New Evidence for Ages in Chaos

Since the publication of Ages in Chaos: From the Exodus to King Akhnaton over twenty-five years have passed. Did the elapsed time supply additional proofs or disclose any weakness in the scheme? The fact that no section of that first edition was withdrawn in subsequent printings should be regarded as a sign that no disproving evidence has come from excavated ground or from deciphered texts and no disenchantment with the general scheme has taken place. On the contrary, many new proofs have presented themselves to verify the Reconstruction and more than one of them was clearly anticipated in Ages in Chaos and also indicated in advance.

I shall survey here some of the evidence that was adduced, and in doing so I shall follow approximately the order of chapters in Ages in Chaos I.

The catastrophic events that interrupted the flow of history served as the starting point of Ages in Chaos for the synchronization of the histories of the ancient East; in Worlds in Collision these cataclysms were reconstructed from historical documents and traditions of ancient races; in Earth in Upheaval the geological and paleontological evidence was presented to substantiate the same claims, and only some scattered archaeological evidence was adduced. The task of collecting and interpreting the archaeological evidence of a great natural upheaval in the area of the Near East was diligently performed by Claude F. A. Schaeffer of the College de France, the excavator of Ras Shamra-Ugarit. During the years of World War II and the years following he labored on his Stratigraphie comparee et chronologie de l’Asie occidentale. Working independently of me he came to the conclusion that great catastrophes of continental dimensions closed several historical ages; the greatest of them took place at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and actually caused its downfall; the earth was covered with a thick layer of ash, violent earthquakes shook the entire ancient East, from Troy at the Dardanelles to the Caucasus, Persia, Egypt; civilizations of the Middle Bronze Age were suddenly terminated; traffic, commerce, and pursuit of the arts ceased; populations of all countries were decimated; the survivors became vagrants; plagues took their toll; the climate suddenly changed, too. Thus Schaeffer and I, following different approaches, on very different material, came to identical conlusions concerning the great catastrophes in the historical past, their role in the termination of historical ages; in the case of the catastrophe that terminated the Middle Kingdom (Middle Bronze II) our views coincide to the day.

It is fair to point out that we are in agreement on the relative, not the absolute, chronology; yet Schaeffer concedes to me that some limited reduction of historical dates may be due—a view to which today more than one scholar tends.⁽¹⁾

Examining the stratigraphical evidence, Schaeffer did not investigate literary sources that refer to the very same catastrophes; but a natural upheaval that took place in a historical period in a country of advanced culture could not but leave a memory in historical documents. Thus Schaeffer stopped short of drawing the proper conclusions for the synchronization of the histories of Egypt and Israel with all the ramifications and consequences for the history of the Near and Middle East.

The Ipuwer papyrus (known also as “Admonistions of an Egyptian Sage” ) was recognized by me as a script of lament at the sight of an overwhelming natural catastrophe followed by the invasion of the Hyksos (i.e., the Amalekites) and by a social upheaval; I also contended that the text was composed in the beginning of the second Interregnum or Intermediate Period. At the time Ages in Chaos, Vol. I was printed, the accepted view was that the papyrus describes merely a social revolution during the First Interregnum (between the Old and Middle Kingdoms); my critics did not omit to stress my divergence from accepted notions.

In the 1964 volume of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology John van Seters published a paper entitled “A Date for the Admonitions in the Second Intermediate Period” ⁽²⁾—a view that since then has received acceptance from other scholars: notably W. F. Albright agreed with this verdict.⁽³⁾

Since several years the view that Papyrus Ipuwer describes a natural catastrophe was repeatedly presented—by A. Galanopoulos, geologist at the University of Athens, and by B. Heezen and D. Ninkovitch, geologists at Columbia University.⁽⁴⁾ Moreover, these scientists followed my interpretation of the papyrus as describing the plagues of Egypt known from the Book of Exodus and thus also my timetable.

An interesting bit of supporting evidence for the identification of the Hyksos with the Amalekites was offered by one of the students of my course “The Changing View of the Universe and of Man’s Past” at the New School for Social Research in New York in the fall term of 1964.

