Queries & Comments

010

Velikovsky Supporters Pounce on Sagan

To the Editor:

Any reader who hoped that BAR would someday give serious attention to the reconstruction of ancient history proposed by Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky must have been sorely disappointed by the Jan./Feb. 1980 issue (“A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision,’” BAR 06:01, by Carl Sagan). Instead of a responsible critique, BAR merely offered excerpts from a 1974 speech by popular author Carl Sagan, reprinted now for the fifth time with minor changes but, as always, without cognizance of the rebuttal literature published in the journal KRONOS, “Velikovsky and Establishment Science” (1977) and “Scientists Confront Scientists Who Confront Velikovsky” (1978) and the pamphlet Velikovsky and his Critics (1978). Sagan’s arguments do not survive critical scrutiny. The merest sampling of the errors permeating Sagan’s article follows.

How can anyone take seriously someone whose polemical approach is to confuse and misrepresent a work of deep scholarship and then scoff at his own straw men? What are we to make of one who can write “I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. … if even 20 percent of the legendary concordances that Velikovsky produces are real, there is something important to be explained” and on the next page without so much as analyzing a single one of these “stunning” concordances concludes that “we should not be surprised if a few elements of a few legends are coincidentally identical. But I believe that all [Sagan’s italics!] of the concordances Velikovsky produces can be explained away in this manner.” This from one who wrote in three earlier versions that “I do not believe that all of the concordances which Velikovsky produces can be explained away in this manner.”

Particularly regrettable, in the context of BAR, is polemic based on flat ignorance of relevant Biblical material explicitly cited by Velikovsky. We refer, for instance, to the section entitled “Manna,” where Sagan writes “we cannot imagine the debris from the cometary tail falling each day preferentially on the portion of the Wilderness in which the Israelites happened to have wandered” (and goes on to a fantastic calculation according to which, if manna had an extra-terrestrial origin, “the inner solar system should even today be filled with manna”). But the wandering was not random. On the contrary, “Whether by day or night they moved as soon as the cloud lifted. Whether it was for a day or two, for a month or a year, whenever the cloud stayed long over the Tabernacle the Israelites remained where they were and did not move on; they did so only when the cloud lifted” (Numbers 9, 21–23).

The unsuspecting reader would get the impression that manna was in fact the invention of an old Jewish storyteller, and that Velikovsky believes it arrived readymade from the tail of a comet. But Velikovsky makes very clear that the description of a heaven-descended food that nourished survivors of a catastrophe of fire and darkness, and which precipitated as frost and dew from low-lying clouds, is found in the traditions of New Zealand, Finland, India, Iceland and Greece, as well as the Near East. And Velikovsky likewise explains that manna was produced in the Earth’s atmosphere by “a process of conversion of hydrocarbons, in the cloud envelope that enshrouded the earth, into edible (carbohydrate or protein-like) substances.” The product of a similar, if not identical, process of conversion of petroleum into concentrated nutrition, is today sold in food stores everywhere as “primary-grown torula yeast.”

Apart from the issue of the correctness of Velikovsky’s work, most of Sagan’s polemic is superficial and irrelevant in addition to being wrong. Contrary to Sagan’s allegations, for example, there never was a plague of scarabs and Velikovsky never said so. Hebrew dwellings did not survive the earthquakes. Hebrews did not escape drowning at the Red Sea. The catastrophes did not involve grazing collisions. “Collective amnesia” has nothing to do with explaining missing concordances as Sagan says. On the contrary, it characterizes the subsequent reinterpretation of explicit descriptions of catastrophes as metaphors or allegories. Mistakes such as these are not the result of serious analysis. These misrepresentations are symptomatic of Sagan’s entire approach to Worlds in Collision.

Many factual statements, as well, are flatly wrong. For example, Sagan writes that geomagnetic “reversals occur about every million years, and not in the last few thousands”. However, Etruscan vases of the 8th century B.C. were found to have been fired under conditions of reversed magnetism. Again, Sagan states “Velikovsky’s contention that mountain building occurred a few thousand years ago is belied by all the geological evidence, which puts those times at tens of millions of years ago and earlier.” But the ruins of the great port city of Tiahuanaco in the Andes with its terraced fields extending above the snow line, more than a mile above the highest altitude at which they could have been when corn was cultivated there, in turn, stand as an embarrassment to the interpretation of geological evidence.

