Re: David Rohl

From: Wayne Mitchell
Date: 20 Feb 1998
Time: 15:43:23
Remote Name: 138.90.161.45

Comments

You mention that you are perplexed as to why David did not mention more about the apparent tie-ins with biblical history, however, this was not his primary goal. Since I have been invited across the pond several times in 1989/90 to David's former house in Redhill Surrey, I can say that at that time David was quite the agnostic and treated his Jerusalem bible as containing "some" possible facts, "since legends usually have some truth to them." Since David is indeed brilliant on Egyptology, he used all historical resources possible to objectively reconstruct Egyptian dynastical chronology. In doing his reconstruction he truely was, to the best of my knowledge, totally objective in the reconstruction. He was no biblical enthusiast, then. As for now I cannot say. That biblical records happened to tie in with his theory at many points was evidence that he was on a probable right track. It is my opinion that the latter US title in "Pharaohs and Kings: a biblical quest" was more from the US publisher than from him, i.e. it was not a biblical quest. Having said that, however, his research/book indeed turns out to be the most probable Egyptian dynastic chronology. I did not think such prior to reading all of his work and persuasive arguments, and in fact published a paper in 1991 suggesting that the 1223BCE eclipse was perhaps the best candidate, vs. the one in Chapter 11 of Davids (US) book. However the overall proposed archao-astronomical fit of all the BCE data is just simply too good to dismiss and I still feel that it strongly supports Davids thesis. Unfortunately, perhaps due to my initial skepticism of Davids theory, I was not privy to the information in his appendix, and therefore the possible dates given in my paper for the Hittite eclipse are slightly too high. It then came as quite a surprise to me to find-at exactly the right tiny window of time-the annular solar eclipse (of noted duration) of 951BCE, which places Mursilis II year 1 at 960BCE. Thus I would be quite surprised if the general reconstruction of archaeology and dynasties were other than suggested.