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Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky526 West 113 Street, New York 25

May 13, 1949

Dear Professor Pfeiffer:
The letter that I mailed to you last Friday was returned to me by the postman: I enclose it here. In the meantime Mr. J. Putnam of Macmillan told me in a telephone conversation that he received “a rather negative” report from you, but when he came to see me yesterday and gave me a copy of your report, I did not find it so negative as he did. Therefore I offered Mr. Putnam to write to you and to ask you to point him whether there is any subject in my reconstruction which you would be able to confront with archaeological facts so as to disprove my scheme. Until now neither you nor anybody else was able to do with my scheme as I did with the conventional chronology pointing, for instance, to Ramses III’s tiles bearing Greek letters of the fourth century incised before being placed in the furnace, to give one example out of a few hundreds in my manuscript. How short an historian would deal with me could he show in my scheme similar facts?
It is actually on the collation of historical texts, first, and on archaeological material, second, that I prove my scheme and disprove the conventional scheme. In the third place are the objects of art, your suggestion in 1942. I have used only very few philological parallels or revisions of the scriptural texts, since I know that these have mostly only controversial value. If it is, therefore, that the difficulty to accept my reconstruction is of psychological nature, then it must be less strong now than in 1942, because since then the conventional chronology is shaken.
Science is not a discipline if unchanging dogmas, neither of feelings and habits, but of reason and facts. My book must be rejected or accepted on basis of historical texts or archaeological facts.
I thank you again for the task of reading the entire work with the chapters added and for the flattering remarks. If my work, has even only a small chance of becoming a classic, as you put it in your letter, it deserved the time you gave to it in the past and again now revising it for Macmillan; this is my only excuse for bringing you again and again into the orbit of my “reconstruction of ancient history” and for asking you to help me to see the book published.

Very sincerely yours,

Immanuel Velikovsky

Postscript.
I finished now our telephone conversation and I am grateful to you for all your efforts to make my ancient history accessible for every scholar by being printed.
I think that Macmillan will make up their mind if they will realize that in your belief, as you wrote to me occasionally,
  1. the conventional chronology is shaken by new finds in Mesopotamia and a reconstruction of chronology and history is due,
  2. that some of my arguments are well built and that your expression of “being left bewildered” refers to this,
  3. that in my reconstruction no statement was found which could be easily disproved by archaeological facts or by collation of texts and that it is not a series of unrelated arguments but a planned and consistently followed scheme
  4. that the scientific world must judge my book and not another single scholar. Therefore it must be printed.
[signed] Im. V.


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