For instance, pseudoarchaeologist Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that the myths of migrations and war gods in the Central American Aztec civilisation represented a cosmic catastrophe that occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE.

This was criticised by academic archaeologist William H. Stiebing Jr., who noted that such myths only developed in the 12th to the 14th centuries CE, over a millennium after Velikovsky claimed that the events had occurred, and that the Aztec society itself had not even developed by the 7th century BCE.

Velikovsky had put forward his ideas briefly in Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History in 1945, where he claimed that the history of the ancient Near East down to the time of Alexander the Great is garbled, but Ages in Chaos was his first full-length work on the subject.

In order to make these identifications work, Velikovsky claimed that the Hittite Empire was an invention of modern historians, and the supposedly Hittite archaeological remains in modern Turkey were actually Chaldean, i. e. Neo-Babylonian.

In 1960, Immanuel Velikovsky ( 1895 – 1979 ) published a book called Oedipus and Akhnaton which made a comparison between the stories of the legendary Greek figure, Oedipus, and the historic Egyptian King of Thebes, Akhnaton.

Another claim was made by Immanuel Velikovsky, who hypothesized an incestuous relationship with his mother, Tiye.

This came to the attention of Shapley, who opposed the publication of the work, having been made familiar with Velikovsky's claims through the pamphlet Velikovsky had given him.

Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters ( particularly the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley ), that some commentators have made an analysis of the conflict itself.

In the same 1960 work, Oedipus and Akhnaton, Velikovsky not only saw Akhenaten as the origin of Oedipus, but also identified him with a Pharaoh mentioned only in Herodotus, " Anysis of the city of the same name " — Akhenaten of Akhetaten.

In his book Ages in Chaos, Immanuel Velikovsky identified him with Thutmose III.

While James credits Velikovsky with " point the way to a solution by challenging Egyptian chronology ", he severely criticised the contents of Velikovsky's chronology as " disastrously extreme ", producing " a rash of new problems far more severe than those it hoped to solve " and claiming that " Velikovsky understood little of archaeology and nothing of stratigraphy.

Chapter 7 in Broca's Brain, " Venus and Dr. Velikovsky ", is a corrected and slightly revised version of " An Analysis of Worlds in Collision ," which originally appeared in Scientists Confront Velikovsky.

James, another Glasgow delegate who went on to publish a work challenging the concept of a widespread dark age at the end of the Bronze Age, credited Velikovsky with " point the way to a solution by challenging Egyptian chronology ", but criticised Velikovsky's chronology as " disastrously extreme ", producing " a rash of new problems far more severe than those it hoped to solve " and noted that " Velikovsky understood little of archaeology and nothing of stratigraphy ".

Velikovsky relates in his book Stargazers & Gravediggers how he tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone.

By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific session to Velikovsky, featuring ( among others ) Velikovsky himself and Professor Carl Sagan.

For many years, Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan ( b. 1925 ), and Ruth Ruhama Velikovsky Sharon ( b. 1926 ), who generally resisted the publication of any further material.

* The work of Peter James who in part built on and revised the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky

Abell was also passionate about debunking pseudoscientific claims such as those by Immanuel Velikovsky.

Immanuel Velikovsky () ( 17 November 1979 ) was a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist and independent scholar, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950.

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russia ( now in Belarus ).

The son of Shimon ( Simon Yehiel ) Velikovsky ( 1859 – 1937 ) and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow, where he performed well in Russian and mathematics.

Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry and psychoanalysis ( which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna ).

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses.

In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary by the BBC in 1973.

( Exceptions include the biography ABA — the Glory and the Torment: The Life of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, issued in 1995 and greeted with rather dubious reviews ; and a Hebrew translation of another Ages in Chaos volume, The Dark Age of Greece, that was published in Israel.

Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this.

The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, in particular, Egypt.

* There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record ( here Velikovsky was advocating Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions ) and archeological record.

Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed.

This was followed by Oedipus and Akhnaton, Peoples of the Sea and Rameses II and His Time, and two further works that were unpublished at the time of his death but that are now available online at the Velikovsky Archive: The Assyrian Conquest and The Dark Ages of Greece.

The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies ( SIS ) was " formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky ".

Velikovsky was almost certainly correct in his assertion that ancient texts hold clues to catastrophic events in the relatively recent past, within the span of human civilization, which involve the effects of comets, meteorites and cometary dust.

Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs ' attack.

The most prominent of these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair.

Although Hörbiger's theories have much in common with those of Immanuel Velikovsky ( parallels between the two were drawn by Martin Gardner in Chapter Three of his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science ), the scientific community had a much calmer reaction to Hörbiger's theories than to Velikovsky's, and his publisher was never boycotted.

Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.

In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website.

Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any one area, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences.

C. Leroy Ellenberger with Immanuel Velikovsky at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in 1978.

The late Stephen Jay Gould offered a synopsis of the mainstream response to Velikovsky, writing, " Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan — although, to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong ... Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends.

Sagan's arguments were aimed at a popular audience and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky's followers to attempt to discredit his analysis.

Earlier in 1974, James Fitton published a brief critique of Velikovsky's interpretation of myth ( ignored by Velikovsky and his defenders ), whose indictment began: " In at least three important ways Velikovsky's use of mythology is unsound.

Bauer accuses Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting interpretations which are at best possible, and gives several examples from Ages in Chaos.

Rejecting the Revised Chronology of Immanuel Velikovsky and the Glasgow Chronology presented at the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies's 1978 " Ages in Chaos " conference, the New Chronology lowers the Egyptian dates ( established within the traditional chronology ) by up to 350 years at points prior to the universally accepted fixed date of 664 BC for the sacking of Thebes by Ashurbanipal.

At the time of his death he considered that completing his reconstruction of ancient history would require a further two volumes: The Assyrian Conquest and The Dark Age of Greece ; these were never published in print in English, but online versions are available at the Velikovsky archive.

Bauer accused Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting his own point of view to be correct, where at best this is only one possible interpretation of the historical material in question, and gives several examples from Ages in Chaos.