Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization, Griffin, 2017.
Graham Hancock has made a career of visiting and exploring remarkable ancient sites around the world and recounting these experiences in engaging first-hand detail. He opens Magicians of the Gods with a description of his time at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates that flow from there down into Mesopotamia. The hundreds of towering megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe are believed to date from around 10,000 BC, making them likely the oldest large-scale human creations yet discovered, 6,000 years older than the first ziggurats of Sumer, 8,500 years before the time of King Tut, and 7,000 years earlier than Stonehenge. They are over twenty feet high and with a weight of around twenty tons and yet were transported from their quarry site to their final location.
But, as numerous and imposing as these creations are, what were they exactly? No one, including Hancock, seems sure. The other ancient remains they most resemble are the rows of giant stone heads, with gigantic “hats” on Easter Island gazing out at the sea on the opposite side of the world. Many of these towering stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe are elaborately carved, most frequently with diverse animal figures. As at other ancient sites, the earlier this work took place the more expert and sophisticated it seems to be. Hancock notes their curious resemblance to the carvings on Babylonian pillars dating from thousands of years later as well as to animal figures engraved into the stela of the Maya.
Hancock’s next stop is on Java, specifically the ruins of the stepped pyramid temple now deep in the jungle at Ganung Padong. There, core-sample drilling has revealed dates of 10,000 -20,000 BC for the first human-made structures on that site. To the locals, the remains of Ganung Padong are known as the “Mountain of Light” or “Mountain of Enlightenment” and is, according to Hancock, a place they revere. It is definitely large, with five levels of terraces and a span of some 160 yards by 40 yards. Until recently, however, even the locals hadn’t realized there was a pyramid hidden beneath all the jungle overgrowth.
Hancock has concluded that a large comet may have struck the earth in northern Canada in approximately 11,000 BC, causing enormous devastation around the world and destroying almost all of that had been an advanced, world-spanning civilization, events still recalled in legends of “the Flood” and survival of far-flung remnants of a once highly evolved culture. By a thousand or so years later, Hancock believes, the multiple waves of severe natural impacts from this catastrophic event had begun to subside. A renewed ice age, triggered by the impacts of the comet, had begun to warm, opening the way for the eventual re-emergence of agriculture.
Outposts of an advanced human civilization had begun to re-emerge, according to Hancock, in locations such as Gobekli Tepe, not far from Mount Ararat where Noah’s ark is said to have landed following the flood. The Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures would all later blossom downstream. The legends of all of these civilizations, set out how far more advanced “gods” had imparted to them the knowledge, skills, and guiding principles necessary for civilization. Ancient texts from cultures all over the world appear to describe these events.
Careful preservation of plants, animals, and seeds that could be used in the regeneration of the earth is a central part of many such stories. The enormous labyrinthine underground cities of Cappadocia in central Turkey, also visited by Hancock, may have been another way for parts of humanity to survive this devastation. Hancock is awed by the subterranean complex of Derinkuyu which he estimates was also created around 10,000 BC.:
“The whole place is a complex and cunning labyrinth on an immense scale- a work of astonishing architectural complexity that would be impressive if it had been built above ground, but that is utterly breathtaking when one considers that it all had to be mined, chiseled, hammered, cut and gouged out of the volcanic bedrock…like a gigantic rabbit warren extending over an area of more than four square kilometers…. And Derinkuyu is just one of two hundred such subterranean complexes identified in (that part of) Turkey.”
Destruction of an advanced, globe-spanning civilization triggered by a comet may also account for Plato’s description of the catastrophic end of “Atlantis”, along with most of its technological marvels, as well. Hancock sees possible remnants of the extraordinary knowledge of “Atlantis” in accounts of how enormous stone blocks –in some cases of more than 500 tons – were moved into place both at Baalbeck in Lebanon and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Ancient records say that the builders of those long-distant times were able to “devise stones endowed with life” or “that moved as if having life”, maneuvered by “magicians” using “words of power.” A papyrus in the British Museum speaks of the magic worker “Horus the Nubian” who “made a vault of stone 200 cubits (300 feet) long by 50 cubits (75 feet) wide rise above the head of the pharaoh who reacted by “opening his mouth in a great cry.” As recently as the 19th century, the Emir of Baalbeck was matter-of-factly informing guests that the massive temple there had originally been built before the Flood, adding that, “and then came the Deluge, after which it was repaired by Solomon.”
The three “monstrous” blocks of the “Trilithium” at Baalbeck each weigh over 800 tons. Cut but still remaining in their nearby quarry are two even more gigantic blocks of 970 and 1650 tons. Hancock describes his experience of encountering these:
“I spend some hours climbing around these weird, otherworldly blocks. I feel as though I’m mountaineering. The scale is so immense, and in a way so “alien”, that a curious detachment from everyday reality sets in and I lose all track of time. I notice that the ‘Stone of the Pregnant Woman’ (one of the largest of all) appears to have been sliced through at the base, where it emerges from the bedrock, with a clean straight cut. How was that done? And no matter where I stand…I am dwarfed by this monstrous product of ancient and unknowable minds.”
