Dear Editor
Dear Editor Genoguilt Marvin Kitman's review of the Roots tele vision series ("On Television," NL, February 14) gives it well-deserved praise for its depiction of Kunte Kinte and of the evil...
...Review is available through Harold Tresman, 18 Fir Tree Court, Allum Lane, Elstree, Herts, England for $16 per year...
...According to the Bible...
...For example, his revised chronology eliminates the Dark Age in Greece which exists solely because of an erroneous ordering and dating of the reigns of Egyptian kings...
...The orthodox chronology became dogma before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered...
...Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J...
...New York City Charles Cogen Velikovsky Robert Gorham Davis' "Velikovsky's World" (NL, January 31), nonhostile though it was, would have benefited had he been more familiar with the subject...
...Inadvertent duplications and interpolations of phantoms were also eliminated...
...Dear Editor Genoguilt Marvin Kitman's review of the Roots tele vision series ("On Television," NL, February 14) gives it well-deserved praise for its depiction of Kunte Kinte and of the evil institution of slavery...
...An important key to the revision was his recognition that some dynasties were contemporaneous and actually successions of priests who governed regions of Egypt in the absence of a central authority...
...is the approximate date of her first encounter with earth...
...Fortunately, two quarterlies are published in which the layman can find reasoned discussions of the questions raised by Velikovsky's work...
...It asserts specifically "that the Planet Venus was born in the first half of the second milennium...
...1 could not, in time to answer this letter, find in libraries copies of the obscure publi- j cations the letter mentions, but I would guess ; they do not contain supportive articles by recognized authorities any more than did the j books 1 cited...
...He says "the Peoples of the Sea is a general name of a conglomeration of tribes or a confederation of nations," and places their origin in Asia Minor...
...Since Mars had triumphed over Venus in the Trojan War, I should have remembered that this selective incineration was caused by Mars as a result of its collision with Venus, and not by Venus directly...
...The destruction of Sennacherib's army is an extreme instance of Velikovsky's readiness to explain folk tales by science-fiction astronomy...
...Peoples of the Sea has examples of all these corrections...
...writes that Warren "has invented a poeiry that fights free even of its own ideological ferocity by way of a sublime energy of language...
...George, N.Y...
...Hegel, Spengler, or Toynbee he has no ideology, no 1 real interest in religion, politics, economics, j or even history, except as he can personally rearrange it to the point of incredibility...
...John Simon, in his "On Stage" column, says of A Chorus Line that it is "the best" of three hits on Broadway...
...Unlike him, I was not there in those days...
...The partisans of Velikovsky are a curious lot...
...1450 B.C...
...Velikovsky holds that Mars, not Venus, brushed the earth in 687 B.C...
...Worlds in Collision was indefinite concerning Venus' birth date...
...Grouch Some grouch years ago said that most critics don't know what they are talking about, and The New Leader of January 31 gave public demonstration of that fact...
...1 have enough burdens without that...
...Velikovsky did not reason that the Sea People were clearly Greeks...
...Leroy Ellenberg.tr Cliff Taylor Robert Gorham Davis replies: Worlds in Collision was not indefinite concerning Venus' birthdate...
...It is a game of one-upping the scholars that on j the whole has not worked...
...We are not aware of an objective refutation of the revised chronology, although invective and ad Imminent arguments abound...
...Ramses gave the name "Pereset" to his chief enemies under whom the Sea People invaded Egypt...
...Velikovsky reasons very clearly that they were Greek mercenaries who fought for and against Ramses III in various campaigns...
...I refuse to take upon myself a genoguilt...
...he loses me...
...185,000 soldiers besieging Jerusalem were all destroyed in one night by an angel so quietly that the inhabitants of the city were startled to wake up and find them dead...
...We find Velikovsky's ideas appealing because, drawing from many disciplines, he synthesizes explanations for widely acknowledged anomalies in the archeological record either for the first time cr with an internal consistency lacking in conventional ad hoc explanations...
...Velikovsky would have us believe they were seared by a planet...
...The Sea People were not Persians...
...It failed to adequately portray—even to the extent that the Haley book itself portrayed—the role of the blacks themselves in helping to enslave their fellow-blacks...
...That sounds more like a description of the rush hour in New York on a snowy afternoon than of poetry...
...Stephen Housman...
...So maybe everybody should have a sense of guilt, if anybody—though to differing degrees...
...08028, is available for $10 per year, while S.I.S...
...KRONOS, c/o Warner Sizemore...
...This scheme has been defended ever since, despite later conflicting discoveries...
...Harold Bloom, in his review of Robert Penn Warren's Selected Poems: 1923-1975...
...Most scholars have identified them with the Philistines, and these in turn with the Peoples of the Sea...
...I saw it and it w;is awful...
...Velikovsky identifies the Pereset as Persians...
...But when Kitman says that he had "an overwhelming sense of guilt...
...Ramses III used a different term, "Peoples of the Islands," when he meant the Greeks...
...Perhaps the trouble was with the onesided-ness of the series...
...Unlike Gibbon...
...For example...
...Fort Lee, N.J...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 5
