Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America

Rating:
Summary: Newsflash: Islands Not Settled By Walkers

Review:
Robert Schoch has done an admirable job in collating data from the Earth's odd corners. This book is one of the best ever books on ancient navigation, and also on catastrophism. Interdisciplinary and of wide scope, it's better and more focused than his earlier popular work, _Voices of the Rocks_ (ISBN: 0609603698).

Schoch isn't the first to raise the prospect of an ancient megalith building, seafaring civilization. He's not the first to come around to a catastrophic way of looking at the past, in historic or prehistoric times. But his presentation and credentials lend much higher credibility and a higher profile to such ideas.

From the work with proxy data in tree rings etc, to anthropological studies around the world, to exploration of the continental shelf, this scientist has produced what is easily the best of a problematical genre, as well as being a work of popular science. So much debris has been penned regarding the origin of the Great Pyramid, alleged astrological links with ancient structures (Tiahuanaco, Stonehenge, Giza, etc), and precolumbian navigation (those works written from a political rather than scientific or linguistic perspective), this book by Schoch is a new light in an ancient sky.

As Schoch recounts, Homo Erectus was crossing miles of open sea 800,000 or more years ago. But we're supposed to believe that crossing open sea was abandoned thereafter in the SW Pacific for at least 750,000 years, then abandoned again for at least another 47,000 years, and Australia was settled just twice during that nearly one million year period.

My reservations about this book involve Schoch's use of the conventional pseudochronology of the ancient Near East. But had he been interested in anything else, his book wouldn't stand a chance. As it is, the book's enemies will continue to forge links for their Marley-banshee chains. Recommended.



Rating:
Summary: A solid case for diffusion
Review: A logical sequence to Voices of the Rocks. Although I am Professor Schoch's webmaster, how could anyone expect me to write a review other than a good one? Questioning my objective views of the book would be legitimate, however, he has obtained good reviews from the skeptics.
Although he centers his book around the pyramids of the world, he also describes how it was possible that these ancient people could have sailed from their country to another after a catastrophic event that ripped apart their culture, taking with them the knowledge they used and seeding a new culture. Thus, leaving temples and other architectural works that show striking similarities with other cultures.
I could go on, but I only have 1,000 words. What I can tell you is that anyone with an interest in this subject, will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Written
Review: At first glance, this book might be mistaken for "Chariots of the Gods" hokum -- it's about pyramids, it suggest prehistoric connections between widely scattered civilizations, and it has an entire chapter on planetary catastrophes. However, this is a very serious effort. Granted, it raises a lot more questions than it answers, and can be a little monotonous in spots. But as a former geology major, I didn't spot any pseudo-science (which is not surprising, given that the primary author has a Ph.D. in Geology from Yale) and I found much food for thought.

Sure, if it turns out that the whole theory of cultural diffusion is wrong, (similarities in disparate civilizations are due to migration and interconnection rather than parallel developoment) this book will be little more than an amusing footnote in the history of science. But then, plate tectonics was once a crackpot theory. This is a serious book that deserves to be read.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Written
Review: I am a friend of the authors, so take this with a pinch of salt, but to the reader who called the book "dry, dry, dry" I can only respond with this line from Kirkus Reviews: "The presentation of this material is as entertaining as science-writing gets." I enjoyed this book throughly and found it a real pot boiler. Friend or not, that's the real deal.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing speculations, too circumstantial to convince
Review: In this stretched-out thesis, geologist Schoch tries to persuade us that the existence of ancient pyramids in various countries around the world is evidence that a protocivilization preceded the pyramid-building cultures we know of in Egypt, India, China, and the Americas. Drawing on a theory developed by Stephen Oppenheimer in his book Eden in the East, Schoch argues that this mother culture was based in Sundaland, a vast extension of Southeast Asia that now lies under the sea. Ancient seafarers, fleeing this flooded subcontinent, allegedly diffused their culture to other parts of the world. According to Schoch, the pyramids were symbolic connections to the heavens inspired by comet-related disasters, "a response to dangerous skies." Schoch ranges widely over ancient cultures, citing similarities in support of his case. He devotes an appendix to redating the Great Sphinx at Giza, arguing that it is much older than the nearby pyramids. While all this is entertaining, the evidence is circumstantial; there are not enough hard facts to make Schoch's theory convincing. The book includes colored photographs of pyramids, those of the Egyptian versions being particularly well done.

