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by

J. Douglas Kenyon

Index of Issue 4 <../ar4contents.html>

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Though few would question the popularity of Raiders of the Lost Ark, no
academic worth his salt, ever dared to say the movie was more than a
Hollywood fantasy, either. So when respected British author Graham
Hancock announced to the world in 1992 that he had actually tracked the
legendary Ark of the Covenant of Old Testament fame to a modern-day
resting place in Ethiopia, serious eyebrows everywhere twitched upward.
Nevertheless, objective readers of his monumental volume The Sign and
the Seal, on both sides of the Atlantic, soon realized that Hancock's
case, incredible though it seemed, was not to be easily dismissed. The
exhaustively researched work went on to enjoy widespread critical
acclaim, to become a best-seller in both America and the U.K. as well as
to become the subject of several television specials.

Hancock's writing and journalistic skills had been honed during stints
as a war correspondent in Africa for The Economist and The London Sunday
Times. Winner of an honorable mention for the H.L. Mencken Award (The
Lords of Poverty, 1990), he also authored African Ark: Peoples of the
Horn, and Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger. In The Sign And The Seal,
Hancock was credited by The Guardian with having invented a new genre,
an intellectual whodunit by a do-it-yourself sleuth....

Apparently though, the success of The Sign and the Seal has only whetted
the writer's appetite for establishment chagrin. In his latest book
Hancock is out for even bigger game. In fact, Fingerprints of the Gods
seeks nothing less than to overthrow the cherished doctrine taught in
classrooms worldwide, that civilization was born roughly 5,000 years
ago. Anything earlier, we are told, was strictly primitive. In one of
the most comprehensive efforts on the subject ever, over 600 pages of
meticulous research, Hancock presents breakthrough evidence of a
forgotten epoch in human history which preceded by thousands of years
the presently acknowledged cradles of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia
and the Far East. Moreover, he argues, this same lost culture was not
only highly advanced but technologically proficient and was destroyed
more than 12,000 years ago by the global cataclysm which brought the ice
age to its sudden and dramatic conclusion.

Just released in the U.S., Fingerprints of the Gods (Crown, 608 pp.),
seeks to duplicate early successes in Great Britain where by mid-June it
had already enjoyed considerable critical praise and six straight weeks as
the number-one bestseller. Kirkus Reviews called it a fancy piece of
historical sleuthing, breathless, but intriguing and entertaining and
sturdy enough to give a long pause for thought.

In America to promote Fingerprints, Hancock was at his hotel room in
Washington, D.C. when Atlantis Rising caught up with him. With just two
days of the tour behind him, it was still too early to estimate how the
book would do here, but already he was enjoying the kind of favorable
media attention which helped to make The Sign and the Seal an American
hit. Interviewers, he felt, were generally positive and open to his
ideas. While the reception among academics has been something less than
cordial, that was to be expected. One of the reasons the book is so
long, he explained, is because I've really tried to document everything
very thoroughly, so that the academics have to deal with the evidence,
rather than me as an individual, or with what, they like to think, are
rather vague wishy-washy ideas. I've tried to nail it all down to hard
fact as far as possible.

Nailing down the facts took Hancock on a worldwide odyssey which
included stops in Peru, Mexico, and Egypt. Among the many intriguing
mysteries which the author was determined fully to investigate were:

* Ancient maps showing precise knowledge of the actual coastline of
Antarctica, notwithstanding the fact that the location has been
buried under thousands of feet of ice for many millennia.

* Stone building technology, beyond our present capacity to
duplicate, in Central and South America, as well as Egypt.

* Sophisticated archeo-astronomical alignments at ancient sites all
over the world.

* Evidence of comprehensive ancient knowledge of the 25,776-year
precession of the equinoxes (unmistakably encoded into ancient
mythology and building sites, even though the phenomenon would
have taken, at a minimum, many generations of systematic
observation to detect, and which conventional scholarship tells us
was not discovered until the Greek philosopher Hipparchus in about
150 B.C.).

* Water erosion of the Great Sphinx dating it to before the coming
of desert conditions to the Giza plateau (as researched by
American scholar John Anthony West and geologist Robert Schoch).

