Fingerprints of the Journalist: Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse - Episode 009

## Introduction:  Who is Graham Hancock?

- Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, the podcast where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith.  My name is Carey Griffel and today I’m going to enjoy talking about the work of Graham Hancock.  That’s not because I think he’s really on to some amazing ideas that are being unfairly repressed by academia.  He might get a kick out of the idea that his work also “raids the ivory tower” of scholarship, though also is not the exact reason that I’m going to enjoy today’s episode.  I do think that people ought to present ideas that shake things up a bit.  I do think that there is a level of snobbery that often prevents some good ideas from being explored.  I can sympathize with Hancock for these things.  Unlike someone like Jonathan Cahn, whose book I reviewed a few weeks ago, at least Hancock is not suggesting he’s a prophet with secret information.  But I can’t help but wonder, for all the years that he has put in to trying to prove his ideas, wouldn’t it have been great for Hancock to actually pursue the ability to enter academia itself rather than remain as he was, as just a journalist and writer trying to talk to people who supposedly actually know what they’re talking about?  I feel like it’s a massive lost opportunity that Hancock didn’t try to become a scientist himself so that he could actively do the searching.  But school is hard work and might put a damper into travel and scuba diving.
- No, the reason I’m going to enjoy this episode is just because, I’ll tell you a secret—I just think Hancock has some fun ideas.  I enjoy thinking about them.  There aren’t really that many “quote-unquote” “conspiracy theories” that I truly like considering, but Graham Hancock certainly has a vibrant imagination and though his dot-connecting immediately implodes upon the first bit of evidence checked out, it’s convincing enough when read together.  For years I thought he’d make a great fiction writer.  He finally did turn his hand to that, but apparently it wasn’t as satisfying as revealing ancient mysteries.
- I think I went on a bit of a tangent here and I need to back up and actually introduce Graham Hancock and what he does.  And if you’re wondering why on earth I’m talking about him on my biblical theology podcast, well, we’ll get there.  And, just being upfront, I’ll get into some weeds to do it.  If this isn’t your kind of boat, then I’m sorry, I hope you enjoy this on some level nonetheless.
- So, Graham Hancock.  He’s not a scientist.  But he has scientific ideas.  I think he styles himself as a bit of an explorer.  And he explores these ideas by traveling around the world, looking at archaeological evidence and talking to people he thinks can support his ideas.  Sometimes these are scientists and other experts.  Sometimes he even talks to scientists about their actual fields of study.  If they are scientists speaking to their expertise, they at least go along with the idea that they are being prevented from studying or publishing the work they want to do because their evidence or findings or ideas are so very contradictory—and threatening—to the current scientific consensus that no one will listen to them.  Work mysteriously grinds to a halt because scientists don’t want to uncover this ghastly truth.  It’s unclear how much of this is propaganda.  The fact is, there are many reasons why archaeology isn’t done—for one thing, it’s insanely expensive.  And of course you have a lot of governmental red tape in any dig, anywhere.
- But in any case, I had thought that Graham Hancock’s work had kind of gone by the wayside.  To my great surprise, a new Netflix show premiered called *Ancient Apocalypse*, which follows Hancock around the world as he uncovers evidence that goes along with the ideas he has been espousing for, I want to say, going on thirty years now.
- So this show, *Ancient Apocalypse.*  I have to wonder how much they debated whether they ought to make their show sound so similar to History Channel’s *Ancient Aliens*.  Apparently *Ancient Aliens* hasn’t been mocked to the point of dissuading them from this choice.  Perhaps this puts their target audience on display?  Of course, there is precedence for this …alignment.  The title of Hancock’s best-selling book, *Fingerprints of the Gods*, does echo the book *Chariots of the Gods?* which suggested ancient alien influence over civilization.
- Hancock doesn’t go quite that far, at least not directly.  His basic premise in most of his work—I say most because he dips into some other strange territory regarding shamanism and the use of mind-altering substances—is that our assumptions of history are all wrong.  Traditional chronology has civilization blossoming between five and six thousand or so years ago with a sensible and linear upwards progression from “primitive” to “advanced.”  Technology and science and even intelligence grow throughout time, somewhat predictably in this model.
- Graham Hancock, on the other hand, suggests that to some degree this is correct, only the dawn of history happened far, far earlier than any traditional historian will admit, and not only that but there was a massive break in this upward trend of civilization.  The linear progression of civilization is only the latest version of civilization that has come along for humanity.
- Let’s stop for a moment and talk about what we can even talk about when we talk about “history.”  Sometimes we think of history as “real events that happened in the past,” and as such, “history” goes back as long as anything happened at any point in time.
- That’s not really what history is, though.  History started with the invention of writing.  Graham Hancock is generally looking at archaeology rather than written records, so the term “history” might not really be the best one to use when talking about his material and ideas.  I’ll probably slip up still and use the term here and there, but we ought to be talking, instead, about “civilization,” which is what we have when societies become more complex and there is some sort of unification with things like government, complex building, farming, eventually writing, these kinds of things.  I’m going to read a quote from the first volume of Claus Westermann’s commentary on Genesis because this is illustrative of our earliest extant writings about the dawn of civilization:
- The origin of the instruments and products of civilization plays a remarkable role in the Sumerian myths *(see further S.G.F. Brandon, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East, pp. 78ff.)* The motif recedes into the background in the Babylonian myths and epics, and where it does occur, it is changed notably. The reason for this is most likely that the Sumerian myths lie closer to the myths of primitive cultures in which the origins of civilization play a dominant role. The unity of creator and founder of civilization goes back to primitive myths. The figure of the founder of civilization or of a civilization hero is widespread throughout the world *(cf. J. Haekel, “Kulturbringer,” RGG3 IV 108; A. Metraux, “Culture Hero,” Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, New York 1949; W. Wundt, J. Frazer, H. Baumann, E. Jensen, Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern)*. He either takes his stand with the creator or is identified with him; in any case he belongs to the primeval period.

