Perhaps the hard-to-convince might be wondering if the original translators of the documents made mistakes which have been blindly followed by the scholars who came after them. How reliable are the translations? How confident can we be that a certain tablet is really dated to month V, day 23, year 21 on Nebuchadnezzar, for instance?
If you were to browse in a large university library in the area of the PJ 3000's you would find volumes which contain the published cuneiform texts. It is the custom for the scholars who publish the texts to include not only their own transliteration and translation of each tablet, but also to include plates showing the actual wedge-shaped cuneiform writing, either as a photograph, or more commonly, as a line drawing.
When cuneiform texts are published in academic journals such as the Journal of Cuneiform Studies it is also the case that they provide photographic plates or line drawings of the actual tablet showing the wedge-shaped cuneiform writing.
Scholars who evaluate the material for their own research do not rely on the English translations or even on the previous scholars' transliterations. They go back and re-read the texts for the themselves.
It boggles the mind to think of the effort men like Dandamaev have put into their research. For instance, read what he says in Slavery in Babylonia:
Having set for myself the task of collecting and studying the material in the Babylonian documents of the seventh through the fourth centuries BC, I transcribed and translated all the documents known and available to me from the eleventh through the second centuries BC.
When scholars who are reviewing the texts for their own research come across a line or word with which they have any question or disagreement, they publish their suggested correction. These minor revisions might suggest a new phrasing in the body of the document based on an expanded knowledge of the language. The lists of witnesses and the dates at the end of each contract tablet, on the other hand, are very straightforward.
So what about the dated tablets cited by Parker & Dubberstein in Babylonian Chronology and cited by Donald Wiseman in the Cambridge Ancient History? (The ones which establish the end of each king's reign and the beginning of his successor's reign.) Have these been reviewed by other scholars? Absolutely.
For instance, Dandamaev listed 123 published documents for Amel-Marduk (562-560 BC) in Slavery in Babylonia, 1984, p. 9.
BE 8 31-34, 38; BIN 1 136, 143; BIN 2 109; BRL II: 47 f.; BRM 1 54, 55; CT 51 43; CT 55 77, 182, 719, 753, 787; CT 57 147 (?), 320; Dalley 68; EM 1-24; GCCI II 76-95; JCS 24:106 UNC 15; Liverpool 9, 10; McEwan 3, 46; Mesopotamia 10-11:15 no. 29; Sack AOATS 4 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 21-23, 28, 29, 35, 40, 41, 56, 57, 61, 64, 66, 75-77, 79, 80, 82, 94; SAKF 135, 150; Speleers 277, 286, 292; Stigers 19; TCL 12 59-62; UCP 9/I II 29; VS 5 17; VS 6 55, 56; VS 20 2, 54; ZA 66: 282, 284, 286; ZA 67:43 f., 48f., 49 f.; ZA 69:42 f., 44.
If you were to consult his list of abbreviations and then painstakingly compare each document with the ones cited by Parker & Dubberstein you would see that they are talking about the same tablets. Scholars have read and re-read these texts for years and they agree on the translations of the dates.
The WT cited an early authority in their 1965 WT article "The Rejoicing of the Wicked Is Short-lived", WT 1/1/1965. They refer to Ramond Philip Dougherty's Nabonidus and Belshazzar, A Study of the Closing Events of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Yale Oriental Series, Resarches, Vol. XV; Yale University Press, 1929.
Already in 1929 Dougherty was familiar with more than two thousand dated cuneiform tablets establishing the kings and their reigns. He says that the chronology established on the basis of the cuneiform documents "must be accepted as the ultimate criterion in the determination of Neo-Babylonian chronological questions..." (p. 10)
So when you read the lists of tablets I posted last night (the ones saying we have tablets dated to year 43 of Nebuchandnezzar through September and October and then we have tablets dated to Amel-Marduk's accession year beginning October 8 followed by tablets from all over Babylon by mid-October, etc.) you can be sure that the dates on these tablets have been read and reviewed many times.
There really is an unbroken chain of kings with each one's predecessor and successor known through the dated "everyday life" tablets.
This is primary evidence. The opinions of the later historians and chronographers (Herodotus, Xenophon, Megasthenes, Berossus, Polyhistor, Ptolemy, Josephus, the Seder Olam, Jerome, Eusebius, Syncellus, etc.) are secondary and tertiary (or worse), so one must evaluate their opinions, especially any divergent opinions, in light of the mass of primary evidence, the dated cuneiform tablets themselves.
The WT seizes on any discrepancy in these later historians and makes a big deal over it. But the later historians were writing many years after the events of the 6 th century and they were often relying on earlier historians, whose work was also opinion and hearsay rather than an eyewitness account, and which had also been transmitted for many years.
Modern scholars (except for a few orthodox rabbis who hold to the old Seder Olam) agree on the chronology of the neo-Babylonian era because it is now based on primary evidence rather than on ancient historians' interpretations.
Marjorie
