From a reader ....
Dear Damien,
Thank you for taking the time to share with [us] your notes on the 19th dynasty! We really appreciate it.
Your approach and ours will yield different results, particularly with regard to stratigraphy because we start with some differing assumptions (presuppositions) that drive us to different answers.
From reading your materials, I gather the following starting assumptions:
A. The earth is millions of years old, and the Creation of Mankind or Creation Week, followed long epochs of geological history of life on Earth (dinosaurs and such).
B. The Deluge of Genesis was a local event in Mesopotamia, which laid down the "flood deposits" in Ur and elsewhere.
C. "Eden" was in the Levant and archaeology in the Levant begins with the cities built by the Predeluvial generations.
D. The Babel Culture is therefore likely to be found after said flood deposits.
Our quite different assumptions are as follows:
1. The entire geological column was deposited in recorded history (since the creation of Adam) and 99% of the sedimentary strata on Earth were deposited by the global cataclysm called "the Deluge".
2. The face of the pre-deluvial world was completely destroyed and re-arranged. The 8 survivors renamed the major geographical features after the places of their old home - thus we have Tigris and Euphrates, but the four rivers originating from one location is not to be found. Some predeluvial cities may be buried under sedimentary rock in certain locations around the world. However, there is no indication that the Garden of Eden was located in what is now the "Middle East". For all we know it could be buried under the Pacific, or could have been completely pulverized.
3. The entirety of archaeological deposits in the Levant were made by people who lived after the Deluge, the Babel culture will be the layer at the very bottom of the oldest sites - which in most cases has not been excavated due to high water table. The sites of the age of Babel will be very few, probably less than 20.
4. Genesis has internal evidence that alphabetic writing existing before the Deluge and the toledoth tablets were written in alphabetic script.
5. The invention of Middle Eastern pictographic writing (from which came cuneiform, hieroglyphics & hansi) was probably an immediate adaptation to the confusion of languages at Babel in 2192 BC. Pictures could be understood by everyone, even if alphabetic words could not. ( I realize that the oldest post-flood alphabets found are based on pictographs of animals/objects that start with said letter in proto-semitic and this was probably the original pre-Flood writing system. After the confusion of tongues, those who were literate would remember that writing was pictures, and having lost the ability to read the alphabetic script, would make up a new pictographs that was initially language neutral. Though later, they evolved into specialized scripts in each civilization's culture area. Hence Thoth [Heth close relative of Osiris (Nimrod)] was the re-inventor of writing in recorded history.)
6. The discovery of the original sites of any of the 6/8 cities mentioned in Genesis 10 would allow a precise calibration of archaeological dating methods, particularly Rehydroxylation dating, which measures the rate of rehydration of ceramic and brick.
Because of our different presuppositions, we will probably arrive at substantially different interpretations of archaeological finds.
Damien, we have greatly enjoyed your writings and learned a great deal from you. We may not always agree. But we hold you in highest respect.
Kyrie Eleison,
....
Damien Mackey's Reply
Dear ....
You have read me completely wrong on matters relating to early Genesis, as have others. See e.g.:
http://genesis1.blog.com/2010/10/20/robert-sungenis-adventures-in-blogland-or-wonderland/
I have never once claimed, nor do I personally believe, that: “The earth is millions of years old …”.
Nor have I ever claimed that: “… the Creation of Mankind or Creation Week, followed long epochs of geological history of life on Earth (dinosaurs and such)”. See my article, “Book of Origins”, at the same site:
http://genesis1.blog.com/2008/04/21/book-of-origins/
Nor do I believe that: “The Deluge of Genesis was merely a local event in Mesopotamia, which laid down the "flood deposits" in Ur and elsewhere”. My Flood model extended way beyond Mesopotamia, e.g. to Egypt and Ethiopia. See my article, “Just How ‘Global’ Was the Great Flood?”:
http://genesisflood.blog.com/2008/04/07/just-how-global-was-the-great-flood/
As to your own research, I suspect that you may be doing methodologically, at least in part, what the theoretical scientists do, conceiving an elaborate a priori mathematicised model and then force that model on the data, whether biblical, historical or scientific. Force the real data to fit the artificial model – and then declare that this is how things are. For a wonderful study of this type of methodology, see Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas and Kant:
http://brightmorningstar.blog.com/2008/10/21/gavin-ardleys-book-aquinas-and-kant/
That is probably why you are reluctant to include archaeology (stratigraphy) in the mix, as it will not yield to allowing a long separation of Egypt’s 19th dynasty from its 18th dynasty, as according to your Velikovskian (in this case) based model.
My best regards
Damien Mackey.
Reader replies ....
Damien, I apologize for misjudging you!
"That is probably why you are reluctant to include archaeology
(stratigraphy) in the mix, as it will not yield to allowing a long
separation of Egypt’s 19^th dynasty from its 18^th dynasty, as
according to your Velikovskian (in this case) based model".
Actually [we are] in the process of going back to the drawing board on the 19th Dynasty, and we have no a priori committment to separating it from the 18th. We are happy include archaeology as part of the puzzle when said archaeological evidence is concretely connected to inscriptions that allow firm identification of exactly what we're looking at - such as the Apis bull tombs. Egypt and Chaldea are rich in inscriptions, thankfully.
Unfortunately, much of the archaeology of Palestine, for example, is of bronze age material with no preserved writing. By correlating the pottery in these finds to excavations in Egypt and the Greek Isles, the erroneous chronology of Egypt led professional archaeologists to false conclusions. For example, Kathleen Kenyan's excavation of Jericho showed the fallen wall and burned city, but she concluded it is "much too old" to be from Joshua's invasion because it was an Early Bronze Age layer - and she is trapped by the assumptions and mistaken chronology of academic archaeology that the Early Bronze Age was in the second and third millennium BC.
Another example, Ugarit and Ebla apparently fluoresced during the era of David and Solomon and were therefore under Israeli hegemony, which explains all the Hebrew names - and also explains why Cyrus Gordon - a Jew - was able to decipher Ugaritic back in the 1950's. The languages of those cities have been mislabeled as "Canaanite" based on the assumption that they are 1-2 thousand years older than they really are. Given that all the written material from Palestine has real dates from after 1400 BC, it is unlikely that we have any written samples of the real Canaanite languages. Phoenecian was simply the coastal dialect of Hebrew, and the Phoenecian people were probably 90% or more Israelite under the kingship of the old Canaanite families and religion.
In other examples, archaeologists tend to calibrate their dating methods, such as thermoluminescence, based upon their erroneous chronological assumptions. This leads to field results that seem to confirm their chronology, but this results from circular reasoning.
Given the extremely poor track record of Archaeology at correctly identifying the cultural remains they are looking at - even for literate cultures like Ebla and Ugarit - we can accept archaeological evidence, but are loathe to accept the conclusions of archaeologists, particularly for sites that have not yielded any inscriptions.
The witness of written history must guide and interpret archaeology, rather than vice versa.
God bless ....
Damien Mackey
That all makes a lot of sense, and I am glad to hear that you ... are prepared to look objectively at the archaeology.
You would do well to focus on the 18th dynasty synchronisms - a modified Velikovsky, including now Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim.
All the best
Damien M.
