Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation

David Rohl continues his quest to reach the historical kernal lying at the heart of some of the greatest unsolved problems and mysteries of Old World history and archaeology. He reveals what really happened in seven famous myths and legends bequeathed to us by the ancients and shows us that the passage of time has not wiped away all the evidence, and it is possible to reach the reality behind the legends- *The true location of the garden of Eden and the origins of Adam and Eve *Paradise is discovered on a desert island in the Persian Gulf *The mysterious origins of the first pharaohs are revealed *The lost tomb of Pharoah Amenhotep I is unearthed *The body of the heretic pharoah Akhenaten is identified *The true site of Solomon's Temple is located in Jerusalem David Rohl's pursuit for historical truth also encompasses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant and his questioning of the chronology of ancient Greek history - when did the Trojan War actually occur?

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