The Restoration of Ancient History – Part 17
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, a work-in-progress of which Heinsohn is the principal architect.
In Part 3 of his lecture, Archaeologically-missing history and historically-unexpected archaeology in major areas of antiquity, Heinsohn reviews a long list of cases where archaeologists have discovered major discrepancies between the archaeology of the Ancient World and its history as recorded by the Classical historians. These discrepancies fall into two broad categories:
Excavations in which the archaeologists failed to find strata that the recorded history had led them to expect.
Excavations in which the archaeologists uncovered strata that did not correspond to any cultures or civilizations in the recorded history.
In this article we will examine Heinsohn’s analysis of the stratigraphy of Tell el-Dab’a, an archaeological site in the Nile Delta, which is now identified as Avaris, the capital city of the Hyksos.
Tell el-Dab’a is located in the southeastern part of the Delta, between the Tanitic and Pelusiac branches of the Nile. In 1885, the site was excavated for the first time by the Swiss archaeologist Édouard Naville. More than half a century later, the Egyptian archaeologist Labib Habachi carried out more extensive excavations and came to the conclusion that Tell el-Dab’a was the site of Avaris, the capital city of the Hyksos. During the Hyksos Period of Egyptian history (also known as the Second Intermediate Period), Avaris stood on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile.
Between 1966 and 1969, excavations at Tell el-Dab’a were conducted under the auspices of the University of Vienna. Since 1975, excavations at both Tell el-Dab’a and the nearby site of Qantir (identified with Pi-Ramesses) have been sponsored by the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Manfred Bietak, the founder and first director of the Institute, and Irene Forstner-Müller, who succeeded him in 2009, have confirmed Habachi’s claim that Tell el-Dab’a is the site of Avaris:
We need not repeat the long history of the search for Avaris and Per-Ramesses, since the identification with Tell el-Dabaa and Qantîr is now common knowledge in Egyptology. (Bietak & Forstner-Müller 23)
Per-Ramesses (or Piramesse) was the capital city established by Ramesses II of the 19th Dynasty. Ramesses flourished a few centuries after the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt by Ahmose I, the founder of the 18th Dynasty.
Tell el-Dab’a is of particular interest to historians because it is one of the few archaeological sites in Egypt with a clear stratigraphy. It is much more common for ancient Egyptian remains to be isolated structures close to the surface, as though they were constructed just a few centuries ago. The Pyramids of Giza are among the oldest man-made structures in the World, but after several millennia they have still not been buried by the sands of the Egyptian desert. Contrast this with the tells of Lower Mesopotamia, which conceal the ancient cities of the Chaldaeans and Babylonians, or with the mound of Hisarlik in Turkey, which comprises at least nine superimposed settlements, including Homer’s Troy.
Before attempting to interpret the stratigraphy of Tell el-Dab’a, however, it is crucial to understand that the conventional sequence of strata at the site has been constructed by aligning strata from different parts of the site with the timeline of conventional chronology:
One of the challenging tasks was to establish a general stratigraphic sequence from the various excavation sites covering different, but largely overlapping, time periods. Contemporary phases at the different excavation sites were mainly identified by ceramic seriation, the introduction of new building materials and specific architectural features, and in a certain horizon the sudden occurrence of emergency graves. The result of these efforts are summarized in Figure 3 (Bietak and Höflmayer 2007), which shows both the phases of the individual excavation sites and the general phases in the rightmost column. (Kutschera et al 408)
Is other words, Tell el-Dab’a comprises several different excavation sites, none of which covers the complete stratigraphic sequence. Heinsohn believes that several strata which mainstream archaeologists arrange in succession in accordance with their preconceived chronology actually represent contemporaneous eras. Heinsohn’s timeline for the relevant period—Strata H through A—is as follows:
Avaris was occupied during the New Kingdom after the expulsion of the Hyksos. During the 18th Dynasty, a palatial complex was built on the site of the Hyksos citadel—possibly by Ahmose I (Bietak 67 ff). Avaris was still in existence some centuries later, when Ramesses II established his new capital at the nearby settlement of Pi-Ramesse (Bietak 82). Avaris was, in fact, the principal harbour for Pi-Ramesse. The city remained inhabited throughout the Ramesside Period and into the Third Intermediate Period— 1070-664 BCE according to the conventional chronology (Bietak 5).
There are also archaeological remains from the Late Period (663-332 BCE) and the Ptolemaic Era (after 323 BCE), but nothing survives from the intervening period, which amounts to over 300 years in the conventional timeline (Forstner-Müller, Bietak et al 4). Heinsohn believes that this lengthy hiatus is chimerical. According to his reconstruction, the later Ramessides were contemporaries of the Imperial Persians:
Egyptologists are stunned by the archaeological absence of the history of Egypt from Ninos (-750) to the end of the Persian Period (-330) which was taken for granted for nearly two and a half millennia. They are convinced that there was not much to conquer for Alexander the Great, when even the finest stratigraphy exhibits a bewildering gap between -1085 and -330. On the other hand, they are struck by the continuity between the material culture of stratum B, which supposedly ends in -1085, in stratum A which only begins after -330.
This assessment does not accord with that of Bietak and Forstner-Müller. According to the latter, Avaris continued to be inhabited into the Third Intermediate Period (1070-664 BCE in the conventional chronology). Following a hiatus, occupation resumed during the Late Period (663-332 BCE). The hiatus, which Heinsohn estimates to have been 755 years long, was only about half as long as that. Nevertheless, the conventional timeline requires that Avaris was abandoned for several centuries, after which it was resettled. Parts of the site were also allegedly abandoned for about a century after the expulsion of the Hyksos.
Note that the chronology which Heinsohn currently espouses is significantly different from the initial, tentative chronology he proposed for Tell el-Dab’a. This was published in 1988 in Die Sumerer gab es nicht (p 262):
In the decades that have elapsed since Heinsohn first published his thoughts on the stratigraphy of Tell el-Dab’a, the Short Chronology has continued to evolve. It is still a work-in-progress, and there are significant discrepancies between the competing models. For this period of Egyptian history, I find myself in broad agreement with the model proposed by Charles Ginenthal and Lynn E Rose, but Emmet Sweeney has also tinkered with Heinsohn’s model.
Making sense of the complicated stratigraphy of Tell el-Dab’a is no easy task. Mainstream archaeologists have imposed their own preconceived chronological model upon it, whereas I see the site as a testing ground for the various competing hypotheses. Instead of seeking to create a single overarching stratigraphy for the whole of Avaris, we should rather study the site piecemeal, identifying the individual strata of each excavation before trying to integrate them all into one grand scheme.
And that is the task I will undertake in the next article.
And that’s a good place to stop.