*Claus Westermann, A Continental Commentary: Genesis 1–11 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 59.*
- Interestingly, the earliest writing we have, from the Sumerians, talk a lot about the sources of civilization, and all those sources are even further back in time.  Graham Hancock takes this kind of information and suggests that there’s a reason for this, for the fact that culture heroes gave us civilization thousands of years prior to our first writing…and that reason is that this is exactly what happened!
- This motif of the “lost civilization” is the core of Graham Hancock’s work.  Thousands of years prior to the start of our current historical records, high civilization had grown and seeded itself all over the world.  Unfortunately, a great cataclysm came along that disrupted all of this, causing a massive backslide into ignorance and a fall back into primitive society until we figured things out again.
- It’s a very romantic story.  And he writes it well.  The fact that he can travel around to exotic places and describe his travel and provide some neat pictures is something he uses to his advantage.
- The great cataclysm which destroyed our first high civilization was a giant meteor which flooded the world and caused general havoc.  So it’s like we’re the dinosaurs, we got wiped out, but not totally.  We’re still kicking around and we’re like T-rex, but still alive.  So that’s Hancock’s basic premise and he travels around the world, looking for evidence, and it’s kind of cool because he does find some kind of neat things that a lot of people don’t know about.  He makes a lot of interesting connections between these different places in the world, suggesting that our amazing lost civilization had great men who went around, seeding the knowledge of society, government, tools, building, farming, medicine, literature, everything.  All over the world, these benevolent civilizers went around helping people out.
- This is the explanation for similar mythology through time, similar flood myths, and the same themes and motifs.
- This is similar to the sci-fi idea of one race of aliens that evolves on a particular planet and then goes out and seeds other planets.  This is the explanation in Star Trek of why there are so many humanoid-type aliens, because they all came from a single source and were all related.
- Hancock’s idea of this great civilization explains all these commonalities in societies all around the globe.
- Okay, so that’s Hancock in a very brief nutshell.  We are going to get into where his ideas have a touch point with the Bible, but I think this discussion is also helpful in regards to critical thinking.  We are inundated today with people who have ideas which sound so good when they present them!  And many times, they really are ideas that are too-good-to-be-true.  But also in today’s world, it is has never been easier to investigate claims ourselves and find out what is behind them.  We are truly blessed today to have access to so much information—but we need to be able to sort out the good from the bad or it does us no good at all.
- All right; on to the specifics:

## Fingerprints of the Gods

- My very first introduction to Graham Hancock was when I was working at a bookstore somewhere at the end of high school or beginning of college.  As I was stocking books, I had a lot of time to look at all the books on the shelf.  I loved book stores, but generally stuck to my tried-and-true sections.  Before this, when I’d go into a book store I would focus on certain shelves.  I loved buying Star Trek novels, that was my thing when I was a teenager.  When I fully realized I had money for myself and I could buy books, that was amazing to me…I could actually buy books.  And I realized there are ST novels and I was a big Trekkie so I bought up all the Star Trek novels that I could afford and that the bookstore carried because this was back in the dark ages before buying things online.  So usually when I went into a bookstore, I went into the sci-fi section.  But since I now worked in the bookstore, I went everywhere I stocked up books and I could just gaze at all the titles and see what all the kinds of books there were.  I think this is also when I first saw that Dean Koontz books existed, but since those were in the horror section of course I ignored those til much later in life.  But that’s another story.
- Anyway, I saw this really thick, impressive-looking book, and I still like the design of the cover.  Actually, what’s interesting to me is that what I came across was not the original edition of the book.  The original edition was blue with gold lettering.  Apparently what I came across was the “first American edition,” as opposed to the original British edition.  The “American edition” has a much more striking design, and I think that this has helped its success.  It doesn’t look as “sensationalist” as the original blue-and-gold book.  Anyway, the book I saw on the shelf was black…I’m holding my copy of the book right now, by the way.  It’s a thick black paperback with red writing on it and a gold sphinx and it says, “*Fingerprints of the Gods*” and I was like, huh, that’s a really interesting title.  I have no idea what that’s about.  But it looked really intriguing at first.  I remember passing it several times before picking it up.
- And, by the way, at the time I was very solidly LDS.  So my idea of “the gods”—you know, the idea of multiple gods, it didn’t scare me.  I didn’t mind that idea.  And I thought, what are the fingerprints of the gods?  What does this mean?  So eventually, I pulled it off the shelf and I see at the top, it says, “The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization.”  How dramatic!
- At the bottom it says, “by the author of *The Sign and the Seal.*”  I didn’t know what that book was.  It took me a while to find it.  In fact, I think I might have had to order it at a bookstore eventually.  My bookstore certainly didn’t have a copy of it; though it says it’s an international best-seller, *Fingerprints of the Gods* definitely did much better than that book.
- *The Sign and the Seal* is about the Ark of the Covenant.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read that; I feel like I ought to read it again.  In any case, there I am, in the book store and I turn the book around in my hands and this is what it says on the back:
- “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.”
- Like that’s a cool first paragraph.  I’m sorry…when I was thinking about college, when I first went into college, I went into elementary education because I thought, I need to find something that I can find a job in.  Well, I didn’t like that, and I was very drawn towards the sciences and things of that nature…it’s like, just…deep study.  And so the back of this book….”using tools as varied as archaeo-astronomy”—what the heck is “archaeo-astronomy”??—”geology, and computer analysis of ancient myths”—I don’t care about the computer analysis, but the ancient myths?  That’s fascinating.  Even back then, I was just, I was fascinated by that stuff.  I wish I’d found better ways of getting into it when I was younger.  Anyway, the back of the book continues with:
- “In *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.”
- Now, if you remember…if you’ve listened to my podcast and you have heard my story of my transitioning from being Mormon, being LDS, to where I’m now, and the idea that we cannot actually trust everything in the past …like, there was hiddenness in the past.  Like, the past existed but it was really hard to find out about, it was really hard to know how much we could know conclusively, and it was really hard to think about it and it was really hard to know, and so this idea of a hidden past…that really resonated with me.  Continuing on in the backcover:
- “In ancient monuments as far apart as Egypt’s Great Sphinx, the strange Andean ruins of Tiahuanaco, 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.”
- How cool is that??  Yeah, this just drew me in.  I love Indiana Jones, I love the story…this study of myths and ancient history and secrets.  And what the heck is archaeo-astronomy??  I had no idea, but it sounded so cool!
- I was so very taken in by this book.  And I noticed at the top, at the top it says the type of, you know, the section of the bookstore that this is supposed to be in.  This isn’t in, like, speculation, this isn’t in anything like fiction.  This is in astronomy.
- Astronomy…I actually ended up…and I wonder if had anything to do with the influence here.  Like I said, when I went into college, I went into education, but that didn’t last long.  It was so boring to me and I realized I was not…that person.  Look, I homeschool my kids and that is fine, I have no problem with teaching my own children, but I don’t want to teach other people’s kids—I do not.  That’s just not my cup of tea.  So I went from being an elementary ed major, and I went into physics because that was the first science class that I took.  Then I took an astronomy class and was hooked there.  And I wonder if *Fingerprints of the Gods* actually played into that in a subconscious way.  I still didn’t last long there, either.  I wish I’d been able to find the fields of study I eventually found.
- But at any rate, I was absolutely hooked into this book.  It helps, too, that I was very young and I liked the idea of someone just coming across this information like a treasure hunt.  I was certain, at least, that what historians tell us now, that can’t actually be right, it can’t be the whole story.  So maybe Graham Hancock is on to something here.
- I’m not sure I understood who he was.  I might have thought he was a historian—or something.  I don’t know.  ….It does say on the back of the book, about the author, that “Graham Hancock was formerly East Africa correspondent for *The Economist* and a correspondent for the London *Sunday Times*.  His *The Sign and the Seal* documented his real-life quest for the Ark of the Covenant.
- And then it talks about some television appearances and whatnot.  So he’s clearly—oh yeah, here’s the other thing.  He mentions the Ark of the Covenant!  Hello, of course I want to know about the Ark of the Covenant!  More things to draw me in.
- This book…it’s…I think he is making things up, okay?  I think he *knows* he is making things up.  I mean, he probably believes these things to some degree, but I really think he knows that not all of his ideas are good, but he’s challenging the establishment, just for the sake of challenging them, which you know, there is something to be said for that.  I was young.  I liked that kind of thing.
- Okay, so I didn’t exactly mean to get into all of that, but as you can see, I get a kick out of it.
- You might wonder, too, what the heck this has to do with a podcast about Genesis and biblical theology.  Well, again, stay tuned and you’ll find out.
- I’m going to talk about this book some more, because though *Ancient Apocalypse* uses different archaeology sites than are presented in *Fingerprints of the Gods*, it’s a very similar narrative and for those who haven’t read the book but are watching the Netflix show, the information in the book might be enlightening.  You can see where he started out in his ideas and thinking.

