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Tiwanaku dating
Heavens Mirror
Antartic exploration
Antartic farce|
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| Why Hancock is wrong |
| Debunking the Lost Civilisation |
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| This Site has moved to the following address Debunking the Lost civilsation You are still welcome to read these pages for now The Author Graham Hancock is a controversial figure who promotes the idea that many of the greatest monuments from our Ancient Cultures were built or designed by a lost civilisation (LC).. Hancock's claims depend on alleged alignments of ancient monuments to certain Star constellations, and he states that the precise match between monuments and star patterns occurs in 10500 bce.The most sigificant alignments are between the Giza Pyramids and Orions belt and the Sphinx with Leo Supported by Robert Bauvals " Orion Theory", one of his prime objectives is to assert that the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx are part of a design hatched in 10,500 bce. This clearly contradicts two hundred years of research in Archaeology and is totally unsupportable by the known evidence. Hancock also makes astonishing claims concerning the date of the Bolivian remains known as Tiwanaku. Then again he ignores all the known archaeology in favour of his own pet theories, which as we shall relate are spurious and against.Instead he prefers to ignore C14 dating results and the Stratigraphy which tells us the real story of Tiwanaku. The Sphinx, Hancock claims was built in 10,500 bce to face the constellation Leo as it appeared due east over the Horizon. However we must ask relevant questions, questions based on Logic and reason, not flights of fancy.In support of this, Hancock claims that the Sphinx originally had the head of a Lion, when there is not the slightest evidence to substantiate this claim. The Egyptians of 10500 bce were a stone age people who lived in a hunter-gatherer society without written language, Hancock wants us to accept that the survivors of some so-called Lost Civilisation came into the Nile Valley at this time and handed down to the Natives a grand design for Giza. Hancock now accepts the orthodox dating of the Giza Pyramids to circa 2450 bce, although he still insists the Sphinx is older and the design for the site plan at Giza is as old as he says the sphinx is. SO, this plan has to be handed down for some 8000 years without the Benefit of written records, which in itself is ludicrous, but where does Leo fit in ? There is no evidence for Leo in Egyptian mythology, or that the Egyptians recognised the constellation we know as Leo or that if they knew it they called it a Lion, does it look like a Lion? perhaps,but a headless one. Leo is a Greek invention..NOT EGYPTIAN. What relevance could Leo have , well the answer again is none--it simply means nothing to the Egyptians. In the Book " Riddles of the Sphinx", ( Sutton Publishing) Paul Jordan says the Following: " The first star charts of the Ancient Egyptians that we possess come from Coffins of Dyn.10 at about 2150 bce. These coffin texts and drawings describe a system of sky division , not into 12 zodiacal constellations around the plane of the ecliptic but instead into 36 star configurations lying somewhat south of the ecliptic plane. None of these configurations has anything to do with Babylonian, Greek and modern signs of the Zodiac. Besides these 36 constellations, the ancient Egyptians also marked out in the rest of the sky about 25 constellations,among them, a crocodile, a hippotamus, a falcon headed God and a lion. But this cannot be matched to the couchant lion of our Leo and in general the Ancient Egyptian's representations of their constellations are from the first so inconsistent with each other and with the stars we see that it has only been possible to indentify three with any confidence. They are Orion=Osiris; our Sirius=Sopdet and our Ursa Major= the foreleg of a bulll ( not Taurus). The first appearance in Egypt of the signs of our Zodiac comes in in the Zodiac of Dendera at a very late date in Egyptian history. The Dendara Zodiac combines Ancient Egyptian star configurations with zodiacal constellations of the Babylonians and the Greeks. There is nothing to suggest that the Egyptians entertained any of the signs of the zodiac before the 1st few centuries BCE....." The Giza pyramids have been dated by Egyptologists to the Fourth Dynasty( ca 2450bce) and that is well enough attested by the archaeological record. Zawi Hawass and Mark Lehner have proved beyond doubt that these monuments are Fourth dynasty Egyptian and it really is going beyond reason to suggest otherwise. C14 dating of organic material from the pyramid workers village confirm the dating, +/- 400 years. In addition, the dating of the pyramids fits in with the King lists and has been further validated by the work of Kate Spence using astronomical evidence and research carried out in the field. Hancock and Bauvals argument rests completely on star alignments produced using Skyglobe software, the problematic weathering patterns on the Sphinx and a pseudo-mystic interpretation of the Pyramid texts. Dr Robert Shoch, a geologist, contends that the weathering pattern oh the Sphinx could only be the result of precipitation and this was only posssible in Egypt if it had been built ca, 5000-7000 bce. Shoch's opinion on the age of the Sphinx is not supported by all geologists. Sorry to relate,but for Hancock, Bauval and West, it doesn't agree with them either. There are other geological opinions on the severe weathering of the Sphinx that do not require it to be re-dated to pre-dynastic Egypt. Shoch's findings are highly contentious and cannot be said to be conclusive as evidence. There is nothing at Giza to alter the orthodox dating and rational of the Site. The alternative authors have no hard evidence and in consideration of archaeological evidence.....and combined scientific work, the result of all this academic work means that we must reject the claims for Giza made by Hancock and Bauval. Also it is pivotal to the claims made by Hancock that the Ancient Egyptians understood precession,.Yet there is nothing in Egyptian records to tell us that they did, whilst it is possible that they were aware of the changes in the night sky over a period of time, it is beyond credibility to reason that they understood the mechanics of Precession and could calculate how the Sky would change during the 26000 year precessional cycle.In other words, how could a tribal neolithic Egyptain decide that OK, these LC guys tell us we have a match with Orion now, ( Whats it supposed to mean, you guys) but hey, lets wait another 8000 years and have a not so good match, not that that they had one then either. There is no evidence from the pre-dynastic period in 10500 bce, that the Stone age Egyptians cared about Orion either for that matter. Which ever way you look at it, the proposition is just irrational and has no credibility in serious study at Giza. The author would like to thank Prof. Garrett G Fagan , Dr. Duncan Edlin and John Wall for their valuable input and suggestions. *For Tiwanaku dating and other links in site, see links in Top left hand corner,this will take you to page 2,3 and 4. The Message Board is located in the options at the top Left hand side of the page Heavens Mirror Antartic farce A critical view of a Hancock lecture Carbon Dating at Giza How Carbon 14 dating works Dougs Archaeology Site Horizons rebuttal of Hancock and his Methods Pre-Dynastic history of Egypt Zawi Hawass and Giza Mark Lehner and the Nova team Author Jane Sellars on how her work was misrepresented by the Alternative writers Geological argument on Sphinx dating My home page on Heavens Mirror
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