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ORIENTAL INSTITUTE RESEARCH ARCHIVES

ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORICAL PROBLEMS OF THE SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES
AND CIVILIZATIONS

BY
BRUCE WILLIAMS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
DECEMBER 1975

EXPLANATION OF REISSUE OF THIS MANUSCRIPT 1999

In the Spring of 1999 at the ARCE meetings in Chicago, Dr. Jacke Phillips read an announcement that Manfred Bietak had initiated an international project to resolve problems of chronology in the early Second Millennium B. C., in the Nile Valley, the Near East, and the Aegean. [THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF CIVILIZATIONS IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN IN THE 2nd MILLENNIUM B.C.] Making my dissertation available in electronic form is my contribution to this effort. The purpose is to make a large body of material available to scholars who may not have ready access to the wide range of evidence that pertains to this age of broad contacts.

This dissertation is now twenty-four years old. Since it was written, great many new sites have been excavated and published, and students of the period have generated quite a bit of discussion on it. A number of significant points in this work must now be changed. The most important change is the reversal of the Kerma chronology. Although I noted that the so-called Nubian cemetery at Kerma was earlier than K, I did not see that Reisner had the order of K reversed. W. Y. Adams and David O'Connor have since corrected this error. This reversal, however, has little effect on the chronology, except, perhaps, to make it slightly easier to accept, for KXVI, now the earliest great tumulus, is dated by a large basin of Dedumose to the latest Thirteenth Dynasty or later. Details are found in the Appendix to OINE VI. A second major change is that earlier phases of Asiatic culture appear earlier in the Delta settlements than I indicated. I will leave other points of discussion to later revisions of the work. Many details remain useful, such as evidence first discerned by Klaus Baer that dates the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty's unified control of the Nile Valley to the Seventeenth Century.

Although many years have gone by since I wrote Archaeology and Historical Problems of the Second Intermediate Period, the two main theses posed in this dissertation are still alive: First, almost all of the Middle Bronze Age is later than 1800 B.C. Second, the Middle Bronze Age was contemporary with the Assyrian Colony and Old Babylonian Periods as dated by the low chronology. Beyond these two theses, the archaeological and historical sequences of this period should be considered interconnected phases. At its beginning, Assyrians live and work in central Anatolia, the state-complex encompassing the lands from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The ruler of Byblos, well known to the Mesopotamians, has a title of an Egyptian nomarch. At the end, the Hyksos are allied with Kush, while the Egyptians claim the friendship of the Aegeans—backed up by interconnections in royal jewelry. The Hittites have descended from the mountains to destroy Yamkhad, and then march all the way to Babylon. A thesis was, and is, that these events were not isolated or coincidental, but parts of larger geo-political and cultural changes that embraced not localities or districts, but all of the regions and states from the Aegean to the Zagros and Anatolia to Sudan. Key to this reconstruction was a system of correlations that required the essential acceptance of Bietak's low chronology for the Middle Bronze Age, and the low chronology for Mesopotamia, which contradicted the very high dates often argued for these same periods, especially in Syro-Palestinian archaeological circles. This contradiction forms the core of the issues now again in question.

I hope this submission will contribute to the research, by pointing out some of the less-familiar evidence, and by raising some points that do not deserve to be ignored.

Bruce Williams
October 1, 1999

ACCESS TO THE MANUSCRIPT

Processing of the manuscript into a form accessible over the Internet is has been done under the auspices of the Research Archives of the Oriental Institute. We are providing the manuscript in twenty-one .pdf files in addition to this introductory statement and table of contents. Links to the .pdf files will be found in the table of contents below. As printed the manuscript covers xxxi + 2143 pages and includes 598 figures, 95 tables and 11 maps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FRONTMATTER

PART I. EGYPT FROM THE END OF THE TWELFTH DYNASTY TO THE EXPULSION OF THE HYKSOS
PART II. EGYPT FROM THE END OF THE TWELFTH DYNASTY TO THE EXPULSION OF THE HYKSOS
PART III. NUBIA FROM THE END OF THE TWELFTH DYNASTY TO THE RECONQUEST IN THE NEW KINGDOM
PART IV. NUBIA FROM THE END OF THE TWELFTH DYNASTY TO THE RECONQUEST IN THE NEW KINGDOM
PART V. PALESTINE AND SYRIA IN THE MIDDLE BRONZE II AND III AGES
PART VI. PALESTINE AND SYRIA IN THE MIDDLE BRONZE II AND III AGES
PART VII. APPENDIXES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Revised: October 4, 1999
Copyright © 1999 Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
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