Hi Chris,

Thanks for your point of view and arguments.

Dr. Ramsey and Dr. Dee are the co-authors of the following articles:
1. Dee M., Ramsey C., Shortland A., Higham T., Rowland J. (2009), Reanalysis of the Chronological Discrepancies Obtained by the Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments, Radiocarbon, Vol. 51(3), pp.1061-1070.
2. Ramsey C., Dee M., Rowland J., Higham T., Harris S., Brock F., Quiles A., Wild E., Marcus E., Shortland A. (2010), Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt, Science 328(5985), pp.1554-1557.
3. Dee M., Wengrow D., Shortland A., Stevenson A., Brock F., Flink L., Ramsey C. (2013) An absolute chronology for early Egypt using radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling, 469, Proc. R. Soc. A.
4. and many others.

As I wrote in the first post of the topic, Dr. Dee answered to my question: "[...] in response to your main question, I can say yes, the absolute dates for the Old Kingdom, as far as I am concerned, could still be moved by 1-2 centuries."
It would be strange to assume that Dr. Dee does not remember his own work (3), which is how you argue "effectively blocks attempts to extend Dyn. 4 back in time as much as 200 years".

I did not ask Dr. Dee for details of such his opinion (on what the possibility of a 1-2 century shift for the OK is based and how this shift is consistent with the data for the early periods), because he wrote that he is busy and gave me a rather brief answer.
Since I am not a specialist in the field of radiocarbon dating, I can comment on your arguments from an amateur point of view.

1. Dating of Ipi-ha-ishutef coffin in "High-precision dendro-14C dating of two cedar wood sequences from First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom Egypt and a small regional climate-related 14C divergence" (Dr. Dee one of the co-authors).

It is supposed that Ipi lived during the 11th Teban Dynasty (2125-1985 BC by Shaw).
My hypothesis suggests that the duration of the 9-10th Herakleopolitan dynasties is underestimated by 200 years, and 11th and all subsequent dynasties are dated correctly.
Obviously, the Ipi coffin belongs to a later period than interests us in connection with the supposed underestimation of the Old Kingdom age.

2. Step pyramid of Djoser in BBC 2010 article.
BBC 2010 article briefly describes the findings of the "Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt" (2010).
As we discussed earlier, a small amount of carbon ages is used for the Old Kingdom in this work (Dr. Ramsey confirms this) and this fact makes it difficult to create a convincing model for it. (In statistical modeling, the reliability of the result is directly proportional to the amount of input data, because on small input sets, possible fluctuations will get a lot of weight).

3. Dates from "An absolute chronology for early Egypt using radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling" (2013).
Most interesting point.
I did not study this article in detail since at the moment, the opinion of the Dr. Dee (that the data of radiocarbon dating does not exclude the possibility that the synchronism I found could take place) is enough for me.
In my opinion, the following details in this article require closer attention:
- more than half of the input data are radiocarbon ages with big 1sigma errors obtained as a result of studies in the mid-20th century.
- the data for Aha and Djer are "older" than necessary for good correspondence with the rest of the data (in order to obtain acceptable durations of their reigns, it is necessary to introduce additional restrictions into the model - the length of the reign cannot be more than 100 years).
- big part of the samples does not have a clearly attested belonging to a particular ruler.

If we look at the problem in general, we have a situation where the following statistical models exist: convincing models for the New and Middle Kingdoms; an uncertain model for the Old Kingdom; more or less convincing model for the 1st dynasty; model for the 2nd dynasty is absent.
Why is there still no convincing model for the Old Kingdom? For me, the answer is obvious - the OK samples still gravitate to the older radiocarbon age and the issue has not gone since the beginning of the millennium (Haas et al., Bonani et al.)



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2020 05:00PM by keeperzz.