Dis Manibus: Peter James, Chronology Challenger
Ancient World Studies has a few bold characters who push ideas that most people are not brave enough or foolhardy enough to say aloud. Peter James was one of them: he took the widely agreed fact that there are not many fine artifacts from the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around 1000 BCE (but objects dated a few hundred years earlier and a few hundred years later that look very similar to one another) to argue that a few hundred years were accidentally inserted into Bronze Age Egyptian history and carried over into archaeology elsewhere before precise scientific methods became available. Not many scholars agreed but some admitted that the evidence for the established system was not as clear as textbooks make it seem, and the Aegean Dendrochronology Project kept themselves busy trying to prove his Centuries of Darkness thesis wrong. Currently there is a fad for performing complicated statistical manipulations on many unclear radiocarbon dates to get one precise date which I am not qualified to comment on. I did not know that James started as a Velikovskian and moderated his ideas as he learned more! Sit terra tibi levis.
Ronald Wallenfels <rwallenfels@verizon.net> forwarded this sad news to the Agade mailing list from Pieter van der Veen <van_der_Veen@gmx.de>:
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On Friday August 30 (2024) we received the sad news that Peter James has passed away.
Peter James had not been well for some time and his health had gradually deteriorated. Peter was born in 1952 and would have become 72 in October.
I have known Peter James since my early adulthood (when Peter was in his late twenties) and it was mainly through him, that my interest in the chronology of the Ancient World was aroused. Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Peter had become a prolific writer on ancient history in the journal SISReview of the Velikovskian British society SIS (Society of Interdisciplinary Studies). This group, however, showed that Immanuel Velikovsky’s own unprofessional theories had many problems and could not be reconciled with the evidence.
Peter James and others in the Society initially suggested minor modifications to the traditional Velikovskian scheme, creating what was then called the “Glasgow chronology” (1978), which left the traditional sequence of most Egyptian dynasties intact (something Velikovsky had not done). Later, however, Peter and others suggested a less radical scheme, which he would eventually publish with some colleagues in his book Centuries of Darkness (1991), suggesting a revision of the standard chronology by ca. 250 years. Peter would adhere to this scheme until his death. Even so, Peter never became dogmatic about it and welcomed scholarly interaction.
Peter was extremely knowledgeable about many topics, foremost about the history and chronology of the Ancient Near East and the Aegean world. This has been rightly acknowledged by friend and enemy. Although he wrote in several well-known scholarly journals – while also writing and editing books – he often did not receive due acknowledgement for his work, as many colleagues would simply not be prepared to consider his work.
Together with Peter James, I co-edited the 3rd volume of the BICANE Proceedings Solomon and Shishak, which came out in 2015. A follow-up book is currently underway (dealing partly with Assyrian and Hittite chronology) and is scheduled to appear in 2025. It will be dedicated to Peter James and will contain an obituary in honour of his work.
Many articles by Peter James can be found at https://bham.academia.edu/PeterJames For more information about his work, see: https://www.centuries.co.uk/
Peter will be greatly missed.
[A notice about him and his work is at https://www.velikovsky.info/peter-james/]
Jona Lendering’s article on Mesopotamian Chronology is a nice introduction to the problems of fitting ancient dates into our calendar. This review of a monograph on ancient glass talks about how there is still a 200 year period in the early Iron Age with no known glass vessels from the Near East (most scholars would say that this is because for a few hundred years there were not many rich people able to bury precious objects in the ground or sink the in the sea). The recent archaeogenetics paper on the domestication of the horse in Nature shows another kind of big chronological debate in archaeology.
(scheduled 20 September 2024)
