A Revolution in the Early Chronology of Western Asia

It has correctly been said that chronology is the skel­eton of history, and that his­tory without chronology would be like a man without a skeleton. Although the skel­eton is not the most important part of the human body, no one can exist without it, nor can a person be useful with a distorted, broken, or in­complete set of bones. The same is true of history, which becomes completely dis­torted if its chronology is incorrect, incom­plete, or greatly disturbed. The reader will recognize this by means of a simple exam­ple. If later historians should misunder­stand the written records of the first two hundred years of American history, and make George Washington a contemporary of Mussolini, Hitler, and Churchill, a com­pletely distorted picture of American and European history would be the result. Sim­ilar and even more grotesque distortions of historical periods of the ancient past can actually be found in many printed works dealing with ancient history, as the result of an erroneous chronology. It can therefore be readily understood that an ac­curate chronological scheme is also an es­sential condition for a correct understand­ing of Bible history, which is closely inter­woven with the history of the ancient world.

In speaking of history it should be re­membered that history is based on written records, and a nation without written sources has no known history. Hence the known history of any ancient nation be­gins with its written records. The earliest of these nations were the dwellers of the Mesopotamian Valley and the Nile coun­try. This is the reason that the earliest chronologies deal only with these two coun­tries. The present article discusses only the early chronology of Mesopotamia; a study of the early chronology of Egypt is left for a later article. To avoid misunderstanding it may not be superfluous to point out that this article does not deal with prehistory, and will therefore enter into no discussion concerning any dates that prehistorians have assigned to hypothetical periods, which preceded the invention of script.

Caution in Use of Ussher's Chronology

Until the middle of the nineteenth cen­tury the historian of antiquity had no other basis for a reconstruction of ancient his­tory and its chronology than the statements of classical writers and the Bible. Based on these sources in the seventeenth cen­tury, Archbishop James Ussher worked out a chronological scheme that has found its way into the margins of many English Bibles since 1679, and for more than two centuries was considered in English-speak­ing countries to be a fixed and reliable chronology of the early history of the world.

The confidence of scholars in the re­liability of Ussher's chronology was shat­tered by the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and of the Babylonian cunei­form script, and through the discovery of numerous written records which, antedat­ing the classical sources by many centuries, provided historical information that had previously been completely unknown. These records, written on clay tablets or fragile papyri, or engraved in stone, ush­ered in an entirely new era of historical studies. Many of the new texts contained chronological data, and their statements written down in antiquity gave an im­pression of trustworthiness, for which rea­son they were generally accepted at their face value during the first fifty years of Assyriological and Egyptological studies—the second half of the nineteenth century.

Scholars thought that at last they had in their hands reliable source material by means of which the early chronology of the ancient world could be reconstructed and its remote past correctly understood.

As an example, a text can be referred to that was discovered in 1882. It contains a statement made by King Nabonidus, the father of the Biblical Belshazzar, that Naram-Sin, one of the two greatest kings of the Dynasty of Akkad, had reigned 2,300 years before him.' Since on the basis of the Canon of Ptolemy it was known that Nab­onidus had reigned in the middle of the sixth century, B.C., Naram-Sin's reign could then be placed in the twenty-ninth century B.C. In 1880, two years prior to this discovery, a cuneiform text had been published containing a list of Mesopota­mian kings called "Babylonian King List B." This was followed four years later by a more extensive "Babylonian King List A," and fragmentary copies of the Su­merian King List, of which the Weld-Blun­dell prism, now in the Ashmolean Mu­seum, Oxford, represents the most com­plete copy.' These various king lists seemed to provide the names and regnal years of all dynasties of Lower Mesopo­tamia from the Flood to the period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in an orderly se­quence. Since data given in these lists agreed with Nabonidus' statement concern­ing the interval of time lying between him and Naram-Sin, most of their data were accepted by scholars as reliable source material, although it was correctly recog­nized that the data about the earliest dynasties were based on legendary tradition. The result was that the earliest historical kings of Lower Mesopotamia were placed in the fifth and sixth millenniums B.C.

For some scholars the history of Meso­potamia seemed to reach back even farther than that. Toward the end of the nine­teenth century, H. V. Hilprecht, of the University of Pennsylvania, found, during the American excavations of Nippur, his­torical records of very early kings. They seemed to antedate by centuries kings al­ready known from other sources, and Pro­fessor Hilprecht did not hesitate to date Enshakushanna of Erech about 6500 B.C.' Sensational discoveries like this seemed to indicate that Lower Mesopotamia had had at least a 6,000-year history before the Per­sians, conquering Babylon in 539 B.C., started the Indo-European rule over that country. Hammurabi, the greatest king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, who was iden­tified by many scholars with the Biblical Amraphel of Abraham's time (Gen. 14:1), was placed by the adherents of the long chronological scheme in the twenty-fourth century B.c.⁶ Since this king was a key figure in early Babylonian history, the dates of his reign have for a long time been the cornerstone of all chronological schemes dealing with periods that preceded the first millennium B.C.

Shortening of the Long Chronology

This situation prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century. Then the reaction came. L. W. King discovered that the so-called Second Dynasty of Babylon did not rule over Babylon at all, but over a ter­ritory in southern Mesopotamia that lay near the Persian Gulf, and that this dy­nasty was contemporary with other dy­nasties.' The result of this discovery was a shortening of the chronological scheme by several centuries, and Hammurabi's reign was moved down to the twenty-second cen­tury B.c.⁸ Yet this was only the beginning of a process that led to further shortenings of the early chronology of Mesopotamia.