Sagan has a penchant for using big numbers to impugn Velikovsky’s credibility. Sagan’s comparison between the energy required for the ejection of Venus from Jupiter, “on the order of 10⁴¹ ergs,” and the Sun’s annual radiant output is an 011inappropriate analogy. It only shows we are dealing with highly energetic processes which are truly miniscule compared with other stellar processes with which astronomers are very comfortable. Contrary to the impression Sagan seeks to convey, the fissioning of planets is a process not foreign to the astronomical literature.

Saying the odds against Worlds in Collision are “almost 100 billion trillion to 1” is meaningless because the odds against a unique historical event are irrelevant. All they amount to are Sagan’s prejudices dressed up in a spurious numerical precision. Granting the calculation for the sake of argument, if it were based on a more realistic approach distance of, say, 100 Earth radii instead of crustal contact, the odds would be reduced over 20 orders of magnitude to only 243 to one. However, Sagan’s entire procedure is erroneous because repeated collisions between orbiting bodies, as resonance phenomena, are not statistically independent as he assumes.

Sagan unjustifiably restricts his criticisms about the cause of the long day of Joshua to stopping and restarting Earth’s rotation. Throughout Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky maintains axial tilt was an alternative for producing the illusion of the Sun standing still. In a recent Journal of Physics article, Peter Warlow showed how the close passage of a large cosmic body could easily turn the Earth over. Furthermore, Ralph Juergens showed in KRONOS that it is even theoretically possible for the Earth’s rotation almost to stop during a near collision and then speed up in order to conserve angular momentum in an enhanced Danjon effect. The scientific basis for Worlds in Collision can be found if one but looks.

The results from Pioneer Venus have supported Velikovsky’s ideas about the nature of Venus. For instance, Sagan’s denial that Venus “is giving off more heat than it receives from the Sun” is belied by the finding, among other, of a strong net upward heat flux in the lower atmosphere. The central Velikovskian contention of Venus’ relative youth is now established by the discovery that the atmosphere contains some 200 to 300 times more primordial argon 36 than Earth, but substantially less argon 40 (produced by the radioactive decay of potassium 40 in crustal rocks). That others may disagree with this interpretation of the data does not necessarily make it wrong. It is consistent with the dominant pre-Pioneer Venus model of planetary evolution.

One’s approach to Velikovsky is determined by answering the question “How do you treat the Bible, as a children’s story, as the revealed word of God or as a book of history?” Taking the Bible seriously, Velikovsky shows how the synchronisms that are missing between Egypt and Israel in the accepted chronology can be restored. The great scandal, pointed out most notably by Kathleen Kenyon, that the great walls of Jericho fell five centuries before the supposed time of Joshua is resolved completely by Velikovsky’s fundamental chronological proposition that the Exodus occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom. After making a strong case for identifying Punt as the area encompassing Phoenicia-Palestine, Velikovsky goes on to equate Hatshepsut with Sheba with equal persuasiveness. The loot catalogued by Thutmose III at Karnak matches the finery from Solomon’s temple described in the Bible.

Quite independently, in Minerals, Metals, Glazing and Man (Harrap, 1978), John Dayton, a metallurgist and field archaeologist in the Near East, has arrived at conclusions similar to Velikovsky’s regarding the need to compress and re-order the chronology of the Near East before about 700 B.C. Dayton shows that the dates for the Late Bronze Age are centuries too high and the ubiquitous “Dark Ages,” a chronological fiction. Perplexed at the situation in which the dates for many artifacts, assigned by archaeologists, implied the ancients mastered complex glazing processes before discovering the simple ones, Dayton studied the development of glazing technology and arrived at his revolutionary conclusions. Thus, regardless of one’s attitude about ancient cosmic catastrophes, the dating problems Velikovsky discusses in his Ages in Chaos series have solid support in principle and deserve the respectful attention of those interested in Biblical archaeology.

Despite 30 years of derision, a proper case against the intelligent study of Velikovsky’s work has never been made. With Velikovsky’s ideas gaining corroboration on many fronts, his historical works raise bona fide issues bearing on Biblical archaeology. Velikovsky stands or falls on the historical record. Whatever happened, happened. Any seeming contradiction between historical fact and the best current formulation of the laws of nature merely indicates the direction in which these laws need to be developed and applied in the ongoing progress of science. In light of the ramifications of Velikovsky’s reconstruction, if there is something wrong it should stand as a challenge for study, not an excuse for dismissal.

Venus, we now have good reason to believe, originated much later and much differently than did Earth. On the level of scientific possibility (laws of nature as raised by Sagan) this fact itself is sufficient 012to establish the plausibility of Velikovsky’s explanation for events recorded both in the Bible and so many other books of traditional wisdom.

To the Editor:

After reading your feature article by Carl Sagan this month, I am forced to cancel my subscription.

As an astronomer, I found Mr. Sagan’s cheap and abusive attacks on Mr. Velikovsky to be unwarranted and dated. Most importantly, Mr. Sagan, who, I might point out, represents the lowest common denominator in scientific thinking in this country, misses the entire import of Mr. Velikovsky’s ideas in today’s world. He doesn’t seem to be able to see the forest for the trees, so to speak.

Mr. Velikovsky has successfully challenged the idea that was prevalent in the 1950’s, namely that we inhabit an ordered, tame universe in which, all forces having been set into motion eons ago—nothing new or unexpected can happen.

Over the past 30 years, we have discovered that this universe is explosive and violent, and that such events are the rule, not the exception. We now suspect that a supernova started the formation of our solar system, just to give one example.

A magazine that doesn’t look any further than Sagan for scientific insight on questions affecting how we view our world obviously has nothing to offer me.

To the Editor:

I hesitated in writing to you when you published the article entitled: “The Hebrew Origins of Superman,” BAR 05:03.

But now I received this month’s issue of BAR and what do I find? I find an article entitled: “A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision,’” BAR 06:01.

Please spare us such ridiculous articles in the future. Stick to what you do best: reporting on archaeological digs and archaeological finds and their possible meanings.

If you find that you do not have enough good articles send your magazine with blank pages. We will understand this much more than why you would ever publish the above articles.

I am ashamed, when you print such articles as the above, to have recommended your magazine to others.

To the Editor:

Your publication is fast losing whatever scholarly reputation it ever had. Articles like “A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision,’” BAR 06:01, have little or nothing to do with archaeology.

To the Editor:

Poor Velikovsky! He had to invent his accommodating comet to perform the “miracles” in the books of Exodus and Joshua, a correct reading of which could have readily explained all.

To the Editor:

Why drag up an old theory of Velikovsky’s that was discredited thirty years ago? Let’s get back to archaeology.

To the Editor:

I was pleased to see your consideration of Velikovsky’s theories, but Carl Sagan’s arguments are riddled with errors. Point-by-point rebuttals of Sagan have been made by qualified scientists and can be found in the book Velikovsky and Establishment Science.

Other publications relevant to this are: The Velikovsky Affair (University Books, 1966), and Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday and Co., 1976).

Now, if BAR is truly unbiased you will print another article—equally as long as 013Sagan’s—giving the other side.

I, with the future of my subscription to BAR, look forward with great interest to seeing such an article.

To the Editor:

Intellectual honesty is the quality which separates a magazine from a propaganda pamphlet. Your current BAR article by Carl Sagan calls the honesty of your publication into question.

To the Editor:

I have just received my January/February 1980 BAR. You may cancel the rest of my subscription. You have had the gall to publish Carl Sagan’s “refutation” of Immanuel Velikovsky (while Sagan himself has been completely and succinctly repudiated in the pages of KRONOS) while refusing my offer to write “a general article” “critiquing his evidence and conclusions.”

