Hatshepsut, Queen of Sheba

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 over the centuries. The people of Ethiopia have always claimed her as their 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 tended to treat both Queen of Sheba and Solomon principally as characters of fairyland and romantic myth. In 1952, however, Immanuel Velikovsky made an astonishing claim: He announced that not only did the Queen of Sheba exist, but that she had left numerous portraits of herself as well as an account of her famous journey to Israel. The Queen of Sheba 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.Scott argues that these significant clues shift the burden of proof onto Velikovsky's critics; and the identification of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba will eventually compel the rewriting of history books. Read more