Velikovsky's World
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Writers & Writing VELIKOVSKY'S WORLD by ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Exactly a century ago Heinrich Schliemann discovered at Mycenae what he fancied to be the gold death mask of Agamemnon, permanently...
...Yet this same latest edition shows how open or alive are many of the questions he poses...
...And so the layman, made eager for answers by all the questions raised by Velikovsky, has nowhere to go...
...Velikovsky is not simply drawing an analogy...
...It comes down very hard on the mean, even dishonest treatment given him by academic astronomers...
...Why were neighboring Israel and Egypt so silent about each other in the centuries following the Exodus, whenever—somewhere between 1500 and 1200—that event occurred...
...Since then the multiplying finds have brought close to us second millenium cultures whose richness and elegance surpass our own...
...The kerchiefs that actually covered the head of the heroine made so real to us by Sophocles and Anouilh can now be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
...Medieval romances are famous for their free play with time and place...
...In his next book, Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960), Velikovsky is obviously trying to outdo Freud in rewriting history and bringing together the mythical and actual...
...The second volume was organized by a magazine outside the academy called Pensee...
...Intellectually brilliant, a vivid writer, an omnivorous reader with a keen eye for the problem areas in astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, and ancient history, he works hard to prove his romances true with documented evidence that could stand up in court...
...Earth in Upheaval (1955) does its postdating on a much grander scale...
...New species developed rapidly under atomic bombardments of extraterrestrial origin...
...Astronomers, when Worlds in Collision was published in 1950, kicked up a great fuss...
...Ovid's stories of Phaeton's flaming ride and Deucalion's flood descended from actual observations...
...Velikovsky makes what seem comparable conjunctions, but he is a romancer of a unique kind...
...sky, this is an actual conflict of planets, according to Velikovsky...
...Among the illustrations in his book is a photograph of a carnelian cameo, from Akhnaton's time, showing his "wife and mother" as the sphinx...
...In digging up jewels, pots and weapons from as many as 18 levels of Middle Eastern and Aegean walled cities, archaeologists have also shown the Old Testament and Homer to be much more accurate historically than 19th-century skeptics wanted to believe...
...Before it settled down and went into orbit, he contends, it twice threw the earth off its course, changed the position of the poles and the length of the year, and nearly destroyed life with its furious heat...
...I can even imagine—the dates permit it—that Joshua or Samson literally fought against heroes who had served under Agamemnon and Menelaus at Troy...
...For the kind of readers who enjoy Velikovsky it is more exciting to think that some of the Sea People, as most scholars suppose, were of Aegean origin and settled in Palestine as the Philistines of the Old Testament...
...They let Alexander and Charlemagne contend with Mohammed and let Theseus, who killed the Minotaur and married Phaedra, become king of Denmark...
...Doubleday has published him ever since and has just issued his fifth book, Peoples oj the Sea (261 pp., $10.00...
...In 687, when Venus brushed the earth for the last time before going into permanent orbit, the army of Sennacherib was incinerated...
...The sun really stood still for Joshua because the earth had been halted in its course...
...In it he radically rearranges Egyptian chronology...
...The astronomers were outraged at Velikovsky's notion that Venus was a relatively new planet that split off from Jupiter around 1450 as a comet with a long tail...
...Writers & Writing VELIKOVSKY'S WORLD by ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Exactly a century ago Heinrich Schliemann discovered at Mycenae what he fancied to be the gold death mask of Agamemnon, permanently grimacing from the blow struck by Clytemnestra...
...For several decades he has lived in Princeton, where he got encouragement from Albert Einstein...
...There is no history without dates," Levi-Strauss has written...
...But despite whole libraries of cuneiform tablets and acres of Egyptian reliefs, absolute dating before 700 BC is extremely difficult...
...Velikovsky, born in Russia in 1895, is still going strong...
...Both books show that some of Velikovsky's assertions about electromagnetic forces in space and about the heat of Venus have been confirmed by recent space probes...
...Given his clue by letters of a late Greek alphabet on tiles from Ramses' palace, his solution is to move the rule of Ramses III forward 800 years and make the Sea People Persians...
