The Testimony of
Radiocarbon Dating

In 1952 Willard F. Libby, then of the University of Chicago, published his Radiocarbon Dating. It was about half a century after the discovery of cosmic rays that he had come upon the idea, and also developed a method, of using the radioactivity resulting from cosmic rays for the purpose of dating organic remains. Libby’s discoveries gave immediate support and even vindication to three independent conclusions of my research into natural events of the past, as described in Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval—the time the Ice Age ended, the time petroleum was deposited, and the time of the classical period of Meso-american civilization.⁽¹⁾

However, the main interest for me in radiocarbon tests was in checking on historical dates of the ancient East, of the period covered in Ages in Chaos. This method was as if created to sit in judgment in the litigation between the accepted and revised time tables.

In Ages in Chaos we have seen that, with the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus synchronized, events in the histories of the peoples of the ancient world coincide all along the centuries.

For a space of over one thousand years records of Egyptian history have been compared with the records of the Hebrews, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and finally with those of the Greeks, with a resulting correspondence which denotes synchronism.

In Volume I of Ages in Chaos it was shown in great detail why Akhnaton of the Eighteenth Dynasty must be placed in the latter part of the ninth century. If Akhnaton flourished in -840 and not in -1380, the ceramics from Mycenae found in the palace of Akhnaton are younger by five or six hundred years than they are presumed to be, and the Late Mycenaean period would accordingly move forward by about half a thousand years on the scale of time.

I wished to have radiocarbon tests that would clarify the issue. I did not need the test in order to strengthen my view on the age of the Eighteenth and the following dynasties, for I considered the evidence that I had presented in Ages in Chaos to be strong enough to carry the weight of the revised scheme. But in view of the novelty of my contentions I realized that a confirmation from a physical method would be of great import for the acceptance of my work.

The efforts that I spent in order to achieve radiocarbon examination of any suitable object from the New Kingdom in Egypt were many and persistent. Correspondence between the British Museum and myself did not produce the desired results, though I was politely answered by the departments of Egyptian, of Assyro-Babylonian and of Greek antiquities. The Museum has a radiocarbon laboratory of its own, and therefore the task could be simplified; but the Museum claimed other preferential tasks. At one time I secured the help of the late Professor Robert H. Pfeiffer, Director of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University in an effort to obtain some organic relics from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but to no avail. Even Albert Einstein’s plea, relayed to the Museum by his secretary upon his death, to have my work of reconstruction of ancient history tested by radiocarbon, went unheeded.

The usual argument explaining the refusal of cooperation was the assertion that the Egyptian chronology of the New Kingdom is known to such exactness that no carbon tests are needed; moreover the tests were claimed to have a margin of error far greater than the incertitude of the historians as to New Kingdom dates.

Since the chronology of ancient Egypt is quite closely fixed by the astronomical evidence from the Eleventh Dynasty onward, in part, to the nearest year, radiocarbon, with its substantial margin of error, could hardly add anything to our knowledge of the chronology of the New Kingdom. . . .

There has been so far as I am aware no radiocarbon dating of objects from the New Kingdom. I do not think that such a test, given the necessary measure of tolerance which must be allowed, is likely at the moment to give a chronology for the New Kingdom which is any more certain than a chronology deduced by historical methods.

In the light of the very complete knowledge we have on this tightly dated and closely recorded period, it would serve no useful purpose to have this done. . . .

During the ten years after the publication of Libby’s Radiocarbon Dating in 1952, which was also the year Ages in Chaos was published, the great period of history in accepted Egyptian chronology from -1580, the beginning of the New Kingdom (or rather from -1680, the fall of the Middle Kingdom) to the time of the Ptolemies, a period of ca. 1250 years in the accepted chronology, a tremendous stretch of time, was left out of radiocarbon testing programs. My efforts, spread over ten years and more, were directed to many museums and places of learning, but they were all in vain. I have recorded and filed the exchanges that took place between my supporters, myself, and those in whose power it was to have the tests made. The museums showed no willingness to cooperate.

For a while it looked a little more hopeful when my friend, Claude F. A. Schaeffer, the excavator of Ras Shamra (Ugarit), acceded to my urging and sent to Dr. Elizabeth Ralph of Pennsylvania University a piece of wood found in the neighborhood of another object which he dated to the reign of Merneptah of the Nineteenth Dynasty. However, the sample became contaminated in the laboratory. From a French laboratory, where a control piece of the same find was sent, no answer was forthcoming, and the circumstances of the find gave no assurance—had either laboratory succeeded in obtaining a result—that the piece of wood from Ras Shamra really dated from the reign of Merneptah in Egypt.

It looked as if the only result of all my efforts would be a stately volume of letters and memoranda entitled ASH. It is to ash that organic specimens must be converted to make the test. It was ash also in the sense that many efforts ended in nothing.

In the meantime, certain systematic disagreement in datings by the radio carbon method with the conventional historical time tables was observed all over the world. But above and beyond this generally observed phenomenon, the Egyptian datings stood unreconciled with the results of the carbon tests. This made quite a few Egyptologists express their disbelief in the carbon method and the physicists even bolder in assuming that the Egyptologists were victims of some undefined systematic error. The perplexing Egyptian dates were discussed at the conference of the workers in radiocarbon that took place in Cambridge July 1962, and two laboratories, of Groeningen in Holland and of the University of Pennsylvania, were entrusted with the task of clarifying the issue. At that time the New Kingdom was apparently not yet investigated on radiocarbon dates, but if it was investigated, the results were never made known.

A few years later the radiocarbon laboratory of the University of Rome published a survey of tests made by various laboratories. Dates of 54 archaeological and historical samples from Egypt were published up to the summer of 1964. Some of these have been repeatedly dated both by the same lab, and as cross-check samples.⁽³⁾

These measurements have shown that most Egyptian samples give a C-14 age which is less than expected historical age often based on astronomical evidences. No satisfactory physical or archaeological explanation of this fact yet found, except a physical attempt by Damon and Long.⁽⁴⁾

Again it seems that only Old and Middle Kingdom material was the subject of the review. The “physical attempt” of Damon and Long referred to in this report considers the possibility that about two millennia before the present era the influx of cosmic rays suddenly changed in rate and that as a consequence the radiocarbon ratio in the carbon pool changed, too. Actually such or similar surmises were expressed by Dr. Ralph, as also by Dr. H. E. Suess and by others.

The change in the influx of cosmic rays could have occurred either in the case of the Earth, together with the rest of the solar system, passing close to a source of such rays, a nova or a supernova; or, preferably, as Suess assumed, in the case of a change in the strength of the magnetic field that shields the Earth from cosmic rays.

These surmises were repeatedly made because anomalous readings from the early periods of Egyptian history accumulated, mostly pointing to more recent dates. Dr. Libby, however, expressed his view that the Egyptian chronology may be wrong.⁽⁵⁾

In Science for April, 1963, he wrote:

The data [in the Table] are separated into two groups—Egyptian and non-Egyptian. This separation was made because the whole Egyptian chronology is interlocking and subject to possible systemic errors . . . Egyptian historical dates beyond 4000 years ago may be somewhat too old, perhaps 5 centuries too old at 5000 years ago. . .⁽⁶⁾

Thus the two solutions offered concerning the too recent dates for the Middle Kingdom actually amounted to either a support for Ages in Chaos or for Worlds in Collision, or for both.

In the conventional scheme of history, the Middle Kingdom ended about -1680. In Ages in Chaos the end of the Middle Kingdom is placed at about -1450. Whereas for most of the Eighteenth Dynasty I claimed that the dates need to be reduced by about 540 years, for the end of the Middle Kingdom the restructured timetable required but about 200 years change toward greater recentness.

A later issue of Radiocarbon brought radiocarbon dates of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, with the verdict that this period of history did not terminate in -1780 or even in -1680 but endured into the fifteenth century before the present era,⁽⁷⁾ as postulated in Ages in Chaos. All this was surmised before tests on New Kingdom material were considered.

In 1963 it seemed hopeless to expect that there would ever be a radiocarbon test of Egyptian chronology of the New and Late Kingdoms, the mainstay of the chronological structure of the entire complex known as the ancient East.

But then from a series of chance meetings a story developed that had all the characteristics of a cloak-and-dagger mystery. I will not tell it here, but the result was that three small pieces of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen were delivered from Cairo Museum to Dr. Elizabeth Ralph of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.

It took a long time, but finally the three pieces of wood were processed. On February 25, 1964 Dr. Ralph wrote me:

“Your great patience in waiting for the C-14 date of the wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen is greatly appreciated. The dates . . . are as follows:

U. of Pa. Lab No.	Name	Age calc. with 5568 half-life	Age calc. with 5730 half-life
P-726	Wood from coffin of Tutankhamen, 18th Dynasty	1030 ± 50 B.C.	1120 ± 52 B.C.

