Ramses II Clearly C8th BC

Taken from:
http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5973

 

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Here is what Sweeney has noted in regard to the similarities between Ashurnasirpal’s cavalry tactics and that of the Hittite opponents of pharaoh Seti I (c. 1294-1279 BC, conventional dates):[1] “Hittite cavalry are shown in action against Seti I, and their deployment etc. displays striking parallels with that of the cavalry belonging to Ashurnasirpal II”. Thus for example the Assyrian horsemen, he says, “ride bareback, obtaining a firm grip by means of pressing the raised knees against the horse’s flanks - exactly the method of riding employed by the Hittites portrayed on the monuments of Seti I and Ramses II”. Again, both the early neo-Assyrian cavalry and those of the Hittites against whom Seti I battled, employed the bow as their only weapon. “Even more importantly, they are used in an identical way tactically: they are invariably used in conjunction with the chariotry”.

Sweeney next turns to Maspero’s description of the cavalry of Ashurnasirpal: “The army [of Assyria] ... now possessed a new element, whose appearance in the field of battle was to revolutionize the whole method of warfare; this was the cavalry, properly so called, introduced as an adjunct to the chariotry.” More specifically, he writes:

This body of cavalry, having little confidence in its own powers, kept in close contact with the main body of the army, and it was not used in independent manoeuvres; it was associated with and formed an escort to the chariotry in expeditions where speed was essential, and where ordinary foot soldiers would have hampered the movements of the charioteers.

Again, this is just what one would expect from the prevailing ‘Indo-European’ influence, the ‘chariot-riding aristocracy’, with its magnificent horsemanship. Similarly, James tells of the definite likeness between the neo-Assyrian art of Ashurnasirpal II and that of the ‘Middle’ Assyrian period several centuries earlier, C13th-12th BC:[2]

One scholar noted that the forms of decoration of the intricately carved Assyrian seals of the 12^th century are ‘clearly late’, as they ‘point the way to the ornate figures which line the walls of the Neo-Assyrian palace of Assurnasirpal [mid-9^th century BC]’. The sculptors employed by this king, in the words of another expert on Assyrian art, ‘worked within a tradition that went back to the thirteenth century BC’.

Professor Greenberg has observed, along the same lines, that Mycenaean Greece Shaft Grave Stelae, currently dated variously to the late C14th, or mid C13th BC, “make a good deal more art historical sense when compared, for example, with the hunting scenes of Ashurnasirpal II from Nimrud, which are dated in the ninth century BC …”.[3]

Thus Meyer was being perfectly logical, according to his own artificial context - with its subsequent misalignment of the early history of Israel - when issuing his bold challenge to gainsay the traditional view that Moses was a real historical person. And Meyer was entirely correct too back then, in 1906 (a full century ago), when stating that “not one of those who treat [Moses] as a historical reality has hitherto been able to fill him with any kind of content whatever …”. For Meyer’s chronology, as promoted by the Berlin School of Egyptology, and later by Sir Henry Breasted, which had become the standard, had made it quite impossible for scholars even to locate Moses in that complex scheme, let alone “to fill him with any kind of content”. Whilst an independent-minded historian like Sir Flinders Petrie might try valiantly to make a major adjustment to Sothic chronology - though still unfortunately based on that system’s faulty premises, by adding an extra Sothic period - he did not like what he eventually saw and so had to reject his novel idea.[4] Meyer’s Sothic chronology therefore survived the challenge and prevailed.

Today, for those who do give some credence to the story of Moses and the Exodus account, the favoured era is, as it was in Meyer’s day, the 19^th Ramesside dynasty, Sothically dated to the C13th-C12th’s BC – but still two or more centuries after properly calculated biblical estimates for Moses. Ramses II (c. 1279-1212 BC, conventional dates) is now generally considered to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus; though no evidence whatsoever for a mass exodus of foreigners can be found during his reign.

Fortunately, the work of revision is serving to resurrect some long-lost biblical characters of great import. I have already shown in fair detail in Part I how C9th BC biblical characters, for instance, emerge in some profusion when a Velikovskian-based revision is carefully applied to the well-documented EA period. According to the model for Egypt that I shall be proposing in Chapter 11 (section: “A Basic, Revised Chronology for Ramses II”), the reign of Ramses II actually straddled the last half of the C9th and the first part of the C8th BC; the latter being the same century to which king Hezekiah in fact belonged. Thus Ramses II came into being more than half a millennium after Moses. He was certainly not the pharaoh of the Exodus.

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[1] Ibid, p. 24.

[2] Centuries of Darkness, p. 273.

[3] ‘Lion Gate at Mycenae’ (1973), p. 28.

[4] Researches in Sinai, ch. xii; q.v. his A History of Egypt, vol. i, add. xvii, xviii.