influences. |
That was never going to work. There’s three thousand years between Sumer and Jesus and nobody lasts that long. Just for starters, those inscriptions were as often as not in the Aramaean alphabet and...
| In the opinion of the eminent palaeographer, Joseph Naveh, the script belongs to 1050 BC as dated by the standard Egyptian chronology. |
Albrecht Goetze, Yale Professor of Assyrian and Babylonian Studies, sidestepped the inscription imbroglio by pointing out Aramaean relief motifs were similar to Mitannian examples. But Albie had thrown a fresh cat among the pigeons because the Mitannian Empire, according to Egyptian chronology, flourished between 1850 and 1350 BC!
Could the archaeologists help out? Anton Moortgat, Professor of Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at Berlin’s National Museum, thought they could and proposed something radical
| His scheme allowed two building phases for the palace complex: the first around 900 BC followed by the ‘Kapara period’ ending in 800 BC |
That was more comfortable for everyone but how was the Mitannian connection to be explained? Could the art experts help out? Henri Frankfort, the foremost expert on ancient Near-Eastern art, thought so
| Frankfort agreed on Moortgat’s ninth century dating but felt obliged to explain the conspicuous Late Bronze Age motifs on the reliefs in terms of a revival of Mitannian styles |
A thousand years later? What is this, asked William Albright, Director of the American School of Oriental Research, the Gothic Revival?
| Albright saw local continuity as the answer and backdated the reliefs to the tenth century |
Nobody followed him. ‘Bill, we’re trying to move Aramaea down because of the Jesus link, not up.’ Frankfort returned and swept the board by coming up with similarities between Aramaean art and Assyrian art and no-one messes with the Assyrians.
True, this created a thousand-year gap between Aramaea and Mitanni despite them sharing a house style but who’s ever heard of the Mitannians? Forget about ’em. Everyone could relax, Aramaea was just where it needed to be.
Oh no, who’s this coming along? It’s never Helene Kantor of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, a specialist in the artwork of Ancient Greece and the Middle East, is it?
| Unlikely though it may seem to find in local and clumsy Syrian reliefs of 850 BC the continuation of features of 1250 BC Mycenaean sculpture, centuries older and now quite extinct, this is yet the case |
Clumsy or not, extinct or not, everyone agreed the resemblance was uncanny. We’re back to 1250 now. When’s the yo-yoing going to stop? It stopped, never to start again, when they dug up a life-sized figure with bilingual inscriptions in Aramaic and Assyrian that could be dated precisely to 866 BC.
| Given the weight of the evidence demanding a mid-ninth century date for the statue, how is one to accommodate such a dating to the apparent eleventh century character of the script of the inscription? What has to ‘give’? |
Aramaean history had to give, that’s what. If nobody studies it we won’t need to worry about it, right? And we won’t need no Dark Age neither because Arameans can be any age you want them to be.
Sorted. Who’s next on the alphabetic list? The Assyrians. We might need to tread carefully with this one. No-one messes with the Assyrians.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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This has some resonance for me personally since it was when perusing the Penguin Atlas of the Ancient World (in my twenties?) that I noticed they were having difficulty with Assyria and thought it odd. My very first twinge after a misspent but orthodox youth.
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Who put the ass in Assyria? November 27, 2024
They were dab hands when it came to providing Dark Ages for others
but who was going to provide one for them?
If they need a Dark Age of course, so that’s the first item on our Assyrian agenda.
| While it has been claimed that “Assyria was the one power in western Asia that survived the upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age”, it is also agreed that it underwent a serious cultural and political recession at this time. |
I don’t know about you, but my revisionist antennae twang when I am told that ‘surviving upheavals’ and ‘undergoing serious cultural and political recessions’ are one and the same thing. But a twang is not necessarily the thang so please, Assyriologists, do go on
| Indeed, the period between 1200 and 900 BC has been aptly described as the ‘Dark Age of Mesopotamia’ |
Not, note, the ‘Dark Age of Assyria’. How you can have a three hundred year Dark Age in Mesopotamia while the chief power of Mesopotamia is only undergoing a bit of a recession is something only Assyriologists know.
They’ve already reduced the five hundred year Greek Dark Age and the four hundred year Trojan Dark Age to a three hundred year Mesopotamian Dark Age, and they weren’t even suffering from it. All the same, I bet they’ll start shaving it down a smidgeon. From both ends.
| For over 250 years, from 1200 BC, Assyrian history is an almost complete blank |
Two hundred and fifty already. And I don’t like the sound of that ‘almost’.
| apart from the interlude around the time of Tiglath-pileser I |
Simo Parpola, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Helsinki, cutely shortened it to two hundred years in a way nobody would notice
| Virtually no contemporary texts such as letters, administrative records or legal documents are extant from 1200 to 1150 or from 1050 to 900. |
Blimey, it’s disappearing before our very eyes. And anyway it wasn’t a Dark Age, it was a cultural and political recession. I mean, come on, we all have those. Life goes on even if the pen-pushers at City Hall are taking a break
| Virtually no contemporary texts such as letters, administrative records or legal documents are extant from 1200 to 1150 or from 1050 to 900. The absence of datable texts makes it impossible to detect trends — indeed, no changes appear to have occurred. |
See! No Dark Age. Just Assyrians being Assyrians only using — well, your guess is as good as mine — written papyrus records or whatever in place of their usual indestructible stylus impressions on baked clay tablets. In fact, if you really want to know the truth, it was from start to finish more stylus over substance
| One scholar noted that the forms and decoration of the intricately carved Assyrian seals of 1150 are ‘clearly late’ as they ‘point the way to the ornate figures which line the walls of Assurnasirpal of 850 BC … working within a tradition which went back to 1250 BC’ |
Four hundred years of steady-state. That’s not a Dark Age I ever heard of. So no, sorry, no Assyrian Dark Age. Though for all about them it was a very different story. Dark? You won’t know what dark is until you sit down by the rivers of Babylon...
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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The Sumerian King List is of interest to Wiley.
Ortho has basically given up on it.
| The Sumerian King List (abbreviated SKL) or Chronicle of the One Monarchy is an ancient literary composition written in Sumerian that was likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power of various city-states and kingdoms in southern Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennium BC.[2][3][4] It does so by repetitively listing Sumerian cities, the kings that ruled there, and the lengths of their reigns. Especially in the early part of the list, these reigns often span thousands of years |
OK
What's the problem?
Especially in the early part of the list, these reigns often span thousands of years. In the oldest known version, dated to the Ur III period (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC) but probably based on Akkadian source material, the SKL reflected a more linear transition of power from Kish, the first city to receive kingship, to Akkad. In later versions from the Old Babylonian period, the list consisted of a large number of cities between which kingship was transferred, reflecting a more cyclical view of how kingship came to a city, only to be inevitably replaced by the next. In its best-known and best-preserved version, as recorded on the Weld-Blundell Prism, the SKL begins with a number of fictional antediluvian kings, who ruled before a flood swept over the land, after which kingship went to Kish. It ends with a dynasty from Isin (early second millennium BC), which is well-known from other contemporary sources. |
It contains a lot that is actually familiar
Fictional kings, a flood, improbably long reigns, cyclical bits, a linear bit at the end.
How did Ortho react?
| During much of the 20th century, many scholars accepted the Sumerian King List as a historical source of great importance for the reconstruction of the political history of Mesopotamia, despite the problems associated with the text.[5][17][18] For example, many scholars have observed that the kings in the early part of the list reigned for unnaturally long time spans. Various approaches have been offered to reconcile these long reigns with a historical time line in which reigns would fall within reasonable human bounds, and with what is known from the archaeological record as well as other textual sources. |
They sensibly tried to make sense of it.
| In order to create a fixed chronology where individual kings could be absolutely dated, Jacobsen replaced time spans considered too long with average reigns of 20–30 years. For example, Etana ruled for 1500 years according to the SKL, but instead Jacobsen assumed a reign of circa 30 years. In this manner, and by working backwards from reigns whose dates could be independently established by other means, Jacobsen was able to fit all pre-Sargonic kings in a chronology consistent with the dates that were at that time (1939) |
| Others have attempted to reconcile the reigns in the Sumerian King List by arguing that many time spans were actually consciously invented, mathematically derived numbers. Rowton, for example, observed that a majority of the reigns in the Gutian dynasty were 5, 6, or 7 years in length. In the sexagesimal system used at that time, "about 6 years" would be the same as "about 10 years" in a decimal system (i.e. a general round number). This was sufficient evidence for him to conclude that at least these figures were completely artificial.[17] The longer time spans from the first part of the list could also be argued to be artificial: various reigns were multiples of 60 (e.g. Jushur reigned for 600 years, Puannum ruled for 840 years) while others were squares (e.g. Ilku reigned for 900 years (square of 30) while Meshkiangasher ruled for 324 years (square of 18)). |
After many years of trying........
They got rid of the earlier bits as problematic or fictional.
| However, while the SKL has little value for the study on Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, it continues to be an important document for the study on the Sargonic to Old Babylonian periods. The Sumerian King List offers scholars a window into how Old Babylonian kings and scribes viewed their own history, how they perceived the concept of kingship, and how they could have used it to further their own goals. For example, it has been noted that the king list is unique among Sumerian compositions in there being no divine intervention in the process of dynastic change.[3] Also, the style and contents of the Sumerian King List certainly influenced later compositions such as the Curse of Akkad, the Lamentation over Sumer and Akkad, later king lists such as the Assyrian King List, and the Babyloniaca by Berossus.[23] |
But deciding it was fictional still didn't help.
| Thus, in the absence of independent sources from the Early Dynastic period itself, the pre-Sargonic part of the SKL must be considered fictional. Many of the rulers in the pre-Sargonic part (i.e. prior to Sargon of Akkad) of the list must therefore be considered as purely fictional or mythological characters to which reigns of hundreds of years were assigned. However, there is a small group of pre-Sargonic rulers in the SKL whose names have been attested in Early Dynastic inscriptions. This group consists of seven rulers: Enmebaragesi, Gilgamesh, Mesannepada, Meskiagnun, Elulu, Enshakushanna and Lugal-zage-si.[15][19][3] It has also been shown that several kings did not rule sequentially as described by the Sumerian King List, but rather contemporaneously. |
OK let's add this to Wiley's fake list
Fictional kings, a flood, improbably long reigns, cyclical bits, a more understandable linear bit at the end......duplicate kings.
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Mick Harper
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In view of this battery of counter-scholarship I had better post tomorrow's offering up today
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It’s the modern Babylon November 28, 2024
The Assyrians might have been treading water but on the banks
of the Tigris-Euphrates they were being submerged without trace.
| Babylonian history 1000 to 750 BC may be characterised as a period of obscurity or ‘dark age’, with the land frequently overrun by foreign invaders and with the central government often unable to assert its jurisdiction in many areas. Little source material has survived from these turbulent times, and this little is sometimes quite difficult to date. |
At any other time in history, archaeologists need JCB’s to excavate source material because the Babylonians were obsessive record-keepers and recorded it all using styluses on indestructible baked clay tablets. So for it to disappear for two and a half centuries things must have been pretty dire. For instance, they had nowhere to live
| In fact, no buildings have yet been excavated in Babylonia which can be dated with certainty to the time of any ruler between 1046 and 722 BC |
But it is hot and dry in those parts so alfresco living might not have been too bad. What about the only other place in Mesopotamia anybody has heard of, Ur? Ur of the Chaldees. Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.
| After flourishing under the Kassite kings 1500–1300 BC the great city of Ur waned a little in importance but there is enough evidence, both written and archaeological, to trace its history down to 1050 BC. Then the documentary record becomes a complete blank over a period of something like 350 years; archaeological remains are equally elusive. Ur returns to well-documented history in 700 BC |
Still, at least we know why Abraham left. The usual. Nowhere to live
| Architectural remains are usually minor repairs on older structures, with no inscription left to record the identity of the repairer |
Probably a conservation area. ‘Abraham lived here.’ Are there any commemorative mugs?
