Fingerprints of the Gods : The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

Rating:
Summary: Revise the revision
Review: Hancock makes the case for a worldwide prehistoric civilization by drawing on the earlier works of Peter Tompkin's "Secrets of the Great Pyramid," Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill," Charles Hapgood's "The Path of the Pole" and "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings," the readings of Edgar Cayce, and other sources. Hancock also speculates that the memory of this civilization was lost due to a world-wide cataclysm.

However a major part of his evidence is the famous Piris Reis map that shows parts of North and South America along with a part the Antarctic drawn from pre-Columbian sources. Hancock says that this points to that prehistoric world-wide culture that explored and mapped the world long before the European age of discovery. With the publication of Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered America," a whole new light is thrown on the Piris Reis map. We no longer have to go back to pre-history to account for early maps; the Chinese drew them and they found their way to Europe. Columbus and Magellan both claimed to have had maps that showed them the way. Now we know where they got them.

Hancock is attempting to revise human history, I hope he can accept this small setback and continue his interesting work.

Rating:
Summary: good book
Review: Good book with a very interesting premise and alot of facts that make you really think. What I didn't like about this book though is that the author used "negroid" to refer to black africans and drew the same old racist eurocentric view that "whites were the first, and whites were the first to civilize everybody." Another thing which confused me was he mentioned certain South American structures that were 12 to 15 thousand years old possibly than the rest of the chapters he concentrated on small dates of about a thousand and a half years and even said there was a stagnation or culture of the olmec unlike the egyptians. Than who built the earlier stuff that he talked about? It wasn't the third party (I'm thinking from atlantis) since he said the third party spread to egypt and latin america around the same time and in Egypt there was no civilization before about 3 and a half thousand years ago where "it appeared out of nowhere with no transition from primitive to great achievements." Godo book but it can be confusing.

Rating:
Summary: Read and learn!
Review: The reason I recommend this book is that I learned more from reading it than I have learned anywhere else. The wealth of information is astounding and exciting. I learned about geology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, astronomy, astrology, construction, navigation, erosion, and on, and on. Hancock may not have hit on the absolute truth, but if you want a stimulating read that will leave you full of questions and eager to learn, this is the book for you. I was one of the spoon-fed masses who had been exposed to nothing but conventional history and this book opened my mind to wonderful new possibilities. I am a history teacher and because of this book, many of my assumptions were turned upside down. There is something new under the sun!

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Great Thesis!
Review: Author Graham Hancock, through "Fingerprints Of The Gods" and his other genre specific books, asks the fundamental archaeological questions never before presented for public consideration.

This book offers a complete thesis so as to complement, augment, and even change contemporary theories concerning the ancient history of mankind. If read with an open mind, this book has the potential to spark the research of a new breed of archaeological investigators determined to "fill in the gaps" of mankind's vague history.

This book will absolutely stimulate your cusiosity into the origins of ancient human history. Hancock's endnotes and research reference notes alone are worth the price of the book.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: But people want to believe it, don't they?
Review: Dear reader: before you see my low rating and immediately decide to give me an 'unhelpful' review, please consider the following. I am not hostile to the author's thesis, and I am inclined, in fact, to believe that there very well _could_ be a technologically advanced Atlantean civilization that existed prior to our own.

Let it be known that I tend to trust scientists and spiritual writers within their own contexts. (A few writers _can_ successfully bridge these two gaps, but they are not the norm.) As a general rule, scientific types, who only know how to deal with the minutiae of quantity, are best left writing about scientific ideas in their own particular niche or subspecialty. They almost always fail when attempting to extrapolate their findings onto the larger realm of human discourse. Likewise, those of a spiritual bent are best when discussing spiritual matters; at this point, I don't think we need any more people discussing how particle physics proves the existence of God, clarivoyance, or ESP when they have little or no idea what they are talking about. Those possessing true spiritual enlightenment always mitigate against ascribing too much literalism to their allegories. Anthropomorphic or archetypal elements in spiritual writing should be used to convey universal spiritual _principles_, not taken literally.

Now, who I don't trust are hack writers who take a jumbled pile of assorted geologic, archaeological, and spiritual 'facts' and throw them all in a pot to create a Procrustean stew that serves no purpose other than to satisfy their own sensationalist theses. (But hey, how else are you going to get your own series of BBC specials?) Hancock manages to enter the realm of elite pseudoscholars such as Sitchin, Von Daniken, etc. by proceeding as follows: first, proceed with an outlandish thesis that you take for granted as 'true'. Then, proceed to take any available 'evidence' and twist it to support said thesis. If a perceived 'fact' should perhaps be interpreted in a more Jungian, archetypal, or manner appropriate to the mythology of a region, treat it as a literal fact. But in the case of hard science, be sure to interpret it in as creative a manner as possible. After all, (per Hancock's own admission on his web site!) he's not saying whether or not his thesis IS true, he's just raising a possibility. That's all fine and dandy, but Aldous Huxley raised a lot of possibilities with _Brave New World_, and that book is still powerful today because it is a powerful piece of _fiction_.

Hancock loves employing cognates (words that sound alike and have a similar meaning in disparate languages) to support his thesis which have been a favorite of pseudoscholars for at least a hundred years, and have been employed to 'prove' dodgy theories such as the British-Israelite theory. However, any linguist can tell you that completely unrelated languages will often contain similar or identical words, especially for common subjects. For example, 'dog' means the same thing in English as it does in Australian Aboriginal languages, yet the two languages are in no way related; likewise, 'mahni' and 'many' mean the same thing in Korean and English, yet the two are in no way related. Statistically, large numbers of words will always be false cognates between languages.

Hancock also likes to take symbolism which is much more at home in a Jungian or similar such allegorical context and treat it as evidence of some literal truth. One of his favorite subjects is how the notion of water (or a flood) is contained in a wide variety of different myths and legends. However, does this point to the literal, materialistic fact that there was a giant flood that engulfed humanity, or is it just that water is processed in a similar archetypal manner on a near-universal basis?

Nevertheless, these errors could very well just be inevitable given a 'true believer' lacking in the critical thinking department. What I find to be most alarming, however, is how Hancock deliberately misrepresents geological science. The fact that the Earth could undergo certain changes over the course of millennia somehow gets twisted into evidence that a certain 'disaster' could happen almost instantaneously. To me, this error is so great that I cannot believe that Hancock actually read the article he is referencing, especially since it is so central to his thesis. And when I see something misrepresented so badly, I cannot help but automatically question the veracity of most of his other 'sources', as well as his overall motives.

There is some compelling evidence out there that ancient peoples possessed knowledge in certain areas that far surpasses what conventional scholarship would have us think (cf. Hapgood's 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.') And I wouldn't be surprised if this came from some previously unknown advanced civilization. But for spiritually minded people (I subscribe to Vedic cosmology myself) any knowledge of these facts is going to be contained in spiritual doctrines; any attempt to elucidate on these subjects by working 'upward' from modern reductionist science is doomed to failure. (But if you're going to take this approach, you could at least not misrepresent the authors you are invoking.) For those interested in cosmic cycles and their implications, you would be MUCH better off reading John Major Jenkins' 'Galactic Alignment' or Weidner & Bridges' 'The Mystery of the Great Cross of Hendaye', both of which treat the notion of any potential cataclysm in a much more even-handed manner devoid of Hancock's sensationalism.