The 800-year difference between the time from the Flood to Abraham is of critical importance when attempting to build an accurate chronology of ancient history. Some Christian scholars, such as the Associates for Biblical Research prefer the longer chronology of the Septuagint, in part, because it is more compatible with their preferred chronology of ancient Egypt.

One of the ABR staff members, archaeologist Henry Smith, has recently started making the claim that the Septuagint preserves the original numbers of the paleo-hebrew text, and the Masoretic Text was deliberately deflated by the Jewish rabbis between the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, and the Bar Kochba War (AD 132-136) to make the chronology of the Old Testament point to Simon Bar Kochba as the Messiah.1

While, Smith’s claim is partially true - Rabbi Akiba and his colleague Ben Halafta definitely altered the chronology of the Persian Empire when they published the Seder Olam Rabbah in AD 132. The Seder Olam Rabbah was eventually incorporated into the Babylonian Talmud and has become the traditional Jewish calendar and chronology of the world. The two rabbis who published the Seder Olam deleted more than a century of the Achaemenid Persian Empire to make the time from the decree of Cyrus to the rise of Bar Kochba exactly 490 years.

Thus Akiba and Halafta definitely modified history to make Bar Kochba appear to be the fulfillment of the Prophet Daniel’s 70-week prophecy to the Messiah (Daniel 9:24-27). However, they did so in a manner that did not require altering the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not give us a chronology of the Persian Empire. The Babylonian Jews used the Seleucid Era of 312 BC for their business contracts. Akiba and Halafta could only delete years from the period between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the Seleucid Era. Therefore, they deleted nearly two centuries from the Persian Empire.

The question is whether the changes to Genesis 5 and 11 were made at the same time and whether they served the same purpose. Most Christian scholars have believed that the Septuagint added eight centuries to the original Hebrew text rather than deleting them. This topic has begun trending lately in various discussions about the relationship of Christianity to modern Judaism. So, I think it is important to address it.

Below I will argue that early Aramaic translations of the Old Testament by the Christian Jewish community in Antioch predated the Seder Olam and therefore prove that there was an older Hebrew manuscript tradition with the shorter numbers found in both Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and the much later Masoretic Text.

Background on the Various Manuscripts of Genesis

The Greek translation of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint. It is sometimes abbreviated as LXX, the Roman numerals for 70, because it was allegedly translated by seventy rabbis in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century before Christ.

The Jewish copies of the Old Testament today are based on the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scribes in the Middle Ages who made copies of Hebrew scrolls for synagogues. In the Roman Era, written Hebrew using the Aramaic Square Script only included the consonants of most words. Since several possible words could have the same consonants, the reader had to guess the vowels based on the context.

To put this in context, imagine that English had no vowels. WRD could mean any of the following: “word”, “weird”, “worried”, or “wired.”

The Jewish Masoretes invented vowel points for Hebrew in the Middle Ages to supply the missing vowels. However, some scholars such as Michael Rydelnik argue that the Masoretes may have deliberately substituted the wrong vowels in certain cases to change the meanings of prophecies that pointed to Christ and were quoted by the Apostles in the New Testament.2

Because Jewish rabinnical tradition required damaged Torah scrolls to be replaced and the old worn ones to be burned, ancient Hebrew manuscripts are exceedingly rare. The oldest copy of the Masoretic Text is the Leningrad Codex which dates to about AD 1000.

This raises a question for Christians — if the only copy of the Hebrew Old Testament came from rabbis who deliberately altered the meanings of some of the passages, how do we know that we have the real Bible?

Thankfully, some much older manuscripts of both the Hebrew text and translations into Aramaic and Latin have been preserved. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls included a full copy of Isaiah that dates to the third century before Christ. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) has a few minor differences in spelling but for the most part agrees with the Masoretic Text, which informs us that the Hebrew text was stable for a period of at least 1,000 years. However, there is an example of using the vowel points to change the meaning found in the passage quoted by Matthew 1:23.

In the final clause, MT is traditionally vocalized “she will call his name Immanuel,” whereas 1QIsaᵃ writes a form that can be read “his name will be called”—a formulation closer to the passive-style clause in Matthew, “they shall call his name Immanuel.” The LXX reads “you shall call,” so it is not identical to either. The variation in the reading does not seem particularly material to whether the Isaiah prophecy referred to Christ. For this verse at least, there is no evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to alter the meaning of the text. Other passages may have stronger evidence of such a claim, but that is not the point of this post.

There are four other manuscript traditions for Genesis that are highly relevant to the question of the chrono-geneologies. These are the Samaritan Penteteuch (SP), Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (LV), the Syrian Peshittas, and the Jewish Aramaic Targums.

The Samaritan Penteteuch

In Antiquities of the Jews 11.302–347, Josephus says that Manasseh, brother of the Jerusalem high priest Jaddua, married Nikaso, daughter of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria. Jerusalem’s priestly authorities required him to divorce her or lose his priestly position. Sanballat offered instead to build a rival temple on Mount Gerizim and make Manasseh its high priest. Manasseh accepted; other Jerusalem priests and Levites who had problematic foreign marriages joined him. The Gerizim sanctuary thereby became, in Josephus’s polemical narrative, a breakaway Judean priestly establishment rather than an ancient Israelite sanctuary in its own right.

Christian scholars have hypothesized that the Samaritan text of the Old Testament was taken by Manasseh to Samaria and edited, particularly the chrono-geneologies. The Samaritan text also adds several centuries from the Flood to Abraham, but less than the full eight centuries of the Septuagint. If true, then the SP dates to the late fifth century before Christ.

The Syriac Peshitta

Antioch, Syria had a community of Christian Jews that grew up around the teaching of the Apostle Paul who took refuge in Antioch some time after his conversion (Acts 11:26). While the later Jewish Wars completely destroyed the Jewish communities and institutions in Galilee and Judea, Antioch was a refuge for the Christian Jews that was spared from destruction in those wars. Consequently, Antioch had an unbroken Christian-Jewish tradition that dated from the personal teaching of the Apostle Paul around AD 45 down to the Muslim Conquest in AD 637. This is highly relevant to the question of whether the rabbis altered the texts of Genesis 5 and 11.

The Christian Jews of Antioch spoke Aramaic, and they translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Aramaic early in the second century, around the same time that Smith claims the rabbis were deflating the geneologies of Genesis in the Hebrew texts. The Aramaic translation of the OT is called the Peshitta, and the oldest extant manuscript of Genesis in the Peshitta dates to AD 463, which more than five centuries older than the Leningrad Codex of the Masoretic Text.

The Peshitta agrees with the MT for Genesis 5 and 11, which suggests that the Hebrew Vorlage used by the Christian Jews in first and second century Antioch was a prototpe of the much later Masoretic Text.

Jerome’s Latin Vulgate

Jerome was a Roman Catholic priest and linguist who traveled to Antioch and Jerusalem, learned Hebrew, and translated the Old Testament of the Latin Vulgate Bible directly from Hebrew manuscripts.

In his correspondence with St. Augustine, Jerome did voice suspicion that Jews might have altered or omitted passages relevant to Christian claims, yet his settled scholarly program was to translate from the Hebrew he called Hebraica veritas (“Hebrew truth”), not to reject it as generally corrupt. He expressed these concerns most notably in correspondence with Augustine of Hippo, who pressed him to identify exactly which Jews had altered which text.

The key exchange is:

• Augustine, Letter 71 (to Jerome; traditionally numbered 104 in Jerome’s letters), written c. 403: Augustine questioned Jerome’s Hebrew-based revision and warned that local Jews might dispute his translations.
  

• Augustine, Letter 82, §34 (to Jerome; traditionally Jerome Letter 116), written c. 405: Augustine explicitly refers to Jerome’s claim that translating from Hebrew could disclose things “omitted or perverted by the Jews.” He then demands clarification: did Jerome mean pre-Christian Jewish translators, or Jews after Christ who allegedly corrupted texts to evade Christian arguments?
  

