What About Gary Bates?

What About Gary Bates? · I forgot one objection he could have ... still on Göbekli Tepe

He wrote a movie review about The 7 Churches of Revelation, Times of Fire, which I have not seen. I can't comment on the review as a review.

But it has a longish intro with two passages relevant to my work ...

We often receive many inquiries about alleged archaeological sites such as Göbekli Tepe, whose assigned ‘secular’ date would actually precede the biblical date of Creation (this, of course, cannot be true!).

I agree wholeheartedly that the carbon date taken at face value cannot be correct. 9600 BC, carbon date for beginning of GT, is not a date. Neither is 8600 BC, carbon date for the end of GT.

However, I have a solution about these carbon dates. If CMI gets so many inquiries, why are they not even mentioning my solution?

A bit less than one halflife ago, the atmosphere had a bit less than 50 "percent modern Carbon" - a term that means how the concentration of C14 in C12 in samples is lower and in previous states of the atmosphere could vary. With a bit less than 50 pmC, and a bit less than a half life, you can get around 25 pmC, which is what one would expect after two halflives (a timespan that has not occurred, ever).

But the problem with this is, my calibration for C14 places GT between 350 and 401 after the Flood, between death of Noah and birth of Peleg according to the Biblical chronology of the Roman martyrology (based on a text like LXX without second Cainan). That is, I identify GT with Babel.

Now, there is a little further problem here, Gary Bates uses the term "alleged archaeological sites" - as if there were any doubt that GT were a genuine archaeological site.

It is certainly more recently discovered than Ur as excavated by Woolley.

European archaeologists did not identify Tell el-Muqayyar as the site of Ur until Henry Rawlinson successfully deciphered some bricks from that location, brought to England by William Loftus in 1849 ... The site was first excavated in 1853 and 1854, on behalf of the British Museum and with instructions from the Foreign Office, by John George Taylor [namesake, btw] ... Excavations from 1922 to 1934 were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania and led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur#Archaeology

In October 1994,[93] German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who had previously been working at Nevalı Çori, was looking for evidence of similar sites in the area and decided to re-examine the location described by the Chicago researchers in 1963.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Research_history

And after that, it was more than 15 years before I heard of it. Perhaps Gary Bates heard of it so late in his life, he had lost curiosity and decided to write it off as an unfounded rumour - I didn't. Or perhaps Gary Bates still prefers his the idea (see his book ... wait, it was Michael and Beverly Oard's ... Life in the Great Ice Age) that Babel happened before Upper Palaeolithic. Before carbon dated 40 000 BP. When Neanderthals were still around.

By contrast, Douglas Petrovich puts Babel into the very late Neolithic, in carbon dated 5000 BC.

Let's put end of Babel in 2556, 401 years after the Flood, uniformly, for comparison.

"38 000 BC" - 2556 BC = 35444 extra years. 1.374 pmC in the atmosphere.
"5000 BC" - 2556 BC = 2444 extra years. 74.405 pmC in the atmosphere.
"8600 BC" - 2556 BC = 6044 extra years. 48.136 pmC in the atmosphere.

Let's take an average of the first two. (1.374 pmC + 74.405 pmC) / 2 = 37.8895 pmC. Using Göbekli Tepe, which at the end, if Babel, would have had 48.136 pmC in the atmosphere is a fair compromise between two extremes. The levels by putting the beginning of Upper Palaeolithic earlier (at the Flood) and base at Eridu later (between Babel and Abraham) would be close to the ones given, and this discrepancy resolves as carbon 14 levels rising quicker between Flood and Babel than between Babel and Abraham.

And if we have a look at the beheadings in Göbekli Tepe, it gives a very fair view of why God stopped Babel.

Now, suppose Gary Bates had said "never heard of GT" - I suppose he could have used that as an explanation why he refuses to look at my option. Suppose again he had good arguments against GT being Babel - "not in Mesopotamia" (true of Tell Qaramel, unless Aleppo river was previously an arm of Euphrates, but not of GT), "not the right direction away from landing place" (true of anything near Classic Babylon, including Ur and Eridu, but not of GT, where "they removed from the east" is spot on), not the right geographic surrounding (true if it had said "found a land in the plains of Shinar" but it says "found a plain in the land of Shinar" so we would prefer where Mesopotamia is overall hilly but has a plain in it), "spoke a post-Babel language" (but we have no linguistic traces from GT or from Jericho which started at same time, neither grammophone records nor even writing) ... he would obviously have been free to dispute my finding as unfounded. I used to have a weak answer for one objection "this was before bricks and mortar" when recently I found that floors in Jericho used the material "terrazzo" ... and that Jericho was contemporary with GT.

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Jericho and Babel Contemporary?
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2021/09/jericho-and-babel-contemporary.html

He prefers to act like a gate-keeper, whether because he seeks an uncritic adept before doing business, or because he is afraid I'm an UFO-logist, while I have more than once said, I don't believe in "Ancient Alien Astronauts" like Graham Hancock believes, but in "Ancient Aspiring Astronauts" like Nimrod would have been one.

The other passage is:

Similarly, there are many conventional dates assigned to well-known artefacts in ancient Egypt that would predate the biblical Flood.

Well, take the Burial Ship of Djoser ... carbon dates go all the way back to 2800 BC, if Imhotep was Joseph, Djoser would have been Joseph's pharao, and we would be looking at the time of Joseph in Egypt. 2800 BC - 1728 BC = 1072 extra years or 87.838 pmC in the atmosphere.

While it is true that uniformitarians do assign whether or not use a carbon date, in the case of Djoser they preferred 2600 BC over it, the carbon date in and of itself is not assigned, it is calculated. On the assumption, which we agree is wrong, that the carbon level was close to 100 pmC. In other words, the one methodological error is (for objects from that far back) to assume the now remaining pmC in a sample equals or is close to the percentage of C14 remaining from when it is from, which is what a uniform c. 100 pmC in the atmosphere would let you expect. Use my correction, and the dates will fall into place.

Between the archaeological date of GT and that of Djoser's we have "3500 BC" as carbon date of reed mats from En-Gedi's evacuation after Chalcolithic settlement. I credit Osgood with pointing out there was such a thing, and that it matches facts from Genesis 14 - when Abraham was c. 80 (between 75 and 86) years old.

"3500 BC" - 1935 BC = 1565 extra years, a level of 82.753 pmC in the atmosphere (the reed mats would have been made of reed having breathed the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of very closely preceding years, if not perhaps uniquely from last year.

2957 BC		2607 BC		2556 BC		1935 BC		1700 BC*
1.2788 pmC		42.8224 pmC		48.1415 pmC		82.73 pmC		87.575 pmC

This gives a fairly good - even - rise for the C14 level, and therefore explains the erroneous carbon dates while also offering a correction to them.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Venceslas of Bohemia
28.IX.2021

* Creation vs. Evolution : New Tables
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-tables.html