Chronological dating

Chronological dating, or simply dating, is the process of attributing to an object or event a date in the past, allowing such object or event to be located in a previously established chronology. Quotes about Barry Strauss’ excellent The Trojan War using conventional chronology, warns the reader that ‘most dating is relative and approximate rather than absolute.’ Barry Strauss in: Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) The book encapsulating it was Centuries of Darkness in 1991. The authors were not fringe mavericks. Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University wrote in the book’s Forword, ‘They [the authors]indicate that the chronology for the time period in question, the so called “Third Intermediate Period”, is altogether shaky. They show that there are problems with the historical chronology of the Near East. And the sad fact is that the historical chronology for the rest of the Mediterranean until well after 700 BC rests on these. It is already widely known that the chronology for early Italy, during the Iron Age period, down to and including the foundation of Rome, is a complete shambles.’ He concluded, ‘I feel their critical analysis is right and that a chronological revolution is on the way.’ Colin Renfrew, in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) Centuries of Darkness was particularly critical of modern Egyptologists. ‘Early Egyptologists were usually more tentative about their chronology, continually revising their opinions in the light of fresh evidence. Sadly the study of Egyptian chronology seems to have become so ossified that it cannot question its fundamental assumptions, accepted more for familiarity than for any basis in fact.’ Centuries of Darkness quoted in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) Sir Alan Gardiner’s 1961 Egypt of the Pharaohs devoted a whole chapter to the dating problem. ‘In spite of all defects,’ he wrote, ‘this division into dynasties has taken so firm a root in the literature of Egyptology that there is little chance of its ever being abandoned. In the forms in which the book has reached us, there are inaccuracies of the most glaring kind…Africanus and Eusabius often do not agree; for example Africanus assigns nine kings to Dyn. XXII, while Eusabius only has three. Sometimes all that is vouchsafed to us is the number of kings in a dynasty and their city of origin…the lengths of reigns frequently differ in the two versions…the reconstructed Manetho remains full of imperfections…. Nonetheless, [it]still dominates our studies.’ Despite decades of archaeological discoveries and scholarly research since then, his conclusion is still relevant. ‘We are dealing with a civilisation thousands of years old and of which only tiny fragments have survived.’ Sir Alan Gardiner, quoted in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) A. R. Burn in the 1930s had doubted the conventional chronology of ancient Greece, also using the Spartan king list, estimating the end of Mycenaean Greece about 1000 BC but felt compelled to withdraw, given archaeologists’ certainty, but his 1966 swansong The Pelican History of Greece reiterated his doubts. ‘If the dates computed by Greek scholars for the fall of Troy (ranging from 1334 to 1127 with 1183 [BC] the most popular) were approximately correct’, he wrote, ‘it was largely by luck for the genealogies, by which those scholars bridged the Dark Age were “heraldically” linked up with the names of epic heroes and the sons of Helen…Those of the kings of Sparta seem to have enough authentic generations to take us back to about the 9th century [BC] and thence…joined up to their heroic ancestor Herakles and to do it their earlier generations are given the improbably long average lengths of 39 years; Spartan reigns in historic times average about 25…Greek tradition may be perfectly right in saying that in the second generation after the siege of Troy, the heroic dynasties fell.’ A. R. Burn, quoted in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) Robert G. Morkot has come to the alarming conclusion that because Egyptologists regard Egypt in isolation, ‘the minutiae of chronology does not matter because at least for the New Kingdom, the relative sequence of kings is certain so the absolute dates are less important.’ Robert G. Morkot , quoted in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) Of the 3rd millennium BC , Marc van de Mieroop confessed ‘the chronology is confused owing to the Sumerian king list’s practice of listing contemporaneous dynasties as successive.’ Marc van de Mieroop , quoted in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022) External links Category:history