Single Combat during the Trojan War

[Sean Manning]

John Bimson and Juan Tebes applied the new chronology to the Timna site and found that only by revising the timeline by the full 250 years could the previous inconsistencies between the Egyptian and Assyrian dating systems be resolved.

That sound very promising, because that is the main problem of redating a chronology - it still has to fit with all the other chronologies. If you shorthen one by 250 years, you must perhaps do that to every related one. Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, etc.

James' argument is that the Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, and so on chronologies all depend on Egypt to attach dates to the fuzzier parts of the king lists. A big part of his book is showing where absolute dates in one region depend on another, and arguing that the traditional dates for Egypt are the lynchpin to the whole system.

I haven't studied LBA chronology enough to have an opinion myself, but even James' critics (like the Aegean Dendrochronology Project) seem to agree that Bronze Age archaeologists have to do more absolute dating to test the numbers currently attached to relative dates. Also, Egyptologists seem to have given up using the Sothic cycle to fix some dates in Egyptian history.