Graham Hancock
speaker
786 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Graham Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high, cut out of solid granite right up there in the highlands of Ethiopia. And then they have an ancient church, the Church of St. Mary, Cathedral actually of St. Mary of Zion, where the Ark apparently was kept for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before that, it was kept elsewhere.
And then now it's been moved into a chapel that stands next to St. Mary of Zion Cathedral. And that chapel is guarded by armed men. The whole town is an armed camp that is protecting what they believe to be the Ark of the Covenant. But it's guarded particularly by one guy. who is the official guardian of the Ark. And he's elected by other monks to be the guardian of the Ark.
And several of them have run away when they get that election. Because once you're elected as the guardian of the Ark when the previous one has died, you're going to be kept in that chapel forever. You'll never be allowed to leave it. So they're close to whatever this object is, they're close to it.
And I met three of them over a succession of years because their mortality is, once they're appointed, they die very soon. And they all had these cataracts over their eyes and they all blamed the object in that chapel, whether or not it's the Ark, for causing their blindness.
They won't let you. Can you bribe them? No.
I don't know what it was. I think it's what is rightly described as an out-of-place artifact. Because if you look at the description in the Book of Exodus, the very precise dimensions of it, I think in modern terms we'd say three feet nine inches long by two feet three inches high and wide. It's got a layer of gold. It's got a layer of wood. It's got another layer of gold.
It's very precisely specified like a blueprint in the Book of Exodus. And then it does all this stuff. It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people. It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of –
treating it like a tourist object, and they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside, and suddenly everybody in that city is dying, and what they're dying of is cancerous tumors. This is described in the Old Testament. So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things. It's just insane that we know where it is.
Well, we know that I believe Ethiopia has a very strong claim to it, but that's all I can say because I've not seen it myself. I've been right outside the door of that sanctuary chapel several times.
That would be a good thought. Yeah.
That would be a good thought.
Yeah. And they all blame the Ark. And one of them, it's a resonant phrase, sticks in my memory. I asked him why. And he said, the Ark is a thing of fire. Just that. Did he describe it to you? He did describe it as a box, rather like the biblical description, unsurprisingly.
Wow. And, of course, gold is a very good insulator against radiation. I don't want to go too far down this track. To me, the fascinating thing is that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that actually claims to have the Ark of the Covenant. That it's central to religion and culture in Ethiopia today.
That there's much to support that argument, particularly in the form of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place. In context of all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it.
Yeah. Well, let's not forget that one of the world's best known flood myths also comes from the Bible, which is the flood of Noah, which again is part of this worldwide tradition of which I am absolutely convinced Atlantis should be understood as a part of that worldwide tradition of a global flood and the loss of a former civilization.
And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years.
Yes, definitely. I have learned from the criticisms of archaeologists. And one of the first things that became very clear to me, and they're absolutely right, is we need more indigenous voices in this series. And that's what we've made sure to do. We have an amazing archaeologist, indigenous archaeologist from Easter Island.
We spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong... This series doesn't do country by country episodes. It's all merged together. Different bits of the story come together in each episode. But a good chunk of it is on Easter Island. And there, Sonia Hoa Cardinale is an indigenous Easter Islander. Her married name is Cardinale because she married an Italian guy.
And she gave us incredible material on Easter Island. And she revealed that she and her team have found what are called banana phytoliths. Now, phytoliths are a minute part of the banana plant. They've excavated them from a crater in Easter Island, and they found that those are 3,000 years old. Now, this is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, bananas do not propagate naturally.
You can't get bananas to Easter Island without human beings bringing them there. That's how they got there. And secondly, the date that she's found 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled 1,000 years ago or less, which is the current idea of archaeology. Again and again, we've had indigenous…
Showing 301–320 of 786 · page 16 of 40
← Previous
Next →