At http://pagosaconferences.com/past-conferences/from-nineveh-to-chaco-cale… … Henry Zemel is president of the CAENO Foundation (see www.caeno.org ) which supports historical and experimental research on the chronology of early civilisations. He has organised several conferences including 'The Origin of Writing Systems' at Peking University, 'Calendars and Years' at Notre Dame University in Indiana, and 'What's old is new again' at EKM, Karlsruhe in Germany.
The conversion from a circular to a linear concept of time epitomises a change in human history has aroused little interest amongst academics and Joe Public. We in the West tend to think of time in a linear fashion – as in a timeline of events one following the other. Zemel's contention is that early civilisations did not think this way about time – and had little idea of a linear laid order of events. This is an interesting point as the Bible is laid out in a linear fashion yet people argue about when it was written down – in the second millennium or the first millennium BC. Some people actually believe David wrote loads of psalms or that Moses wrote the first few books of the Bible. Clearly, there are several ways of looking at ancient chronology but if Zemel is right one has to concede the Bible was not written down as early as some people might like. It is also clear that even if they did not view the past in a circular manner, repeating itself in an endless fashion, it is true to say that what happened a few generations earlier than any given king or ruler was somewhat murky – unless it was supported by bureaucratic accounting of time such as the Assyrian limmu lists, or the court and temple records in, for example, Jerusalem during the Monarchy. Zemel's contention is that the idea of circularity has an origin in the orbit of the planets – and these planets were the gods of the ancient people. Whilst that is what Velikovsky alleged it does not necessarily hold true as it is also feasible that the gods had a cometary parallel (and especially in a comet that was in the process of disintegration over a long period of time). Zemel's idea is worth consideration as we really do not know for sure what the exact nature of the ancient gods was and planets can be seen to move in an orbit, and do form a circular kind of motion around the Sun. The circle was an important symbol in the past – particularly in Iron and Bronze Age Britain. Houses were circular, henges likewise, and round mounds came to prominence in the Bronze Age. Having said that prior to 3200BC the long barrow was trapezoidal, almost oblong, in shape, sometimes possessing an elongated tail. Neolithic dwellings were often square or rectangular – quite opposite from circular. The concept of the circle may not be as ancient as the theory demands.
It is also worth pointing out that historians do not always take into the account the problems involved in non linear chronology – a fact that revisionists of mainstream need to bear in mind when concocting their various revised schemes. For instance, one of the authors of the post Roman dark age in Britain, one Gildas, a monk, or religious scribe, had very little idea of what had occurred a couple of generations before his lifetime – even though he wrote extensively about it. This has hampered all attempts to bring the Early Saxon era into daylight as when the monk Bede, came to write his history, he only had Gildas work to fill the gap between the establishment of the Roman Church at Canterbury and the date the Romans left Britain for the last time, nearly two hundred years previously. It is possible Gildas chose to leave out some unpalatable, for him, details, but one is left thinking that the concept of time without a bureaucratic establishment was just so vague that one can interpret the evidence in a variety of different ways and still be none the wiser. This means that in civilisations such as ancient Egypt or Sumeria/Babylonia, there are large grey areas when civil administrations broke down. In Egypt this is most famously during the three so called intermediate periods (which appear to have parallels elsewhere, especially in Assyria and Babylonia/Sumeria). One would expect any discrepancy to arise in those periods of civil malfunction rather than in those periods of functioning government. The big question is to what degree are those discrepancies and do they amount to a lot of years – or just short periods of time. Grafting on Henry Zemel's circular concept of time makes all this more difficult to chew upon and ruminate with a prospect of enlightenment. One suspects that chronologists ignore the fact the linear concept of time may not go back too far as it simply complicates their struggle to come to terms with what has been preserved in documentation of one kind or another. How do you integrate the circular concept of time into chronology?
See also www.velikovsky.info/Henry_Zemel … which tells us that he wrote and directed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television programme 'Velikovsky: The Bonds of the Past' first transmitted in 1972.