that found in Plato's description of lush Atlantis.
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Summary: This book is utter nonsense
Review: Do not waste your money on this book. It is nothing but pseudo-science
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Summary: Must read. A brilliant revision of history
Review: This reminds me of "Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds" by Charles Berlitz published in 1972. Hancock must be familiar with it but does not mention it. Berlitz has been unfairly dismissed as a pulp writer. Hancock's work is more thoroughly researched & with a different conclusion.This book is both illuminating & frightening in its implications. It is amazing that orthodox Egyptologists can continue to ignore Hancock's painstaking & elegantly constructed arguments for the existence of an unknown, technologically advanced civilization that vanished in Pre-history. You have to be either brain-dead or without intellectual integrity not to be rocked by this book. Everyone should be required to read this.
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Summary: Ask yourself, who DID make those maps?
Review: I found this book to be well written and thought provoking. The facts are presented and Mr. Hancock doesn't claim to have the answers, he just wants the questions to finally be asked. Combined scientific fields and willingness to unlearn falsehoods are essential in our quest to fill in the gaps of history and pre-history, and Mr. Hancock and others are on the right road. Read the book and decide for yourself.
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Summary: Open minds will be blown away
Review: If your mind is already made up about the origins of human civilization, and you rigidly refuse to believe anything beyond what you were taught in fourth grade history, please do not read this book.If, however, you are open to the idea that there is something more out there, that the conventional wisdom is sometimes just convention and not wisdom, don't miss this book. Hancock writes an incredible, believable story, backed up with much scientific research and indisputible empirical evidence.
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Summary: An alternative to the establishment
Review: While bound to ruffle a few feathers, Hancock tries to make a few objective observations about the pyramids, what they mean and why they were put there. Sure, some of his ideas are pretty hard to grasp, but the evidence he gives is about as plausible as the evidence most egyptologists give. Perhaps they should wake up and realise that times change, new ideas are put forward, new evidence is put forward, changing the landscape of history. One is forced to ask what is the purpose of the pyramids, are they just tombs, why waste so much time and effort on a tomb, and how were they built? Not even the Japs could build a third-scale model of it, let alone the real thing. After seeing so many things encoded into the great pyramid, I continually asked myself "how could a bunch of thick egyptians do THAT!?" An interesting perspective, definately one worth reading.
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Summary: Good Story
Review: Not an academic work, to be sure, yet full of explanations. A combination of Paddington the Bear Abroad, Astrology and Who Shot JFK? In other words, it is a book whose central figure has lots of exciting travels, becomes obsessed with measurements, and eventually lapses into paranoiac disillusionment. Which just goes to show that talking bears from Lima, interested in the necessity of star movements, but in severe need of professional medical help, do not make good witnesses, but are nevertheless quite funny.
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Summary: Good summary of 'alternative' theories
Review: This book provides a good summation of various radical theories in a new genre. It is primarily a popularization of the research of others. It's worth the read but his coy handling of the end of the world stuff within a few years destroys a lot of his credibility. If you really want to follow the ideas currently circulating in this field you're better off to dip into the original work of the authors cited in this book.
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Summary: Intriguing, fun and just plain silly
Review: Graham Hancock is at this point perhaps the best known popularizer of what might generously be termed "alternative archaeology," one of the major points of which is that civilization originated far earlier than commonly thought, and was subsequently destroyed (i.e., Atlantis). Then again, this particular field is populated almost entirely by popularizers, who with rare exceptions (Robert Schoch, perhaps Robert Bauval) are unfamiliar or even hostile to establishment scientific principles such as peer review. Hancock's work is occasionally given to fits of pique at the supposed monopoly that establishment archaeologists have on the dissemination of knowledge; little understanding is shown of the simple fact that in scientific journals all ideas are subject to review by other scientists, and that if you wish to publish your views, you must present convincing evidence for them. Hancock and others like him should (and probably do, at least in private) be gratified that, as the parade of positive reviews of his books here on the Amazon.com web site attests, the establishment view of archaeology enjoys no monopoly on ideas in the public sphere, and in fact is if anything underrepresented. For an illustration, I would suggest that you go to your local bookstore and find something by Hancock, West, Bauval, Schoch, Cremo, the Flem-Aths, Sitchin, von Daniken, or Colin Wilson. Now find the establishment archaeological view. Which was more prominent? Which was there at all?