I notice you got William H. Steibing to write a general introduction to Sagan’s piece. I must take issue with Steibing on one point (just Steibing here; if I tried the same with Sagan, I’d have to write a book). He says, “Since conventional scientific theory made no allowance for cataclysms in historical times, Velikovsky began revising astronomy and geology as well as ancient history.” This is an insidiously dangerous statement. It implies that Velikovsky revised these fields so he could show that his thesis was valid; hence, Steibing accuses Velikovsky of “jury-rigging” the data. This places suspicion in the reader’s mind even before he comes, to Sagan’s writing—and if anyone ever had prejudice against Velikovsky, it is Carl Sagan (don’t take my word for it—see KRONOS III:2 and IV:2 to see how he can “jury-rig” data).

All of this convinces me that you are only interested in seeing Velikovsky and his work done away with; you’ll be damned if you’ll let him be shown to be correct!

Although I support his work and believe him to be correct in the large majority of his efforts, I am not monolithic in acceptance of all his work, my main thrust is for honest evaluation and critique for his work. BAR’s publication of this piece by Sagan, with this subtle anti-Velikovsky tone of Steibing’s preface, is not, in my opinion, an honest evaluation. Sagan has yet to clean up his own act and your publication is an accessory to the crime. Hence, I can have nothing further to do with you or your magazine.

To the Editor:

I find Carl Sagan’s article a concise and very readable summary of the scientific community’s opinion regarding Velikovsky’s cosmological and geological theories. However, the article deals mainly with topics that are irrelevant for BAR. It would have been of far greater interest for your readers if Velikovsky’s theories regarding Egyptian and Biblical history were discussed.

As an open minded scientist on the sideline I think most of Velikovsky’s cosmological and geological theories have been effectively refuted by Sagan. How about an equally effective enquiry into the substance of Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos?

Runic Cryptanalysts Never Give Up

To the Editor:

In Queries & Comments, BAR 06:02, Professor Marshall McKusick, author of “A Cryptogram in the Phoenician Inscription from Brazil,” BAR 05:04, made a number of comments on my letter to the editor in the same issue. Some of his statements can easily be shown to be mistaken and to lack factual support; hence this brief reply.

I must protest as without foundation his statement as follows: “Dr. Landsverk states the matter precisely when he writes that every professional authority totally rejects the Monge-Landsverk system (of cryptography in runic inscriptions).”

A check of my letter shows that I said nothing of the kind. It is his statement, not mine. His so-called “professional authorities” are also not cryptanalysts but runologists and linguists. He and they are laboring under the false impression that cryptography obeys the same rules as do runic writing and the Old Norse language. Neither he nor they are in any sense of the word authorities in this very special field of runic cryptography.

There is, of course, no 014Monge’-Landsverk system of runic cryptography. The system was developed over a period of four centuries from the 11th to the early 15th century by a segment of the Norse clergy. They adapted for use in their runic inscriptions a cryptographic tradition which dates back to the early Hebrews and Greeks. It was cryptanalyst Alf Monge’ who rediscovered it. From 1962 until his death in 1978, he solved a total of sixty-seven runic cryptograms from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Eighteen of them are distributed in the United States from New England westward to the Mississippi River basin.

This cryptography was worked into runic inscriptions by priests, monks, a bishop and even a nun. All were members of the clergy because only they, with few exceptions, were sufficiently familiar with the use of the perpetual calendar of the Roman Catholic Church to enable them to conceal dates within their runic inscriptions. Fifty-eight such dates have been solved.

It is worthy of note that even the mid-14th century Kensington inscription shows a strong Christian influence. Line No. 8 has the Latin abbreviation, A V M for “Hail to the Virgin Mary”. The next line appropriately reads: “Save us from evil.” Eight of the eighteen dates on runic inscriptions in the United States are Advent Sunday or are related to it directly.

Professor McKusick stated in his comments that “as a professional North American archaeologist,” he is “not a specialist in medieval runic writing.” This confessed lack of competence led him to invite Professor Erik Wahlgren to co-author his reply. The hope was that this would give his comments “more weight.” But he badly misjudged the situation when he assumed that Wahlgren could increase his credibility on runic cryptography. During his career, Wahlgren has been accepted by his colleagues as a linguist, not a runologist. But that is not the real problem. This is that cryptography can not be understood, analyzed or solved by runology or linguistics. They are miscible and compatible only in the sense that this can be said of a bullet which is shot into a piece of wood. The runic inscription is merely a convenient means for concealment of the cryptography.

