Herodotus was told by the priests of Memphis that their records went back 11,000 years. If they had survived a cataclysm, wouldn't accounts of it have played important roles in what the priests told Herodotus?

Unfortunately, the Egyptian records were on papyrus and skin scrolls, housed in one of the greatest libraries of antiquity, the Alexandria Library. Much of that library, along with a large portion of its 700,000 scrolls -- the equivalent of 10,000 textbooks of today -- was lost to fire during the reign of Caesar. Nevertheless, the Alexandria Library was rebuilt and continued to be a great repository of ancient records until AD 390. In that year the Bishop of Alexandria, evidently insane and a religious fanatic, led a mob through the streets of the city and pillaged the library of half a million of its scrolls, all of which were burned at his order. Not too long after that, the remainder of the collection was destroyed by the invading army of Caliph Omer.

Fortunately, though, during his visits, Herodotus noted some other very peculiar information passed on to him by the priests... information which heretofore has been discounted as imaginings.

Assuming that an observer in one of the so-called safe areas of Earth at the time of a capsizing were looking at the heavens, he would note a drastic change in the course of the moon, stars and sun. The sun might rise in the south instead of the east, and set in the north instead of the west. Or it might even shift a full 180 degrees, so that the sun would appear to rise in the west instead of the east.

Imagine that at the moment of the last capsizing it was nine in the morning in Memphis. The Earth suddenly began moving sideways even while continuing the normal rotation from west to east. To an Egyptian looking upward at such a time, it would appear that the sun had stopped in its path, then moved about erratically for a while and finally set very close to where it had risen.

An impossible supposition? So it has always seemed. Consider, though, what else the priests of Memphis told Herodotus. They told him with great assurance that in the history of their country, spanning 11,000 years -- or, as they put it, 341 generations (Egypt had by then had 341 kings and a similar number of high priests) -- the sun had twice risen where it had set, without any great change in the productivity of their country!

This heretofore inexplicable statement begins to have considerable relevance. There is a possibility that Egypt was fortunately situated where it could survive two capsizings with little damage. In other words, two capsizings ago, one of the poles was at Hudson Bay. When the capsizing occurred, the area now known as the Sudan Basin became a polar site. The Egyptians then lived in a climate not unlike that of Fairbanks or Reykjavik.

Then another rollover occurred and once again the sun seemed to stand still and then set where it had risen, and what had been a pole became the Sudan Basin of today. The reference by Herodotus to the sun rising and setting twice in the same direction fits into the precepts of the HAB Theory very nicely.

The HAB Theory contends that when a capsizing occurs, the ice caps suddenly move to the equator, and areas which were previously equatorial become sites for the new poles. This goes wholly against long-established geological estimates which, for example, place the age of the South polar ice cap at approximately 13 million years (though these estimates were revised downwards, to 130,000 years, in the mid 1980s).