In the pronouncement of Balaam in which he referred to the Amalekites as “first among the nations” and to Agag their king, (Numbers 24: 7, 20) there is also a reference to the Israelites, or their king, destroying, sometime in the future, the Moabites and the “children of Seth” (24:17). There is no clear opinion among the commentators as to the identity of the “children of Seth,” but it is agreed that Seth is the same as Seth, son of Adam, and therefore the Biblical concordances have: ‘an unknown king or, race’ or ‘a tribe of unknown origin.’

The Hyksos worshipped the god Seth and also introduced him into the Egyptian pantheon. The term “Children of Seth” signifies worshippers of Seth, or Hyksos. Thus the references to the Amalekites and to the children of Seth by Balaam reveal the identity of these two designations.

The Biblical reference to the horsemen (“the horse and its rider” ) of the Egyptian host that perished in the Sea of Passage could be, and actually was, offered as an argument against the timetable of this reconstruction; it was generally assumed that the Hyksos arriving from Asia introduced the horse to the Valley of the Nile; therefore a Middle Kingdom’s “horse and its rider” would be an anachronism.

Walter B. Emery, digging at Buhen in the Sudan, announced that under a layer of ash, in a stratum dating from the Middle Kingdom, a skeleton of a horse was found, which fact disproves the old contention that the Hyksos were the first to introduce this animal into the Valley of the Nile.⁽⁵⁾ The layer of ash is apparently the residue of the catastrophe that terminated the age of the Middle Kingdom (Middle Bronze II) in Egypt; such a layer, according to Schaeffer, is found regularly in all excavated places from Troy to the Caucasus, Persia, and Egypt.

In Jericho Kathleen Kenyon found a great city wall that fell in an earthquake and an important city that was leveled in an assault following the earthquake; thereafter the city and its wall were not rebuilt, and only after several centuries was a very insignificant attempt to establish a new habitation made. Since the great wall of Jericho fell shortly after the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, there was no city to vanquish, neither was there a wall to fall down when Joshua and his troops approached Jericho. “It is a sad fact that the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within which the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace remains.” ⁽⁶⁾ This fact is regarded by M. Noth and others as the most flagrant discrepancy between Scriptural statements and archaeological discoveries, throwing a shadow on the historical veracity of the Hebrew Testament.⁽⁷⁾

But it is very different when the timescale of the present work is considered: the Exodus took place at the very end of the Middle Kingdom, actually within its last days; the crossing of the Jordan and the arrival at Jericho took place four or five decades later, in full agreement with the results of Kenyon’s digging. Thus the excavation of Jericho actually presents a verdict of vindication of the present reconstruction and a condemnation of the conventional schemes.⁽⁸⁾ Equally, J. Pritchard, excavating at Gibeon, another city memorable in connection with Joshua’s conquest, found to his surprise no Late Bronze strata at the excavated site.⁽⁹⁾

In the conquest of northern Canaan the battle of Joshua against a confederation of many city-kings at the “waters of Merom” was decisive. Upon victory Joshua took Hazor—“for Hazor beforetime [in the time of Joshua] was the head of all these kingdoms . . . and he burnt Hazor with fire. . .” (Joshua XI: 10, 11).

But Hazor soom rebounded and in the days of the Judges it dominated the entire country. “And the Lord sold them [the children of Israel] into the hand of Jabin, King of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor . . . for he had nine hundred chariots of iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel.” (Judges IV: 2, 3).

The deliverance of the children of Israel led by Deborah the prophetess and Barak the captain who defeated Sisera, the captain of King Jabin, is told in chapters four and five of the Book of Judges.

