Graham Hancock

Most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they based their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived.

These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea. So you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time, and then you could work out your longitude.

There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is, these portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the Ice Age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula. And the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass.

And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the Sunda shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archaeology, which says, oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it. So they put a fictional landmass there. I don't think that makes sense.

I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age. But that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world.

Those maps... were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire.

I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that's where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.

Yes, that's about as far as I would take it. And when I say that it, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I'm not saying that they were building steam engines. I don't see any evidence for that.

building tricks and skills of how to well definitely and this again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself.

This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.

And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubix, who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx.

John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt, and he was… hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right. Maybe there was some kind of flooding here.

And that's when he brought Robert Schock, second person I'd like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Schock to Giza. And Schock was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ire of Egyptologists, and say, well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least 1,000 years of heavy rainfall.

And as Shock's calculations have continued, as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back. And he's now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12,500 years ago, during the Younger Dryas. for the creation of the Great Sphinx. Of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara

was a completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it. There were lakes in it. It was fertile. It was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.

The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Boval. Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He's got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius.

And it does take a genius sometime to make these connections, because nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt. And skeptics will say, well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want, but Orion actually isn't any old constellation. Orion was the god Osiris in the sky.

The ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognize it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. What's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation. And then, when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening.

First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, it's not precisely related to how Orion's Belt looked at that time. There's a bit of a twist. They're not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back,

and back and back, and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago, in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly. They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground. And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this for themselves.