Bizarre Mainstream Archaeology - Queen of Sheba - 222 LexiLine Journal

For some bizarre mainstream archaeology see

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28514-2003Sep4.html

for the Washington Post story of one mainstream archaeologist's
erroneous vision of Sheba
and

http://www.bartleby.com/108/14/9.html

which is the Second Book of Chronicles in the King James Version for
the original story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Here are some sites about Saba and the Queen of Sheba
http://www.windweaver.com/sheba/Sheba.htm
http://www.geocities.com/mandaeans/Sabians4.htm

For me, as a man trained in law and evidence, one of the most
disturbing things about mainstream archaeology is its academic
nihilism, its lack of intellectual depth and scope, its substitution
of flowery non-content for nuts-and-bolts factual materials, all of
which are combined with a near absence in archaeological circles of
a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction.

For example, when historic personages can not be found in the eras
assigned to them by archaeologists, it is presumed that HISTORY has
erred, but never have the grave-diggers themselves erred. This is a
unique academic concept of self-infallibility which archaeology
shares with many of the soft humanities, where people merely have to
claim their motor works, without it actually ever having to run.

For this reason, many so-called "archaeology scholars" have argued
that famous personages such as Abraham, Moses, King Saul, King David
and King Solomon, etc. never existed, because archaeologists have
never found any physical evidence for these persons in the historic
era to which THEY erroneously assign these persons.

see e.g. http://www.northwestern.edu/univ-relations/media/news-releases/1999-00/*events/biblesymp-events.html

but see also
http://www.geocities.com/elchasqui_2/ZSitchinbook3m.html

giving various data
showing that Abraham was initially - and CORRECTLY -
dated to a much earlier era originally than currently

i.e. Abraham as having lived at the same time as the early Elamites,
which is early in the third millennium BC, when Pharaonic
Civilization also started, for Abraham went "down into Egypt".
The entire record is there in the Bible.

[For that 3rd millennium date in the archaeology of the Elamites see
The Archaeology of Elam, Cambridge University Press, 1999.]

Some scholars have even denied the presence of Jews in Egypt in
ancient days and have declared Exodus and the Babylonian Captivity
as fictions.

We even have people in Germany today who deny that the Holocaust of
WWII and the near extermination of the Jews ever took place.

One way to try to destroy a people or a person is to steal their
identity or to take away their rightful history.

Look at the current Middle East - is this not in part a battle about
where the Jews belong? It is a historical question of great
importance. It is also a topic which fills our daily news - with no
end in sight. So, we really should get it right, should we not?

A man of intellectual depth - as opposed to mainstream archaeology -
would extend his questioning with regard to Biblical personages and
the age in which they allegedly lived. He would objectively
ask: "but what about other eras? could these persons have lived in
other periods?" - perhaps it is WE and not history, who have erred
in our time-keeping and our name-giving. Let us try to fit the
known facts to another period. Perhaps OUR chronology is wrong".

As indeed it is.

As I have pointed out, Biblical personages can indeed be found in
the physical historical record, albeit in different historical eras
than those now assigned to these personages by the clueless
mainstream archaeologists.

We now have another mainstream archaeologist

- see same link as at the top of the page -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28514-2003Sep4.html

who has added his voice to those who question the existence of
Jewish-related Biblical figures and kings. He alleges that the Queen
of Sheba may not have existed, because - as we might logically
expect - no physical evidence of her has been found in the erroneous
era in which the archaeologists have looked for her.

Interestingly, this archaeologist alleges that "Truth is but a
construction". What does this say about the "science" involved?

No man of the law, trained in logic would ever accept this
definition of Truth. Truth is NOT "but a construction". If you do
not eat and drink, and breathe, you die. That is a truth. It is a
fact, an inviolable fact. It is not a construction.

But what people "view" to be "their" truth based on "their" personal
prejudices and beliefs, may be THEIR truth for THEM, but it is not
THE truth. There is a difference. Truth is not that which
is "accepted" as a matter of academic construction, as the
archaeologists might claim. Rather, that which is accepted is merely
a "convention" - and archaeology consists almost entirely of
conventions, and very, very few truths.

One must ask in the case of the Kingdom of Saba - why not look for
the Queen of Sheba (Saba) in the period of the first historical
mention of this people? i.e. when they first made known contact with
the outer world - for the Queen of Sheba knew nothing of the outer
world until she visited Solomon. This first Sabaen mention is ca.
the 12th century BC, a period which corresponds to my dating of the
Biblical King Solomon, who was in my view Ramses II, Pharaoh of
Egypt.

[note: The name Ramses is a reading by the Egyptologists of one of
the several royal pharaonic hieroglyph name cartouches of this king -
the hieroglyph which actually reads "Solomon" is read incorrectly
by the Egyptologists as MERI-AMUN, thus AMUN is correct but MER is
not a part of the name but means "measure. The entire hieroglyph
means MENesis (MOON, AMUN), MER (measure), SAULE (RA - the Sun, from
RATS "the wheel") MEDZIS [born of] hence SAULE (SOL) AMUN (oMON) =
SOLOMON MEDZIS, born of the sun and the moon - and indeed this is an
eclipse during his reign, a meeting of the Sun and the Moon.]

THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE (!) indicates

(quoting p. 95 of C. Edens & T.J. Wilkinson, "Southwest Arabia
during the Holocene," Journal of World Prehistory, 12, Epigraphic
Chronology (1998) that "The stratigraphic context of these inscribed
sherds establish that a writing system appeared in S. Arabia [Saba]
perhaps as early as the 12-11th [century] BC, seemingly well before
the first identified monumental inscriptions (perhaps early the 8th
BC). This conclusion requires that the South Arabian writing system
was borrowed from northern antecedents as early as the Late Bronze
Age." [my comment - and this will be the Egyptians and King
Solomon's legacy to Sheba]

But, as one commentator notes at
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2003-April/008422.html
this would mean an impossible gap of hundreds of years from early
evidence of writing at Saba to the monumental inscriptions....
He is right. There is no such gap. The dating of the kingdoms of the
monumental inscriptions is off the mark by hundreds of years.

What this means in the evidence of SABA is that we have the same
several-hundred-year chronological error that we find everywhere
else. Obviously, evidence of writing goes hand in hand with
monuments - there is no hundreds of years inbetween. So, Sheba
learned the art of writing in Egypt and brought it to her country.
That fits the Biblical historical record, when Sheba visited Egypt
in the days of Ramses II, who was King Solomon.

The archaeologists are thus looking for evidence of the Queen of
Sheba in the wrong century. In their case, there is no truth,
but only self-deception and falsehood, lodged in an erroneous
archaeololgical convention of how history ought to be in THEIR
conception, and not how history actually was.