Page "Immanuel Velikovsky" Paragraph 7

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton.

The book was inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism and explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhenaton was the legendary Oedipus.

Freud had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in the desert.

Freud's claim ( and that of others before him ) was based in part on the resemblance of Psalm 104 in the Bible to an Egyptian hymn discovered on the wall of the Tomb of Akhenaton's general, Ai, in Akhenaton's city of Akhetaten.

To disprove Freud's claim and to prove the Exodus as such, Velikovsky sought evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian documents.

One such document was the Ipuwer Papyrus, which he felt reported events similar to several of the Biblical plagues.

Since conventional Egyptology dated the Ipuwer Papyrus much earlier than either the Biblical date for the Exodus ( ca.

1500 — 1450 BCE ) or the Exodus date accepted by many of those who accepted the conventional chronology of Egypt ( ca.

1250 BCE ), Velikovsky had to revise or correct the conventional chronology.