| The problem confronting the archaeologists was that it was almost impossible to identify any pottery styles characteristic of the Dark Age. The little material which might belong to it was hard to distinguish from the style before 1150 BC |
Strewth, you try running a museum with that little lot. You don’t even know what name to put on the door according to Robert McCormick Adams, an Iraq specialist and Secretary of the Smithsonian
| It remains a little-known intercalary period |
Though after he left Iraq for the Washington gig his old muckers came up with something
| with attitudes towards its limited cultural attainments aptly summarized by casual reference to it among field-workers as the ‘Various Dynasties period’ |
He could have told them D.C.’s no Garden of Eden except Eden is reputedly in Iraq, at Dilmun, where the river meets the sea. The tide was out for several hundred years there too
| In 1000 BC the region vanishes from history, re-appearing again only in late Assyrian times … aptly described by its current excavators as ‘an occupational enigma’ |
Are they talking about housing again? Chevy Chase, Maryland, that’s an occupational enigma. Have you seen the prices? You’d have to be old money even to get a sniff.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Duplicate kings, Wiley? Don't miss (now) tomorrow's...
| ...until the subjugation of Elam in 1100 BC by Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon. Not to be confused with the infamous sixth century King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar (often confusingly spelled Nebuchadrezzar). | |
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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As threatened.
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Iran by any other name November 29, 2024
Smells as sweet, which is more than you can say about its history
We have now arrived at the eastern terminus of the Great Egyptological Empire, the area of the world that uses Egyptian king-lists to compute a basic chronology for ancient history, and which therefore suffers ‘Dark Ages’ to account for the non-existent five hundred years Egyptologists have inserted into ancient history.
When it comes to dealing with Iranian ancient history, the favoured technique is ‘creative labelling’
* Before Iranians were called Iranians, they were called Persians
* Before they were called Persians, they were called Medes
* Before they were called Medes, they were called Elamites
* Before they were called Elamites, they were lost in the annals of time
| Elam, as this kingdom was known by 2700 BC … remained a distinctive and vigorously independent civilization, the most important rival to Babylonia and Assyria |
Still is. The Iranians and the Arabs are still duking it out for supremacy in the Middle East. An example of the old applied epistemological adage: ‘The truth is always boring’. [Remind me to tell you about how today’s Ashkenazi Israelis are descendants of Khazars from the Caucasus mountains and have no historical connection with the Middle East whatsoever. Some other time.]
The history of Elam has been reconstructed from both Elamite records and from what the Babylonians and Assyrians had to say about them.
| It is continuous right up until the subjugation of Elam in 1100 BC by Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon. |
Not to be confused with the infamous sixth century King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, an understandable error since they are one and the same person. But between the two of them nothing more is heard of Elam until 821 BC. As the Cambridge Ancient History puts it in sepulchral tones
| as a political power Elam was finished. This period was followed by a dark age of three centuries, during which there are no native texts nor is Elam mentioned in the Mesopotamian sources. Undoubtedly broken up internally, Elam was not to be mentioned again until 821 BC when Elamite, Chaldean and Aramaean troops were defeated by the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad V |
If Elam was finished in 1100 BC, how could it be putting armies in the field in 821 BC? There was only one way: ‘creative labelling’. It was agreed there was
one Elam in the sense of the area occupied by Elamites
two Elams in the sense of before and after the Babylonian captivity
four Elams to make any sense of it all: Early, Middle, Neo I and Neo II
| The Middle Elamite period down to 1100 BC is well represented by material remains, as is the Neo-Elamite civilisation after 800 BC. But the dating of the intermediate period, labelled Neo-Elamite I, is fraught with chronological problems |
It’s easy when you know how.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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For those technically-minded, note how people arriving randomly, as people are wont to do on Medium, have to be catered for each time without boring the socks off people who haven't.
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Cyprus, the sunny island with a Dark Age past November 30, 2024
Where everyone has their say but nobody’s listening.
Cyprus is an ideal test bed for Revisionist Dark Age Studies. Right in the geographic centre of the Mediterranean/Fertile Crescent zone we’re interested in, but with no academic Great Powers to queer the pitch. There’s no such thing as a Cypriologist.
