Anybody know if contemprary archaeology has proven any of Velikovsky’s idead to be true?
I recall that Velikovsky posits that much of Egyptian history is misunderstood, because the history includes the same stories, repeating after a span of about 800 years.
It’s an interesting idea…anyone know if any of it is truez?
If I remember correctly, Carl Sagan wrote quite a bit on the subject and, as you can probably guess, the verdict was bunk.
Here is a good link .
If IV had claimed that a lot of ancient religious & mythic lore is based on comets or meteors closely approaching Earth with resultant disasters, it would be plausible & worthy of study. When he got into claiming that it practically involved planetary collisions & a comet wreaking havoc within human history & THEN becoming trapped in a closer orbit to the sun, thus becoming the planet Venus, he was just setting himself up for bashing.
All you have to do is read Velikovsky to see how ridiculous it is. I once had a friend who thought Velikovsky’s ideas might be worthwhile, but he hadn’t actually read any of it. So I sat down and read some to him, and that converted him away.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that maybe some ancient cataclyesm happened and is reflected in the myths of mankind (Although, to be honest, I don’t believe that any myths have been inspired by a single cataclysmic event – myths seem to be the result of repeated observation. but that’s another thread). There have been science fiction and fantasy stories with that as a plot. Velikovsky’s problem is that, although he wants this to be accepted as really having happened, he doesn’t build a respectable case. He quotes myths out of context and piecemeal, without trying to show how it could be related to the suipposed event in any way.
As a minor example , he claims in one of his books that there was a darkening of the atmosphere during one year in Roman times. He gives one rather ambiguous quote from some Roman source regarding this, and that’s the entire case that he builds. But in the Real World, a noticeable darkening of the sky is a Major Event – proving this would be a good topic for a paper in a journal, bringing in cites from many places – from Chinese records, for instance. Geologic evuidence could bec marshalled. You’d expect this to affect the weather, etc. None of this in Velikovsky. One cite and he’s off to the next cosmic cataclysm, which seem thick as flies in his books.
I’m NOT talking about Velikovsky’s dubious work “Worlds In Collision”. I agree-that stuff is pure rubbish. In "AGES IN CHAOS’, he talks about the gap in Egyptian history, and finds taht the same characters apparently repeat , after a 800-year interval (during the “old kingdom”). I find this kind of intriguing-for one thing, it explains why the date of the Hebrew’s Exodus from Egypt is so ambiguous. I really don’t believe most of Velikovsky’s speculations about planatary bodies-it is impossible.
But he may have been on to something, regarding the history of the ancient Egyptians.
Sorry – I’ve read WIC more recently.
But I read AIC a while back, and my recollection is that it’s also filled with a lot of catastrophism. In any event, my real point was that what he regards as “proof” leaves a lot to be desired.
Velikovsky himself said that he “hayunted the library” in New York (I think it was Columbia U’s) and got his info from there. The problem is that it was mainly old stuff – look at his cites. He rarelt dredges up anything that was even close to his own time. His physical cites hark back to Laplace, fer cryin’ out loud!
I’ve come across two different places that say something like"critics say “I don’t trust his physics, but his history is impressive” if they’re physicists, and “I don’t like his histiorical cites, but his physics cites are impressive” if they’re historians." Take him with a big chunka salt.
I honestly don’t recall about the Egyptian gap. And i’ve never read his later books, which build up his theory of ancient history, I’m told. He wrote about half a dozen or so.
Ah, Hollow History. While there’s nothing to prove we don’t have a few dates off here or there, and there are some interesting points about repeated kings, most of Velikovsky’s specific claims, which were mostly designed to align revealed egyptian history with that of the bible, in such a way that the things told to us in said bible, were literally true, have failed to be borne out by investigation.
That is, that the Israelites were so important at the time they’d be noticed, that Thutmose was Moses, and so on, and so on. A lot of the old testament seems to be, ah… slightly exaggerated as to the relative importance of the Israelites. Sort of like reading what a football team publishes about itself.
This seems a good summary of a reasonable proponent of the concept. Even he claims Velikovsky was wrong in detail.
However, there are some oddments. I don’t know the specifics of such things, I’d have to check my notes and with a professional. Maybe this weekend, I’ll dig up what I have.
Briefly, though, what I’ve heard is that physicists are impressed by V’s history, but his physics is junk. And historians feel the same… in reverse.
How do you separate them? While published independently, all of IV’s works were devoted to attesting to a coherent (and seamless) whole. Take away Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos has no supporting structure or methodology to support it. It is rather like his “correct” prediction that Venus would be discovered to have a very high surface temperature while getting the mechanics that led to that heat entirely wrong. Except that with his attempt to realign Solomon with the era of Hatshepsut he cannot point to a single datum point (high heat on Venus), but must reconcile hundreds of years of history with all the interactions of his characters reconciled with all the other historical events that are known to have occurred.
It would be like noting that Roosevelt brokered the peace between Russia and Japan and then having to reconcile the Spanish American War and the U.S. “intervention” in the Philipines with Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March and trying to figure out where WWI, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and the Great Depression fit into the scenario.
I went to the same college where Steven Jay Gould got his undergraduate degree, and had some of the same professors. One of the geology professors had us read one of the Velikovsky books to help us keep an open mind (he didn’t believe in them). He argued that catastrophism vs. gradualism was a false debate, and that there was a blend of both; deep canyons cut by thousands of years of erosion as well as huge, short-term phenomena such as the Decca floods (I’m not doing justice here).
