Rohl traces his fascination with ancient Egypt to a visit of that country at the age of nine, which featured a journey on the Nile on King Farouk's paddle-steamer.

He first worked as a rock musician, forming a band in 1968, (Sign of Life, later Ankh), which were signed by Vertigo, but split up after Vertigo rejected the finished product. In 1969/70 Rohl completed an Institute of Incorporated Photographers degree at the University of Manchester, before forming a new group, Mandalaband, which released two albums, Mandalaband (1975 - "an ambitious concept inspired by the Chinese occupation of Tibet") and The Eye of Wendor (1978). About 1974, Rohl started work as a sound engineer, ultimately becoming chief engineer at Strawberry Studios, the Stockport home of the group 10cc. Royalties from four solo artist and composing recording contracts enabled him to retire from music and focus on Egyptology, in particular to develop the New Chronology which he had been working on for five years during his music career.

In 1985 Rohl became the first Director of the Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences (ISIS), and editor of its Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum since 1986. In 1988 he was accepted by University College, London and awarded the prestigious W.F. Masom History Research Scholarship by the University of London as well as being awarded his degree in Ancient History and Egyptology in 1990. He then began his research on a doctoral thesis entitled "A re-examination of the Chronology of the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt" but failed to complete the PhD due to long-term book writing and TV commitments. He is a past President of the Sussex Egyptology Society (SES) and edits the Eastern Desert Survey Report. He excavated at Kadesh in Syria for the London Institute of Archaeology during the 1990s, and is currently Co-Field Director of the Eastern Desert Survey in Egypt.

The publication of his book, A Test of Time led to his role in a three-part television documentary, "Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest", which appeared late summer 1995 on Channel 4 in the UK, and spring 1996 on The Learning Channel/Discovery in the USA.

The New Chronology is a revised Chronology of the ancient Near East created by Rohl. It involves a major revision of the conventional chronology of ancient Egypt, in particular by redating Egyptian kings of the 19th through 25th Dynasties. Rohl asserts that the New Chronology allows scholars to identify many of the main characters in the Old Testament with people whose names appear in archaeological finds. The New Chronology has not gained wide acceptance among Egyptologists, and was sharply criticized as no longer tenable in early 2010 after the release of a radiocarbon date study for artifacts linked to specific pharoahs' reigns. However, if correct, the same study would also refute portions of the Old Chronology with findings that would push the dates for several kings earlier. Regardless, proponents of the New Chronology have since noted several problems with the radiocarbon dating itself, including reliance on questionable and unpublished tree-ring data (dendrochronology) for calibration and use of assumptions about the sequence and lengths of Egyptian reigns.

In addition to his theories on Egypt, Rohl has put forth other theories related to the Old Testament. In his published work, Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation, he posits a location for the legendary Garden of Eden in Iranian Azarbaijan, in the vicinity of Tabriz upon which the Genesis tradition was based. In the same work, he develops a local flood theory for the Genesis Flood, positing that the biblical reference to the covering of "all the high mountains" is merely a description of the flooding of cities in the plains of Mesopotamia on the basis that the Hebrew word 'har' does not just mean 'mountain' but also 'hill' and 'city mound'. In his book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible, Eric H. Cline, writing about Rohl's suggestion for the location of Eden, says "his suggestions have not caught on with the scholarly establishment. His argument is not helped by the fact that it depends upon speculations regarding the transmission of place-names for both the various rivers and nearby related areas from antiquity to the present. In the end, while Rohl’s suggestion is not out of the question, it seems no more probable than any other hypothesis, and less likely than those suggested by Speiser, Zarins, and Sauer."

Books

• Published in the U.S. as
• Published in paperback as

Videos

• Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest, 1995. Three-part documentary shown 1995 on Channel 4 in the UK, Spring 1996 on The Learning Channel/Discovery in the US.
• In Search of Eden, 2002.
• The Bible: Myth or Reality, 2005.