[JESOT 1.2 (2012): 223–48]

Correlation of Select Classical Sources Related to the

Trojan War with Assyrian and Biblical Chronologies

RODGER C. YOUNG

rcyoung8@swbell.net

ANDREW E. STEINMANN

Concordia University, Chicago

Andrew.Steinmann@cuchicago.edu

Archaeological findings have added greatly to the credibility of

Josephus’s citations of Tyrian records, in particular the list of Tyrian

kings and their lengths of reign from 1000 to 786 B.C. and then from

593 to 532 B.C. Considerable skepticism remains, however, regarding

the accuracy of another chronological datum that Josephus found in

the Tyrian records, namely that Tyre was (re)founded 240 years before

construction began on Solomon’s temple. The present study cites

Pompeius Trogus/Justin and other classical authors that placed the

refounding of Tyre immediately before the end of the Trojan War, thus

bringing into harmony the date given in the Parian Marble for the fall

of Troy, 1208 B.C., with the date for Tyre’s refounding as calculated

from Josephus. Essential to this reasoning is the argument for the

independence of the various sources that date these two events to the

last decade of the 13th century B.C. Their independence, yet essential

agreement, is compared to the weakness of the reasoning for the

traditional date of 1183 B.C. for the end of the Trojan War. The

precision of these various arguments is based on the firmness of the

regnal dates of Solomon and his successors, as derived from biblical

texts.

KEYWORDS: Old Testament Chronology, Josephus, Solomon,

Hiram of Tyre, Tyrian King List, Trojan War

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ISSUES RAISED BY COUCKE’S SUCCESS IN DERIVING

CHRONOLOGICAL BENCHMARKS OF ISRAEL’S

KINGDOM PERIOD FROM CLASSICAL SOURCES

An article published in 2010 ¹presented the innovative approach of

Valerius Coucke in determining chronological benchmarks in the

histories of the Hebrew kingdoms.²The article highlighted Coucke’s

extensive knowledge of classical authors, and his use of that knowledge

to establish two fixed dates in the Hebrew kingdom period: the end of the

Judean monarchy in 587 B.C. and the beginning of construction on

Solomon’s temple in 967 B.C.

In Coucke’s methodology, the date for the destruction of

Jerusalem by the Babylonians was set by determining from Ptolemy’s

Canon the accession year for Amel-Marduk (the biblical Evil-

Merodach), and then referring to 2 Kgs 25:27, Jer 52:31, and Ezek 33:21

to place the fall of Jerusalem 25 years earlier, in the summer of 587 B.C.

Subsequent archaeological findings have verified the basic soundness of

this approach. More surprising was Coucke’s reference to the Tyrian

King List found in Menander/Josephus³as one of two methods used to

determine that construction began on Solomon’s temple in the spring of

967 B.C. After this derivation was done from classical sources, Coucke

referred to the biblical data in 1 Kgs 6:1 and 11:42 to date Solomon’s last

year to 932t.⁴These dates for Solomon, one year earlier than Thiele’s,

1. Rodger C. Young, “The Parian Marble and Other Surprises from Chronologist V.

Coucke,” AUSS 48 (2010): 225–49.

2. V. Coucke, “Chronologie des rois de Juda et d’Israël,” RBén 37 (1925): 325–64; idem,

“Chronologie biblique” in Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible, ed. Louis Pirot, vol. 1

(Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1928), cols. 1245–79. An annotated English translation

of the latter is available from www.rcyoung.org/papers.html (cited 8 May 2012). Valerius

Coucke was chief librarian at the Grootseminarie Brugge (Grand Séminaire de Bruges) in

the 1920s. After the AUSS article cited above was written, the seminary’s present chief

librarian, the Reverend Stefaan Franco, was contacted for further information about

Coucke. This was kindly provided after a search of parish records and records of the

seminary. This information was used to create a page in Wikipedia containing what is

known about Coucke’s life (entry “Valerius Coucke”). A search by Reverend Franco for

other publications of Coucke found nothing beyond the two articles cited.

3. Ag. Ap. 1.17/108; 1.18/117–126.

4. A year determined by the calendar of the southern kingdom, in which regnal years

began in the fall month of Tishri, is represented by the B.C. year in which the regnal year

started followed by a small ‘t’. For the northern kingdom, the regnal year started in Nisan

and a year reckoned by this calendar would be represented by the B.C. year followed by a

small ‘n’.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

225

agree with the dates calculated for Solomon in a 2003 Journal for the

Evangelical Theological Society article,⁵where the reasoning was based

on different criteria; Coucke’s contributions in this matter were not

known at the time. Coucke also assumed that the division of the kingdom

took place after the midpoint of the year 932t, so that he dated the

division of the kingdom to sometime after Nisan 1 of 931 B.C. and before

Nisan 1 of 930 B.C.

Coucke’s date for the division of the kingdom is in exact

agreement with the date that Thiele derived some years later from

Assyrian and biblical data. Thiele was unaware of Coucke’s research

when he initially published his findings. Also unaware of Coucke’s work

were several scholars who later used the Tyrian King List in the same

way that Coucke did to derive the date for the beginning of construction

of Solomon’s temple. Their studies followed the publication, in 1951, of

an Assyrian inscription showing that the List’s figure of 143 years from

when Hiram of Tyre sent material for the construction of the temple until

Dido’s departure from Tyre, after which she founded Carthage in North

Africa, were consistent with Dido’s departure in 825 B.C.⁶These later

scholars agreed that the Tyrian data gave the date of 968/67 for the start

of temple construction. Although this was the same date that Coucke had

derived from the Tyrian King List in the 1920s, no reference was made

to his work. Coucke had been forgotten.

A slight refinement should be made to the work of Coucke and

the later scholars who correlated Tyrian chronology with the date when

construction began on Solomon’s temple. Josephus relates that Tyrian

records show that it was in Hiram’s eleventh year (so Ant. 8.3.1/62), or

twelfth year (so Ag. Ap. 1.18/126), that construction began on the temple.

(Since Against Apion is a later work that the Antiquities, the twelfth year

should be preferred.⁷) The Bible gives a precise date for the beginning of

construction: it was the second of Ziv (Iyyar) in the fourth year of

5. Rodger C. Young, “When Did Solomon Die?” JETS 46 (2003): 589–603.

6. See the discussion, with citation of the relevant studies, in Rodger C. Young, “Three

Verifications of Thiele’s Date for the Beginning of the Divided Kingdom,” AUSS 45

(2007): 179–87. These studies, along with the archaeological finds on which they were

based, have been instrumental in verifying the historicity of Dido (also called Elissa),

who had been considered as an entirely mythical figure by some classicists.

7. The twelfth year is also to be preferred because Josephus, in Ag. Ap. 1.18/126, says

that it was in the twelfth year of Hiram’s reign that Temple construction began, and also

that Hiram began to reign 155 years and eight months before the foundation of Carthage

while the building of the Temple in Jerusalem began 143 years and eight months before

the foundation of Carthage. The redundancy in Josephus’s account has safeguarded the

figures given (the 155 years, the 143 years, and their difference as 12 years) from the

errors of copyists.

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Solomon (1 Kgs 6:1; 2 Chr 3:2), that is, in the spring of 967 B.C.⁸

However, it seems likely that this is not exactly what would have been

commemorated in the Tyrian archives. For Tyrian recorders, writing

from a Tyrian standpoint, the date of interest would be when the rafts of

logs and carts or shiploads of stone were dispatched from Tyre or from

its holdings on the mainland. This material must have been delivered to

the site before construction work began. But sending rafts of logs by sea

is a risky business, not to be undertaken during the winter months, and

probably not in the early spring either. Although it could be argued that

the Tyrians invented just-in-time delivery by sending their log flotillas to

the shore of Israel in late winter or very early spring,⁹hoping that the

following overland journey would get the material there just before the

second of Ziv, it is more reasonable to assume that the rafts were

assembled and sent during the summer or early fall of the preceding year,

before the storms of October/Tishri (Acts 27:9). That the assembly of

materials took place well before the start of construction is indicated by

the account of preparation for building the temple given in 1 Chr 29:1–9,

where v. 2 specifically mentions the collection beforehand of timber as

well as a great quantity of fine stone and marble. It is therefore

reasonable to assume that the Tyrian accounts cited by Josephus recorded

the dispatch date of the material (timber and fine stone), rather than the

date that construction began on the temple.¹⁰If the log rafts and carts of

8. Thiele’s chronology would give the spring of 966 B.C., but his choice of putting

Solomon’s death after Tishri 1 of 931 B.C. instead of in the months preceding Tishri 1

(but still preserving 931n as the year of division of the kingdom) led to a one-year

discrepancy in the reigns of the first rulers of the southern kingdom that was never

reconciled in his publications. See the discussion in Young, “Three Verifications,” 169–

72. Recent publications that include this one-year correction for the reigns of Solomon

through Athaliah, thus placing the start of temple construction in the spring of 967 B.C.,

include Bryant G. Wood, “The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest

Theory,” JETS 48 (2005): 477, 488; Douglas Petrovich, “Amenhotep II and the

Historicity of the Exodus Pharaoh,” MSJ 17 (2006): 83; Leslie McFall, “The Chronology

of Saul and David,” JETS 53 (2010): 533 (chart); Andrew E. Steinmann, From Abraham

to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (St. Louis: Concordia, 2011), 133–34, 138.

9. A likely Julian date for the second of Iyyar in 967 B.C. is April 18/19 (see a calculation

of this type in footnote 30).

10. Katzenstein cannot believe that the building of Solomon’s temple would have been

mentioned in the state archives of Tyre (H. Jacob Katzenstein, The History of Tyre from

the Beginning of the Second Millennium B.C.E. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian

Empire in 538 B.C.E. [Jerusalem: Schocken Institute, 1973], 82–3). Such skepticism is

unwarranted. Phoenician merchant-princes were very interested in the inventory of

material sent to their customers and the date of sending, as shown in the records retrieved

from his archives by Zakar-Baal, prince of Byblos, a little over a century before the time

of Hiram (ANET 27).

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

227

stone were dispatched in the summer preceding Ziv/Iyyar of 967 B.C.,

this would synchronize Hiram’s twelfth year with Solomon’s third year,

not with his fourth year (the year in which temple construction began).¹¹

The regnal years of Hiram were probably reckoned from Tishri,

similar to those of Solomon. ¹²Coucke observed that in the time of

Solomon, Hebrew month names were identical to Phoenician month

names, so it was logical to assume that Tyre began its regnal year at the

same time as did Jerusalem, on the first of Tishri. Coucke’s assumption

in this matter has found support in records from Ugarit, where a yearly

coronation ritual was observed on the first of Tishri.¹³According to W.

F. Albright, there was a common Canaanite/Phoenician culture,

including artifacts, language, religion, and customs, from Ugarit in the

north to Southern Palestine,¹⁴so that it is to be expected that Tyre

observed the same calendar as did Ugarit. This is one of several areas

where Coucke’s theories, seemingly somewhat bold when propounded in

the 1920s, were verified by later research and archaeological findings.

Assuming then that the logs to aid in building Solomon’s temple

were sent several months before construction began in order to avoid the

winter and early spring storms in the Mediterranean, the year that the

rafts of logs were dispatched would be 969t. From this date as a starting

point, the Tyrian data cited in Josephus gives the time when Dido fled

from her brother Pygmalion, 143 years later,¹⁵as (969t – 143) = 826t.

This is in agreement with the statement of the Roman author Pompeius

Trogus (18.6.9) that placed Dido’s flight (which he or his epitomizer

Justin conflated with her founding of Carthage¹⁶) in the year beginning

11. The assumption that the Tyrians sent their material to Jerusalem in the same year that

temple construction began has been implicit in all studies that tied the Tyrian King List to

the chronology of the reign of Solomon. This includes the two most recent studies

(Young, “Three Verifications,” 186; idem, “The Parian Marble and Other Surprises,”

235).

12. For the demonstration that Judah’s regnal year began in Tishri, see Edwin R. Thiele,

The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3d ed.; Grand Rapids, MI:

Zondervan/Kregel, 1983), 51–2.

13. KTU 1.41:50–55.

14. W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (New York: Doubleday,

1969), 71–2, 114–18; idem, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (New York: Doubleday,

1969, p. 115).

15. Ag. Ap. 1.17/108, 1.18/117–126.

16. The date usually given for the founding of Carthage is that of Timaeus, 814 B.C. J. M.

Peñuela has argued, based on ancient texts describing Dido’s activities after she left Tyre

but before the people of North Africa granted her permission to build a city, that eleven

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on March 1, 825 B.C., 72 years before the founding of Rome on April 21

of 753 B.C., as measured by the early Roman March-based calendar. The

overlap of these two calendar systems, the Tyrian and the Roman, places

Dido’s flight at some time between March 1 and the first day of Tishri,

825 B.C.¹⁷

The year in which Hiram sent material for building the temple in

Jerusalem can be used to calculate another date used by Coucke, namely

the year Tyre was refounded.¹⁸According to Tyrian records as cited in

Josephus (Ant. 8.3.1/62), this happened 240 years before the Tyrians

helped Solomon build the temple, in the eleventh year of Hiram. As

mentioned above, Josephus made a correction in his later work Against

Apion, stating that Tyre’s aid was given in Hiram’s twelfth year, so a

corresponding correction would make this the 241st year of the

refounded city of Tyre. The rebuilding of Tyre then may be dated to

(969t + 240) = 1209t or (969t + 241) = 1210t. Pompeius Trogus/Justin

(18.3.5) related that Troy fell one year after Tyre was built, which would

place the fall of Troy in either 1208t or 1209t, assuming a fall-based

calendar.¹⁹The latter of these years agrees with the Parian Marble’s date

for the fall of Troy: June of 1208 B.C.

Except for a cursory introduction given in the 2010 AUSS article,

later scholarship has failed to deal with Coucke’s use of this information

______________________________________________________

years elapsed between her flight and the foundation (or possibly, dedication) of the city,

thus explaining the apparent discrepancy between Trogus and Timaeus in this matter. J.

M. Peñuela, “La Inscripción Asiria IM 55644 y la cronología de los reyes de Tiro,”

Sefarad 14 (1954): 28–29 and nn. 164–67.

17. For authors who assumed that the 143 years are measured from when construction

actually began on the temple in Jerusalem, the years would be measured from 968t and

the overlap with the 72-year figure of Pompeius Trogus would place Dido’s flight in the

period from Tishri 1 of 825 B.C. to the last day of February, 824 B.C.

18. Supplément, col. 1251. Coucke’s reasoning was the reverse of what is found here,

because for him the date that needed to be calculated was the date when construction

began on Solomon’s temple, which he could then use as his starting place in providing

the years of the Hebrew kingdom period. For additional details, including the discussion

of the refounding of Tyre as a consequence of the Sea People invasion in the reign of

Pharaoh Merenptah, see Young, “The Parian Marble and Other Surprises,” 232–35.

19. Justin’s epitome gives no date for either event (the fall of Troy or the founding of

Tyre) in terms of ancient chronologies, merely stating that the king of Ashkelon defeated

the Sidonians, and the Sidonians then “took to their ships and founded the city of Tyre

the year before the fall of Troy.” It can be demonstrated that some of the chronological

schemes in Trogus/Justin are incorrect, but the simple statement that one event took place

a year before another event can be true, and remembered correctly, even though the

author may not have known the correct absolute chronology for either event. Another,

apparently independent, source that also places the fall of Troy one year after the

founding of Tyre will be discussed below.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

229

that connects an entry in the Parian Marble with the date when Tyre sent

aid for the building of Solomon’s temple. Coucke used as his starting

place the Parian Marble’s date for the fall of Troy and went on from

there, using only classical sources and no biblical data, to say that the

year in which Hiram of Tyre sent aid to Solomon to start building the

temple must fit in the narrow time range of 969 to 967 B.C. As shown

above, this agrees with the date derived from the Tyrian King List, as

measured upward from Dido’s fleeing Tyre in 825 B.C. It also agrees

with the dates of Solomon derived from Assyrian and biblical sources by

later scholars who were not aware of Coucke’s work. However,

Coucke’s logic relied on the Parian Marble’s date for the end of the

Trojan War, which is 25 years earlier than the date of Eratosthenes that

was widely accepted by ancient writers after the time of Eratosthenes and

Apollodorus (i.e., after the beginning of the first century B.C.).

