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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 of first-class evidence for a reduction in Egyptian chronology, in the end Velikovsky could not make all of the pieces fit together, and his reconstruction was generally rejected both by mainstream historians as well as revisionists.

By the 1970s technical and stratigraphic evidence, presented especially by John Dayton, seemed to indicate that a reduction in dates much more dramatic than anything even Velikovsky had called for was required. Dayton found, for example, that certain types of glazing employed during the Third Egyptian Dynasty could not have been produced before the ninth or tenth century BC, and the working of hard stones such as basalt and diorite by the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age seemed to indicate familiarity with steel in that supposedly far-off epoch.

During the 1980s things were taken a stage further by Gunnar Heinsohn, who argued that the stratigraphy of the Middle Eastern sites demanded an enormous reduction in timescales. By the late 80s Heinsohn had produced two pivotal equations: The supposedly Early Bronze Age Akkadians were the Imperial Assyrians of the eighth century BC, and the supposedly Late Bronze Age Mitanni, whose remains lie immediately on top of the Akkadians, were the Medes, conquerors of the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BC. If these two identifications were correct, it meant the subtraction of two thousand years from the antiquity of the Near Eastern civilizations, which must then have arisen just before the start of the first millennium BC.

In my Ages in Alignment series I have argued that Heinsohn was absolutely correct with regard to the broad outlines. The Akkadians were indeed the Assyrians and the Mitanni were the Medes. In addition, as Heinsohn also stated, the Sumerians were one and the same as the Chaldaeans, and the Neo-Assyrians were identical to the Persians. After this, however, Heinsohn and I differ. Whilst he regards both the Middle Assyrians and the earliest Neo-Assyrians (beginning with Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III) as Persians, I see the Middle Assyrians as alter-egos of the Mitanni, and view the early Neo-Assyrians as late Medes. I also differ profoundly from Heinsohn with regard to Hebrew history. For him, no Israelite history prior to the time of the Divided Monarchies can be regarded as historical, which means that neither the Exodus nor the first kings of Israel should be sought in the monuments. He rejects too al the synchronisms and identifications proposed by Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos; a grave error, in my opinion. Velikovsky’s original work was first class, and should form the basis of any reconstruction of ancient history. My work therefore builds upon the original research of Velikovsky and combines it with the best insights of Heinsohn, as well as those of other researchers, such as Dayton, James, and Bimson. Bringing all these together, the following outline of pre-Hellenistic history emerges.