Online Introduction to Underworld
From Fingerprints of the Gods to Underworld
By Graham Hancock
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Graham Hancock, the bestselling author of The Sign and the Seal, reveals the true origins of civilization. Connecting puzzling clues scattered throughout the world, Hancock discovers compelling evidence of a technologically and culturally advanced civilization that was destroyed and obliterated from human memory. Four 8-page photo inserts.
He begins the book by introducing us to an ancient map of Antartica, made in 1513. It is called the Piri Reis map and was drawn up in Constantinople. It is an enigma because according to our current "knowledge" Antartica was not discovered until 1818. Hancock goes on to reveal many examples wich indicate that at some time in the distant past mankind was much more "evolved" tecnologically than in the recent past. Somehow the ancients had detailed knowledge about astronomy, mathematics, engineering, etc much of which we have only "learned" in the past century. How did they learn of these things? How did we - as a species - forget or lose this knowledge? |
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The central claim of my 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods is not that there was but that there could have been a lost civilisation, which flourished and was destroyed in remote antiquity. And I wrote the book, quite deliberately, not as a work of science but as a work of advocacy. I felt that the possibility of a lost civilisation had not been adequately explored or tested by mainstream scholarship. I set myself the task of rehabilitating it by gathering together, and passionately championing, all the best evidence and arguments in its favour.
In the early 1990's when I was researching Fingerprints there were a number of new ideas in the air that seemed to me to have an important bearing on the lost civilisation debate. These included Robert Bauval's Orion correlation, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's work on Antarctica and earth-crust displacement, and the geological case presented by John Anthony West and Robert Schoch that the Great Sphinx of Giza might be much older than had hitherto been thought.
At the same time I was aware of a huge reservoir of popular literature, going back more than a century to the time of Ignatius Donnelly, in which the case for a lost civilisation had been put again and again, in many different ways and from many different angles. I knew that not a single word of this vast literature had ever been accepted by mainstream scholars who remained steadfast in their view that the history of civilisation is known and includes no significant forgotten episodes.
But, I thought, what if the scholars have got it wrong?
What if we've forgotten something important in our story?
What if we are a species with amnesia?
After all, scientists are now pretty sure that anatomically modern humans, just like us, have been around for at least the last 120,000 years.
Yet our "history" begins 5000 years ago with the first cities and the first written records. And the prehistory of this process has presently only been traced back (often quite tentatively) to the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago when it's thought that mankind began to make the transition from hunter-gathering to food production.
So what were we doing during the previous 110,000 years?
And isn't it odd that we only really remember the last 5000 well and have to "reconstruct" our picture of everything that went before from extremely scanty remains that have accidentally survived the passage of time?
So I decided that I would re-examine the popular literature on Atlantis and other lost civilisations, including the work of writers like Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchen, to see whether there was anything in it that might strengthen the new synthesis I had in mind.
I also made a clear decision at the outset that it was not my job to present an "objective" or "balanced" case for a lost civilisation by giving deference to orthodox views on the matter. Rather I saw my role as doing the best that I possibly could to present a persuasive counter-case to the orthodox position and to undermine the largely unquestioned support and acceptance habitually given to the mainstream version of the past. In the late 1980's when the idea of Fingerprints first began to take shape in my mind, orthodox history and archaeology enjoyed absolute intellectual dominance over the unorthodox, "alternative" camp. Reasonable people who even speculated vaguely that the Great Pyramids of Giza might have been more than tombs and tombs only were branded as "pyramidiots", anyone with an interest in Atlantis was automatically assumed to belong to the lunatic-fringe, and in general the notion of a lost civilisation was rapidly on its way to becoming the non-issue of the twentieth century, good only for popular entertainment but of no serious weight.
I felt that the only way to confront this mindset was to write a passionate one-sided book -- and this is exactly what I set out to do with Fingerprints of the Gods.
I sought out what I thought was most provocative and intriguing in the popular literature from Donnelly to von Daniken, and in the exciting new ideas of Bauval, the Flem-Aths, West and Schoch. I also looked for any and every weapon I could find in mainstream historical and archaeological research that I might be able to turn against the orthodox view of the past. At the same time I spread my limited funds as widely as I could, engaging myself at first hand in the mysteries of some of the most intriguing and spectacular ancient sites around the world -- amongst them the Pyramids and the Sphinx of Egypt, the Nazca Lines of Peru, the megalithic city of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon at Teotihuacan in Mexico. In each place I built my own synthesis upon a superstructure that others had already erected, trying to bring together disparate evidence and observations with the objective of reinvigorating the lost civilisation idea from the doldrums into which it had fallen.
I think I succeeded in this objective. As increasing numbers of university lecturers in disciplines like archaeology and ancient history will tell you, part of their job now is to "debunk Hancock" to credulous students -- in other words, those students who are foolish enough to suspect, as I do, that there really could have been a lost civilisation.
I know of three books that have been written rubbishing my work, an official "debunking" website has been founded with the same purpose, and I recently had the privilege, alongside my friend Robert Bauval (author of The Orion Mystery), of finding myself the subject of an entire episode of BBC2's prestigious science series Horizon.
