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Early Work: The Makings
of an Iconoclast

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1905, and graduated from the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow in 1913. He completed premedical studies in France and Scotland, returned to Moscow during World War I to study law and ancient history, and received a medical degree in 1921. He then moved to Berlin, where he helped found and published a series of monographs by prominent Jewish scholars, known as Scripta Universitatis, which was instrumental in forming the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. The volume on mathematics and physics was edited by Albert Einstein. In 1923 Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a violinist from Hamburg, and the following year moved to Palestine to become a general medical practitioner and psychiatrist.

How It All Began: A Small Question About the Exodus

In the summer of 1939 Velikovsky came with his family to the United States to complete his research for a proposed book on ancient history. The period he was interested in covered the time of the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, and in comparing records it struck him as curious that an event that figured so prominently in Hebrew history, with all its attendant troubles and plagues, seemed to have no corresponding account in the Egyptian records. This had been a longstanding problem for historians, who because of the incongruities involved had never even been able to agree on who the pharaoh at the time of the Exodus had been. It turned out to be only one of many examples of major historical events in the Hebrew account with no correlating Egyptian counterpart, which had led some historians to dismiss Hebrew history as largely fictional. On the other hand, its claims received substantial support from archeological findings.

Further investigation led to a translation of an obscure papyrus written by an Egyptian sage called Ipuwer, kept at the museum of Leiden, in Holland, that described a time of rivers turning to blood, falling stones, sickness, darkness, and other events uncannily like those recounted in Exodus, in the aftermath of which the land fell into ruin and civil war, to be overrun by Asiatic tribes from the east. A papyrus preserved at the Hermitage in Leningrad told a similar tale of the Egyptian empire perishing in a period of natural disasters and falling prey to desert nomads.

It seemed that the missing Egyptian corroboration had been found. However, such considerations as language style and certain historical references indicated the time of these events to be the collapse of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, conventionally dated around five hundred years before the Exodus, the latter being identified with the expulsion from Egypt of a people referred to as the Hyksos. Velikovsky began to suspect that this equating of the Hyksos with the Hebrews was an error, and the Hyksos were in fact the desert tribe that had invaded Egypt at the time the Middle Kingdom ended and the Hebrews left—and were then driven out themselves at a later date. This would mean that the Middle Kingdom ended more recently than the accepted chronology holds, leading Velikovsky to reexamine the entire Egyptian-Hebrew historical record. Since Egyptian chronology was taken as the standard by which the histories of other cultures in the region were correlated and dated, any error found in it would have widespread repercussions. And Velikovsky's conclusion was that the grounds the standard rested on were a lot shakier than was confidently supposed.

The ancient Egyptians did not use an absolute time scale as we do today, of dating all events with respect to a chosen reference year. They chronicled events occurring during the reign of each ruler separately, dating them from the beginning of that period—a bit like saying that the great San Francisco earthquake happened in the second year of Theodore Roosevelt, and then having to start over again with William Taft. This created many uncertainties for later scholars, first by being unclear about exactly what was meant in such cases as a co-regency by father and son, and second by frequently leaving no definite indication of how long a reign lasted. In addition to these, the list of dynasties drawn up by the historian-priest Manetho, which is used as the key in many accepted reconstructions, has been passed down in two recorded versions that don't agree, both apparently having been exaggerated by the inclusion of extraneous years and dynasties. Sometimes this stemmed from the practice of giving the same person different names, leading to acts of the same pharaoh being attributed to different individuals; at others it seemed deliberately contrived to show Egypt's civilization as going back farther than rivals such as the Greek or Assyrian-Babylonian.

Resorting to astronomical evidence to provide an absolute time scale frequently leads to the same kind of circularity as we found with Darwinism. The historians and the astronomers each believe that the other has accurate data to support the conventional chronology, and hence their own speculations must be true. A. H. Gardiner, the original translator of the Ipuwer papyrus, commented that "what is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and tatters." 88 Velikovsky's response was to go with what the weight of evidence seemed to say and concluded that Egyptian history was padded to the extent of making events seem 500 to 800 years further away from the present than they had in fact been. To bring things into line, he proposed moving the end of the Middle Kingdom and invasion by the Hyksos down 500 years to accord with the Hebrew date for the Exodus of around 1450 b.c. When this was done, a whole set of what had been other anomalies were found to line up, too.