In any case, "Fingerprints of the Gods" is Hancock's defining work (even after the publication of its sequel, "Heaven's Mirror") and provides the most comprehensive summary of the "evidence" for a lost civilization in antiquity as currently espoused by the above writers. You will find summarized here the notions that the Sphinx is far older than modern archaeologists would like to think, that the pyramids may be as well (which Hancock has since retracted, though he maintains that the ground plan is still super-ancient), and that other monuments in Latin America similarly speak of origins far in the distant past; that collected myths and legends from peoples all over the world speak of a common origin, in a civilization of great technical prowess that was destroyed by a worldwide cataclysm (essentially a summary of de Santillana and von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill," albeit with conclusions they did not reach); that a series of old maps provides evidence of knowledge of the earth's contours in remote antiquity (a summary of Charles Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings"); that the cataclysm in which this new vision of Atlantis was lost could be repeated the next time the earth's crust decides to shift (borrowed from Hapgood again).
It is a mistake to consider anything that Hancock has done "research," as several other reviewers have done. His work consists of travelling the world to view ancient monuments and compiling the speculations of others. What results is often sloppy and inaccurate: Hancock repeats verbatim an assertion first made by Sitchin that early Egyptologist Howard Vyse forged the "quarry marks" in the Great Pyramid that link it to the pharoah Khafre, and this assertion has been rather conclusively proven wrong (as Hancock has admitted). Hancock also swallows whole the long-discredited theory of "earth crust displacement." Proponents make much of the fact that Einstein apparently liked this theory, but then Einstein was not a geologist, knew nothing of plate tectonics, and was wrong many other times in his life. Regardless, the "evidence" for a massive, concerted shift of the entirety of the earth's crust over such a short period has been completely invalidated by modern science. When Hancock mentions trees indicative of deciduous forest buried in Antarctic ice, he fails to recognize that these trees are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old. And so on.
It is chiefly by presenting a relentlessly one-sided view of the "evidence" he cites that Hancock creates the illusion of a coherent argument. In truth, the closer one looks at any single line of evidence in "Fingerprints," the less convincing it seems. Too many of Hancock's arguments rely on the inability to accept anything as coincidence, and the almost pathological impulse to manufacture coincidences where they may not actually exist. Anyone reading this book should be honor-bound to seek out the other side of the story--for example, Paul Jordan's "Riddles of the Sphinx" provides an excellent summary of how conventional archaeologists date the monuments of Egypt. It is not that difficult to find attempted refutations of most of Hancock's arguments on the internet. There is simply no excuse for taking "Fingerprints" as the last word on any of its subjects.
This book is typical of tracts of "alternative archaeology" (one writer whose name escapes me termed pursuits such as these "pathological science") in that it often consists of first-person narrative. Hancock is a journalist and knows how to spin a tale for greatest effect; readers such as myself, however, who are not fans of travelogues may therefore find themselves impatient in certain sections. I give the book 3 stars simply for entertainment value--regardless of the truth or falsity of what's in "Fingerprints," it is fun to think about in a science-fictional vein. Those looking for the next paradigm shift should be greatly disappointed. _Should_ be, that is.
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Summary: People That Think are the People that like this book
Review: Quite Simply one of the finest examples of academic literature i have ever read. The Magic of Graham Hancock is the he does not pose answers to the questions of History and its antiquity, but instead Offers Theories that are NOT his own. The theories outlined are a compilation of many, many Great Minds like Charles Hapgood and Albert Eienstien. Hancock is simply a messenger that takes multiple theories and Offers the simplest solution to them all. He is forwarding Information to the reader for him/her to make their own judgement. Graham never claims to be a scholar, instead just a journalist telling the world about his exciting trip into humanity's history that no other author has so completely accmplished to date.
