Graham Hancock - Forgotten Knowledge (2008)

Graham Hancock – Forgotten Knowledge (2008)

Graham Hancock's global quest looks at astronomical, cultural and symbolic evidence that, while scattered around the world, links inextricably together.

He starts in Peru, where the Nazca lines, the biggest drawings in the world, etched in the desert over 2000 years ago, are, he believes, just one of a series of global ground maps of the night sky, part of a world wide grid that is the legacy of an earlier civilisation that left clues to its identity throughout the world.

At the pyramids at Giza, in Egypt, he shows how the famous King's Chamber's shafts are exactly targeted at the stars in the belt of Orion as they would have been in the skies at the date of 10,500 BC. How did the Nazcans possess the understanding to know how to plot that progress with a retrospective knowledge of the constellation's movement?

But as well as astronomy and mathematics, Hancock draws on other evidence. History tells us that Egyptians never crossed the Atlantic. How then, to explain, the culture of pyramid building in central and South America. Possibly a coincidence. How then, to explain the recurrence of one symbol - that of a feathered serpent - in Cambodia, Egypt, Central America and South America? Coincidence? And how then to explain the mystery of the massive caved heads left behind by the mysterious Olmec civilisation in South America.