Eratosthenes’ date was also widely accepted by modern classical

scholars until quite recently, so that Katzenstein wrote as late as 1973,

“The date of 1183, established by Eratosthenes of Alexandria, is now

almost generally accepted (CAH I [1970], 246-247).”²⁰The disagreement

with the popular date given for Troy’s fall may account for the oblivion

into which Coucke’s argument fell. To his contemporaries, Coucke’s

choice of the Parian Marble’s chronology for the Trojan War, versus the

more commonly accepted chronology, must have seemed entirely

arbitrary and not worthy of comment.

Is there any evidence that the Parian Marble’s date for the end of

the Trojan War is more credible than that of Eratosthenes? The first

evidence in favor of the Parian Marble is the observation that by starting

with the Marble’s date, Coucke was able to derive a date for the

beginning of construction on Solomon’s temple that has proved to be

correct.²¹This by itself is a cogent argument, since if the Marble’s date

were wrong, it is difficult to explain how Coucke could derive a correct

and quite precise result when using it as his starting point. Could it be

that Eratosthenes’s date relies on arbitrary assumptions and so is suspect,

20. History of Tyre, 61, n. 94. However, such confidence in the date of an event in the

second millennium B.C., as derived from Greek or Roman sources, has now been replaced

by a general skepticism about the reliability of any information in Greek or Roman

sources that purports to describe events in the sixth century B.C. or earlier (Alden

Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition [London,

1979], 92–93).

21. Or, in reverse order, it may be said that the information in Josephus about the years

from the founding of Tyre until Tyre sent aid for the building of Solomon’s temple, plus

the statement of Pompeius Trogus that Troy fell one year after Tyre was founded, is an

independent means of calculating the fall of Troy, one that agrees with the date given for

that event in the Parian Marble.

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rather than the Parian Marble’s date? Both sides of this question need to

be examined: “Any study therefore that seeks to establish the Parian

Marble’s date over the commonly accepted date needs to consider the

question of the Parian Marble’s overall trustworthiness. Sources such as

the Canons of Eusebius that are used to justify the 1183 date should also

be examined for their credibility. The issues involved are somewhat

complex, and the fuller discussion that they require has been relegated to

a separate article.”²²The remainder of the present study addresses this

double-sided question.

THE PARIAN MARBLE

Nature of the Marble’s Text: Format and Genre

The Parian Marble is essentially a chronological list that dates past

events in terms of the years they happened before the base date of the

tablet. The base date is written in the form 264/63 B.C. on the University

of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum Web site.²³In the extant portions of the

text, each of the 107 entries includes two items of information related to

the listed event: the number of years before the base date and the name of

the king or archon who was ruling in Athens at the time. The only

exceptions are that in nine entries, the place where the name of the

archon or king is expected is no longer readable, and in 14 entries the

space for the statement about the number of elapsed years has similarly

been effaced. This strongly implies that the ultimate source of the

information in the Parian Marble was the state archives of Athens, where

it would be expected that an annalistic recording of events would list the

kingship or archonship in which an event occurred, along with some

more exact indication of the year. Athens apparently was keeping an

AUC type calendar that measured the years from some event, probably

the beginning of the kingship under Cecrops. From these years, the

author of the Parian Marble calculated the time from his “present” date

back to the date of the event being described. The Athenian provenance

of the information in the tablet is important to keep in mind when its

dates for the Trojan War are compared with the dates derived from the

22. Young, “The Parian Marble and Other Surprises,” 236. The title of the current follow-

up article has been changed from what was initially proposed in order to delineate more

exactly the thesis that is being presented.

23. Text of the surviving portions of the Parian Marble is available at the Ashmolean

Museum Web site (“Parian Marble,” n.p. [cited 8 May 2012] www.ashmolean

.org/ash/faqs/q004/q004006. html).

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

231

Tyrian King List and Pompeius Trogus/Justin above, and from other

Asiatic sources below. If the Tyrian, other Asiatic, and Athenian sources

are independent, and if they agree on the date of the Trojan War, that

would be strong evidence in favor of the factuality of the date that they

supply.

Statement of Sources in the Heading Text of the Marble

That the ultimate source of the information in the Parian Marble was the

state archives of Athens seems to be contradicted by the restoration of

the first line of the tablet given on the Ashmolean Web site. The English

interlinear translation, with text that is restored by conjecture indicated

by square brackets, is as follows:

[From] al[l the records and general accounts] I have

recorded [the previous times], beginning from Cecrops

becoming first king of Athens, until [____]uanax was

archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.

However, the restoration of the effaced first phrase as “[From] al[l the

records and general accounts] I have recorded . . .” is intrinsically not

plausible. The Greek source is “[ἐξ ἀναγραφῶ]ν (?) παν[τοί]ον [καὶ

ἱστοριῶν κοι]νῶν (?) ἀνέγραψα...” The ἐξ of the conjectural restoration is

reasonable because in this genre of writing we expect the author to report

“from” where he got his information. What is dubious, however, is the

restoration of the first part of the word ending in -νῶν so as to give

κοινῶν—“common, general, ordinary,” which the Ashmolean Web site

extrapolates to “general accounts.” The writer of an annalistic history

that professes to give exact dates for events would not assure readers of

his credibility by saying that his information was derived from the

“common” folklore. He would instead do as Josephus did when

presenting information regarding Hiram and the history of Tyre.

Josephus declared that his account was authentic because it was drawn

from the state archives of Tyre, as translated into Greek by Menander

and Dius. For the Parian Marble, such reassurance would be given if the

original word, for which the genitive plural ending -νῶν has survived,

was not κοινῶν, but Ἀθηνῶν, preceded by the ἀναγραφῶν and ἱστοριῶν

of the Ashmolean restoration: all the public records and histories of

Athens.²⁴The construction “of Athens” is found in the next phrase of the

24. In classical Greek, “Athens” is a plural noun. Felix Jacoby is apparently the source of

the Ashmolean’s restoration of –νῶν to κοινῶν (Das Marmor Parium [Berlin:

Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1904], vii.)

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introductory text, and “king of Athens” occurs throughout the rest of the

tablet, down to the time when the archonship began in 684/83 B.C . The

phrase “records of Athens” is thus in keeping with the common mode of

expression of the author. The introductory phrase should be restored as

follows:

[From] al[l the public records and histories of Ath]ens I

have recorded [the previous times], beginning from

Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until

[____]uanax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in

Athens.

This restoration gives the assurance of credibility that we expect in the

author’s introductory sentence. It is also in keeping with the content and

annalistic style of what follows. The Parian Marble is essentially a

transcript of selected records drawn from the official archives of the city

of Athens. Its credibility ultimately rests on the credibility of those

archives.

