Table Of ContentEXODUS TO
ARTHUR
CATASTROPHIC ENCOUNTERS WITH COMETS
MIKE BAILLIE
B.T. BATSFORD LTD; LONDON
r
Dedicated to my mother, Hester
By about the sixth century AD, Christian beliefs included the dogma
that nothing that happens in the heavens could have any conceivable
effect on the Earth.
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1993
©Mike Baillie 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, in any form or by any means without
permission from the publisher.
B.T. Batsford Ltd
583 Fulham Road
London
SW6 5BY
ISBN 0 7134 8352 0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Printed by Biddles Limited, Guildford
Illustration credits
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for kind permission to
reproduce copyright illustrations: David Hardy/Science Photo Library for page 52;
Hulton Deutsch Collection for page 217; Novosti Photo Library for page 123;
Private collection for page 45; Professor Barry Raftery for page 42; Somerset County
Museums Service for page 35; South American Pictures for page 23; The Ulster
Archeological Society for page 40.
The illustrations on pages 16, 17, 22, 24, 49, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63a, 63b, 67, 68, 97, 119,
120a, 120b, 124, 127, 200 and 201 are courtesy of Mike Baillie.
Contents
Preface . . . . . 6
Table........... . 9
Introduction 10
Part 1
Chapter 1 Introduction to dendrochronology....................... 14
Chapter 2 Some examples from dendrochronology.............. 31
Chapter 3 Volcanoes and tree-rings......................................... 48
Chapter 4 The volcano story continues to build.................. 62
Chapter 5 Not all plan sailing: tensions in the volcano story. 79
Part II
Chapter 6 Problems with dating the Shang Dynasty and the
New Kingdom......................................................... 90
Chapter 7 Exodus and the 480-year interval......................... 99
Chapter 8 The Exodus-Santorini scenario: independent testing? 109
Chapter 9 Independent suggestions of extraterrestrial effects. ... 122
Chapter 10 Other environmental effects...................................143
Chapter 11 The wasteland concept............................................153
Chapter 12 Velikovsky revisited.................................................166
Chapter 13 Merlin, Lug and Michael........................................181
Chapter 14 Reinforcing the connections...................................192
Chapter 15 Conclusions..............................................................203
Appendix. 219
Glossary . 249
References 256
Index . .. 267
r
P
reface
' I 'his book grew out of the apparently simple question, asked by
I Charlotte Bickerstaffe and carried on by Monica Kendall at Batsford,
-A. ‘Could you write a popular version of your recent book A Slice
Through Time!' That book was about the building and completion of the first
long oak tree-ring chronologies in Europe, and about some of the applications
of those chronologies to archaeology, building history, trade and
environmental studies. At the time I thought a popular version would be
possible simply by expanding a few of the more interesting aspects of that
existing book; what actually happened was quite different. As I wrote, at every
turn I started to find new hints of a much bigger story. Spaced environmental
events already observed and dated in the tree-rings appeared to be reflected in
spaced events in ancient histories and mythologies. The new text started to
take on the form of a ‘what if’ story. If the comets recorded in ancient China
were the same as those alluded to in biblical sources then logic suggested
something special about those particular comets, or something special about
the periods in which they were observed. If the similarities in happenings in
the sixth century AD and at the time of the Exodus were real, that logic
suggested something too. By following the path ‘but if that is the case then
surely that means...’ the text of this book was born. Thus the book was not
conceived as a complete text but grew as the links were made and the logical
questions were asked.
Several people contributed to useful discussions, notably Richard
Warner, Valerie Hall, Peter Francis, Chris Lynn and Gerry McCormac. I
should also mention the contributions made by Bob Kalin, Don Carleton
Peter Pritchard, Leroy Ellenberger and Bob Kobres, each of whom supplied
information which triggered new lines of enquiry. I am grateful to Ruarl
OhUiginn for saving me from the worst pitfalls of the Rosualt sea-monster
legend. Ian Tyers and Janet Ambers sat patiently through renditions of the
basic story, while Jim Mallory, Tony Farrell and Ken Burnett bravely read
drafts of the text to assist with ironing out some of the worst howlers. I would
hasten to add that I am solely responsible for the text and any errors of fact or
interpretation, in the many fields where I am not a specialist, are mine alone.
In writing the later chapters, with their hints of cometary interactions with
6
PREFACE
planet Earth, I found that the developing story had distinct similarities to the
earlier writings of the contentious catastrophist, Immanuel Velikovsky. I
therefore felt obliged, under the rules of prior work, to make use of a fraction
of Velikovsky’s work even though it is normally totally disregarded by
scientists. After the book was written, Benny Peiser pointed out that much of
Velikovsky’s thesis contains striking echoes of the extremely strange works of
Cornyns Beaumont, an Englishman who was writing in the 1920s, 1930s,
and 1940s. I had never heard of Beaumont, and it was not until July 1997
that I was able to obtain inter-library loan copies of his books, The Mysterious
Comet and The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain. In the Foreword of the latter book
Beaumont states, in bold capitals,
THE FLOOD IMMORTALIZES THE COLLISION
OF A FALLEN PLANET, LATER TERMED SATAN.
ACTUALLY A COMETARY BODY,
WITH OUT EARTH.
Anyone reading to the end of this book will see why I bother to quote
Beaumont’s prior statement here. Mixed in with many completely crazy ideas,
for example, Britain being Atlantis, Beaumont correctly identified comets as
a major hazard; he suggested that the dragon image was the description of a
fireball, and that diseases come from space. He even suggested, in a
roundabout way, and for all the wrong reasons, that meteoric impacts can
trigger volcanic eruptions. If the rules of prior work really do apply, people in
a wide variety of disciplines may find themselves citing Cornyns Beaumont in
the future. However, as with all such work, Beaumont was not actually the
originator of many of the ideas about comets. Authors too numerous to
mention, dating back at least to the seventeenth century, had discussed the
possible hazards associated with cometary interactions. It is surprising how
effectively such thoughts have been expunged from mainstream science; it
seems that for most of this century concern about comets has been confined
to eccentrics. It is fair to say that things are beginning to change in this regard.
In terms of conventions, I have used AD and BC to indicate
dendrochronological dates and historical dates. CalAD and CalBC are
estimates of real age based on calibrated radiocarbon dates. I have used AD’
and ‘BC’ for other calendars which in my opinion are not well related to real
time (eg, Irish prehistoric annals). I have chosen to use mostly old Chinese
7
EXODUSTO ARTHUR
nomenclature when referring to historical Chinese characters, simply because
it relates the text better to the quotes of prior authors such as Legge or Sagan
and Druyan. Finally, much useful information used in this book has been
gleaned at conferences on dendrochronology, radiocarbon, vulcanology,
clathrates and catastrophism attended as part of more mainstream
environmental research funded by the EC Environmental Research
Programme, Contracts EV5V-CT94-0500, and ENV4-CT95-0127
Climatology and Natural Hazards, 2K and 10K.
8
PREFACE
Tree-ring
events Europe Near East Hebrew China
3195BC Start Egyptian
civilization
Henge at
Stonehenge
constructed
2354 BC Bronze Age Akkad Flood of Noah Emperor Yao
starts, Britain (Ussher date) famous for
and Ireland floods
Middle Start Xia
Kingdom Dynasty
1628 BC Start Second Exodus of Moses Comet End
Intermediate Plagues of Egypt Xia Dynasty
Stonehenge Period (King Chieh)
abandoned Start Shang
Dynasty
(KingT’ang)
New Kingdom Shang Dynasty
1159 BC Comet Troy Comer Babylon Comet Jerusalem Comet End
ends Middle Start Third David Plague Shang Dynasty
Bronze Age Intermediate (King Chou)
Period Start Zhou
Dynasty
(King Wu)
207 BC Stones fall from Famines
sky Cybele Stars not seen
brought from Start Han
Asia Minor to Dynasty
save Rome
44 BC Death of Caesar Famines
540 AD Dark Age Justinian Famines
Arthur/Mcrlin Plague
Beowulf
9
Introduction
"\'\7"7r'1at is the purpose of this book? It is an introduction to
\ X / dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, for the interested reader
V V who may not have come across the potential of this quite
remarkable dating method. However, if that was all the book was about it
probably would not have been worth writing; any one of a number of pre
existing books would have sufficed, including my own A Slice Through Time
(1995). In fact, to understand just what this book is about it is necessary to
say a few words about some previous work.
A tree-ring chronology is a year-by-year record of what trees thought of
their growth conditions in the past. The lengths of the records are not
restricted to the lifespans of the oldest trees. By overlapping the patterns of
wide and narrow growth rings from living trees with the patterns of
successively older and older timbers from historic buildings, archaeological
sites and natural sources, really long tree-ring records can be produced. The
international tree-ring community now have such annual tree-ring records
running back for thousands of years, from areas as diverse as Ireland,
Germany, Fennoscandia, northern Russia, North and South America and
Tasmania. Thus we can look at any year in the past several thousand years and
see what trees, widely dispersed around the globe, thought of conditions. It
turns out that when we interrogate some of these records in this way we find
some positively alarming evidence of extreme environmental events in the
past which also ‘seem’ to be recorded in human history. I use the word seem
because much of human history is not very well dated in comparison tI o the
tree-ring records which are precisely dated to exact calendar years. So we: know
the exact dates of the environmental downturns and these fall close tI o the
dating estimates of human trauma deduced by ancient historians and
archaeologists. Because of the way these extreme events showed up, with
tentative links to volcanic acid in Greenland, the initial hypothesis about their
cause was that they were related to the environmental effects of large explosive
volcanic eruptions.
