Astronomical fine-tuning of the chronology of the Hammurabi age
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This paper has its origin in a lecture that I presented at the workshop "Towards an absolute chronology of Mesopotamia during the second millennium BC".This workshop was organized by Klaas Veenhof and myself during the 58 th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Leiden, the Netherlands in July 2012.After the meeting and the ensuing discussion I realized that the revision of the list of Old Assyrian eponyms (presented by Gojko Barjamovic at the workshop) and the radiocarbon dating of tree ring sequences in beams used in the construction of the Warsama palace in Kanesh (presented by Sturt Manning) provided such severe constraints to the absolute calibration of the Old Assyrian chronology that the problem addressed in the workshop might be considered solved with an uncertainty margin of only ±10 years.I also realized that the Venus observations during the reign of the Old Babylonian king Ammi-Òaduqa and the solar eclipse around the birth of the Old Assyrian king Samsi-Adad, which by themselves provided insufficient constraints to resolve the problem of the Old Babylonian chronology, could quite well be used to fine-tune the absolute chronology to the ultimate accuracy of 1 year.
Author: T. de Jong
Language: English
Topic: Ancient Near East History
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2283520225