### The Beginning of Hancock’s Quest

- We begin our discussion of Hancock’s book where he started—with the continent of Antarctica of all places.  Antarctica has nothing to do with the Bible—seriously, absolutely nothing to do with the Bible aside from the fact that Antarctica is part of the world that God created.
- Antarctica is…a pretty romantic place in a way.  I mean, aside from penguins, no one wants to hang out at the beach in Antarctica in a bikini (and penguins would look pretty funny in bikinis), but Antarctica is a symbol, an archetype even, of an otherworldly place.  A place we seemingly can’t reach, certainly not easily.  What mysteries might it hold under all that ice?  It stimulates our imagination.  Combine that with mysterious maps, and you’ve really got a great beginning to a book.
- The first bit of evidence that Hancock brings up in *Fingerprints of the Gods* is a centuries-old map called the Piri Reis map.  This map dates from the year 1513.  And so we ask, what does a 500-year-old map have to do with a lost civilization that thrived before the beginning of our current…societal dispensation, we might say?
- First of all, Hancock didn’t come across the map himself and have some eureka moment where he saw something that no one else did.  What happened instead is he came across a book.  He read a book called *Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings* written in 1966 by Charles Hapgood.  Hapgood said that he communicated with an Air Force colonel who affirmed that the Piri Reis map showed an *ice-free* coastline of Antarctica.  As far as we know, in 1513, Antarctica had not even been seen, but even if it had been, in 1513 the coastline of Antarctica would still not have been free of ice, so then the question is, where could this map have come from??  Hancock’s conclusion is that this map is a copy of a copy of a copy of an ancient map which was made in a time when people did know of this continent and had mapped it.  No one in 1513 had any idea of what this map truly showed.
    - I won’t get into any critique of the content of the book just yet.  But I will say that he’s right, at least, to suggest that this map is, legitimately, from 1513, so at least he’s not claiming that it’s far older than that.  He’s just claiming the *content* of the map is older.  And this was a thing that was done in cartography…map makers did use older maps to fill in the newer ones they were making.  The Piri Reis map itself claims, in fact, that one of its sources was none other than Christopher Columbus.  So the map maker himself does not claim that this is a fresh and original map but rather that it used prior sources.
- There are other maps that Hancock brings out in his thesis—or, rather, that Hapgood brings out.  Though it has footnotes, this entire chapter is sourced almost entirely from Hapgood’s 1966 book.  Graham Hancock’s book came out almost three decades later, in 1995.  We’ll go ahead and save further discussion of the other maps for the next part of this episode where we do a little bit of evaluation for ourselves.
- And of course I can’t bring out every bit of evidence that Hancock has in his book.  He actually presents a lot; just the sheer volume of information he puts together makes his case very appealing, especially when you see all the footnotes ….and not all of his sources are things like books written in the 60s.  Some of his sources are pretty ancient, including writing from the early Spanish missionaries with the conquistadores.  (I suspect he’s still getting all of these quotes from secondhand sources, though.)

### Evidence in South America

- The next section of *The Fingerprints of the God*s is centered in South America.
- Most of you have probably heard of the Nazca lines before.  They are truly bizarre—long drawings done on the earth that supposedly can only be seen well from the sky (which, incidentally, can’t really be true since they were discovered by someone *hiking*).  These drawings were made by scraping away these volcanic pebbles on the ground, to a layer a few inches deep, but hundreds of feet of these lines are done for each image.
- The reason Hancock brings these up is to put on display the knowledge that someone had to have had to produce these.  According to some people, these lines seem to line up in certain astronomical ways, so the suggestion is that these people may have been the same—or at least had the same basis of knowledge—as the ancient map makers.  I could insert a question here as to why on earth these had to be the same people…this isn’t explained, just suggested by Hancock.  And boy does he love to “suggest” things.
- Also, of course, the Nazca lines produce great images for his book and create an aura of wonder and mystery…how *could* people have done that?  And why?  It’s a fascinating question.
- Hancock’s next topic is the Viracochas.  According to Hancock, the Viracochas were “mysterious bearded strangers…from across the sea in a ‘time of darkness’ [who came] to restore civilization after a great upheaval of the earth.”  (*Fingerprints*, p. 32).
    - These figures are said to have been mentioned by the indigenous people to the Spanish missionaries.  Sometimes they had different names in different locations but seemed otherwise exactly the same.
    - The missionaries wrote down descriptions of these Viracochas who were said to have white skin and long beards—definitely not a description of a typical indigenous person.
- The main example presented by Hancock was sourced from the Incan people at the time of Francisco Pizarro around 1532.  The Incas worshiped a sun god but said that the highest god was Viracocha, which Hancock says translates to something like “Foam of the Sea” (a more reliable translation seems to be something more like “the lake of creation”…a nitpicking point, but one which suggests something about his methodology).  Hancock goes on to explore some of the ruins and temples of the Andes.
    - You’ve maybe heard the story of how, when the Conquistadors came to conquer, they found it easy because the people there had mistaken the Spanish for gods or demi-gods.  (There is a great bit of suggestion that this is mostly Spanish propaganda, that Viracocha was not actually Caucasian-looking.)
    - In addition to stories about these figures who were teachers of civilization and who brought things like medicine, metallurgy, road-making, and farming to the ancient South Americans, the Spanish missionaries also wrote about flood myths whose details paralleled the Great Flood of the Bible in such details as having a man and a woman saved in some kind of a box.  These writings of the local myths even included stories of giants who preceded the flood.
    - Hancock spends quite a bit of time in his book centered in South America.  One of his points that is essential to us here in the podcast is that he brings up some “fish-garbed” figures which feature in some South American temples.  He mentions that these are eerily similar—different, he admits, but he thinks quite similar—to some Assyrian and Babylonian figures and images, even down to the fact that these depictions are all holding…something.  Again, they’re not holding the exact same thing in each location, but to Hancock, they are similar enough to mention.