But I was not completely satisfied with the result, and I suspected where the additional two hundred years or so may have lain hidden. In my reconstruction, Tutankhamen’s death falls in the second half of the ninth century. In a letter to Dr. Ralph I inquired whether the carbon age of a trunk discloses the time when the tree was felled or the time of the formation of the tree rings. To this, on March 5, 1964, a week after her first report, Dr. Ralph answered that the latter was true.

Various tests have indicated that only the outer growth ring of a tree has a contemporaneous amount of C-14, that is, it is in equilibrium with the atmospheric C-14. Except for a slight diffusion of sap inward, which seems to be insignificant, the inner rings seem to have C-14 ages representative of the years that have elapsed since they were outer rings. Therefore, a C-14 date for a sample cut from the inner part of a log would not be representative of the time of the cutting of the tree.
The magnitude of the error varies greatly in different regions and with different trees.

The three pieces of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen consisted of Spina Christi (two pieces, aggregate weight 14.5 grams) and Cedar of Lebanon (weight 11.5 grams); since they together weighed but 26 grams, and 25 grams is considered the necessary minimum quantity for a test, all were tested as one batch. Spina Christi is a comparatively short-lived thorn plant; but Cedar of Lebanon is one of the longest living trees. There is no question that the Cedar of Lebanon was not cut for export as a sapling; the tree reaches the venerable age of a thousand and more years. Whoever visits the cedar forests still surviving in a few areas of Lebanon at elevations of five to nine thousand feet, and sees their majestic trunks and branches, will realize that since 43 percent of the wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen tested (11 grams out of 26) was Cedar of Lebanon, the probability is that an additional correction of several hundred years is necessary, thus making the discord between the accepted and the carbon dates much greater than three hundred years.

The report on wood from Tutankhamen’s tomb was printed in 1965 in the annual volume of Radiocarbon. The circumstances of the find of this tomb are well known. In 1922 Howard Carter, digging in the Valley of the Kings, came upon a hidden stairway, and a door sealed with the seal of the priests of the Necropolis and also with the seal of the dead pharaoh, the youthful Tutankhamen. In my Oedipus and Akhnaton I presented a reconstruction of the events that led to Tutankhamen’s death. If the tomb was ever opened, it could only have happened in the reign of Ay, who succeeded Tutankhamen and whom I identified as the prototype of Creon of the Greek legend of the Oedipus cycle. The tomb was also free from percolating water and therefore there was no reason to suspect contamination by water which might have first seeped through some decomposed organic material. There could not be a better source for radiocarbon test but that material itself.

Several other tests on wood from the New Kingdom in Egypt, also performed in the laboratory headed by Dr. Ralph, were published in the same volume. The specimens from the New Kingdom were assessed by their finders or by specialists as dating from the Eighteenth (or in one case possibly from the Nineteenth) Dynasty:

Sample no. & material	provenance	conventional date	C-14 date
P-717 Charcoal	estimated to be of Thutmoses III to Amenophis III periods	1500 to 1370 B.C.	1161 B.C.
P-718 Charcoal	reign of Amenophis III	1408 to 1372 B.C.	1137 B.C.
P-720 Wood from sarcophagus	may date from end of 18th Dynasty or, more likely, from the 19th Dynasty	1370 to 1314 B.C. or 1314 to 1200 B.C.	1031 B.C.

In all cases the age arrived at by radiocarbon testing was several centuries younger than the conventional chronology would allow.

In view of what was said above concerning the radiocarbon age of a piece of wood, any wood unless it is an annual plant would deceive by offering a greater antiquity than the date of its use for building purposes. Clearly, the preferred material for radiocarbon dating would be something like grain, papyrus, cotton or linen, animal hide, or mummy remains. Any result obtained from wood contains an x number of years that depend on the number of rings and their count from the bark inward—and this x must not be neglected in the estimates. Evidently further testing is necessary and the tomb of Tutankhamen could provide grain, dried flowers (probably not enough for a test), or a piece of mummy, if only the importance of such a test for the entire field of Egyptian archaeology would be realized.

In 1971, or seven years later, the British Museum processed palm kernels and mat reed from the tomb of Tutankhamen. The resulting dates, as Dr. Edwards, Curator of the Egyptian Department of the British Museum, wrote to the University of Pennsylvania radiocarbon laboratory, were -899 for the palm kernels and -846 for the mat reed.⁽⁹⁾

These results, however, were never published.