There are actual Great Powers though with an interest in the place. Hector Catling, Director of the British School at Athens, claimed something he was very familiar with was also happening in Cyprus c. 1200 BC
| There was a terrifying diminution in the population and abandonment of large parts of the island. |
The other half of the Special Relationship agreed. Here’s that old stager Lawrence Stager, Professor of Archaeology at Harvard
| In 1150 BC nearly ninety percent of the settlements of Cyprus are abandoned. Practically all of our evidence comes from the coastal sites … By 1000 BC, even these had ceased to exist |
Good gracious, what on earth has happened?
| A great earthquake has been proposed. From then on a veil of darkness covers the history of the island. |
The locals are not terribly keen on talk of natural catastrophes, it might affect the tourist trade. They prefer to look elsewhere and since the locals come in two varieties — Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots — they know where to look. The Greek-Cypriot archaeologist, Vassos Karageorghis, for instance
| The history of Cyprus after about 1050 BC is clouded by what is usually called the “Dark Age” in Greece |
Why not the Anatolian Dark Age, Vass? There was one of those too and it is a lot closer to Cyprus than Greece will ever be. (Don’t worry, we shan’t breathe a word about you shaving a hundred years off when nobody was looking.)
But even Turkish Cypriots would agree the Greeks have it when it comes to ancient writing systems. Or maybe not. The ancient Cypriots were behaving very oddly:
before 1100 BC
They are writing in a script known as Cypro-Minoan
1100 to 800 BC
They had their Dark Age and wrote nothing
after 800 BC
They start writing again in Cypro-Minoan
This has got everyone stumped. How can you remember how to write after three hundred years of not writing? Is it a miracle?
| The still largely undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script appears on a variety of objects (tablets, vases, weights, seals etc.) throughout Cyprus, down to 1100 BC … it then completely vanishes … it then miraculously flourished again … from 800 to 100 BC |
Academics are not supposed to believe in miracles. Sterling Dow, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Harvard, was first astonished and then prosaic
| The instance of Cyprus is perhaps the clearest, most neglected, and most astonishing … during the intervening centuries the Cypriots wrote largely, perhaps exclusively, on perishable materials. |
’Course they did. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m always banging on about how you can’t trust ancient written sources because manuscripts haven’t a prayer of surviving for thousands of years.
On the other hand the Cypriots weren’t ‘exclusively’ using manuscripts before 1100 BC or after 800 BC ('tablets, vases, weights, seals etc') so it’s passing strange they would decide to do so for three hundred years. The very same three hundred years they were suffering their Dark Age. Either it’s a complete coincidence or one in the eye for litterateurs.
Stanley Casson, back at the British School in Athens, rejected the ‘perishable materials’ theory on the understandable grounds it was totally daft and produced something dafter
| The knowledge of the script reverted to the hands of bards |
who were presumably writing it all down secretly in Cypro-Minoan in case they forgot their lines. And there we must leave the Cypriot Dark Age. In the hands of eejits.
But don’t go away. This might be small beer in the ordinary run of things, but Cypriot squabbling about times and dates was destined to play a major role in the ancient history of the one we’ve all been waiting for. Israel. God alone knows how we’re going to sort that out.
We’ll manage, dinna worry.
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Mick Harper
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This one would test the patience of the casual Medium reader though not, I trust, anyone here. Anyone here?
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Ancient Cyprus Spreads Its Wings December 1, 2024
How one small island ended up ruling the archaeological roost.
In the previous chapter of our saga (you have been keeping up, I trust) they were busy reconciling the Cypriot Dark Age with the Ancient Greek Dark Age, 1200–700 BC or thereabouts. Both sets of experts were relying on Egyptian chronology
* the chronology adopted by all historians and archaeologists of the ancient period to ensure their individual histories dovetailed together
* the chronology that had managed to include six hundred years that never existed
* the chronology that had necessitated everyone having ‘a dark age’ to account for the six hundred years when apparently nothing was happening
* the chronology that was causing everyone grief trying to account for why everything was the same after the six-hundred year gap as before the six-hundred year gap
* the chronology that no single set of experts could question without the entire gallimaufry saying, “For Chrissake, we’ve just spent the best part of the twentieth century getting it all to fit, and now you want us to start all over again?”
