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The reconstructed history presented by Velikovsky was hailed by many at the time as signaling the beginning of a radically new view of the ancient past. But the jubilation was short-lived, and major difficulties were soon to arise.

Because of his unquestioning support for traditional biblical chronology, Velikovsky left the early Hebrew monarchs in the tenth and ninth centuries, where he now also placed the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty. However, his researches soon made it equally clear that the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt belonged squarely in the sixth century BC, and that is precisely where he placed it in Ramses II and His Time (1978). This of course forced him to separate the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty from the beginning of the Nineteenth by two centuries — a separation which neither archaeology nor historiography could support — and which eventually led to the discarding of virtually every volume of Ages in Chaos, even amongst those who had been its staunchest supporters.

The problem, which for many years seemed insoluble, was that while both Ages in Chaos Vol. 1 and Ramses II and His Time were excellent pieces of scholarship with much to recommend them, one reduced Egyptian history by five centuries, the other by seven. What was the solution? Trying to reconcile the two seemed to be akin to squaring the proverbial circle.

Enter Gunnar Heinsohn. By the late 1980s, the work of the German Professor Gunnar Heinsohn began to cast an entirely new light on the problem. Heinsohn’s Mesopotamian work made him realize that all literate civilizations belonged in the first millennium BC. This involved a contraction of history much more dramatic than anything even Velikovsky had envisaged. From there it was but a short step to recognizing that Velikovsky’s date for the Eighteenth Dynasty, which involved taking five centuries off the length of history, was too high. By 1987 Heinsohn had equated the Mitanni people with the Medes, conquerors of the Assyrian Empire in the 7th century. Since the Mitanni were contemporaries of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it became imperative likewise to place that line of kings in the 7th century.

In effect then what Heinsohn had done was what the other researchers had failed even to consider: leave Ramses II and the Nineteenth Dynasty where Velikovsky had placed them in the sixth century, and bring the Eighteenth Dynasty downwards into the seventh century to link up with it. Following this conceptual leap it has become possible, I shall argue, to complete the reconstruction of ancient history which had commenced so promisingly in 1952.

Before proceeding, however, we might wonder how it was that Velikovsky could, with equal validity, reduce the dates of parts of the New Kingdom by just over five (the Eighteenth Dynasty) and just over seven (the Nineteenth Dynasty) centuries. In fact, he was working with two entirely different dating blueprints.

In Ages in Chaos, Velikovsky had labored to synchronize Egyptian history with biblical history, whilst in Ramses II and his Time, he had labored, in the main, to synchronize Egyptian history with classical history. It is indeed true that the synchronisms established in Ages in Chaos between Egypt and the Bible were correct. Bringing the great pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty forward in the timescale by five centuries did make them contemporary with the early biblical kings. The problem was that the Bible itself was not synchronized with the classical world. It too, just like the Egyptian history, was unnaturally lengthened. Not indeed by the seven plus centuries of Egyptian chronology, but by just over two centuries. Thus the Israelite King Ahab and his Assyrian adversary Shalmaneser III, although normally dated to the second half of the ninth century BC, actually belong near the end of the seventh century. Thus too the Neo-Assyrian kings Adad-Nirari III and Tiglath-Pileser III, normally placed (by synchronization with biblical timescales) in the early to middle eighth century BC, actually belong in the early to middle sixth century.

The king known in the Bible as Tiglath-Pileser III is none other than the king known to the Greeks as Cyrus the Great of Persia.

The application of these two separate dating blueprints, the classical and the biblical, has had a devastating effect on the historiography, as well as the archaeology, of the Near East. Numerous cultural and artistic features of the (biblically and Assyriologically dated) eighth and seventh centuries are found to occur again in the (classically) dated sixth and fifth centuries. Even more to the point, cultural features from the Ramesside (Nineteenth Dynasty) period, supposedly of the fourteenth century, will be found to reoccur in the late ninth/eighth century, after a gap of just over five centuries, and again in the late seventh/sixth centuries, after a gap of a further two centuries. Again and again this strange five- and seven-century echo is heard.

In terms of absolute dates, then, it is true (as Velikovsky argued in Ramses II and his Time), that Ramses II reigned in the sixth century, just prior to the rise of the Persian Empire. In terms of biblical dates, however, the so-called Glasgow Chronologists, who wanted to make the Nineteenth Dynasty follow the Eighteenth in the latter ninth century, were right in making Seti I and Ramses II contemporaries of the Neo-Assyrian kings Shalmaneser III and Adad-Nirari III. All of these men were contemporaries; only they reigned in the sixth century, not in the eighth, as conventional history believes.

As a corollary to this, it can be shown that the Neo-Assyrian kings from Tiglath-Pileser III onwards were identical to the Persian Great Kings, and that it was these men who brought the Nineteenth Dynasty to an end.

We shall find too that the so-called “Libyan” kings, of the Twenty-Second Dynasty, were actually Persian vassals, installed in the Nile Valley by Cambyses and his successors, and that these men, as well as the Nubian kings of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, were contemporaries of the last rulers of the Nineteenth Dynasty — Siptah, Tewosre and Seti II, all of whom, as descendants of Ramses II, struggled to reassert Egyptian independence in the early years of the fifth century.

My proposed reconstruction may be formulated thus:

Contemporary Epochs And Historical Alter-Egos