September 7

Amber page


Good 
Queen Bess, born today in 1533, at what was then Greenwich Palace, but most of it got demolished after the Civil War, and then rebuilt as the Old Royal Naval College, designed by Christopher Wren, around 1690; you can still see some of the Tudor remains in the cellars.


Brazil declared independence from Portugal, today in 1822


The first world heavyweight championship under Queensberry Rules took place today in 1892; apparently Gentleman Jim Corbett defeated John L Sullivan, though whether on points or by knock-out I have not taken the trouble to find out


The Peace of Peking, or Bei-Jing as we are now told to pronounce it, signed in 1901, bringing to an end that other heavyweight bout, the Boxer uprising


The "blitz" started, today in 
1940

 

And finally, and this really will require further investigation, though it is unlikely to be verifiable: according to a calendar note in the BBC History magazine, “3466 bc: End of the Great Flood - according to the 19th century Leipzig philologist Gustav Seyffarth.”

Everything you could possibly be totally disinterested in about Seyffarth can be found here; for our subject, take him to be part of the same school that alma matered Gesenius and the Bible Critics.

But the subject here is the precise precision of that date, and you cannot deduce it in the solar calendar because it is computed biblically in the lunar, and times of that period are famously magnified.

Genesis 7:24 tells us “the waters prevailed upon the earth 150 days”, but gives no starting date. Archaeologists of Hittite Ararat, and mythological speculators like 
Robert Graves, have tried to demonstrate that the Flood story was simply a Creation myth, a means of explaining the laws of science before Physics, Chemistry and Biology had been invented; the flood analogising the breaking of the waters when a woman gives birth, the tale pseudo-historicising a full solar year from God first calling Noah to build the Ark until the setting of the rainbow in the sky. This would make a date around September logical, because the Jewish New Year falls at this time. But how does Seyffarth compute the 7th of September specifically? Perhaps Rosh ha-Shana fell on that date in the year that he made his calculations, and he did not realise that lunar dates perambulate across the solar calendar? And as to the year itself (I am ignoring the BBC's usage of "bc" instead of BCE) - 3446. This is achieved, I guess, by counting the ages of known men backwards from the date of Christ, a method equally as preposterous as the Jewish one of counting forwards from the date of Adam (which itself would anyway put the New Year five days out!)



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