The one thing everyone was agreed on was that after c 600 BC everything settled down and there was no need for dark ages and special pleading. Einar Gjerstad, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Lund University, and the ruling authority on all things Cyprus, spoke for everyone
| From 650 BC onwards both Athenian pottery and Egyptian scarabs dated everything securely. |
We knew that, Einar, it’s the ‘before 650 BC’ we’ve been having trouble with.
| For earlier periods a statistical method could be employed using local pottery and not an absolute chronology |
We like it! We’ve all got local pottery and not having an absolute chronology means we can play fast and loose. When is this age of ‘relative chronology’ to start?
Professor Gjerstad made a bit of a ricket here. He should have remembered nobody was interested in Cypriot history, everybody is interested in Greek history. But he’s not the sort of person that lets other people get in the way
| Dating the start of the Iron Age could not be pushed back as early as Mycenaean scholars required at that time ie 1150 BC |
Swedes are not neutral when it comes to infighting
| Arne Furumark, of Uppsala University, the leading authority on Mycenaean pottery chronology argued that Cypro-Geometric could not have started later than 1150 BC |
But Gjerstad showed off the power of non-absolute chronology
| Feeling intuitively that this date was too high, Gjerstad arbitrarily reduced it by a century, to 1050 BC and launched a lengthy attack on Furumark. Although the arguments were unconvincing Furumark felt inclined to accept most of them, evidently in view of his opponent’s superior grasp of Cypriot matters. |
Thanks to Gjerstad, the Cypriot tail was now wagging the Greek dog
| This acceptance had the drastic result that the later part of Mycenaean chronology was now dated by Cyprus, against all previous expectations. |
The Prof looked around to see if any other dogs needed wagging
| A challenge with greater impact came from archaeologists working in the Levant |
What better site than Armageddon for the battle?
| Palestinian stratigraphy was in such a chaotic state that only Megiddo VI was thought important enough to discuss |
A swift application of non-absolute chronology from Einaar
| Gjerstad decided to pick the very lowest date proposed for this level (1050–1000 BC), which suited his own scheme… Gjerstad’s chronology created pandemonium |
Oh my giddy aunt. Aunt Judy Birmingham, the English archaeologist specialising in Iron Age Cyprus, suggested redefining the ceramic categories. There being a dozen or so to choose from surely everyone could be accommodated. Not apparently Scandi-wildcats
| By disregarding the results obtained by numerous, methodical archaeological excavations carried out both by Cypriote and foreign expeditions, she has evidently convinced herself of having made a positive contribution to the study of Cypriote culture. |
Meow. Lawrence Stager (remember him, the Harvard Professor?) came up with a radical proposal. The truth.
| A further possibility to be investigated is that the two to three century ‘Dark Age’ of Cyprus is largely illusory — created by modern scholars, not ancient disasters |
Was understanding dawning at long last? Of course it wasn’t. You don’t get tenure in the Ivy League blurting out the truth
| Raising the dates for the Cypro-Geometric to close the 11th to 9th-century Dark Age gap can be carried out only by creating a new ‘Dark Age’ later in the pottery sequence |
There was only one way to bring peace to the warring factions and that was to appoint an umpire acceptable to all sides. Robert Merrilees was Australian ambassador to Israel, Sweden and Greece and an expert on the Bronze Age archaeology of Cyprus and the Levant. His qualifications for the job could not have been better.
Or worse. They should have consulted us Brits first, we could have told them what Australian diplomacy consists of. Kicking everyone in the cruds even-handedly
| It is in fact not uncommon to find that the Bronze Age strata of Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt have been dated according to the imported Cypriote pottery, whose chronology in turn depends on theirs! As a result the dates of part of, or even whole, Bronze Ages come to be built up like houses of cards, with all the stability and longevity which characterise that kind of monument. |
So the scene was set for the final showdown, in the Holy Land. God versus the archaeologists. He stood no chance...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This was appallingly long for Medium people so I had to make sure it rollicked along.
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Where is the Queen of Sheba? December 2, 2024
Was Jezebel a Jezebel? That’s the last you’ll be hearing about either, so settle down.
The extra five hundred years bequeathed to history by the follies of Egyptologists’ timekeeping is not only a problem for academics studying the ancient world. Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all ‘religions of the book’ relying on the historicity of various events, meaning all three are potentially in hock to historians.
