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

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Could the story of mankind be far older than we have previously believed? Using tools as varied as archaeo-astronomy, geology, and computer analysis of ancient myths, Graham Hancock presents a compelling case to suggest that it is. Graham Hancock is featured in Ancient Apocalypse, a Netflix original docuseries.“A fancy piece of historical sleuthing . . . intriguing and entertaining and sturdy enough to give a long pause for thought.”—Kirkus ReviewsIn Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock embarks on a worldwide quest to put together all the pieces of the vast and fascinating jigsaw of mankind’s hidden past. In ancient monuments as far apart as Egypt’s Great Sphinx, the strange Andean ruins of Tihuanaco, and Mexico’s awe-inspiring Temples of the Sun and Moon, he reveals not only the clear fingerprints of an as-yet- unidentified civilization of remote antiquity, but also startling evidence of its vast sophistication, technological advancement, and evolved scientific knowledge. A record-breaking number one bestseller in Britain, Fingerprints of the Gods contains the makings of an intellectual revolution, a dramatic and irreversible change in the way that we understand our past—and so our future. And Fingerprints of God tells us something more. As we recover the truth about prehistory, and discover the real meaning of ancient myths and monuments, it becomes apparent that a warning has been handed down to us, a warning of terrible cataclysm that afflicts the Earth in great cycles at irregular intervals of time—a cataclysm that may be about to recur. “Readers will hugely enjoy their quest in these pages of inspired storytelling.”—The Times (UK) Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; Reissue edition (April 2, 1996)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0517887290


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 95


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.52 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.05 x 1.62 x 9.18 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #1,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Ancient Egyptians History #1 in Archaeology (Books) #3 in Ancient & Controversial Knowledge


#1 in Ancient Egyptians History:


#1 in Archaeology (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews


  • The case for lost advanced civilisations
They say he’s polarising. It’s always best to keep our skepticism intact when reading a book that contains bombastic claims, and this book probably has one of the grandest claims of them all: that there were advanced ancient civilisations before our supposedly “official” beginning roughly 6000 years ago, as agreed by the archeologists. But they’re all vanished due to an apocalypse. Which is an intriguing hypothesis to say the least. Hence, the rabbit hole that I dug to eventually arrive at this book: Like many others in 2022, I first heard about Graham Hancock from his Netflix documentary, and then I saw that he was interviewed in the Joe Rogan Podcast so I listened to the 6+ hours of rich conversations spread among 2 episodes. Still not fully convinced by what I’ve heard, I then decided to dive deeper into this book, to see what he is talking about. There’s nothing really new about the narrative that he hasn’t already elaborated in the podcast interviews, or summarised neatly in the Netflix documentary (especially episode 8). But the book does give a more detailed and in-depth explanations, as well as the interpretation of evidences (including several thorough chapters on Egypt that was not covered in the documentary, because he wasn’t given the permission to shoot there). And it is these voluminous explanation that makes reading this book so damn challenging due to the abundance of information that come flooding. You see, for a long time I found Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces to be the most well-researched and well-written book that is hard to emulate. But here in this book Hancock, just like Campbell, not only found the common themes of the myths and merge them into an insane single narrative, but he also takes the similarities into a more investigative mode and turned the stories somewhat into historical records. At the core of Hancock’s argument is this hypothesis: like I said above, there once exist lost ancient civilisations that have advanced technology, living during the Ice Age. But then they all quite abruptly disappeared due to the end of the Ice Age that saw melting ice became floods. As Hancock remarks, “[h]ow different the world was during the ice age. The sahara desert was green. The amazon jungle lies under a deep canopy. 400 feet sea level rise at the end of ice age, the prime real estate 27 million square km were submerged.” The floods were all actually told in the many mythology and religion around the world, from the flood of Noah in the Bible, to the story in Hindu scripture, to South American mythology, to Greek tragedy. Hancock believes that myths are not necessarily created by unsophisticated society trying to understand the world from a primitive point of view, but rather a historical record occurring in many parts of the world that have a similar storyline. To be exact, the apocalyptic event happened on Earth between 12800 and 11600 years ago, when during that 1200 years the Earth was an inhospitable place. Another core hypothesis of his is the similarities among the records kept by ancient civilisations about the story that wise bearded men came to teach them how to re-build a society from scratch after the great disaster. “What is surprising,” Hancock remarks, “is that the myths not only describe shared experiences but that they do so in what appears to be a shared symbolic language. The same ‘literary motifs’ keep cropping up again and again, the same stylistic ‘props’, the same recognizable characters, and the same plots.” Literaly motifs, like the carvings they have in the temples that shows similar stories, such as the serpents from the sky. What are these serpents? They were what Hancock believes to be the trigger that ended the Ice Age, which caused the melting of the ice and ignited the hell on Earth during what they called the younger dryas period where the Earth was so unstable and natural disaster occurred everywhere. The sky serpents in all ancient myths are the debris of a meteor, that came in the form of thousands of meteor showers into the Earth, whose impacts equivalent to atomic bombs and produced dusts, fire, and flooding, increased the Earth’s temperature and caused the ice to melt. And thus another of his hypotheses: the many ancient monuments - like the Pyramids in Egypt, the monuments in Maldives, the Stonehenge - that are weirdly perfectly aligned towards the stars, and all that ancient obsession with astronomy. They are simply the ancient civilisations’ way to observe the skies to ensure that they will be more ready if another “serpents” striking down Earth and to also warn future generations. Curiously, In 600 BC Plato mentioned about the disappearance of Atlantis 9000 years from his time. Which makes it 9600 BC, exactly 11600 years ago at the end of the younger dryas of the Ice Age, a period called meltwater pulse 1B where there were a single biggest rise in overnight sea level. This is of course a separation from the generally agreed narrative by archeologists, where the academic consensus believe civilisation was first developed in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, in Mesopotamia. According to the “official” consensus, the development began after 4000 BC and culminated in the emergence of the first true civilisations around 3000 BC: Sumer and Egypt, followed by China and the Indus Valley, and civilisation took off spontaneously and independently in the Americas in about 1500 BC. However, as Hancock shows repeatedly in the book, there are several evidence that refute this narrative - from the Piri Reis Map to Gobekli Tepe - which shows that there were already an advanced technology or advanced understanding of the world way before 4000 BC but all of which are ignored or dismissed by archaeologists simply because they don’t fit with the agreed upon narrative. As Hancock remarks, “[m]ore than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.” Naturally, this bold claim does not bode well with the archaeology community, and since 1995 (the publication year of this book) there were many that tried to discredit Hancock. But out of the many counter-argument articles from archaeologists that I’ve read so far - even the most credible ones like Flint Dibble from Cardiff University - none of them have convincingly debunk him. Because, Hancock structures his arguments through the scientific method. So, at the very least give me a similarly neatly organised evidence on how he is a fraud, and I’ll believe you. But so far I haven’t seen a single counter argument that can manage to do that instead of calling him crazy, or pseudo this pseudo that, or picking just one or two claims and unconvincingly attack them. Like the most credible critic in Scientific American mentioned about his take on Gobekli Tepe, where the article defends archaeologists’ definition that it is a “ceremonial religious site, not a city” but fail to address the fact a civilisation much older than 6000 years can make such a temple and completely ignore Hancock’s finding that Pillar 43 at gobleki teppe leads to a particular date 10,900 - 10,800 BC. I’m not saying that Hancock is 100% right, nobody knows this for sure because in the end his hypotheses are indeed speculations. But if we spend much time digesting his work, it’s all calculated speculations. He’s asking the right questions, questions that archaeologists refuse to entertain for some reason (and being so defensive about it. He definitely hit some status quo’s nerves). And this book in particular shows very strong arguments with meticulous detail, he keeps referring to data, data, and data. And if all of the findings and arguments in this book turns out to be wrong, then at the very least it has made some big narrative worthy of a Dan Brown novel. But if it’s true, then it can significantly change the course of history and our understanding of our civilisation, not to mention what they are trying to tell us so that we can be more prepared for the future. At the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast episode 1897, Hancock and Randall Carlson mention about ancient technologies that are way different than ours, such as the technology of sound that was used by the Egyptians to cut and move stones, and that the technologies are being tested by scientists as we speak. But then again, Nikola Tesla once tried to re-create these ancient technologies but he was then quickly suppressed and labelled as crazy. By whom and why, we can only guess. But according to Carlson this time is different, Mazda is already on board and lending their facilities for the testings, and the white paper of these technologies will be published for the public in February 2023. So, buckle up, a bombastic news might or might not come out very soon. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 29, 2023 by edsetiadi

  • The first 200 pages on mythology were thought provoking.
About 2,400,000 years ago the earth entered into an ice age. This ice age is likely still going on, there having been at least 17 interglacial periods which represented a warming of the planet, a receding of the ice caps, and then eventually a re-freezing. The glacial periods were likely about 100,000 years long, with the interglacial periods lasting about 20,000 or 25,000 years. The current interglacial period for the earth started probably around 15,000 BC. But the current interglacial period was not like the others. Something dramatic happened, an apocalyptic event sometime around 12,800 BC, a few thousand years into the warming which simultaneously slowed down the warming (another cool period for 1000 years) while at the same time causing a massive melt-off and a massive flood. This dramatic event was likely a meteor, about 1.5km across that smashed into Greenland right around that time. This meteor would have been apocalyptic, causing a darkening of the sky, volcanos and tsunamis and earthquakes. The great flood. Noah’s flood. None of that is very controversial. Most is well-established and increasingly better understood through the geological record. The question is, was there a pre-diluvian civilization of any sophistication at all? An “Atlantis” lost in the rubble of the cataclysm? Humanity, evolutionists would say, in its current form (Homo Sapiens) came onto the scene maybe 50,000 years ago. Or during the last glacial period. They were likely a result of an older competition between Neanderthals and Homo Floresiensis and Denisovans (and a few others). A sort of “Middle Earth” where various species were living together and vying for dominance, upon a world which was much colder and in which the land available was significantly less. We won. Then, we were almost wiped out in the catastrophe and the ensuing fallout. The question that this book looks at is, before this catastrophe hit – that is to say during the last ice age – and presumably within the last 50,000 years, was there a civilization that we don’t know about? Now, that question is more controversial than it would seem. There do appear to be hints at this civilization: in Plato and in Genesis and in Gilgamesh (and many other cultures). But it’s hard – we have even lost track of major civilizations in our own time (the Hittites, for example) to say nothing of what might have happened before the meteor hit Greenland. So, how do we learn about ancient cultures? Archeology is the study of random stuff you find buried in the ground. Philology is the study of words, etymologies, what they mean, in what other languages they appear and the attempt to follow them backward. Mythology is the study of ancient stories. A good researcher tries to blend all three. This book is mostly about mythology, and in that it is interesting. Why do all cultures have a flood legend? Why do the legends of the Bolivian Altiplano seem so similar to those of mezo-America? It is the study of ancient stories in ancient manuscripts like the Popol Vu and the Peri Rais map in Istanbul and the Epic of Gilgamesh, of carvings on rock. And there is a lot to wonder about: why were the Incas waiting for white European looking people as their saviors? Same for the Aztecs? Why did Olmec statues look like Africans? And how did the Mayans have such an advanced calendar but no wheel? Etc. That is the first 200 pages, which were riveting. Then Hancock went to a very dark place, where most conspirologists go – looking for a master designer of all myths; dabbling in the kabala and seeking meaning in random numbers seen here because that same number appeared over there. Finding star charts in everything and extrapolating some mathematical master-code in odd buildings and random foundations. Confirmation bias, when we look for something we can usually find it. And this is why Hancock gets called a quack. The reality, however, is extraordinary. And it’s good enough. Was there a pre-diluvian civilization? Probably. It was probably small, and pretty sophisticated, and wiped out by an asteroid. Survivors hid in the mountains, away from the waters – the remainder of the human race. And they became our ancestors: Urartians from Ararat; Tuaregs descending from the High Atlas Mountains; Mongols coming down from the Altai; Tiwanaku people from the Altiplano of Bolivia. All these cultures talk about how their ancestors came from high mountain valleys. It seems that our own interglacial period is coming to an end. Why, we don’t know – what these rhythms represent (Einstein thought they had to do with gravity and the Earth’s position relative to the sun and other planets), we can know if we study. What will happen when the glacial period resumes? Will the cataclysm have affected this process? Will our own carbon emissions have any impact? I don’t know. But I am glad to think about these things. I have fallen in love with our interglacial period. These few 15,000 years – a blink of an eye really – which gave us Tolstoy and Homer and Hercules; which took us to the moon and gave us flat-screen TVs and the World Cup; which gave us Rome and the Persians and the great Armenian Empire of Artashes. I have been glad to be a part of it. I don’t know what happens next; are we able to break through into the galaxy before the next cooling? Or have we reached our own singularity, and we have to start from scratch – with the exception of a few pyramids and a group of men in 100,000 years wonder who put those rocks on top of each other? Those are the great questions. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

  • My favorite!
I'd recommend any book written by Graham Hancock. His perspective will open your mind to possibilities, but in a logical way. When he's paired with Randall Carlson, they are a truly dynamic duo.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2023 by Stephanie Meyer

  • My husband loves it!
Got this book for my husband for Christmas and he absolutely loves it!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 22, 2023 by Amber Starling

  • Extensive Research for Debatable Conclusion
Well written, well researched but with hastily concluded implication. There is limited basis behind the “conclusion” related to Antarctica and the author seemed to have conjured a set of intriguing “facts” to draw up a so-what that is unlikely to withstand deeper scrutiny. Well written “fiction”.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2023 by AS

  • It’s Graham Hancock!
What more can be said!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2023 by Raj Krishan Singh

  • Great book!
I gave this to my dad for Christmas. This is a big book. Paperback but still quite hefty!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 3, 2023 by Elizabeth Morrison

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