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 land of Israel, as Velikovsky had claimed. Lorton proves his point primarily by: (a) An examination of the flora and fauna of Punt, which he maintains shows beyond question that Punt was in Africa; and (b) By an examination of the famous Karnak Lists – a bas-relief at Thebes on which Hatshepsut’s successor Thutmose III records the lands he conquered in his first year as sole ruler. These lists, Lorton claims, prove beyond doubt that Punt was a region to the south of Egypt.
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 time as the kingdom of Israel, and that the first pharaohs of that line, Ahmose and Amenhotep I, were contemporaries of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David. About thirty years after the war of liberation, Egypt came to be ruled by Hatshepsut, an extraordinary woman, one who, unique in the annals of Egypt’s history, claimed the honor and title of Pharaoh. In Velikovsky’s system, Hatshepsut must have been a contemporary of Solomon, the fabulously wealthy and powerful son of King David. For Velikovsky, it was but a short step from placing Hatshepsut at the same time as Solomon to making her identical to Solomon’s famous royal visitor, the Queen of Sheba.
In support of this claim, Velikovsky noted that one of the most important events of Hatshepsut’s life was an expedition to a mysterious land named Punt. The journey to Punt, which she immortalized on her funerary monument at Deir el Bahri, was obviously regarded as an event of immense importance by the Queen, for she placed it alongside the story of her divine birth on the temple walls. Punt, Velikovsky argued, must have been Israel; and the expedition recounted on the Egyptian temple a contemporary record of the Queen of Sheba’s expedition to Jerusalem.
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 and words) and the language found in the Books of Psalms and Kings. In the Books of Kings we find reproduced the same words, expressions, idioms, and popular sayings, that already occurred in the Amarna Letters, though these are supposed to have been written six hundred years earlier.
The evidence of language was augmented with that of art and archaeology, whilst the position of the Amarna Letters in the time of Solomon’s great-grandchildren was reinforced by Velikovsky’s earlier equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba. If Hatshepsut was the Queen of Sheba, and a contemporary of Solomon, then the Amarna Letters, which were written three to five generations after her time, must also date to a period three to five generations after Solomon – the time of Ahab and Jehoshaphat.