• Jerome, Letter 112, §20 (to Augustine, c. 404): Jerome defends translating according to what he found in Hebrew and as understood by Hebrew speakers. Augustine’s line of questioning was therefore directed at Jerome’s own earlier or recurring language about Jewish omission/tampering.

The fact that Jerome was aware of the possibility of Jewish tampering with the text, and yet still produced the Latin Vulgate Bible where the text of Genesis 5 and 11 agree with both the Syriac Peshitta and the much later Masoretic Text strongly suggests that during his time in Antioch Jerome had access to early Hebrew manuscripts that had a secure chain of custody back to Apostolic times through the local Christian-Jewish community church.

The Jewish Targums

The non-Christian Jewish community in Syria and Judea also translated the Old Testament into Aramaic. Their translations are called Targumim, or Targums. The oldest extant targum, Targum Onqelos, is dated to the seventh century, making it four or five centuries older than the Masoretic Text. Like the Peshitta and the Latin Vulgate, it agrees with the MT for Genesis 5 and 11. However, an older portion of a Targum was found at Qumran, indicating that the oldest Targum was translated before the Advent of Christ.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

While the Dead Sea Scrolls date to the first to third centuries before Christ and have preserved many important books and passages of the Old Testament, sadly, no scrolls with Genesis 5 or 11 have survived.

Chrono-geneologies: Deflated or Inflated?

The Creation History blog is primarily about ancient history and chronology. One of the most significant differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is the ages of the patriarchs when their sons were born in the 5th and 11th chapters of Genesis. These passages are referred to as the chronogeneologies, because they give us a chronology through the geneology from Abraham back to Noah, and from Noah back to Adam.

In the Septuagint, the total number of years from the Flood to Abraham in Genesis 11 is 780 years longer than the 352 years in the Masoretic Text. The LXX also gives a longer period of 580 to 600 years from Adam to the Flood in genesis 5.

A Christian archaeologist, Henry Smith, has published several papers and posts in the past decade arguing that the anti-Christian Jews who supported the Bar Kochba Rebellion deliberately deflated the chronology of the Old Testament to produce what later became the Masoretic Text. Smith argues that the long chronogeneologies of the septuagint (LXX) were the original numbers in the text, and that the Jews altered them around the time of the Bar Kochba Rebellion, to make all the numbers point to Bar Kochba as the Jewish Messiah.

Smith’s argument is tendentious because he needs it to support his chronology of ancient Egypt. But, given there is evidence that the Masoretes who gave us the Masoretic Text may have altered certain prophecies that clearly pointed to Christ, let’s give his argument a fair examination.

There are three strong arguments against Smith’s position that the anti-Christian rabbis deflated Genesis 5 and 11.

First, the three oldest manuscript witnesses to the Hebrew Vorlage of the first century Old Testament, the Peshitta, the Vulgate, and the Targum Onqelos, all agree with the Masoretic Text for Genesis 5 and 11. The older two of these three witnesses were translated by Christians who would have rejected any changes by rabbis intended to discredit Jesus Christ as the Messiah. The Peshitta was probably translated by Jewish Christians before the Bar Kochba Revolt and the creation of the Seder Olam chronology.

Second, Isaac Cullimore pointed out in 1835 that all of the variant chronological manuscripts, including the Samaritan Penteteuch, and the two major codices of the Septuagint, appear to have been using the same scheme to “correct” the Biblical chronology to agree with their “modern” astronomical calculations for the date of the Flood.

The Babylonian estimate of the rate of precession was 1 degree per century. A more accurate modern calculation is 1 degree in 71.5 years. The Jews and other ancient cultures of the Mediterranean region knew that the Flood had occurred when the Vernal Equinox was in the constellation of Pleiades. They could calculate the elapsed years since the flood by measing the number of degrees from the Vernal Equinox in their time, to the constellation of Pleiades, and then multiplying by 100 years.

The problem was that their estimate for the rate of precession was not sufficiently accurate. Using 1 degree per century added about 40 years per century that had elapsed since the Flood. The more time that had elapsed, the greater the error would become. When one looks at the various manuscripts, the earliest of which was the Samaritan Penteteuch, the later versions kept adding more years between the Flood and Abraham.

When plotted on a chart, all of the variant manuscripts fall nearly exactly on the line for 1 degree per century precession as shown below. Cullimore’s discovery supplies the motive for the editors of both the Samaritan Penteteuch and the Septuagint adding the extra centuries between the Flood and Abraham. They were trying to update the Bible to make it agree with the best science of their day.

The third argument against Smith’s deflation theory is that there is no discernable motive for Ben Halafta and Akiba to deflate the chronogeneologies of Genesis 5 and 11. We can definitely see whey they deleted two centuries from the Achaemenid Persian era to make it seem that Daniel’s 70-weeks prophecy pointed to Bar Kochba. But deflating the chronology from the Flood to Abraham, or from Adam to Abraham, in neither case seems to directly affect the fulfillment of any prophecies by Jesus Christ or by Simon Bar Kochba.

Conclusion

The Bibles that we use in the English world today, which are various forks of the King James Bible, are ultimately descended from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. Jerome was wary of the possibility of rabbinical corruption of the Hebrew text and studied manuscripts in both Antioch and Jerusalem. The oldest translations of Genesis, including the Syrian Peshitta, the Aramaic Targum, and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate all point to an ancestral Hebrew vorlage in the first century of the Christian Era that preserved the same chronological numbers as the later MT for Genesis 5 and 11.

While the Septuagint is the Greek Bible of the ancient world, and gives older and better translations for many of the prophecies that pointed to Jesus Christ, the editors appear to have altered Genesis 5 and 11 in order to make it conform to a Greek or Egyptian idea of the time from the Flood, based on an erroneous rate of precession. This occurred in the third century before Christ and was done for completely different and unrelated reasons than those of Halfta and Akiba in the second century of the Christian era. Thankfully, the other translations of the Hebrew allow us to be confident that Jerome’s Latin Vulgate preserved the correct numbers for Genesis 5 and 11.

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We used several medieval Irish sources, some of which date as far back as the eighth century, to create a composite history of Ireland, which saw five waves of colonization from the time of Babel down to the invasion of the sons of Mileadh in the reign of King David. The Milesian dynasties of Irish kings and clan chieftains has continued since then down to the present time. In this post, I will present a short review of that history.

The Formorians: 2208 - 1043 BC

According to Keating, the first sighting of Ireland after the Flood was made by a man named Adhna, who landed, took soil from it to claim it 140 years after the Flood, and then reported the find back in Babel. Cichol, from the household of Sidon, and father of the Formorians began hunting and fishing there shortly afterwards.

The Formorians were a fierce people who were the primary foreign enemy of the Irish colonies for about a thousand years. Given the record that they were “of the sept of Ham”, we might identify them with the Soulutrean Culture of the mainland of Western Europe, whose Y-DNA halogroup was in the family C, which Ryan Fortner has identified as being Canaanite.

Partholon’s First Colony

Partholon, descended from the Tribe of Magog left Babel and began camping and hunting in Ireland 313 years after the Flood, in the first year of Semiramis, who appears in the Sumerian Kinglist as Dumuzi (2035 BC). After several years he encountered Chicol, father of the Formorians, and defeated him in battle at Mag Itha in 2024. Partholon founded the first permanent settlement in Ireland in 2023 BC.

At that time the Ice Age was nearing the glacial maximum, when the oceanic sea level was about 450 feet (144 meters) below the present sea level. Due to the lower ocean level, the continental shelf was exposed so that Ireland and Britian were connected to the French mainland.

Partholon’s colony lasted 269 years until it was devestated by a plague. One of the survivors was Nemed, who returned to the Ancient Near East for about 30 years before returning with a new group of colonists who were probably from the Yamnaya Culture.