### Evidence in Central America

- After his time in South America, Hancock jaunts up north, to Central America (never mind the fact that “Central America” isn’t really a continent) where he explores more ruins and learns about figures like Quetzalcoatl who seem again very similar to the Viracochas of South America.
- Hancock, of course, visits the pyramids which look eerily similar to the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia.  He talks about the cycles of time that were supposedly counting down to the end of the world which *didn’t happen* in December 2012 (the fact that these are cycles suggest, instead, that these “endings” are just resets to the calendar rather than the end of the world).
- Of interest to us, Hancock mentions what he calls the “Mexican Babel.”
    - I’m amused that he suggests that we need to pay attention to how this story and the story in the Bible are not only similar but also different—the differences matter, says Hancock.  I do agree at that.
    - Hancock has a quote from a Spaniard interviewing an elder concerning the making of a local ziggurat, and this quote tells of a myth that sounds very like the episode in the Bible of the Tower of Babel.  Hancock gets this quote from a book called *Atlantis: The Antediluvian World,* which was published in 1882.  So this is several steps away from the primary source, and from such an interesting book, about Atlantis of all things.  By the way, if you’re interested in looking at Hancock’s sources like this, most of them can be found on archive.org, an internet library where you can “borrow” books to read online.  It’s an incredibly useful resource because there are so many out-of-print books that are very expensive to find in copy.  Anyway, here is this quote (apparently you can find the original source of the quote, but it’s in Spanish and I don’t understand Spanish):
    - “In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this place, Cholula, was in obscurity and darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water, without tree or created thing.  Immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature who possessed the land.  Enamored of the light and beauty of the sun they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky.  Having collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with which they speedily commenced to build the tower…and having reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky, ‘Have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamored of the light of the sun and his beauty?  Come and confound them, because it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.”  Immediately the inhabitants of the sky sallied forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the edifice and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth.” (*Fingerprints*, p 113-114)
    - The original quote from the book about Atlantis is actually a little different; Hancock removed a part that would have been a little hard to understand for his modern readers, but mostly it’s the same quote.
    - For interests sake, I want to read what the Atlantis book has right after this quote; on page 201, the author, Ignatius Donnelly, goes on to say:
    - “One can recognize in this legend the recollection, by a ruder race, of a highly civilized people; for only a highly civilized people would have attempted such a vast work.  Their mental superiority and command of the arts gave them the character of giants who came from the East…”
    - Okay, enough of that.  According to Ignatius Donnelly, the myth wasn’t talking about *real* giants, but *mental* giants, the heroic sages of civilization.  The superior attitude of this book from 1882 is not uncommon for the time, of course, but it makes me wonder how anyone can read it and take it seriously.  Maybe it has the original quote right and maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe the original Spanish writer of the quote got his information correct or maybe he didn’t.  Assuming he did, this story is a record of the start of civilization, connecting the people who lived at the time with this, and it doesn’t suggest anything about great civilizers coming from anywhere else to do this work.
    - Hancock goes on to talk about the biblical story of the tower of Babel and points out that in this story from the Bible, the desire of the people of Babel was to “make a name for themselves.”  That point isn’t mentioned in the story from Mexico, but Hancock suggests that we ought to think of them as having the same motivation nonetheless, that the Mexican ziggurat builders were concerned with keeping a legacy alive, even if their civilization and language became unknown.
    - You see what he’s doing here…he doesn’t point out the similar language of the two myths, which are pretty obvious.  Though he mentions that we ought to pay attention to differences in mythology, he doesn’t point any of those out, either.  **His** point about “differences” is not to use them to do literary criticism but rather to suggest that the reason these myths aren’t exactly the same is because these myths have common sources but have grown apart in thousands of years.  His ultimate point is a complete non sequitur to prop up his thesis—a non sequitur that can’t even be seen in the original myth!  It’s a bit bizarre and I genuinely wonder if most readers would see the disconnect unless they really read this several times and tried to critique it.

### Mythology

- Okay, let’s move on to Hancock’s next major section, which focuses on mythology.  And again, if you follow Hancock’s sources, you’ll see that he’s not bringing forth thoughts on his own, but rather he’s putting together ideas that others have had into his own cohesive thesis.
- I’m going to read another quote because this kind of condenses the idea that Hancock is putting forward:
    - “In some of the most powerful and enduring myths that we have inherited from ancient times, our species seems to have retained a confused but resonant memory of a terrifying global catastrophe.
    
    Where do these myths come from? 
    
    Why, though they derive from unrelated cultures, are their story lines so similar? why are they laden with common symbolism? and why do they so often share the same stock characters and plots?  If they are indeed memories, why are there no historical records of the planetary disaster they seem to refer to?
    