I later wondered if Steve Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” theory was influenced by this thought.
Here’s the problem with the writings of people like Velikovsky - the reason they get so much traction is because they span so many disciplines that it’s hard to find a single expert reviewer who can refute all of it. In addition, a clever fraud can sound very compelling if you don’t know the field he’s writing in. So Velikovsky would often get a pass from reviewers who were ignorant about whole sections of the book. A physicist reviewing the book might say, “Of coourse, the physics is totally loony, but I was very impressed by the depth of the historical knowledge in the book.” Then a historian would read it and say, “Of course, Velikovsky doesn’t know a damned thing about history, but the physics in the book impressed me greatly…”
11 posts before this one and each of them independently came up with the “historians say… physicists say…” line? Is that a common quote thrown about by Vel’s. detractors?
I seem to remember reading it in one of Sagan’s books – he was a scientist who had been impressed with the historical research, while thinking the science was nonsense, then he ran into a historian who said something along the lines of “the history is of course nonsense, but I was impressed by the science”.
I meant to say:
“11 posts before this one, and three of them…” not “… each of them…”
Yep…
But, as I said above, I came acros two completely different citations which I believe to be independent. I gotta look them up, but if I remember correctly, one of them was Carl sagan (as someone claims above).
This is kind of a “live” issue for me, because I’m doing it. I’m a physicist, bt I’ve ritten a book on th origins of a Greek myth, and I’ve written other articles and given talks at the annual meetings of the Classical Association of New England on these topics. My explanations frequently span physics and mythology, and I am constantly striving to be taken seriously. I’ve caught some flak for this on the Internet, but the fact that I keep getting invited back and keep publishing shows that I have at least a toehold on respectability. My constant refrain is “I am not Velikovsky.” One ay I am not is that my physics is respectable to the physics cmmunity (I also give talks at astronomical meetings, for instance) and my mythology is respectable to folks in the classical community. This is the harder one to maintain, becase I have no formal training in his area. But I think (an hope) I am holding my own.
Nor is Velikovsky the only one. Robert Temple and his “Sirius Mystery” (and now his book “The Crystal Sun”, which covers a respectable subject, but hasn’t, as ar as I know, been reviewed by any respected journal), Graham Hancock. Robert Bauval used to be respectable , invited to Egyptology conferences, and published in their journals, but then he took on with Hancock and, I think, went off the deep end, believing in 10,000+ year old world-girdling civilizations. I’d like to escape the taint of these authors, but I think it’s a long, hard battle.
What I’m interested in is… and this is sketchy memory… the missing 300 years of greek history. Apparently, people made pots in X way, left for 300 years, came back, made the same pots. Greek Dark Ages?
Well, there’s this entry on Wikipedia:
As for the pottery, the examples on display at the Boston Museum of Fine arts show very distinct differences between pre-Dark Age and post Dark Age. So I don’t understand this:
The term “Dark Age” refers to the disappearance of written records over that time. Prior to the Dark Age there was Minoan script, thn it disappears, then afterwards the Greeks started using the Phoenician-based alphabet we’re familiar with. There’s no question about that gap. The questio is why it occurred.
Like most ‘hollow history’ claims, things vanish when examined closely. I’m running off five year old memories, too. I do think I picked the right period to be interested in, despite being wrong about specifics. Why did they go? Where? And how the heck did they come back?
Well, the easiest solution to such problems is to assume that they never went anywhere. Civilization is actually a pretty fragile thing. Something as “simple” as crop failures, plague, or invasions from nearby (so possibly related, but perhaps not as technologically developed) groups could bring down a civilization of modest size (such as the Myceneans) so that there was no longer the major evidence such as buildings and writings, while the people may have held on to lower tech knowledge so that they were able to hoist themselves up, again, after a certain period of time, either by simply scrabbling back up the way they had made it the first time or by getting a slight boost from traders or the next wave of invaders if the next group was, itself, more technologically advanced.
In fact, the Greeks, themselves, attributed the fall of Mycenae to the Dorian invasion. Current scholars often (not always) raise their eyebrows at the possibility that an organized and military society could be overrun by “mere” barbarians, but that presumes that the Dorians did not have a similarly well organized military. It also ignores the possibilities that the Dorian invasion could have been accompained by drought, pestilence, or internal divisions. I agree that it is surprising that the Myceneans abandoned writing, but if the invasions (or whatever) destroyed the centers needed to prepare and preserve scrolls while also detroying the trade that prompted writing to begin with, it is not hard to see how writing could fail along with the building of cities.
Well, as I say, the thing about AIC is that it offers a coherent explanation of some things that no other historians seem to be able to explain, such as:
-who was the “Queen of Sheba”? Some say she was a queen of the Sabaens (modern Yemen) or a queen of the ethiopeans. Velikovsky claims that she was actually Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt.
-where was “Punt”? Speculation ranges from Somalia, to points father couth.
-who was the pharoah of the Exodus? Nobody seems to know.
Again, I am no expert on ancient Egypt. But it seems to me that the ancient Egyptians did quite a bit of documentation, and distances were not great in the ancient world (Palestine is a few days walk from Alexandria). Therefore, at least some of Velikovsky’s work might well be valid.