The Nemedian Colony

The Nemedian Colony lasted from 1725 BC for about 420 years. About halfway through that period, they fought three battles against the Formorians around 1509 BC. Shortly afterwards the events of the Younger Dryas Event, the same year as the Exodus (1491 BC), led to the Baltic Ice Dam breaching unleashing a massive flood that destroyed the lowands, now under the North Sea and carving out the English Channel. The survivors were those who lived inland on higher ground. But the now weakened Nemedian Colony increasingly fell prey to the Formorian raiders. The Formorians established a fortress on an island off the northern coast of Ireland and built Conaing Tower. Their king demanded a tribute of half the crops and children born to the Nemedians every year. In 1304 BC the Nemedians fought a great battle against the Formorians at Conaing Tower, but the victory as Pyrrhic, and the colony collapsed.

The Fir Bolgs

One of the Nemedians had returned to the mainland in Belgium and then came back with a group of colonists called the Fir Bolgs. These ruled Ireland undisputed for 37 years from 1304 to 1267 BC, contemporary with the Ur III civilization in the Ancient Near East.

The Tuatha De Danaan

In 1267 BC a related group called the Tuatha De Danaan invaded Ireland. It took them 27 years to secure complete control, which was finally achieved in 1240 BC, the same year that Ur III fell to Isin. The Tuatha De Danaan basically means the Tribe of Danaan, and were conceivably related to the Mycenean Danaans described in Homer’s Illiad, as well as the tribe of Dan, which according to Scripture were dwelling in ships around that time. Modern constructions that Tuatha De Danaan meant the people of the goddess Dana, is pseudo-historiography and should not be taken seriously.

The Arrival of the Milesians - 1043 BC

One of the Irish families had gone back to Scythia with the tribe of Magog, and then worked as mercenaries in Egypt around 1086 BC. This was the end of the 17th Dynasty when the upper Egyptians were fighting to expel the Hyksos Amalekites. The man named Mileadh fought for the Egyptians and was given a daughter of Pharaoh named Scota to wife in gratitude. He and his people left Egypt around 1073 BC, which was the year after Saul and Jonathan defeated Agag the Amalekite in alliance with Ahmose I of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. They wandered for 30 years sailing West and colonizing Spain, before deciding to move to Ireland. While Mileadh died before arriving in Ireland his wife and sons landed in 1043 BC and defeated the local Irish chieftains establishing the Milesian Dynasty. The descendents of Mileadh have been the kings and chieftains of Ireland from that day until this.

Connection to the Yamnaya People

It seems odd at first reading that the Irish claim each successive wave of colonists were descended from Magag and the Scythians. However, Y-DNA studies seem to support this claim. The first settlers in Ireland were from haplogroup I, which Ryan Fortner argues is Semitic. However, in the Neolithic times they were overwhelming replaced by the Yamnaya people who originated on the steppes of Russia and Ukrain (Scythia), and flooded Scotland and the UK to the point that their Japhetic R1b haplogroup is found in the majority of Irish and British men to the present time. The Yamnaya bloodline became dominant, probably with either the Nemedian or Fir Bolg colonization of Ireland between 1725 and 1300 BC. Thus the Irish claim to be descended from Magog seems to hold true in the DNA results.

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Furthermore, the transition from the Xia to the Shang Dynasty can be precisely dated by correlation to Joseph’s Famine. The following summary is derived from Sima Qian’s Shiji (Allen 1894).

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The final years of King Jie’s reign over the Xia were marked by cascading natural disasters that his misrule left him powerless to manage. Ancient records note that the last years of his rule brought extreme weather — ice forming on summer mornings, unseasonable frosts in July, heavy rains that collapsed buildings, and catastrophic crop failures that left his people without food. Jie had squandered his realm’s resources on extravagant personal display: demanding exotic foods from the four corners of the empire, building elaborate palaces for his concubines, and treating his subjects with merciless cruelty whenever they failed to satisfy his excesses.

The Shang kingdom, under its leader Tang, had meanwhile been doing precisely the opposite — encouraging agriculture, lowering taxes, building alliances with disaffected states, and cultivating talented ministers. When Tang’s chief counselor Yi Yin — who had spent years in the Xia capital as a spy and envoy, observing Jie’s weakness firsthand — finally judged the moment right, Tang declared war. At the Battle of Mingtiao, fought during a thunderstorm, Jie’s demoralized army was routed. Jie fled, was captured, and was eventually exiled to Nanchao, where he died of illness — and the Xia dynasty ended with him.

According to the Bamboo Annals and other sources, the early years of Tang’s own reign as the first Shang king were plagued by five consecutive years of drought. Tang responded with a dramatic act of selfless leadership: rather than increasing taxes or conscripting labor, he minted gold coins and distributed them to impoverished families who had been forced to sell their children into bondage during the famine, so they could buy them back. Most strikingly, Tang — according to later tradition — is said to have gone to a sacred mulberry grove, cut his hair and nails in a gesture of self-abnegation, and offered himself as a sacrifice to Heaven to pray for rain on behalf of his people. The story became one of the defining moral exemplars of the Confucian tradition: a ruler who considered his people’s suffering his own personal responsibility, and who earned the restoration of Heaven’s blessings through humility rather than force.

Across virtually every major ancient text — the Shiji, the Shangshu, the Bamboo Annals, the Zuozhuan, the Guo Yu, and even newly unearthed Warring States bamboo slips from Tsinghua University — the account is the same: Tang (湯), first king of Shang, defeated the tyrannical last Xia king Jie (桀) at the Battle of Mingtiao, drove him into exile, and founded the Shang dynasty in his place. The Tsinghua Bamboo Slips, discovered only in 2008 and dated to the 4th century BC, add the detail that Yi Yin — Tang’s minister — played a key role in the overthrow, and these correspond closely to older transmitted texts (Foster 2021). The Shanghai Museum bamboo slips independently list 16 Xia rulers following Yu, consistent with the Shiji genealogy. Therefore, the story has multiple sources, is internally consistent, and is attested across independent textual traditions spanning at least seven centuries of pre-imperial writing.

We can recognize the climate disasters in the reigns of Jie and Tang as the seven year famine described in Genesis, which lasted from 1708 to 1701 BC. It was probably caused by a supervolcano eruption, which is consistent with the summer frosts described in the Chinese account of the fall of Jie. It appears that King Tang overthrew Jie in the same year that Jacob entered Egypt, 1706 BC, as the famine lasted for five more years into Tang’s reign.

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Before attempting to match up the eyewitness accounts that marked the end of the Ice Age with the geological record, we must take an excursus to determine the order and direction of the overflow that created the Bosphorus Strait between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea that should be obvious to geologists, but for some reason is not. The current scholarly consensus is that the Bosphorus was formed when the Mediterranean overflowed into the Black Sea (figure 2), though a minority argue the opposite. The majority position is clearly wrong, as will be argued below.

While the Mediterranean later did overflow in the opposite direction after the channel had already been cut, there are two obvious reasons the Mediterranean could not have been the first to overflow the Bosphorus sill.

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The Bosphorus Sill was Too High

First, the ridgeline or sill that had to be overtopped at the Bosphorus has a minimum elevation of 90 meters along its entire 250 kilometer length, with the exception of the Bosphorus channel itself. However, the ridge on either side of the Bosphorus rises to 180 meters. Therefore, prior to the channel being cut by water, the Bosphorus was not even the lowest point along that sill. The reason the flood cut the channel at the Bosphorus was that the North Anatolian Fault (NAF) created a weak point in the sill, making a fissure for water to flow through. The underlying rock is not soluble, therefore the channel was cut purely purely by mechanical erosion of water flowing through the fault.

Even if all the ice on the earth today melted and flowed into the world ocean, the highest sea level would be about 70 meters. Therefore, the Mediterranean could never have overflowed the 90-meter ridge north into the Black Sea Basin to cut the Bosphorus channel. While the NAF created a path for the water to flow without necessarily overtopping the 90 meter sill, there still would have to have been a significant head difference between the two bodies of water to generate the flow and velocity required to erode the entire channel to its current width of 1 kilometer and depth of 36 meters below sea level. It is far more likely that the Black Sea, being the smaller basin, was overfilled to create the head difference that generated the force of water that exploited the fault and cut the Bosphorus channel.

The Gibraltar sill that is believed to have existed prior to the Zanclean Flood was less than 10 meters above sea level. Therefore, even if the Mediterranean had a massive continental source of water higher than its rate of evaporation, it would have overflowed outward into the Atlantic at Gibraltar, or at Suez of similar elevation, without ever reaching the necessary height to cut the Bosphorus.

During Deglaciation, the Smallest Basins Overflowed First

Second, the combined Black-Caspian Sea basin drained the southeastern side of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet, which is estimated to have contained 15% of the “extra ice” at the last glacial maximum. According to geologists, after the last glacial maximum, as the Scandinavian Ice Sheet melted it created the Baltic Ice Lake, blocked by a glacial dam, which kept the water level at 150 meters above sea level. Around the era of the Younger Dryas the ice dam was finally breached and the entire Baltic Ice Lake drained into the North Atlantic. However, prior to the dam breach, during the GM and deglaciation, meltwater from the Scandinavian Ice Sheet overtopped the divide and flowed south into the Black-Caspian drainage. The elevation of the divide between the basins was so low that only a modest rise in water level behind the ice dam was needed to redirect flow southward.

While the combined watershed of the Black and Caspian Seas is quite large, it is miniscule in both area and volume compared to the world ocean. At the glacial maximum, the world ocean is estimated to have been 135 meters lower, the Mediterranean 1,000 meters lower, and the Black Sea somewhere between 30 and 100 meters lower. The top 100 m of the Black Sea holds about 43,640 km³ of water, while the top 135 m of the world ocean holds approximately 48,856,500 km³ — roughly 1,120 times more. Put another way, the Black Sea’s top 100 m represents only about 0.089% of the world ocean’s top 135-meter layer.

As the glaciers began melting, their waters flowed to the world ocean, the Black-Caspian Sea basin, and the closed Mediterranean Basin depending on the watershed. The Mediterranean had the least proportional exposure to glacial meltwaters of the three, while the Black-Caspian basin had the highest relative exposure to meltwater. All other things being equal (such as the relative inflow of meltwater), the smallest basin by volume would naturally have overflowed first. Being the smallest by area and having the greatest exposure to glacial meltwater relative to its volume, the Black Sea basin logically had to overflow long before the Atlantic or Mediterranean could have done so.

Eyewitnesses Saw the Flood that Carved the Bosphorus Strait

Finally, we have the eyewitness testimony to the event, by the people who saw it, recorded by Diodorus Siculus:

[5.47.3] … And the Samothracians have a story that, before the floods which befell other peoples, a great one took place among them, in the course of which the outlet at the Cyanean Rocks was first rent asunder and then the Hellespont.

[5.47.4] For the Pontus [the Black Sea], which had at the time the form of a lake, was so swollen by the rivers which flow into it, that, because of the great flood which had poured into it, its waters burst forth violently into the Hellespont and flooded a large part of the coast of Asia and made no small amount of the level part of the island of Samothrace into a sea; and this is the reason, we are told, why in later times fishermen have now and then brought up in their nets the stone capitals of columns, since even cities were covered by the inundation.”

[5.47.5] The inhabitants who had been caught by the flood, the account continues, ran up to the higher regions of the island; and when the sea kept rising higher and higher, they prayed to the native gods,”
– (Diodorus 1935, V.47.3-5)

The eyewitness testimony from history agrees with our logic that the Bosphorus was formed by the overflowing of the Black Sea within recorded history. Disregarding the evolutionary narrative of many cyclical ice ages in favor of the creationist hypothesis of a single Ice Age, we might conclude that the initial breach of the Bosphorus was caused by an overflow from the Black Sea, which preceded the overflow and breach of Gibraltar by the rising Atlantic. Both events occurred during the deglaciation of the Ice Age, but were separated by several decades.

As we have argued in the paper CFAH-19 (unpublished at this writing), the Flood of Deucalion in which the Black Sea overflowed occurred in 1491 BC, and was the direct result of the Fire of Phaeton melting a substantial portion of the Scandanavian Ice Sheet. The Bosphorus Strait was created as a consequence of one of the chain of catastrophic events surrounding the Exodus of Israel from Egypt in 1491 BC.

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Why David and Solomon mattered so much

For centuries, readers of the Bible have encountered David and Solomon not just as religious figures, but as epic founders of a powerful kingdom.

• David is portrayed as the warrior who unites the tribes, captures Jerusalem, and defeats surrounding enemies.

• Solomon is depicted as ruling a wealthy, peaceful empire from Jerusalem, building the Temple, and hosting foreign dignitaries like the Queen of Sheba.

If archaeology could uncover clear, datable evidence for a united, powerful kingdom centered on Jerusalem in the 11th century BC—the traditional time of David and Solomon—it would strongly support those stories as rooted in real political power. If not, say skeptics, then perhaps the stories were later idealizations, written generations after the fact. That “yes or no” question gave these two kings an outsized importance in modern debates.

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The early hunt: looking for a golden age

In the early days of biblical archaeology (late 19th and early 20th centuries), many explorers went into the field expecting to “prove the Bible right.”

• They looked for monumental architecture in Jerusalem and across Israel that could be linked to David’s conquests and Solomon’s building projects.

• The hope was to find palaces, city walls, and inscriptions actually naming these kings—something like “Palace of King David, year X” or “Solomon, king of Israel, built this.”

Every big find—a city gate, a palace, a strong wall from roughly the right period—was eagerly measured against the biblical description. When major structures from the 10th–9th centuries BC were uncovered at places like Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, some archaeologists initially saw them as proof of Solomon’s centralized building program.

At that stage, many believed it was only a matter of time before an inscription mentioning David or Solomon in their lifetimes would appear.

The challenge: silence and reinterpretation

But as methods improved—radiocarbon dating, more precise pottery chronologies, careful stratigraphy—things became more complicated.

• Some buildings once assigned confidently to Solomon were later redated down to the 9th century BC, more likely linked to later kings like Omri or Ahab.

• Excavations in Jerusalem itself are difficult: the ancient city lies under a dense modern one, and key areas are politically and logistically sensitive. That limits what can be found and how clearly it can be interpreted.

For decades, there was no contemporaneous inscription from the 10th century BC explicitly mentioning “David king of Israel” or “Solomon son of David” from inside Israel or Judah. That silence led some scholars to propose that David and Solomon were much smaller figures than the Bible suggests—or even purely legendary.

This tension—rich literary portraits on one side, hesitant or ambiguous archaeology on the other—is a big part of why the search for David and Solomon was called a holy grail. It seemed to hold the key to how “historical” the biblical narratives really were.

A turning point: the “House of David”

One of the most important shifts came not from Jerusalem, but from the north. In the 1990s, excavations at Tel Dan in northern Israel uncovered fragments of a victory inscription set up by an Aramean king (most likely Hazael of Damascus). The text, written in Aramaic and dated to the 9th century BC, appears to mention a Judean ruler as belonging to the “House of David.”

Even though the inscription is about a century after David’s supposed lifetime, it matters because:

• It shows that foreign neighbors recognized a dynasty in Judah named after a founder called David.

• That implies that David was not just a late literary invention, but a remembered royal ancestor important enough to name a ruling house.

This didn’t suddenly prove all the biblical stories in detail, but it shifted the conversation. The figure of David now had extra‑biblical support as a real, early king, even if the scale of his kingdom remained debated.

An Interpretive Key: They Were Not Looking Deep Enough

Together with Darrell K. White, I have been developing the Chronological Framework of Ancient History - a chronology for the ancient world that is based on historical durations between events as recorded by ancient historians. We have come to the conclusion that the real reason that archaeologists have failed to find David and Solomon has been that they were looking for them in the Iron Age Strata, when David and Solomon lived in the Middle Bronze Age, and were contemporaries of Hammurabi of Babylon. In short, they did not dig deep enough.

We have just published Paper #16 in our Chronological Framework of Ancient History series, in which we reveal the holy grail of archaeology. David and Solomon are found in the letters of Mari, Qatna, and Babylon in the Old Babylonian Period. The reason scholars never associated them before was that they have the wrong date for the Old Babylonian Period. They have shoved Hammurabi back eight centuries before he actually lived. Once he is placed in his proper chronological context, Hammurabi is named in contemporary texts as an equal of King Solomon.

Not only did we find David and Solomon, we also found King Saul and his ill-fated son Ishbosheth. Ishbosheth made a marriage alliance with David’s enemy, Hadadezer, who then supported him with a few thousand troops to fight the civil war against David.

If you want to learn the details, please enjoy the paper.

https://www.academia.edu/166250608/CFAH_16_The_Kings_of_Israel_and_Judah_Paper_No_16_in_the_Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_Series

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The SKL continues:

Then the Flood swept over. After the Flood had swept over, and the kingship had descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kiš.

The list continues city by city, however the first two cities after the Flood, Kish and Uruk, have kings with reigns far longer than a human lifespan, but not nearly as long as the predeluvial kings. For example, the longest reign in the First Kish Dynasty was that of Etana the Shepherd who reigned for 1,500 years.

After the First Kish Dynasty, the SKL says:

Then Kiš was defeated and the kingship was taken to Eanna.

It then lists the kings of Uruk, the first five of whom again, have reigns of several centuries. After Gilgamesh, the fifth king, the reigns of the rest of the rulers in the list appear to be reasonable for normal human lifespans, except for the Kish dynasties II-IV, which continue to be “too high”.

Ancient Priests Loved to Play Games with Numbers

In several of my papers with Darrell White, we have pointed out that according to both Censorinus and Eusebius the pagan priests of several of the Mediterranean cultures would sometimes report days, months, bimestrals (two months), quadrimestrals (4 months) as “years” when giving their histories. We found several examples of this.

For example, Pliny the Elder reported that Greek astrologer, Epigenes (~270-200 BC), claimed the Babylonians had 720 or 720,000 years of astronomical observations on clay tiles. 720,000 year seems ridiculously too long, but 720 years is much shorter than Babylon was known to practice astronomy. However, if the 720,000 years are interpreted as days, they amount to 1,971 Julian years.

If Epigenes obtained this figure from a Babylonian source in the reign of Antiochus II Theos, whose accession to the throne was in 262 BC, then 1,971 years earlier was 2233 BC, the year for which we have found several other sources claiming the Tower of Babel was founded.

Another example of this practice was reported by Diodorus Siculus who said that the Egyptians claimed that Menes reigned 23,000 years before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. Interpreted as months, the 23,000 units become 1,859.5 years. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC. Adding 1,859.5 years comes to 2192 BC, the year reported as the Dispersion from Babel and the start of the reign of Ninus (Nimrod) by several sources.

Decrypting the Sumerian King List

My analysis of the Sumerian King List has revealed what appears to be a cipher. The scribe who composed the SKL multiplied the real reigns of the “gods” meaning ancestors before the Flood, and the rulers of Kish and early Uruk, by a consistent set of numbers, in order to exaggerate the reigns of the god-kings.

According to Eusebius and Syncellus, the Babylonian priest named Berossus wrote the history of Babylon as the book, Babylonaica, in Greek for the Seleucid Court. In that book, Berossus explained three Babylonian units of time as the saros (plural saroi) which was 3,600; the neros which was 600, and sessos which was 60.

The Babylonians used the sexagesimal numerical system where instead of each power of a number being written as 0-9, it was written as 0-60. In that system “10” means 60x60, or 3,600.

The Predeluvial Saros

While Berossus said the saros of 3,600 meant years, it could also have meant days. If we interpret the 432,000 years of predeluvial reigns reported by Berossus as being 120 x 3,600 days, the result is 120 decades of 360-day years, which is to say, 1,200 years of kings before the Flood. That is actually reasonably close to the time period recorded in Genesis that there were 1,656 years for the ten generations before the Flood from Adam to Noah.

Thus we might conclude that the 120 saroi in that context referred to decades. This multiplied the true solar years of the predeluvial rulers by a factor of 360.

The Deccans of Kish

After the Flood, the SKL continues with the rulers of Kish. We hypothesize that Cush originally named the city later called Babel after himself - Cush, or Kish. The reigns of Kish are inflated, but not nearly to the degree of the predeluvial kings. The first King of Kish is listed as Gišur, whom we identify as the Sumerian name for Cush.

By trial and error we came to the conclusion that the rulers of all four Kish dynasties in the SKL were given in deccans. A deccan is a period of 10 days. It was used in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and also in China and Greece for astronomy. The constellations were divided into 36 deccans, using a 360-day year. This probably means the constellations were so divided into deccans by one of the patriarchs before the Flood, when the year was only 360 days. If my hypothesis is correct then the reigns of the Kings of Kish in the SKL are multiplied by 36.

The god-Kings of Uruk

The first five kings of Uruk in the SKL also have inflated reigns. They have the star-sign meaning “god” written next to their names. However, they do not all use the same cipher. The first King of Uruk, Meš-ki'ag-gašer, is also identifiable as Cush, as pointed out by David Rohl. This indicates that the Uruk Dynasty counted its origin from Babel also.

It appears to us that the SKL multiplies the reign of Meš-ki'ag-gašer by a factor of 6, so the time period counted is in bimestrals of two thirty-day months. His actual reign from the time the Earth was Divided, when Peleg was born, was 54 or 55 years until the Dispersion when the tongues were confused in 2192/2191 BC.

After Meš-ki'ag-gašer come three rulers: En-mer-kar (Nimrod), Dumuzi (Semiramis posing as a man), Gilgamesh (Ninyas Zames in Ctesias). (See the table below.) These three appears to be using the multiple of 3.33, or 20/6. This is not a natural cycle, but appears to be a numerical cipher chosen by the scribe to be less than six, but for some reason, greater than 3.

The Babylonians worshipped their first king, Cush, under the name Bel Marduk, the son of Utu (Ham). But they also considered Gilgamesh the last of the gods. So perhaps the scribe felt he should inflate the reigns of those three, but not as much as the first King, Bel Marduk, also known as Meš-ki’ag-gašer.

By the way, Meš-ki’ag-Gašer means “the youth has become mighty.” This applies well to Cush who usurped the kingship after Noah divided the earth as an inheritance among his sons and grandchildren, 101 years after the Flood in 2247 BC.

To Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.
— Genesis 10:25

So, we conclude that the first five kings of the Uruk Dynasty reigned about 282 years. After Gilgamesh the reign of the rest of the kings the SKL, excepting Kish and Hamazi, are given in regular years.

If my hypothesis is correct then the scribe who wrote the SKL used the following series of descending ciphers to inflate the reigns of the early kings. In all but one case the scribe steps down by one of the factors of 60: 10 or 6.

Predeluvial: 360X
Kish Dynasty (Babel): 36X
Cush: Meš-ki’ag-Gašer: 6X
Nimrod-Gilgamesh: 3.3 X
After Gilgamesh: 1X

The entry for Lugal Banda in the list is an outlier as his 1,200 year reign appears to use the deccan of Kish (36X).

Ok, so now we have a hypothesis, and we have a theory for why the scribe did it this way. But is my hypothesis falsifiable? Yes, it can be tested, which I will do next.

The Test Case: From Babel to Sargon of Akkad

I have identified the first rulers of both Kish and Uruk as references to the same person, Cush, the son of Ham, remembered as Belus, or Bel Marduk, and later worshipped as the god of Babylon.

There is a synchronism between Ur Zababa, the second king of the fourth Kish Dynasty in the SKL, and Lugal Zagesi, the only king of the third Uruk Dynasty. They were both defeated by Sargon of Akkad, near the start of his reign. And Lugal Zagesi was the king of Uruk whom Sargon persuaded to help him defeat King Ur Zababa of Kish. If my hypothesis is correct, then the time from the founding of Babel to the defeats of those two kings should be about the same in both Kish (multiplied by 36X) and in Uruk (factoring for the inflated reigns of the first five god-kings). If the time between those two events does not come to roughly the same duration using the 36X multiple for the reigns of Kish, then my hypothesis will be proven false.

However, the first five reigns at Uruk are not precise, so we will count instead from the death of Gilgamesh, also known as Ninyas Zames, which several ancient chroniclers dated to 1968 BC.

Summing the reigns of SKL kings after Gilgamesh down to the death of Lugal Zagesi comes to 352 years. Subtracting from 1968 BC yields 1616 BC.

On the Kish side, if we sum the reigns of the Kings of Kish from Gisur to the death of Ur Zababa, and then divide by 36, the result is 614 years. Subtracting 614 from the year that Cush founded the Tower of Babel, 2233 BC, yields 1619 BC for the defeat of Ur Zababa by Sargon and Lugal Zagesi. That is only three years difference!

Even if we use my estimate of 282 years for the first five kings of Uruk, and use the year the Earth was Divided, when some chroniclers counted the start of the reign of Cush, then the result comes to 2247-634 = 1613 BC for the death of Lugal Zagesi. While that date is not as close to the start of Sargon of Akkad’s reign, it is still close enough to be plausible if someone does not like my date for Gilgamesh.

The results along the two paths give answers that are only three years apart. (see chart below) It is entirely reasonable that after helping defeat Ur Zababa and establishing himself as King of Akkad, it took three years for Sargon to consolidate his power and then attack and defeat his former ally, Lugal Zagesi.

Conclusion

This result confirms my hypothesis that the scribe who first composed the Sumerian King List was using a cipher to inflate the reigns of the early kings that Sumerian culture deified as gods. The Sumerian King List preserves real data, but inflates the reigns of the early kings using a consistent cipher that decreases by powers of 6 and 10, the two base factors of the Babylonian numeral system.

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CFAH-14: Ancient Assyria — A Layman’s Summary

This paper, co-authored by me (Kenneth Griffith) and Darrell K. White, is the 14th installment in the Chronological Framework of Ancient History (CFAH) series. Its central argument is that two major errors in how scholars have interpreted Assyrian history have caused ancient Babylonian and Israelite history to be misplaced by nearly a millennium — and that correcting those errors allows seven biblical kings of Israel to be identified in the archaeological records of neighboring nations.​

What Is the Paper About?

The paper examines ancient Assyrian historical sources — including the Assyrian King List (AKL), the Eponym Chronicle, Ptolemy’s Canon, and royal inscriptions — to reconstruct a revised chronology of Assyria that aligns with the Ussher-Jones chronology of Scripture. The Ussher-Jones chronology is the traditional biblical timeline, which places Creation at 4004 BC and the Exodus at 1491 BC. The paper argues that Assyria was actually the oldest civilization on earth, even predating Babylon and Egypt, and that according to Cicero, the Egyptian god Thoth brought writing and laws from Assyria to Egypt.​

The Assyrian King List Goes Back to Adam

One of the paper’s striking claims is that the 17 earliest names in the Assyrian King List — the “kings who lived in tents” — correspond to the pre-Flood patriarchs of Genesis. For example:​

• Adamu = Adam

• Nuabu (”Noah is Father”) = Noah

• Abazu = Shem

• Azarah = Asshur, son of Shem and ancestor of the Assyrians

• Ushpija = the founder of the city of Assur, grandson of Shem​

The city of Assur itself is dated to approximately 2139 BC, shortly after the Biblical Dispersion from Babel in 2191 BC, when Nimrod (known to ancient chroniclers as Ninus) was driven out of Assyria into Egypt by Shem’s descendants.​

The Four Errors That Derailed History

The paper identifies four errors that have distorted conventional Assyrian chronology. The two big ones are:

Error 1: The Shamshi Adad Problem

This is the paper’s most important finding. A king named Shamshi Adad appears in Assyrian records as a famous conqueror who fled from a “Naram Sin” and then conquered the city of Assur and the kingdom of Mari. Scholars assumed this was Shamshi Adad I, who reigned around 1841 BC. However, the paper argues he was actually Shamshi Adad IV, who reigned around 1053 BC — nearly 800 years later.​

The confusion arose because two different kings named “Naram Sin” lived 800 years apart. The Naram Sin that Shamshi Adad actually fled from was the king of the city of Eshnunna (a Middle Bronze Age city), not the ancient Naram Sin of Assyria. A late scribe in the era of Ashurbanipal apparently conflated them — possibly deliberately as political propaganda — to make it appear Assyria had been allied with Babylon from the very dawn of civilization.​

The effect of this error was to push all of early Babylonian history back by nearly 1,000 years in the conventional timeline.

Error 2: The Ashuruballit Problem

Two letters (EA15 and EA16) found in the famous El Amarna archive of Egyptian diplomatic mail were written by an “Ashuruballit” who called himself “Great King of Assyria.” Scholars identified him as Ashur-Uballit I from the Assyrian King List (~1353 BC). The paper follows researcher Reilly in arguing this was actually a non-canonical Assyrian governor of Harran, a vassal of the Mitanni empire, who reigned around 920 BC. Conflating these two figures made Assyria appear to be a major military power a full century before it actually became one, and pushed the chronologies of Egypt and the Kassite Dynasty of Babylon back by roughly four centuries.​

Why Does This Matter for Biblical Chronology?

This is where the paper becomes especially exciting for students of the Bible. When you correct the Shamshi Adad error and move him from the 19th century BC to the 11th century BC (around 1053–1020 BC), he falls precisely into the era of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon in the Ussher-Jones biblical timeline.​

The paper identifies 18 specific synchronisms — matching names and events — between the archives of Mari/Qatna and the Bible. These include:​

Additionally, the Banu Yamina mentioned as enemies of Shamshi Adad in the Mari Letters is essentially identical to the Hebrew word for Benjaminites (Benyamina), consistent with Saul being the first king and defining Israel by his tribe. The paper also notes that letters from Ishbosheth (Saul’s son) and mentions of David, Solomon, Jeroboam, and Nadab appear in the Mari and Qatna archives once the revised dating is applied.​

The Anchor Points: How They Date Everything

The paper works backward from secure historical dates, establishing a chain of “anchor points”:​

• 539 BC — Cyrus conquers Babylon (universally accepted)

• 626 BC — Accession of Nabopolassar (from Ptolemy’s Canon + Berossus)

• 612 BC — Fall of Nineveh (confirmed by the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle)

• 705 BC — Death of Sargon II (Ptolemy’s Canon)

• 1232 BC — Tukulti-Ninurta I conquers Babylon (10+ independent durations)

• 1841 BC — Shamshi Adad I (from Shalmaneser I’s temple inscription: “580 years elapsed”)

• 2000 BC — Erishum I (from another duration in the same inscription)

• 2191 BC — The Dispersion from Babel / founding of Nineveh by Nimrod​

Each anchor point is triangulated by multiple independent ancient sources, including Berossus, Ctesias, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Ptolemy’s Canon.​

The Bigger Picture

The paper is part of a larger project to show that the conventional academic chronology of the ancient world — which places many events centuries earlier than the biblical timeline suggests — rests on a small number of specific errors that, once corrected, bring archaeology and Scripture into remarkable agreement. By placing the conquest of Mari by Shamshi Adad (Hadadezer) in the 1050s–1020s BC, the entire Middle Bronze Age of the ancient Near East aligns with the period of the United Monarchy of Israel under Saul, David, and Solomon. This is a dramatic claim that, if correct, would mean that a vast body of ancient Near Eastern archaeological material — palace archives, diplomatic letters, king lists — directly corroborates the historical narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles.​

Prepared using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Thinking

You may read the full paper here:
https://www.academia.edu/92995116/Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_2_Founding_of_the_Nations

1. The Temple Was Founded 144 Years before Carthage

First, because Josephus said Solomon founded the Temple 144 years before Elissa founded Carthage, there has been much debate over when Solomon built the Temple and when the city of Carthage was founded. Several Roman sources seem to place the founding of Carthage in 814 BC, which suggests Solmon’s Temple was founded in 958 BC, which is 53 years later than the biblical chronology places the founding of the Temple. I have answered this problem in detail in the paper, The Foundings Dates of Tyre and Carthage. The simple answer is that Phoenician sources, the culture that actually built Carthage, unanimously place the founding of Carthage in 868 BC, agreeing precisely with the Ussher-Jones chronology of the Bible.

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2. David’s Hiram Was Reigning 25 Years Before Solomon’s Hiram Came to the Throne

A second problem is that Josephus states that Solomon founded the Temple in the 12th year of King Hiram of Tyre, which scripture states to have been the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (1 Kings 6:1). However, 2 Samuel 5:11 says that Hiram of Tyre sent messengers to King David in the first year that he reigned in Jerusalem, which was seven years after he became king in Hebron, therefore 1048 BC. If Solomon’s temple was founded in the 12th year of Hiram, then Hiram’s reign began in 1023 BC. This means that David’s Hiram sent messengers and gifts 25 years before Solomon’s Hiram began to reign!

Academic scholars merely bend the scripture durations of David and Solomon’s reigns to force a fit for the reign of Hiram of Tyre. However, there is a simple and obvious solution that harmonizes the biblical data with that of Menander and Josephus. Josephus does not say how long that Abibaal, the father of Hiram reigned. We only know that he died 12 years before Solomon founded the Temple in 1011 BC. Therefore Abibaal died in 1023 BC. If his reign was about 20 years, then his predecessor would have been on the throne when David founded his throne in Jerusalem in 1048 BC.

Therefore, we can conclude that there were two kings of Tyre name Hiram. Hiram I was reigning in 1048 BC, and probably died within five years of that date. He was followed by Abibaal, with a reign of about 20 years. Hiram II took the throne in 1023 BC, eight years before the death of David in 1015 BC.

3. The Sums of Menander’s Reigns in Josephus Fall 19 Years Short of the Given Total

Josephus passed on two durations from Menander relating Hiram II and the Temple to the founding date of Carthage. He said the sum of reigns of all the kings from Hiram to the 7th year of Pygmalion, when Elissa founded Carthage, was 155 years. Elsewhere he wrote that the time from the founding of Solomon’s Temple in the 12th year of Hiram to the founding of Carthage was 143 years and eight months.

Table 1 lists the figures of Menander for the reigns of the kings of Tyre. Two problems arise from this data. Both the sum from the start of Hiram’s reign and the sum from the 12th year of Hiram’s reign fall 19 years short of the totals of 155 and 144 years given by Josephus. This suggests that there has been a scribal error when copying the reigns of one of the kings.

Scribal errors do not normally change a number with a completely new one. The most common error when copying a king list is for the scribe’s eye to wander to the wrong row, and thus copy the reign of a king above or below the row with the value that he meant to copy.

In all probability the scribal error is one of the repeated numbers. In Menander’s kings list, we see two 12’s and three 9’s. Since the list comes 19 years short, this suggests that a 19+9 = 28 was replaced by a 9, or a 19+12 = 31 was replaced by a 12.

Given that the only number repeated consecutively was 12, we will guess that the error was to replace the 31 year reign of either the unnamed usurper or Astartus with a 12.

Since Ahab married Jezebel, the daughter of Ithobaal, we can test this correction to see if the reign of Ithobaal still overlaps with the reign of Ahab.

We tested this correction in Table 2.

In the Ussher-Jones chronology of Scripture, Ahab reigned from 918 to 897 BC. As seen in Table 2 above, our test correction places the reign of Ithobaal from 920 to 888, thus overlapping with Ahab. Furthermore, we can deduce that Ithobaal came to the throne at the age of 36 by subtracting his years of reign from his length of life. If Ithobaal sired Jezebel when he was 20 years old, then she would have been 18 years old when she was given in marriage to Ahab in the first year of his reign. Therefore the test case passes.

Just to be thorough we tested adding the missing 19 years to the other 12 and the three 9’s in the list. As it turns out, the reigns of Ahab and Ithobaal still overlap no matter where we insert the 19 years in the list. However, if we insert the 19 years into the reign of Matgenus, it results in Ahab coming to the throne in the 21st year of Ithobaal as king, and the 55th year of his life. Both of those are still quite reasonable.

We conclude that while several solutions to the Ithobaal problem are possible, the most probable solution is to make the reign of Astartus 31 years. Table 2 can therefore be safely relied upon for the dates of the Kings of Tyre.

Conclusions

We may conclude that the city of Tyre was founded in 1251 BC, 240 years before Solomon’s Temple, and Carthage was founded in 868 BC, 143 years and eight months after the Temple.

The Hiram who sent messengers and gifts to King David in 1048 BC was Hiram I, the grandfather of Hiram II who supplied Solomon with the materials to build the Temple.

Ithobaal of Tyre most likely reigned from 920 to 888 BC, overlapping all of Ahab’s reign and outliving him by 9 years. This may also help explain how Jezebel was able to retain power after Ahab’s death. Her father was a powerful king of Tyre.

And finally, Pygmalion, the brother of Elissa, reigned from 873 to 826 BC and was contemporary with Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb of Eygpt. He was the author of nine of the El Amarna Letters, #146–#155, as Abimilki, meaning Abimelech, King of Tyre. Either Menander or Josephus transliterated Abimelech into Greek as “Pygmalion.”

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https://www.academia.edu/146031286/Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_No_13_The_Hittites_Cimmerians_and_Medes

AI Summary of the Paper

The paper argues that the so‑called New Kingdom “Hittite Empire” centered on Hattusa is in fact the western capital and bureaucratic expression of a late Iron Age Cimmerian–Median–Scythian coalition, and that several key “Hittite” kings are identical with named figures in Neo‑Assyrian annals and Greek historiography.​

Core thesis and chronological claims

• The authors contend that the archaeological “Median Empire” in Iran is largely missing, whereas the Hittite kingdom at Hattusa is archaeologically robust but inexplicably absent from Greek narrative sources.​

• They propose that New Kingdom Hittite rulers Mursilis II, Muwatallis II, and Hattusilis III are respectively Tugdamme the Cimmerian, Madyes the Scythian, and Cyaxares the Mede, so the Median “Empire” of classical authors is really a Cimmerian‑led coalition ruling from Hattusa ca. 705–547 BCE.​

• This reconstruction is embedded in the broader “Chronological Framework of Ancient History” (CFAH), which lowers Egyptian and Near Eastern dates, placing Ramesses II from 644–578 BCE, the Battle of Kadesh in 639 BCE, and the Treaty of Kadesh in 623 BCE, synchronizing them with late Neo‑Assyrian history and the rise of the Medes.​

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Hittites, biblical Hittites, and Tabal

• The paper distinguishes the biblical Hittites (descendants of Heth in Canaan) from the later Anatolian kingdom of Hattusa, arguing that the latter’s name “Hatti/Kheta” overlaps geographically and linguistically with Syrian “Hatti land” but arises in a different period.​

• It traces biblical references to Hittites from Abraham through Joshua, David, and Solomon, arguing that Israelite expansion pushed Canaanite Hittites north into Syria, where they formed the Hatti/Hattina of the Amuq and later Tabal/Neo‑Hittite states.​

• Assyrian references to Tabal, Mushki, and related polities (Tubal and Meshech of Ezekiel) are reinterpreted as the Old/Middle/New Hittite phases, leading into the Cimmerian takeover and the emergence of a “Hittite” (i.e., Tabalian) royal center under Cimmerian control at Hattusa.​

Key synchronisms: Mursilis II = Tugdamme

• The central argument is a synchronism “cluster” equating Mursilis II with Tugdamme (Dugdammi) the Cimmerian based on four shared features:

  • Both campaign against Sardis/Ephesus and defeat a Lydian ruler whose name means “grandfather” (Uhhazitis vs. Gyges), argued to be dialectal variants of the same name.​

  • Both reigns record a “thunderbolt/fire from heaven” event at or near Ephesus that injures or destroys the enemy, interpreted as a bolide airburst that later underlies the Ephesian cult of the “stone fallen from heaven.”​

  • Both kings suffer a stroke‑like illness involving facial paralysis and speech impairment (Mursilis’ “mouth went sideways” vs. Tugdamme’s half‑body palsy and tongue injury in Ashurbanipal’s annals).​

  • Both have a decisive solar eclipse omen interpreted in nearly identical divinatory terms (king or royal woman must die), which the authors fix to the precisely dated 15 April 657 BCE eclipse over Cimmerian territory.​

• By associating Mursilis’ eclipse campaign against Azzi (year 7 or 10) with the 657 BCE eclipse, they date Tugdamme–Mursilis’ accession to 667/664 BCE and the death of Gyges/Uhhazitis to 661 BCE, aligning this with Ashurbanipal’s third campaign chronology.​

• The authors argue that the probability of all four rare events coinciding twice, seven centuries apart, is effectively zero, so conventional Hittite–Assyrian chronology is displaced by roughly seven centuries.​

New dating: Hittites, Babylonia, and Egypt

• Using Berossus, the Sumerian King List, Larsa year‑names, and Babylonian King List B, the paper recalculates the fall of Akkad (to 1477 BCE), the life of Hammurabi, and the end of Babylon I, placing Mursilis I’s famous raid on Babylon in 851 BCE rather than the late second millennium, and linking it to a Kassite civil war described in Shalmaneser III’s annals.​

• Mursilis I (“Mushallim‑Marduk” in Assyrian eyes) thus becomes a player in ninth‑century politics, and the old‑Babylonian chronology is lowered to the early first millennium; this is set up for fuller treatment in CFAH‑14 and CFAH‑15.​

• The Dakhamunzu letter to Suppiluliuma I is likewise redated: the authors reject the standard identification with Tutankhamun’s widow, arguing instead for a queen of Necho‑Ramesses I (an Egyptian high‑king under Assyrian hegemony, killed in 664 BCE), amid conflicts involving Taharqa and Tantamani, Psammetichus’ flight, and Assyria’s reconquest of Egypt.​

• Within this framework, Suppiluliuma I becomes Partatua the Scythian (Prototythes/Phraortes in Herodotus), married to an Assyrian royal (Tawananna as Esarhaddon’s daughter), turning “Hittite” family politics into Scythian–Median–Assyrian dynastic politics.​

Cimmerian–Median empire built from west to east

• The authors challenge the standard model in which a Median state in Iran grows westward to absorb Urartu and Anatolia, insisting instead that power progresses from west to east: a western Cimmerian horde establishes itself in Tabal/Hattusa under Tudkhaliya III and Suppiluliuma I; Hattusa becomes a western capital; and only later does control extend over Central Iranian Media.​

• The Cimmerians are treated as closely entangled with Scythians and Medes, with Ishpaka (Ishkallu/Eshpai) and his son Partatua as early leaders, and Tudkhaliya III–Suppiluliuma I as their Hittite throne names.​

• The death of Sargon II in 705 BCE “on campaign to Tabal” is read as the Median revolt remembered by Herodotus and Ctesias, with Ctesias’ Arbaces and Sardanapallus narrative treated as a conflation of Sargon’s death and the later fall of Nineveh.​

• Evidence such as the Saqqez dish with a Luwian‑hieroglyphic inscription naming Partitavas (identified as Partatua) is used to argue that Scythian elites in Media adopted the Hittite writing system, confirming a Cimmerian/Scythian presence in the Hittite scribal milieu around 690 BCE.​

Madyes/Muwatallis II, Cyaxares/Hattusilis III, and later history

• Madyes the Scythian, who dominates Asia and the Medes for 28 years in Herodotus, is identified with Muwatallis II, the Hittite king who battles Ramesses II at Kadesh; his “28 years” are read as overlapping the reigns of Muwatallis II and his successor Mursilis III.​

• Hattusilis III is identified as Cyaxares the Mede, whose Hittite title “Kheta‑sar” (“king of Kheta/Hatti”) is argued to underlie the Greek form “Kyaxares”; Hattusilis (“man of Hattusa”) and Khetasar would be complementary throne titles for the same ruler.​

• Within the revised timeline, the Battle of Kadesh (Muwatallis II vs. Ramesses II) occurs in 639 BCE, corresponding to Madyes’ invasion of the Levant, and the Treaty of Kadesh (Ramesses II and Hattusilis III) falls in 623 BCE, just as Cyaxares and Nabopolassar launch their war on Assyria.​

• This treaty secures Egypt’s flank with the Cimmerian–Median coalition; the authors suggest it may explain later Judahite resistance to Necho II (Josiah’s death in 609 BCE) as an attempt to uphold an older Egyptian–Median arrangement.​

Extended synchronism network and king‑list harmonization

• A long sequence of synchronisms is assembled linking Hittite kings of Old/Middle/New phases with Assyrian rulers (Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III, Tiglath‑pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal), Lydian kings (Midas, Gyges, Alyattes, Croesus), and Median kings in Herodotus and Ctesias.​

• Labarna I and Hattusilis I are tied to Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III; Middle‑Kingdom Tudkhaliya II and Arnuwanda I are linked to Tiglath‑pileser III and Sargon II as puppet kings in Tabal; Mita of Mushki (Midas of Phrygia) surfaces in both Assyrian and Hittite texts, anchoring the middle chronology.​

• A composite king list is constructed in which Herodotus’ Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares, and Astyages, Ctesias’ parallel sequence, Hittite Tudkhaliya III–Suppiluliuma I–Mursilis II–Muwatallis II–Hattusilis III–Tudkhaliya IV–Suppiluliuma II, and Scythian/Cimmerian names (Ishpaka, Partatua, Tugdamme, Madyes) are all cross‑identified or aligned.​

• Late Hittite Tudkhaliya IV is equated with Astyages; conflict with an unnamed “king of Assyria” in Hittite letters is re‑attributed to Nabonidus rather than Shalmaneser/Tukulti‑Ninurta, on the grounds that Levantine and later Greek sources often call the Babylonian king “king of Assyria.”​

• Suppiluliuma II, last Great King of Hattusa, is identified as Cyaxares II/Darius the Mede (from Xenophon and Daniel), whose campaigns in Lycia and Tarhuntassa are equated with warfare against Croesus and Nabonidus leading up to Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon.​

• Hartapu, a Hittite prince ruling in the Konya plain, is proposed as Harpagus, the Median general who aids Cyrus and later becomes satrap of “Asia,” using Hittite/Arzawan evidence to backfill Greek accounts.​

Interpretive conclusions

• The authors argue that once Mursilis II is accepted as Tugdamme and Hattusilis III as Cyaxares, the Hittite archives furnish the missing internal history of the Median/Cimmerian Empire: a line of kings using Hittite throne names but remembered by Greeks under Median and Scythian ethnonyms.​

• “Median Empire” is thus recast as a convenient classical label for a Cimmerian‑dominated federation of Cimmerians, Scythians, Medes, Manneans, Urartians, and Tabalians, with Hattusa as a major western capital linked to Media by the Persian Royal Road.​

• Herodotus’ neat genealogy from Deioces to Astyages is taken to compress co‑regencies, hostage princes, and succession by sons‑in‑law or nephews, much as the Hittite succession often passes through marriage rather than direct patrilineal inheritance.​

• The paper closes by asserting that this re‑identification of New Kingdom Hittites with Cimmerian–Median rulers both explains the archaeological absence of “Median imperial” material in Iran and the textual absence of “Hittites” in classical narratives, while vindicating the lowered, duration‑based CFAH chronology developed in earlier installments.​

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By Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White

Introduction

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