User talk:EthanS/Near East Regnal Table

Hey - got here from Talk:Chronology of the Ancient Near East. I think you mean "Jehoiakim" when you say "Jehoiachin." The latter only reigned briefly in 597. Will look over the rest and comment as I go. john k 15:39, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also - normally, when doing regnal years, the last regnal year of a king is the year he died. The first regnal year of the new king is the year after he actually took the throne. So it should sho Nabopolassar as king through 605 BC, and Nebuchadrezzar starting in 604. john k 16:01, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The early Hittite kings, at least, are not properly synchronized with the First Dynasty of Babylon. Mursili I was the Hittite king who sacked Babylon and ended the first dynasty. The dates for the Hittites are obviously middle chronology dates (at least for this part - I'm less certain of the Neo-Hittite dates - but Muwatalli shouldn't be dying in the year of Kadesh), while the Babylon dates are low chronology. john k 16:14, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regnal Years: In using one line per year, you need to eliminate the overlap when kings die mid-year. In general, I thought it more important to indicate when a king started to rule than when he finished.

But this process (assigning one king per year) was done by the Assyrians and Babylonians themselves, and they counted the overlapping year to the monarch who died in that year. (This is also how the Chinese traditionally did it). As far as I am aware, at any time regnal years have been used, it was done in this manner. john k 06:24, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As for the middle vs. Low chron, I couldn't find a good discussion of the merits of the various Hittite chronologies and their synchronisms with Assyria or Egypt. Babylon and Assyria are closely linked, and for Old Babylon, I used the low chron dates as those appear to have a much large consensus behind them.

As for formats - I'd like it to be easy to edit in the wiki, but to shift a King up or down a year means changing hundreds of rows. I did the original in Excel and then had to re-format into HTML and then convert to WikiPipe to keep the code really clean for the twenty thousand cells. Ugh... I started with simple regnal lists and wrote the Excel code to extract the year dates from them. Thanks for the comments - I'll update my master file and post and updated chronology. I think I'll also post the indivdual chronologies I used on a second user page, because those are a lot easier to edit. EthanS 19:10, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've messed about with the table. It is much easier to edit than you think - there is no need to change hundreds of rows, just the two terminal ones for each monarch. john k 05:37, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]