The thrust of Horizon's argument was that the idea of any kind of great lost civilisation of prehistory is nothing more than "preposterous", "misleading", "insidious" "garbage". "You could summarise it by saying a load of codswallop" proclaimed Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. The programme portrayed me essentially as a charlatan, or as a fool, or perhaps as a bit of both. No merit whatsoever was found in anything I have ever written. My ideas were dismissed as valueless and I was accused of presenting evidence selectively in order to bias the reader in favour of the lost civilisation hypothesis.
Thus the very method that I had chosen to restore balance to an extremely one-sided debate -- by writing a book that one-sidedly champions and advocates the neglected possibility of a lost civilisation -- was now being cited as a fundamental critique of my work.
It did.
And I stand by it.
The book raised many legitimate questions and brought together new arguments and evidence in support of the lost civilisation hypothesis.
But I researched and wrote it between 1991 and 1994 when serious debate on this possibility was rare. Fingerprints was part of a process that stimulated serious debate and as a result the standards of evidence and argument today are much higher than they were in the early 1990's.
Then my top priority was to cram in and get down on the page anything and everything that I thought might weigh in favour of the lost civilisation idea. This was more important to me at that time than taking meticulous care with the quality of every source or being choosy about what leads I followed. I was also too quick to attack weaknesses in the orthodox position while failing to take proper account of orthodox strengths.
The result was that my case for a lost civilisation was anything but bullet-proof ,and Fingerprints has come in for a massive amount of criticism -- some of it richly deserved. Often, for example, I ignored the official carbon dates for sites I was writing about -- just brushed them aside on the grounds that C-14 can't date stone monuments directly -- and got on with finding my own way through all the good (and bad) reasons to doubt the orthodox chronology.
This was a mistake. With the benefit of hindsight I now recognise that I should have taken much fuller account of the C-14 evidence for megalithic sites like Tiahuanaco, and presented it to my readers in sufficient depth and detail before making the case for an alternative chronology. I should have understood that in the long run no attempt to propose much greater antiquity for any archaeological site is likely to thrive unless it can deal with the carbon dates on which the orthodox chronology usually rests.
However, what I'm referring to here is the whole approach that led me to be so cavalier about C-14, not any of the basic questions about the past that I raised in Fingerprints and my other books. I still think, for example, that a great mystery surrounds Tiahuanaco in Bolivia and that it's origins may be much older than we are taught. I'm glad I presented some of the evidence for an older Tiahuanaco in Fingerprints, and in Heaven's Mirror, but I also recognise in retrospect that my case was weak because it failed to deal with the C-14 evidence against an older Tiahuanaco.
Accordingly I've set out with Underworld to write a book of historical dissent that is nevertheless rooted and grounded in accepted archaeological evidence in a way that Fingerprints is not -- and wasn't intended to be. By way of direct comparison, Underworld contains a challenge to the orthodox chronology of Malta's megalithic sites that's just as ambitious as the challenge to Tiahuanaco's antiquity in Fingerprints. The big difference is that in Underworld I thoroughly examine the Maltese C-14 evidence, and indeed the other ingredients of the orthodox chronology, and take full account of these in the case I make.
So there is definitely a change of approach in this new book. But this should not be confused with any fundamental change of attitude on my part towards my previous books - because there has been no such fundamental change. In response to a question on this subject put to me recently on the Message Board of this site I wrote:
I regard all my work as a continuity. Like every other human I make mistakes. Like everyone else I learn from my mistakes, grow in the process, and try not to repeat them in future.
But you would be wrong to imagine because I recognise and am willing to admit to mistakes when I've made them that this means any kind of "retraction" of my previous work..
The central point of Fingerprints, Keeper [of Genesis] and Heaven's Mirror is that there has been a major forgotten episode in human history localised around the end of the Ice Age and that this forgotten episode will likely be proved to have involved the loss of an urban civilisation that was at least advanced enough to have mapped the world. Maybe there was more than one lost civilisation? I've never ruled out that possibility.
After what I've learnt in order to write Underworld I feel a lot closer to proving this central point, not a lot further away.
Another Message Board contributor also asked me what if anything I retracted in my previous books. I replied:
It's not a matter of retracting anything, but a matter of evolving as a person, as a researcher and as a writer. It's also a matter of listening to my critics and trying to find a new approach that takes their reasonable concerns into account. Although not all their concerns are reasonable some of them are. Contrary to appearances I don't disagree with everything they say about me. More often what I disagree with is how they say it.
In a way I'm lucky to have such vigilant critics because it keeps me on my toes.
Because I very much wanted to avoid another battle over old bitterly contested ground, Underworld is not a book about Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Easter Island or Angkor -- which were primary subject areas in my earlier books. Geographically the main above-water focus in Underworld is on India, Malta, Japan, China and Taiwan.
There is a section on ancient maps in Fingerprints and there is a major section on ancient maps in Underworld. The work on maps in Underworld is all new, and does not cover any of the ground covered in Fingerprints. Nevertheless the chapters on ancient maps in Underworld strongly support the notion advocated in Fingerprints -- i.e. that the world was mapped at various stages during the meltdown of the Ice Age.
In summary I regard Underworld as a much stronger defence than anything I have previously written of the essential concept of my previous works -- namely that there has been a significant forgotten episode in human history, that the post-glacial cataclysms have something central to do with it, and that civilisation as we know it has far older roots than is presently accepted. At the same time, my objective from the outset has also been to present a very simple and yet completely new idea that's never been explored or worked through before.
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