Graham Hancock Quote

Piri Reis is not only remembered for his 1513 map but for another slightly later work, a manual of sailing directions known as the , which also contains references to the book of Columbus. Reported above is Mcintosh's impression from comments made in the that the 'book' Piri is speaking of might have been Ptolemy's . Yet the Turkish scholar Svat Soucek points out that this is not the obvious deduction from the text of the where it touches on 'the great story of the discovery of America':'The country's name is Antilia, and it was discovered by a Genoese (astronomer-cum-astrologer) named Columbus ... The story goes all the way back to Alexander, who had roamed the whole earth and written a book about it. The book remained in Egypt until the Muslim conquest, when the Franks fled the country, taking the book with them. Little attention was paid to it until Columbus read it and realized the existence of Antilia to the west of the Atlantic. He convinced the king of Spain of the possibility of its discovery and colonization, which he then successfully carried out.

Graham Hancock

Piri Reis is not only remembered for his 1513 map but for another slightly later work, a manual of sailing directions known as the , which also contains references to the book of Columbus. Reported above is Mcintosh's impression from comments made in the that the 'book' Piri is speaking of might have been Ptolemy's . Yet the Turkish scholar Svat Soucek points out that this is not the obvious deduction from the text of the where it touches on 'the great story of the discovery of America':'The country's name is Antilia, and it was discovered by a Genoese (astronomer-cum-astrologer) named Columbus ... The story goes all the way back to Alexander, who had roamed the whole earth and written a book about it. The book remained in Egypt until the Muslim conquest, when the Franks fled the country, taking the book with them. Little attention was paid to it until Columbus read it and realized the existence of Antilia to the west of the Atlantic. He convinced the king of Spain of the possibility of its discovery and colonization, which he then successfully carried out.

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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.