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.
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I believe that's the case. But one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful? There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing and which is going to get bogged down in the sand and which is not going to be helpful.
So the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones. And I don't dispute that. The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air. Right. You can slide anything on wet sand on a sled with enough people pulling it. How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? That's the problem.
How do you fit it perfectly? Perfectly. And, you know, I've been up there and I've been in every one of the chambers above it. And each one of them is floored with these 70-ton blocks and roofed with it.
More advanced in a different way. I think this is part of the problem where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization. I keep trying to emphasize… That we shouldn't look for ourselves in the past, that if we're going to go back 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years into the past and talk about a civilization, it's not going to be like us.
It's going to be very different. It's going to have different priorities, different ways of looking at things. But one of the things that the ancient Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single culture.
set of spiritual ideas and to sustain that for 3,000 years and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after. This is an amazing achievement, amazing stability when you look at it. What our civilization, how old is it really? Can we trace it back to the Romans? Probably not. Maybe 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and so on and so forth in our civilization. Pretty amazing.
I think this is an area where I often get criticized. But I think when we look at a civilization and what it is and what it's achieving and why it's so special… When we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology. We are brilliant at science. We can make the best possible machines.
And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own, what they possess, what they produce. And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions. Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus.
Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary. Their main thing was material. What are we here for? Why are we living this life? What happens to us when we die? They investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that I know of. And they were doing so right from the beginning of records.
Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it.
Well, I think first of all, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea. When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that apparently had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with
is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source. And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization, that these spiritual ideas are found all around the world. And they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens.
Sometimes it's called an underworld, but really it's set in the sky. And this journey that takes place where you are judged on what you've done with your life. This is something else that we avoid in the world today is taking responsibility for our own lives. The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life.
And if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good. You had to... you had to celebrate the gift of life. You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given. And one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom. And that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding.
But in the case of ancient Egypt, That idea is developed over 3,000 years. And it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is at the end. That the soul, that death is not the end. This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem. That death is not the end. We may think it is. Scientists may tell us it is.
But when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more, we're just physical bodies and when the light goes out, it goes out forever, that's actually not a scientific fact. That's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated.
They're very perplexing questions which actually are of great significance to every one of us. Yeah. I mean suppose death just is the end. Then that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused. Or for the joy that we may have caused.
If death's the end, there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do. But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end. And you have been given the precious gift of life. What did you do with it? And there are moral aspects to that question. There's these 42 assessors. They're called the negative assessors. who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life.
And those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship, actually, to the Ten Commandments. But there's another question, which is called the weighing of words. And that question is, what did you do with the gift we gave you? We gave you the gift of the human life. We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate.
At your choice, we gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres. What did you do with it? Did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it?
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