Prof. Dr. Dr. Gunnar Heinsohn

PROFESSOR GUNNAR HEINSOHN (* 1943 in Gynia/Poland) studied sociology, history, psychology, economics and religious studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a university diploma in sociology (1971) and doctorates in the social sciences (1973) as well as in economics (1982). His publication list exceeds more than 400 tides. Since 1984 he has been a tenured professor at the Universität Bremen where he is director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie und Genozidforschung in 1993. His research focuses on the history and theory of civilization. Population and family history was dealt with in Prof. Dr. Dr. Gunnar Heinsohn is a leading German autor in the research field of chronology critizism and historical revisionizm. He was one of the first, who in the last quarter of the 20. century began to develop in Germany the ideas of Velikovsky concerning the shortening of the chronology. The theory of the catastrophism and the general new point of view on the historiography played an important role in this research.
1979 he published a German paper on "Hot Venus, the dark age of the Greece an the tremble in the conventional academic doctrine construction. The life and research of Immanuel Velikovsky" (Freibeuter, Bd. 1, Nr.2, Dez. 1979) the first paper of German Velikovskinists .
The reconstruction of ancient history was lined out in his classical book

Prof. Dr. Dr. Gunnar Heinsohn
(See also his German page in this magazine)

Some additional internet-resources on G. Heinsohn:
The Restoration of Ancient History

What follows is one of the newest abstracts of Gunnar Heinsohn (datet by 2.11.1999 as paper presented to the SIS conference
Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations:
Archaeological, Geological and Astronomical Perspectives.

A conference at Fitzwilliam College. Cambridge. 11th-13th July 1997
Organised by The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies

THE CATASTROPHIC EMERGENCE OF CIVILISATION: THE COMING OF THE BRONZE AGE CULTURES

Gunnar Heinsohn

University of Bremen, P. O. Box 330 440, 28334 Bremen, Germany
e-mail: gheins@uni-bremen.de
Throwing of barley grains or small stoned showering of ashes, public defecation and obscene exhibition, panic yelling as well as manic romp and frenzy, mortal duels of humans and animals in strange costumes making them look like snakes or mixed creatures, entire burning of slaughtered beings - these and similar activities took place in extremely carefully choreographed blood rituals which emerged at the beginning of the Bronze Age. The holy precincts in which these sacrificial ceremonies were staged provide the archaeological markers by which the Bronze Age can be told apart from the Stone Age. The theory of religion is at a loss when it comes to understand this tremendous turn in the history of religion which, after all, brought about the first stage of civilisation. This perplexity did not always dominate the scholarly world. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759), a French civil engineer and sociologist' had deciphered the great ceremonies of man as ritualised memories of deluges and revolutions of the earth's crust. It was the dogma of evolutionism which slowly obscured past global catastrophes from the view of learned men. Yet, the religious texts were still there. Eventually, they were regarded as mere emanations of exalted souls. The cataclysms described in them supposedly had nothing to do with earth and cosmos but everything with the unconscious. This paper tries to prove the basic correctness of earliest cuneiform sources which explicitly state that the first "cult places" with their priestly personnel were established to give "counselling" to people who were left "beclouded" after a "flood had swept over the earth." Counselling, indeed, meant that the therapeutic capacities of a child's play were used to heal entire communities. The confused survivors were assigned roles in which not only the disturbing behaviour of man under the impact of cataclysms but also the catastrophic cosmic agents themselves were re enacted. The scene of 'cosmic' clashes ended in the spilling of blood and the killing of at least one contender. In this gruesome act the tense aggression - bottled up in the helpless survivors - was released in one dramatic and cathartic shot Reconciliatory acts in front of the corpses of the victims required their elevation. Bowing and asking forgiveness before the natural agents who had acquired the human or animal shape of their skilled impersonators constituted the worship of--freshly slaughtered--idols. After the gradual abandonment of blood sacrifice in the Iron Age, which was no longer struck by cosmic cataclysm, they were replaced by their portraits in wood, bone or stone giving shape to the typical statuary gods of high religion.