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Ages in Chaos is a book by the controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky, first published by Doubleday in 1952, which put forward a major revision of the history of the Ancient Near East. A second volume was due for publication shortly after this but was postponed and expanded into four volumes, two of which (Peoples of the Sea and Ramses II and his time) were published in the two years proceeding his death, and two of which remain unpublished in print (The Assyrian Conquest and The Dark Age of Greece)—however the manuscripts have long been available via the http://www.varchive.org site.
Velikovsky claimed in this book that the histories of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel are five centuries out of step. He began by claiming that the Exodus took place not, as orthodoxy has it, at some point during the New Kingdom, but at the fall of the Middle Kingdom. He identifies the Hyksos with the Biblical Amalekites, the Biblical Queen of Sheba with the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, the Biblical Shishak king of Egypt with Pharaoh Thutmose III, and claims that the Egyptian Amarna letters from the late 18th Dynasty describe events from the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, roughly the time of King Ahab.
Critique
Several criticisms could be levelled at Velikovsky's work.
His view that the Hittite Empire is simply an invention of modern historians, and that the supposedly Hittite archaeological remains in modern Turkey are actually Chaldean (i.e. neo-Babylonian) appears extremely problematic, and he only began to address the problems here in his fourth work on ancient history, Rameses II and his Time.
Although most of the theories presented in Ages in Chaos are considered quite unacceptable by most scholars, some of the ideas have been confirmed by independent research by notable scholars. For example, his hypothesis that the Ipuwer Papyrus belongs not in the First Intermediate Period but rather in the Second Intermediate Period of ancient Egyptian history was confirmed in 1966 by John Van Seters in The Hyksos: A New Investigation. Van Seters' analysis was based on sound linguistic criteria and has never been refuted. His conclusions were reached quite independently of Ages in Chaos. Van Seters was probably not even aware of Velikovsky's work.
Other chronological revisions inspired by Velikovsky
The controversy over the chronology of Ancient Egypt has not entirely gone away. The Egyptologist David Rohl has put forward his own revised chronology; Peter James has also put forward a revised chronology similar though not quite identical to Rohl's in Centuries of Darkness. Although they share some common ground with Velikovsky in terms of their criticisms of the orthodox chronology there are some important differences. In particular, these recent revisionists consider that the chronology of the Ancient Near East becomes "fixed" with the conquests of the Assyrians in the 7th century BCE, i.e. at this point the history of the Ancient Near East becomes sufficiently well established that the orthodox view cannot be questioned. Velikovsky would have disagreed, he carried his revisionism down into the Late Period in Ancient Egyptian history, and considered that the history of the Ancient Near East only becomes "fixed" with the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE.
External links
"Ages in Chaos"