    Could it be that the myths themselves are historical records?  Could it be that these cunning and immortal stories, composed by anonymous geniuses, were the medium used to record such information and pass it on in the time before history began?”  (Fingerprints, p. 187)
- In a bit, I’ll talk more about where he’s sourcing this idea.  But he goes on to talk about flood myths, beginning with Gilgamesh and going on to the Bible and the flood myths recorded in the Americas.
- He also brings forth some interesting statistics, which he found in the book, *The Flood Reconsidered* (which again, luckily is found on archive.org!).  Hancock says, “in a survey of 86 of these [500 deluge legends around the world]…the specialist researcher Dr. Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.”  (*Fingerprints*, p. 193)
- I’m still working on tracking down all this information of how we can know that all these flood myths are independent…most of these claims are from books that are sixty to ninety years out of print, and to be honest a lot of this work during this time period was being put out by Christian fundamentalists who definitely had some skin in the game.  There was a great fear that science at the time was overtaking religion and so there was a push to put out “scientific” information that corroborated a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture.  Again, I’m not suggesting that these interpretations are wrong.  But when looking at evidence, it’s fair to look at bias and motivation.
- In any case, I’m going to be continuing to look more deeply myself at flood narratives because I’m genuinely curious where they crop up, who recorded them, how similar or dissimilar they are to the Bible’s narrative, and so on.  I’m not interested in proving or disproving the flood one way or another because I don’t think that the truth of Scripture hinges on that point.  I **am** interested in making sure the evidence we have and use is as solid as possible.  As I’ve said before, propping up a correct argument with substandard evidence is less helpful than having no evidence at all.  In fact, it’s downright damaging.
- Back to Hancock, his suggestion is that myths record actual history.  Again, though I’ve dipped a little bit already into critique, I’ll save more of that for later.
- After talking about flood myths, of which everyone is surely aware, Hancock then goes into descriptions of other ancient cataclysms.  These parallel the flood myths because his idea is not about a flood per se but actually a meteorite which caused things like floods, but was not limited to that kind of destruction.  So he is free to draw upon descriptions of fire and earthquakes and the like.
- I wish we had more time to get into a lot of the detail in this section on myths.  He gets into astronomy here, and this is where I finally figured out what archeo-astronomy is!  This is the study of how ancient people studied the sky and how their study impacted their culture.  There are various ways that this is studied.  And not all of them are crackpot ideas!
- Hancock looks a lot at the way ancient people seem to have aligned constructions to important elements of the sky.  Archaeoastronomers also use ancient mythology and narratives because quite often these stories held information about the sky.  In fact, we see this in the Bible in places like Revelation.
- The purpose of these ancient records, recording things in buildings and structures and myths, was, in Hancock’s estimation, for the purpose of making sure that some of the information at least from this most ancient of civilizations was not lost.  He surmises that they knew it would be and worked to prevent it!  These were deliberate communications from the past to the future, like a time capsule of sorts.  How they knew that these particular types of messages would not get lost, I have no idea.

### Egypt

- I find it interesting that Hancock moves directly to discussion of Egypt *after* the section on myth.  Perhaps he needed the explanation from archaeoastronomers in order to properly do justice to the information he finds in Egypt.  This is where he talks about the pyramids and their alignment to the stars in the belt of Orion.
- He does things here like claim that the Great Pyramid can’t have been built in the time of Khufu because there’s no evidence.  He later recants (not inside the book, but elsewhere) that there is, in fact, evidence of this…in the form of Khufu’s actual name found inside the pyramid!  This blows apart his idea that the pyramid had to have been built in the eleventh century B.C.  But he fixes that by claiming that the Egyptians *designed it* as if it had been built then.
- So convenient.
- You know, I probably could have just led with that fact and this episode could have been a lot shorter.  That doesn’t sound as fun, though.
- The rest of the book has quite the preponderance of “evidence” further discussing the dating of this catacylsm and geological evidence for it and whatnot.

## Ancient Apocalypse (Netflix Original)

- So I’ve spent a lot of time talking about *Fingerprints of the Gods*; I won’t go so much into the show *Ancient Apocalypse*, as I trust that you’ll watch that if you’re interested.  It’s a whole lot easier than reading a 500 page book.
- And besides, part of my point in getting into all of that is to help you contrast it with his work in the Netflix show if you choose to watch it.  His methodology and attitude toward establishment academia hasn’t changed.  His theory hasn’t fundamentally been adjusted in any way.  As you can see with the episode with the pyramid text, if he is faced with some fact that demolishes one of his cornerstones of data, he just finds a way around that.
- The series begins with a dramatic introduction to Hancock, who admits out of the gate that he is a journalist.  The videography of the series is excellent; it gives all these amazing shots of archaeological sites.  So gorgeous.  Hancock is portrayed as someone who is fighting against academia, that scholars call him names out of spite and that the consensus of scholars now is that humanity in the ice age were “simple” hunter-gatherers.  Note that term, “simple.”  He’s not drawing that from academic papers.  That’s how Hancock is framing it, not scholars.  In fact, he goes on in his episode to use the term of people.  So from the start, he’s created a strawman version of the scholarly world.  He says he is “enemy number one” to archaeologists.  He says archaeologists are extremely “defensive, arrogant, and patronizing.”
    - *Thank goodness* Mr. Hancock isn’t doing anything of that sort.
- The introduction ends by Hancock saying that he is trying to “overthrow the paradigm of history.”
- And you know, that’s an interesting goal.  Could even be a worthy one.  Questioning things, as I hope I’ve made clear, is pretty essential to thinking and investigation!  And it can be easy to get stuck in the rut of our ideas and need someone else to come along to give us a push start in another direction.  But he really picks up the rhetoric in the second episode, as he states that some archaeologists “hate him”?  That’s some nice rhetoric.  I wonder how archaeologists could dislike someone who keeps suggesting that they are hiding things and ignoring evidence…
- I’m not going to take the time to call out much of the information in this show…watching it made me want to do some kind of Mystery Science Theater commentary through the whole thing—but no, I’m not going to really do that.  I don’t have any robots to comment with me.
- But I will note that in the second episode, Hancock speaks to an author who writes about Atlantis and who believes that he has traced three separate empires that are directly connected to the city of Atlantis.  Hancock never mentions Atlantis in his book, so I find it interesting that he does go out on this limb in the show.  But more on that in a minute.

