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.

While he agrees that the Exodus should be dated to the collapse of the Middle Kingdom, and that Tutimaios is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, there are few points of contact between the Velikovsky and Rohl chronologies, largely because of the different methodologies used to resolve the later periods.

Courville used a different methodology than Velikovsky.

* To explain the celestial mechanics necessary to permit these changes to the configuration of the solar system, Velikovsky thought that electromagnetic forces might somehow play a greater role to counteract gravity and orbital mechanics.

A number of scholars, including Charles Beke, Sigmund Freud, and Immanuel Velikovsky, have proposed that the biblical description of devouring fire on Mount Sinai refers to an erupting volcano ; this possibility would exclude all the peaks on the Sinai Peninsula and Mount Seir, but would match a number of locations in north western Saudi Arabia, of which Hala -' l Badr is the most prominent.

Courville lowered the era of the Hyksos to a period after the Exodus and, like Velikovsky and David Rohl, identified them with the biblical Amalekites.

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 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.

Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries ( a scheme he called the Revised Chronology ), placing The Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

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.

Velikovsky carried his revisionism into the Late Period of ancient Egypt, and considered that chronology only becomes fixed by the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE.

Unlike Velikovsky, Courville examined the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt.

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.

* 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.

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 ".

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

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

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

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.

By that time, an elderly Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, which his daughter said may have been exacerbated by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work.

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.

) A volume of Velikovsky's discussions and correspondence with Albert Einstein appeared in Hebrew in Israel, translated and edited by his daughter Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan.

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

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.

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.

" A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky.

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.

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.

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

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 ..."

The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century ; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair.