A chronological revolution made by historical analytics
By Eugen Gabowitsch (Potsdam, Germany)
Knowledge of our history timeline is important, and not only for historians. If indeed the dates of antiquity are incorrect, there could be profound implications for our beliefs about the past, and also for science. Historical knowledge is important to better understand our present situation and the changes that take place around us. Important issues such as global warming and environmental changes depend on available historical data. Astronomical records could have a completely different meaning if the described events took place at times other than those provided by traditional chronology. I trust that the younger generation will have no fear of "untouchable" historical dogma and will use contemporary knowledge to challenge questionable theories. For sure, it is an exciting opportunity to reverse the subordinate role science plays to history, and to create completely new areas of scientific research.
Kasparov, Garry, Mathematics of the Past, Website New Tradition.
Part 3. Eminent critics of chronology and historiography in the past: the five classics.
Independent thinkers who weren’t afraid of the fact that historical science and the people whose interests it represents have always been extremely hostile towards all criticisms of chronology, existed in every epoch, alongside the masses of obedient historiographers that were too scared or too reluctant to go against the grain. Owing to the fact that these independent researchers had possessed the courage to expose blatant contradictions inherent in the very chronological foundations of historiography, official science didn’t manage to keep them out of the general public’s reach. We shall mention some of them below.
The four names one finds below are merely the ones who received the most publicity. Many honest historians have tried to criticize the condition of historical sources, but never dared to cross the border of loyalty to historical science in general, as well as the corporate mass of fellow historians. They remained in the shade – however, their efforts helped several radical critics of chronology to emerge and voice the existence of the abovementioned contradictions and blind spots in history publicly.
Sir Isaac Newton
Readers familiar with the works of Fomenko and Nosovsky know that the great English physicist had also been an eminent chronologist; they keep emphasizing ([g1]) that in his every book Sir Isaac insists on the necessity of narrowing the historical temporal space drastically. This part played by Sir Isaac is recognized in the article of Uwe Topper ([g2]) entitled “Sir Isaac Shortened Greek History by 300 Years”.
In my own article ([g3]) I tried to consider the lifelong activity of the great physicist and theologian, emphasizing his criticisms of consensual chronology rather than the shortening of the historical period.
Let us assume that Joseph Scaliger, the founding father of the consensual chronology, had been perfectly scrupulous in his work with the historical sources that he had selected for his research. It is true that he may have invented some of them; however, seeing as how modern historiography regards them as valid historical sources, this circumstance (hardly an extraordinary phenomenon in the past) is of little importance to us. On the other hand, we have no reasons to assume that Newton wasn’t capable of conducting his chronological calculations without any errors, based on the sources that he had chosen for this purpose. Assuming this, we can claim that Newton de facto proves the following two theorems – empirically, if not logically.
THEOREM 1: The system of historical sources is woven of contradictions: some of its parts lead one to conclusions that contradict other parts.
THEOREM 2: Consensual chronology as used by the modern historical science is untrue. Furthermore, the general mass of historical sources that we have at our disposal doesn’t allow for its unambiguous reconstruction.
COROLLARY: Historical chronology is nonexistent.
I emphasized the following as yet another thing that Sir Isaac must be credited for in [g3]: Newton had been the first to use statistical considerations for testing the veracity of chronological materials. He can therefore be considered the ideological progenitor of the Russian critical school in Chronology (Morozov, Fomenko et al), which is concerned with natural scientific and mathematical argumentation for the most part, albeit not exclusively.
Jean Hardouin
Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) was a contemporary of Newton and one of the best-educated people of his epoch. A member of the Jesuit order, he had been the director of the French Royal Library since 1683. Hardouin had also been a Professor of Theology who would constantly surprise his listeners by the depth of his knowledge and his tremendous erudition. Hardouin is the author of several books on philology, theology, history, archaeology, numismatics, chronology and philosophy of history (see [g4] – [g6] for a complete bibliography). Unfortunately, these oeuvres remain unknown to the wider audience of specialists, one of the reasons being the fact that they’re written in Latin for the most part.