The historical Jesus relies on a single passing reference in Josephus’s eye-witness account of The Jewish War, and that has all the hallmarks of being a later interpolation. Not to mention that Josephus is eye-wash to start with. The Koran treats Jesus as a real person so it is on thin ice too.
German historians of the nineteenth century (AD) sank their teeth into the New Testament and found it severely wanting as a work of reference. The Old Testament didn’t bear a great deal of scrutiny either. Neither David nor Solomon have any corporeal existence either in the historical or the archaeological record.
The State of Israel was alive and kicking according to both, but when? It may depend on the affiliations of the individual scholar. Ephraim Stern, a specialist in the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian centuries (what he would call the Late First Temple Period) can take up the story:
| The old debate, which began in the mid-fifties, in which the validity of Gjerstad’s chronology was challenged, seems now to have found its solution in favour of the earlier dating of the Palestinian material |
The earlier the better, as far as he was concerned. 1000 BC was what Stern the Jewish archaeologist was looking for, but Stern the archaeologist could not help but admit this wasn’t really what the evidence showed...
| Our study of the black-on-red pottery from stratum VII led us to assign it to 950 BC … If this is correct and stratum VI began only in 450, the five-hundred year gap creates a unique situation. |
This is academese for ‘wrong’. The fundamental problem is that for all kinds of indisputable reasons the State of Israel has to be coeval with Mycenean Greece and Egyptian chronology has cast Mycenean Greece in the 1450-1250 BC era. That is way too early for the Israelites to be having Biblical run-ins with Assyrians and Persians in the 800–500 BC time frame:
| This coherent set of chronological evidence is unfortunately at odds with the accepted date of pottery in Cyprus. This dispute has raged since the 1930s … It seems that the basic chronologies of many sites in one culture or the other are off by at least a century |
‘At least a century’ is academese for two, three, four, five, six centuries — take your pick. And things, if anything, are getting worse not better:
| There are also many finds of Assyrian-style pottery in contexts conventionally dated two centuries earlier than the initial invasion of Israel by the Assyrians in 733 BC. |
| A similar anomaly is presented by Black-on-Red Ware, dated by Cypriot archaeologists to the period 850–700 BC, but found repeatedly in 1100–900 BC contexts in Palestine. |
| Not only was 950 BC pottery found under the 850 BC floors; it was also found above them. |
‘As above, so below’ as the Gnostic Gospels might put it. Kathleen Kenyon, one of the more influential archaeologists of the twentieth century, was operating before the vice of Egyptian chronology had completely clamped down except
| Kenyon’s low chronology, however, never caught on. Taken to its logical extreme, it would have created a void between 850 BC levels and those firmly placed by Egyptian evidence to 1200 BC. There seemed to be no way out of the dilemma. |
There was. Ditch Egyptian chronology. But academia doesn’t go in for easy solutions. Not when they’ve all been taught the hard way as undergraduates. Henri Frankfort, who we met when puzzling over Jesus and Mel Gibson’s fondness for talking Aramaic, had a suggestion. Bury your head in the sand:
| Once it is realised that the whole of North Syrian art after 1000 BC represents a fresh start … the attempts to fill the gap between 1200 and 850 BC with transitional work can be abandoned |
A fresh start in the Middle East? He’s got a hope. William F. Albright of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem was old school and denounced Hans for
| What amounts to a systematic campaign to discredit the entire Solomonic building tradition by the simple expedient of denying the existence of art or architecture in Greater Syria between ca. 1200 and 850 BC. |
Not wishing to discredit Mr Albright, but he has no business believing in a Solomonic building tradition unless he cares to tell us where he picked up such a name in the historical record. Perhaps they should both turn to the people who even the Bible acknowledges were responsible for the Solomonic building tradition, the Phoenicians:
| The 950 BC finds from Tyre are meagre, while the evidence recovered from Sarepta, the one Phoenician city that has been thoroughly studied, is very limited and the possibility of ‘a considerable abandonment’ from 1100 to 800 BC has been discussed |
This is unsettling for those of us who learned in Sunday School that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre were such great mates. How can Hiram be ruling an abandoned city? I’m glad my Sunday School teacher wasn’t Professor James Muhly, Director of the American School of Classical Studies:
