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.
For a while it looked a little more hopeful when my friend, Claude F. A. Schaeffer, the excavator of Ras Shamra (Ugarit), acceded to my urging and sent to Dr. Elizabeth Ralph of Pennsylvania University a piece of wood found in the neighborhood of another object which he dated to the reign of Merneptah of the Nineteenth Dynasty. However, the sample became contaminated in the laboratory. From a French laboratory, where a control piece of the same find was sent, no answer was forthcoming, and the circumstances of the find gave no assurance—had either laboratory succeeded in obtaining a result—that the piece of wood from Ras Shamra really dated from the reign of Merneptah in Egypt.
It looked as if the only result of all my efforts would be a stately volume of letters and memoranda entitled ASH. It is to ash that organic specimens must be converted to make the test. It was ash also in the sense that many efforts ended in nothing.
In the meantime, certain systematic disagreement in datings by the radio carbon method with the conventional historical time tables was observed all over the world. But above and beyond this generally observed phenomenon, the Egyptian datings stood unreconciled with the results of the carbon tests. This made quite a few Egyptologists express their disbelief in the carbon method and the physicists even bolder in assuming that the Egyptologists were victims of some undefined systematic error. The perplexing Egyptian dates were discussed at the conference of the workers in radiocarbon that took place in Cambridge July 1962, and two laboratories, of Groeningen in Holland and of the University of Pennsylvania, were entrusted with the task of clarifying the issue. At that time the New Kingdom was apparently not yet investigated on radiocarbon dates, but if it was investigated, the results were never made known.
A few years later the radiocarbon laboratory of the University of Rome published a survey of tests made by various laboratories. Dates of 54 archaeological and historical samples from Egypt were published up to the summer of 1964. Some of these have been repeatedly dated both by the same lab, and as cross-check samples.(3)
These measurements have shown that most Egyptian samples give a C-14 age which is less than expected historical age often based on astronomical evidences. No satisfactory physical or archaeological explanation of this fact yet found, except a physical attempt by Damon and Long.(4)
Again it seems that only Old and Middle Kingdom material was the subject of the review. The “physical attempt” of Damon and Long referred to in this report considers the possibility that about two millennia before the present era the influx of cosmic rays suddenly changed in rate and that as a consequence the radiocarbon ratio in the carbon pool changed, too. Actually such or similar surmises were expressed by Dr. Ralph, as also by Dr. H. E. Suess and by others.
The change in the influx of cosmic rays could have occurred either in the case of the Earth, together with the rest of the solar system, passing close to a source of such rays, a nova or a supernova; or, preferably, as Suess assumed, in the case of a change in the strength of the magnetic field that shields the Earth from cosmic rays.
These surmises were repeatedly made because anomalous readings from the early periods of Egyptian history accumulated, mostly pointing to more recent dates. Dr. Libby, however, expressed his view that the Egyptian chronology may be wrong.(5)
In Science for April, 1963, he wrote:
The data [in the Table] are separated into two groups—Egyptian and non-Egyptian. This separation was made because the whole Egyptian chronology is interlocking and subject to possible systemic errors . . . Egyptian historical dates beyond 4000 years ago may be somewhat too old, perhaps 5 centuries too old at 5000 years ago. . .(6)
Thus the two solutions offered concerning the too recent dates for the Middle Kingdom actually amounted to either a support for Ages in Chaos or for Worlds in Collision, or for both.
In the conventional scheme of history, the Middle Kingdom ended about -1680. In Ages in Chaos the end of the Middle Kingdom is placed at about -1450. Whereas for most of the Eighteenth Dynasty I claimed that the dates need to be reduced by about 540 years, for the end of the Middle Kingdom the restructured timetable required but about 200 years change toward greater recentness.
A later issue of Radiocarbon brought radiocarbon dates of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, with the verdict that this period of history did not terminate in -1780 or even in -1680 but endured into the fifteenth century before the present era,(7) as postulated in Ages in Chaos. All this was surmised before tests on New Kingdom material were considered. qFree Free Dating Www Stripped The Testimony of Radiocarbon Dating Free Free Dating Www Strippedv Dating eFree Free Dating Www Stripped The Testimony of Radiocarbon Dating Free Free Dating Www Strippedy h Online Dating