Correlating the calendars of ancient civilizations and today's is a difficult problem. To achieve the greatest accuracy, historians strive to find events that they can date accurately. Such events are solar eclipses.
The use of this technique could help scholars date the Israeli conquest of Canaan, and possibly the reign of some of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Book of Joshua
The Bible refers to the book of Joshua, which tells how the Israelites won the battle for Canaan. During the bloody battle, Jesus prays that the sun "stands in the middle of heaven and does not rush westward for almost the whole day." And it stopped until the Israelites conquered Canaan.
This description runs counter to numerous laws of physics - the religious authorities of the Middle Ages even began to assert that the sun revolves around the earth, thereby refuting the theory of Copernicus.
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New interpretation
However, Professor Colin Humphreys of the University of Cambridge argues that the original Hebrew text may have been interpreted differently. The words of the Bible could mean a request not to stop the movement of the sun, but to stop the light of the sun.
In other words, Joshua could pray for a solar eclipse. Other scientists have previously come to the same conclusion, but faced a problem - it was almost impossible to date an appropriately calculated total solar eclipse.
However, in Astronomy & Geophysics, Humphries points out that ancient cultures did not make much of a distinction between total and annular eclipses, when the Moon is in the farthest part of its orbit and is too distant to eclipse the entire Sun.
Ancient eclipse
Humphreys calculated that an annular eclipse could have been observed from the Middle East towards the evening of October 30, 1207 BC. If his calculations are correct, this may be the oldest eclipse ever recorded.
Although there are several older candidates, evidence is lacking as their dating was based on controversial translations.
An event such as an annular eclipse would of course become part of local folklore for people of the time who had never seen anything like it, especially if this phenomenon turned out to interrupt and possibly change the course of an important battle.
Timeline of Ancient Egypt
In addition to the Bible, Humphreys connects this eclipse with Egyptian chronology by examining the famous granite block with inscriptions, which refers to the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, who conducted a military campaign in Canaan and defeated the Israelites.
Humphreys believes that Joshua's victory roughly coincided with the arrival of Egypt in Canaan. He thinks that this was the campaign of Merneptah, which makes it possible to almost accurately date his reign, and therefore the reign of his immediate predecessor, Ramses.
Rebuttals
Humphries' conclusions are, of course, open to controversy and doubt. On the one hand, the calculation of eclipses before 1000 BC is considered dubious and imprecise, since small tilts of the Earth's axis could affect the calculations.
In addition, the Egyptian history and chronology proposed by Humphreys suggests that Merneptah's military campaign in Canaan corresponds to the date of the eclipse, while he relies only on his own interpretation of the events set forth in the Bible.
In any case, whether Humphreys is right or not, historians and astronomers now have a new topic for study and discussion.
Hope Chikanchi