We have known about this story for about the last decade and it has been
a matter of accumulating information to try to get a handle on the exact
sequence of events and to prove the actual cause of the environmental
10
INTRODUCTION
downturns. However, as research has continued the story has started to turn
strange, and to contain hints of an extraterrestrial component. Things are still
highly speculative but already the outline of a new story can be put together.
It is not the story I set out to write because at every turn new pieces of
information have slotted in - in some ways making more aanndd more sense, in
others becoming stranger and stranger. The purpose of this book is to share
with the reader the outline of what this story may ultimately be. Put another
way, it would be easier to believe that the story you are about to read is true
than to believe that all the apparently logical steps could just be one big
mistake. You, the reader, will have to judge. All I can say is that there is no
fiction in what follows, although there are some quite big leaps of faith. I make
use of facts and I add in myths - other peoples ancient myths - and still other
peoples interpretations of those ancient myths, but all the logic steps are
obvious and nothing is made up; in many cases I use the dates and linkages
others have already committed to print. I quote extensively from published
sources and, if I were asked, I could document just about every statement made
in this book. In fact, to aid anyone who wishes to check or follow up the
sources, most principal authors cited are given in a bibliography at the end of
the book. It may be fitting that as we approach the millennium this book could
at last be written - the story as far as I can see has been waiting to be told.
So, what is new about this book? Well, people previously trying to make
sense of the last several millennia have had to rely on ancient history,
archaeology and mythology. Of these three sources mythology has had the
worst press and has been mostly relegated to the sidelines; suitable for literary
but not for scientific study. However, in each of these disciplines, time control
has been, to say the least, limited. When it comes to chronological issues,
ancient history, archaeology and mythology share similar problems. For
example, poor chronological control has stopped workers trying to relate
happenings in the East and West; while relatively little, almost no, use has
been made of environmental markers to link distant but contemporary
happenings. In this work I have introduced some independently dated
environmental downturns, deduced from the precisely dated tree-ring
chronologies, and have then attempted to show that a plausible case exists that
dynasties in the East and West suffered at the same times as the trees. The new
linking factor is the occurrence in both East and West of references to comets
or cometary interactions at or around these same environmental events. The
11
EXODUS TO ARTHUR
result is a scenario which is amenable to testing and which, if it turns out to
be correct, will give a core of real meaning to much mythology. Indeed, if the
cometary scenario is true, recent human populations, and most scientists,
have been missing a significant global hazard. If that is the case, then it is truly
imperative that we know the score well in advance of the next such episode so
that we have adequate time to work out a mitigation strategy'.
Now, that said, I need to explain a couple of other points. I am not
schooled in mythology or the study of ancient literature. What has astounded
me is that even with no specialist experience I have been able to access, and
take some broad hints from, the analysis of such sources as the Grail Legend,
tales about Arthur and Merlin, Anglo-Saxon poetry and classical mythology'.
On the more historical side I use evidence from Chinese and Hebrew
literature. Now, either myth is so wide a concept that you can find in it
anything you want to reinforce any idea, or, more realistically, myth is partly
based on real memories, no matter how distant and distorted by' re-telling.
Common sense would suggest that some of the deep-remembered tales would
relate to important events which may also have been recorded in ancient
history; catastrophic events could very' well fit the bill. The problem in the
past is that poor time-control has normally' stopped people from seeing the
links between the different sources. With the fixed points provided by'
dendrochronology, we can begin to see the possible links between ancient
history' and mythology and real environmental happenings. My personal
feeling of success in having found evidence in these areas to support the
hypothesis developed in this book is tinged with the knowledge that I have
merely scratched the surface of fields which have exercised scholars for
centuries. My' only defence for intruding into the complex areas of history and
myth is the fact that, through dendrochronology, I am one of the first people
to have access to aspects of the previously missing environmental story. The
implication is that there is much more evidence to be located by specialists in
those other fields; hopefully this text will be the starting-point which will
trigger some fresh understanding. This feeling would also be consistent with
the following observation. As I put together the text of the last few chapters I
found that new and interesting pieces of information were being discovered
every few day's — colleagues would say ‘have you seen this ... ’ or ‘did you know
that ...’ Every trip to the library' or the literature turned up more usable tit
bits. In fact, where this book ends is an essentially arbitrary point in the
12
