Graham Hancock: Magicians of the Gods — Snapshots of a Work in Progress

Hi I'm Graham Hancock and I'm recording this in December 2014. The purpose is to introduce a film of a presentation that I gave in March 2014 concerning the ongoing work on the sequel to my best-known book Fingerprints of the Gods and the sequel is probably going to be called Magicians of the Gods and probably published in late 2015 or early 2016. I just want to use this opportunity to say a couple of things. First of all, uh the presentation that I gave in March 2014 that you're going to be watching uh is very much a presentation of a work in progress. Uh since I gave that presentation, I've done a further research trip, a very long one, in Indonesia. Uh I've done a research trip in the Lebanon uh looking at the incredible megaliths of Baalbek. I've done another research trip in Turkey going back to Göbekli Tepe, probably the most important archaeological site in the world, and uh visiting other as yet unexcavated sites of the same antiquity in that region of Turkey. Uh I also did a research trip in Armenia. Uh and all of these trips are are not mentioned or discussed at all in the presentation that I gave in March 2014. Another research trip that I did just in September and October, which again is not mentioned in that March 2014 presentation, was a huge journey across North America uh with the catastrophist researcher, brilliant brilliant man, Randall Carlson, who showed me through his eyes the effects of the cataclysmic flooding that hit North America uh 12,800 or 12,900 years ago after a comet hit the North American ice cap. Uh and again, I'm not presenting that material in the presentation that you're going to be watching. Uh but I think the presentation does respond to the request that many have put my way that I share uh more publicly than simply in lectures some of the information that I've been researching and it will give you at least a glimpse uh as to the direction in which my new work on Magicians of the Gods is going. Uh and it also recapitulates some of the work that I did in Fingerprints of the Gods. So, I hope you enjoy it. Sit down, relax. Here we go. It's a great pleasure to welcome back to our terraces uh Graham. Um he's been here many times before. Um and um his is career started. He was originally a journalist. Um he was working in Africa and a trip to Ethiopia took him into another uh sphere and um his interest in lost civilizations was sparked. So, please join me in Graham Hancock a very warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for such a a warm welcome. I really really appreciate it. It's it's a it's a great honor and a privilege for me to have the opportunity to to talk to you and and thank you all for for being here. Um I am going to talk tonight uh about I suppose the subject that has been my main theme for for more than 20 25 years really, which is the possibility of a lost civilization. Um I am working on a sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, which will be published in uh 2015 in October 2015 roughly, if I deliver the manuscript on time. And it's provisionally called Magicians of the Gods. That may change as well. So, what I'm going to be doing this evening is talking through a work in progress. Uh there will be uh some new material that nobody has ever uh that I've never presented before and there will be some uh review of uh of of older material as well. Um some slides may be familiar to you if you've seen me talk before, but I hope you'll accept that in in context of uh a work in progress. I think we could start by turning the these lights down of over here. Um I've also uh be somewhat contrary to the wishes of my publishers been developing a parallel career as a novelist. And uh I have a series of novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico uh called War God. Uh the first volume uh War God Knights of the Witch is coming out in paperback on the 27th of March, uh but we do have some advanced copies of the paperback here. Uh I'll be very happy after the talk to sign books, uh sing and dance, pose for photos, whatever, you know. I'd be very happy to do that. What I'm showing on the right of the screen is the second volume, War God Return of the Plumed Serpent, uh which I've just delivered to my publishers and which is going to be published in October uh this year, October 2014. So, for those who think that I never finish my series, uh I definitely have the second volume in the bag now. And there will be a third volume uh as well. But this is my book Fingerprints of the Gods, a well-thumbed copy, uh completely distorted by the screen. We could not overcome the technological problems. Uh and what are the effect is that the screen is making everything long and thin. Um this book was published in uh 1995, amazingly, nearly 20 years ago now. Uh and I had no idea at the time that it was going to strike a nerve with the public or that there was going to be any kind of reaction to it at all. Uh I I thought that it would just disappear without a trace as most of my books before that had done. Uh but for some reason it did it did strike a nerve and it it did so in in many countries uh all around the world uh and caused a a huge furor, which I also had not expected. Uh when you uh criticize the mainstream archaeological view, the picture of our past that we're given by the education system, by archaeologists and by their friends in the in the media, uh the unforgivable sin is to do so successfully. Uh if you criticize in a way that nobody notices, you don't get any reaction and they just assign you to the lunatic fringe and you're gone. But if by chance, and it was chance, I I think it was the the the there was just something in the air in the early mid-90s, which which led to the success of this book. This resulted a furious series of attacks upon me and upon my work, which I was not at all uh prepared for. Um and and uh I had to learn how to deal with that and I also had to learn I had to learn to accept and welcome that uh because that is um that is the way that ideas move forward. Uh it's you have to be prepared to have i- ideas criticized and and and criticized violently uh if you are uh opposing the mainstream. Now, the the gist of the book was that that civilization is older and more mysterious than we thought. And one of the many uh magazines that attacked me uh for proposing this hypothesis was uh New Scientist magazine. So, I have to admit a certain warm glow when this headline appeared in New Scientist in October 2013. The True Dawn, civilization is older and more mysterious than we thought. This was just October last year. Um I I shall preserve that image uh throughout the rest of my time on this planet because it just was very very nice moment to to see that. And I will be going into into why there is a growing recognition that there's something