Hardouin’s most famous work is a collection of ecclesiastical edicts in re the assembly of Ecumenical Councils, starting with the I century A. D. and on. When this grandiose oeuvre finally came out in 1715 after 28 years of labour and after the editions of 1684, 1685 and 1693 (11 volumes with comments altogether), it had remained banned by the church for the 10 years that followed, since the ecclesiastical authorities had, understandably enough, been alarmed by the criticisms of sources contained in the conclusions made by Hardouin in the course of his research. The church had only allowed public access to the materials published by Hardouin after the public renunciation of the latter’s former beliefs, which was perceived as a mere formality by Hardouin’s contemporaries.
From 1690 and on, J. Hardouin had claimed that the works of many ancient authors were written hundreds of years later than whatever was implied by the consensual datings of their lifetimes. In other words, he had exposed the works in question as forgeries. This critique of sources had been getting ever more scalding; one of Hardouin’s final conclusions had been that nearly all the ancient works of literary art date from the XIII century the earliest. He had made exceptions in several cases: the works of Cicero, the satires of Horace, Virgil’s “Georgics” and Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History”. However, his famous comments were written about his authors, and so Hardouin may have found it hard psychologically to recognise them as mediaeval authors.
Hardouin had claimed that Christ and his apostles, if they existed at all, must have read their sermons in Latin. He was convinced that the Greek translations of the New and the Old Testament date from a much later epoch than the church presumes. He had named St. Augustine among the fraudulent Christian classics and didn’t trust the veracity of his works. He had also mentioned the falsification of nearly all of the “ancient” coins, works of art, stone carvings and, particularly, the documents of all the Ecumenical Councils that had preceded the Council of Trident (1545-1563).
The reaction of Hardouin’s contemporaries to his iconoclasm is of as great an interest to us as his criticisms of historical sources. Hardouin naturally got criticised, but usually sotto voce, which leaves one with the impression that the critics themselves were well aware that the publication of apocryphal works had been the norm relatively recently. Even his most vehement opponents acknowledged that Hardouin’s academic eminence and his highest authority in the scientific world made it unnecessary for him to seek cheap publicity of a nihilist or to amuse himself with disclosures that irritated the ecclesiastical and scientific circles alike. Only deep conviction about the veracity of the critical approach to chronology and historiography could have made Hardouin dare to oppose the entire canonical science and theology.
It is noteworthy that Hardouin criticised Newton’s book on amended chronology in the same vein of the complete negation of deep antiquity, urging Newton to stop writing about the fictitious “days of yore”. He had been of the opinion that the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of Troy were the same event in reality, which corresponds to the point of view expressed by Fomenko and Nosovsky.
Most of Hardouin’s work (including the ones published postmortem) were banned by the church in 1739-1742 and included in the list of banned books. After the death of J. Hardouin, most of the “ancient” sources that he had exposed have been “rehabilitated” and are once again taken seriously be historical science.
Robert Baldauf
If Newton and Hardouin were world famous scientists whose biographies are known in great detail, the only thing we know about Robert Baldauf, the Swiss philologist, is that he was a unsalaried lecturer of Basel University and published two volumes out of the four that he had intended to publish under the general title of “History and Criticism”, namely, the first and the fourth volume. These two volumes are of the utmost interest to the critics of chronology and history, since Baldauf managed to come to virtually the same conclusions as Hardouin using an altogether different method, that of philological analysis.
Baldauf had studied the archives of the famous Swiss monastery of St. Gallen, formerly one of the key centres of Catholicism, and discovered the traces of the barbaric library raid made by Poggio Bracciolini and a friend of his, both of them highly educated servants of the Roman curia. They purloined numerous manuscripts and books that were considered ancient from the library of this monastery (however, the manuscripts may date to a more recent epoch, which wouldn’t preclude them from serving as prototypes for the manufacture of numerous “ancient” works by Poggio and his assistants.
One must also mention Baldauf’s study of numerous presumably ancient manuscripts and the exposure of the latter as recent forgeries for the most part. Baldauf discovered parallels between the “historical” books of the Old Testament and the works of the mediaeval Romance genre as well as Homer’s “Iliad” that were blatant enough to lead the scientist to the assumption that both the Iliad and the Bible date from the late Middle Ages.
Some of the mediaeval chronicles ascribed to different authors resembled each other to such an extent that Baldauf was forced to identify them as works of the same author, despite the fact that the two documents were presumed separated chronologically by an interval of two centuries at least. At any rate, some of the expressions characteristic for Romanic languages that one finds in both documents fail to correspond with either of the alleged dating (one of them being the IX and the other the XI century). Apart from that, some of the manuscripts contain distinctly more recent passages, such as frivolous stories of endeavours in public steam baths (which the Europeans only became acquainted with during the late Reconquista epoch) and even allusions to the Holy Inquisition.
Baldauf’s study of the “ancient” poetry in Volume 4 demonstrates that many “ancient” poets wrote rhymed verse resembling the mediaeval troubadours. Unlike Hardouin, Baldauf is convinced that the verse of Horace is of a mediaeval origin, pointing out German and Italian influences inherent in his Latin. Furthermore, Baldauf points out such pronounced parallels between the poetry of Horace and Ovid (who were presumably unaware of each other’s existence) that one becomes convinced that the works of both belong to a third party – apparently, a much later author.
Robert Baldauf wasn’t alone in his criticism of the style characteristic for the “ancient” authors. As early as in 1847 Borber expressed surprise about the striking similarity of the Druids and the Egyptian priests as described in Julius Caesar’s De bellum Gallico, which he considers a later forgery, likewise De bellum civile by the same author. Baldauf sums up his research in the following words: “Our Romans and Greeks have been Italian humanists”. All of them – Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle and many other “ancient” authors, so different in our perception, hail from the same century, according to Baldauf. Furthermore, their home wasn’t in the Ancient Rome or Hellas, but rather Italy of the XIV-XV century. The entire history of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, likewise the Biblical “history”, which correlates with the above to some extent, was conceived and introduced by the Italian humanists, as well as their colleagues and followers from other countries.
Humanism has given us a whole fantasy world of the antiquity and the Bible, as well as the early Middle Ages, which Baldauf had also considered an invention of the humanist writers. This fictional history, initially drafted on parchment, was carved in stone and cast in metal; it has rooted itself in our perception to such an extent that no positivist criticisms can make humanity doubt its veracity.
Wilhelm Kammeier
In case of Wilhelm Kammeier, a German critic of historical sources, we don’t know so much as the date of his birth. According to the estimation cited in [g4], he was born between 1890 and 1900. He died in 1959 in Arnstadt (Thuringia, former GDR). He was a teacher and had worked in Hanover. He had taken part in World War II and was taken prisoner. After that, he had lived in Arnstadt, which became the new home of his family after the destruction of their Hanover residence during the war. All his post-war life he had been afflicted by poverty and state repressions. There is an opinion that his death resulted from chronic malnutrition.
Analysis of old deeds from the point of view of a notary provided Kammeier with an excellent foundation for the critical research of old documents, which he became fascinated with in 1923. By 1926 he had completed his 292-page manuscript entitled The Universal Falsification of History, where he subjects historical documents serving as the basis for the mediaeval history of Germany to rigorous criticisms. However, it had taken him many years to find a publisher for this critique.
He sent a brief summary of the key points related in the manuscript to the Prussian Academy of Sciences with a request to be given the opportunity of making a public speech in front of the historians. This request was rejected under a formal pretext that private persons weren’t allowed to address the Academy, with no substantial argumentation given. The mere fact that Kammeier had not held an office in an academic institution sufficed for the rejection of a well-reasoned critique.
Kammeier’s manuscript got published as late as in 1935. It was followed by a brochure, where the criticisms of historical sources were taken further, encompassing the entire mediaeval period in Europe, and seven more brochures on the same subject. This work has long ago become a bibliographic rarity. It was published again in a small number of copies as part of the book that also includes the following works of Wilhelm Kammeier dating from 1936-1939:
• “Enigmas of Global History – an Answer to my Critics”,
• “The Mystery of Mediaeval Rome”,
• “Dogmatic Christianity and the Falsification of History”,
and
• “The Foundation of the Roman Ecumenical Church”.
Finally, Kammeier’s manuscript on the “sources” of the early Christianity and their falsification, previously unpublished and presumed lost, came out as a book.
Official science had only been reacting to Kammeier’s works during the first few years that followed the release of his first book – critically, of course. One of his critics, a certain Professor Heimpel, accused Kammeier of having no positive conception of history. A critic must naturally be concerned with the positive historical picture first and foremost, regardless of whether or not it is a work of fiction through and through: “If we see the entire historical conception of the Middle Ages disintegrate and transform into a spot of impenetrable darkness, or indeed a gigantic question mark, we shall naturally end up with feeling inner resentment against Kammeier’s criticisms, well-reasoned or not”.
Kammeier’s counter-argumentation was that it hadn’t been his fault that the history of Germany and the entire Old World proved a work of fiction to a tremendous extent, the literary and documental sources of the epoch being forgeries. He only pleaded guilty of discovering this historical falsification, mentioning the necessity to live with a new historical truth that new generations of historians would inevitably face (as we know, they still shudder at the mere thought), alluding to Schopenhauer’s concept about truth needing no permission for its existence. Once perceived, the truth becomes an elemental force: intelligent persons shall try to turn this force to their benefit instead of opposing it.
However, after the reasoned refutation of the historians’ criticisms by Kammeier, the learned scholars have switched to the tried and viable tactics of obstruction and concealment (after all, things that remain unknown to the general public may as well be nonexistent). The world war that broke out around that time had aided this obstruction greatly. Kammeier’s participation in military action, his captivity and the unsettled state of his post-war life had interrupted his active research for a long time.
The only job Kammeier managed to find in the GDR was that of a schoolteacher. As soon as circumstances allowed, he resumed his research of the “ancient” documents, concentrating all of his attention on the documental foundations of the history of early Christianity. It is possible that he had counted on a benevolent attitude towards this topic from the part of Socialist historiography in an atheistic country that the GDR was striving to become. Instead of that, as soon as he had offered his critique of early Christian documents to the historians of the German Democratic Republic, he became a victim of repressions. He lost his job, the manuscript of his book ([g11]) was confiscated and had been presumed lost for a long time. His estate was nationalised, and his family forced to dwell in hunger and poverty.
Kammeier’s research of the “ancient” documents became with the trivial remark that every donation document (the most common kind of mediaeval documents; donations could assume the form of estate, privileges, ranks etc) must contain information about the nature of the gift, the date of the donation, the names of the benefactor and the receiver and the place where the document was written. Documents with blank fields (date, name of the donation’s receiver etc) are null and void from the legal point of view, and can only serve as historical sources indirectly (in the research of historical falsifications, for instance).
Documents kept in libraries often fail to correspond to these criteria:
• One finds documents with no date, or a date that was obviously introduced later – alternatively, the date can be incomplete or transcribed in a manner that fails to correspond with the presumed epoch of the document’s creation.
• Documents dating to the same day would often be “signed” in different geographical location.
• The analysis of places and dates leaves us with the following picture: all German emperors, regardless of age, health and basic human logic, don’t reside in any capital, but keep on the move all the time, occasionally covering gigantic distances in a single day, in order to make more and more donations to their loyal subjects.
• It would be interesting to feed all such data to a computer in order to compile analytical overviews of the movement speed of the German feudal rulers and their supernormal Wanderlust. However, the tables that the historians have already compiled, demonstrate that German emperors often managed to be present in two mutually distant geographical locations on the same day. For instance, Emperor Conrad is presumed to have been present in 2 or 3 different cities at the same annual Christian feast for 50 years in a row.
• The family name of the donation’s recipient is absent from a great number of documents (this is the case with up to half of all surviving documents for some epochs) – one can therefore speak of headers at best, valid official documents being a far cry.
Naturally, Kammeier wasn’t the first to discover forgeries during the research of ancient (or presumably ancient) documents. His primary merit is that he had managed to recognize the more or less systematic large-scale activities of whole generations of hoaxers serving the Catholic Church or individual feudal rulers and grasp the real scale of the historical falsification campaign, which had been great enough to surprise historians even before his time.
These hoaxers have destroyed a great many of old originals and replaced them by forgeries. Old text would often be erased with new one taking its place on an ancient parchment, which would make the forgery look like an “authentic ancient relic” in the eyes of the hoaxers. It would often take a very minor alteration to change the original meaning of an old document completely.
According to Kammeier, the key goal of this prolonged and massive campaign for the falsification of historical documents had been the concealment, distortion and arbitrary extension of the pre-Christian history, with all the achievements of the pagan epoch ascribed thereto. Apart from that, “legal” acknowledgement of the possession rights must have been in high demand among the new feudal rulers, whose property was acquired from lawful pagan owners rather recently, and in a violent manner. Falsified donation documents were necessary to declare ancient rights of possession; their authorship could be traced to one of the great Christian rulers of antiquity – fictitious entities invented for this specific purpose in many cases.
The general condition of historical sources at the moment can be described as follows: the number of forgeries is mind-boggling, and every “ancient” work of history lacks an original (this is hardly a chance occurrence). However, historians keep on using forgeries in lieu of official documentation – possibly due to the fact that their inveracity has not been proven irrefutably yet, or that such irrefutable proof does in fact exist, but remains concealed from the scientific community.
One can find the following corollaries made by Kammeier in the course of his research of mediaeval documents in [g12]:
• The humanists took part in the massive falsification of history alongside the Catholic clergy striving to create some proof of the historical significance attributed to their church; this process falls on the XV century for the most part.
• The documents related to the pagan “German” history have been destroyed and replaced by Gaulish and Romanic forgeries.
• The existence of Catholic Pontiffs before the so-called Avignon captivity is of a figmental nature through and through.
• Historical events that preceded the XIII century are beyond reconstruction, since all of the earlier documents have been destroyed and replaced by counterfeits.
• The pre-Papal wars between national churches were subsequently presented as struggle against the heretics and the apostates.
• “Ancient” literature is as much of a forgery as the mediaeval documents. One of such fake literary works is “Germany” by Tacitus.
• The Catholic clergy can be credited with the invention of the New Testament, or at least a radical rearrangement thereof.
• The church keeps on manufacturing counterfeited “ancient” manuscripts in order to “prove” the authenticity of Evangelical texts and their great age with the aid of the new findings.
Immanuel Velikovsky
The written history of the ancient world is composed without correct synchronization of the histories of different peoples of antiquity: a discrepancy of about six hundred years exists between the Hebrew and Egyptian histories as they are conventionally written; since the histories of other peoples are synchronized both with the Hebrew and the Egyptian past, they are completely distorted.
The ground plan for a redesigning of ancient history was ready in its main features in the spring 1940. During the years 1940-1944, I wrote and completed a Reconstruction of ancient history from the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt to the advent of Alexander the Great. Due to war conditions and their interference with the printing of extensive scientific works, the publication of “Ages in Chaos” had to be postponed. This short paper is intended to bring together in concise form most of the innovations of my work; I present them in the form of theses; the manifold proofs which underlie the Reconstruction and the numerous collations of historical material are reserved for the work itself.
Velikovsky, New York, June 10, 1945.
The biography of Immanuel Velikovsky is well known in the circle of his admires, but unfortunately not for most people. Even in Israel, where he lived during the 20ties and 30ties and where his daughter now lives and books about his life writes is his name less known. The same is the situation in Russia where a biography of Velikovsky was published for ten years:
• Degen Ion, Immanuil Velikovsky. A story of an outstanding man, Fenix, Rostov-na-Donu, 1997 (In Russian).
Also in these ten years all books of Velikovsky have been translated into Russian but even today he is known in his motherland only for a small circle of readers. But here I am not trying to close this biographical hole, I only would like to underline his role as a pioneer of the chronology revision in the Western hemisphere. Let us remember the first three of some hundreds of THESES FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF ANCIENT HISTORY FROM THE END OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN EGYPT TO THE ADVENT OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT written as early as 1945:
1. Ancient History before the advent of Alexander the Great is written in a chaotic manner. It is entirely confused, and is a disarray of centuries, kingdoms and persons.
2. The cause of this confusion lies in an incorrect representation of the Egyptian past; and since the history of Egypt is chosen to serve for orientation in compiling the histories of other peoples of antiquity, the histories of these other peoples are brought into disorder as well. The error in Egyptian history consists of six to seven and, in some places, eight centuries of retardation.
3. Histories of Palestine, Syria, Babylonia, Assyria, Mycenae, Classical Greece, Chaldea, Phoenicia, and Caria, are written in duplicate form, with the same events repeated after a period of six or seven centuries. The confusion of centuries makes the life of many personages double; descendants are transformed into ancestors, and entire peoples and empires are invented.
Sweeney said in London (2002) the following:
“The first person to suggest that there was something fundamentally wrong with the timescales of ancient history was of course Immanuel Velikovsky and in the early 1950s he proposed that 18th Dynasty Egyptian chronology was too long by around 500 years. Ages in Chaos Vol. 1, published in 1952, demonstrated to the world how, if those 500 years were removed, the histories of Egypt and Israel, which had hitherto shown almost no correspondence whatsoever, could be made to ‘fit‘, much like matching pieces of a jigsaw, from generation to generation.
Ages in Chaos Vol. 1 was greeted initially with much enthusiasm in the ‘Velikovskian‘ movement but the celebration was short-lived. By the 1970s it became apparent that Velikovsky wished to separate the end of the 18th Dynasty from the beginning of the 19th by almost 200 years and his Ramses II and his Time (1978) argued for placing the great pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty in the first half of the 6th century BC.
It was then that the first serious dissension broke out. Various British scholars argued that the 200 year hiatus was historically insupportable. An SIS Conference held in Glasgow in 1977 produced what was then described as the ‘Glasgow Chronology‘. Basically, this argued for holding on to all of Velikovsky‘s Ages in Chaos Vol. 1, whilst at the same time making the 19lh and 20th Dynasties follow on directly from where the 18th Dynasty ended. Thus the Glasgow school placed the 19th Dynasty in the latter years of the 9th century and the first half of the 8th. However problems soon arose too for the Glasgow school and one by one its architects and supporters abandoned it. Since then one writer after another has grappled with the problem, with dynasties being shuffled backwards and forwards like historical playing cards.”
Let me also give the description of the role of Velikovsky in history revision debates written by Crowe in his overview:
“His theories about catastrophism went totally against the astronomical dogma of his day, which claimed beyond dispute that the planets were solely ruled by gravity. If Venus and Mars had moved as and when Velikovsky claimed, they could not have assumed their present new and stable orbits so quickly under gravity alone. Also bodies in space could not collide. The ruthless and shameful attempts by leading Harvard academics to condemn the book as heretical and to ridicule its author only heightened worldwide public interest in the book. It was this interest, and a recognition that the many brilliant ideas postulated by Velikovsky were of sufficient importance to deserve further study and debate, which in the UK led eventually in 1974 to the formation of the SIS.
Then, with ‘Ages in Chaos‘ (AIC) in 1952 [17], he ignited a public debate on ancient chronology. As mentioned in the introduction, he looked at Egyptian and Palestinian history over the period from the Exodus to the early Divided Monarchy era, and found none of the expected synchronisms. In the CC, Ramesses II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but none of the other OT historical events could be found in their expected places. Focussing on the Exodus events, which he considered to have been caused by a catastrophe affecting much of the Middle East, Velikovsky found what he regarded as evidence of this catastrophe in two ancient Egyptian texts, Papyrus Ipuwer and the Ermitage Papyrus. By dating these texts to the end of the MK, he showed that Tuthmoses III fitted the mantle of the Biblical Shishak much better than Shoshenk I. In doing so, he was clearly unaware that Newton had long ago arrived at a similar conclusion. He pointed out that Shoshenk‘s list of Asiatic cities, which some Egyptologists no longer regard as evidence of a military campaign, were mainly located in Israel rather than Judah. It includes none of the ‘fenced cities of Judah‘ mentioned as captured by Shishak in the Old Testament (OT). Shoshenk I‘s supposed campaign against Judah therefore has no archaeological support. However, hundreds of scarabs of Tuthmoses III have been found across Palestine and Syria, all in strata that are now dated some 5-600yr after his time. Despite the fact that many of these are believed to be genuine D18 scarabs, the archaeologists have had to interpret their finds as either heirlooms or as souvenirs made in Palestine when there was a revival of devotion to Tuthmoses III. And so, as has happened so often, archaeological fact has been distorted by the proponents of historical theory. Why Tuthmoses III, and only Tuthmoses III, who must in his day have been a dreaded and hated invader, should become the object of veneration 5-600yr later is never explained. Velikovsky showed that the resulting down dating of the NK by around 500 years brought the early histories of the two nations into a much more convincing alignment, and resolved many glaring chronological problems.
Also in AIC, Velikovsky identified the Hyksos with the Biblical Amalekite hordes, who fought with the Hebrews as they fled from Egypt at the time of the Exodus. He also claimed that Hatshepsut was the ‘Queen of Sheba‘ of the OT who visited Solomon, and who was referred to by Josephus as ‘the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia‘. He then showed at Ugarit, which was given Egyptian dates from scarabs of Amenhotep III found in its final destruction layer, that the archaeological evidence, including the texts of many of the cuneiform tablets unearthed there, could be interpreted to provide excellent supporting evidence in favour of his proposed 500yr down dating. The evidence there supported the traditional view of Biblical scholars that the Canaanites received their culture from the Hebrews, not vice versa as is taught today. The book ended with a lengthy analysis of the Amarna Letters, in which he found many synchronisms with ancient Jewish history around the time of Ahab and his successors.
