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Heath, Dunbar I.; Corbaux, Fanny
The Exodus papyri — London, 1855

DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.548#0048
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SECTION IV.----DATE OF THE EXODUS. 45

season, and which then happened to fall due in the
civil Egyptian month Paoni.

As the festival in question might fall on any-
one of the thirty days of Paoni, and as the new
moon of the Spring equinox, opening the Hebrew
sacred year, might be the day of the equinox itself
or any one of the twenty-eight days after it, a de-
finite date from so loose a datum is of course out
of the question. All we get is a chronological
limit between two possible extreme points. This
gives rope enough to false chronology, whether
Biblical or Egyptian. Yet all this extra length
of tether will not save the Usherian date of the
Exodus — B.C. 1491. For even supposing the
doubly extreme case of the lunation falling on
the very first day of Paoni, and twenty-eight
days after the equinox, in order to get the ear-
liest possible period within the range of coinci-
dence, this position will only denote the year
b.c. 1381, which is still 110 years later than
Usher's date.

I now leave the thoughtful reader to choose his
alternative :—whether to give up, as one of " the
stumbling blocks that have been kept fixed in our
path of progress," that safe corner-stone of chro-
nology printed in the margins of our Bibles as the
date of the Exodus; or, as the only alternative,
give up the connection of that event with the
Shepherd-revolution under King Amenophis or
Seti-Meneptah II.

The views I have now put forth are the founda-
tion of the history of the period, which at no very
 
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