Emmet Scott is an independent writer and researcher who has published numerous articles and several books taking an alternative view of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilization.

Over the centuries the figure of the Queen of Sheba has loomed large in poetry and romance. The mysterious Queen, who is said to have visited Solomon in Jerusalem, has cast her spell over poets, painters and storytellers of many lands. The people...

Over the centuries the figure of the Queen of Sheba has loomed large in poetry and romance. The mysterious Queen, who is said to have visited Solomon in Jerusalem, has cast her spell over poets, painters and storytellers of many lands. The people of Ethiopia have always claimed her as her own, and to this day boast that her son Menelik ' fruit of the union between the Queen and Solomon ' stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem after Solomon's death. For all that, historians have been more sanguine, and increasingly over the past century the academic community has veered towards consigning both royal characters to the fairyland of myth and romance. In 1952, however, Immanuel Velikovsky made an astonishing claim: He announced that not only did the Queen of Sheba exist, but that she left numerous portraits of herself as well as an account of her famous journey to Israel. The Queen of Sheba, Velikovsky announced, was none other than Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of Egypt, who built a beautiful temple outside Thebes on the walls of which she immortalized the most important event of her life: an expedition to the Land of Punt. Punt, said Velikovsky, was one and the same as Israel. In this volume historian Emmet Scott brings forward dramatic new evidence in support of Velikovsky. He finds, among other things, that: Ancient Israel, just like Punt, was a renowned source of frankincense. Egyptian documents, generally ignored in academic circles, unequivocally place Punt in the region of Syria/Palestine. The goddess Hathor was known as the 'Lady of Punt,'� but she was also known as the 'Lady of Byblos.'� The Egyptians claimed to be of Puntite origin, but Jewish and Phoenician legends claimed that the Egyptians came from their part of the world, and the Phoenicians named Misor ' almost certainly the same as Osiris ' as the Phoenician hero who founded the Nile Kingdom. This, and a wealth of additional evidence, has, Scott argues, shifted the burden of proof onto Velikovsky's critics; and the identification of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba will eventually compel the rewriting of all the history books. Joyce Tyldesley's 'Hatchepsut'� deals with the same character, but from an entirely conventional viewpoint. She never even raises the possibility that the accepted chronology of Hatshepsut's life may be wrong. In his 'Ages in Chaos,'� however, Immanuel Velikovsky did raise this possibility, and was the first to suggest that Hatshepsut be identified with the Queen of Sheba. Velikovsky's work remains extremely popular, and the present book aims to take his ideas forward, exploring new evidence that has come to light since his death. This new evidence,Scott argues, puts the equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba virtually beyond doubt.

