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Rating: 
Summary: rationality essential (pace reader from Great NorthWest)
Review: 'A reader from Great NorthWest' claims that Hamilton's book 'opens your mind unless you've got the lock of rationality and science chained around it'. The reference is apparently to my own earlier review. But rationality (including science) is exactly how we evaluate competing theories about the world. It is NOT out of date ('1950') and it is NOT the same thing as closed-mindedness or thinking inside a 'tiny box' (that does occur but is very rare in serious scholarship). If Hamilton wants us to accept a radically novel & in many ways implausible account of the matters discussed, he must produce better evidence and argumentation than he does in his book. After all, if he is right, large parts of existing theories and ideas which are themselves very well supported must somehow be wrong. Perhaps 'reader from Great NorthWest', or some other admirer of Hamilton, can marshall evidence & argumentation and rebut my criticisms (which could be expanded to considerably greater length & detail). If so, I will cheerfully accept and promote Hamilton's views. If not, I stand by my criticisms; and on current evidence I am confident that other scholars would endorse them. (No one can say I ignored the book because of the views it expresses. Some scholars would think it unworthy of comment, but I am an active skeptic and thus take a different view.)
Rating:
Summary: rationality essential (pace reader from Great NorthWest)
Review: 'A reader from Great NorthWest' claims that Hamilton's book 'opens your mind unless you've got the lock of rationality and science chained around it'. The reference is apparently to my own earlier review. But rationality (including science) is exactly how we evaluate competing theories about the world. It is NOT out of date ('1950') and it is NOT the same thing as closed-mindedness or thinking inside a 'tiny box' (that does occur but is very rare in serious scholarship). If Hamilton wants us to accept a radically novel & in many ways implausible account of the matters discussed, he must produce better evidence and argumentation than he does in his book. After all, if he is right, large parts of existing theories and ideas which are themselves very well supported must somehow be wrong. Perhaps 'reader from Great NorthWest', or some other admirer of Hamilton, can marshall evidence & argumentation and rebut my criticisms (which could be expanded to considerably greater length & detail). If so, I will cheerfully accept and promote Hamilton's views. If not, I stand by my criticisms; and on current evidence I am confident that other scholars would endorse them. (No one can say I ignored the book because of the views it expresses. Some scholars would think it unworthy of comment, but I am an active skeptic and thus take a different view.)
Rating:
Summary: linguistics too inaccurate/unsophisticated to sustain claims
Review: Hamilton argues that there are historically and spiritually significant links between the Great Serpent Mound (Ohio) and the Greek alphabet.I say nothing here about non-linguistic issues in the book, but this should not be taken to mean that I see no problems on these fronts (I see many). I simply think it best to concentrate here on my own main relevant areas of expertise, namely general and historical linguistics and the history of the Greek language. One problem which is shared with most amateur proposals in this area involves the use of outdated comparative linguistic methods in 'establishing' historical links between words. It is demonstrably unreliable to equate (even tentatively) forms (from pairs of languages, whether known to be related or not, or even within any one language) on the basis of superficial, unsystematic phonetic similarities between forms with related meanings - even more so if the semantic link is not at all obvious. Most such cases will involve accidental similarity. Eg, there is NO basis for suggesting a link between <ophion> and <Ohio> (p 138). (This has been known for very many years, and now the statistics have been calculated.) In some cases it is actually clear that forms which are equated are NOT connected, because the etymologies are known; eg, <thesauros> is clearly NOT <theo-> + <sauros> ('god-lizard') (p 151). The known historical phonology of Greek excludes this: the vowels in <the(o)-> and the position and type of the inherent accent on <sauros> differ between the two cases, showing that the forms are unconnected. In other cases Hamilton accepts a standard etymology but offers a redundant reinterpretation involving a 'deeper' sense. Eg, the letter-names <o-micron> and <o-mega> (p 147) very clearly refer to the LENGTHS of the vowels named (short and long respectively). There is no basis for an interpretation in terms of 'spirit'. The identifications of Greek letter-forms with parts of the Serpent Mound (pp 153-191) are essentially impressionistic and do not appear at all persuasive. One would need to see evidence that at least a high proportion of these identifications or the set