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19. 12. 74


Dear Dr. Velikovsky!

I hope this letter finds you in good health. I had your letter from July 3, where you wrote that you had this Symposium at the Master University Hamilton in spite of a bout of viral pneumonia. How are things now? I had no time yet to read the report in Pensée, Summer 1974. However, I would like to report on Isaacson (Fall 1974).

It seems to me that the Dark Ages find a very sordid explanation in Manetho’s hostile pen. It was not merely a slip of the pen, what made him write Jerusalem instead of Sharuhen. Neither is the unreliability of his Egyptian king lists solely due to “a late, careless and uncritical compilation” . Manetho was very much concerned to identify the Jews with the Hyksos. He made the Hyksos invasion far in time before the Exodus. His aim, conscious or unconscious, was to incriminate the Jews with the guilt for the obnoxious occupation of Egypt between the two kingdoms. Had he acquiesced with the entrance of the shepherds at the moment the Jews left Egypt, then the Jews could not have been the Hyksos (s. your chapter “The Israelites meet the Hyksos” ).

As you know Manetho instilled into the heads of his readers very defaming ideas about the Jews. He wrote that Moses was a leper who made bad laws. Being never very scrupulous in his time-table and in the logic of his claims he further stated: “... that the regime of the Shepherds seemed like a golden age to those who beheld the impieties of their [Egypt’s ] present enemies [the Solomites with the polluted Egyptians]” (Ag. Ap., I, 248).

In my opinion it is an obsessional force which prevents scholars to lower the Egyptian dates for the required 500-700 years, in spite of all the explicit evidence to the contrary (archaeological and historical). Stiebing is begging the question of the chronology of the Bronce and Iron Ages, by granting dates which should be proven. And he is very quick to state that the “Admonitions of Ipuwer” [...] “could not have been contemporaneous with the Exodus and could not have described a cosmic cataclysm which supposedly occurred at the time of Moses. Again he relies on archaeological evidence based on the king lists produced by Manetho’s hostile pen. Why should Stiebing be so concerned to establish “that the beginning of the Hyksos period in Egypt cannot be equated with the time of Moses” ?

It appears that the “gloom of the Dark Ages of the ancient world” is just the projection of the present state of things in our world. The obsessional fear which forces mankind to project its destructive guilt feelings on the Jews can be explained by the dislike of the Law and the inherent catastrophic consequences.

With many kind regards, also to Mrs. Velikovsky,
Yours sincerely Rix