Velikovsky's Historical Sources

Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was a Russian-born psychotherapist who developed a radically new view of the
chronology of the ancient world.  In his view, modert scholars had made serious errors in their reconstruction of
ancient history.  In his alternative reconstruction, the reigns of many kings were exposed as spurious doublets of
the lives of other kings, and 500 and more years preceding the time of Alexander the Great were deleted from
Egyptian history, and the histories of surrounding nations.  In this way, Velikovsky proposed to close a 500-year
"Dark Ages" gap that archaeologists and historians claimed existed in the histories of most of those nations.

 

Velikovsky's chronological revisions were expressed in a sequence of books collectively known as the Ages In
Chaos series.  In those books, Velikovsky quoted or cited many texts for historical source information.  This site is devoted to making as many of those historical texts as possible available to modern readers.  Since several of the sources Velikovsky used were in French or German, I am providing those in translation; as far as I can tell, this will be the first time any of those works will have appeared in English.  (Where those works are French or German translations of ancient writers, English versions may have been made directly from the originals, but Veklikovsky did not consult those.)

 

The original impetus for building this site was my growing realisation, as I investigated Velikovsky's sources for myself, that he had frequently misrepresented their content in one way or another--usually by highly selective quotation, but occasionally by actually falsifying the wording.  Accordingly, I will provide an Editor's (or Translator's) Preface to each work, indicating some of the ways in which Velikovsky used or abused the text.

 

I am preceded in this work by Bob Forrest, who published a 6-volume series of booklets  under the title Velikovsky's Sources in the late 1970s, now sadly almost unobtainable.  However, Bob's interest lay in Velikovsky's intersecting ideas of a catastrophic basis for ancient history, and the sources he exposed were astronomical, geological, and mythical in nature, rather than being concerned with history.  Accordingly, this site is complementary to his work, rather than superceding it.

 

All documents uploaded to this site are free of copyright, but I would appreciate being mentioned if the documents are used or quoted, especially those that are my own translations.  Naturally, any translation errors are my own responsibility.

 

The site is new and is under construction.  Completing it will be a long and arduous task, which may prove impossible in the end.