Since 1955 a team of Israeli archaeologists led by Yigael Yadin excavated at Hazor. Their chronological scale was the conventional timetable. In the Middle Bronze II (Middle Kingdom of Egypt) there was a huge settlement and fortress in Hazor; again it was a dominant city in Middle Bronze III, or the time of the Hyksos; it was not as prominent in the days of the Late Bronze (New Kingdom in Egypt); levels of a series of subsequent periods were discovered, also of the time of the el-Amarna correspondence (Hazor is mentioned twice there); next there were signs of destruction and fire; but in the level ascribed by Yadin to the period of the Judges there was no Hazor worth mentioning, and this despite the fact that according to the books of Joshua and Judges it was the most prominent city—actually the capital—of the greater Canaan, up to the slopes of Mount Hermon. This result, in conflict with the books of Joshua and Judges was most perplexing, and later caused the leader of the excavations to admit ruefully: “there existed no city (emphasis Yadin’s) at Hazor; thus Deborah’s battle had nothing to do with Jabin, king of Hazor.” ⁽¹⁰⁾ But according to the revised chronological table the Middle Bronze III—and thus also the huge fortress-city of Hazor—falls in the time of Conquest and Judges. In the days of the Kings it was only a regional town; it was burnt and leveled by Tiglath-Pileser III in -732; the signs of this destruction were also discovered by the expedition under Yadin. Thus the revised chronological timetable finds in Hazor an expected sequence of levels and no disagreement with Biblical data.

Of the archaeological discoveries related to the period of the downfall of the Hyksos-Amalekite empire made after the publication of Ages in Chaos I, the most important is a stele with King Kamose’s description of the siege of Avaris, the capital-fortress of the Hyksos.⁽¹¹⁾ Previously only one hieroglyphic text was known to deal with the subject—an inscription from the tomb of an officer who served under the king Amose (son or brother of Kamose). The newly discovered text makes even clearer the fact that the Egyptian native rulers had an all-important ally in the siege and capture of Avaris. Actually, Saul, King of Israel and his army were the main participants in that siege and conquest.

A large number of scarabs was found in Palestine and in Syria dating to the period of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt, recognized by us as contemporary with the House of David. Scarabs—seals of the pharaohs—and impressions of these seals in clay are as a rule found in these countries in much more recent levels than expected by the established chronology. Especially startling is the fact that the scarabs of Thutmose III are regularly found in levels supposedly five to six centuries younger; an accumulation of newly-found seals of Thutmose III since the establishment of the State of Israel has caused archaeologists to wonder increasingly at the regularity of the phenomenon;⁽¹²⁾ but this is exactly what must be expected.

To realize the state of affairs in Egyptian and Palestinian archaeology, the following observation of C. C. McCown, who dug at Tell en-Nasbeh,⁽¹³⁾ is worth considering; it is also symptomatic of all other places in Egypt and Palestine, and sounds very familiar to a reader of archaeological reports:

The scarabs and scaraboids [found in the place] are unanimously dated from the 18th Dynasty or later. Since, as all ceramic evidence clearly indicates, Tell en-Nasbeh was not occupied until the 19th Dynasty and since scarabs, especially those bearing the cartouch of Thutmose III, with his throne name, Men-kheper-re, were used and imitated for centuries after their original date, those which may have been made before 1200 have no chronological value whatever. The exact dating of such scarabs, which depends solely upon stylistic considerations, is a matter of uncertainty, upon which Egyptologists differ greatly.

The only scarabs which affect chronology seriously are those which the Egyptologists consulted have agreed in dating to the 25th [Ethiopian] Dynasty (712-663 B.C.).⁽¹⁴⁾

At Tell en-Nasbeh, various scarabs and the style of certain buildings speak for the fifteenth-thirteenth centuries, or the Eighteenth to Nineteenth Dynasties; but other evidence and the scarabs of the Ethiopian Dynasty speak for the end of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries. An archaeological solution was achieved by disregarding half the evidence; in an historical construction in which only the Ethiopian period is properly anchored in time, it is inevitable, as in this instance, that the scarabs of all other periods would appear to be in conflict with the established timetable of Egyptian chronology and the sequence of dynastic succession.

