Centuries of Darkness makes a powerful case for over-turning the traditional chronology of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the subsequent assumed Greek and other Dark Ages. I picked this up randomly in a second-hand bookshop, as I do with most books. One the one hand, theories and scholarship that challenge the status quo are always appealing, but on the other hand I’m also wary of unsubstantiated crank history as well (aliens built the pyramids, Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare etc). Immediately in this book’s favour was a foreword from no less than Colin Renfrew, who I knew originally as the author of my first year archaeology textbook and had latterly enjoyed a number of his other works, so I decided it was worth purchasing.

Published in 1990, I also wanted to verify how the theory stated in here had developed since that time, and was pleased to find the author maintains a website where the debate continues to the present day. In the foreword, Professor Renfrew endorses the general scholarship of the book, and its convincing destruction of the accepted chronology, though he stops short of endorsing their final conclusions, which are that much of the dating of Bronze Age events, all of which are interlinked, are far too old, or ‘high’ to use the academic parlance, and they can be brought forward by about 250 years, eliminating much of the Greek and other Dark Ages.

This is an academic work which can be read by a general reader with an interest in the topic, but you shouldn’t expect a popular history. The bulk of the book works systematically through the individual chronologies of the different interlocking regions, from Italy to Nubia to Mesopotamia. They provide a heavily cited and detailed analysis of the dating methodologies employed, exposing numerous inconsistencies by working their way through the main research and evidence in each case. While some elements of this can be a little dry if you’re not familiar with the key academics and details of the debate, which I am not. But what I found fascinating is the surprising Procrustean ‘hand-waves’ that other experts have used to make the facts fit their theory rather than the other way around. Explanations of artifacts appearing hundreds of years out of context have been explained away as prized imported heirlooms, and cultures and writing systems have been supposed to have lain dormant for hundreds of years of illiteracy before being suddenly revived almost unchanged. It is the exposition of these fallacies that I find the most convincing. In their place the author offers a far simpler explanation, which I have learned is almost always the right one.

After systematically deconstructing each chronology, the author brings us to the source of the problem, the substantial errors in dating Egyptian history. Egyptian dating is heavily reliant on the the Sothic cycle, whereby the gradual shifting of the rising of the star Sirius against the standard solar year (essentially due to Egyptians not employing leap years), creates a 1461 cycle where the date can be assumed from Egyptian records which record on which date in  the Egyptian civil year Sirius rose, allowing those years to be tied to an absolute chronology. The whole of Egyptian dating has been built around this however a closer examination shows that not only are the initial records on which it is based are fairly scant, requiring a degree of assumption, but even more damningly it is based on the assumption that there were no changes or reforms to the Egyptian civil calendar throughout its thousands of years of history. Thus the whole Sothic cycle dating seems based on false precision, claiming to be able to date Egyptian events to a precise year (or range of 4 years), whereas the underlying assumptions could be off by hundreds of years. This has led to the creation of the Third Intermediate Period in Egyptian history where Pharoahs with scant details or monuments are placed and allotted the longest possible reigns. Taking this further the author also exposes a considerable amount of circular reasoning, where dates in one region are assumed based on dates in another, however these assumptions can often be traced back to dependent on their own source in some way.

After this analysis there is a fascinating chapter on the exaggeration of antiquity, looking at the evidence and motives as to why ancient civilisations wanted to demonstrate as long a history as possible. It became a matter of civilisational-pride for the Greeks and others to show that they had a long history that could compete with the Egyptians. Thus there has been a strong incentive for historians like Herodotus to extend their histories as far back as possible, often with nothing more complex than allotting forty-year generations to every recorded ruler and other fairly basic assumptions which would never past muster in modern analysis but can often be found to underpin a lot of historical assumptions.

Particularly interesting, to me at least, though not expounded on in great detail in this work, is the implications for the dating of the Trojan War.  Though one of the co-authors has since published further on this topic. Widely accepted in antiquity to have taken place in 1183 BC, a date in this range still forms part of most modern analysis, placing at around the beginning of the so called Bronze Age collapse.  Centuries of Darkness would place the date of the Trojan War somewhere in the 10th century BC instead. This creates a much shorter gap between these semi-mythical events, from the palace culture of Mycenae, and the Greek language being written in Linear B on the one hand, to the reemergence of the Greek language in new script and the writing down of works like The Iliad on the other. This is convincing, while it is clear that The Iliad and The Odyssey must have evolved in spoken form over a period of time before being written down in the form we know them today, a period of closer to one century than three between the events and their documentation feels more realistic.

Equally the survival of the Greek language, albeit in a different script, but otherwise recognisably Greek from the Linear B tablets found in Mycenae and elsewhere makes more sense when a shorter time period is assumed. It is worth remembering that until Michael Ventris and John Chadwick deciphered Linear B in the 1950s nobody believed that the language that script documented was Greek. And more broadly, this is a reminder of how often assumed histories and other scientific theories are suddenly over-turned with the discovery of new evidence. A timely reminder to always be aware of the limits of our knowledge.