Any attempt to précis
this vast span of
history inevitably runs
the risk of obscuring
social dynamics and
ordinary people amid a
roll call of dynasties
and great men and women.
While the continuity of
so many aspects of
Egyptian life supports
this conservative view,
dramatic watersheds and
subtle fluxes are also a
feature of Egyptian
history. Nor are the
facts graven in stone.
Egyptology is riddled
with uncertainties, not
least in its chronology
of dynasties and kings.
In recent years,
chronology has been
a hotly debated issue in
the world of Egyptology,
whose established dating
system has been under
attack by two writers
advancing utterly
dissimilar theories.
Their arguments deserve
to be read in full, but
can be summarized as
follows.
In A Test of Time,
David Rohl
examines the "Four
Pillars" of
synchronicity between
ancient Egyptian and
Biblical history and
judges only one to be
impeccable. Anomalies
such as the royal
burials at Tanis and
Deir el-Bahri, Israelite
chariots on the Ashkelon
Wall at Karnak, and
evidence of their
sojourn at Avaris call
for a revision of the
chronology of the Third
Intermediate Period,
with knock-on effects on
earlier times. Rohl's
New Chronology puts
the Exodus in the XIII
rather than the XIX
Dynasty, and makes
Akhenaten a contemporary
of David and Saul;
further ramifications
are still being worked
out for his doctoral
thesis.
Unlike Rohl,
Anthony West is not
a professional
Egyptologist, and his
Serpent in the Sky -
propounding that the
Egyptian temples embody
the legacy of an older,
greater civilization
dating back to Atlantis
- was laughed off until
two geologists agreed
that the erosion in the
bedrock of the Sphinx
shows that it was
created at least 2600
years earlier than had
hitherto been assumed.
Egyptologists failed to
refute their evidence in
a showdown at the 1992
conference of the
American Association for
the Advancement of
Science, but have since
taken comfort from a
study by the Getty
Institute, which
concludes that the
erosion proves nothing
of the kind.
As both debates are
unresolved, we've stuck
to the established
chronology , which
even mainstream
Egyptologists
acknowledge as having
margins of error. These
are up to a hundred
years in the period
around 3000 BC,
seventy-five years
around 2000 BC, and
between ten and fifteen
years around 1000 BC.
From 500 BC onwards,
dates are fairly precise
until the Ptolemaic era,
when the chronology gets
hazy, only firming up
again in Roman times.
