Velikovsky also posited that Akhenaten had elephantiasis, producing enlarged legs.

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 ).

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

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.

Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt.

As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s.

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.

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.

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.

He wrote a book called In the Beginning ; in the book Velikovsky describes catastrophes which had occurred before those described in his first book, Worlds in Collision.

In 1984 Egyptologist David Lorton produced a detailed critique of chapter 3 of Ages in Chaos, which identifies Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba, e. g. accusing Velikovsky of mistakes which he would have avoided if he had a basic knowledge of the languages of the ancient near east.

Velikovsky put forward the psychoanalytic idea of " Cultural Amnesia " as a mechanism whereby these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.

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, claiming that the histories of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel are five centuries out of step.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Velikovsky devoted a great deal of his time and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and he continued to tour North America and Europe to deliver lectures on his ideas.

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.

* 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.

Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy.

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.

Earlier, Henry Bauer challenged the traditional view that the Velikovsky Affair illustrated the resistance of scientists to new ideas by pointing out " the nature and validity of Velikovsky's claims must be considered before one decides that the Affair can illuminate the reception of new ideas in science ..."

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.

Velikovsky used this to explain the biblical plagues of Egypt, the biblical reference to the " Sun standing still " for a day ( Joshua 10: 12 & 13, explained by changes in Earth's rotation ), and the sinking of Atlantis.

Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained an enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment for Velikovsky by orthodox academia.

Upon taking his medical degree, Velikovsky left Russia for Berlin.

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.

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

Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious.

Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation.

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 ".

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.

" In his case studies, for example, " with the Velikovsky affair, there is much more rhetoric than substance.

He is best known as a defender of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky and for his numerological theories about the dimensions of the Great Pyramids.

It was first formulated between the years 1978 and 1982 by a working group following the Glasgow Conference of Society for Interdisciplinary Studies ( SIS, a non-profit organization advocating serious academic analysis of the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and other catastrophists ).

Worlds of Their Own — A Brief History of Misguided Ideas: Creationism, Flat-Earthism, Energy Scams, and the Velikovsky Affair, Xlibris, ISBN 978-1-4363-0435-1, Part I.

In 1984 fringe science expert Henry H. Bauer wrote Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, which Time described as " the definitive treatise debunking Immanuel Velikovsky ".

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.

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.

Velikovsky claimed that this made him a " suppressed genius ", and he likened himself to Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake.

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.

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.

Similarly to earlier authors such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken, Sitchin advocated hypotheses in which extraterrestrial events supposedly played a significant role in ancient human history.

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.

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.

Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of these events, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can be global in scale.

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.