Imagine how distorted our understanding of ancient history would be if the chronological framework around which it was built had several extra centuries added. What if the backbone of Egyptian dynasties contained duplicates? If they were far enough back in time there would be no outside reference for comparison. But if duplicates occurred while Greeks and Hebrews were recording history there would be a very predictable consequence. The archaeological remains of the pharaohs from the duplicated dynasties, those with Greek and Hebrew names, would be missing from Egypt.
At the same time, the dynasties with Greek names would be prefigured further back in time with Egyptian names. Those pharaohs would have left abundant archaeological, even monumental, remains. An entire history would be built around the writings left by these pharaohs. And just as surely the Greeks and Old Testament writers would know nothing of those.
How would the effects of this distorted history manifest on those surrounding cultures whose archaeology is cross-dated to Egypt? Greek pottery placed as funerary gifts in pharaohs’ tombs locks two chronologies. But Greek history does not have the kind of rigid dating seen in the Hebrew scriptures. So the two main “victims” of faulty Egyptian chronology would be affected in dramatically different ways.
In the following pages, I assert that this is precisely what has happened. While some details of any review of antiquity are bound to be left open to question, I hope the ideas presented here will challenge those engaged in the study of these civilizations to take a fresh look at some important assumptions. On the one hand, Greek history has been forced to accommodate a Dark Age following the Trojan War, in contradiction to what the Greeks themselves believed happened. Their history indicates that Dorians moved south two generations after the war and so overcrowded eastern Greece with refugees that they had to send out colonies. Archaeologists have bullied historians into accepting a very different version: that, basically, after the war the culture collapsed and Greece was uninhabited for 500 years. Hypothetical (read “pretend”) evidence has been used for so long to minimize this gap that nobody even realizes it is happening. But at least the distorted sequences of Greek history remain intact.
What happens when there is a complete rigid history paralleling Egyptian history? Which history will be trusted? Will the Old Testament Chronicles, with sequentially dated reigns of kings and judges for over 1500 years, be accepted? Or will it be assumed that disagreements with Egyptian archaeology disqualify scripture?
The battle between these two versions of history will be the subject of this work. It spans a great deal of time and territory. It is quite impossible to be an expert in all the disciplines touched by the reconstruction. And a certain amount of seemingly boring (at least to the layman) material must be included to support the theory. Those parts or chapters can be skipped, by the casual reader, without losing the story.
It took fifteen years of research before I felt qualified to undertake the project. It then took five years to write and refine the work. I can only thank my family for their patience, and my long time friend and consummate historian Vern Leming for his editorial efforts.
