The absolute chronology of the Ancient Near East

[E.P. Grondine]

I posted the best chronology of the ancient near east here:

http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... =10&t=2247

It is based on primary sources, and is unique in that it makes use of our new knowledge of impact events as a significant force on man's physical and cultural evolution.

Incidentally, an OT comparison is included for those who are interested in the study of OT composition.

What brings about this repost? The amazing ignorance demonstrated here of Hurrian (pie language, apparently), the finds at Ebla, and the inscription of Naram Sim.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Where did you acquire that elegant eloquence, E.P.?

[Minimalist]

As you keep pointing to that same post, EP allow me to quote my comment on it.

You have complained about being called a "kook" but, when you start talking about Atlantis you have to realize that it is a risk you take. That word is a lightning rod for the scientific community.

Two hundred years of archaeological excavation in Egypt has failed to uncover any evidence of any "exodus" in 1628 BC or any other time. This is a terrible annoyance to fundamentalists ( life is unfair to those people) but I can't worry about them.

[E.P. Grondine]

As you keep pointing to that same post, EP allow me to quote my comment on it.

You have complained about being called a "kook" but, when you start talking about Atlantis you have to realize that it is a risk you take. That word is a lightning rod for the scientific community.

Plato's tale of Atlantis is frequently discussed by Middle Bronze Age Aegean scholars, and they are not considered "kooks", nor are they attacked in the scientific community. In fact, they are the part of the scientific community which specializes in that area.

Let me start this by repeating Aristotle's comment that Atlantis was simply created by Plato to make a point. Aristotle knew Plato personally, and I agree with him.

But Plato was a great writer, and his tale of Atlantis has fascinated and been taken literally by nearly everyone reading it ever since he first constructed it. That power to create belief has most recently been used in cult archaeology, in other words by those supporting and promoting cult leaders creating a bogus history to support their theosophist religions - in other words the cults directly derived from Augustus and Alice LePlongeon's confusion. Their activities most likely explain why Plato's tale of Atlantis is now becoming such a lightening rod.

To end some of that confusion, here is a short summary of my view of some of the components Plato used in his construction of his morality tale: The Great Atlantic impact mega-tsunami took place exactly in the middle of the invasions of Egypt by the Sea Peoples. This impact mega-tsunami must have hit those sea peoples based in Spain very hard. The Egyptians were employing Greek mercenaries at the time to repulse their attacks.

Plato seems to have combined memories of these events with memories of both Thera and the Lycian trade federation (the "Minoans") and then added in dates from the Holocene Start Impacts.

Two hundred years of archaeological excavation in Egypt has failed to uncover any evidence of any "exodus" in 1628 BC or any other time. This is a terrible annoyance to fundamentalists ( life is unfair to those people) but I can't worry about them.

You seem to be unfamiliar with Ahmose, or his Tempest Stela, describing the eruption of Thera. It is known that earlier there was a massive earthquake of the African fault preceding the eruption, one which likely released Nile source caustic lake water into the Nile River, and thus perhaps the plagues.

Ahmose expelled the Hyksos. My current working hypothesis is that some of the ancient Israelites (related to the working of the south Jordan rift copper mines) were vassals to the Hyksos, and provided them with a line of communication to Egypt's east with Egypt's Nubian enemies to her south.

You have your fundamentalists to deal with, min, and I have mine. The following link agrees with my current opinion on OT construction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohath

In other words, there were written sources used in OT construction. But since my stroke this kind of work is really beyond me, and the suggestions you make to me for further study in this area are useless as this point. Memories of earlier work are still here ( and by the way I am tying this reply using one finger on my left hand and taking a long time to do it), but that part of my brain which looked at this earlier...

I am not a "fundamentalist", min. I can only hope that this is clear to you now. But when you've been under attack for a long while, it is sometimes difficult to tell friends from enemies.

[Minimalist]

and they are not considered "kooks",

Well...some are but in one post or another you indicated that you had been called that word yourself.


Anyway, here's my problem with all this. Just for shits and giggles I ran the phrase "Great Atlantic Mega-tsunami" through Google and got 8 hits. Two were duplicates and nothing but a document tree, anyway. 1 was a 404 error. 2 were from some email archive site and mainly seemed to be your writing and 3 were advertisements for your book. There is not a lot of chatter out there about that event.

As a second test I ran "Ullikummi Impact Event" through Google and got 3 hits: 1 was to CCNet, 7 years ago, and seems to have been written by you. The other two hits were to the Walls of Jericho thread in this forum. Again, if this happened it is hardly setting the scientific community on fire.

Lastly, I dug up this photo of the Naram-Sin stele, which is in the Louvre.



I'm not sure what that is supposed to show but I have to concede that it does exist.

Anyway, Plato was a great writer but so was Hemingway and he was a novelist. Plato was a philosopher and one presumes that he had a reason for telling the story but that doesn't make it any more true than Farewell to Arms. The Greek town of Helike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helike sank into the Gulf of Corinth in 373 BC...curiously while Plato was alive. In 360 BC Plato wrote the dialogues of Timmaeus and Critias which tell the Atlantis story. I'm sorry but this is simply not that mysterious a connection. Certainly not worthwhile for people to go jack-assing across the world from Peru to Cyprus "looking" for Atlantis.

Now, as I've said before, if someone wishes to go looking for Atlantis and they can either fund the activity themselves or get someone to write them a big check then more power to them. Who knows, they may find something else of value. But "Athens" defeating the Atlanteans 9,000 years before Solon simply sounds like a lot of jingoistic claptrap designed to make the Athenians of Plato's time ( when the city was no longer the leader of anything ) feel better about themselves.

[Minimalist]

You seem to be unfamiliar with Ahmose, or his Tempest Stela, describing the eruption of Thera. It is known that earlier there was a massive earthquake of the African fault preceding the eruption, one which likely released Nile source caustic lake water into the Nile River, and thus perhaps the plagues.

No, I'm quite familiar with Ahmose and the "tempest stele" describes Ahmose's response to a bad rainstorm thanks mainly to the acclaimed international idiot, Simcha Jacobovici, who tried to shoehorn that very artifact into his Exodus Decoded pile of shit.
As Chris Heard notes at his Higgaion review of that film.

The Ahmose stela. The Ahmose Stela predates 1500—Jacobovici’s date for the exodus—by several decades, and the “tempest” described on that stela does not closely resemble the biblical plagues story, as Jacobovici claims it does.

This site contains a translation of the Tempest Stele which is called that because it describes a serious storm which flooded some temples and the pharaoh's efforts to assist the victims. If only G. W. Bush had responded as well to Katrina!

http://www.therafoundation.org/articles ... nofahmose/

[jw1815]

What brings about this repost? The amazing ignorance demonstrated here of Hurrian (pie language, apparently), the finds at Ebla, and the inscription of Naram Sim.

Amazing ignorance, indeed, but whose? Hurrian was neither PIE nor Semitic. It belonged to the Urartian linguistic family. Its speakers are believed to have come from the Armenian mountain region. The Armenian language contains several loan words from Hurrian. Hurrian itself contained many loan words from the Indo-Aryan PIE sub group, particularly relating to horses. Hurrians had several PIE names among their aristocracy, but the Hurrian language and culture were most definitely not PIE.

Hurrians were not Sumerians, either, and Sumerian also wasn't a PIE language, so I'm not sure what the reference to the Naram Sim stele was about in that context. Sumerian was a language isolate, meaning that, like Basque (Euskara), it had no known linguistic relatives, no family grouping to which it belonged.

[Minimalist]

There inevitably seems to be a "silly season" as noted in the article below, with any find in the entire Middle East as bible-thumpers instantly jump on it and claim "proof" for their cherished fairy tales. Later, as more sober science takes the time to study the finds, those early claims fall by the wayside. So it is with Ebla, too.

http://cojs.org/cojswiki/Ur_and_Jerusal ... /Dec_1983.

According to Genesis 11:28–31, Abraham was born in the city of Ur. Contrary to earlier reports, the name Ur does not appear in the mid-third millennium cuneiform tablets uncovered at the ancient city of Ebla, now in Syria. That is the latest word from Ebla’s Italian team of archaeologists and epigraphers, who toured the United States last spring. This revision is the most recent of a long series concerning the contents of the tablets, especially as they relate to the Bible.1

The name Jerusalem is another withdrawn claim. There is no reference to Jerusalem in the Ebla tablets, the Italians say, nor is there any mention of Megiddo, Lachish, Shechem or the Biblical Cities of the Plain. The city of Kish does appear in the texts, but not Uruk, Nippur or Assur.

[E.P. Grondine]

Anyway, here's my problem with all this. Just for shits and giggles I ran the phrase "Great Atlantic Mega-tsunami" through Google and got 8 hits. Two were duplicates and nothing but a document tree, anyway. 1 was a 404 error. 2 were from some email archive site and mainly seemed to be your writing and 3 were advertisements for your book. There is not a lot of chatter out there about that event.

The description "Great Atlantic Impact Mega-Tusnami" is my own. And there is not a lot of chatter about it, not yet. When the USGS cores from the Carolinas come in, that will likely change.

As a second test I ran "Ullikummi Impact Event" through Google and got 3 hits: 1 was to CCNet, 7 years ago, and seems to have been written by you. The other two hits were to the Walls of Jericho thread in this forum. Again, if this happened it is hardly setting the scientific community on fire.

Actually, the translation was Guterbok's. Yep, it is not setting the scientific community on fire.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to show but I have to concede that it does exist.

Naram Sin himself told us - read the chronology.

[Minimalist]

By way of comparison....

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,470,000 for Bigfoot [definition]. (0.24 seconds)

[E.P. Grondine]

No, I'm quite familiar with Ahmose and the "tempest stele" describes Ahmose's response to a bad rainstorm thanks mainly to the acclaimed international idiot, Simcha Jacobovici, who tried to shoehorn that very artifact into his Exodus Decoded pile of shit. As Chris Heard notes at his Higgaion review of that film.