The biblical account of the Queen of Sheba's royal visit to Jerusalem after hearing of the fame and wisdom of King Solomon has always had something of a mysterious air, not the least being that the identity of this majestic sovereign and the location of her domain have never been established. She is described elsewhere as queen of Egypt and Ethiopia, but conventional chronology has no female pharaohs in Egypt during this period. But 600 years before the accepted biblical date, practically the inverse story is told in Egyptian records. Queen Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh, journeyed with a large entourage to a land to the east called Punt, described by one official as being associated with Byblos, the old capital of Phoenicia, its ruins today lying eighteen miles north of Beirut. Descriptions of the route overland from Thebes to the Red Sea coast, and by sea to the Gulf of Aqaba, returning via the Mediterranean and back up the Nile, tally. On her return, Hatshepsut built a temple patterned after the one she had visited in Punt, its wall decorated by reliefs commemorating her visit. The gifts from the ruler of Punt that they record closely match those that the Hebrew texts list as Solomon's to the Queen of Sheba. One of the features of Solomon's temple that especially impressed the Queen of Sheba was its terraces planted with algum trees. Hatshepsut's temple at Thebes was laid out with similar terraces planted in the same way.

And so it goes. Hebrew history records that after Solomon's death his son and successor, Rehoboam, was conquered by a king of Egypt called Shishak. Hatshepsut's successor in Egypt was Thutmose III, who invaded Palestine. Topping the list made at Karnak of the 119 cities that he took—the place where the most important would normally be found—is one called Kadesh. Many Hebrew and Arabic writings give Kadesh as the name of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. Conventional historians have always hesitated to make this connection, however, since by their chronology David didn't establish it as the capital until long after Thutmose. A number of the other cities listed as conquered by Thutmose III didn't even yet exist according to the orthodox chronology. But if Shishak and Thutmose III were one and the same, as Velikovsky maintained, then it all makes sense.

Velikovsky's revised chronology also explained many discrepancies in the histories of other cultures whose chronology is derived from the Egyptian standard. One example is in styles of pottery and tomb construction found in parts of Cyprus and the neighboring coast of Syria, where clear association between the two cultures is indicated. However, conventional dating puts the Syrian culture five hundred years earlier than the other—presumably implying that customs and influences took that long to propagate across sixty miles of water. Another is the "dark age" of ancient Greece that orthodox chronology is forced to postulate to make its dates match with the Egyptian, when progress in the development of Greek art and technology ceased for half a millennium for no apparent reason and then resumed again. What makes this even more perplexing is that the activity of the Greek olive industry that supplied oil for lamps, cooking, and so forth, as recorded in layers of pollen grains preserved on lake bottoms, indicates it to have been at a maximum during precisely this time This would be like archeologists of the future determining that U.S. oil production peaked before Columbus arrived. But under the revised scheme the Greek time line closes up as Egypt's is contracted, and the need for a dark age goes away.

The outline for Velikovsky's revised chronology was published in 1945 as a booklet, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History. Later, a more detailed account of about half of this work would be published as a full book form, covering the period from the Exodus to the time of the pharaoh Akhnaton. 89 

Implications of Catastrophism

For Velikovsky this was only a beginning. The Exodus had been synchronized with the collapse of the Middle Kingdom at around 1450 b.c. However else the plagues and other disruptions attending these events might have been interpreted at the time, the most likely explanation was that they coincided with a period of natural disasters. This invited the questions, how widespread were they? and what caused them? Starting with the regions adjoining Egypt and Israel, Velikovsky began investigating the histories and received mythologies of other ancient cultures for indications of parallel events. It became apparent that the phenomenon had affected not just the entire Middle East but places far remote from it as well. In fact, it showed signs of being nothing less than a global catastrophe. Further, it hadn't been the first time such a thing had happened, and neither was it the last. 90 

The first affliction that the Bible describes as befalling the Egyptians was the rivers turning to blood and there being blood throughout the land, both of which Ipuwer echoed. Babylonian myth tells of the land being covered by the blood of the slain heavenly monster, Tiamat. Likewise, those of the Asiatic Tartars and the Central American Maya relate sagas of the world turning red, while the Finns say it was sprinkled with pink milk.

Then came "hail." The word chosen by the earlier translators was one that we associate with icy pellets and cold rains, but this might be because they could imagine little else falling from the sky. The original Hebrew word, barad, means hot rocks. Ipuwer describes falling stones and fire, which in a day, he says, turned all the fields to wastelands. Similar accounts of red-hot stones falling in torrents, frequently accompanied by crashing thunder and showers of a blazing, sticky substance that ran along the ground causing widespread death and destruction, appear in Buddhist texts on world cycles, Siberian legends, and tales handed down in places as far apart as Mexico and Siberia. The same kind of story can be told relating days of darkness so intense that people were unable to move from the spot they were at, worldwide hurricanes that swept away towns and forests, and earthquakes devastating entire regions.

According to Velikovsky, the familiar interpretation of the tenth plague as the smiting by the Angel of Death of the Egyptian "firstborn" (Hebrew bkhor), which of course would require some supernatural agency, arises from a corruption of bchor, which means "chosen," or high-born. 91 Hence the reason why the Israelites fared better was probably that as slaves they lived in dwellings made of reeds and clay, whereas the brick and stone houses of the Egyptians were more susceptible to collapse by earthquake. Eminently reasonable in my opinion.

