Articles
In my Genesis of Israel and Egypt, first published in 1997, and in various other places, I have argued in detail that the Abraham epoch, which saw the migration from Lower Mesopotamia of the ancestors of the Jewish people, was contemporary with the beginning of dynastic civilization in Egypt. The profound Mesopotamian influence, which archaeologists detected in the culture of First Dynasty Egypt, is the material evidence of the culture-bearing migration to Egypt mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and impossible to explain in a few lines. Suffice here however to note that “Abraham”,…
According to the ancient authors, the fall of he Assyrian Empire saw Upper Mesopotamia, the Assyrian heartland, pass under the control of the Medes; whilst Lower Mesopotamia came to be ruled by the Scythians. Scythian rule in the region was said to have lasted at least 80 years.
In the late 1980s Gunnar Heinsohn of Bremen University identified the Bronze Age Mitanni with the otherwise elusive Medes, no trace of whom could be found in the Iron Age strata where they had been sought. By contrast, the Mitanni folk, whose kings bore Mede-sounding Indo-Iranian names, left very many remains in…
According to the chronology outlined in my Ages in Alignment series of books, the Mita people, or Mitanni, who ruled the land of Assyria in the time of the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty, were one and the same as the Medes, conquerors of the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BC. We know in fact that the Mitanni Great King Shaushtatar, a contemporary of Thutmose III, was famous for his capture and despoliation of the city of Nineveh, capital of a mysterious line of kings known as the “Old Assyrians.” In the late 1980s Gunnar Heinsohn identified the latter, whose two…
The first writer to suggest that the accepted textbook chronology of the ancient world might be wrong was Immanuel Velikovsky, and in his Ages in Chaos (1952), he unveiled a radical reconstruction of Egyptian and Hebrew history which involved subtracting over five centuries from the length of New Kingdom Egyptian chronology. The histories of Egypt and Israel did not “fit,” according to Velikovsky, because they were out of sync by half a millennium. Therefore it was not surprising, he said, that scholars could find no mention in the hieroglyphic records of the great events (such as the Exodus) which the…
In my Ramessides, Medes and Persians, first published in New York in 2001, I argued that the so-called Neo-Assyrian kings, beginning with Tiglath-Pileser III, were but alter-egos of the Achaemenid Persians; and that Tiglath-Pileser III himself was one and the same as Cyrus the Great, who established Persia as a world empire. This was following the stratigraphic work of Professor Gunnar Heinsohn, who pointed out that in Mesopotamia the Achaemenid Persians were entirely missing and that, in the immediate pre-Hellenic strata where excavators would have expected them, they found instead the material remains of the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians. Having…
Immanuel Velikovsky argued that roughly five and a half centuries needed to be subtracted from New Kingdom Egyptian history to bring it into line with that of Israel; and indeed in Ages in Chaos (1952) he demonstrated many striking synchronisms between the two histories once these extra years were removed. In line with that system he suggested that Ahab of Israel and Jehoshaphat of Judah were two of the correspondents of the Amarna documents who exchanged letters with Amenhotep III and Akhnaton. He also argued that Shalmaneser III of Assyria, a contemporary of Ahab, was the “King of Hatti” who…
In his Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960), Velikovsky introduced his readers to one of the most fascinating episodes of ancient history. In this volume he identified Akhnaton, the heretic pharaoh, with Oedipus, the incestuous king of Greek legend. He went on from there to suggest that the entire “Theban cycle” of legends surrounding Oedipus and his children rightfully belonged in Egypt and described the downfall of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Thus Eteocles and Polyneices, the two sons of Oedipus who battled for the throne of Thebes after the exile of Oedipus, were identified with Tutankhamun and Smenkhare, who also apparently were in contention…
According to the textbooks, the first literate civilizations arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt sometime in the second half of the fourth millennium BC. There is general agreement that the literate culture of Mesopotamia slightly predated that of Egypt; so that the beginning of civilization in the former region is dated to roughly 3400 BC, whilst its commencement is placed at around 3200 BC in the latter.
Scholars are very confident of these dates, and they are quoted with a certitude that leaves little room for doubt. Yet there is a great deal of evidence, of an extremely compelling nature, to…
Some years ago an article by Egyptologist David Lorton entitled “Hatshepsut, the Queen of Sheba, and Immanuel Velikovsky” appeared on the internet. During the past decade this essay has had wide circulation and has been instrumental in “warning off” many of the public with regard to Velikovsky and his work. In the essay, Lorton purports to show that Velikovsky’s equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba could not be correct. This is done primarily by a sustained criticism of the notion that Punt, which was the destination of a famous expedition launched by Hatshepsut, could not possibly be the…
In my Pyramid Age (2007), I argued in great detail that the pyramids of Giza were not built as tombs, but as offerings to the gods in celebration of the rebirth of the sun. Both in the above book, and in my recently published internet article “Impact of the First Passover,” I show how the event known to Hebrew tradition as the Exodus was in fact a world-wide catastrophe which released vast amounts of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, obscuring the sun and darkening the earth. With the passing of these “days of darkness” the sun reappeared and indeed seemed…
In his Ramses II and his Time (1978) Velikovsky argued that Ramses II, the great warrior pharaoh of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty, reigned in the first half of the sixth century BC, and not in the thirteenth century BC, as conventional scholarship believes. In support of this dating Velikovsky brought forward manifold proofs, from many different disciplines; and, from an archaeological perspective at least, the case he presented was compelling.
There were however two major problems: First and foremost, if Ramses II was to be placed in the sixth century, this meant opening a gap of two centuries between the end…
It could be that recent revelations regarding the methods and motives of scientists behind the man-made global warming theory will give rise to a renewed scepticism about the pronouncements of “experts” in other fields. Certainly it is to be hoped that it will: for outrageous though the behaviour of climate scientists may have been, it arguably looks almost honest compared with the behaviour of evolutionary biologists and geologists over the past century and a half. In this field, so crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the natural world, the “experts” have been involved in a cover-up…
In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from his triumphant excavations at Troy, began work in Mycenae, the ancient capital of Agamemnon. Unlike Troy, the location of Mycenae had never been forgotten, and the famous Lion Gate, though half-buried by the rubble of centuries, always remained visible on a hilly peak overlooking the Argive Plain. According to a legend reported by Pausanias, Agamemnon and his followers had been buried by Clytemnestra – shortly after she had murdered them – inside the citadel walls, just to the right of the Lion Gate. The spot, said Pausanias, was marked by a circle of marker-stones,…
At the end of the Old Stone Age, continuing through the New Stone Age and into the Early Bronze Age, the earth suffered several episodes of massive volcanic activity. This “vast eruptive age,” as English explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett described it, left its signature around the globe: huge areas of land, even in non-volcanic regions such as the British Isles, were sunk beneath the sea. These events are apparently recalled in the legends of Ireland and Wales, and to this day submerged forests and Neolithic settlements are regularly located by archaeologists and marine geologists around our coasts. The seismic disturbances…
Velikovsky’s identification of the Queen of Sheba with Hatshepsut of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty meant that Hatshepsut’s successor on the Egyptian throne, Thutmose III, had to be identified with Shishak, the ruler of Egypt who, according to the Book of Kings, plundered the Temple of Jerusalem shortly after Solomon’s death. Shishak also seemed to be identifiable with Sesostris (or Sesoosis), the great warrior-pharaoh who, according to Greek writers such as Herodotus and Diodorus, conquered much of Asia.
In Ages in Chaos Velikovsky devoted an entire chapter to the identification of Thutmose III with Shishak/Sesostris, and the arguments he presented were both…
A British legend, first committed to writing by Nennius (9th century), tells how a tyrant king named Vortigern was responsible for the ruination of Britain after he invited a force of Saxon and Jute mercenaries into the country. The same Vortigern is said to have built a tower which was repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes. Inquiring as to the reason, he was informed by a druid that he should bury a spotless child under the foundations of the tower. The child Merlin was selected as victim, though in the event he was never sacrificed.
There is virtually nothing in this story…
Ancient authors had much to say about the history of Mesopotamia, a region which they recognised as being home to one of mankind’s oldest civilizations. Among the kings and rulers mentioned by writers such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, Sardanapalus and Semiramis stand out: the former was universally regarded as the last king of an independent Assyria, whilst the latter was said to have been a queen of Babylon who ruled the whole of the Middle East from the borders of Egypt to those of India.
Notwithstanding the prominence accorded these two figures by the ancient historians, they are more…
In my 2006 book Empire of Thebes: Ages in Chaos Revisited I argued that most of the synchronisms and character identifications proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky in his Ages in Chaos (1952) were actually correct, and that the errors committed by him – which the critics made so much of – were of a relatively minor nature.
Ages in Chaos, in short, needed fine-tuning, not complete rejection. Indeed, Velikovsky missed a great deal of evidence in his favor. This was the case, for example, with the equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba.
In Ages in Chaos Velikovsky argued that the Eighteenth Dynasty rose to power at the same…
In my Genesis of Israel and Egypt (2008) I show how the earliest civilizations commenced in the wake of a great natural catastrophe. After this event there appeared the impulse to worship the gods in high places ("altars"), and the raising of these (stepped pyramids) delivered to mankind the knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and record-keeping. This cataclysm, recalled in all ancient legend, has left its clear imprint in the archaeological record, but that imprint has been obscured and effaced by academic jargon.
In 1922 an Englishman named Leonard Woolley began what was to become one of the most celebrated archaeological…
The problem of trying to match the characters and events of early Hebrew history with those of Egyptian history is one that has exercised the minds of scholars for over 2,000 years. Egypt, the Egypt of the pharaohs, plays an extremely prominent role in the story of the Jewish people; for which reason the Land of the Nile has long fascinated Christian and Jewish writers. Which pharaoh, they have wondered, reigned in the time of Abraham; who it was that made Joseph his vizier; and which ruler of the Nile oppressed the Israelites in the time of Moses? Following the…
Virtually all the customs and traditions of the Jewish people can be traced to the Exodus. The Exodus seems to have been a cataclysmic occurrence; one which saw the forces of nature unleashed against the land of Egypt. Ten Plagues, we are told, struck the earth. Amongst these was a plague of hail, mixed with fire. Another saw darkness envelop the world; and a final “plague” brought the death of the nation’s “first born.” We are told that, in the wake of this last terror, the Israelites made good their escape – only to be pursued and overtaken at the…
In Ages in Chaos (1952), Immanuel Velikovsky argued that the Amarna Letters, a series of over 300 royal correspondences composed during the reigns of pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaton, were written during the lifetimes of Ahab of Israel and Jehoshaphat of Judah. These latter, according to Velikovsky, were identical to the Amarna-period potentates Rib-Addi of Sumur and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem. Velikovsky presented an enormous quantity of evidence, from many areas of knowledge, in support of this claim. He was able to show, for example, the astonishing parallels that exist between the language used in the Amarna documents (which often include Hebrew sentences…
According to biblical tradition, the Hebrews were a tribe of Mesopotamian nomads who, under the leadership of Abraham, or Abram, made their way to the “promised land” of Canaan. Their wanderings did not stop there, however, for we are told that during a time of famine Abraham led his followers into Egypt.
The Scriptures tell us very little of Abraham’s sojourn in the land of the Nile, save that after an initial welcome he and his followers were asked to leave by the pharaoh. The first century historian Josephus has rather more to say and provides a curious story, evidently…
The chronology of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, as found in the textbooks, is wrong to a dramatic degree, with major events misdated and placed many centuries before they actually occurred. The pyramids of Egypt, for example, especially the massive monuments at Giza, are utterly inexplicable and puzzling if we follow the conventional dating scheme. These gigantic structures, which seem to display a knowledge of Pythagorean geometry on the part of their builders, are nevertheless said to have been erected near 2500 BC – around 2,000 years before Pythagoras lived. Even worse, the pyramid-builders worked granite as well as…
In my Ramessides, Medes and Persians (Algora, 2007), I argued in detail that the rulers known to history as the Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians were in fact Great Kings of the Persians under the guise of Mesopotamians. There I demonstrated how the Neo-Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser III had to be identified with Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid line, and that the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian monarchs who followed could be identified, point by point, with the Achaemenid kings who followed Cyrus. Thus Cambyses, who reigned only six years and campaigned in the direction of Egypt, sounds like Shalmaneser V, who reigned…
As I have shown in great detail in my Ages in Alignment series, the histories of the early civilizations are much shorter than is stated in the textbooks, and that the present chronology is the result of errors and misconceptions which accumulated over the centuries, beginning even before the start of the Christian era.
The first major attempt at rectifying the situation was launched in the 1950s by Immanuel Velikovsky, whose Ages in Chaos series sought to realign the histories of Egypt and Israel, so that they agreed with each other. Whilst Ages in Chaos brought forth a great quantity…
One of Velikovsky’s most fundamental and radical premises was that cosmic catastrophes occurred within the memory of mankind, and even within the period of recorded human history. In this spirit he presented, especially in Earth in Upheaval (1955), manifold proofs that the mass extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene took place no more than a few thousand years ago, with much of the evidence pointing to 1500 or 1400 BC as the cut-off point. In my own writings, and especially in The Genesis of Israel and Egypt (first published in 1997), I have presented much further evidence in support…
In his Worlds in Collision (1950) Immanuel Velikovsky used myths, legends and traditions from throughout the world to illustrate his thesis that between the fifteenth and seventh centuries BC the earth suffered a series of devastating encounters with planetary bodies, which were recorded by the peoples of the time. Controversially, Velikovsky argued that in the fifteenth century a giant ball of fire, later to be the planet Venus, had erupted in a terrific explosion from the gas giant Jupiter and that this proto-planet, pulled by the sun’s gravitation, moved towards the inner solar system, where it came on a near-collision…