## Can He Be Right?

- We’re going to take a few minutes to critique some of the things that Hancock has claimed.  Can he be right?  I will link some websites that go into some of this material pretty in depth, for those interested.  But some of it directly connects to our purposes here, in looking at biblical context as well as just general critical thinking and research.
- Because he himself started here, let’s have a look at his cartography.
    - So what about those maps?  Is the Piri Reis map an accurate representation of the coast of Antarctica?  Remember, first of all, that Antarctica was not yet “discovered” when this map was made.  The map shows the west coast of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula (remember that’s where Portugal and Spain are); these are fairly obvious and remember that multiple sources were used to create this map.  The “west region” of the Piri Reis map, which is across the Atlantic ocean from the Iberian Peninsula was what was sourced from Columbus.
    - Now, you’d think that would mean that the western part of the Piri Reis map was going to show the new world, not Antarctica.  And it does.  But the idea of Hapgood and Hancock is that, just like with this map, having a map done by Columbus doesn’t mean that Columbus himself had to have travelled the whole area and mapped it any more than the later cartographer did.
    - And again, I can’t really show this audibly because it’s hard enough for us to see the regions of the map just by looking at it itself let alone just talking about it, but if you check out the bonus files on my website or maybe the show notes, I’ll have images so you can see this more clearly yourself.  But in this rendering of the map, the east side of the map shows Spain and Africa.  The west side of the map has South America directly across from the Iberian Peninsula, as you might possibly expect because we need to remember that the longitudes are not lined up according to a modern map, but this coast extends down and then it extends ***across*** the bottom of the map, and this part is what Hapgood and Hancock suggest is part of Antarctica.  The coastline is entirely connected, and remember we’re going to expect scales and perspective to be “off” on an old map, so we could easily see this as just continuing the coast of South America, but of course that’s not very juicy-sounding.
    - Something not mentioned by Hancock, or maybe just conveniently ignored, is that the map has text.  It identifies locations.  It has place names.  It describes climate and animals.  The most southerly portion of the map is clearly in Argentina, not Antarctica.  The fact that it doesn’t scale the coast of the entire continent correctly and curves in an extreme way around the bottom of the map doesn’t mean that the lower part has to be Antarctica; it just means that they really didn’t know how the coast actually curved.  Or perhaps it was an accommodation to the space they had on the map!  And if you’re just following the coast of South America and mapping that, it does curve in this type of a way.  They just didn’t get it right in proportions.
    - I point all of this out in particular because this is the beginning of Hancock’s “quest” and thus I would have hoped that he’d have spent a lot of time actually investigating Hapgood’s claims.  But apparently he did not.  He took the idea that he liked and, rather than deeply investigating every point he could, he just moved on with his idea because this sounded too good to mess with.
    - That’s pretty shoddy investigation for a reporter—yeah, I know, I know, journalism isn’t really what it purports to be.  But that’s the thing.  Hancock is clearly being the journalist here, not the scientist.  He has a story to tell and he’s going to find a way to fill in those gaps in the story.  He isn’t all about **finding facts**; he’s all about **finding his story**.
    - Of course, the Piri Reis map isn’t the only one mentioned.  Hancock also pulls out the Orontius Finaeus map, from 1531.  A detail of the map that Hancock does not point out is that, across the landmass that is supposedly Antarctica, it states, “*The southern land recently discovered but not yet fully known.”*
    - That doesn’t sound like the map maker is very carefully copying something in intimate detail from an older map.  Hapgood said that this map’s details were proof of this careful copying.  It might be more likely that these details (which still aren’t visible today in Antarctica, by the way, and which are not proven to have existed in just this way in the past to boot) were simply made up because the land had not yet been explored.  This was not an uncommon feature of cartography at the time.  The next map that Hancock mentions seems to be—according to Hancock—even “more accurate” regarding a supposed iceless Antarctic; the problem is, this ancient map was sourced from Orontius’ map, this time with further speculation.
    - And just a thought.  It also strikes me that we should keep in mind, too, that there was another continent at the time which had yet been unmapped by European explorers…that of Australia.  So if we were talking about old maps being repurposed by ancient sea farers, why can’t one of those old maps have been depicting Australia rather than Antarctica?  They aren’t that “off” in shape and aspect when we’re talking about ancient map making.  The problem for Hancock is that, in such a case, of course, we could not conclusively date them as far back as Hancock dreams.
        - For the record, I don’t know of any maps that chart Australia prior to the 1500s, either, but…since we’re just making suppositions on zero physical evidence, then we might as well throw that into the mix as a potential contender.
- So that’s the cartography.  Now let’s look at something a bit more biblically-oriented.
    - Our next point to look at is the topic of the flood myths of South America.  And I want to be delicate here, but my first thought that I want to bring up regarding the similarities of the South American flood myths to the Bible is to note who, exactly, is doing the recording of the myths.
    - We don’t necessarily have any written records before the Christian missionaries came.  Some ancient Americans had no writing of their own.  And when they did—their records often got destroyed.  So our oldest written record of these myths is by the pen of Christians.  And again, I don’t want to make too strong of a point here or suggest nefarious motives, but the fact that we don’t have any writing from the people themselves is problematic.
    - Hancock presents the Spanish chronicler who wrote much of this down—who was, by the way, half Incan himself—as a person who was “regarded as one of the most reliable chroniclers…and had done his work in the 16th century, soon after the conquest, when those traditions had not yet been contaminated by foreign influences…” (*Fingerprints*, p. 55).
        - And again, not to disagree with him, but…first of all, note, that this was a man who had both feet embedded in two different traditions.  This may have been *before much other foreign influence* had come, but there was undoubtedly influence.  And this influence can happen with the best of intentions or even without any intention at all.  A couple of possibilities I will mention for thought:
            - A) Christian missionaries are…Christian missionaries.  They want the people they are talking to to understand the Bible.  Cross-contamination can—and honestly inevitably happens in such a situation either overtly or inadvertently, through influence of narrative or even translation bias.
            - B) What about the people themselves?  The fact that similar stories were found throughout the region could be explained by either similar, historical sources for the stories, or it can be explained by a cultural tendency to fold new stories into old stories.  There is no malicious or negative intent here—it is simply how some societies treat narrative.  If you’ve listened to my previous episodes touching on mythology and ANE literary context, this is simply how many people in the world think.
            - In fact, here is a quote from Hancock’s book…this isn’t in reference to the flood myths per se but it speaks to how the Incan people in particular treated the myths and stories that they heard around them:
            - “All the scholars agreed that the Incas had borrowed, absorbed and passed on the traditions of many of the different civilized peoples over whom they had extended their control during centuries of expansion of their vast empire.”  (Fingerprints, p 56)
                - Sooo, why then would we think it out of character for the Incan people to have absorbed the traditions of the Christian missionaries?  ****We see this kind of appropriation often, in many places of the world.  There’s no reason to judge this as a negative thing, but such tendencies ought to be figured in to our analysis of material.
        - Again, I’m not suggesting there is any slam-dunk evidence that missionaries “planted” these flood myths or perhaps just some of the details of the flood myths (on purpose or even unknowingly), but we do need to take this possibility into account.  I’d like to point out, also, none of this means we necessarily give up on the idea of a global flood.  That’s not my point.  We just need to be as honest as we can be about our evidence because that’s good form.  The proof that “people all around the world” have flood myths is not going to be taken that convincingly if it is the case that the first records we have of all of these myths come from the pens of European Christians.
    - As I said before, I’m hopelessly enamored with researching more about flood myths and their origins.  What about the idea that these myths might be recording actual history?
    - If you listened to my last episode about mythology, you might see how Hancock is still taking these myths out their natural context by even asking this question.  He is solidly grounded in a materialistic scientific understanding where records of past events are recording factual on-the-ground information.  This is how *we* think today, how *we* want to see things recorded.  And while yes, I hear some of you say “well why couldn’t it be so?”…it’s just so obvious that the ancient person thought so differently than we do that to try to make these things match together is, I think, like trying to put two puzzles together into one complete picture.  There’s nothing wrong with separating out the puzzle pieces and letting them be their own unique—and authentic—picture.  The ancient person simply did not think of history as a record of factual events.  The lid of their puzzle box shows a different image than the one we have on ours.
    - We are left with the important question of:  How do we, then, explain these similar stories?  That’s a whole conversation itself!  Is it possible that they are all recording actual events?  Yes, sure it is.  I guess we’re not going to get away from our scientific exploration of trying to figure this out and collecting evidence; and, honestly, we shouldn’t stop exploring and wondering and thinking like this.  That’s what we do!  Please hear me:  I’m not trying to say that these can’t form some evidence of a common memory.  I am saying that we ought to be critical when thinking about this…how much of our own biases are we allowing to lead here?  If we found out that actually most of these myths were recorded by Christian missionaries with agendas, is that going to be proof against the Bible?  No.  It’s really not.  I promise.  My point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of where the evidence ends up because it’s simply not essential.
    - Hancock is certainly not using these myths to prove the legitimacy of the Bible.  He gives a nod to a vague Creator in his book, but he’s certainly not trying to prove biblical truth.  For him, the Bible is just another set of data points along his investigation, just the same as any other.
    - Hancock doesn’t talk about inspiration or anything along those lines, of course, but nonetheless he seems to find a need to explain why these things have lasted and why we must find them accurate.  I find this a bit amusing.  Here’s a quote from the book:
    - “It is…not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forebears.
    
    Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.  Indeed the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been ‘written’ by the same ‘author.’”
    - Oh maybe he’s giving credit to God!  Well, no.  Let’s keep reading for a moment:
    - “Could that author have had anything to do with the wonderous deity, or superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying [global] geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to the shocked and demoralized survivors?” (*Fingerprints*, p. 268)
    - In case it’s not clear to you, he’s not talking about actual deities, but rather super cool humans who had an awful lot of foresight.
    - And then, of course, he mentions Caucasian Osiris and Viracocha and Quetzalcoatl.
        - Now, here’s a key point for us in our study.  God never “brought civilization” to the biblical world.  If there were any “civilizers” in the Bible, they were actually the ones who helped **instigate** the flood, not the other way around.  They weren’t the good guys, in other words.
        - Okay, because this is not spelled out in the Bible, I’ll need to draw some things out here.  The context of the Bible does seem to obliquely reference the Mesopotamian context of the apkallu, the great civilizers…these are Hancock’s “fish-garbed figures” from the ANE.  *Fingerprints of the Gods* was my first exposure to these.  Apkallu are not gods—they are sages, wise men.  Depending on what literature you are looking at, they are human sages or they are semi-divine sages, demi-gods or half-divine.  And in the context of Babylon, they were usually portrayed as positive figures, bringing about Babylon’s greatness.  But, importantly, even in Mesopotamia, they were not always good guys.  Sometimes they were the source of demonic influence.  In either case, these figures were the ones who brought weapons and magic and secret arts to humankind.
        - So here we are at our real hinge point with the Bible in Hancock’s work, the concept of the apkallu.  If you’re not already familiar with this, you are now asking, okay, so who are the apkallu, or whatever they are, in the Bible?
        - Let’s turn to one of the quintessential “weird passages” of the Bible in Genesis 6.
        - Genesis 6:1–4 (ESV)
        1When man[kind] began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them,
        2the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
        3Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
        4The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
        - Now, there’s a lot we could go into here, of course.  This is right before the flood.  God “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  This follows right after the text telling us about these sons of God and their associated Nephilim, so it seems they were connected to this wickedness of man.  I’d like to do an episode on the interpretations of who the sons of God were, but today we’re going to suggest that the background of how we should read this is connected to the apkallu.  All the pieces fit—connecting the sons of God, the Nephilim, and the escalation of the wickedness of humankind, plus some other juicy details about the origin of demons—and in the show notes I’m going to provide a link to a journal article which lays this out really well, called *On the Origin of [the] Watchers*, by Amar Annus.  “Watchers” are, in a nutshell, the sons of God of Gen 6, and the apkallu.  Watchers are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, specifically in Daniel, and their story is spelled out in the non-canonical book of 1 Enoch.  Which is, no, not Scripture, but which definitely informed the thinking of the Jewish people in the second temple or intertestimental period.
            - Now, as an aside, these sons of God are spiritual beings, as I’ll argue if I ever do an interpretation comparison episode, but these sons of God in Gen 6 are *not* the exact same beings as the sons of God that I’ve mentioned in prior episodes, who are part of God’s divine council and who are the created, non-sovereign gods of the nations.  This is a point of confusion for many people who get into this material, because the same term is used for multiple situations.  It’s difficult for us to separate all this out sometimes, probably due in part to the fact that Hebrew simply had a more limited vocabulary and we don’t have the same types of things in mind that they would have had.
        - So these particular sons of God, the Watchers, supposedly the Babylonian apkallu, came down and mated with human women and created the Nephilim, mighty men or giants—another thing that I can’t cover quite yet.  And how are they connected with the coming of the flood?  This isn’t **remotely** clear in the Bible!  But if we read this as someone who was familiar with Babylonian mythology, the connections would be obvious.  These figures provided knowledge, science, metallurgy, secret arts, medicine which included poisons and things like that—in other words, they made it so that people could kill other people much more easily.  Though mankind’s wickedness is squarely their own, human depravity escalated on account of this knowledge—not too dissimilar to the escalation of violence which occurred after the taking of the tree of knowledge.
    - To sum up now, in Hancock’s estimation, the apkallu were benevolent beings who graciously shared knowledge of civilization.  In the estimation of the Babylonians, these same figures were seen as positive—in that they helped make Babylon great—or sometimes negative, in that they formed the basis of demonology.  In the Bible, these same figures were at least partially to blame for the flood as they contributed to the violence and evil of mankind.  And they were the progenitors of the Nephilim, who were the source of the giants of the conquest.  And in Israelite mythology, the spirits of dead Nephilim, who were, remember, of mixed heritage—divine and human—were the source of demons.  This is, in fact, why they are called “unclean spirits” in the NT; it was this mixed heritage which made them “unclean”—unholy mixing being one of the things that caused a thing to gain the status of “unclean.”
    - So yeah—was that enough information to pack into the last few minutes?  I will undoubtedly be bringing more of this material up later—in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of resources you could explore if you want to reach out and ask some questions.
- Back to Hancock; I’ll say something about his sources.
    - There are a lot of footnotes in *Fingerprints of the Gods*.  It looks like a very well-sourced book.  And occasionally it is; sometimes Hancock goes to the trouble to find the primary source of a quote or a claim; sometimes he will talk to real scientists—but if you follow his trail, most of the time he’s talking to experts who are talking about things that are actually outside their field, or he will misquote someone for his own purposes (if you find the links I’ve provided for reviews, you can see where some of these things have been brought to attention so I’m not going to go into detail about them here).
    - By far, most of Hancock’s sources are secondary, not primary, and in actuality this is where he is sourcing many of his **ideas,** as well.  We’ve already looked at how it was actually Charles Hapgood who suggested in the 1960s that Antarctica had been mapped thousands of years ago.  In the section of his book about Mexico, much of Hancock’s ideas come from Constance Irwin, who wrote a book called *Fair Gods and Stone Faces*, in 1963.  I was able to find this book—huzzah for [archive.org](http://archive.org) once again!
        - Irwin seems to have the same kind of attitude towards establishment academia that Hancock has.  Surprise, surprise.  In his book, Irwin suggests that the mythology of the South American people is necessarily connected to historical people and events.  This is a theme that Hancock picks up on strongly, as we have seen.
        - And of course, I’m not saying that getting your ideas from others or synthesizing material together is at all a bad thing.  Hey, he provides his footnotes so you can go down the same path that he does.  He’s not stealing ideas or anything like that.  But he does hedge his information in some ways.  In his book, he tries to steer away from direct imagery of Atlantis, and I wonder if that’s because he felt like he wouldn’t be taken as seriously.  In his Netflix show, he doesn’t hesitate to go down the path of considering Atlantean imagery and sources.  And yes, he does get push back against that from those ever-judgmental establishment scholars.
        - Another link I’ll provide is to an episode from the History Extra podcast which has a conversation with an archaeologist about the source of the story of Atlantis.  Spoiler alert:  the myth really isn’t a myth, it’s just an analogy that Plato uses.  Yep, it’s true—ancient people used made up illustrative analogies just like we do today.  If it was a myth, which, remember, we would expect them to take as “historical” at the time, we’d see other mentions of it, and certainly ancient graphical representations of such an interesting history—but we don’t.  We don’t have any of that, which suggests that no one was actually taking this as a real myth and thus no one was actually ascribing any real history to it—because remember, myth and history were the same in the ancient world.