Finally, there are suggestions that the "parting of the waters" during the pursuit by the Egyptians could have been the local aspect of a tidal disruption of global dimensions. Chinese annals tell of a time when the world was in flames, after which the water of the oceans was piled to enormous heights and swept across the continent to fill the valleys between the mountains, taking decades to drain away. The traditions of the people of Peru hold that after five days of darkness the ocean left the shore and broke over the land with a terrible din, changing the appearance of the surface permanently. The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma (not their original habitat) relate a time when the world was plunged in darkness until light appeared in the north; but the light turned out to be mountain-high waves of water rapidly approaching.

Venus and the Cosmic Connection

Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity—almost invariably a goddess—coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet; they described it as a comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican astronomers referred to it as "the star that smokes," while on the opposite side of the world the same theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The Aztecs called Venus the "heart" of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means "plumed serpent," with feathers that signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify "comet," examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world.

The word "comet" comes from the Greek coma, meaning hair, and among ancient astronomers referred to a star with hair, or a beard. The same appellation was given to Venus. One of the Mexican names for Venus was "the mane"; the Peruvian name, chaska, means "wavy-haired"; the Arabs call Venus "the one with hair." One of the most vivid comet images is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, recognized universally as representing Venus. Ishtar is described as being "the bright torch of heaven," "clothed in fire," and the "fearful dragon," while her heavenly manifestation is known as the "bearded star."

Another widespread association of Venus was with the figure of a cow or a bull, still recalled in many religious rites and cults today. If Venus did indeed once possess a cometary coma, the illuminated portions would at times be seen as a gigantic crescent in the same way as the crescent forms of planets and of the Moon, especially during close approaches to Earth. The curving shapes sprouting from the body of the comet would be suggestive of a bull's head and horns.

Velikovsky discovered that the Hindu records from before the second millennium b.c. spoke of four visible planets, not five, omitting Venus. The Babylonians, who were also meticulous in their observations, likewise made no mention of Venus in their tables of planets. In Greek mythology, Venus was the goddess Pallas Athene, unique among the deities in being born during the time of human history and not present, like all the other gods, from the beginning. The hymn dedicated to her by Homer describes Pallas Athene as being born from the head of Zeus, i.e., Jupiter. And once again mythologies of other peoples, too, carry accounts of the birth of their deity that corresponds to Venus, but not Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, or any of the other gods.

In Greek legend, Athene was attacked by a monster, Pallas-Typhon, whom she fought and killed. Likewise, the newborn Egyptian Horus battled with the serpent-monster, Seth, as did the Hindu Vishnu, also a newcomer to the celestial family, born of the many-armed Shiva. Horus was originally the Egyptian name for Jupiter, apparently transferred to the new object that became supreme in the sky—possibly due to some initial confusion as to which was which. The same thing happened in the Babylonian version, where Ishtar was originally Jupiter and became Venus, Jupiter being renamed Marduk.

Many ancient traditions divide the history of the world into a series of ages each ending in calamity, the birth of the new age being attended by altered appearances of the heavens. Early astronomers diligently recorded the motions of celestial bodies, looking for changes that might signal coming destruction and the end of the current age. The times following the above happenings saw repeated allusions to the motion of the Sun and the stars being reversed, and north and south changing place. Both the Ipuwer and the Ermitage papyruses speak of the land turning upside down and south becoming north. Herodotus, in his visit to Egypt in the second half of the fifth century b.c., was told by priests about a former era when the Sun rose where it now sets and set where it now rises. Plato and Seneca wrote about the same thing. The architect of Hatshepsut's tomb included a stone panel from an earlier age showing the celestial constellations upside down. Similar accounts are found in the Hebrew Talmud and the Islamic Koran; with the Chinese, whose zodiac signs also have the strange property of proceeding in a retrograde direction; and in the written or oral myths of Greeks, Syrians, Aztec, Maya, Mexican Indians, Greenland Eskimos, and tribes of western Brazil and the Indian Ocean Andaman Islands, to name a few.

Velikovsky's conclusion, then, was that Venus is not billions of years old as believed according to orthodox theory, but a young object ejected from Jupiter within the span of recorded human history. In the course of evolving into the planet that we see today it had passed close enough to bring death, terror, and destruction on an immense scale, and disturbed the motion of the Earth itself. This carried the impertinent suggestion that the ancients might not have been so facile as to spend lifetimes inventing fairytales and building imposing monuments to them, but might actually have known what they were talking about and had something important to say; that the "mythologies" dismissed by the authorities of today as fanciful fictions could in fact have been attempts by nontechnical people to describe events that they actually witnessed. This would mean, of course, that the comforting picture of a safe and secure Solar System acting out its predictable cycles with minor variations, arrived at by projecting back today's quiescent conditions, was wrong; the Solar System could be a very violent and unpredictable place indeed. But Velikovsky had already shown from his historical revisions what he thought of conventionally accepted pictures of things if what appeared to be the facts indicated otherwise.

What first suggested a cosmic connection was a passage that Velikovsky came across in the Book of Joshua, describing what sounded like an intense meteorite shower causing widespread destruction before the famous incident where the Sun "stood still." (The meteorites killed more of the enemy than Joshua's soldiers did.) This led to the discovery of the wider pattern of cataclysms associated with Venus and suggested the possibility that the events at the time of the Exodus, fifty-two years previously, might have been an early instance of the same thing. Velikovsky's eventual conclusion was that Venus had come close to Earth on both occasions, although the second encounter was farther away and less violent. Maya records also tell of a time of destruction coming fifty years after an earlier, greater catastrophe. Interestingly, their account talks about the night being abnormally long.

Thereafter, priests and astronomers everywhere followed the movements of Venus relentlessly for signs of its returning again. Whole temples and cults were devoted to worshiping and appeasing the deity that it was taken to be, invariably regarded as violent and wrathful. A fifty-year cycle between times of hardship and destruction is recounted in the traditions and records of cultures the world over. The natives of pre-Columbian Mexico observed a ceremony of congregating every fifty-two years to await a catastrophe, fearful that the Sun would fail to rise again. They watched for the appearance of Venus, and when the world didn't end, celebrated with bonfires and sacrifices the new period of grace that had been granted. The Israelite festival of the Jubilee was proclaimed every fifty years as a time for leaving the land fallow, releasing slaves, and returning land to the original owners as a sign of repentance in preparation for the Day of Atonement.

The Universal War God: Mars

This pattern continued for something like seven centuries. Then a striking change took place in the order of precedence the ancients gave to their celestial gods: Venus ceased being the most feared object in the heavens, the destroyer and bringer of chaos, and was replaced in this role by Mars, universally acclaimed as the war god.

Mars had not figured as a significant figure in the celestial pantheon before the eighth century b.c. It was known, of course, and its motions tabled, but it seems generally to have been considered a minor player. Then, suddenly, it achieved prominence. This was not a period shrouded in the distant past, but a time when observations and written records had become more refined and extensive. Mythologies abound with accounts of battles between Venus and Mars, one of the most well known being Homer's Iliad, in which heavenly deities influenced the fortunes of the combatants in the ten-year siege of Troy, Athene siding with the Greeks, while the Trojans were backed by Ares, the Greek name for Mars. Interestingly, this practically mirrors the situation on the other side of the world in the wars between the Aztecs and the Toltecs, where Mars rooted for the former, and Venus, the latter. (Once again this questions conventional chronology, making the American civilizations much older than is generally held. Of which, more later.)

Following these encounters, Mars continued to menace Earth periodically for about ninety years, bringing earthquakes, floods, and times of desolation, though never with a ferocity rivaling the first two visits of Venus. This was the age of prophets, who developed reputations for knowing when hard times were ahead; it could also be the source of the astrological belief in celestial events portending disasters and affecting lives down on Earth—it would be a peculiar notion to arise today, with the planets being insignificant pinpoints. The prophet Amos predicted destruction that arrived in 747 b.c., but didn't live to see it because he seized the opportunity to link the event to morality and warn people to mend their ways, so they killed him. Amos's cue might have been an encounter that conceivably took place in 776 b.c., the year the Olympic games were founded—possibly in commemoration of it.

Isaiah, Joel, and Micah all had their turns until 687 b.c., which marked the final Mars approach. This was the year in which the army of Sennacherib was "smote" in the night, while preparing to attack Jerusalem, by something usually translated as "blast" that left 185,000 dead in the morning. Velikovsky guesses at an interplanetary electrical discharge. The Hebrew Talmud and Midrash date this event as the first night of the Passover, which would make it March 23. Chinese sources ascribed to Confucius, and also Chinese annals referring to the tenth year of the Wu Dynasty under Emperor Kwei pinpoint this date as a time when "the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The Earth shook." 92 

Before this time, the calendars of the Chinese, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Hebrews, as well as the Incas of Peru and the Mayas of the Yucatan had all shown a year of 360 days. The modern year of 365 1/4 days was introduced subsequently. Following this final event, Mars and Venus retreated to take up their stations as we know them today. And the gods, their anger, and their caprices faded from being a vivid and terrifying reality in human affairs, to a realm regarded these days as imaginative fancy and superstition.

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Framed