But is it possible that Athens was keeping a written record of

events that extended back to 1582/81 B.C., the date of the Parian

Marble’s first entry? This would seem to be contradicted by the

conventional understanding of the “Dark Ages” that followed the

collapse of Mycenaean civilization in about 1120 B.C. and lasted for two

and one-half centuries. The lack of Greek inscriptions that can be dated

to this period has led to the assumption that all literacy had been lost. If

that were the case, it would be in conflict with the idea that the Parian

Marble’s dates related to this period and earlier are derived from “the

public records and histories of Athens.” That Athens could not have had

written records during the Greek Dark Ages is essentially an argument

from silence, and therefore a weak argument. It should be remembered

that an earlier argument from silence held that the Greeks had no literary

abilities at all before the middle of the eighth century B.C. This consensus

was shattered in 1952, when Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B

script that was in use from about 1400 B.C. to 1200 B.C., showing that its

language was Greek. We learn from the examples of Linear B and Linear

A that if writing was known in Athens as early as the 16th century B.C.,

the writing would not have been in an alphabetic script, such as the

Greeks adapted from the Phoenicians, or some other West Semitic

source, in the eighth century.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

233

Some Selected Dates Given by the Parian Marble

As mentioned above, the “base date” of the Parian Marble, the year from

which all entries are dated in terms of the elapsed number of years, is

generally written as 264/63 B.C. In keeping with what has been said

about the source of the Marble’s information, it may be assumed that the

underlying calendar on which these dates are based is the archon-

calendar that was used in Athens in the third century B.C. In this

calendar, the year began with the first new moon after the summer

solstice, i.e. on June 22 or in the 29 or 30 days following.²⁵Alternately, it

might be surmised that the calendar used would be the Macedonian

calendar that was in general use in the western (Mediterranean) part of

the Hellenistic world in the third century B.C. In the Macedonian

calendar the year began in the fall month that was equivalent to the

Babylonian and Hebrew Tishri. Although this is less likely, for the

purpose of the present study it is not important to choose between these

two options, the Athenian calendar vs. the Macedonian, since they both

produce the same date when using the Parian Marble’s chronology for

the fall of Troy (see footnote 30). Since a decision is not necessary in this

regard, dates as determined from the Parian Marble will be expressed in

the traditional form whereby, for instance, the base date of the Marble is

written as 264/63 B.C. It should also be noted that the reckoning of when

the year started in Athens may well have changed from the time of

Cecrops to the third century B.C.

The earliest event recorded is when Cecrops became king of

Athens in 1582/81 B.C., 1,318 years before the base date. Entries 3, 10,

12, and 14 are plainly mythological. Several entries refer to persons to

whom later generations attributed fabulous exploits. One such individual

was Cecrops, but the Marble’s entry only states he succeeded a certain

Actica, from whom the area received its previous name. Similarly, the

entries for Deucalion, who became the center of many flood-myths,

simply state that he was king in Lycoreia and there was a flood in his

time, from which he fled to Athens, where later his son became king.

The major analysis of the Parian Marble is that of Felix Jacoby,

published in 1904.²⁶Jacoby notes previous studies of the inscription from

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but these only treated the

fragments taken to England, since the third fragment was not discovered

until 1897. He mentions a few studies of the third fragment in the early

years of the twentieth century. Jacoby generally does not discuss the

25. Alan E. Samuel, Greek and Roman Chronology: Calendars and Years in Classical

Antiquity (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1972), 64.

26. Jacoby, Das Marmor Parium.

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

accuracy of the dates given in the Parian Marble. He includes parallels

from other classical sources and notes the difference in dating among all

the sources, including the Parian Marble. There apparently has been no

major work devoted to a study of the Parian Marble since Jacoby’s

monograph, although the tablet is sometimes cited with reference to its

time for particular events. In particular, there is a need for a more

extended study of the accuracy of the Parian Marble as checked against

established dates. In one limited study, for the time range from 320 to

311 B.C., R. M. Errington found that “the Marmor Parium [Parian

Marble] for this period constitutes a careful and accurate collection of

good information by the compiler.”²⁷Going backward over three and

one-half centuries, the Marble’s date for the beginning of the annual

archonship in Athens, 684/83 B.C., is in agreement with the commonly

accepted date.²⁸For earlier centuries, there are few reliable inscriptions

or histories against which to test the Marble’s dates. A certain caution is

therefore justified in accepting its dates for events when it is the sole

witness to that date, or for events for which other sources provide a

different date. When, however, the Marble’s date for an early event

(thirteenth century B.C.) is in agreement with evidence from another

source, and that source is independent of the Parian Marble, it is not a

mark of scholarly impartiality to reject the Marble’s testimony just

because most classical writings related to this time are overlaid with

mythological inventions, or because verification from contemporary

inscriptions has not yet been found.

The present paper, the thesis of which depends on showing the

independence of various traditions that place the fall of Troy in the last

decade of the thirteenth century B.C., is intended to show that the Parian

Marble’s date for this event should be given new respect. At the same

time, classical scholars may not fully appreciate the force of this

argument because they are unfamiliar with the solid evidences that

support one chronological marker that is essential to this line of

reasoning, namely the date of 967 B.C. when construction began on

Solomon’s temple—a date that is fixed based on biblical texts. These

biblical texts are tied eventually to astronomical dates and the Assyrian

Eponym List. Additionally, it has been our experience that some classical

scholars are not familiar with the archaeological evidence that establishes

the essential historicity of the two Tyrian King Lists found in Josephus:

27. R. M. Errington, “Diodorus Siculus and the Chronology of the Early Diadochoi, 320–

311 B.C.,” Hermes 105 (1977): 504. Errington regards as “inexplicable,” however, that

the Marble assigns 312/11 to the solar eclipse that was visible at Athens on August 15,

310 B.C.

28. OCD, s.v. “Archontes.”

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

235

the first from Abibaal, father of Hiram I in about 1000 B.C. to Pygmalion

and his sister Dido/Elissa at the end of the ninth century B.C. (Ag. Ap.

1:18/117, 121–126) and the second covering the period from 593 to 532

B.C. (Ag. Ap. 1:21/156–159). The historicity of the First Tyrian King list

is essential to the thesis of the present paper, and those interested in the

arguments for its veracity are referred to the several studies mentioned in

Young, “Three Verifications,” 179-181, particularly those cited in nn. 40

and 42.

THE DATE OF TROY’S FALL ACCORDING TO THE PARIAN MARBLE

Entry 24 of the Parian Marble states that Troy was taken 945 years

before the base date, on the seventh day before the end of the month

Thargelion.²⁹The lunar month Thargelion usually began sometime in

May, so that the Marble’s testimony would place the fall of the city in

early June of 1208 B.C.³⁰This agrees with the date given above by

combining the Tyrian data for the date of the founding of Tyre, 1209t or

1210t, 240 or 241 years before Tyre sent material to aid in the

construction of Solomon’s temple, with the statement of Pompeius

Trogus that Troy fell one year later. The agreement is the more

remarkable when it is remembered that Josephus derived his information

from a Phoenician source, as translated into Greek by Menander and

Dius, whereas the other source that provided the (same) date was a Greek

account, as derived from the archives of Athens. There is no mention in

the Parian Marble of the date that was crucial in the derivation of the date

of the fall of Troy using the Tyrian data, namely the date when

construction began on the temple in Jerusalem. Equally significant,

29. The grammar of the Greek phrase employed means that the city fell six days before

the last day of the month.

30 . According to the NASA table of moon phases at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa

.gov/phase/phases-1299.html, an astronomical new moon (conjunction) occurred at 20

minutes before midnight, GMT, on June 14, 1208 B.C., which was about 1:50 AM June

15, Greek (Athens) local time. At the latitude of Athens and in the month of June, the

new crescent becomes observable about 35 hours after conjunction on the average, so that

the month following Thargelion would have begun with the observation of the new moon

at sunset on June 16. The daytime of June 16 would be in the last day of Thargelion, and

the Parian Marble’s date for the end of the Trojan War, six days earlier, would be June

10, 1208 B.C. The same date results whether the Parian Marble was reckoning by an

Athenian calendar that began on or shortly after June 22 or a Macedonian calendar that

began in the fall. The exactness of this date does not prove that it is historically correct,

or even that there was such a thing as the Trojan War. It is proper, however, to state that

June 10, 1208 B.C. is the date for the end of the Trojan War given by the Parian Marble,

and it is very probable that the Parian Marble extracted this information from the archives

of the city of Athens.

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Josephus could not have calculated correctly the years from his own time

back to the reign of Solomon, in order to obtain the absolute (B.C.) date

that was derived above for the refounding of Tyre. The knowledge of

how to properly interpret the chronological data of the Hebrew kingdoms

had been lost, only to be recovered in recent decades of the modern era.