* Evidence that the monuments of the Giza plateau were built in
alignment with the belt of Orion at circa. 10,500 B.C. (as
demonstrated by Belgian engineer Robert Bauval).

Unfettered as he is by the constraints under which many so-called
specialists operate, Hancock sees himself uniquely qualified to
undertake such a far-reaching study. One of the problems with academics,
and particularly academic historians, he insists, is they have a very
narrow focus. And as a result they are very myopic.

Hancock is downright contemptuous of organized Egyptology, which he
places in the particularly short-sighted category. There's a rigid
paradigm of Egyptian history, he complains, which seems to function as a
kind of filter on knowledge and which stops Egyptologists, as a
profession, from being even the remotest bit open to any other
possibilities at all. In Hancock's view Egyptologists tend to behave
like priests in a very narrow religion, dogmatically and irrationally,
if not superstitiously. A few hundred years ago they would have burned
people like me and John West at the stake, he laughs.

Such illogical zealotry Hancock fears stands in the way of the public's
right to know about what could be one of the most significant
discoveries ever made in the Great Pyramid. In 1993, the German inventor
Rudolph Gantenbrink sent a robot with a television camera up a narrow
shaft from the Queen's chamber and discovered what appears to be a door
with iron handles. That door, Hancock suspects, might lead to the
legendary hall of records of the ancient Egyptians. But whatever is
behind it, he feels it must be properly investigated. So far, though,
there has been no official action, at least not a public one. Citing
episodes personally witnessed, he protests you have Egyptologists saying
there is no point in looking to see if there's anything behind that
slab', they call it a slab', they won't call it a door, because we know
there's not another chamber inside the great pyramid. The attitude
infuriates Hancock, I wonder how they know that, in this 6-million-ton
monument which has got room for 3,000 chambers the same size as the
king's chamber. How do they have the temerity and the nerve to suggest
that there's no point in looking?

The tantalizing promise of that door has led Hancock to speculate that
the builders may have purposely arranged things to require technology of
ultimate explorers. Nobody could get in there unless they had a certain
level of technology. And he points out that even a hundred years ago we
didn't have the means to do it. In the last 20 years the technology has
been developed and now the shaft has been explored, and lo and behold;
at the end is a door with handles. It's like an invitation, an
invitation to come on in, look inside, when you're ready.

Hancock is far from sanguine about official intentions. If that door
ever does get open, probably there will be no public access at all to
what happens. He would like to see an international team present, but
suspects that, instead, what we're going to get is a narrow elite group
of Egyptologists who will strictly control information about what
happens. In fact, he thinks it's possible that they've even been in
there already. The Queen's chamber was suspiciously closed for more than
nine months after Gantenbrink made his discovery. The story was given
out that they were cleaning the graffiti off the walls but the graffiti
was never cleaned off. I wonder what they were doing in there those nine
months. There's what really makes me angry, that this narrow group of
scholars control knowledge of what is at the end of the day the legacy
of the whole of mankind.

Gantenbrink's door is not the only beckoning portal on the Giza plateau.
Hancock is equally interested in the chamber which John Anthony West and
Robert Schoch, in the course of investigating the weathering of the
Sphinx, detected, by seismic methods, beneath the paws. Either location
might prove to be the site of the hall of records. In both cases, the
authorities have resisted all efforts at further investigation.

Hancock believes the entire Giza site was constructed after the crust of
the earth had stabilized following a 30-degree crustal displacement
which destroyed most of the high civilization then standing. According
to Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's When the Sky Fell, upon which Hancock
relies, that displacement had moved an entire continent from temperate
zones to the south pole where it was soon buried under mountains of ice.
This, he believes, is the real story of the end of Plato's Atlantis, but
the A word is not mentioned until very late. I see no point in giving a
hostile establishment a stick to beat me with, he offers. It's purely a
matter of tactics.

The Giza complex was built, Hancock speculates, as part of an effort to
remap and reorient civilization. For that reason he believes the 10,500
B.C. date (demonstrated by Bauval) to be especially important. The
pyramids are a part of saying this is where it stopped. That's why the
perfect alignment, for example, to due north, of the Great Pyramid is
extremely interesting, because they obviously would have had a new north
at that time.

Despite a determination to stick with the hard evidence, Hancock is not
uncomfortable with the knowledge that his work is serving to corroborate
the claims of many intuitives and mystics. On the contrary, he believes,
that the (clairvoyant ability) of human beings is another one of those
latent faculties which modern rational science simply refuses to
recognize. I think we're a much more mysterious species than we give
ourselves credit for. Our whole cultural conditioning is to deny those
elements of intuition and mystery in ourselves. But all the indications
are that these are, in fact, vital faculties in human beings, and I
suspect that the civilization that was destroyed, although
technologically advanced, was much more spiritually advanced than we are
today.

Such knowledge, he believes, is part of the legacy of the ancients which
we must strive to recover. What comes across again and again,
particularly from documents like the ancient Egyptian Pyramid texts,
which I see as containing the legacy of knowledge and ideas from this
lost civilization, is a kind of science of immortality, a quest for the
immortality of the soul. I feeling that immortality may not be
guaranteed to all and everybody simply by being born. It may be
something that has to be worked for. Something that results from the
focused power of the mind. The real purpose of the pyramids, he
suggests, may be to teach us how to achieve immortality. But before we
can understand, we must recover from the ancient amnesia.

Hancock believes we are a species with amnesia. I think we show all the
signs that there's a traumatic episode in our past, which is so horrible
that we cannot somehow bring ourselves to recognize it. Just as the
victim suffering from amnesia as a result of some terrible episode fears
awakening memory of that trauma and tries to avoid it, so we have done
collectively. The amnesia victim is, of course, forced to return to the
source of his pain and, if you wish to move forward and continue to
develop as an individual you have to overcome it. You have to confront
it, deal with it, see it face to face, realize what it means, get over
it, and get on with your life. That is what society needs to be doing.

In the institutional resistance to considering ancient achievement,
Hancock sees a subconscious pattern based on fear. There's a huge
impulse to deny all of this, because suddenly all the foundations get
knocked out from under you and you find yourself swimming loosely in
space without any points of reference anymore. The process needn't be so
threatening though. If we can go through that difficult experience and
come out on the other side, I think we'll all emerge better from it. I'm
more and more convinced that the reason we are so messed up and confused
and totally disturbed as a species at the end of the 20th century is
because of this, because we've forgotten our past.

If it is true that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to
repeat it, then there are lessons in our past which can be ignored only
at our peril. Clearly written into the mythology of many societies are
stories of cataclysmic destruction. Hancock cites the work of Giorgio de
Santillana, an authority on the history of science at M.I.T. In his book
Hamlet's Mill, Santillana hypothesized an advanced scientific knowledge
was encoded into ancient myth. Hancock points out, Once you accept that
mythology may have originated with highly advanced people, then you have
to start listening to what the myths are saying. What the myths are
saying, he believes, is that a great cataclysm struck the world and
destroyed an advanced civilization and a golden age of mankind. And the
bad cataclysm is a recurrent feature in the life of the Earth and will
return. The messages from many ancient sources, including the Bible,
point to a recurrence of such a cataclysm in our lifetime.
Notwithstanding such views, Hancock insists he is not a prophet of doom.
His point is, We've received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from
the past, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we
must recapture that heritage, learn what we can from it, because there
is vitally important information in it.

The stakes couldn't be higher. I'm convinced that we're locked today in
a battle of ideas, he says. I think it's desperately important that the
ideas that will lead to a recovery of our memory as a species triumph.
And therefore we have to be strong, we have to be eloquent, and argue
clearly and coherently. We have to see what our opponents are going to
do, how they are going to try to get at us. And the dirty tricks that
they are going to try and play. We have to fight them on their own ground.

Hancock's next book will be a collaboration with Robert Bauval in which
he plans not only to complete the decoding of the archeo-astronomy of
the Giza plateau, but also to protest the way official Egyptology has
behaved. In the process, Hancock promises to air some of the
establishment's dirty linen, to look behind the scenes at what they've
been doing, how research has been hindered, misled and misguided by a
narrow group of scholars protecting their own interests at the cost of
the rest of humanity. We have uncovered a really serious scandal in
Egyptology which, once it's brought out into public view, will make it
impossible for this group of scholars, who have controlled Giza for the
last 20 years, to have any credibility at all.

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