"Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs" Topic

A puzzling event in The Bible that mentions both the Moon and the Sun can be interpreted as describing a solar eclipse. We have dated it to 30 October 1207 BC, making it possibly the oldest datable solar eclipse recorded. This enables us to refine the dates of certain Egyptian pharaohs, including Ramesses the Great. It also suggests that the expressions currently used for calculating changes in the Earth's rate of rotation can be reliably extended back 500 years, from 700 BC to 1200 BC.

In modern astronomy, solar eclipses are categorized into three types: total, annular and partial. In the ancient world, however, observers did not distinguish between total and annular solar eclipses. For example, the Han and later Chinese records indiscriminately apply the same expression chi ("total") to both total and annular eclipses. On the other hand, the Chinese records do have a separate word for a partial solar eclipse (chin; Stephenson 1997). It is only when we get to the eclipse of 28 July AD 873, observed in Nishapur, Iran, that we have an unambiguously explicit statement of annularity from Al-Biruni.

In a total solar eclipse, the Moon covers the disc of the Sun with only an annulus of white light from the surrounding corona being visible, the level of illumination from which is roughly equivalent to that from a full Moon. In an annular eclipse, the silhouette of the Moon's disc is surrounded by a thin annulus of light from the uneclipsed Sun and the level of illumination on the Earth is roughly equivalent to dusk. In early times, both were called total and what was important was whether such eclipses happened or not.[…]

Cheers,
Martin from Canada

So what does this do for the adherents of the "New Chronology" or the "Glasgow Chronology"?

For a quick overview:

link

(warning: the word "consensus" is used )

Sorry, I thought this was open access.

It completely shreds the new chronology.

Oh no! Velikovsky is wrong again? Who knew?

Basically if you buy that the sun standing still in 10 Joshua is an eclipse (less problematic if you buy that the King James Bible was mistranslated* – the original Hebrew word has the same root as the Babylonian for eclipse, and thus can plausibly be read as as the sun and moon not doing what they were supposed to rather than standing still), we can nail down the reign of the Pharaoh prior to Ramses the Great, and thus shrink the 9 year margin of error for Merneptah's reign (due to counting length of reign and cross-referencing with neighboring civilizations) to one year. That has a ripple effect with nailing down the reign of Ramses the Great.

*This isn't a new idea, but scholars previously didn't have access to the computing power to calculate the eclipse, or looked for a total eclipse rather than the rare annular solar eclipse.

Thanks for the article, Martin.