In my own historical reconstruction, however, the Ethiopian Dynasty ruled between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties; and therefore objects of closely following epochs found in the same place do not require the disqualification of half the evidence—the other scarabs and seal impressions found at Tell en-Nasbeh have an equally well-founded chronological value.

The question of whether frankincense was grown in Palestine is of historical importance for the problem of identifying God’s Land, the place to which Queen Hatshepsut traveled. Because of the frankincense, the produce of the land, the place was thought to be in southern Arabia or Ethiopia. ⁽¹⁵⁾

I maintained that in Biblical times frankincense grew in Palestine. (Ages in Chaos, pp. 141, 172-173). The recent excavations at Ein Gedi disclosed that frankincense actually was grown in the tropical climate on the shores of the Dead Sea.⁽¹⁶⁾

Some of the supporting evidence came from the literature of earlier years, not exploited in Ages in Chaos. W. F. Albright came to the same conclusion:

Contemporary Egyptian inscriptions almost vanish after about 1750 B.C. and do not resume their normal flow until about 1580; Babylonian inscriptions fail us entirely after the fall of Babylon cir. 1600 and are almost completely lacking until after 1400 B.C.; Assyrian records cease about 1780 and (except for a few short inscriptions from cir. 1570-1520) do not appear again until after 1450 B.C. There are hardly any contemporary Hittite inscriptions of the Old Empire, but even later copies of early documents in the archives of Khattusas break off about 1550 and contemporary inscriptions do not begin until after 1400 B.C. In short, it is certain that there was a catastrophic interruption of the normal flow of ancient history.⁽¹⁷⁾

The Greek Septuagint (“translation of the Seventy” ) that dates from the third century before the present era and similarly the Vulgate (the earliest Latin translation) see in Shwa (Seba) the personal name of the Queen, not the name of a region (Regina Seba).

As to some Egyptian reference or references to Punt as located in the south, a point brought up by a few of my readers, the following needs to be said: the opening passage in the History of Herodotus ⁽¹⁸⁾ tells that the Phoenicians came to their country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from their original home on the shore of the Erythrean Sea, by which the Red Sea and also the Indian Ocean are known to have been meant by the Greeks. This would explain such early reference. But in another Egyptian text Punt is referred to as being to the north of Egypt.⁽¹⁹⁾ Besides, we should be mindful of the fact elucidated in Worlds in Collision that in historical times the cardinal points have been—and more than once—reversed, or, as it is out in a hieroglyphic text, “the south becomes north, and the Earth turns over.” ⁽²⁰⁾

The statement of an Egyptian official from the time of the Old Kingdom that he visited eleven times Byblos and Punt ⁽²¹⁾ should not be interpreted, as some scholars wished that he went this number of times to South Arabia or Somaliland, and as many times to the Phoenician coast. Actually, the ships which in the New Kingdom traded with Punt were called “Byblos-ships” ⁽²²⁾ Cf. also E. Danelius, “The Identification of the Biblical ‘Queen of Sheba’ with Hatshepsut, ‘Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia,’” KRONOS I.4 and II.1 (1976).

Finally, the written account of Thutmose III’s campaign to Phoenicia-Palestine uses the same geographical name: Divine Land, that we found in the travelogue of Queen Hatshepsut, from whom Thutmose took over the throne.

In a paper printed in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1940, Professor Julius Lewy (“The Sulman Temple in Jerusalem” ) proved that in Jerusalem in the days of the el-Amarna correspondence there was such a temple; the king of Jerusalem refers to it in his letters, and it must have had a dominant position in the capital city. Knudtzon, the translator of the tablets, read the ideogram, “House of Ninib,” and I followed Knudtzon and tried to interpret such references in the letters of the king of Jerusalem in the light of events that were taking place. Lewy, however, had already shown why the ideogram must be read “Temple of Sulman” ; he interpreted the name as another version of the deity Salem. In a private discussion with me Professor Albright expressed his disagreement with Lewy’s interpretation of Sulman as the name of a deity, it not being supplied with a sign indicating divinity; but this only gives validity to my interpretation of “Temple of Sulman” as the Temple of Solomon. In the Hebrew Bible the name of the king (Shlomo), derived from the word “peace” shalom, has no final letter “n,” but the Septuagint of the third pre-Christian century—the earliest known translation of the Scriptures into any language—has a final “n” in Solomon’s name.⁽²³⁾

