Graham Hancock

who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they are referred to in the Edfu building texts as seven sages, because that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia, it's seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and

of architecture and of astronomy it's found it's found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in giza who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter foragers who lived at giza at that time and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter foragers but it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time and that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within

very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years, and finally it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt. And, you know, the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn't be We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC.

And knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight.

Well, this is where I'm often accused of presenting a God of the gaps argument, that I think there was a lost civilization because there's lots of the earth that archaeologists have never looked at. Of course, I'm not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I'm interested in. And I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before.

It's not just because there are gaps in the archaeological record. It's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age. And they specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the Ice Age and went through this warm, wet period when it was very, very fertile.

Certainly some archaeology has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional. It's tiny. And I think if we want to get into the origins, true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that. And the Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers.

The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. It's well established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in dribs and drabs.

There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more rapidly. much more slowly. So that 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years. But there are episodes within it, like Meltwater Pulse 1b, like Meltwater Pulse 1a, when the flooding was really immense.

Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. And I'm not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe.

Because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the Ice Age. I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the Ice Age. And that, of course, includes the coastlines. that are now underwater.

Of course it includes the Sahara Desert, and of course it includes the Amazon Rainforest as well. All of these places I think are candidates for quote-unquote my lost civilization. And because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating, seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn't only in one place. It was probably in a number of places. And then I can only speculate.

Maybe there was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them. Just as even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest.

Although, interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past. And only when we come to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge. amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I'm putting forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact.

But for me, it helps to explain the evidence.

That's right. Very tiny percent. And even a tiny percent of every archaeological site has been studied by archaeologists, too. Typically, one to five percent of any archaeological site is excavated.

Some kind of archive, some kind of hall of records. There's both mystical associations with the hall of records at Giza from people like the Edgar Cayce organization, There's also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt. It's quite present in ancient Egypt.

So far, as far as I know, nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx. And, of course, there's very good reasons for that. You don't want to damage the place too much. But let's call it the Hall of Records. I'd love to find that. But I think in a way, that's what Gobekli Tepe is. Gobekli Tepe is a hall of records.

You know, it's interesting that just as I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 BC. years ago or so. Pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram.

Martin Swetman of Edinburgh University has brought forward the best work in this field, but it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley, who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today.