Such cases make me appeal that all tests, irrespective of how much the results disagree with the accepted chronological data, should be made public. I believe also that if nothing else, the curiosity of the British Museum Laboratory officials should have induced them to ask for additional material from the Tutankhamen tomb instead of discontinuing the quest because “On the basis of the dating it was decided that the samples did not come from the tomb” and therefore it “was decided that the results should not be published.”⁽¹⁰⁾

In the Proceedings of the Symposium on Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology held at Uppsala in 1969, T. Säve-Söderbergh and I. U. Olsson introduce their report with these words:

C 14 dating was being discussed at a symposium on the prehistory of the Nile Valley. A famous American colleague, Professor Brew, briefly summarized a common attitude among archaeologists towards it, as follows: “If a C 14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out of date we just drop it.” Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method. . .⁽¹¹⁾

Another way of dulling the sharp disagreements between the accepted chronology and the results of the tests is described by Israel Isaacson.⁽¹²⁾

In this case nothing was purposely hidden, but two different approaches were applied. In one and the same year the University of Pennsylvania tested wood from a royal tomb in Gordion, capital of the short-lived Phrygian Kingdom in Asia Minor, and from the palace of Nestor in Pylos, in S.W. Greece. In Gordion the result was -1100; in Pylos -1200. However, according to the accepted chronology, the difference should have been nearly 500 years—1200 for Pylos at the end of the Mycenaean age was well acceptable, but -1100 for Gordion was not—the date should have been closer to -700. Dr. Ralph came up with the solution for Gordion. The beams from the tomb were squared and the inner rings could easily have been four to five hundred years old when the tree was felled. But in Pylos the description of the tested wood indicates that these were also squared beams—yet the corrective was not applied—this because -1200 was the anticipated figure. However, as I try to show in detail, there were never five centuries of Dark Age between the Mycenaean Age and the historical (Ionic) Age of Greece. If the same correction had been applied to both cases, then since the Gordion beams were dated to -700, the Pylos beams should be dated to ca. -800.

As mentioned earlier, the fact that the Middle Kingdom dates were regularly found to be too young by several centuries caused the surmise by Damon and Long that the influx of cosmic rays changed four thousand years ago or thereabouts.

Now the question arises—how can the radiocarbon method be used for deciding between the conventional and the revised chronologies?⁽¹³⁾

Libby, in his Radiocarbon Dating, stressed that the method is good only on the condition that the influx of cosmic rays has not changed during the last 25 or 30 thousand years, and also that the quantity of water in the oceans has not changed in the same period of time. In a sequel volume to Worlds in Collision I intend to show that the Earth passed through a period of intense bombardment by cosmic rays at the time of the Deluge. Libby’s insight, by the very fact of stressing these preconditions for the validity of the method, is amazing.

The great catastrophe in the middle of the second millennium that terminated the Middle Kingdom must also have disrupted all processes that underlie the carbon dating method. On the one hand much radioactivity and radiation must have been engendered as the consequence of interplanetary discharges, and thus any organic material of a date after the catastrophe would appear disproportionately younger than the material from earlier periods. On the other hand, the general conflagration that accompanied the cosmic catastrophe must have caused contamination of the air by carbon from burning forests, and even more so by burning fossil carbon in oil and coal, besides the contamination of the air by the products of volcanic eruptions, which were simultaneous on all continents. Such intrusion of non-radioactive carbon into the atmosphere would have disturbed the C-12/C-14 balance in the sense of making any organic material that grew and lived after the catastrophe appear in the carbon test as older and belonging to an earlier age.

Thus two phenomena of opposite effect have acted in the catastrophes, and depending on the preponderance of one of the two factors, the objects subjected to test would appear younger or older than their real age. Furthermore, carbon of extraterrestrial origin (ash and polymerized hydrocarbons) added a third factor, and its evaluation in the carbon pool as to its tendency to heighten or lower the radioactivity is hardly possible.

In the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century before the present era, the last series of cosmic catastrophes took place. Although not of the same ferocity as far as the Earth was concerned, these catastrophes and conflagrations must also have left their imprints on everything organic.

Thus radiocarbon dating needs to take into consideration the catastrophic changes in historical and also prehistorical times. To determine the extent of correction necessary to render the radiocarbon method reliable, dendrochronologists, notably Suess, devised a plan to control the radiocarbon dates by building a chronology of tree rings of the white bristlecone pine. However, three or four rings formed in one year is not uncommon, especially if the tree grows on a slope with the ground several times a year turning wet and dry because of rapid outflow of water.⁽¹⁴⁾

And certainly the building of tree “ladders,” or carrying on the count from one tree to another may arouse erroneous conclusions. One and the same year may be dry in Southern California and wet in the northern half of the state.⁽¹⁵⁾

Moreover, as R. D. Long writes in a comprehensive review of dendrochronology, the Suess tree ring calibration curve data “proposed as the solution for correcting conventional radiocarbon ages cannot be applied to Egypt. As will be demonstrated, physical geographical location has crucial meaning to C 14 dating and calibration.” This, he claims, “demolishes the theory on which the Suess curve rested.”⁽¹⁶⁾

Then how can the radiocarbon method contribute to the clarification of Egyptian chronology, especially in the age of the New Kingdom?

The answer to this is that the method can be objectively and profitably used for the purpose of finding out whether the conventional or the revised scheme is the true one, and there are two ways of making the test work for this purpose. The first way is in comparative dating: according to my reconstruction, the Eighteenth Dynasty (the first of the New Kingdom) was contemporaneous with the dynasty of Saul and David; Akhnaton and Tutankhamen were contemporaneous with Jehosphaphat of Jerusalem and Ahab of Samaria, and with Shalmaneser II of Assyria, all of the ninth century before the present era. Organic material of Egypt presumably of the fourteenth century (the time the conventional chronology assigns to Akhnaton and Tutankhamen) should be compared with organic material from ninth century Israel or Assyria. I expect that the carbon analysis will certify the contemporaneity of these periods in Egyptian history on the one hand, and Judean and Assyrian history on the other.

The other way of using radiocarbon dating to test the correctness of the reconstruction of ancient history is in testing organic material from a period removed by several centuries from the last cosmic catastrophe. A choice case would be Ramses III and the Twentieth Dynasty in general. As I show in Peoples of the Sea, Ramses III of the historians is but Nectanebo I, who occupied the Egyptian throne in the first half of the fourth century and who warred with Artaxerxes II, the Persian.

According to the accepted chronology, Ramses III started to reign in -1200 or a few years thereafter. The UCLA Egyptologist who claimed that no carbon test is needed for dating the New Kingdom used Ramses III as an example:

. . . Since the chronology of ancient Egypt is quite closely fixed by astronomical evidence . . . radiocarbon, with its substantial margin of error, could hardly add anything to our knowledge of the chronology of the New Kingdom. Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt, Vol. II, dates Ramses III to 1192-1160 B.C., and this date is not likely to contain a margin of error greater than about five years each way.

Since the problem to solve is whether Ramses III lived almost 32 or less than 24 centuries ago, the difference being so great as to exceed 25 percent (33 percent if counted on 24 centuries), the radiocarbon method, with its margin of uncertainty of less than 50 years, must provide an unambiguous answer in the contest for the title of the true history.

In a number of letters directed to various persons and institutions, I have asked for such tests. Again—as before the testing of the wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen—I found resistance; some famous collections of Egyptological antiquities disclaimed possessing any organic material (wood, swathings, hide, seeds, papyrus) that could be sacrificed or even the very possession of such material dating from the Nineteenth, Twentieth, or Twenty-first dynasties. In one case I was offered one gram of linen whereas one ounce (ca. 30 grams) are needed for one single test.

Since the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago spent decades on excavating and describing the palace temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, my request went also that way; but the answer I received from Professor John Wilson was not promising. Thus I decided to publish Peoples of the Sea, after much postponement, and let the readers of that volume clamor for the performance of radiocarbon tests for the solution of the problem—which of the two conflicting histories of the ancient world is spurious and which is genuine?

[Dr. John Iles of Ontario, actually did succeed in one such an endeavor. In 1977 N. B. Millet, curator of the Egyptian Department of the Royal Ontario Museum, described the historical background of the mummy of Nakht, which the Canadian Medical Association was analyzing. According to Millet Nakht was “invariably described as the weaver of the kny temple” of King Setnakht, the first ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty and father of Ramses III. Millet wrote about Nakht’s mummy that there was “unusually clear evidence of its date.”⁽¹⁷⁾

Upon reading the report, Dr. Iles wrote a letter to the Canadian Medical Association’s Journal, asking that a Carbon 14 test be performed.⁽¹⁸⁾

The death of King Setnakht, the first ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty, is conventionally dated at -1198.

On Dr. Iles’ initiative, the Royal Ontario Museum submitted linen wrappings from the mummy of Nakht to Dalhousie University for radiocarbon testing. On November 9, 1979, W. C. Hart of Dalhousie University wrote to Dr. Iles: “The date on linen wrappings from the mummy of Nakht is: DAL-350 2295 ± 75 years before the present (1950),” meaning -345 ± 75. Dr. Iles reported these results in a letter to the association’s journal. (March 8, 1980).