Letters written by the king of Jerusalem in the ninth century should conceivably contain a reference to the Temple of Solomon that dominated the capital. The letter #290 of the el-Amarna collection, written by the king of Jerusalem to report the approach of Trans-Jordan tribes, refers to the Temple of Sulman. In Second Chronicles (20:4-5), in the story of such an invasion, the king of Jerusalem gathered his people in the Temple and prayed to forestall the capture of the city.

It was brought out that the names of the cities in Israel and Judah as known from the books of the Old Testament correspond in pronunciation to the Egyptian usage under the Eighteenth dynasty, but differ from the pronunciation under the Nineteenth.⁽²⁴⁾ Yet, according to the accepted chronology, the events described in the Old Testament under the Dynasty of David took place not during the reign of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, not even during the Nineteenth, but much later, under the Twenty-first to Twenty-fifth Dynasties. Also the offices under the kings of the House of David are very similar to the officies in the palace of the pharaohs of the Eighteenth dynasty, supposedly five or six centuries earlier.⁽²⁵⁾

The names on the ostraca (inscribed potsherds) found in Samaria closely resemble the names found in the el-Amarna colllection of letters, on tablets written from Syria-Palestine, a fact that had been observed by J. G. Duncan ⁽²⁶⁾ and that is better understandable in the light of what is said in Chapters VI to VIII of Ages in Chaos I.

In Chapter VIII the theme is developed that the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III of the ninth century was a contemporary of Pharaoh Akhnaton, and the name Burraburiash, signed on his letters, is the Babylonian throne name of the Assyrian king, it being known that at Nineveh and at Babylon the kings of Assyro-Babylonia used different throne names; I also claimed that Shalmaneser received large quantities of art objects in ivory from Akhnaton who, in disagreement with the conventional timetable, reigned in the ninth century. The Assyrian king actually demanded the despatch of objects of ivory, and gave these orders: “Let experts, who are with thee, make animals, either of land or of river, as if they were alive. . .” Akhnaton enumerated the huge quantities of carved ivory sent to the king of the Double Stream Kingdom, and among other objects we read of “six beast-paws of ivory, nine plants of ivory . . . twenty-nine gherkin oil vessels of ivory . . . forty-four oil vessels of ivory, three hundred and seventy-five oil vessels of ivory . . . nineteen breast ornaments of ivory” —the list is excessively long.

On November 26, 1961, the New York Times carried this message from London:

When archaeologists dug into the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in Iraq earlier this year, they were suprised to find not Assyrian but ‘Egyptian’ carvings. The explanation given this week by David Oates, Director of the British School of Archaeology’s Nimrud Expedition, is that the archaeologists have dug into an ancient Assyrian antique shop. The ‘Egyptian’ carvings had been cut to satisfy their rich clients’ demands for foreign ‘antiquities.’”

Nimrud, or Calah of ancient times, was the military headquarters of Shalmaneser, and the excavations actually “have been concentrated on Fort Shalmaneser, headquarters of the Assyrian army from the ninth to the end of the eighth century B.C.” A statue of King Shalmaneser III was found, and according to an inscription on it the king considered it a good likeness of himself.

The site that has been excavated consists of three large courtyards surrounded by store-houses, workshops, administrative offices and barrack rooms.” A military camp is certainly not a natural place for forgeries in foreign antiquities in ivory.

“One chamber, 90 feet in length, is packed by them [ivories],” and “three seasons’ work has not emptied it. Two more rooms known to contain ivories have not yet been opened.”

“The carvings are of a style that antedates by hundreds of years the period in which they were made. If found elsewhere, they would have been identified as Egyptian.” The findings of this cache, in the military headquarters of Shalmaneser III, of a multitude of objects in ivory, many of which depict animals, of Egyptian make ⁽²⁷⁾ and of a time presumably by centuries preceding the time of this king, was anticipated in Ages in Chaos.