The book that follows is partly biography; but more than the history of a person it is the history of a controversy and of a mystery. It is a history concerned as much with time and context as with personalities. It is the story of the Egyptian queen known to history as Hatshepsut, and also of the mysterious queen known to history as the Queen of Sheba, or Queen of the South. These two characters, removed from each other in the textbooks by a little over five centuries, are revealed to be one and the same person. I was not the first to reach this conclusion: That honor goes to Immanuel Velikovsky, whose 1952 book "Ages in Chaos" acquainted the reading public for the first time with this startling revelation. In line with his proposal that Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian history needed to be shortened by just over five centuries, Velikovsky came to the conclusion that Hatshepsut, the great female Ã??'pharaohÃ??'�, whom conventional history places between 1508 and 1458 BC, must have been a contemporary of Solomon, the most glorious of IsraelÃ??'s early kings, whom history tells us reigned between 971 and 931 BC. Two such extraordinary characters, thought Velikovsky, if they had lived at the same time, must have interacted in some way. Could it be, Velikovsky mused, that Hatshepsut was the mysterious Queen of Sheba, whose meeting with Solomon in Jerusalem had led, throughout the centuries, to such romantic speculation? ... But criticisms there were Ã??' though the most forceful of these only appeared after his death. These proceeded precisely as Velikovsky had in some ways predicted they would: by ignoring the overall picture and focusing upon a questionable detail here and there. And since his equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba was one of the most attractive and compelling parts of the reconstruction, it was here that the critics focused their gaze. One of the problems with hair-splitting is that it obscures the wider picture. If critic and author are involved in a prolonged debate over the meaning of a word here or the interpretation of a sentence there, the central purpose of the discussion can rapidly be forgotten. And this of course is precisely why hair-splitting is such a favorite tool of the pedant: In absence of a coherent counter-argument, this procedure will confuse the picture sufficiently to make it appear the critic has won. If he can also catch the author out on an actual mistake, even a minor one, so much the better. This can now be used as an excuse for throwing out the entire work. And this was precisely the tactic employed by VelikovskyÃ??'s opponents. ... In the course of the present volume we shall have occasion to look at some of the most important objections of the critics. For the present, it is sufficient to note that in general they denied that the biblical Queen of Sheba could be identified as an Egyptian sovereign, and they rejected Ã??' predictably enough Ã??' VelikovskyÃ??'s attempt to identify Punt Ã??' where Hatshepsut sent her famous expedition Ã??' with the land of Israel. The evidence identifying Punt with a region in Africa, they said, was far too convincing to be overturned by VelikovskyÃ??'s arguments. Both the flora and the fauna depicted on the Punt reliefs, they said, were clearly African, and it was absurd to try to claim otherwise. They claimed too that in several Egyptian inscriptions Punt was named as a southern country Ã??' though they also admitted that in several other places Punt is named as an eastern and even (on several occasions) as a northern country. In his 2006 book "Empire of Thebes" (which is volume 3 of a general reconstruction of ancient history named Ã??'Ages in AlignmentÃ??'�), as well as in various articles published in the journals of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, revisionst historian Emmet Sweeney answered some of the more obviously erroneous of these objections, and indeed in Empire of Thebes devoted an entire chapter to the topic. Although SweeneyÃ??'s contribution over the past decade has been valuable, I have come to the conclusion that the Hatshepsut question needs a much more detailed treatment. This is due to the fact that it has become clear that the identity of Hatshepsut is central to the whole topic of Egyptian history and its relationship with the Bible: It is in every respect a pivotal question on whose resolution may well depend our entire understanding of ancient Egyptian and biblical history.

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1: TWO MONARCHS AND TWO NATIONS The Woman who would be King ' When did Hatshepsut Live? ' Velikovsky, Hatshepsut and Queen of Sheba ' The Journey to Punt ' Biblical Parallels with

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1: TWO MONARCHS AND TWO NATIONS The Woman who would be King ' When did Hatshepsut Live? ' Velikovsky, Hatshepsut and Queen of Sheba ' The Journey to Punt ' Biblical Parallels with the Punt Reliefs ' Objections of the Critics CHAPTER 2: IDENTITY OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA The Terms 'Queen of Sheba'� and 'Queen of the South'� ' Sheba, City of the Sphinx ' The Queen of Sheba in Ethiopian Tradition CHAPTER 3: THE MYSTERY OF PUNT The Queen of Egypt did go to Punt ' The Location of Punt ' God's Land: Its Meaning and Location ' The Myrrh Terraces of Palestine ' Punt: Homeland of the Egyptians�  Egyptian Texts locating Punt in Palestine ' Thutmose III's List of Conquered Lands ' Punt as a 'Southern'� Boundary? ' The Flora and Fauna of Punt ' Sea-Life on the Punt Reliefs ' Ethnic Identity of the Puntites ' Eritrea and Somalia in Hatshepsut's Time: A Primitive Land ' Recapitulation CHAPTER 4: THE JOURNEY TO PUNT AND ITS MEANING The Route to Punt ' A Journey through a strange Land ' Purpose of the Expedition ' Was the King of Israel shown on the Punt Reliefs? ' Was the 'Splendor of Splendors a Copy of the Jerusalem Temple? ' Echoes of Hatshepsut's Journey in the Song of Songs? CHAPTER 5: THE AFTERMATH Thutmose III and Shishak ' Thutmose III destroys Hatshepsut's Legacy ' Where was the Land of Kadesh? ' The People of Palestine fall into Disagreement ' The Road to Kadesh ' The Conquest of God's Land ' The People, Flora and Fauna of Canaan ' The Plunder of Solomon's Temple ' Shishak and Sesostris. EPILOGUE