Graham Hancock Quote

Not only was the constellation of Orion part of the Moundville story [of Native Americans], not only was a journey to the realm of the dead part of it, too, but now I knew also that a series of trials would have to be faced on that journey, that the Milky Way was involved and, last but by no means least, that Moundville itself had been thought of as an image, or copy, of the realm of the dead on earth. Every one of these were important symbols, concepts, and narratives in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts that I'd been fascinated by for more than 20 years. It would be striking to find even two of them together in a remote and unconnected culture, but for them all to be present in ancient North America in the same way that they were present in ancient Egypt, and serving the same ends, was a significant anomaly.

Graham Hancock

Not only was the constellation of Orion part of the Moundville story [of Native Americans], not only was a journey to the realm of the dead part of it, too, but now I knew also that a series of trials would have to be faced on that journey, that the Milky Way was involved and, last but by no means least, that Moundville itself had been thought of as an image, or copy, of the realm of the dead on earth. Every one of these were important symbols, concepts, and narratives in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts that I'd been fascinated by for more than 20 years. It would be striking to find even two of them together in a remote and unconnected culture, but for them all to be present in ancient North America in the same way that they were present in ancient Egypt, and serving the same ends, was a significant anomaly.

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About Graham Hancock

Graham Bruce Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica.
Born in Edinburgh, Hancock studied sociology at Durham University before working as a journalist, writing for a number of British newspapers and magazines. His first three books dealt with international development, including Lords of Poverty (1989), a well-received critique of corruption in the aid system. Beginning with The Sign and the Seal in 1992, he shifted focus to speculative accounts of human prehistory and ancient civilisations, on which he has written a dozen books, most notably Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods. His ideas have been the subject of several films, as well as the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), and Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss them. He has also written two fantasy novels and in 2013 delivered a controversial TEDx talk promoting the use of the psychoactive drink ayahuasca.
Reviews of Hancock's interpretations of archaeological evidence and historic documents have identified them as a form of pseudoarchaeology or pseudohistory containing confirmation bias supporting preconceived conclusions by ignoring context, cherry picking, or misinterpreting evidence, and withholding critical countervailing data. His writings have neither undergone scholarly peer review nor been published in academic journals.