Archaeology in general came into more and more embarassing situations. Again and again, five to six “dark centuries” were found inserted into the histories of the peoples of antiquity: no literary document, practically no sign of habitation or relic of culture could be discovered. This is the case of Greece and the Aegean region, Crete,, Asia Minor, and Cyprus, too. Ekrem Akurgall, professor at Ankara University, in his Die Kunst Anatoliens von Homer bis Alexander (Berlin, 1961), writes of the dunkles Zeitalter (Dark Ages): “The catastrophic events that took place about -1200 appear to be of such great impact that today, despite the energetic digging of the last decades, the period from 1200 to 750 for the most part of the Anatolian area lies still in complete darkness.”

One of the most important and far-reaching theses of this Reconstruction is in the conclusion that these so-called Dark Ages of the Greek and Anatolian histories are but an artefact of the historians, and never took place. The Mycenaean Age was followed by the Ionic times with no centuries intervening; ⁽²⁸⁾ the break in culture is but the consequence of natural upheavals of the eighth century and of the subsequent migrations of peoples. The Ionic culture must show great affinity with the Mycenaean heritage; therefore, I have also claimed that the Linear B script would prove Greek; but this was not a view that had many supporters.

In 1950 the eminent authority on Homeric Greece, H.L. Lorimer, in her Homer and the Monuments wrote of this script and of the efforts to read it: “The result is wholly unfavorable to any hope entertained that the language of the inscriptions might be Greek.” ⁽²⁹⁾

On the occasion of addressing the Forum of the Graduate College of Princeton University on October 14, 1953, I once more formulated my expectations:

“I expect new evidence from the Minoan scripts . . . I believe that when the Minoan writings unearthed in Mycenae are deciphered they will be found to be Greek. I also claim that these texts are of a later date than generally believed.” And I quoted myself from my Theses.

Only half a year later, on April 9, 1954, the New York Times carried on its front page a United Press news report that the ancient script “that for the last half-century and longer has baffled archaeologists and linguists has been decoded finally—by an amateur. The riddle was solved by Michael Ventris, an English architect.” The language proved to be Greek, to the surprise of many scholars; the entire field of early Greek civilization experienced the greatest shock since the discovery of Troy. In the deciphered tablets the names of the deities of the Greek pantheon, supposedly “created” by Homer and Hesiod in the seventh pre-Christian century were found written in the Linear B script—to the even greater surprise of the scholarly world.

When enbarking on the task of deciphering Minoan Linear B, Ventris expressed his belief that it was not Greek—he worked on the premise that it was Etruscan; the inquiry ⁽³⁰⁾ that he sent out to a large number of classicists in 1949 as to the probable language of the script did not bring even a single answer favoring Greek. ⁽³¹⁾

With this imposing score of confirmations from the field of archaeology, ever growing since 1952, for my work of reconstruction of ancient history, the question could be asked: which test, besides a complete radiocarbon survey of the New Kingdom in Egypt would I desire and which discovery reflecting on chronological problems would I anticipate in the years to come? Compelling evidence will continue to arrive from almost every excavated place and there will be an ever-growing number of surprises. I shall select here one site of great promise for excavation. the identification of Avaris and el-Arish was offered by me as a crucial test—for my equation of the Hyksos (called Amu by the Egyptians) and the Amalekites, one of the basic contentions of Ages in Chaos: “generally, Avaris is looked for in the eastern part of the Delta, from Pelusium to Heliopolis, passing through Tell el Her, el-Qantara, San el-Hagar (Tanis), Tell el-Yahudieh,” wrote P. Montet in Le Drame d’Avaris. The site as identified in Ages in Chaos is quite a distance northeast from the Delta: el-Arish is at the wadi of the same name, known in the Old Testament as Nakhal Mizraim (“Stream of Egypt” ), the historical frontier between Egypt and Palestine.