...The silence of the Middle Eastern scholars is more effective than the scandalous attempt at suppression by the academic astronomers...
...Two books have been published in support of his theories, The Velikovsky Affair (1966) and Velikovsky Reconsidered (1976...
...Middle Eastern scholars have ignored him as totally as Egyptian chroniclers ignored Moses and Yahweh...
...In the new book Velikovsky addresses himself to solving the mystery of the Sea People threatening Egypt in the time of Ramses III...
...Led by Harlow Shapley and Cecilia Payne -Gaposchkin at Harvard, they threatened a boycott of publications and book firms that printed his work...
...Two volumes are still to come, one of them already in proof...
...Were there really four dark illiterate centuries between the fall of Troy and the writing form of the Homeric epics...
...But considering the closed nature of the professional guilds and their cold rejection of ventures by outsiders, this is unlikely to occur...
...This enables him to show that the account of woes in the Egyptian Ipuwer papyrus refers to exactly the plagues described in Exodus, and it enables him to identify the Queen of Sheba as the famous Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut...
...The burning bush of Moses was fueled by hydrocarbons raining down from Venus...
...Many followers—unfortunately not astronomers or Middle Eastern scholars—also believe this...
...What we need is a collective work—or perhaps a continuing periodical— addressed to readers of Velikovsky and laymen of kindred interests, in which experts from various fields deal in a receptive but critical way with the excitements he has aroused...
...Though its anthologv includes a score of technical articles supporting Velikov-sky's scientific theories, none of the contributors is an academioally recognized authority on the subject he discusses...
...This claim will not be as appealing as most in his earlier books...
...As a result Valikovsky wrote Ages in Chaos—his first book, though it was published second, in 1952, after Worlds in Collision...
...In myth as an outgrowth of ritual he has no interest...
...When the Iliad has Mars and Athena battling in th...
...Carbon dating is still unreliable and early astronomical observations highly disputable...
...He decides that the story of Oedipus, placed in Grecian Thebes, is a direct and now documented account of the family life of the incestuous Pharaoh Akhnaton, the same one whom Freud made the tutor of Moses...
...Ordinary reference books confidently supply exact dates for the pharaohs, but a little inquiry shows that these depend on elaborately correlated inferences from pottery, ancient kings' lists, and hard-to-identify references to foreign rulers in inscriptions, with nothing firm to which they can be fixed...
...Neither book has anything to say about his rewriting of Middle Eastern and Aegean history...
...He is convinced from the objects found in it that an underground 7' x 7' x 6' chamber near the burial place of the two brothers in the Valley of the Kings is the spot where the imprisoned Egyptian original of Antigone died...
...Unlike the politically conservative uniformitarians, Lyell and Darwin, who required a geologic and biologic evolution occurring slowly over vast periods of time, Velikovsky is a catastrophist, who explains hippopotami remains in Yorkshire and whale remains in Michigan by upheavals of earth and sea— accompanied by climatic changes—that occurred as recently as 35,000 years ago...
...He sincerely believes that he has done so...
...Macmillan gave in...
...One would not know from the bibliographies in the new 1975 edition of the Cambridge Ancient History that Velikovsky exists...
...For 25 years the formidable Immanuel Velikovsky has attacked scientific and scholarly dating—astronomical, evolutionary, historical—and proposed startlingly different conjunctions of his own...
...V elikovsky's latest, Peoples of the Sea, is the second of a series based on Ages in Chaos...
...The first is an expansion of an issue of The American Behavioral Scientist devoted to him...
...All this was recorded by the ancients, Velikovsky says, in their astronomies and in myths that were not myths...
...His father, a Hebrew scholar, helped in the building of Israel...
...Evolution, he says, must "now be viewed in the light of the experience of Hiroshima and no longer from the portholes of the Beagle...
...Trained in psychoanalysis in Vienna, youna Velikovsky became obsessed with the ancient Middle East after reading Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud makes Moses an Egyptian who was taught monotheism by the eccentric Pharaoh Akhnaton...
...Akhnaton's sons, Smenkhare, shabbily buried, and Tutankhamen, brilliantly entombed, become Oedipus' two sons...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 3