as a whole should be preferred (eg on statistical grounds) to other possible interpretations and especially to the null hypothesis of there being no link between the Mound and the alphabet. The null hypothesis would appear to have the strength (in terms of Ockham's Razor) of a better fit with the lack of historical evidence of contact between the two entities. In addition, there are further specific worries here, eg confused comments about Etruscan and the origin of gamma on pp 156-157, inaccurate phonetics on p 191. Other points in the linguistic section (pp 141-152): 1) The Greeks did NOT invent the alphabet (pp 141, 150) but rather (as Hamilton actually acknowledges) adapted a Semitic (probably Phoenician) abjad to Greek, using consonant symbols not needed for Greek to represent vowels (this does occur in Semitic scripts but became universal in Greek) and (naturally) adding symbols to represent additional consonants and clusters requiring their own characters. This was clever but does not demonstrate any superior facility with Semitic symbolism. (Naturally, the senses of the Semitic letter-names were not carried over into Greek with its very largely unrelated vocabulary. By the time of transfer, the pictographic element in many of the letters was no longer obvious, in any case.) 2) The ordering of the alphabet as recited and used in dictionaries was derived from the Semitic scripts. (p 141) I know of no evidence that the numerological values of the letters had any significance beyond numerology. 3) There is no link between the earlier syllabic Greek scripts and the alphabet; in all probability, most Greek communities went through a period of illiteracy in the interim. (p 141) 4) Language naturally flourished in Greece (as elsewhere) even in the absence of literacy. The Homeric poems were originally composed by illiterates. (p 143) 5) It is not clear what would count as evidence for or against various mystical-sound statements about language on pp 143-147, or even what some of them mean. They appear susceptible only to subjective/impressionistic confirmation or disconfirmation - which would naturally tend to involve unresolvable disagreements and thus could not carry much weight. 6) The counter-criticism of mainstream scholarly methods in these respects on p 151 is not adequately justified. 7) No good evidence is produced for the claims (p 144) that there is an important link between numerical symbology and the adoption of alphabetic writing and that the alphabet was very deliberately planned. 8) The choice and structure of the linguistic terminology is strange, eg <PRIMARY vowel> (alpha), <BASIC velar> (gamma), <CLASSIC dental> (delta), beta described as the 'mean' of the mutes (plosives), beta described in terms of manner (plosive) but gamma and delta in terms of position (velar, dental), the non-technical term <guttural>, etc (p 144-145). 9) It is quite possible that some parts of the Semitic abjad system were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs (p 144), but this does not show that any specific cultural influence is even likely, still less that any such influence later penetrated to the Greeks. 10) No good evidence is produced for the claims about changes to the spellings of letter-names and their motivation and significance, made in general terms on pp 144-145 and later in more detail (eg on p 156 for <beta>). 11) The minuscule forms of Greek letters are late developments only. (p 152). Whether or not the general theory can be made to hold up (which one must doubt), Hamilton will need to address points such as those made above and to increase the sophistication of his linguistic discussion. Until he does this, he will struggle to attract the interest of experts in these matters.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This book is one of the most incredible books on the Serpent Mound I have read. Traditional archeologist, of course, will not accept the theories presented here because they contain numberology, spirituality, and most of all, the fact that the Greek alphabet is encrypted within the Serpent Mound. The author, however, doesn't notice that this aludes to the fact that builders of the Serpent Mound where aware of the Green Language of the Alchemist, also known as the Language of the Birds. These subjects are covered fully in William Henry's "Language of the Birds" and David Ovason's "The Secrets of Nostradamus".
One of the most important discoveries in this book is that the Great Serpent Mound is meant to mirror the constellation of Draco. This constellation is important to Eastern esoteric sciences such as Tao, among others.
Rating:
Summary: rational mind is so limited that it doesn't know it
Review: This book opens your mind. Unless you've got the lock of rationality and science chained around it. Many people like the "DR." who reviewed this book will not get it. It is outside the tiny box they have squeezed their minds into. For a well researched and thoughtful look at some of human history, without the fear of grasping at the circa 1950 type of rationality, buy this book.
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