  ::Okay, this is a very important point you have raised John. My response is as follows.  ::The four pillars described in A Test of Time were historical. That is to say they were a summary of the methods used by Egyptologists to establish and fine tune the Egyptian chronology. The Assyrian synchronisms - of which there is in fact only one direct example - were introduced later to support the dating arrived at using the Shishak/Shoshenk identification and Sothic dating. Today the Ebers papyrus Sothic date has been abandoned by most Egyptologists, however they continue to use the Year 7 Middle Kingdom Sothic date to determine dates for that period.  ::Now to deal with the so-called Assyrian synchronisms. An Assyrian ruler called Ashuruballit did correspond with Akhenaten. However, in the Amarna Letters he gives his father's name as Ashurnadinahhe, whereas Ashuruballit I, in his royal genealogy, gives his father's name as Eriba-Adad, whilst Ashurnadinahhe is not mentioned at all. Bernard Newgrosh, in his book Chronology at the Crossroads, argues that there is sufficient doubt here to suggest that we are dealing with two Ashuruballits and not one. He also shows that the Ashurubalit of the Amarna Letters claimed victory over Hanigalbat, whereas neither the earlier Ashuruballit I nor his descendants recorded a victory for this king over Hanigalbat. The other synchronisms you mention between 19th Dynasty pharaohs and Hittite kings (no problem there) and then between those Hittite kings and Assyrian rulers is more problematical. In the correspondence between Hatti and Assyria the royal names do not have identifiers such as 'I' or 'II' - just the names Shalmaneser and Tukulti-Ninurta. In the New Chronology the Egyptian and Hittite dates coincide, not with Shalmaneser I and Tukulti-Ninurta I but with Shalmaneser II and Tukulti-Ninurta II. As for Burnaburiash of Babylon, he is not independently datable but tied to Assyrian chronology. Therefore, if Assyrian chronology is revised - as Newgrosh has proposed on independent grounds to the issues I raised over Egyptian chronology - then Kassite and post-Kassite chronologies would move with any lowering of Assyrian chronology prior to 911 BC. It might be useful to take a look at Newgrosh's book to get all the arguments. It is very comprehensive and I can't do his arguments justice here. If you can't do this, then his much shorter paper in JACF IX is available on-line at ISIS - Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum. My final comment would be, given the copious amounts of data available to Egyptologists from within their own discipline, do you not think that they should be able to construct a chronology of the pharaohs without recourse to outside chronologies whose synchronisms can be questioned?  