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Oldest Recorded Solar Eclipse Helps Date the Egyptian Pharaohs

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 30 2017, @08:20PM   
from the lights-out dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible, and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.

Using a combination of the biblical text and an ancient Egyptian text, the researchers were then able to refine the dates of the Egyptian pharaohs, in particular the dates of the reign of Ramesses the Great. The results are published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics.

The biblical text in question comes from the Old Testament book of Joshua and has puzzled biblical scholars for centuries. It records that after Joshua led the people of Israel into Canaan -- a region of the ancient Near East that covered modern-day Israel and Palestine -- he prayed: "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies."

"If these words are describing a real observation, then a major astronomical event was taking place -- the question for us to figure out is what the text actually means," said paper co-author Professor Sir Colin Humphreys from the University of Cambridge's Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, who is also interested in relating scientific knowledge to the Bible.

Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington. 'Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs.' Astronomy & Geophysics (2017). DOI: 10.1093/astrogeo/atx178.

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Original Submission

• Re:Fossils are important only to modern times. (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:16PM

  by khallow (3766) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:16PM (#590016) Journal

  Let's look at that chain of logic. We have traditional stories about flooding. Geologists find evidence of huge flooding in the prehistoric past. Therefore, the stories are about that flooding. I can't say whether the Australian stories are accurate or not. That field has been subject to confirmation bias and fraud before, though there's evidence here of rigorous passing on of relatively accurate oral knowledge over many thousands of years.
  
  But that doesn't mean that everyone is equally successful at doing so. For example, the Bible was a repository of oral tales and writing is generally considered to be more reliable than speech. But they experienced considerable drift with the tale of Noah and the Flood, which among other things, inherited a weird shift of aging. Peoples' ages as recorded in the Bible prior to the global Flood are an order of magnitude greater than after, with the fig leaf of God deciding for no apparent reason that people are living too long. The easier explanation is that they were measuring ages in lunar months for these ancient stories, and years for later.
  
  A more notable drift likely happened to stories that took place before the Babylonian captivity (for example, the books of Joshua through Kings, which describes the period of time from the initial conquest of Canaan through to end of the reign of King Solomon, who was the last ruler of a united Hebrew kingdom) since these stories would be valuable for propaganda purposes.
  
  And one thing about flooding is that it's a common human experience. Even the driest parts of the world experience flooding on occasion. How to determine that stories of flooding are about distant prehistoric causes rather than more recent ones?

  Parent