Chronology of the ancient Near East

The chronology of the ancient Near East is a framework of dates for various events, rulers and dynasties. Historical inscriptions and texts customarily record events in terms of a succession of officials or rulers: "in the year X of king Y". Comparing many records pieces together a relative chronology relating dates in cities over a wide area.

For the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, this correlation is less certain but the following periods can be distinguished:

Due to the sparsity of sources throughout the "Dark Age", the history of the Near Eastern Middle Bronze Age down to the end of the First Babylonian Dynasty is founded on a floating or relative chronology. There have been attempts to anchor the chronology using records of eclipses and other methods such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, but none of those dates is widely supported.

Currently the major schools of thought on the absolute dating of this period are separated by 56 or 64 years. This is because the key source for this analysis are the omen observations in the Venus tablet of King Ammisaduqa and these are multiples of the eight-year cycle of Venus visibility from Earth. More recent work by Vahe Gurzadyan has suggested that the fundamental eight-year cycle of Venus is a better metric. Some scholars discount the validity of the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa entirely. The alternative major chronologies are defined by the date of the eighth year of the reign of Ammisaduqa, king of Babylon.

The most common Venus Tablet solutions (sack of Babylon)

The following table gives an overview of the different proposals, listing some key dates and their deviation relative to the middle chronology, omitting the Supershort Chronology (sack of Babylon in 1466 BC):

In the series, the conjunction of the rise of Venus with the new moon provides a point of reference, or rather three points, for the conjunction is a periodic occurrence. Identifying a conjunction during the reign of king Ammisaduqa with one of these calculated conjunctions will therefore fix, for example, the accession of Hammurabi as either 1848, 1792, or 1736 BC, known as the "high" ("long"), "middle", and "short (or low) chronology".

A record of the movements of Venus over roughly a 16-day period during the reign of a king, believed to be Ammisaduqa of the First Babylonian Dynasty, has been preserved on a tablet called Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa (Enuma Anu Enlil 63). Twenty copies and fragments have been recovered, all Neo-Assyrian and later. An example entry is "In month XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away, and in month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible: springs will open, Adad his rain, Ea his floods will bring, king to king messages of reconciliation will send." Using it, various scholars have proposed dates for the fall of Babylon based on the 56/64-year cycle of Venus. It has been suggested that the fundamental 8-year cycle of Venus is a better metric, leading to the proposal of an "ultra-low" chronology. Other researchers have declared the data to be too noisy for any use in fixing the chronology.