"A Matter of Times": Tell el Dab'a and the Interlinked Chronologies of Minoan Crete and Egypt in the Bronze Age

Abstract

Interrelations between Minoan palatial civilization and pharaonic Egypt take place all through the Bronze Age in very different forms. The hypothesis of an “African” influence on the development of Minoan civilization seems by now very reductive and unlikely, and the arguments advocated have proven to be controversial and outdated.. Direct and indirect contacts are attested from an archaeological point of view from as early as the Early Bronze Age, and become increasingly significant in correspondence with the development of the Middle Kingdom and later Hyksos/Canaanite international trading networks. Between the Middle and Late Bronze Age interrelations between Minoan Crete and Egypt certainly started to reach significant proportions and an official status, with Minoan artisans and officers physically working in Egypt and Minoan “embassies” being represented in the Theban tombs of the early XVIII Dynasty viziers but the uncertainty in the absolute chronology for the beginning of the Late Minoan I A and subsequent Late Minoan I B periods in Crete and the Aegean stemming from the statistical analysis of radiocarbon measurements from Akrotiri and other LBA sites of the Aegean (the Aegean High Chronology). The conflict between the archaeological based “traditional” chronology and AHC has become one of the more discussed subjects all of Mediterranean archaeology, and lead to the publication of an extremely huge amount of bibliography in the last two decades. After more than 30 years, the many ambiguities affecting the reconstruction of Minoan and interrelated absolute chronologies for the MBA-LBA transition make it impossible to properly understand the processes of this contact. This study aims to review, update and refine the views exposed in preceding studies by the authors (Fantuzzi, 2007a, 2007b, 2009) and summarize the present state of the debate on Late Bronze Age Aegean chronology.