Ancient History Reconsidered

Pottery:

The following is an extract from Ancient History Reconsidered:

Professor Leonard Palmer, one of the philologists involved in translating the Greek Linear B texts, has already questioned the accuracy of sherd-based history. He became suspicious when the clay tablets which had been retrieved from the ancient Greek city of Knossos by the renowned English archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, kept referring to large numbers of a type of jar known as a stirrup-jar. The problem he encountered was that the tablets were dated to a different era to the many stirrup-jars which were found on the site whereas he insisted, quite logically, that they both belonged to the same period.

At first, Evans’s followers refused to accept Professor Palmer’s findings. However, on persisting with the matter, Palmer was compelled to undertake a detailed examination of the original site excavation notes as well as personally making a visit to Knossos in person in order to prove his point. After a long investigation, he was successful in demonstrating that his suspicions were correct. Nevertheless, even this was not without a struggle. Evans’s supporters were prepared to make up the most ridiculous ad hoc hypotheses rather than accept the obvious true interpretations. Professor Palmer’s work, which is entitled Mycenaeans and Minoans, is well worth reading because it demonstrates how our preconceived ideas tend to influence the way we think. It is essential that we apply common sense as well as more lateral thinking to our interpretations. Professor Palmer’s opponents seemed to be ready to accept the most incredible theories before being persuaded to accept the obvious true interpretation.

Professor Palmer has turned the whole of sherd based pottery dating on its head. Quoting the words of H. van Effenterre, the French excavator of Mallia, he records:

“One may now say, by a sort of paradox, the more carefully one analyses pottery, the decorative motives or seals or any kind of archaeological objects whatsoever, subdividing them into classes at will, the less one feels justified in attributing to these distinctions any clear-cut chronological significance.”¹

The chronology of Late Minoan (LM) pottery is based on the stratification at Knossos. According to the conventional belief, Late Minoan I and II is supposed to have preceded Late Minoan III. However, Professor Palmer has successfully challenged the interpretation of the archaeological results and has conclusively shown that the facts have been misrepresented.

He comments:

“An LM I-II vase now formed part of the burnt debris deposited above a pavement that had sealed in LM IIIB bowls.”²

In addition to this, stone jars dated stylistically to LM II were found in an unfinished state and it was correctly concluded that they represented work in progress during the last days before the city was destroyed by a conflagration.³ This means that LM II jars were still being produced during the LM IIIB period if not later.

The archaeologist in charge of the excavations at Knossos was Sir Arthur Evans:

“The inner part of the School Room (so-called because it had benches along the walls) had likewise been used as a pottery store, where the pots were found on a stone bench. In Volume I of his great work Evans classified the pots as Middle Minoan IIIB, and he concluded that this part of the palace had been engulfed in that period and that reconstruction had taken place above the debris. It was not until 1930 that Evans realised that he had made a catastrophic blunder in diagnosing the pottery... ...The pots were not Middle Minoan IIIB but Late Minoan IIIB!”⁴

This is not the only blunder that Evans made. The same problem is encountered with the classification of Early Minoan pottery. Duncan Mackenzie who took over from Evans wrote a letter to him querying his whole system of classification:-

“What emerges clearly from the letter is that Evans as late as September 1905 had no inkling of what had been found in the way of Early Minoan pottery at Knossos. Mackenzie was at a loss to understand how his employer had come to imagine his carefully distinguished strata. Yet in the spring of that year (1905) Evans had communicated to an international congress his famous ‘Système de Classification’, which was to remain canonical and is still defended.”⁵

Referring to Mackenzie’s pottery notebooks, Professor Palmer discovered further errors. The stirrup-jars assigned by Evans to the Room of the Stirrup-Jars were in fact found on the South Front which was nowhere near the room in question.

It should here be added that these corrections to the dating of Minoan pottery were introduced by Professor Palmer in the late 1960’s. Nevertheless, Archeologists are today still using the spurious system of dating introduced by Sir Arthur Evans.

Interestingly, excavations on a dolmen at Tell el Hammam in Jordan have uncovered pottery which supposedly spans 2,000 years!

“At approximately 1m x 3.2m, the chamber of HD.78 was larger than average. It contained over 40 ceramic vessels spanning almost 2,000 years – from the Chalcolithic Period, Early Bronze Age, and Intermediate Bronze Age – including jugs and small juglets, bowls and amphoriskoi. With the vessels there were very few human bones, only a few beads, and what appears to be a small basalt grinding stone.”⁶

They are clearly making the very same mistakes that everyone else is making. In Ancient History Reconsidered, I demonstrate that the Chalcolithic Period extended right through to historical times, even overlapping with the so-called Bronze and Iron Ages. Megaliths and dolmens were erected by Israelites and can be found both in the Land of Israel and all across Europe, leaving a trail, or waymarks, from whence they came:-

“Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps: set thine heart toward the highway, even the way which thou wentest: turn again, O virgin of Israel, turn again to these thy cities.” (Jer. 31:21.)

Notice then that Israel is to return to the Promised Land by the self-same route.

Art:

The following is an extract from Ancient History Reconsidered:

One spurious method of dating is based on comparisons of cave paintings and the different styles employed. This theory suffers from the same problems as pottery styles which have already been discussed. Comparisons are often made with bas-reliefs of Egypt or with the rich palatial murals of Assyria, Babylonia or Greece. The argument used is that because the cave paintings are much coarser they must be of earlier date. However, such reasoning is totally unsound. The royal paintings will indubitably have been commissioned by the king and the most experienced artisans will have been employed to undertake the work. By contrast, the cave drawings may well have been done by fugitives or social outcasts. It is more than likely that many of the cave finds which have been classed as prehistoric should belong firmly to the historic periods. In fact, this problem has already been encountered by archaeologists working in Egypt:

“The earliest depictions in Egypt are drawings incised on rocks in the desert; these are difficult to date unless there is connected archaeological material. An example at Sayala in Nubia is dated to the period before the arrival of the A-Group culture, and animals depicted on rock-drawings suggest the wetter climate of the Predynastic Period or earlier. However, similar drawings occur on the walls of the Trajan kiosk at Philae, and thus can only date to the second century AD or later; this makes dating by style alone impossible at present.”⁷

The assumption that primitive practices or life style automatically means an early historical date is therefore erroneous. We have already dispelled a similar argument in connection with pottery. I here quote the words of William Stevenson Smith Ph.D., who was Curator of Egyptian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, concerning the shoddy workmanship of a small stela discovered on the grave of a court lady of the Egyptian Early Dynastic Period:-

“The craftsmen available to the private person had not been able to keep pace with the rapid strides being made in the royal workshops.”⁸

He noticed also that the quality of the work depended on the materials which were available to the craftsman:

“But in Nubia the materials available to the craftsman were different from those to which he had been accustomed at home, requiring certain modifications of technique, while he was at the same time exposed to the influence of the native African crafts. The skill and adaptability of the Egyptian workmen asserted themselves under these new conditions. The arrival of these new craftsmen must have acted also as a considerable stimulus to the local industries. The result was the growth of a school of arts and crafts having its own peculiar style which continued to make itself felt, although gradually submerged by native influence, until the more thorough Egyptianization of Nubia during the New Kingdom.”⁹

I would also add that much depended on the skill of the craftsmen being employed. You cannot seriously expect all craftsmen to produce the same quality of work.

Ages Theory:

The idea that man started off as a Stone Age hunter who later developed the use of metals is an old theory which is still adhered to up to this present day. Unfortunately, time and again the archaeological results prove that this theory is false. For example, at the ancient Phoenician site of Motya, a small island off the extreme western tip of Sicily, we find archaeological evidence to demonstrate that the Bronze and Stone Age co-existed:

“The Motyans apparently had a connection with an earlier, more primitive people. Whether they conquered them, elbowed them aside or moved in amicably with them is unclear. But they did absorb some of the burial customs of those earlier peoples, who seem to have had one foot still in the Stone Age, since some of the tools and weapons that were put in those oldest graves were made of worked flint. These predecessors, though capable of making clay pots, had not refined the craft. The graves contain vases of an extremely crude nature, shaped by hand instead of a potter’s wheel.”¹⁰

Similar problems occurred elsewhere. In some instances, archeologists have either invented weird theories to explain away the anomalies, or manipulated the results to fit their theories. (See Ancient History Reconsidered for further examples.)

Realising the problems that this Stone Age --> Bronze Age --> Iron Age theory causes, some archaeologists, such as Immanuel Anati have adopted a more simplistic view. He argued that man started out as a primitive hunter who later turned to farming the land and then, later still, to living in towns and cities, hence everything is classed by Anati as Proto-Urban or Urban. This theory again is not supported either by archaeological or written evidence. The Greek writers, for example, inform us that some tribes were living as primitive hunters even as late as the first century ce.

In short, the very theories on which archaeologists are basing their results are fundamentally flawed.

1.	Mycenaeans and Minoans, pp.303-304, Leonard B. Palmer, Faber & Faber, London, 1965. [Return]
2.	Ibid. p.248. [Return]
3.	Ibid. p.240. [Return]
4.	Ibid. pp.237-8. [Return]
5.	Ibid. p.283. [Return]
6.	Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project Vol. 1, Hammam Dolmen 78 Excavation A joint scientific project of The College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University and The Department of Antiquities, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. [Return]
7.	The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt p.148, Edited by Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer, British Museum Press, 1993 (ISBN 0-7141-0965-7). [Return]
8.	Ancient Egypt as represented in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston p.24, William Stevenson Smith, Ph.D., Curator of Egyptian Art, Boston, Massachusetts 1960. [Return]
9.	Ibid. p.74. [Return]
10	The Emergence of Man - The Sea Traders pp.142-143, Professor James B. Pritchard, Time Life International (Nederland) B.V., 1976. [Return]

Dated 28 Nov 2013.
^©AHR Researches, Birmingham, England.