We are, Hancock believes, “a species with amnesia.” Writing of new restrictions on public access to Gobekli Tepe and lack of archeological interest in uncovering other nearby, equally remarkable sites, he adds that:
“It feels almost like a deliberate, calculated act of disempowerment- as though someone among the powers that be suddenly woke up and realized how dangerous this ancient place has become to the established order of things and how subversive it potentially is to the system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that keeps modern society in order.”
Hancock is aware he is often operating, writing, and thinking outside the bounds of conventional, academically-based archeology. He tells us that academic archeologists often give him the “evil eye” when he shows up and wants to probe their digs.
Academic archeology, Hancock writes:
“…is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus-perhaps to a large extent subconsciously – on evidence and arguments that don’t upset the apple cart…God forbid that anything should be discovered that might undermine the established paradigm.”
Hancock’s next stop is the fortress of Sacsayhuaman outside the old Inca capital of Cuzco and its “cyclopean” stone walls. This isn’t Hancock’s first visit to Sacsayhuaman, but each time he is amazed by what he finds there. As Hancock recounts:
“When you are building a wall in which the smallest block you plan to use weighs a ton, while the majority weigh over 20 tons, where many weigh 100 tons, some weigh 200 tons and a few weigh more than 300 tons, you have already set yourself a formidable logistical challenge. But then suppose, just for the hell of it, you decide to up the ante a little more and insist that these walls must be constructed in the form of huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Every block has to be a polygon with anywhere between six and a dozen sides, every polygon has to be different –no two alike-and they must all fit together with one another so tightly that you won’t be able to get a razor blade between the joints.”
These megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, Hancock declares, are the “mature work of grandmasters of stone.” It’s almost as if “it was easy for them.”
Hancock is at Sacsayhuaman with his Inca guide:
“We’re standing in a corner at a juncture of a dozen or so of these incredible blocks. My guide highlights again the precision of their joints that look as though some modern machine tool has been at work, and the daunting complexity of the patterns they form… ‘No tool marks,’ he reiterates. ‘No chisels. No hammers.’ So how, (Hancock asks), did they do it?’
‘Doesn’t it look,’ his guide replies, ‘like they worked with the stone when it was soft?…Like butter? So they could mold everything together?’
Suddenly all becomes clear. The strange shapes I’m seeing in the rock would be easy, indeed effortless, to create if these blocks were made of something of the consistency of room-temperature butter, instead of cold, hard limestone.”
Researchers from the Russian Academy of Science concluded that the blocks had been subjected to intense heat between the time they were quarried and the time when they were placed into the walls. The joints between the blocks, Hancock observes, seem molded together. There is, in addition, a curious glassy sheen around the joints, which his guide believes is evidence of “vitrification caused by exposure to intense heat”. Indeed, what may be the “vitrified” elements appear to form a clear skin over the underlying blocks. Hancock doesn’t attempt, however, to explain how such vitrification may have occurred.
The final stops on Hancock’s journey take him back to the South Seas to the Bada Valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. He is led to an enormous basalt figure known as the “Wise Man.” Only part of it is protruding above the ground, but that part is over thirteen feet tall. Hancock estimates it weighs over 20 tons. The posture of its arms and legs are, surprisingly, strikingly similar to the giant “Maoi” stone figures found on Easter Island and also at Gobekli Tepe, definitely far-flung corners of the world. By the end of the day, he has been led to multiple other similar stone figures lying strewn around in the jungle.
Hancock sets out the considerable limitations on much-heralded “carbon dating.” In fact, no one really knows how old these figures are. Like many other coastal parts of the world, Indonesia shows evidence of major flooding approximately 12,000 years ago, followed by the re-emergence of considerably smaller land masses, the present islands, from out of the ocean. There are those, Hancock finds, who believe the legends of “Atlantis” may actually be based on the submergence of these ancient lands in the South Seas. There is startling evidence of the long ago inter-connection between such ancient cultures on different continents, specifically Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, known as the “Gosford Glyphs”, found Australian coast north of Sydney.
Hancock had encountered myths in the oldest civilizations of the Middle East about a drowned “homeland of the gods” somewhere far to the East. The Egyptians had called it the “Isle of Fire, the mystic land of origin beyond the horizon.” In his earlier work Underworld, about ruins beneath the ocean, Hancock described his exploration of extensive submerged structures off the coast of Southern India, now dated back to approximately 10,000 BC. In Magicians of the Gods, he returns there again. These discoveries, he writes, extend the history of civilization in India back thousands of years beyond what had previously been known. For Hancock, the “implications of an advanced civilization in the Indian Ocean more than 11,000 years ago can no longer safely be ignored.” By the end of Magicians of the Gods, Hancock has carried his overview of pre-historic but highly developed accomplishments, and only now-emerging interconnections between them, on multiple continents all the way around the world.
Next: Temple of the Cosmos: The Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred