The Restoration of Ancient History – Part 20
The Restoration of Ancient History is a paper delivered in November 1994 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bremen in Germany, at a symposium in Portland, Oregon. This paper questions the conventional chronology of ancient history and offers in its place a radical reconstruction—the so-called Short Chronology, of which Heinsohn is the principal architect. In this series of articles, we are taking a closer look at the evidence cited in this paper in favour of Heinsohn’s new chronology:
Heinsohn recognizes four periods in the history of Mesopotamia before the conquests of Alexander the Great:
| Dates BCE | Assyria | Babylonia |
|---|---|---|
| 1150-750 | Early Assyrians | Early Chaldaeans |
| 750-620 | Assyrian Empire | Assyrian Empire and Scythians |
| 620-540 | Empire of the Medes | Chaldaeans |
| 540-330 | Persian Empire | Persian Empire |
In this article we turn to Part 4 of Heinsohn’s lecture, in which he asks the question: How could historical periods, so well known from Greek authors, be shown to be “elusive”, whereas in the very same territories modern archaeology has revealed sensationally ancient civilizations, unknown before the late 19th century?.
This is a common problem in modern archaeology. Here in Ireland, we have the same disconnect between our native records & traditions and the discoveries of the archaeologists. The latter have excavated an abundance of evidence for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers and Bronze-Age warriors going back almost ten thousand years—cultures completely unknown to our more recent ancestors—but have failed to find convincing evidence for the many Celtic invasions enumerated in The Book of Invasions and other ancient records. Once one realizes that those “pre-Celtic” cultures have been grossly misdated, it becomes clear that they are the Celts:
The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of 7500-4500 BCE are really the Priteni Celts of 750-450 BCE,
The Neolithic farmers of 4500-2500 BCE are really the Belgic Celts (Fir Bolg) of 450-250 BCE.
The Bronze-Age warriors of 2500-500 BCE are the Laginian Celts (Lagin, Domnainn, or Gálioin) of 250-50 BCE.
Heinsohn believes that a similarly flawed chronology is responsible for the disconnect between the accounts of Classical historians—eg Herodotus, Xenophon, Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus—and the history taught in modern textbooks:
The best scholars of Classical Times today are looked upon as inventors, dreamers and liars, because the archaeological strata excavated by modern researchers are not dated in accordance with the dates used by Greek historiography. They applied different dates to the excavated strata. If it comes to stratigraphic depth, the Greek sequence of periods might well fit the strata in the ground. Yet, these strata are not dated according to their location in the ground. They are dated by modern day Egyptological and Assyriological chronology schemes against which the Greek dates look utterly out of place. The triumph of modern scholarship, therefore, appears to be twofold: (i) It ‛debunked’ the Greek sequence of empires as a hoax. (ii) In addition, it proved Ancient Greece’s finest scholars to be ignorant of Asia’s most splendid civilizations between -3000 and -1000.
If modern dates can be shown to be sound the Greek sequence of empires indeed is left without sufficient material evidence, and must be discarded. With all due respect, its defenders will be pushed into the cranks’ corner. If, however, modern dating schemes can be shown to be without scholarly foundation, it will be possible to compare the four major post-Chalcolithic strata-groups of modern archaeology, with the four major post-Chalcolithic periods of Classical historiography. In the writer’s view, the former provide the material basis for the latter. (Heinsohn)
By redating the archaeologists’ strata, Heinsohn realigns their discoveries with the records of the Classical historians. Herodotus never mentions the Sumerians because he knew them as Chaldaeans. He does not recount the history of Mitanni but he does recount the history of Media. He writes of only one Assyrian Empire, because what the archaeologists call the Neo-Assyrian Empire was actually the Persian Empire:
But in Heinsohn’s opinion, modern archaeologists are not entirely to blame for this state of affairs. The misalignment of ancient chronologies had already begun centuries before the science of archaeology even existed:
When and why did Herodotus’ four historical periods lose Herodotus’ and later Greek historians’ dates (-1150 to -330)? This happened as early as the 2nd century CE. In that time Jewish and Christian chronographers established what today is called comparative world history. It began with the comparative history of Greeks and Jews. This comparison focused on the question if Moses was more ancient than Homer. The basis to decide this contest was written material whose correctness was not doubted. Stratigraphical research to check the dates of Bible and Iliad still had to be waited for another 1,700 years. Since dates used in the Bible simply were earlier than the Greek dates, the latter lost the competition for the earlier periods of civilization. Nevertheless, the Jewish historians of the Persian and Hellenist periods had already taken a tremendous step towards a reasonable chronology, by boldly cutting bewildering time-spans of nearly 400,000 years, which were used by Babylonian and Egyptian priests, down to some 4,000 years. Yet, this time-span still was three times as long as the one adopted by Herodotus. The Jewish writers had reduced phony time spans down to one-hundredth. Still, the Greek dates cut the biblical ones down to about one-third. When their dates were replaced by the biblical ones, the following picture emerged. Suddenly, the historians were confronted with a gap of 1,500 years. It was created by equating Biblical Nimrod of Abraham’s -3rd millennium with Herodotus’ Ninos of the 8th century ...
Biblical dates ... openly dominated comparative world chronology up to about 1870 and—in a disguised manner—are used up to the present. (Heinsohn)
This is a point I made in an earlier article on the Short Chronology. For all their magnificent discoveries, the archaeologists have continued to apply a chronological framework to the Ancient World that is little more than the traditional Biblical chronology of James Ussher with knobs on.
In the early Christian era, Rabbinical scholars compiled a comprehensive chronicle of Biblical history from the Creation of the World to the time of Alexander the Great. The Seder Olam Rabbah, or Great World Order, however, is often at odds with Ussher’s chronology, which was also based on the Bible. One striking discrepancy between the rabbinic and the conventional chronology is the focus of Mitchell First’s study Jewish History in Conflict:
According to Seder Olam Rabbah (SO), the work that forms the basis for almost all rabbinic chronology, the period from the defeat of the Babylonians by the Medeo-Persians until the beginning of Greek rule encompassed 52 years and spanned the reigns of three Persian kings. [Footnote 1: According to SO, the reign of these three Persian kings was preceded by the reign of a Medean king named Daryavesh, who reigned 1 year (see App. A, n. 8.). The 1 year of this Medean king is counted as the first of these 52 years.] According to the chronology that is universally accepted by historians today (conventional chronology), this period of Persian [Footnote 2: The conventional chronology knows of no Medean king Daryavesh and of no brief period of Medean rule preceding the reign of these Persian kings.] rule over the land of Israel encompassed 207 years (539 to 332 BCE) and during this period more than ten Persian kings reigned. (First xix)
Other sources, such as the Talmud and Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, provide us with a plethora of other chronological headscratchers. For example, in Ginzberg, Nebuchadnezzar is referred to as a son-in-law of the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib (Ginzberg 1913:268-269). In the conventional chronology, the latter died in 681 BCE, while Nebuchadnezzar was born around 634, so this relationship is considered impossible. In Emmet Sweeney’s model of the Short Chronology, Sennacherib is identified with the Persian Emperor Xerxes I and Nebuchadnezzar with the Persian Emperor Artaxerxes III. The former died in 465 BCE, while the latter was born around 425 BCE, so the relationship in The Legends of the Jews is again impossible. In conventional history, Artaxerxes III was the great-great-grandson of Xerxes I. In the last article, we saw that Heinsohn identified Sennacherib with the Persian Emperor Darius II (423-404 BCE). Apparently, he also came to identify Nebuchadnezzar with Artaxerxes I. But the latter was the father of Darius II, not his son-in-law.
Elsewhere in The Legends of the Jews, Nebuchadnezzar is identified as a son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Ginzberg 1913:300)! Make of that what you will.
Heinsohn identifies the early Christian scholar Eusebius of Caesarea as the source of the Bible-based chronology that continues to dominate our textbooks. Eusebius was the Bishop of Caesarea in the 5th century. Part of his Chronicle was translated into Latin by St Jerome—Chronicon or Temporum Liber—who added some results of his own research in the field.
In an article in my series on the Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah, Eusebius, Jerome and Biblical Chronology, I examined the work of Eusebius and Jerome. A re-examination of that material would not be out of place here.
The 4th-century theologian and scholar St Jerome is best remembered today for the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible which he coauthored. He was also a prolific correspondent, with over 150 letters to his name. In one of these, Letter 36, which was addressed to Pope Damasus I, he noted the following discrepancy (as he saw it) in Biblical chronology:
Indeed, Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, became king in the forty-first year of his life and reigned in Jerusalem for XVII years, although his father, who reigned for forty years from the age of twelve, was surely unable to father a son at the age of eleven. (Hilberg 54:276-277, my translation)
Nowhere in the Bible are we actually told how old Solomon was when he became king, though in 1 Kings 3:7 he calls himself a little child. It is merely a rabbinical tradition—one recorded in the Seder Olam—that he was twelve years old:
(2 Sam. 15:7-8) “It was at the end of 40 years that Absalom said ... because your servant made a vow ...,” that was the 37th year of the reign of David. Rebbi Nahorai) said in the name of R. Yehoshua, at the end of 40 years after Israel demanded a kingdom in the tenth year of Samuel the Seer. From here you can compute that Solomon was 12 years old on his accession. (Guggenheimer 138)
As we saw in an earlier article, however, there is another king who seems to become a father at the age of eleven if the Bible’s figures are taken at face value:
In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah Ahaz the son of Jotham king of Judah began to reign. Twenty years old was Ahaz when he began to reign; and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem ... Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. (2 Kings 16:1-2 ... 18:1-2)
If Ahaz was thirty-six years old when he died, and his son Hezekiah was twenty-five when he succeeded him, then Ahaz must have been eleven when Hezekiah was born.
Some years later Jerome was asked about these discrepancies by the presbyter Vitalis, to whom he replied (Letter 72):
Read again all the books of both the Old and New Testaments and you will find so many discrepancies in the number of years between Judah and Israel, i.e. between both kingdoms taken together, that to devote oneself to questions of such a kind befits not so much the studious as the idle man. (Hilberg 55:12, my translation)
It is clear that Jerome and his adherents assumed that the rabbinical scholars knew what they were talking about. Jerome accepted the inerrancy of the Scriptures as a matter of faith, but he was reluctant to put them or the Holy Spirit to the test by scrutinizing their figures too closely.
Curiously, Jerome was not uninterested in the study of chronology. His Temporum Liber [The Book of Times] is a Latin translation of the second book of the Chronicon, or Universal History, of Eusebius of Caesarea, with a supplement bringing the chronicle down to Jerome’s time (379 CE). But neither he nor Eusebius attempted to clear up the apparent discrepancies in the Biblical texts. For example, they both put the death of Jehoram of Israel four years after the death of Ahaziah of Judah, even though 2 Kings 9:21-28 describes how Jehoram was killed by Jehu shortly before the death of Ahaziah (Jerome 132).
The Seder Olam synchronizes these two deaths:
“From God was the downfall of Ahaziahu to come to Joram ...” and both of them fell together on the same day. (Guggenheimer 158)
In the first book of his Chronicle, which Jerome did not translate, Eusebius was quite happy to choose one Bible chronology and set aside a conflicting one:
[The chronology] from the death of Moses to the time of Solomon’s construction of the temple is described differently [by the available sources]. The Book of Judges, as well as the blessed Apostle Paul in Acts of the Apostles calculate it one way, while the Book of Kings and Hebrew tradition calculate it another way. It will be best to describe both and then select [the account] which proves truest. (Eusebius & Bedrosian 31)
For the period of the Divided Monarchy, Eusebius simply listed the Kings of Judah with the appropriate lengths of their reigns. He did not even mention the rival Kingdom of Israel, let alone try to synchronize its history with that of Judah.
The only part of the Bible in which Eusebius actively sought to explain away apparent discrepancies was the New Testament. His fragmentary Gospel Problems and Solutions, was written to address some questions raised by two fellow-Christians, Stephanus and Marinus (Pearse et al).
In Heinsohn’s opinion, Eusebius’ comparative world history provided the Greek tradition with Biblical dates, as can be seen in the third column from the left of the most famous of all Christian-period history books:
First page of Eusebius’ 4th century Chronicle, in Hieronymus’ 5th century Latin translation, with Abraham’s Bible Fundamentalist date as anchor point for comparative world history, with Egypt still waiting for the patriarch’s arrival (Rudolf Helm (editor), Eusebius Werke, Siebenter Band, Die Chronik des Hieronymus, Pages 19-20, Berlin (1913)):
Abraham’s Biblical dates were also used by Eusebius as an anchor point for the comparative history of Egypt (Helm 22-23). In the next article, we will see how long this Biblical dating scheme endured.
And that’s a good place to stop.
