Most of us have a passing familiarity with the wonders of ancient Egypt, if chiefly with Tutankhamun's fabulous burial treasure. But the big mystery is how such a sophisticated culture sprang up so quickly, as if from nowhere, and how this ties in with civilisation's best-known founding story, the Old Testament.

The Eastern Desert rock carvings depict an epic journey made by a godlike people - exotic and terrible strangers - who, by what looks to have been a surprise invasion of Egypt, dragged their large reed ships overland from the Red Sea to the Nile. These were plainly warships, with up to 80 oars apiece, their chieftains armed to the teeth and pointing westward. Great lines of other men are shown dragging the ships with ropes. Strategically, you can see how it could have worked: haul the ships two-thirds of the way, get into the dried-up river beds, then wait for the annual high Nile to carry you to war at 80-oar speed.

Rohl is convinced that these invaders came from Mesopotamia at the onset of the 3rd millennium BC: 'We can tell this from their style of weapons, ship design, their dress and their religious symbolism,' he says. 'They carry pear-shaped maces, far more lethal than the disc-shaped maces the Egyptians used at that time, and their ships are typical Mesopotamian seagoing vessels. Their chieftains wear tall twin plumes, and kilts with animals' tails attached. I've linked them with the mythical 'followers of Horus' because the carvings feature the falcon god, Horus.'

Rohl's interpretation of these rock-art sequences as an all-out invasion of Egypt neatly elides with an archeologically famous ceremonial knife. Unearthed at nearby Gebel el-Arak, it was made in the same era as the invasion. Carved on its ivory handle is the world's oldest pictorial record of a battle. 'And we know who won it,' says Rohl, 'because it shows the long-haired Nile-valley dwellers succumbing to the pear-shaped maces of the short-haired invaders. We also see the high-prowed boats knocking the hell out of the people in the crescent-shaped Nile boats, who are shown drowning.'

Further evidence strongly suggests that these foreigners eventually became the pharaohs: 'Within 500 years, in pyramids and tombs, we begin to see all this Mesopotamian symbolism now become part of Egyptian culture. The gods wear tall twin plumes, the kings have tails attached to their kilts, and the bodies of the pharaohs are dragged to their underworld tombs in high-prowed ships. After the falcon god in the rock carvings, we soon get the Horus kings of Egypt. We see pharaohs smiting their enemies with pear-shaped maces and, as with King Tut, they're all depicted wearing false beards, as if imitating the divine heroes of Mesopotamia.'

But what has all this to do with civilisation's founding story, as told in the Old Testament (OT)? According to Genesis, following Adam's ancestral line from the Garden of Eden, through Noah and the flood, it was Ham's second son, Mizra, who came with his tribe and settled Egypt. Still today, an Egyptian will refer to himself as Masri, a descendant of Masr. Not just a phonetic similarity, it's an etymological fit.

As civilisation's founding stories go, the OT is by no means an exclusive. The Sumerian and Akkadian epics come to us from Mesopotamia, written down for the first time - in cuneiform script on clay tablets - circa 2,500BC. Albeit with different names, they tell the same story - the first of all stories - involving the same principal characters. Like Eve in the OT, in Mesopotamian legend 'the Lady of the Rib' is banished from eternal life in heaven. Next, there's Noah, the exact double of the Sumerian flood hero Utnapishtim. Both send out doves from the ark to find dry land. Later, Noah's great-grandson, Nimrod - warrior, mighty hunter and builder of the great city of Erech - has his twin in the Sumerian saga of Enmerkar, 'Enmer the Hunter', the warrior and builder-king of Uruk. Same man, same city?

But of all Rohl's evidence for the adoption of Mesopotamian culture by Egypt, here's a language-trail detail to lift the hair on your neck. The odd epithet ascribed to the ancient Mesopotamian flood hero, 'the far distant', is the exact meaning of the Egyptian word 'Horus'. This takes you from Noah to the pharaohs in just one word.

That Rohl packs more into one book than most archeologist-historians would attempt to set down in a lifetime is only the half of it. In his latest work, The Lost Testament, he upsets convention by very ably demonstrating that the OT was in great part based on real people and actual events. Following the Mesopotamian invasion of Egypt, he pieces together Joseph's life as Pharaoh's right-hand man, through to how Moses came to learn the true name of God - Yahweh - to the exodus, the Israelites' storming of the promised land, and the extraordinary rise of King Saul and King David, ending with the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BC - 5,000 years of history delivered at a tremendous lick. If, here and there, Rohl's evidence reads a little thin, it's chiefly because he's attempted to tell a seamless story for a lay audience. At the back of each chapter, however, he presents his evidence cold.

Of course, conventional academic wisdom holds that the OT is little better than a fairy story because no archeological evidence for it has been found. On the contrary, says Rohl. There's evidence galore, and all sorts of specialists have been staring at it for decades. The mistake, he argues, is that the ancient world has been dated wrongly. Take Joshua and his Israelite army destroying the city of Jericho. Jericho's tumbled walls are still there, along with storage jars, the grain inside burnt to a cinder, consistent with Joshua's infamous torching of the city. The glitch is that orthodox chronology would place Joshua at the end of the late Bronze Age, when no such fortified cities were built. Hence, either Joshua was born too late to have had anything to do with Jericho, or he never existed. Everyone's problem, of course, is that there were no calendars BC, only tantalisingly incomplete king lists and dynastic records. All we have, then, are evidence-based interpretations - and ferocious arguments.

When Rohl first advanced his new chronology in A Test of Time, published in 1995, he got some awful stick. The leading Bible scholar Professor Thomas L Thompson insisted that any attempt to write history based on a direct integration of biblical and extra-biblical sources was 'not only dubious but wholly ludicrous'. The very architect of Egyptian chronology, Professor Kenneth Kitchen, dismissed Rohl's thesis as '98% rubbish'. Undeterred, in his next book, Legend, Rohl advanced new discoveries relating to the Book of Genesis. Indeed, as readers of The Sunday Times may recall, he even gave a geographical fix for the Garden of Eden, in Iran, based on his deciphering of the ancient-language names of the four rivers given as co-ordinates in Genesis, chapter two.

For our story, we went and we saw, including a place 'east of Eden', as described in Genesis, that is still called Noqdi, the Land of Nod.In the interim, the pendulum of serious opinion has begun to swing Rohl's way. Dr Ronald Wallenfels, for example, the curator of New York's Metropolitan Museum, and an Assyrian specialist, says there's plenty of flexibility in the ancient Assyrian dates. Given that all chronologies are interdependent, the same flexibility would inevitably apply to the Egyptian time line. Just recently, too, one of Rohl's peers, an American Egyptologist, cold-canvassed a number of other Egyptologists with a single question: if you were to place the Israelite sojourn and exodus in any period in history, what would it be? The majority picked the middle Bronze Age, concurring with Rohl.