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 IIIs 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,
-
the conventional chronology is shaken by new finds
in Mesopotamia and a reconstruction of chronology and history
is due,
- that some of my arguments
are well built and that your expression of being left bewildered
refers to this,
-
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
-
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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