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Amazon Review
In The Lost Testament, David Rohl continues on the path he began with A Test of Time and Legend. In these books, and in a couple of TV documentaries, Rohl established himself as a relatively respectable iconoclast in the over-subscribed genre of rewriting ancient history. He's not one of those who finds extra-terrestrials or proto-Freemasons lurking under every pyramid. His main thesis is simply this: academic Egyptologists, archaeologists and historians have got their dates wrong, and this is why they can't match the Old Testament "historical" books to known Middle Eastern history. Their dating of ancient Egyptian history is out by 200-300 years, says Rohl. In The Lost Testament, Rohl retells the Bible story--or at least the portion of it from Adam to the start of the Babylonian Captivity--in the light of his New Chronology. He links it in considerable detail with the mythology, history and geography of Mesopotamia and Egypt, showing where, in his view, the stories of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David and the other well-known biblical heroes fit into their surrounding context. After telling the rewritten version of the biblical story, each chapter concludes with a section on the archaeological and historical setting of that story. Like his earlier books, The Lost Testament is richly illustrated with black and white photographs throughout. Whether one agrees with Rohl's theory or not--and it must be said that most conventional historians and archaeologists don't--this is not only a worthwhile intellectual exercise, but also a useful contribution to most readers' understanding of the Middle East three or four thousand years ago. --David V Barrett
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