How then could these two independent sources give the same date for the

fall of Troy? The best explanation is that Athens on the one hand, and

Tyre on the other, were keeping an annalistic log of the passage of years,

similar to that found in the Assyrian Eponym Lists or the consular lists of

Rome. That the two sources agree on the date of closely related events in

the late thirteenth century B.C. indicates that for both Tyre and Athens,

the reckoning of years had started at a very early date and continued

without interruption down to the time of Menander and Dius in one case

and to the time of creation of the Parian Marble in the other. It is difficult

to think of any other explanation that can account for the agreement of

these two traditions, the Phoenician and the Athenian, on the dating of

two events that happened a thousand years earlier, in 1209 and 1208 B.C.

THE DATE OF TROY’S FALL ACCORDING TO ERATOSTHENES

Eratosthenes (ca. 275–194 B.C.) used the system of Greek Olympiads to

provide an absolute calendar for all events as far back as the first

Olympiad, which he set in 776 B.C., a date that is generally accepted as

reliable because it was established from lists of Olympic victors that the

Greeks kept in multiple sources. Prior to 776 B.C., Eratosthenes

depended on the list of Spartan kings, for whom he apparently had names

and lengths of reign back to 1043 B.C. Before that time, there was a

Greek tradition ostensibly based on an oracle from Delphi which stated

that two “crops” or generations would pass from the fall of Troy until the

return of the Heraclidae (descendants of Hercules) to Sparta.³¹This may

have been a vaticinium ex eventu; the story of the oracle could be entirely

fictitious and derived from an early tradition that two generations were

involved in the exile of the Heraclidae. Leaving aside the question of the

oracle, what was important for Greek chronologists was the tradition of a

time span of two generations. One tradition measured these two

generations as 100 years.³²Strabo (13.1.3) counted 60 years, and other

31. Whether or not there was an actual person named Hercules behind the myths that

became associated with his name, it is incontrovertible that certain Greeks considered

themselves descendants of an early ruler of Sparta named Heracles (Roman “Hercules”).

These are the Heraclids/Heraclidae mentioned in classical authors. As late as the fourth

century B.C., Alexander the Great considered himself in this category.

32. OCD, s.v. “Heraclidae.”

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

237

authors gave different figures. Eratosthenes followed Thucydides (1.12)

in giving 80 years, and then he gives another 60 years from the return of

the Heraclidae to the settlement of Ionia. After that, he used the Spartan

king lists. The date for the fall of Troy then becomes 1183 B.C. The

existence of these rival conjectures for the time from the fall of Troy

until the return of the Heraclidae calls into question the trustworthiness

of Thucydides’s 80-year figure that was accepted by Eratosthenes. It has

been remarked that Eratosthenes, as administrator of the great library at

Alexandria, would have had access to Tyrian and other sources that

could provide a check on this chronology, but he neglected non-Greek

authors in constructing his system.³³

Nevertheless, the system of Eratosthenes, which puts the fall of

Troy in 1183 B.C., became widely accepted. It found its most important

codification and expansion in the works of Apollodorus (born ca. 180

B.C.). The works of these and later chronographers, however, included

synchronisms and dates from various sources that were often

incompatible with the dates given by Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, so

that Mosshammer writes, “The chronographic system of Eratosthenes

and the historical chronology of Apollodorus were gradually combined

with the dates of other traditions and with the unsystematic synchronisms

of popular opinion. The result was an indiscriminate mix such as that

transmitted by Eusebius.”³⁴

THE DATE(S) OF TROY’S FALL ACCORDING TO EUSEBIUS

Divergent Dates for Troy in Eusebius’s Chronological Canons

The Greek original of the Chronological Canons of Eusebius of Caesarea

(ca. A.D. 260–340) has been lost, so that Jerome’s Latin translation, and

an Armenian version, are the primary extant sources. The Canons

appear, on first reading, to follow the chronology of Eratosthenes for the

dates of the Trojan War. An evidence of this is the entry in the Canons

for 1191 B.C., which reads, “Alexander Helenam rapuit et Troianum

bellum decennale surrexit”: “Alexander [also called Paris] carried off

33. “It is rather surprising that Eratosthenes based his chronology entirely on Greek dates.

Working in Alexandria, he should have had easy access to Egyptian documents or direct

contacts with Egyptian priests. But as John Dillery has argued, he ignored even

Manetho’s Egyptian history written in Greek, whose chronology takes up the Egyptian

king list.” Astrid Möller, “Epoch-making Eratosthenes,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine

Studies 45 (2005): 258.

34. Mosshammer, Chronicle of Eusebius, 164.

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

Helen and started the ten-year Trojan War.”³⁵By inclusive numbering,

this would end the Trojan War in 1182 B.C., in general agreement with

the 1183 B.C. date given by Eratosthenes. Various other entries are

consistent with this date, within the one or two years that would be

expected because of uncertainty over the calendar being used or whether

the years were by inclusive or exclusive reckoning. There is another

source of inaccuracies of about a year or two: Jerome stated that he

dictated his translation of the Canons from Greek to Latin in haste,³⁶so

that his scribe would have had difficulty in placing the text entries at just

the correct year-figure. A perusal of any edition of the Canons that

preserves the original two-page format would show the difficulty that the

scribe, or even a modern publisher, would have in placing the text entries

in precisely the correct place to display accurately the year of the event.

According to Mosshammer, “A two-year shift in the Canons of St.

Jerome is not uncommon, given the difficulties of the textual tradition.”³⁷

Other entries in Eusebius’s Canons, however, support the 1208

B.C. date for the fall of Troy given in the Parian Marble. One such entry

is cited in the article “Phoenicia” in the 1885 edition of Encyclopedia

Britannica.

Philistus (in Euseb., Can., No. 803) gives us without knowing it

the era used in Tyre and in early times also in Carthage when he

says that Zorus (i.e. Çōr, Tyre) and Carchedon³⁸built Carthage

in 1213 B.C., or rather, according to a very good MS. (Regin.), in

1209, which agrees with the date 1208 for the fall of Troy on the

Parian marble.

35. Quotations from the Canons of Eusebius are from Rudolf Helm, Eusebius Werke,

Siebenter Band: Die Chronik des Hieronymus (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956).

36 . Notario uelocissime dictauerim: “I dictated very hastily to a stenographer.”

Mosshammer presumes that Jerome had his scribe first write the columns of year-dates

along the edges of the pages, after which Jerome did his dictating (Chronicle of Eusebius,

68). The scribe would then have difficulty in writing down Jerome’s rapid Latin dictation

in exactly the right place on the page.

37. Chronicle of Eusebius, 195.

38. “Carchedone” (Britannica Carchedon) is in one MS of Eusebius; other MSS give

chartagine and cartagine. The entry, as given in Helm, is “Filistus scribit a Zoro et

Carthagine Tyriis hoc tempore Carthaginem conditam”: “Philistus writes that Zoro and

Carthagine, Tyrians, at this time founded Carthage.” The entry is obviously corrupt,

probably because the editors (Philistus, Eusebius, or some prior compiler) were not

familiar with the Semitic languages and did not realize that in whatever source they were

using, Zoro (Hebrew/Phoenician

צור

, “rock”) and Carthagine/Carthage (Phoenician:

Qart-hadasht, “New city,” here applied to Tyre) were city names, not personal names.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

239

Philistus/Eusebius would thus seem to be a source that is

independent of those already cited for the date of the founding of Tyre

(called here “Carthage,” which means “New City” in Phoenician). The

date of the Reginus MS for the founding of Tyre is one year before the

date of the fall of Troy as given in the Parian Marble, in agreement with

the statement of Pompeius Trogus—who gives no dates—that Tyre was

founded one year before Troy fell.

Support for the Parian Marble’s chronology is also given by an

entry in Eusebius’s Canons for 1206 B.C., which reads, “Sub Tautano

rege Assyriorum Troia capta est”: “Under Tautanus,³⁹king of Assyria,

Troy is captured.”⁴⁰The two-year difference from the Parian Marble’s

date is not significant, given the uncertainties mentioned earlier in the

placement of entries in the tables of Eusebius.

Sources of Eusebius’s Canons

Although the majority of texts in Eusebius favor the chronology of

Eratosthenes, the presence of texts that are consistent with the dates of

the Parian Marble is significant. Obviously, the sources used by Eusebius

were varied and divergent. In the early 1600s Scaliger maintained that

the major source of Eusebius’s Canons was the writings of Julius

Africanus, a Christian chronologist whose five-volume history of the

world was finished about A.D. 221, but of which only fragments have

survived in the writings of Eusebius and others. Scaliger argued that

39. See footnote 43 regarding this Tautanus.

40. Helm, Chronik, 59a. Helm has a double-page format, in keeping with the format of

Jerome’s work. Mosshammer, Chronicle of Eusebius, 63–5, argues that this also reflects

the general format of Eusebius’s lost Greek original, as contrasted with the format found

in Armenian versions of Chronological Canons. Mosshammer’s work is a valuable

introduction to the literary, textual, and historical issues involved in understanding

Eusebius’s Canons, but unfortunately it does not provide their text. The text, in Jerome’s

Latin translation, is provided in Helm. An Internet resource that, like Helm, preserves the

double-page format of the original Canons, with a translation into English, is found at

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/jerome_chronicle_02_part1.htm

and

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/jerome_chronicle_03_part2.htm (cited

28 April 2012. In public domain. For printing use landscape mode.) In the double-page

format, entries on the left page (“a” pages) are taken from Hebrew and Assyrian, and

sometimes Sicyonian, sources. Entries in Eusebius that support Eratosthenes’ date for the

Trojan War are largely found in the right or “b” pages of Eusebius, while the unnamed

source in the “Assyrian” area in the left page used some other source—a source that was

consistent with the chronology followed by the Parian Marble.

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

Eusebius was basically an excerptor or epitomizer of Africanus. ⁴¹

Scaliger’s idea that Eusebius was fundamentally deriving his chronology

and historical notes from Africanus was refuted when the Armenian

versions of Eusebius were found. The Armenian versions included the

Chronographia, a prefatory book to Eusebius’s Canons. Jerome had not

translated the Chronographia into Latin, and it was not available to

Scaliger. In the Chronographia, Eusebius named his sources. Although

he used Africanus to synchronize Hebrew history with that of the Greeks,

the greater part of his history was derived from the classical Greek and

Roman chronologists. Mosshammer’s research led him to believe that

behind these various historians listed by Eusebius, the principal source of

his chronology for the Greeks was ultimately the Chronicle of

Apollodorus, a second-century B.C. work that became the standard upon

which later Greek and Roman chronographers constructed their

chronologies.⁴²Apollodorus, in turn, based his chronology of the early

Greek period on Eratosthenes.

Reference has been made to the “indiscriminate mix” of

chronological systems found in the Canons. Much of this mix came from

Porphyry, a historian who was contemporary with Eusebius. In the list of

sources for his work that Eusebius gives in his introductory

Chronographia, he says that he derived from “Porphyry, our

contemporary philosopher, an epitome from the fall of Troy to the reign

of Claudius.” Claudius here is Claudius Gothicus, who reigned A.D. 268–

270. Eusebius is specific in saying that his use of Porphyry starts with the

fall of Troy. Mosshammer identifies Porphyry as the source of the

anomalous date for the fall of Troy in 1206 B.C. in Eusebius’s Canons.⁴³

41. Joseph Scaliger, Thesaurus Temporum (Leyden 1606, Amsterdam 1658), v, cited in

Mosshammer, Chronicle of Eusebius, 150.

42. Ibid., 158.

43. Ibid., 145. Porphyry’s absolute date (i.e., in terms of years as related to the first

Olympiad) would have come from the Tyrian records, while his (or Eusebius’s)

synchronizing the fall of Troy with a king of Assyria, Tautanus, came from Diodorus,

who cited Ctesias (Diodorus 2.21.8, 2.22.2). The fixing of the absolute date, from Tyrian

records, is therefore independent of the statement of Ctesias that this was in the time of

Tautanus. No Assyrian king is known with this name. Neither is there any correlation

between the other kings of “Assyria” listed in the Canons just before and after Tautanus

with names known from Assyrian and other Near Eastern sources. Ctesias, a generally

unreliable historian, says he derived his list of kings from Persian sources; he was a

Greek who was the personal physician of Artaxerxes II Mnemon. He may have

mistakenly taken a list of Persian or Median kings as a list of Assyrian monarchs. The

errors of Ctesias in his king-list, however, should not be used as an argument against the

placement of the fall of Troy in ca. 1206 B.C. as given in the Tautanus reference of

Eusebius, since Eusebius apparently used a source independent of Ctesias to calculate the

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

241

For the major parts of the history of the Greeks, Mosshammer also

presents evidence that Porphyry followed in the tradition of Castor,

Eratosthenes, and Apollodorus, so that Porphyry, and Eusebius with him,

were at the end of a 700-year tradition of Greek chronographers. Why

then did Porphyry depart from the Greek tradition that used the date of

Eratosthenes and Apollodorus for the fall of Troy, believing instead that

the date that was compatible with Asiatic or Phoenician sources, and also

with the date of the Parian Marble, was more to be trusted? Mosshammer

provides the answer: Porphyry was a native of Tyre.

THE DATE OF THE TROJAN WAR: THE PARIAN MARBLE VS.

ERATOSTHENES

It was shown above that the most commonly accepted dates for the

Trojan War, 1192/91 to 1184/83 B.C., as derived from Eratosthenes and

accepted widely by classical chronologists after him, relies for its

accuracy on one very weak link. The weak link is the time that

Eratosthenes, following Thucydides, reckoned to have elapsed between

the fall of Troy and the return of the Heraclidae to Sparta. Thucydides

gave 80 years for this time, but so many divergent figures have been

found from classical sources, beyond the few cited above, that it could be

said that for the ancients, the time elapsed was anyone’s guess. There is

apparently no independent witness to corroborate the 80-year figure of

Thucydides. If this is so, there is no independent witness to support the

dates of Eratosthenes and his follower Apollodorus for the Trojan War.

In contrast, the Parian Marble’s date for the end of the Trojan

War, 1208 B.C., is supported by the following sources:

 The statement in the Tyrian archives cited by Josephus that

placed the founding of Tyre 240 or 241 years before Hiram of

Tyre sent aid for the construction of Solomon’s temple—thus

1209 or 1210 B.C.—combined with the statement of Pompeius

Trogus that Troy fell the year after Tyre was founded.

 The Reginus MS of Eusebius’s Canons, which, properly

interpreted, places the founding of Tyre in 1209 B.C., thus

supporting the date for that event given by Josephus’s citation of

______________________________________________________

absolute date. He (or Porphyry, before him) then combined that with the information

from Ctesias in order to specify who was reigning in “Assyria” at the time (see

Mosshammer, Chronicle of Eusebius, 334, n. 31).

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

Tyrian records. ⁴⁴Neither Eusebius nor Josephus could have

correctly calculated this date based on the datum that Tyre was

founded 240 or 241 years before Hiram sent materials for the

temple in Jerusalem, since the chronologies of both authors were

incorrect by several decades in dating the start of temple

construction. The chronology of Josephus gives 1053 B.C. for

this event, and that of Eusebius, following Africanus, 1033 B.C.

The Reginus date therefore comes from a source independent of

both Josephus and Africanus.

 The “Assyrian” entry in the left pages of the Canons that dates

the fall of Troy to 1206 B.C. According to Mosshammer, the

source of this entry is the Tyrian historian Porphyry. Porphyry

very likely obtained this information from the records of his

home city, Tyre, so that this testimony to the date of the Trojan

War does not depend on, nor is it derived from, the date derived

from the state records of Athens as transcribed in the Parian

Marble. Nevertheless, the two dates agree, within the two-year

error that must be allowed because of the format of Eusebius’s

Canons. Porphyry’s dating the fall of Troy to ca. 1206 B.C. is not

dependent on the problematic statement of Ctesias that placed

this event in the reign of an otherwise unknown Tautanes, king

of somewhere.

These evidences are not proof that the Parian Marble’s date for

the end of the Trojan War is the correct date. It has been demonstrated,

however, that 1208 has more to recommend it than does the 1184/83 date

of Eratosthenes. The fact that two independent traditions—the Athenian

(Parian Marble) and the Phoenician (Menander and Dius coupled with

Pompeius Trogus, and—separately from Trogus—Philistus and

Porphyry) agree on this date or on the closely associated date of the re-

founding of Tyre should weigh far more than the guess of Thucydides

that Eratosthenes employed to date the Trojan War. Furthermore, the

statement of the Roman author Pompeius Trogus that Troy fell one year

after the founding of Tyre should not be summarily dismissed as

unhistorical simply because it is not consistent with some weakly

supported alternate scheme, or because of Trogus’s inaccuracies

elsewhere.⁴⁵Evidence from a different source supporting the accuracy of

44. Other textual variations of Eusebius differ from this date for the founding of Tyre by

only four years.

45. It should be remembered that the statement of Trogus/Justin that allowed the dating

of Dido’s flight to 825 B.C. was vindicated by the Assyrian inscription that recorded the

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

243

Trogus’s statement, as summarized just above, was given in the first

section above (the dating of the refounding of Tyre to 1210 or 1209 B.C.

from the Tyrian accounts preserved in Josephus) and also in the fifth

section above (the Reginus MS dating the founding of the “New City” of

Tyre to 1209 B.C.).

That these various traditions agree on important events that took

place in the last decade of the 13th century B.C. leads to another

conclusion: there really was a Trojan War. Of this the ancient world had

no doubt. For the Greeks, the war between the Mycenaean Sea People

and the Trojans marked the beginning of “real” history, as distinguished

from the preceding mythical age. In contrast, for modern scholars there is

a wide spectrum of belief regarding the historicity of the Trojan War. “At

one end of the spectrum of opinion is the conviction that there was

indeed such a war and that it was pretty much as the poet [Homer]

described it,” while for others, “the Iliad is a story about a war that never

took place, fought between peoples who never lived, who used a form of

Greek that no one ever spoke and belonged to a society that was no more

than a figment of the imagination of a poet who never existed.”⁴⁶

Hopefully the present article will reduce the credibility of the extreme

skeptical position so amusingly described by Professor Bryce.

A TALE OF THREE CITIES: ATHENS, TYRE, AND JERUSALEM

It might be thought that the purpose of the present article is to vindicate

the historical accuracy of the Parian Marble. That is not the case. In

dating events that happened far from Athens, such as the accession year

of Xerxes king of Persia, the Marble can be in error by as much as four

years. Furthermore, any analysis dealing with the Marble’s credibility

needs to account for the mythological entries.⁴⁷Although these issues are

of some interest to the historian, the focus of the present article has been

on just one datum, the date for the end of the Trojan War. The Marble’s

______________________________________________________

tribute to Shalmaneser III from Dido’s grandfather Balazeros/Ba’limanzer in 841 B.C. The

best-attested reign lengths for Dido’s father and grandfather do not allow enough time for

their reigns from 841 to Dido’s flight if that flight was in 814, but their reign lengths are

compatible with her leaving Tyre in 825, which was the seventh regnal year of her

brother Pygmalion.

46. Trevor Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours (London and NY: Routledge,

2006), 180.

47. As stated above, the entries for Cecrops and Deucalion should not be dismissed as

obviously mythological, even though many fabulous tales became associated with their

names over the course of the centuries. The mentions of these individuals in the Parian

Marble are prosaic and devoid of anything unreasonable.

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

demonstrated inaccuracy for some events does not detract from the

importance of explaining how its date for the Trojan War finds

corroboration from sources that are far removed from, and quite

independent of, the state archives of Athens. It has been argued that the

author of the Parian Marble derived his dates from those archives.

The crucial question is then whether the other sources that agree

with the Parian Marble’s date for Troy’s fall are truly independent of the

Marble’s Athenian source. There is no problem in assuming that these

other sources could have recorded the event in writing, since they are

mainly Phoenician in origin, and Phoenician literacy in the thirteenth

century B.C. is well established. But it is highly controversial that Athens

could have kept written records this early, which is the natural inference

from the issues that have been discussed. The question of early literacy

in Athens, however, is not the primary issue for the present study.

Instead, the most important issue that follows from the agreement of

these ancient records is something different: their significance in

supporting the authenticity and historical accuracy of the records of Tyre

as preserved in the writings of Josephus.

Josephus’s citations of Tyrian records fall into four general

categories: (1) The mention of the time elapsed from the founding of

Tyre until the building of Solomon’s temple.⁴⁸(2) The First Tyrian King

List⁴⁹dealing with the kings of Tyre from Abibaal father of Hiram I to

the death of Pygmalion (ca. 1000 to 786/85 B.C.). (3) The Second Tyrian

King List⁵⁰recounting the kings from Ithobaal III to Hiram III (593 to

532 B.C.). (4) Various anecdotes dealing with relations between Hiram I

and Solomon.⁵¹The credibility of the first category has been dealt with at

length in the present paper. For the second category: since the translation

of the Assyrian inscription dealing with the tribute of Ba’limanzer

(Balazeros II) to Shalmaneser III appeared in 1951, there have been

several studies dealing with the authenticity of the First Tyrian King List,

as mentioned in the first section above. A good survey of the evidence is

48. Ant. 8.3.1/62.

49. Ag. Ap. 1.18/117, 121–126. Ag. Ap. 1.17/108.

50. Ag. Ap. 1.21/155–159.

51. Ant. 8.2.6/50–52, 8.2.7/53–54, 8.2.9/57–58; Ag. Ap. 1.17/109–115, 1.18/116–120.

The last reference also contains some information about Hiram’s building activities in

Tyre and his expedition against the Titians, who probably were residents of Cyprus.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

245

found in the chapter devoted to this subject in Barnes.⁵²For the third

category: the Second Tyrian King List has been mentioned only briefly,

and although there are some textual problems,⁵³it is generally accepted

that its register of kings and their lengths of reign is historically accurate,

so that Katzenstein writes regarding both lists, “We do not doubt that the

lists are based on Tyrian sources.”⁵⁴

Consequently, in places where it is possible to correlate the

Tyrian history with records or facts that are external to the Tyrian records

themselves, the Tyrian accounts have repeatedly been vindicated. The

most important vindications have come from a careful examination of the

dates that can be derived from these accounts. When all the information

is put together, the excerpts of Tyrian history found in Josephus provide

a chronological system of considerable complexity. They cover almost

seven centuries, from the re-founding of Tyre in 1209 B.C. until the end

of the reign of Hiram III in 532 B.C. Twenty-one rulers are named, with

lengths of reign for all but one of these (Abibaal, father of Hiram I).

Most importantly for testing the credibility of the Tyrian data, at five

places⁵⁵it is possible to synchronize their information with dates or

52. William H. Barnes, Studies in the Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel

(Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 29–55.

53 . One problem is whether Nebuchadnezzar’s thirteen-year siege of Tyre that is

mentioned in this king list started in the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar (so most

readings) or in the seventh year of Ithobaal III (so a Latin version of Josephus). The first

option would start the siege in 598n, but the Babylonian Chronicle has no mention of

Tyre in that year or any year until its record breaks off in 594n. The second option would

date the siege from 586 to 573 B.C., plus or minus one year. It has been advocated by

Benjamin Marshall, A Chronological Treatise Upon the Seventy Weeks of Daniel

(London: James Knapton, 1725), 64; John Jackson, Chronological Antiquities: Or, the

Antiquities and Chronology of the Most Ancient Kingdoms, from the Creation of the

World, for a Space of Five Thousand Years (3 vols.; London: J. Noon, 1752), 1:473;

Katzenstein, History of Tyre, 326; and D. J. Wiseman, s.v. “Tyre” in NBD. This

interpretation is consistent with Ezek 26:7, which speaks of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege as

yet future in September 587 B.C. (Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul, 168), and with

Ezek 29:17–18, which shows that the siege was over at some time before the twenty-

seventh year, the first day of the first month (April 26, 571 B.C.). With the seventh year of

Ithobaal III set as 586 B.C., the reign lengths of the Second Tyrian King List date the

reign of the last king in the list, Hiram III, as 552 to 532 B.C., The accuracy of this is

substantiated by the list’s synchronization (Ag. Ap.1.21/159) of Hiram’s 14th year, 538

B.C., with the year that Cyrus the Persian came to power (in Babylon), a date that is well

known from other sources.

54. Katzenstein, History of Tyre, 326.

55. Synchronisms are: the date of the refounding of Tyre as established from the other

sources mentioned in third and fifth sections above; the sending of Tyrian materials for

the construction of Solomon’s temple in the 12th year of Hiram, which was the third year

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

events derived from sources independent of the list. This illustrates an

important principle for the historian: chronology provides an effective

test of historical authenticity. The chronological test can be applied

whenever the source material provides more than a trivial amount of

information regarding spans of time and synchronizations. This certainly

characterizes the Tyrian data preserved in Josephus, even though those

data were a small part of what was originally available in the writings of

Menander and Dius. If these records were the creation of a late-date

author or redactor, whether Josephus, Menander, or anyone else, their

various statistics would not have formed a complex, coherent, and

testable chronological system.

That all these numbers do fit into such a scheme indicates that

Tyre had been keeping an annalistic calendar that measured the years

elapsed since its rebuilding as a “New City” in 1209 B.C. by the

Sidonians. This reckoning of years extended down to the Persian period,

and probably later.⁵⁶We therefore can go farther than the judgment of

Katzenstein that “the lists are based on Tyrian sources,” to say that those

sources, insofar as they can be checked by a basically mathematical

method (a chronological system), are eminently credible.

The fourth category of Josephus’s citations from Tyrian records

is not susceptible to this kind of verification. It consists of excerpts from

the correspondence between Hiram and Solomon⁵⁷and anecdotes about

58

an exchange of riddles between the two individuals.

The

correspondence is quite unremarkable and almost uninteresting, since

most of it is nothing more than Josephus’s rather loose translation into

Greek of the correspondence as recorded in 1 Kgs 5:3–9 and 2 Chr 2:3–

16. Little else of interest is added except for the statement that if anyone

doubted what Josephus wrote about this correspondence, he could ask

the keepers of the public records of Tyre to show the Tyrian copies of the

______________________________________________________

of Solomon; the flight of Dido from Tyre 143 years later in 825 B.C., agreeing with the

date of Pompeius Trogus/Justin’s conflated account for her founding of Carthage;

Nebuchadnezzar’s 13-year siege of Tyre in the reign of Ithobaal III, which fits with the

prophecies of Ezekiel that place the siege between 587 and 571 B.C.; and the installation

of Cyrus as king of Babylon in the 14th year of Hiram III, 538 B.C.

56. Despite Katzenstein’s doubts, it is by no means incredible that Tyre could have been

keeping such a calendar (History of Tyre, 61). According to Num 13:22, the cities of

Zoan (Tanis) in Egypt and Hebron in Canaan were keeping AUC type calendars dated

from the time of their founding, presently unknown, in the second millennium.

57. Ant. 8.2.6/50–52, 8.2.7/53–54.

58. Ant 8.5.3/143, 148–149; Ag. Ap. 1.17/114–115, 1.18/120.

YOUNG & STEINMANN: Correlation of Select Classical Sources

247

letters, since they were still extant in Tyre when Josephus wrote—a

statement not likely to have been made if it were not true.

Josephus said that he found the anecdotes concerning the

exchange of riddles between Hiram and Solomon in both Menander and

Dius. The easy course is to follow Katzenstein⁵⁹and dismiss the accounts

as “legends.” Two considerations weigh against this. The first is the

principle followed in courts of law (and, indeed, in everyday life) that

when a witness has been found truthful in all statements that can be

verified by an independent source, that witness should be assumed to be

credible when speaking of events that cannot be independently verified.

The second principle is that, given the fondness of the ancient world for

riddles, it is not surprising that Solomon would misuse his famous

wisdom in this kind of trivial pursuit. In our own day there are abundant

examples of incidents where an individual, greatly gifted by God in some

way, has misused that gift, often with tragic results.

Athens dated its years not from the founding of the city, as Tyre

did, but from the beginning of the kingship under Cecrops. This is the

conclusion that follows from the citation of Athenian records by the

author of the Parian Marble. The very sparse records that have survived

from these two sources, the Tyrian and the Athenian, intersect in the late

thirteenth century B.C. with the mention of two events related to the

depredations of the Mycenaeans: the fall of Troy and the refounding of

Tyre by the dispossessed Sidonians. Here the tales of the two cities

merge, and we would see much more of their agreement if Josephus was

not restricting his citation of the Tyrian records to just what related to the

biblical history. Nevertheless, the interconnection of the two events is

illuminated by Merenptah’s inscription describing the incursions, and

defeat, of the Sea People, an inscription which current scholarship dates

to the pharaoh’s fifth year, ca. 1208 B.C.⁶⁰

The key information that allows tying together these two

histories, the Athenian and the Tyrian, originated in neither city. It comes

from Jerusalem, and to some extent also from the archives of the

northern kingdom, Israel. This information is found in the scriptural texts

that allow a precise determination of the regnal years of Solomon, in

whose fourth year construction began on the Jerusalem temple. The time

when temple construction began—the spring of 967 B.C.—was pivotal in

establishing the credibility of the Tyrian records that dated the re-

founding of Tyre over two centuries before that date, and also for

checking the validity of the date when Dido fled Tyre to found Carthage

59. History of Tyre, 99.

60. E. Hornung, R. Krauss, and S. Warburton, eds., Ancient Egyptian Chronology

(Handbook of Oriental Studies; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 495.

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Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2

almost a century and a half later. It is the firm dates for Solomon, derived

from the biblical texts and assigned absolute (B.C.) dates from Assyrian

synchronisms and astronomical calculations, that give credibility to the

Tyrian data preserved by Josephus.⁶¹According to the thesis of the

present paper, the firmness of Solomon’s dates also allows the

calculation that gives credibility to the Parian Marble’s date for the end

of the Trojan War. This situation is analogous to the acceptance by

Egyptologists of the date of the death of Solomon, as given by Thiele, in

establishing dates for pharaohs of Egypt’s Twenty-first and Twenty-

second Dynasties.⁶²The dates of these pharaohs can be derived only

approximately from Egyptian sources, but by using 2 Chr 12:2 to

synchronize the fifth year of Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam, with an

invasion of Shoshenq I (the biblical Shishak), a precise date can be

assigned to Shoshenq’s invasion of Judah. Egyptologists combine this

with an inscription of Shoshenq that is used to date his invasion of Judah

to his twentieth year, thus giving dates for Shoshenq’s reign. Shoshenq I

was the first pharaoh of the 22nd Dynasty. From this fixed starting point

in his reign, Egyptologists determine the dates of all pharaohs of the

Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Dynasties. Given the convergence of

data from the Bible, Tyrian, and Athenian sources, will classicists in the

future find biblical chronology useful in determining the date of Troy’s

fall?

61. Perhaps it is a comment on the skepticism of some scholarly circles that Barnes

(Studies, 54) does not derive his date for the construction of Solomon’s temple from the

biblical data, but from the First Tyrian King List. Using this as his starting point, Barnes

constructs a chronology for the Hebrew kingdom period that was meant to replace that of

Thiele, but which has not succeeded in doing so. Coucke had followed this backward way

of doing things before Barnes, but Coucke wrote before Thiele’s research was published.

62 . Kenneth Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 B.C.)

(Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1973), 73. Thiele’s chronology dated Rehoboam from

931t to 914t, so that his fifth year was 926t. Assuming the usual Egyptian custom of a

northward campaign in the spring months, Egyptologists therefore placed Shoshenq’s

invasion in the spring of 925 B.C. With the one-year adjustment to Thiele’s dates for

Solomon through Athaliah that was discussed in footnote 8, this should be changed to the

spring of 926 B.C., with a consequent one-year adjustment for the years of Egyptian

pharaohs whose regnal years are measured from this date.