The end of bronze age

[Matthew Amt]

Can you, Matt, or Dan, point me to sources on the current state of opinion on the timeline? (or give us a synopsis if you have the time)

Well, I DO hope that most authorities now agree that some sort of adjustment has to be made! In some cases, however, it seems to be the equivalent of grudgingly acknowledging that the living room is on fire by simply closing the dining room doors and carrying on with dinner...

There are certainly holdouts who end up sounding a lot like the guys who went after Gallileo. There was apparently an entire conference held years ago to try to "debunk" the book by James et al., though I don't believe the authors were invited to present their findings to an open-minded audience. Basically it was a kangaroo court. You hear a lot of mud-slinging, character assassination, comparisons to the aliens-built-the-pyramids types, and so on. No reasoned scientific debate by the high chronology crowd so far. Oh, there was one article that attempted to prop up the high chronology with carbon 14 dates, but it seems that only one of the samples they presented was both creditable and relevant. And it ignored that fact that it has become regular practice to simply ignore carbon 14 dates when they fail to match the excavators' preconceptions. Which is all too often...

I read not long ago that carbon 14 dates in Egypt and the east were being calibrated by objects of "known date", a blatant circular argument! If one of King Tut's chairs, for example, yields an uncalibrated date of 1075 BC, but we KNOW he died in 1376, we just tack on 300 years, and presto! Perfect proof once again! You see the problem.

Since most of the Assyrian dates actually depend on cross-references to the Egyptian chronology, it should all work out pretty well when the Egyptian dates are lowered. All the dependent parallels and comparisons will remain intact, in fact in most cases even more are possible. And we can give up all these desperate theories about how cultures were "revived" after the Dark Ages, or how so many artifacts were kept all that tiime as heirlooms, etc.

Mind you, I'm not an academic, so the "Inquisition" can't burn me at the stake or ruin my career! I can keep up the fight with impunity. But that also means that the hard-noses can simply ignore me as a silly amateur. In all fairness, some of those folks have long careers in this field, and it's not easy for them to toss out 30 years of research and publication with a big "OOPS--Never mind!" But a little more open-mindedness and less vitriol would be nice.

Anyway, the website for "Centuries of Darkness" can summarize the whole problem better than I can:

http://www.centuries.co.uk/

Khairete,

Matthew