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David Rohl’s not-so-‘New Chronology’

David Rohl (born 1950), an English archaeologist, has published a number of books (A Test of Time and Legend: the genesis of civilisation are the best known) in which he attempts to produce a revision to the accepted chronology of Ancient Egypt that would make possible the synchronisation of events found in Egyptian texts with those in the Bible. A cornerstone of his thesis is the difficult chronology of the later New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (Dynasties 19 to 25, about 1305-656 BCE in the standard chronology), which has long proved difficult to work out in detail.

Like Peter James and Immanuel Velikovsky before him, he starts by criticising Jean-François Champlollion’s (1790-1832) identification of the Biblical שישק (Shishaq), King of Egypt (1 Kings XIV.25 etc.), with one of the 22nd or 23rd Dynasty kings named Shoshenq, who ruled according to the conventional chronology between around 945 and 715 BCE. Instead, he argues that he should be identified with the more well-known Ra‘messe II on the grounds that the name could be contracted to Sessi, which he claims to be the origin of Shishaq. However, according to the conventional chronology, Ra‘messe II reigned 1289-1224 BCE. By identifying Ra‘messe II with Shishaq, though, he can bring forward the reign of Ra‘messe II by more than three centuries, to the later tenth century BCE. He also suggests that the astronomical data that is conventionally used to date the ninth regnal year of Amenhotep I to 1542 or 1517 BCE (the latter is the preferred date) is no such thing and that it is a text about an adjustment to the notoriously erratic Egyptian calendar. One of the more intriguing astronomical details he provides is that of a solar eclipse during the reign of Akhnaton, which was visible from the Syrian city of Ugarit. According to a computer program he used, the only date at which an eclipse would have been visible in Ugarit during the second millennium BCE occurred on 9 May 1012 BCE, which post-dates its destruction according to the standard chronology. Akhnaton is also generally supposed to have reigned 1364-1347 BCE.

These arguments had already been rehearsed by Immanuel Velikovsky and, more recently, Peter James, each of whom reached conclusions different from Rohl’s. He also uses data cited by Peter James about the dedication stelae for the Apis Bull hypogeum, known as the Serapeum, at Saqqara, in which the dearth of inscriptions dating from the 21st and 22nd Dynasties (conventionally 1069-715 BCE) is taken as evidence that they were contemporary with each other and with the 19th and 20th Dynasties (convetionally 1305-1186 BCE). To reinforce this proposition, he proposes that the tomb of Osorkon II (conventionally 874-850 BCE) was built before that of Psussenes I (1039-993 BCE), which reverses the conventional chronology.

Rohl does not confine his chronological and historical speculations to Egypt: indeed, it is clear from his other works that it is Biblical history that really interests him and that his identifications of the Garden of Eden with south-eastern Azerbaijan (the part inside modern Iran) and a localised Flood of Noah are attempts to bring the Book of Genesis into line with historical facts.

Problems

Rohl’s hypothesis is not new and clearly takes its inspiration from Immanuel Velikovsky (whose identification of Queen Hatshepsut (1490-1468 BCE) with the Queen of Sheba (tenth century BCE?) meant an even more radical down-dating of Egyptian chronology by over five centuries!) and much of its detail from Peter James. The latter settled on Ra‘messe III (conventionally 1184-1153 BCE) as the Sessi to be identified with Shishaq of the early tenth century BC. In an exchange in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal during the 1990s, James’s hypothesis was thoroughly demolished.

This did not stop Rohl from bringing up the same evidence once more. His use of the Serapeum is disingenuous: it is by no means fully excavated and in recent years, a stela has been found dating from the reign of Shoshenq I (945-924 BCE), a member of one of the supposedly missing Dynasties. The irony that this is the pharaoh usually identified with Shishaq is delicious! Even worse, he ignores the discovery of a lintel from the tomb of Psussenes re-used in Osorkon II’s, which upholds the conventional view of their relative sequence and the discovery of which was first announced in 1987.

Rohl makes extensive use of priestly genealogies, to which he assigns an arbitrary generation length of twenty years, which is ridiculously low (it assumes that over numerous generations, the eldest son survived to succeed his father, something that is inherently improbable). Worse, the genealogies he cites are full of well-known errors and omissions. When the names of the High Priests in the genealogies are compared with contemporary inscriptions naming the pharaoh at the time, those of the 21st Dynasty always precede those of the 22nd and 23rd. This is true for both Memphis and Karnak; one of the High Priests of Memphis, Shedsunefertem, lived under both Psussenes II (959-945 BCE) and Shoshenk I (945-924 BCE), showing that the 23rd Dynasty must have followed the 22nd.

Rohl is clearly guilty of ignoring evidence that does not fit his theories. This is a technique of Bad Archaeologists: Good Archaeologists need to address potentially damaging evidence if their hypotheses are to be accepted. Instead, Rohl seems much more concerned with more receptive public lectures, especially on the American circuit, where anything that appears to support the supposed inerrancy of the Bible is lapped up. Witness his 2005 set of three DVDs, called The Bible – Myth or Reality?, which makes his motivations thoroughly clear.

David Rohl’s MySpace site

This page was last updated on 19 August 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews