The Restoration of Ancient History is a paper delivered in November 1994 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bremen in Germany, at a symposium in Portland, Oregon. This paper questions the conventional chronology of ancient history and offers in its place a radical reconstruction—the so-called Short Chronology, of which Heinsohn is the principal architect. In this series of articles, we have been taking a closer look at the evidence cited in this paper in favour of Heinsohn’s new chronological model. In this, the final article in the series, we will summarize what we have learned.
Gunnar Heinsohn is a catastrophist, who began his investigations into the chronology of the ancient world as a disciple of Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky did much to reinvigorate both fields—catastrophism and ancient chronology—but his reconstruction of ancient history, radical though it was, was not nearly radical enough for Heinsohn. For the most part, Velikovsky’s model—which he documented in a series of books known collectively as Ages in Chaos—is consistent with the chronology of the Bible as interpreted by James Ussher:
The Exodus took place around 1447 BCE at the end of the Middle Kingdom, when Egypt was being invaded by the Hyksos.
The Conquest of Canaan by Joshua took place fifty-two years later, around 1395 BCE.
The Period of the Judges and the Hyksos Kingdom in Egypt lasted about 400 years.
Saul reigned as King of Israel around 1020-1000 BCE, followed by the forty-year reigns of David and Solomon.
The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah flourished from around 930 BCE until 721 (Israel) and 586 (Judah).
The Conventional Chronology of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires is more or less correct.
In a later work, In the Beginning, which was never published in his lifetime, Velikovsky speculated about catastrophes of earlier epochs:
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah took place in historical times, according to my scheme in a catastrophe which caused also the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt ... Abraham lived at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (In the Beginning, The Overthrow of the Cities of the Plain, Zedek)
Velikovsky broke new ground in radically altering the way in which certain Near Eastern civilizations were aligned with his Biblical framework. Dating the Expulsion of the Hyksos and the beginning of the New Kingdom to the time of Saul necessitated the shifting of many of the later Egyptian dynasties by several centuries. The chronology of Mycenaean Greece and Minoan Crete were also radically affected. And the history of the Mitannians and the Hittites were reinterpreted. The former were identified with the Medes and the latter with the Neo-Chaldaeans. On the other hand, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Chaldaean chronology was hardly altered at all. And Velikovsky had no problem with dating the rise of civilization in Dynastic Egypt and Sumerian Mesopotamia to the third or fourth millennium BCE. His revised chronology is clearly Bible-based.
Initially, Heinsohn set out as a disciple of Velikovsky and accepted much of the Russian scholar’s new chronology. This is reflected in his 1988 book Die Sumerer gab es nicht. Subsequently, however, Heinsohn and his followers—most notably Emmet Sweeney, Charles Ginenthal and Lynn E Rose—went so far beyond Velikovsky that the latter, in my opinion, would have denounced them for betraying his vision. Heinsohn has now come to reject the Biblical framework as unsound, and he has no confidence at all in archaeoastronomy as a tool to date the past. Instead, he claims that his chronological model is based purely on stratigraphy. He is particularly critical of the penchant of mainstream archaeologists to postulate gaps or hiatuses—“Dark Ages”— in the stratigraphical record in order to synchronize the various timelines.
Heinsohn believes that civilization rose from the ashes of a global catastrophe much more recently than anyone ever imagined—perhaps as recently as 1150 BCE. Around this time, the earliest stirrings of civilization emerged more or less simultaneously in different parts of the world:
Chaldaean (ie Sumerian) city states in southern Mesopotamia
The First Dynasty in Egypt
The Indus-Valley Civilization in India
The Shang Dynasty in China
The Olmecs in Mesoamerica
To these we might add the Norte Chico Civilization of ancient Peru, though Heinsohn does not mention it in any of his writings. The focus of his investigations lies in Mesopotamia, where stratigraphy has achieved its most far-reaching results. Heinsohn recognizes four periods in the history of Mesopotamia before the conquests of Alexander the Great:
| Dates BCE | Upper Mesopotamia | Lower Mesopotamia |
|---|---|---|
| 540-330 | Persian Empire | Persian Empire |
| 620-540 | Empire of the Medes | Second Chaldaeans |
| 750-620 | Assyrian Empire | Assyrian Empire and Scythians |
| 1150-750 | Early Assyrians | First Chaldaeans |
Like Velikovsky, Heinsohn’s reconstruction has forced him to make radical alterations in the way we interpret the past:
The Neo-Assyrian Emperors are now the Persian Emperors, misdated and hence misidentified.
Mitanni is identified with Media, just as Velikovsky first surmised.
The Chaldaeans of the ancient historians are identified with the Sumerians of the modern archaeologists.
The Hittites are identified with the ancient Cappadocians.
The Neo-Chaldaeans (Neo-Babylonians) are identified with the Neo-Sumerians.
Having worked out a new chronological framework for the Near East, Heinsohn proceeded to fit the histories of other civilizations—Asiatic, European, American—within this time frame.
Heinsohn’s Disciples
Just as Heinsohn altered what he found in Velikovsky, so other catastrophists have altered what they found in Heinsohn.
Emmet J Sweeney is currently one of the most active of Heinsohn’s disciples. But Sweeney has modified Heinsohn’s model in a number of significant ways. Heinsohn, for example, identified the Kings of Mitanni with the Emperors of the Medes, the Neo-Assyrian Emperors with the Persian Emperors, and the Neo-Babylonian or Neo-Chaldaean Empire with the Neo-Sumerians. Sweeney, however, identifies the first few Neo-Assyrian Emperors with the last few Emperors of the Medes, the remaining Neo-Assyrian Emperors with the early Persian Emperors, and the Neo-Babylonian Emperors with the late Persian Emperors. Sweeney makes a clear distinction between the Neo-Babylonians (Late Persians) and the Neo-Chaldaeans (Neo-Sumerians). Sweeney has also criticized Heinsohn’s identification of the First Dynasty of Babylon (the Old Babylonians) with the Persian Empire, which he regards as a breach of Heinsohn’s fundamental Principle of Stratigraphy. Instead, Sweeney has identified this Dynasty with the Scythians who ruled Lower Mesopotamia after the Fall of Assyria, while the Medes were in power in Upper Mesopotamia.
Charles Ginenthal and Lynn E Rose, both of whom are now deceased, were also keen supporters of Heinsohn. But, like Sweeney, they too took issue with some of his theories. For example, Heinsohn is an advocate of the work of the German catastrophist Heribert Illig, who has hypothesized that the 297 years between 614 and 911 CE are “phantom years”—they never existed. Heinsohn defends this by claiming that the archaeological strata required for these centuries don’t exist. Ginenthal and Rose, however, believed that these strata are not missing, they have simply been misdated and misidentified:
At this point we are brought to other revisionist chronologies regarding these times. Heribert Illig hypothesizes that three centuries, A.D. 614–911 never existed. Anatoly Fomenko’s theory holds that historical chronology does not come into being until around A.D. 1100–1200. Both Heinsohn and Sweeney are proponents of Illig’s missing three centuries, while Sweeney places the building of Stonehenge and the Megalithic Age in the early first millennium B.C ... (Ginenthal 486)
Those who have been following us in the volumes of Pillars of the Past will understand that the absence of archaeological strata for the post-Roman/Medieval epoch must be filled by the people who left archaeological evidence in these same places but who were erroneously assigned to the Late Neolithic, Bronze and even Early Iron Ages. In this case, although Gunnar Heinsohn disagrees with our chronology, our analysis is typically developed along the lines he pioneered several decades ago. That is, all the missing strata from around A.D. 500/600 to 950, are the strata given to the Megalithic Age, dated to prehistoric times. (Ginenthal 210)
As far as ancient history is concerned, however, Ginenthal and Rose’s chronology is broadly in line with Heinsohn’s. They differ from both Heinsohn and Sweeney in their timeline of Israelite history, and in their understanding of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Both are strong advocates of archaeoastronomy and this has coloured their chronology.
Ireland and Britain
For the most part, Heinsohn has restricted himself to the great civilizations of the past: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus-Valley, China, Mycenaean Greece, Minoan Crete, etc. A few years ago, however, after I had become convinced that some model of the Short Chronology was correct, I wondered what the implications were for the ancient history of my own country, Ireland, and its sister isle, Britain. The implications, it transpired, were profound. If the Short Chronology is an accurate model of the timeline of recent human civilization, then the prehistory of Ireland and Britain must be radically rewritten.
This is something I have been trying to do over the past few years, documenting my findings in numerous articles on my Hive blog. When applied to Ireland, the Short Chronology requires us to redate and reinterpret most of the discoveries of the archaeologists. The Conventional Chronology and the working model of the Short Chronology that I have tentatively proposed as a substitute are compared in the following table:
| BCE | Conventional Chronology | Short Chronology | BCE |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7500 | Mesolithic Hunter Gatherers | Priteni Celts | 750 |
| 4500 | Neolithic Farmers | Bolgic Celts (Belgae or Fir Bolg) | 450 |
| 2500 | Bronze Age | Laginian or Dumnonian Celts (Laigin, Fir Domnann and Gálioin) | 250 |
| 500 | Iron Age | Goidelic Celts (Gaeil or Milesians) | 50 |
As can be seen, the conventional timeline of Irish prehistory is about ten times as long as the short timeline. The Short Chronology, however, solves several problems that have bedevilled the preshistory of this part of the world for decades:
The so-called Celtic Problem is the anomaly that the ancient Irish and Britons were clearly Celts—they spoke Celtic languages—but according to archaeologists, there is little or no archaeological evidence of any Celtic invasions of Ireland or Britain. It is as though the Celtic languages diffused to these islands, supplanting the pre-Celtic languages of the native inhabitants. But this is ludicrous. If we adopt the Short Chronology, however, then there is an abundance of evidence of multiple Celtic invasions, just as our myths and legends have recorded. This evidence, however, has been grossly misdated and attributed to fictional pre-Celtic cultures that are never mentioned in any of our native records.
If the conventional chronology is correct, then Ireland and Britain were inhabited continuously by pre-Celtic and pre-Indo-European people for at least 5,000 years before any Celtic languages could possibly have been spoken here. It stands to reason that these early inhabitants would have named every feature of the landscape: every river, every lake, every mountain, every headland, every inlet. Even the islands of Ireland and Britain must have acquired pre-Celtic names. But today not a single pre-Celtic toponym has been preserved in these islands. Every placename is either Celtic or post-Celtic. This is an impossible state of affairs. Everywhere else in the world where a land was conquered by foreign invaders, the newcomers adopted or adapted many of the native placenames. Why did this not happen in Ireland or Britain? The simple answer is that the first post-glacial settlers of these islands—the so-called Mesolithic hunter-gatherers—were Celts. And for about a millennium, Ireland and Britain continued to be colonized by Celtic peoples. These early settlers did bestow names on every part of the landscape—Celtic names.
Why do our native records—eg The Book of Invasions—know nothing of any pre-Celtic peoples? Why do they attribute our megalithic monuments to Celtic tribes—monuments that were allegedly built by Neolithic farmers thousands of years before any Celt set foot on the island? Why is there such a huge disconnect between what the archaeologists tell us of the prehistory of our country and what our native records tell us?
This is a field that I intend to investigate further. There are still many unanswered questions. Charles Ginenthal’s theory that the archaeology of the Dark Ages (614-911 CE) has been misdated by the archaeologists and misidentified as Neolithic, Bronze Age, and even Iron Age remains may be true as far as mainland Europe is concerned, but it is incompatible with my model of Irish prehistory. I have redated these three periods, but they are still firmly anchored in the pre-Christian era. Has the Dark Age archaeology of Ireland been found? And what of Britain? How does our sister isle fit into my scheme?
These are subjects that need to be thoroughly investigated, but currently I seem to be the only one interested in doing so. Perhaps one day my efforts will be rewarded. As I write these words, Gunnar Heinsohn is 78 years old and is still widely regarded as a crank—so I’m in good company.
And that’s a good place to end.
References
- Charles Ginenthal, Pillars of the Past, Volume 4, Forest Hills, NY (2012)
- Gunnar Heinsohn, Catastrophism, Revisionism, and Velikovsky, in Lewis M Greenberg (editor), Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis, Volume 11, Number 1, Kronos Press, Deerfield Beach, FL (1985)
- Gunnar Heinsohn, The Restoration of Ancient History, Mikamar Publishing, Portland, OR (1994)
- Gunnar Heinsohn, Die Sumerer gab es nicht [The Sumerians Never Existed], Frankfurt (1988)
- Gunnar Heinsohn, Heribert Illig, Wann lebten die Pharaonen? [When Did the Pharaohs Live?], Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt (1990)
- Gunnar Heinsohn, M Eichborn, Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht? [How Old Is Mankind?], Mantis Verlag, Gräfelfing, Munich (1996)
- Emmet Sweeney, The Ramessides, Medes, and Persians, Ages in Alignment, Volume 4, Algora Publishing, New York (2008)
- Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, Victor Gollancz Limited, London (1951)
- Immanuel Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time, Paradigma, Online (2010)
Image Credits
- Gunnar Heinsohn: © Freud, Creative Commons License
- Immanuel Velikovsky in 1974: Wikimedia Commons, Donna Foster Roizen (photographer), © Frederic Jueneman, Creative Commons License
- Emmet Sweeney: © Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), Fair Use
- Charles Ginenthal: © Dwardu Cardona, Fair Use
- Lynn E Rose: © The Velikovsky Encyclopedia, Fair Use
- Knowth Megalithic Complex: Celtic or Pre-Celtic?: © 2017-2021 Mythical Ireland & Anthony Murphy, Fair Use
Online Resources
