Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Oh, almost forgot to mention Fingerprints of the Gods. Well there's not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said. Hancock present to us a hugely diverse range of fascinating oddities, from all around the world, and attempts to link them together with the grandiose notion of a highly advanced civilization, about which we know virtually nothing because (wait for it)... any remaining evidence will be buried beneath miles of Antarctic ice.

Certainly there's lots to ponder over, but I'm afraid that Hancock's treatment of the evidence is sorely lacking in scientific rigour (for instance, many times we're told something along the lines of: Such and such a thing is an uncannily accurate and expertly crafted representation of X, but the people couldn't possibly have known about X unless blah blah blah, but the thing in question doesn't look very accurate or expertly drawn to me... maybe I'm just a philistine).

I don't doubt that we have a huge amount of explaining to do before we can honestly claim to understand how, say, the Egyptian pyramids came to be constructed - and this book certainly does a fine job of drawing this to our attentions. However, the links Hancock draws between the disparate trails of evidence are far too tenuous to justify his conclusions.

Still, it's great fun to read - just be sure to approach it with your skeptical hat on.

My problem with Mr Hancock's work is not that he challenges scientific orthodoxy, indeed anyone with the slightest acquaintance with science will know that such challenges are the very lifeblood of the advance of scientific understanding, but that there are glaring examples of his theory not accounting for facts perfectly adequately explained by existing theories. An example is the aging of Antarctic ice cores, Mr Hancock does not address the issue of how they can be so much older than would be allowed by his theory.

While Mr Hancock's research may be "brilliant", to quote other reviewers, it certainly is not exhaustive.

At the end of the day, Mr Hancock has presented a new theory, the onus is on him to show why it should be taken seriously. Making basic errors is not the way to persuade the scientific community.

Hancock searches the mythology of the Egyptians and South Americans to find evidence of the colonization of white civilizers. These civilizations divided history among the rule of the Gods, the rule of heroes and the rule of men. The rule of the gods is thought to refer to the original Aryan colonizers. At one point, Hancock attempts to demonstrate that the South Americans had depicted a Caucasian in a blatantly ambiguous relief sculpture, whose only Aryan feature would be small beard. Hancock also goes on the present the worldwide recognition of a universal cataclysm, to refer to the period that these Caucasians or Aryans would have survived. Because astrology is one of the main aspects of what is thought be the Ancient Wisdom of the Aryans, finally, Hancock attempts to prove that the pyramids were configured according to astronomical data.

As acknowledged by occultists, the Ancient Wisdom is the Kabbalah, from which they have borrowed their fansical theories. However, the Kabbalah is not an ancient wisdom, but a Jewish heresy of the sixth century BC. This astronomical knowledge identified with the Kabbalah can also be demonstrated to have emerged in the same century. It has often been attributed to the Babylonians, who supposedly taught it to the Egyptians, or to the Indians who taught it to the Babylonians, but always back to the original Aryan conquerors. However, as Franz Cumont has pointed out:

"That Babylon was the mother of astronomy, star-worship, and astrology, that thence these sciences and these beliefs spread over the world, is a fact already told us by the ancients... But the mistake of the Pan-Babylonists, whose wide generalizations rest on the narrowest and flimsiest of bases, lies in the fact that they have transferred to the nebulous origins of history, conceptions which were not developed at the beginning but quite at the end of the Babylonian civilization. This vast theology, founded upon the observation of the stars, which is assumed to have been built up thousands of years before our era, nay, before the Trojan War, and to have imposed itself on all still barbarous peoples as the expression of a mysterious wisdom, cannot have been in existence at this remote period, for the simple reason that the data on which it would have been founded, were as yet unknown...