However, the main interest for me in radiocarbon tests was in checking on historical dates of the ancient East, of the period covered in Ages in Chaos. This method was as if created to sit in judgment in the litigation between the accepted and revised time tables.
In Ages in Chaos we have seen that, with the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus synchronized, events in the histories of the peoples of the ancient world coincide all along the centuries.
For a space of over one thousand years records of Egyptian history have been compared with the records of the Hebrews, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and finally with those of the Greeks, with a resulting correspondence which denotes synchronism.
In Volume I of Ages in Chaos it was shown in great detail why Akhnaton of the Eighteenth Dynasty must be placed in the latter part of the ninth century. If Akhnaton flourished in -840 and not in -1380, the ceramics from Mycenae found in the palace of Akhnaton are younger by five or six hundred years than they are presumed to be, and the Late Mycenaean period would accordingly move forward by about half a thousand years on the scale of time.
I wished to have radiocarbon tests that would clarify the issue. I did not need the test in order to strengthen my view on the age of the Eighteenth and the following dynasties, for I considered the evidence that I had presented in Ages in Chaos to be strong enough to carry the weight of the revised scheme. But in view of the novelty of my contentions I realized that a confirmation from a physical method would be of great import for the acceptance of my work.
The efforts that I spent in order to achieve radiocarbon examination of any suitable object from the New Kingdom in Egypt were many and persistent. Correspondence between the British Museum and myself did not produce the desired results, though I was politely answered by the departments of Egyptian, of Assyro-Babylonian and of Greek antiquities. The Museum has a radiocarbon laboratory of its own, and therefore the task could be simplified; but the Museum claimed other preferential tasks. At one time I secured the help of the late Professor Robert H. Pfeiffer, Director of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University in an effort to obtain some organic relics from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but to no avail. Even Albert Einstein’s plea, relayed to the Museum by his secretary upon his death, to have my work of reconstruction of ancient history tested by radiocarbon, went unheeded.
The usual argument explaining the refusal of cooperation was the assertion that the Egyptian chronology of the New Kingdom is known to such exactness that no carbon tests are needed; moreover the tests were claimed to have a margin of error far greater than the incertitude of the historians as to New Kingdom dates.
Thus wrote a member of the faculty of the University of California in Los Angeles in response to an inquiry and a plea of a reader of mine.(2) Similarly wrote an assistant curator of the British Museum:Since the chronology of ancient Egypt is quite closely fixed by the astronomical evidence from the Eleventh Dynasty onward, in part, to the nearest year, radiocarbon, with its substantial margin of error, could hardly add anything to our knowledge of the chronology of the New Kingdom. . . .
Another reader of mine wrote to the Director of the Metropolitan Museum and read in the reply he received:There has been so far as I am aware no radiocarbon dating of objects from the New Kingdom. I do not think that such a test, given the necessary measure of tolerance which must be allowed, is likely at the moment to give a chronology for the New Kingdom which is any more certain than a chronology deduced by historical methods.
It almost looked as if there were a concerted opposition to the submission of any object dating from the New Kingdom to a radiocarbon test. I have even employed the argument, for instance at my coming to see Dr. William Hayes, the late Director of the Egyptological Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Let the test be made in order to disprove me. My book Ages in Chaos was read by hundreds of thousands of readers and found many followers—why not show me wrong if this is so easy? But such arguments were not effective either.In the light of the very complete knowledge we have on this tightly dated and closely recorded period, it would serve no useful purpose to have this done. . . .
During the ten years after the publication of Libby’s Radiocarbon Dating in 1952, which was also the year Ages in Chaos was published, the great period of history in accepted Egyptian chronology from -1580, the beginning of the New Kingdom (or rather from -1680, the fall of the Middle Kingdom) to the time of the Ptolemies, a period of ca. 1250 years in the accepted chronology, a tremendous stretch of time, was left out of radiocarbon testing programs. My efforts, spread over ten years and more, were directed to many museums and places of learning, but they were all in vain. I have recorded and filed the exchanges that took place between my supporters, myself, and those in whose power it was to have the tests made. The museums showed no willingness to cooperate. wCheap Discover Cheapcunt Public Naked Forced The Testimony of Radiocarbon Datingl x x Love n n Dating Sex wCheap Discover Cheapcunt Public Naked Forced The Testimony of Radiocarbon Datingg t Prancing