The chronology of Ancient Egypt is grossly in error, the source of serious interpretive problems for historians and archaeologists alike, who work in cultures whose antiquity is synchronized with the timeline of the traditional Egyptian dynastic history.  For over a half century attempts to revise or entirely rewrite Egyptian history earlier than the twenty-fifth dynasty have been underway, beginning with the pivotal, ground breaking Ages in Chaos (1952) of Immanuel Velikovsky and continued most recently by Peter James et. al. in Centuries of Darkness (1991) and  by David Rohl in his controversial book A Test of Time  (U.S.A. Pharaohs & Kings (1995)).  

The Bottleneck

        Most, if not all of these works suffer from the criticism that they consider as sacrosanct the 664-525 B.C. dates for the 26th dynasty, and the date 691-665 B.C. for the reign of Taharka, the last 25th dynasty pharaoh.   Many favor a lowering of dates for dynasties 21 and 22, and presumably therefore for earlier dynasties as well (a domino effect), but are hindered in their research by irresolvable conflicts with the firmly entrenched dates for Taharka and the 26th dynasty pharaohs. 

        Without doubt the most influential of the revisionist works is that of Immanuel Velikovsky.   In his groundbreaking Ages in Chaos he presented convincing evidence that the Egyptian 18th dynasty should be moved at least 500 years forward in time, from the 16th to 14th centuries B.C. to the late 11th through mid 9th centuries.  But there he stopped, unable to relocate the 19th and 20th dynasties which ought to have followed in sequence.  There was simply not enough room in the traditional timeline to fit the remaining dynasties.  What to do?  For the next quarter century the scholastic world waited for Velikovsky to resolve the problem.  In 1977 in Peoples of the Sea, and in 1978 in Ramses II and His Time, only a year before Velikovsky's  death in 1979, the answer came.  The 20th dynasty was moved to the 4th century where its pivotal king Ramses III emerged as Nectanebo I of the 30th dynasty.  The 19th dynasty was moved to the late 7th century where Ramses II assumed the identity of the Egyptian king Necho, who killed Josiah king of Judah and fought several battles against the neo-Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar (now an alter-ego for the Hittite king Hattusilis).  These solutions were clearly unacceptable to fellow revisionists, much less to traditional historians.  The logic of Velikovsky's arguments was strained to say the least.

The Solution

        The problem for Velikovsky was in large measure the same problem that has faced dozens of reformers who have followed him.  There is simply not enough time between the mid 9th century and the year 664 B.C. in which to reposition dynasties 19 to 25.   This Displaced Dynasties series of books solves the problem.   Volume 1 moves the 26th dynasty forward in time 121 years, from the traditional dates 664-525 B.C. to a position overlapping a slightly extended 27th (Persian) dynasty (543-404 B.C.).   Volume 2 relocates dynasties 20 and 21 in the interval from the mid 8th to the mid 7th century, presenting unimpeachable evidence that Piankhi, the founder of the 26th dynasty, was the son and successor of  Pinudjem I , the last king of the Theban branch of the 21st dynasty.    Thus these two books essentially remove the bottleneck, allowing a full century (mid 9th to mid 8th century B.C.) in which to situate the 19th dynasty.   

        Positioning the 19th dynasty, and slightly revising Velikovsky's positioning of the 18th dynasty, were the tasks of the third book in the Displaced Dynasties series.  It turns out that Velikovsky was only about 50 years late in his placement of dynasty 18.  Many of his arguments have been marginally revised and/or rephrased in Volume 3 of our series.   In this volume the Amarna age of Egypt is dated to the years 930-900 B.C., synchronous with the beginning of the divided monarchy in Israel.   Akhenaton, the heritic king of Egypt responsible for introducing a deviant form of monotheism into Egyptian religion, supposedly the inspiration for later developments in Israelite religion (and literature),  turns out to have lived at the end of the 10th century B.C.    His ideas were clearly antecedent to the fully developed religion of Israel.   There can be no doubt that he received his believe in one all powerful deity from the writings of kings David and Solomon, not the reverse.   The 19th dynasty kings Seti I and Ramses II are dated 869-840 and 840-774 B.C. respectively, the death of the latter preceding by less than a decade the cataclysm which ended the dynasty.

        Volume 4, the last in the series, deals exclusively with the 2nd millenium B.C., providing a reliable timeline for dynasties 3-17, i.e. from the time of Imhotep, the powerful visier of pharaoh Djoser of the 3rd dynasty (who we identify conclusively as the Israelite boy genius Joseph ben Jacob), to the 17th dynasty Hyksos/Amalekite king Apophis, whose dealings with Saul, the first king of Israel, are well documented in the Hebrew Bible.

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