Latest News
NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Hatshepsut
Queen of Sheba *
The Queen of Sheba is one of the few ancient historical figures that has not been linked with Atlantis. Wikipedia refers to her as “a figure first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In the original story, she brings a caravan of valuable gifts for the Israelite King Solomon………..modern historians identify Sheba with the South Arabian kingdom of Saba in present-day Yemen and Ethiopia. The queen’s existence is disputed among historians.”(a)
In Arabia she was known as Bilqis, to the Christians of Ethiopia she was Makeda, while Josephus referred to her as Nicaule.
Nevertheless, she is mentioned from time to time on these pages, particularly regarding her identity and the time of her reign. In the 1950s Immanuel Velikovsky, proposed, in Ages in Chaos [039] that either six centuries were missing from Israel’s history or had six hundred ghost years crept into Egyptian history. One of the keys to his revised chronology was the identification of the Queen of Sheba as the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut.
This caused quite a stir at the time and generated a degree of support for Velikovsky. However, in 1986 John Bimson published a paper, ‘Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba’, debunking Velikovsky’s contention, which had the effect of eroding that support. Then in 1997, Damien Mackey re-ignited the controversy with a paper challenging Bimson’s conclusion(f) and so the debate continues(h).
There are a number of 21st-century commentators who still accept Velikovsky’s identification of Hatshepsut as the Queen of Sheba including Emmet Sweeney [1867.25] and Emmet Scott(d), Damien Mackey(f), as well as Ken Griffith & Darrell K. White(e) and, I might add, no lack of opponents either.
Eulalio Eguia jr. offered a different Egyptian identification suggesting Nefertiti instead of Hatshepsut(b). Riaan Booysen went further, not only agreeing with Eguia but proposing that Nefertiti was also Helen of Troy(c)!
Among the Ethiopians, there is a tradition that the Queen of Sheba and Solomon had a child, Menelik, who visited Jerusalem and returned to Ethiopia with the Ark of the Covenant. There is no evidence to support this tale which is thought to have been “originally created to legitimize Yukuno Amlak’s rule of the late 13th century AD who had killed the Zagwa king to obtain power.”
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Sheba
(b) Nefertiti – The Queen of Sheba | PDF | Tutankhamun | Akhenaten (scribd.com) *
(c) Thera and the Exodus – Graham Hancock Official Website
(d) Hatshepsut: Queen of Sheba: Scott, Emmet: 9780875869452: Amazon.com: Books (I suspect that Emmet Sweeney, a Scot, and Emmet Scott are the same person and share the same publisher)
Byblos
Byblos is an ancient Phoenician city in modern Lebanon. Emilio Spedicato has pointed out that since this harbour city dates back to at least the third or fourth millennium BC, it can be used to demonstrate the relative stability of Mediterranean Sea levels over that period. The proponents of the idea that there had been a Sicilian Landbridge that was destroyed in the second millennium BC will have to consider either:
(i) Revising the dating of the existing harbour in Byblos,
(ii) the Sicilian landbridge was destroyed earlier than the building of the harbour, or
(iii) the landbridge did not exist within human memory.
>Emmet Sweeney in Empire of Thebes [1867] returned to the debate regarding the identity of the Queen of Sheba where he follows the conclusions of Immanuel Velikovsky and argues for her having been the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, whose funerary monument details her trip to the land of Punt. Sweeney offers Byblos, in modern Lebanon as the location of Punt, which is also similar to the theories of Velikovsky.<
Temple of the Obelisks – Byblos
Twenty years ago the underwater archaeologist Ibrahim Noureddine had voiced the opinion that the current port at Byblos is too small to have accommodated the Phoenician fleet as recorded by the likes of the Palermo Stone(b)*. The current harbour is only 2.8 meters deep and with a solid rock floor could not have been deeper in the past. Noureddine is now researching alternative sites. If the content of the Palermo Stone is accurate and not an exaggeration it would appear that the matter of ancient Mediterranean sea levels may be still open to question. The resolution of this matter is critical for supporters of a Mediterranean Atlantis.
>He returned to the subject in a 2010 paper(c) noting that “in the Phoenician heartland, today’s Lebanon, no Phoenician harbor structure has been clearly identified to date in the main cities of Tyre, Byblos, Beirut, and Sidon. Tyre, the most famous Phoenician city, has particularly attracted many scholars who dedicated their efforts to finding remains of its illustrious harbor. Some of them failed in their quest, while others were able to secure some, but certainly not all, of the answers.”<
A November 2016 report claims that the discovery of the ancient port “is close”, quoting George Papatheodorou, professor of environmental and geological oceanography at the University of Patra’s Department of Geology(a).
(b) https://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/000755.html *
(c) https://www.academia.edu/3305769/New_Light_on_the_Phoenician_Harbor_at_Tyre *