Immanuel Velikovsky: Right Identification of Philistines, Wrong Era



More Genealogical and Art-Historical Anomalies

On a genealogical note, Donovan Courville has made a telling point in regard to what had appeared to be the following severe genealogical problem with the current chronological setting of Ramses III in relation to the early 19^th dynasty: [1]

 

The case of Bokenkonsu, the architect under Seti I, presents another anomaly, by current views, which is eliminated by the altered placements …. Bokenkonsu lived to have his statue carved under Rameses III …. By current views, Bokenkonsu must have lived at least to an age of 118 years … even if the “many years” of the Harris Papyrus are limited to the brief reign of Siptah as proposed by Petrie. The more time that is allotted to this “many years” only makes the necessary age of Bokenkonsu more and more improbable.

 

Bierbrier had also included treatment of Bokenkonsu and his family amongst his case studies (“The Bakenkhons Family”[2]. And here, once again, we encounter the apparently extreme age of an Egyptian official even when minimal conventional date estimates are used. There is no stretch at all, though, with my arrangement that has Ramses III a slightly later contemporary of Seti I.

But what might appear to be a significant difficulty for the conventional chronology becomes a complete impossibility in Velikovsky’s context, as already argued.

More positively for Velikovsky, both he[3]and Courville [4]had rightly insisted upon a dating much later than that conventionally given for Ramses III on the basis of Greek writing on the backs of Ramses III’s building tiles.

I take here Courville’s very brief account of it, beginning with his quoting of Petrie:

 

“… A subject of much difficulty in the earlier accounts of the objects was the marking of “Greek letters” on the backs of many of the tiles; but as we know that such signs were used long before the XXth dynasty, they only show that foreigners were employed as workmen in making these tiles”.

About which Courville then commented: [5]“The difficulty with this explanation is that it does not explain the use of Greek letters centuries before the Greeks adopted the alphabet …. Hence the dating of Rameses III in the 11^th century is a gross anachronism”. With Ramses III re-located to about the mid C8th BC though - and given also the influx during his reign of ‘Sea Peoples’, likely including Greeks - then the ‘anachronism’ readily dissolves.

Velikovsky had brought some surprising evidence in support of his sensational view that Ramses III had actually belonged as late as the Persian period, with his identification of the Peleset arm of the ‘Sea Peoples’ - generally considered to indicate Philistines - as Persians. [6]This Velikovsky did through comparisons between the Peleset, as shown on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu reliefs, and depictions of Persians for instance at Persepolis, both revealing a distinctive crown-like headgear. And he also compared Ramses III’s references to the Peleset to the naming of Persians as P-r-s-tt (Pereset) in the C3rd BC Decree of Canopus.

Our explanation though for this undeniable similarity would be, not that Ramses III had belonged to the classical Persian era, but that the ‘Indo-European’ Persians were related to the waves of immigrants, hence to the Mitannians (who may therefore connect with the Medes), but perhaps to the Philistines in particular. These ‘Indo Europeans’ had gradually progressed from Anatolia in a south-easterly direction. Eventually we find for instance Kurigalzu [II], set up on the throne of Babylon by the ‘Mitannian’ Assuruballit, conquering Elam (Persia) and ruling there for a time.[7]

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[1] Ibid, p. 307.

[2] Op. cit, pp. 2-5.

[3]Peoples of the Sea, pp. 7-13.

[4]The Exodus Problem, p. 307.

[5] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[6]Peoples of the Sea, ch. II: “Persians and Greeks Invade Egypt”.

[7]Cf. M. van de Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 171; G. Roux’s Ancient Iraq, pp. 257, 260, 262.