Rating:
Summary: Worth Consideration
Review: The title's provocative phrase "The True Origins of the Pyramids..." does not indicate a proposed alternate civilization of pyramid-builders; instead, it is about the possible common historical origins of the various pyramid-builder (and other) civilizations around the world.

Schoch, a geologist, is perhaps best known for his re-dating of the Sphinx back to 4700-7000 BC, based on weathering and climactic patterns. (This book has an Appendix where Schoch replies cogently to various critics of his Sphinx theory and cites some additional support.)

The main premise in this book is that there are enough distinct threads of evidence to support the theory that the proto-civilization for many of the notable cultures of the past (such as the ancient Egyptions, Mayans, and so on) was based in a time when the sea-levels were much lower in a region called "Sundaland". This region is now mainly underwater due to glacial melting since the last Ice Age and stretches from Indochina to Borneo and Timor.

Schoch uses a myriad of types of circumstantial evidence such as commonality of flood myths, linguistic comparisons, genetics, geologic, tree-ring data, archeological remains, ancient math and astronomical knowledge, and so forth to piece together support for his theory. Some of it is robust, some of it is a bit tenuous, but all in all, I find it worth considering.

In pulling together these disparate trails of evidence into a prehistorical timeline, I do not think Schoch has reached beyond plausibility; indeed, I consider some of mainstream archeology to be more ardently ideological and consist of far more speculative story-telling than what Schoch proposes here.

This book is a worthwhile read for someone interested in the idea that civilization did not spring up suddenly in the last 5-6,000 years. To me, it is far more parsimonious that the homo sapien mind of 10,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 or more years ago - a mind which was identical in capability to ours - had societies and cultures which acted as significant sources of knowledge and influence on the later cultures we know historically. Whether Sundaland was indeed the site of one of these proto-civilizations is something that will likely never be provable to a high degree of certainty, but perhaps this book will at least stir more investigation.

Rating:
Summary: Bringing Ancient History to Life
Review: This is a terrific book! It provides a fascinating and convincing view of ancient history that upends many of our previous assumptions. It is extremely well-written and even manages to be suspensful! I had a hard time putting it down!
I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the origins and history of civilization.

Rating:
Summary: Nice theory, but dry, dry, dry
Review: VOYAGES OF THE PYRAMID BUILDERS by Robert Schoch is the geologist famous for re-dating the Sphinx (with John Anthony West) thousands of years earlier than Egyptologists had determined. However, Schoch is not much of a writer, and even with a co-author, this book is about as exciting as your college physics textbook. The problem is over-research. I get the feeling the Schoch is so used to writing academic papers that he feels that every single fact must be documented and footnoted. In the popular press, the reader is willing to go along with some ideas as long as they are documented now and then.

Once you get past the format, it's not hard to apprehend Schoch's primary theme. He believes that the pyramid structure has not popped up all over the globe by accident, but that ancient mariners brought the ideas with them. He won't date the time of this migration, but it sounds quite a bit like an Atlantean diffusion. Schoch finds pyramids in China, India, Africa, the Mid-east and the Americas. There also are the mounds in North America.

Schoch is convinced that the American pyramids came from China, although his reasoning here is not easy to follow. When even the Mayan legends themselves speak of settlers from the East, Schoch opines that the settlers actually came across the Pacific and worked their way east to the Yucatan. This I find completely unbelievable, especially in light of the underwater findings that have been sighted near Cuba. Clearly the migration was from east to west. Another problem is that Schoch sees pyramids where I can only make out conical towers. He claims that many Indonesian structures are pyramids, but they don't even resemble the stepped or triangular structures to me.

His last chapter refutes those who refute his Sphinx dating. It's dry in the extreme, but he certainly has the academic goods on his detractors. As a skilled geologist, he can easily rebuff Egyptologist Mark Lehner's absurb peeling and scaling theory.

This is a book to skim. It drags where it should inspire and reiterates what we already know. As for ancient boat migration, all he had to do was refer to Thor Heyerdahl's Ra and Kon-Tiki experiments. There's some good information here, but much of it is material you'll want to skip.