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Egyptologist and archaeologist David Rohl sets out to discover the historical truth which lies at the very heart of the Book of Genesis, but what
Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation ends up being is a new Rohl-legend about the beginning of ancient Near Eastern civilisation--with many gaps.
The book is divided into three parts. Firstly, Rohl proposes that Eden and its garden was between Lakes Van and Urmin and the Caspian Sea, with Nod on its east. Then he claims the ancestors of the Sumerians migrated in the 6th millennium BC from this "Eden" to Mesopotamia, establishing Sumerian culture there, and identical with biblical Shem. The Mesopotamian and biblical Flood, he sets in the late 4th millennium BC. In part three, Rohl brings Sumerian traders to East Africa (Punt & Sudan--"Kush"), and Egypt, becoming founders of Pharaonic Egypt, using cultural links c.3000BC.
Rohl needlessly burdens the book with the "new chronology" from his Test of Time of 1995, which is known to be 100 per cent wrong (along with the biblical "identifications") from a mass of contrary factual evidence. Rohl's story is also weakened by unsustainable guesswork on supposed language-links, artificial identifications of early biblical and Mesopotamian characters, etc. It's a lively "read", but much of it is likely to prove fictional, not historical. --Kenneth Kitchen
Kurzbeschreibung
In a quest to solve some of the unsolved mysteries of ancient history, David Rohl claims to reveal the true locations of the legendary Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark, identifies heroes from the Book of Genesis in ancient records, and unearths the origins of the first Egyptian pharaohs. Colour and b/w illus.