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Oldest Recorded Solar Eclipse Occurred 3,200 Years Ago, Academicians Figure Out Using Biblical Texts

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys and his team at Cambridge made this breakthrough by re-examining Joshua and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
PUBLISHED JAN 17, 2025
Solar Eclipse (Representative Cover Image Source: Unsplash | Photo by Justin Dickey)
Solar Eclipse (Representative Cover Image Source: Unsplash | Photo by Justin Dickey)

A group of British researchers in 2017 announced the date of the earliest recorded solar eclipse by humans—October 30, 1207 B.C., after analyzing ancient biblical texts and carvings from Egypt, according to Newsweek. This breakthrough discovery came when Professor Sir Colin Humphreys and his team at the University of Cambridge re-examined passages from the 'Old Testament' book of Joshua alongside Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. In doing so, their analysis pinpointed this historical astronomical event and provided dates for the reign of one of the most significant pharaohs in the history of Egypt, Ramesses the Great.



 

The biblical passage that motivated this study was the famous prayer by Joshua: "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped," according to the Express. It was a passage that had been teasing scholars for several centuries until Humphreys' team interpreted its meaning in its original Hebrew. "Going back to the original Hebrew text, we determined that an alternative meaning could be that the sun and moon just stopped doing what they normally do: They stopped shining," Humphreys said, as per the Express.



 

The breakthrough came when researchers linked this biblical account with the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian granite block that is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This artifact, from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses the Great, provided the most critical historical context, confirming that the Israelites had indeed been in Canaan between 1500 and 1050 B.C. Unlike previous attempts to date this eclipse, Humphreys' team considered both total and annular eclipses in their calculations. "This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Hebrew word translated 'stand still' has the same root as a Babylonian word used in ancient astronomical texts to describe eclipses," Humphreys said, as per the Express. Their pioneering work involved writing a new eclipse code that accounted for Earth's variable rotation.

Solar eclipse (Representative Image Source: Unsplash | Photo by Scott Szarapka)
Solar eclipse (Representative Image Source: Unsplash | Photo by Scott Szarapka)

It resulted in an unprecedented precision of dates for ancient Egyptian rulers. The calculations place the reign of Ramesses the Great as 1276–1210 B.C., and his son Merneptah came to power in either 1210 or 1209 B.C. "The precise dates of the pharaohs have been subject to some uncertainty among Egyptologists," said Humphreys, "but this new calculation could lead to an adjustment in the dates of several of their reigns and enable us to date them precisely," as per the Express.



 

This discovery, announced in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics, showed how modern scientific techniques can provide insights into ancient mysteries. During this celestial event, the moon passed directly in front of the sun but was too far away to cover the disk completely, creating what modern astronomers call a 'ring of fire' appearance. The team's calculations revealed that this was the only such eclipse visible from Canaan during the historically confirmed period of Israelite presence in the region, making it a crucial astronomical anchor point for dating both biblical events and Egyptian dynastic chronology.

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