## Where is the Middle Ground?

- To be clear, I don’t want to accuse Mr. Hancock of things he’s not doing…but he himself admits that he cherry-picks data to formulate his conclusions…he uses the metaphor of being a lawyer building a case.  That’s so bizarre and maybe explains why he never *really* wanted to be a scientist.  He is not so much interested in truth, but in pushing his idea to see where he can make it line up.  I don’t think that’s *necessarily* dishonest.  But what a strong and strange agenda that is.  Fitting the evidence to fit your hypothesis is…well, it’s just not the way I want to think and it’s not the way that I suggest anyone else try to think, either.  At least not in our culture, which is the one he is operating within—he’s using science without actually…using science…
- He actually introduced me to the figures of the Apkallu and a number of other aspects of ancient Near Eastern culture long before I came across the work of Dr. Heiser, which I’ve mentioned before.  Actually, Hancock developed his ideas even before much of the work of recent scholars, such as the work of Amar Annus, whose paper *On the Origin of [the] Watchers* I mentioned before is referenced by Dr. Heiser to put a linchpin into the supernatural view of the sons of God of Gen 6.
- To be as fair as I can, I do think there’s a space that can be had for people who push against ideas, even if they’re not doing so with evidence.  Getting people to think outside the box is a laudable goal, and as I keep stressing, sometimes we jump the gun in our assessments of people and positions and what they are doing.  I just wish we could avoid some of these…unsavory practices.  Is it a terrible bias to have to want information to be presented fairly and in as unbiased a fashion as possible?…well I guess it’s a bias I’ll accept.

## Last Thoughts:  The Intersection of Imagination with Logic

- In case there’s anyone who didn’t catch this before, Graham Hancock is not a Christian; we could make some points about how interesting it is that Christians often get accused of letting their biases show.  Hancock uses the Bible as just another ancient record of “something” happening in the lonistant past.  And I will absolutely give him credit for his imagination and the way he connects the dots (it’s just that, critical as he is of academia, he will only give credit to scientists and scholars that will prop up his ideas of a long-lost civilization that was destroyed in a cataclysm).  He is, in the end, only a writer (a “journalist,” as he says), but one who refuses to participate in the scholarly side of things because he thinks academia won’t listen.  Funny how he’s not even tried…he’s certainly had enough time to gain some credentials and enter the fray, but it seems he’s happy enough to stir the pot from the populist side, which I think is a bit of a shame.  He’s energetic enough about his ideas that I think it would be very interesting had he done the work to become an archaeologist himself.
- It’s a shame, too, that he doesn’t put all of his considerable reasoning power to finding out truth rather than merely to build a cohesive story.  In a way, it feels like he’s working quite a bit like an ancient mythographer himself (is that a word?  I don’t feel like I’ve ever heard it before, but what a great word!).  And this is an interesting idea—I actually think this is why Hancock is so popular today, because we all yearn for myths which anchor us in meaning and history.  We are all looking for purpose and narrative.
- If you just like stories and fun plots and ideas, I could recommend his work for that.  He is great at jogging the imagination, and we all need that sometimes.  But please don’t take him too seriously…I’m not even sure he takes himself all that seriously, for that matter.

## Outro

- Thanks, once again, for listening and if you thought this was a strange tangent to go off on for an hour, well, what can I say.  I found it interesting to dive back into Hancock’s work as I had been “away” from it for a while.  And I think I found some great leads to help me on my research regarding flood myths and their origins, so hey, bonus there.
- I’d appreciate it if you’d like and subscribe and review and rate this podcast if you’ve enjoyed any of my episodes.  Feel free to contact me at genesismarksthespot@gmail.com or find me on Facebook.  I’d love to hear if you’ve got any interesting questions or points to make regarding what I discuss here.  Appreciation to Wintergatan for the music and I hope you’ll join me next week where we will be finally getting into…views of creation.  That will be a big topic.  Thanks again, see you next week.