AIC was intended to be the first volume in a series proposing a full historical reconstruction from the Exodus to the Ptolemaic period. These later volumes were long delayed, but by 1974, when the SIS was formed, revisionists were aware, from his earlier ‘Theses‘, of some of his more important synchronisms in later eras, and his further volumes were eagerly awaited.”
Trevor Palmer describes the role of Velikovsky for the revision of the ancient Middle East chronology in such a way:
“Velikovsky concluded that the conventional chronology was incorrect. In his view, the Exodus took place around 1450BC, in line with biblical reckoning, and coincided with the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. He regarded this as occurring not at the end of Dynasty XII, as in some schemes, but the end of Dynasty XIII, when Dudimose was on the throne. Dudimose was the Tutimaeus‘ identified by Manetho as the last native pharaoh before the arrival of the Hyksos, whose kings were the main rulers of Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, the first being Salitis (also called Shalek or Sheshi), founder of Dynasty XV.
Velikovsky believed that the Hyksos invaders were the Amalekites, whose confrontations with the departing Israelites were mentioned in Exodus. Manetho allocated 511 years to the rule of the Hyksos but the conventional chronology reduced that to around 200 years, partly because of constraints imposed by the supposed Sothic datings of Senusret HI of the Middle Kingdom and Amenhotep I of the New.
Velikovsky doubled that allocation, placing the start of the 18th Dynasty, and hence the New Kingdom, at around 1050BC, 500 years later than generally supposed. That served two main purposes - it eliminated the Dark Ages which had been inserted into the histories of Greece and other countries on the basis of the conventional chronology of the New Kingdom and it allowed Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty, known to have campaigned in the Holy Land, to be identified as the biblical Shishak, despoiler of the Temple of Jerusalem in the time of Rehoboam. According to the detailed evidence of the Bubastite portal, the conquests of the traditional candidate, Shoshenq I, did not include Jerusalem or neighbouring cities, so he could not have been Shishak. A further consequence of placing the 18th Dynasty at this time was to allow the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, to be the ‘Queen of Sheba‘ who visited Solomon and to make Akhenaten a contemporary of Ahab of Israel and of Shalmaneser III of Assyria. Velikovsky claimed to have identified Ahab as an El-Amarna correspondent”
As we mentioned above not all ideas are today accepted by his followers but his role in starting the chronology debate is undisputable.
Conclusion
Let me start to conclude this short survey with the words which open our International scientific and popular-scientific interdisciplinary Internet magazine for sceptic and new chronology and critical historiography HISTORY & CHRONOLOGY. Criticism. Shortening. Reconstruction:
• Our main topics are chronology criticism and the revision of history on the basis of modern scientific research, the computer analysis of historical sources and the statistics of historical number sets, source criticism and historical falsifications, mistakes made by historians and false dating.
• We would like to know more about proofs (if such proofs exist) for statements of historians and the bases of their chronological dogmas. We have kept our natural distrust of the exactitude of historical descriptions, of the insufficient self-criticism of the historians and of their less than open behavior concerning the full amount of existing problems of “historical science”.
A bridge between the Russian and the Western chronological revolution is today our main problem which must be solved. Heinsohn and other German researchers shortened the historical time by about 2000 years in the case of Sumerians. Topper is shortening the history of Christianity by additional almost 1500 years as the Russians do that. So, 2000 and more years of shortening is today an acceptable or at least a disputable step for us, we are discussing that in the Western countries.
So which gap exists between the Russian idea that the full history was in reality playing in the last millennium (and this idea is accepted by many German researcher) and the models of Gunnar Heinsohn and Uwe Topper? I have a feeling that the researchers in Eastern Europe and around SIS are converging in the same tunnel. The question is, are they going in the same direction, will they meet in the middle and find a short chronology which fits all the critical ideas? It is a very complicated question but in any case we can try to do that, to manage this work through some contacts in the way that we can really meet together in the middle of the tunnel and not in different parts of the area.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part 3.
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