GREATSITE.COM Presents
1728 The Chronology of Ancient
Kingdoms Amended, Item # IN1001

1728 The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the illustrious natural philosopher, was born at Woolsthrope Manor in Lincolnshire. He was the greatest mathematician of modern times. He discovered the binomial theorem, and method of fluxions, and in 1666 the contemplation of the fall of an apple led to his greatest discovery of all, that of the law of gravitation. The following year he discovered the composite nature of light. He held the Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge for 33 years. In 1699 he became Master of the Mint. He represented his University in Parliament, and was elected President of the Royal Society, a post which he occupied for 24 years. He was knighted in 1705. He lived to his eightieth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Bishop Burnet described him as the "whitest soul he ever knew." Sir Isaac Newton made a hobby of Chronology, and became an ardent student of the subject during the last 30 years of his life. He read widely, and thought deeply on the problems of early Chronology, and came to the conclusion that the Greeks and the Latins, no less than the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians, had greatly exaggerated their antiquity, from motives of national vanity.

In his great work The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, which was published posthumously in 1728, the year after his death, he endeavoured to construct a system on new bases, independent of the Greek Chronologers, whose unsatisfactory method of reckoning by generations, reigns and successions he exposed, laying bare the foundation on which their Chronology rested, and thereby overthrowing the elementary dates of Greek, Latin and Egyptian Chronology. He reduced the date of the taking of Troy from B.C. 1183 to 965. He followed Sir John Marshall in identifying Sesostris with Shishak, whose date he thus reduced from B.C.1300 to 965. Newton cites Thucydides and Socrates, the musician Terpander, and the Olympic disk of Lycurgus, he uses his calculation of the procession of the equinoxes since the time of Hipparcus, and he substituted a reckoning of 20 years each instead of 33 for the succession of the Kings of Sparta. Newton . . . has certainly destroyed the possibility of regarding the Chronology of the Greeks as a stable foundation for any system of Chronology that can be used as a standard by which to judge, and correct, the testimony of the Old Testament. Yet this conjectural Chronology of the Greeks is the foundation upon which the Canon of Ptolemy rests, and the Canon of Ptolemy is the only obstacle in the way of the establishment of the Chronology of the Old Testament.