For over twenty years Emmet Sweeney has researched the questions raised by Velikovsky's efforts to reconstruct ancient history as it is currently taught. He holds a Masters Degree in Early Modern History from the University of Ulster and is currently a lecturer at West University, Timisoara, Romania.

Sweeney describes the salient features of each volume in his "Ages in Alignment" series and points out the important consequences of the skewed historical record as it is usually taught in his website at Emmet Sweeney.net.

Reconstructing the early period of Greek history upon new chronological lines, the reader will get to the bottom of a prolonged and rancorous debate among classical scholars about how various archeological finds should be dated....

Reconstructing the early period of Greek history upon new chronological lines, the reader will get to the bottom of a prolonged and rancorous debate among classical scholars about how various archeological finds should be dated. Based on physical evidence, the majority of classicists and Hellenic scholars were convinced that Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns belonged primarily in the eighth century BC. The Egyptologists, however, won out, and the Mycenaean period was placed firmly in the second millennium. The immediate consequence of this was the insertion of a “Dark Age” into the Greek past: for little or no material remains existed which could fill the gap of many centuries between the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the beginning of Greek history in the eighth and seventh centuries.

We shall then proceed to examine how the adoption of Egyptian dating caused problems in every area of Greek history. One of the most pressing of these related to the nature and interpretation of pottery sequences. Along with “Mycenaean” pottery, the early excavators found large quantities of a type they named “Geometric.” It was clear right from the beginning that Geometric culture was the direct ancestor of that of the Greeks of the Classical Age, and the sequence from Late Geometric to Archaic art in the seventh century could be easily traced. Yet everywhere, in almost every site of southern Greece, Geometric pottery was found inextricably mixed with Mycenaean. Indeed, on occasion it was found underneath Mycenaean ware.
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Eratosthenes and other ancient authors generally agreed that history, properly speaking, started with the foundation of the Olympic Games. Everything before that was mythikon, the age of myths. Yet the Olympiads, we have seen, were established long before the war against Troy and apparently before the great majority of the events normally described as “Greek Myth.” It is true that events surrounding the Trojan War and the lives of many of the characters who participated in it, have a distinctly mythic quality. Yet we have seen that characters who are undoubtedly historical and belong in the eighth and seventh centuries, such as Midas, have the same mythic qualities. Thus Midas met deities and had a Golden Touch and ass’s ears.

The generation which fought at Troy, as well as its immediate predecessors, belonged in the eighth century BC and was undoubtedly historical. Names of individuals known from Greek legend, including Agamemnon himself, even occur on the Boghaz-koi documents, documents we have identified as being the state archives of the Lydian kingdom.

Greek history thus begins with the cosmic event which marked the establishment of the Olympiads, an event which, for a great variety of reasons, we place in the middle of the ninth century, probably within a decade of 850 BC.
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Much of Greek myth, in short, is about the natural events of 850 BC, and natural events which preceded them. This being the case, it seems reasonable to assume that the inhabitants of the region at the time were most probably — at least in part — ancestral Greeks. The culture of these Early Helladic folk was maritime and warlike. They raised great fortifications around many of their settlements — settlements which tended to lie along the coast. They were already familiar with tin-bronze, which speaks of trading relations with Atlantic Europe; ...

When considering the source of the military threat against which the Early Hellads raised their huge coastal fortifications, we need to think of Atlantic Europe and Atlantic North Africa, where a mighty seafaring culture, contemporary with Early Bronze Age Greece, is also attested. And this of course brings us into altogether deeper water, in more ways than one.

In the book that follows I shall be arguing that early Greek history as found in the textbooks is seriously misdated. I am not the first to make such a proposal. That honor goes to Immanuel Velikovsky, whose series Ages in Chaos (1952) held that the whole of ancient Near Eastern history before the classical age was a fabrication. Velikovsky identified Egyptian chronology as the source of the problem; and indeed the chronology of early Greek history, during the so-called “Mycenaean” period, was constructed along the lines demanded by Egyptian history. Thus when it became clear, towards the end of the nineteenth century, that the great flowering of “Mycenaean” culture coincided with the Egyptian New Kingdom, especially the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was decreed that the Mycenaean Age belonged in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, where Egyptologists had already placed the Eighteenth Dynasty. There were many dissenting voices at the time, most notably from the ranks of the classicists, and that great curmudgeon Cecil Torr fought a prolonged and very public battle with Flinders Petrie over the issue. In a thousand ways, claimed Torr, the Mycenaean Age showed itself to belong in the eighth or even seventh century BC. With what justification then did Petrie and the Egyptologists force their timescales into the world of the Aegean? Still, such doubts were ultimately laid to rest. The Egyptologists, who by this time were claiming a scientific foundation for their chronology, stressed the numerous connections disclosed by archaeology between the Mycenaean Age and the Eighteenth Dynasty and thereby compelled a second millennium date for the former.

Many of the objections raised by Torr were later resurrected by Velikovsky. Echoing his predecessor, Velikovsky demonstrated that Mycenaean art and culture seemed to find its closest parallels in art and culture of the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Furthermore, it was found that Mycenaean material occurred at no great depth beneath that of the classical period, whilst in many places it was apparently associated with Archaic ware of the seventh and even sixth centuries. This, for example, was the case at various sites throughout the Peloponnese and southern Greece and most especially on Crete and Cyprus. And, in a multitude of ways, legend and tradition agreed. So, for example, Homer’s Iliad is full of references to the Phrygians, who were evidently close allies of the Trojans. Indeed, so intimate is the connection that we might suspect the Trojans themselves of being a branch of the Phrygian nation. Yet Phrygia, it is known, did not exist until the eighth century BC, when the Moschians, or Bryges, a Thracian people, migrated across the Bosphorus and settled in Asia Minor. Greek tradition is explicit that Priam, king of Troy during the famous siege, was a contemporary of Gordius, the first Phrygian king and founder of the capital city Gordion.

Where Does Greek History Begin?
The Rediscovery of Homeric Greece
The Early Debate
A “Dark Age” Intrudes
The Dark Age in Asia Minor

Artistic Anomalies
A Bitter Controversy
The Emergence of Greek Culture
The Earliest Greek Culture
Contemporary Cultures

Epic Poetry
The Loss of Literacy
The Linear B Tablets
The Language of Linear B
Cadmus and the Phoenician Alphabet

Thrace and Scythia
Magna Graecia
Etruria
Cyprus and the East

Greece and the East
Achaean Warriors Fight the Assyrians
The Shaft Graves of Mycenae
Pelops and Chariot Warfare
Agamemon in the Records of the Hittites
Mopsus

Myth and History
A Dramatic Beginning
Greeks and Pelasgians
The Rise of Crete
Mycenae before Agamemnon
The Story of Thebes

The Dorian Invasion
The Age of the Tyrants
The Age of Colonization
Iron Swords of Tegea
Festivals and Legal Codes
Some Genealogies and Chronologies