Shortly after World War I several dis­coveries of inscriptions were made in south­ern Mesopotamia, which shed light on the earliest history of that country. Some of these inscriptions, notably those from Ur of the Chaldees, showed that some kings who according to the Babylonian King Lists were separated from each other by many decades or even centuries, actually were contemporaries ruling over different cities at the same time. It was quickly rec­ognized that the Sumerian and Babylonian King Lists were not reliable sources for a reconstruction of ancient history, and fur­ther drastic reductions in the prevailing chronological schemes were necessary. The result was that Hammurabi's dates were again lowered, this time to the twentieth century (1947-1905) E.c.⁹ It should be re­membered that each lowering of Hammu­rabi's dates resulted in a proportionate lowering of all other earlier, and some later, dates.

Two Important Discoveries

Two further great discoveries have fi­nally stabilized the fluid Mesopotamian chronology of the third and second mil­lenniums a c The first of these discoveries was made at Khorsabad in 1932 and 1933 by the expedition of the University of Chicago, which found an almost complete Assyrian King List. A virtually identical duplicate list was discovered by the writer of this article in 1953. The first one is known as the Khorsabad King List, and the second one as the Seventh-day Advent­ist Seminary (SDAS) King List. Although the Khorsabad List was not completely published until 1954," enough excerpts be­came known to make it possible for schol­ars to put the early Assyrian chronology on a firm basis. The only uncertainty was provided by a number of gaps in the Khor­sabad King List caused by breaks in the clay tablet, which unfortunately have only partly been filled by the SDAS King List that has become available for comparison, because this latter list contains breaks at approximately the same places as the former.

The second important discovery was made in the ancient city of Mari on the central Euphrates, where a French expedi­tion has been excavating under the direc­tion of Andre Parrot since 1933. The ex­cavators had the good fortune of finding a large archive in the ruins of the royal palace of Mari, which revealed that King Hammurabi, of Babylon, was a contem­porary of King Shamshi-Adad I, of Assyria. This was great news, because it had always been believed that Hammurabi had lived much earlier than Shamshi-Adad I. Since the latter's reign could be approximately fixed in the seventeenth century B.C. by means of the Khorsabad King List, a fur­ther lowering of Hammurabi's date was necessitated.

It was interesting to follow the scholarly activity of chronologers during the years when more and more exciting evidence be­came known that shed light on the Meso­potamian history of the second millen­nium B.C., as the tablets from Mari were deciphered. Prof. W. F. Albright was one of the first scholars to recognize the im­portance of the Mari material in relation to the early chronology. In an article en­titled "A Revolution in the Chronology of Ancient Western Asia," published in 1938, he advocated as an approximate acces­sion date for Hammurabi the year 1870 Lc.' Two years later new evidence forced him to lower his date for Hammurabi by another sixty years.' Then followed Sidney Smith of the British Museum and the Ger­man Assyriologist Arthur Ungnad, both of whom came out for dates approximately the same as those suggested by Albright in 1940." After a further interval of two years, Albright published another article entitled "A Third Revision of the Early Chronology of Western Asia," in which he proposed an even lower date for Hammurabi-1728­1686 B.C."

Although some scholars reached even slightly lower dates than Albright," the end of the revolutionary reduction of the early Mesopotamian chronology was reached in 1942. Since that time many ar­ticles have been written either in defense of this so-called low chronology," or with the purpose of raising it again by some fifty or one hundred years, since some schol­ars think that the available evidence does not allow as drastic lowering of Ham­murabi as the proponents of the low chron­ology advocate. Scholars who have been in the forefront of those who argue for some higher dates are Professors Albrecht Goetze, of Yale University," and Benno Landsberger, of the University of Chicago." Space does not allow discussion of the various arguments brought forth by those scholars who disagree in their interpreta­tion of the evidence.

The reader who is interested in study­ing the conclusions reached by these schol­ars and the reasons for their divergence is referred to the sources listed in the refer­ences at the end of this article. It may suffice to say emphatically that anyone who, like the writer of this article, has closely fol­lowed the scholarly battles that have raged during the past few decades about the chronology of Western Asia, is convinced that Hammurabi reigned certainly not earlier than during the eighteenth century B.c., and not later than during the seven­teenth century. Since the whole early his­tory of Mesopotamia hinges on this key figure, the beginning of the early dynastic history of the Mesopotamian Valley is put by historians between the years 3100 and 2800 B.C.

The chronology of Mesopotamia has not yet been fixed to the point that no fur­ther revision seems to be possible; how­ever, it has reached a stage of relative stabilization. It is now generally believed that future discoveries can do no more than slightly change the current low chron­ology of early Mesopotamia, but that rev­olutionary changes, such as those witnessed during the past fifty years, are impossible. However, after having observed the trend of the last few decades, cautious historians will be careful not to become dogmatic concerning the early chronology of Meso­potamia. One thing is certain; namely, that the older views have been proved to be erroneous, and that the beginning of Meso­potamian history, put into the seventh mil­lennium B.C. some fifty years ago, is now recognized to have taken place some 4,000 years later.

The reader is therefore advised to be careful in using older books that deal with the ancient history of Western Asia, be­cause not only are their chronological dates outmoded and erroneous but in many cases so is the reconstruction of historical events. Only the latest works in ancient history should be used, and even the dates given in these works should be accepted as provisional, since they may have to be adjusted on the basis of new evidence pro­vided by future discoveries.

To provide the reader of this article with a vivid picture of the drastic reductions that the early Mesopotamian chronology has experienced during the past fifty years, the accession dates of three representative ancient kings will be given: (1) of En­shakushanna of Erech, one of the earliest Sumerian kings of which contemporary records are available; (2) of Sargon of Akkad, the illustrious Semitic conqueror of legendary fame; and (3) of Hammurabi, the great lawgiver of Babylon. The left column presents the years in which the  ancient dates, given in the right column, were suggested or published. In the central column the references are provided (SEE PDF FOR REFERENCES)