Velikovsky's Sources

in his Ages In Chaos series, Velikovsky provided numerous footnote references to many sources which, at the time he published, were very difficult for his average reader to obtain.

The advent of the Internet has radically changed that position, and while some of his sources remain unavailable via that medium, a great many of them--particularly those long out of print--are available and can be found by Google searches, or on the Internet Archive web site.

The first "Velikovsky source" that I looked at was Griffith's transcription and transliteration of the El Arish shrine inscription, which I bought in hardback from Amazon. My purpose was to defend Velikovsky against a particular attack, but I was horrified to find out how drastically the Great Man had mishandled the text. Later, in a different context, I sought to refute Lorton's essay attempting to disprove Velikovsky's equation of the Biblical Queen of Sheba with Queen Hatshepsut of the Egyptian 18th Dynasty. At first I made great progress (Lorton made numerous mistakes in the early part of his essay, but my case began to unravel when I reached the sections in which Larsson engaged with Velikovsky's use of the Deir el-Bahari reliefs, where Queen Hatshepsut recounted her expedition to the Land of Punt (which Velikovsky located in Palestine and, specifically, Solomon's Jerusalem). I found myself agreeing with Larsson that Velikovsky had, indeed, drastically misused the information on the reliefs; and, finding a copy of Breasted's Records on line--one of Velikovsky's resources--found even more difficulties than Lorton had pointed out. (When I subsequently obtained a copy of Naville's Temple of Deir el Bahari, with its complete set of photographs of the Punt Reliefs, I discovered yet more.)

These discoveries undermined my faith in Velikovsky's scholarly competence. Problems continued to accumulate when, as a result of an email discussion, I looked into Velikovsky's sources for the "Greek tiles of Ramses III" issue, and found that they, too, had been misused, and were cited as giving information that in fact they had not (a fourth-century date for the tiles). Then, following yet another email discussion, I came to realise how very seriously Velikovsky had misrepresented both the Biblical and, even more so, the Islamic evidence concerning the Amalekites. This led to a a sequence of papers in the SIS journal, Chronology and Catastrophism Review (2014, 2015:1, 2015:2), and to the thought that I should make those sources, and others I had retrieved, available to a wider public.

This web site is the outcome.