The basic statement is this: There is absolutely no connection or similarity between the rules by which the Norse puzzlemasters constructed their cryptography and the principles and practices which govern normal runic writing or the Old Norse language. The cryptography had to be fitted, and, when this was necessary, forced, into a preexisting runic text. This often caused numerous distortions of the text, such as in the Kensington inscription. They had nothing to do with runology and linguistics.

What Professors Wahlgren and McKusick have yet to learn is that cryptography in runic inscriptions is based almost entirely on mathematics. It takes the form of quite elementary, but often quite extensive, applications of arithmetic and geometry. The arithmetic consists in large part of counting the number of symbols in single groups of runes as well as in successive groups whose counts yield a number series. These numbers are thereupon transformed into dates from the perpetual medieval calendar of the Roman Catholic Church or, in the case of a series, into a concealed runic message.

One of the ways in which geometry is involved is in a class of operations by which the positions of the runes are shifted in an organized manner. The hidden message is then revealed by restoring the runes to their original positions. The operations which depend on counts of runes are known today as substitution ciphers. Those which are based on changing the positions of the runes are called transposition ciphers. Both types are favorites among cryptographers to this day. They have been in use during almost three millennia.

Forcing cryptography into runic texts necessarily produced visible distortions. They were not runic or linguistic in origin and can not possibly be explained as such. Yet this is precisely what Professors Wahlgren and McKusick are trying to do. In his comments McKusick quotes Wahlgren in just such futile attempts. Of course, such attempts must necessarily result in failure. This then is used to justify the claim that the inscription is a hoax.

Professor McKusick applauded as being persuasive my statement that cryptography can only be solved by cryptanalysts. This would seem to be a self-evident axiom. Yet he ignored the statement throughout his comments. Instead, he made sweeping conclusions based on mistaken assumptions from runology and linguistics and from his alleged authorities from those fields.

The only trained and experienced cryptanalyst who has expressed an opinion on runic cryptography is Professor Cyrus Gordon. In 1974 he made these comments on the work of Mr. Monge’ as a review of my third book on the subject of runic 015cryptography, Runic Records of the Norsemen In America:

“Dr. Landsverk is rendering an important service in putting on record new evidence for the Norse presence in pre-Columbian America. Of particular value is his bringing to light Mr. Alf Monge’s solutions of runic cryptography, which are epoch-making not only for their brilliance, but also for their impact on ancient and medieval history.”

The recommendation could scarcely have been more earnest, or have come from a more reliable source.

Israel Department of Antiquities Leads Negev Rescue Operation

To the Editor:

In my article “Rescue in the Biblical Negev,” BAR 06:01, you omitted the name “Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums” from the list of institutions participating in the rescue operations. May I stress that the Department of Antiquities was and continues to be instrumental in this operation, and without its support and encouragement there would have been no chance for the project to materialize.

Furthermore, the Department in its capacity as the Official Archaeological Institute in this country is co-ordinating all rescue excavations and surface surveys done in the Negev. In most cases it is also directing the field work or financing the projects carried jointly with other Archaeological Institutions.

Archaeology Can Be Dangerous When You Don’t Watch Your Grammar

To the Editor:

Archeology can be dangerous. In “The Marvelous Mosaics of Kissufim,” BAR 06:01, I read:

Although partially destroyed, we were able to infer from what remained of the inscription, that the priest Zonainos was buried here …

I’m curious to know who was injured and how it happened. Were they hit by flying tesserae or caught off guard by a dangling participle?

I’m always fascinated by your publication and wish to commend it to our readers.

Quick Note from Inspired Reader

To the Editor:

Just a quick note to let you know how much I’m enjoying your magazine. I bought my first subscription to it after being “inspired” by my visit to the Holy Land in November, 1976. Your magazine helps refresh those memories for me as well as provide useful, interesting, up-to-date information on the holy places. I must add, too, that the caliber of your readers is quite impressive.

Keep up the good work!

