Brief aan B.Curnock

In september 2024 stuurde ik een brief aan Barry Curnock, contributor of the C&C-review, magazine of the English "Society for Interdisciplinary Studies".

Dear mr Curnock,
I want to thank you for the effort you made in recent years to write the articles in C&C-review, in which you defend the reconstruction of ancient history as proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky.
I appreciate the way you stubbornly defend Velikovsky against those who supported part of Velikovsky's theories, but then came up with other chronologies, that never convinced me. Or against people who could find mistakes in any sentence Velikovsky wrote, and found explanations for names, words or texts different from Velikovsky's explanations.
When I write this, I feel like being a true believer who thanks you for keeping up my faith. I must admit that indeed I hoped that all the criticism and all the alternative chronologies would prove to be wrong. I am not a scientist specialised in ancient history, so I can not decide who is right or who is wrong. Many scientists are convinced Velikovsky is wrong, provided they ever heard about him.
I think Velikovsky must be mainly right, but I am not a believer. When I read Velikovsky's work I am still in doubt, can so many scientist be so fundamentally wrong?
Your articles gave Velikovsky's chronology a bigger credibility and I wonder if there ever comes a time that Science will aknowledge that the Trojan war was in 800 BC, that Tutankamun lived shortly before this time and that Ramses II and Nebuchadnesar are contemporary?
Until that day I wait patiently.
Henk Spaan.


Barry Curnock answered


Henk,
Thank you for your kind email.
I originally read the 'Ages in Chaos' series in the 1970s and thought the arguments were convincing.
However, in the 1990s I read 'A Test of Time' and 'Centuries of Darkness' and these made me question Velikovsky's reconstruction of Ancient History. Being an engineer, I tried to find a stringent test of Velikovsky's reconstruction. I knew that 'Rameses II and his Time' was the main reason Rohl and James had moved away from Velikovsky, so any test I devised had to test that book.
Over the years, I had studied the Hittites in some detail and this led me to realise that the Hittites could be the test. If Rameses II lived in the seventh and sixth centuries, then the whole of the history of the Hittites had to support the dating of Muwatalli II and Hattusili III to the same time. I was very surprised to find that every part of Hittite history and archaeology supported the late dating. In fact, the re-dating solved a host of anomalies.
Like you, I wonder if some day historians will be forced to consider a re-think, but it would probably need an inexplicable find to make that happen - maybe a treaty between Suppiluliuma I and Ashurbanipal listing several of their predecessors!
Regards, Barry