Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [16]
All these factors affect the accuracy of radiocarbon dates. Then there is the pleasingly mysterious “systematic uncertainty,” the causes of which seem to be unknown, which gives errors of one hundred to two hundred years. Further limitations come from the fact that only certain materials are suitable for processing. Charcoal and well-preserved wood are best; bone, for various reasons, has given unsatisfactory results. The sample must be burned to be tested, which means that choice specimens are not readily relinquished. And, because of the rapid (in geologic terms) decay rate of carbon 14, the process cannot be used with any material that is over 70,000 years old. This is plenty long enough from our point of view, but it frustrates archaeologists who work with fossil man and his immediate ancestors.
Several other physical techniques are employed in chronology. Thermoluminesce analyzes the decay of certain elements in pottery. Dendrochronology counts tree rings, and in some parts of the world scientists have constructed overlapping series of such rings which cover extended periods of time. Both techniques have their limitations, which I do not intend to discuss. Suffice it to say that although they have been of some use in establishing prehistoric chronology, their use in the dynastic periods of Egypt is limited. By the time these techniques were developed the chronology had already been fairly well established—though like everything else in Egyptology, it is constantly being revised.
One of the people who worked on chronology back at the beginning of the present century was James Henry Breasted, who is arguably the United States’s most famous Egyptologist. Born in the small midwestern town of Rockford, Illinois, Breasted had a long way to go to get to Egypt. In his day it was essential for an Egyptologist to study in Berlin, where the monumental figure of Adolf Erman was placing the Egyptian language on a sound philological basis for the first time. Breasted’s family was not wealthy, but he got to Berlin, and later to Egypt. Like Petrie, the American Egyptologist was a man of tremendous energy, but his talents lay in philology and administration rather than in excavation. His History of Egypt is still a wonderful read, though his interpretations are out-of-date. Breasted’s magnum opus was the translation of every known historical text from Egypt; the result fills five thick volumes, and required the personal inspection and copying by Breasted of almost every text included—many of the pre-Breasted copies of inscriptions look as if they were made at twilight by a myopic scholar who had lost his glasses.
The book, Ancient Records of Egypt, is Breasted’s great work in terms of published material, but many would say that his true monument is an institution, not a book. This is the renowned Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the first department for the study of Egyptology on American soil. Its expeditions have worked for many years in other parts of the Near East as well as in Egypt, and its publications number in the hundreds.
The first volume of Ancient Records contains a lucid summary of basic methods of Egyptian chronology. These methods have been refined since Breasted’s time, but the essential sources remain relatively unchanged.
The nearest thing to a contemporary history of Egypt we possess is the work of an Egyptian priest named Manetho, who wrote and lived under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, in the middle of the third