Debate over Dating Formula

To the Editor:

In his letter to the editor published in Queries & Comments, BAR 05:06, M. R. Lehmann misunderstands the date formula of the Samaritan papyrus which refers to the “20th of Adar, Year 2 (the same being) the accession year of Darius the King,” by overlooking the fact that the regnal years in this date belong to two different kings. Year 2 of the first half of the date belongs to Arses who reigned from 338 to 336, while the accession year of the last half of the date belongs to Darius III who came to the throne in the same calendar year of 336 (spring-to-spring) in which Arses died.

The practice is paralleled by date formulae from three Neo-Babylonian contract tablets from the Persian period: 1) “4th month, day 25, 41st year, accession year, Darius, king of Lands,” in a tablet from the British Museum (BM 33342); 2) “41st year, accession year, 12th month, day 14, Darius, king of Lands,” in a tablet from the Berlin Museum (NBRVT 216); and 3) “41st year, accession year, 12th month, day 20, Darius, king of Lands” in a tablet from the University of Pennsylvania Museum (BE VIII 127). All three of these datelines refer to the 41st and last year of Artaxerxes I which fell in the same calendar year as the accession of Darius II. In other words, the scribes who wrote the papyri at Samaria dated them according to a practice in common with other parts of the Persian empire. I am not opposed to tracing Rabbinic customs back into the ancient world; I simply think it should be done accurately.

Dr. Lehmann replies:

In my letter to BAR of last year, I was guided by many years of study of Jewish business contracts, ranging from Biblical days until the Middle Ages. Starting with Jeremiah chapter 32, we note a strictly controlled system of Jewish business contracts. Next, the large body of Elephantine business contracts likewise yield rich legal practices in Jewish contract law and practice. As in the case of marriage contracts and bills of divorce, there is an amazing consistency and uniformity in certain formulations and clauses. The Samaria contracts, also written by Jews in Aramaic, therefore neatly fit in to the chain of documents which connect the Biblical period with the Talmudic period. With such evidence of strictly controlled legal tradition, I therefore believe that when we have a choice between influence from Babylonian clay tablets on one hand, and hand-written Jewish documents on the other, we are justified in tracing influences through Jewish rather than non-Jewish contracts. Even though, therefore, a Neo-Babylonian tablet may indicate a different method of dating, I give more weight to the evidence from the dating found in later Jewish contracts. After all, Jewish history is unique in its traditionalism, throughout the centuries, in all phases of life—whether religious or legal, which are closely related areas in Judaism.

011

Immanuel Velikovsky Dies

Immanuel Velikovsky, still hard at work on several new volumes to substantiate his theories about ancient history, died of a heart ailment on November 17, 1979. He was 84 years old.

His theories may have outraged the scientific world and community of scholars, but they mesmerized countless scientific and historical buffs. His most famous book, Worlds in Collision, was originally published in 1950. Twenty-five years later it had gone through over 50 hardback editions with paperback sales in the millions. Astronomer Carl Sagan recently attacked this work in the January/February 1980 BAR.

Concerning Velikovsky’s historical reconstructions, Carl Kraeling, the director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, has stated: “There is nothing we as historians can do about Dr. Velikovsky’s work other than smile and go about our business.”

Velikovsky was undaunted by the opposition of the scholarly community. “I have been proven correct too many times,” he told an interviewer. “My old critics can no longer ignore my ideas and today’s young scientists are open minded enough to listen to me.”

Born in Russia in 1895, Velikovsky came to the United States in 1939. He was a physician and psychoanalyst before devoting himself to research on cosmic evolution and historical reconstructions.

014

Joseph Headed for Broadway

When the BAR staff first heard the music for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, they were so impressed that they arranged to offer the record to BAR readers at a discount. At the time the musical was playing mostly on the church and synagogue circuit.

Apparently the public reacted to Joseph just as our staff did. The musical appeared at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. and is headed for Broadway. Richard Coe of the Washington Post called it a musical of “grand contagious zest.”

The clever words and appealing music, which imitate a variety of modern musical styles from jazz to calypso, is especially attractive to children. This is one way they will always remember the details of the Joseph story.

Readers who wish to purchase the record may order a copy at BAR’s special discount price.

Velikovsky Supporters Pounce on Sagan

To the Editor: