Egyptologists say that they can retrocalculate, by means of dead reckoning, from securely dated later dynasties back through the Third Intermediate Period to the New Kingdom. Is this true?
This claim is frequently made but is false. The lynchpin for the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt is the identification of Shoshenq I (founder of the 22nd Dynasty) with a character mentioned in the Old Testament. According to the First Book of Kings “Shishak king of Egypt” invaded Judah in the fifth year of Rehoboam (c. 925 BC). Since Champollion’s time it has been assumed that Shoshenq I, who campaigned in Palestine in his Year 21, was the same person as Shishak. This meant that Egyptologists could use biblical chronology to date the beginning of Shoshenq’s reign, and hence that of the 22nd Dynasty, to 945 BC. Various reign-lengths were then assigned to fill up the time between this point and the firmly fixed dates at the end of the TIP about 670 BC. Yet Kitchen claims that he arrived at a 945 date for Shoshenq I by ‘dead reckoning’, i.e. by adding up the reigns of the pharaohs involved back from the 7th century BC. This he manifestly did not do. To take just one example, Pharaoh Ta
Related Questions
- Egyptologists say that they can retrocalculate, by means of dead reckoning, from securely dated later dynasties back through the Third Intermediate Period to the New Kingdom. Is this true?
- Is the work presented at the design competition considered to be non-archival, which means it can later be submitted to another venue requiring original work?
- What were the influences that the Xia and Shang dynasties have on later chinese history?