| This is really quite remarkable. The great age of Phoenician mercantile activity, the time of Hiram I, of Solomon and the biblical accounts relating to Ezion-geber, the Tarshish fleet and three-year voyages to the Land of Ophir, is simply not documented in the archaeological record from Tyre and Sarepta. |
In truth we never paid a lot of attention in Sunday School. We were far more interested in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Though we weren’t allowed to stay up and watch Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the first television archaeologist:
| Mining activity at the site of Timna was sharply redated to c.1200–1150 BC, after which time it was supposedly abandoned until Roman times … In spite of traditional associations of King Solomon with the mines and the landscape, the great king is probably the most eminent absentee from the archaeological sequence. |
It was only when we went off to college that we heard from the likes of Nelson Glueck, a rabbi and an archaeologist, who could serve two masters on the Sabbath but on weekdays couldn’t tell the difference between 1200 BC Midianite pottery from Timna and 600 BC Edomite pottery from the Gulf of Aqaba:
| Nevertheless, there is apparent continuity between the two styles. It has been admitted that the present centuries long gap in the tradition of painted pottery in this area of north-western Arabia makes little sense. Numerous similarities between the Midianite and Edomite wares actually make ‘some degree of chronological overlap perfectly plausible’ |
Academese for ‘That’s not believable in a month of Sundays.’ And so it goes on. It is weird for us watching it all from the comfort of our Applied Epistemological armchairs. Why won’t they grasp the nettle, move on from Egyptian chronology and solve all their technical problems once and for all?
Though I suppose it may be better that the historicity of Christianity, Islam and Judaism wasn’t sorted out once and for all. We’d be sorry to lose them. But as for ourselves, we’re off to Rome and Carthage. Won’t that be fun? No.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Getting your reader onto familiar ground is a mixed blessing. As we say in AE, 'The more you know, the less you'll learn.'
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The Age of Spain Stays Mainly in the Brain December 3, 2024
The academics say 1100 BC, the crazies say 500 BC. Which is it?
Iran may be the eastern terminus of the Egyptian Chronological Empire but how far west does it extend? To Spain, where the vacant six hundred years are being dealt with in the usual way. A shrug, a smile and a let’s move quickly on.
Two famous British panjandrums — Glyn Daniel, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, and John Evans, President of the Society of Antiquaries — can tell us all we need to know
| The period 1300 BC to 900 BC is the most obscure in the prehistory of the Peninsula. From the scattered finds which exist it is extremely difficult to piece together an intelligible picture. |
Applied epistemology has a principle: one input, one output. If Spain and Iran are both suffering from that rare thing, a Dark Age, and suffering it at the same time, that is surely one output. Unless Messrs Daniel and Evans can come up with one input, they will not be eligible for membership in the Society of Applied Epistemologists.
Needless to say our distinguished duo are blissfully unaware there is even a connection. They are not Iranian scholars, they are prisoners of a Classical education and reliant on Homer, Thucydides and the rest of the gang for their ancient history:
* The Mycenaean Greeks (1400–1200 BC) did not get as far as Spain
* The Classical Greeks (600–300 BC) took an interest in it, especially Cadiz
* The Classics say Cadiz was founded a hundred years after the Trojan War
* Messrs Daniel and Evans (et al) insist the Trojan War happened c 1250 BC
* which obliges D, E…n to conclude Cadiz was founded around 1150 BC.
Applied epistemologists prefer to inspect the evidence, not half-remembered lecture notes scribbled down thirty years before
| The only objects at Cadiz that could possibly pre-date 600 BC are three religious statuettes dredged up from the sea |
1150 or 650? If the Iliad was not helping, what about the Bible?
* The Old Testament refers to a mysterious country called Tarshish
* Tarshish sounds a little like Tartessos
* Tartessos was the ancient name for southern Spain
* If this is correct, Cadiz is the same age as David, Solomon & Co
* and the academics are home and dry.
Applied epistemologists point out the theory was first advanced in the sixteenth-century (A.D.) when Spanish researchers were asked to gather evidence that Spain was older than Portugal. It is something of a surprise to find British archaeologists of the twentieth century giving it credence but modern academia is far more effective at instilling orthodoxy than the Spanish Inquisition ever was.
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