The Ahmose stela. The Ahmose Stela predates 1500—Jacobovici’s date for the exodus—by several decades, and the “tempest” described on that stela does not closely resemble the biblical plagues story, as Jacobovici claims it does.

This site contains a translation of the Tempest Stele which is called that because it describes a serious storm which flooded some temples and the pharaoh's efforts to assist the victims. If only G. W. Bush had responded as well to Katrina!

http://www.therafoundation.org/articles ... nofahmose/

There is a real problem here as the eruption of Thera is known to have occured at 1628 BCE by tree ring data. When we take a look at some of the dates for Ahmose, there is a hundred year difference.

[E.P. Grondine]

What brings about this repost? The amazing ignorance demonstrated here of Hurrian (pie language, apparently), the finds at Ebla, and the inscription of Naram Sim.

Amazing ignorance, indeed, but whose? Hurrian was neither PIE nor Semitic. It belonged to the Urartian linguistic family. Its speakers are believed to have come from the Armenian mountain region. The Armenian language contains several loan words from Hurrian. Hurrian itself contained many loan words from the Indo-Aryan PIE sub group, particularly relating to horses. Hurrians had several PIE names among their aristocracy, but the Hurrian language and culture were most definitely not PIE.

Hurrians were not Sumerians, either, and Sumerian also wasn't a PIE language, so I'm not sure what the reference to the Naram Sim stele was about in that context. Sumerian was a language isolate, meaning that, like Basque (Euskara), it had no known linguistic relatives, no family grouping to which it belonged.

I suppose it depends on whose definition of PIE you use. Does the one you're using include Lycian?

IMO, Sumerian likely had cognate languages among the early languages of India.

[Minimalist]

Here's a full translation of the stele...I guess the text is written on the back?

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sitch ... ses01a.htm


Other than talking about a storm and a "rising deluge" I'm not sure what you mean.

[Minimalist]

There is a real problem here as the eruption of Thera is known to have occured at 1628 BCE by tree ring data. When we take a look at some of the dates for Ahmose, there is a hundred year difference.

Precisely.

But Jacobovici never lets "facts" get in the way.


This attack by Upper Egypt ( Kamose ) against Lower Egypt (the Hyksos) took quite a while before it was successful. It is not unreasonable to think that the effects of Thera, happening 75-100 years before Ahmose, did weaken the Hyksos regime. Certainly, they held the coast and were more likely to have been harmed by whatever fallout reached Egypt. The fact that Manfred Bietak found such minimal residue of volcanic ash at Avaris indicates that the bulk of the ash cloud headed northeast as the prevailing winds would indicate. Certainly the tsunamis would have wiped out any fishing villages along the Med but would anyone lose a lot of sleep over the loss of a few villages? More likely, the Hyksos suffered because their trading partners in Crete and Cyprus, etc. were devastated. The resulting loss of wealth may well have encouraged the Upper Egyptians to strike while their opponents were weak. That, at least, makes sense from a strategic point of view.

[jw1815]

I suppose it depends on whose definition of PIE you use. Does the one you're using include Lycian?

Not sure why you’re throwing Lycian into the mix, but I’ll answer your question in the course of clarifying some terms.

A simple definition for any linguistic family is a shared core of words derived from common roots and a shared pattern of grammatical structure among member languages.

The proto language of a linguistic family is the oldest or “original” form, before it evolved into various branches and sub branches of different, but related languages.

So, PIE does not apply to Lycian, although IE does. Lycian was part of the Luwian sub group of Anatolian IE languages. There were other branches of IE at the time, so this is too late in time to be calling these languages PIE. Hittite was also an Anatolian IE language. Is it possible that you’re confusing Hittite with Hurrian because their speakers were near each other geographically and their cultures interacted so closely at times? However, the two languages, Hittite and Hurrian, were from different linguistic families.

In summary, linguists include Lycian as well as Hittite into the ancient Anatolian branch of IE, but neither one is the proto language for the IE linguistic family, so PIE doesn’t apply to them. Hurrian was not a member of the IE family. It was a member of the Urartian linguistic family, related to other Urartian languages.

IMO, Sumerian likely had cognate languages among the early languages of India.

Even if this were true, which it doesn't appear to be, it would have no bearing on the fact that Hurrian is not IE. And there’s no linguistic family relationship between Sumerian and Lycian, or between Hurrian and Lycian.

Sumerian did not share a common grammatical structure with IE languages, nor common root morphemes for core vocabulary.

http://history-world.org/sumerian_language.htm

The linguistic affinity of Sumerian has not yet been successfully established. Ural-Altaic (which includes Turkish), Dravidian, Brahui, Bantu, and many other groups of languages have been compared with Sumerian, but no theory has gained common acceptance. Sumerian is clearly an agglutinative language in that it preserves the word root intact while expressing various grammatical changes by adding on prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. The difference between nouns and verbs, as it exists in the Indo-European or Semitic languages, is unknown to Sumerian. The word dug alone means both "speech" and "to speak" in Sumerian, the difference between the noun and the verb being indicated by the syntax and by different affixes.