seriously wrong with the picture of history uh as I indeed maintained in in Fingerprints of the Gods. Um so, this is the the conventional view uh of our of our past. Again, I'm sorry, it's difficult to see the images clearly, but about 2 million years ago, you get the lower Paleolithic, the old the old Stone Age, the first stone tools are created. Um Some evidence of religious beliefs actually a bit earlier than 28,000 years ago. I think you could easily push that back to 70 or 80,000 years ago now. Uh there's the last ice age, the coldest period of the last ice age, but it's really only well after 12,000 years ago that you get into the so-called Neolithic, the stone circles, Stonehenge, Avebury, places like that, and the and the so-called agricultural revolution, and the first civilizations are thought to have emerged in the fourth millennium BC. We're talking 3,600, 3,300 before Christ in in places like Sumer in Mesopotamia, and ancient Egypt, the first dynasty, the predynastic period is into the third into the fourth millennium BC, the first dynasty on the cusp of the fourth and third millennia BC, so roughly 5,000 years ago would be would be the time when when civilization is supposed to have begun. Uh and there is these are images from Sumer uh in in Mesopotamia, the area occupied by modern Iraq, and and what we're looking at here are pictures of the city of Ur, known in the Bible as Ur of the Chaldees, uh which isn't that old, it's about 2,100, 2,200 BC, uh but there are predecessors to Ur, uh which which go back further, certainly into the 3,300, 3,400, more than 5,000 years in the past. And you can see that this was a pretty advanced civilization at that time, building gigantic structures mainly with mud brick at the time. Now, the interesting thing is that there is a flood myth from Sumer. Uh it's called the Epic of Gilgamesh, and in fact our story of Noah in the Bible is derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are very clear similarities. Uh the notion that the gods became angered with mankind at some remote time in the past and sent a gigantic flood which virtually destroyed all of mankind with with a few survivors who preserved the seeds of of future civilization. Um and there is also a figure called Oannes, uh who oddly enough wears a fish on his head. He's called a fish-garbed figure. Um and he is a civilizing hero who emerged from the waters of the flood and and taught civilization again to a devastated mankind. So, the myth is saying that before the current epoch of civilization, there was an earlier epoch of civilization which was brought to an end by a cataclysmic flood. If we go to Egypt now, uh many Egyptologists will tell you that that there is no story of Atlantis in Egypt, and they say that's a problem because Plato claims through his his antecedent Solon that he got the story of Atlantis from Egypt. They say there's no story of Atlantis in Egypt, and that's true. There is no single Egyptian text that refers to Atlantis as such. But there are the Edfu building texts. These are very interesting texts. This is a Ptolemaic temple, the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Not that old by Egyptian standards. It was actually built about 400, 300 before Christ in the Ptolemaic period, 2,300 years ago. But they said that they had inherited a document from ancient times, and that document was in such a fragile state, it was so remotely ancient that it was falling apart, and they needed to preserve the information in that document in a permanent form. So, they decided to copy the document onto the walls of this temple, the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Uh and these are called the Edfu building texts, and they indeed do speak of a former age, a time of the gods, a great flood, an island uh on on which an advanced culture thrived, the homeland of the primeval the primeval ones. Uh and it tells how it was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood and how the survivors came to Egypt and uh established the basis of what in due course would become Egyptian civilization. But this isn't set just before the first dynasty. This is set in the time of the gods, Zep Tepi, the first time, thousands and thousands of years in the past. So, Egypt does have uh a flood myth. Now, there's Plato. Uh and he is the the earliest surviving source of the story of Atlantis. And Plato said that he got the story of Atlantis from his ancestor Solon, the famous lawgiver, who lived around 600 BC, and that Solon in turn had got the story in Egypt. Uh and that what Solon was told was that Atlantis existed 9,000 years before his time. In other words, 9,600 BC in our calendar, in other words, 11,600 years ago. And a cataclysmic series of floods and earthquakes caused Atlantis to be submerged in a single day and a night --- ctually flooded at the end of the ice age and after the end of the Younger Dryas. But let's go to Dwarka up here on the Gulf of Kutch. And in Dwarka there is a detailed story of the god Krishna. It was the city of the god Krishna. And a flood came and destroyed the city and the whole city was flooded and and submerged under water. Well, Santha and I have been diving at Dwarka. There's Dwarka as you see it today. It's a very beautiful city on the coast and there are many rituals which involve veneration of the lost city of Dwarka and there indeed is a lost city of Dwarka underwater off the coast as the myths say. And if we go to the Gulf of Cambay up here in northwest India Sidescan sonar has shown the remains of gigantic structures underwater. 40 m underwater, more than 120 ft under the sea. There are what appear to be two enormous cities along the shores of ancient riverbanks and those rivers are now of course submerged under the under the sea. They've been underwater for the best part of 12,000 years. This is way before the beginning of the Indus Valley Civilization. And the team from the National Institute of Oceanography who took these sidescan images also did some dredging and they brought up man-made artifacts from those structures to this day and I cannot explain why there has been no attempt to dive on the site. It does involve technical diving. You would you would need really to use remotely operated vehicles. It's not 40 m is at about the limit of normal scuba diving, but there are huge currents in the Gulf of Cambay and it's also very turbid and and muddy water, but for one reason or another the site has never been dived yet. Indian flood myths also go south into the area that we call Tamil Nadu today. And there's a very specific tradition of a land called Kumari Kandam which existed to the south of the existing southern tip of India. The existing southern tip of India is a place called Kanyakumari. And there's a great statue in the sea there to a to a Tamil poet and philosopher called Thiruvalluvar. And he cast our minds back to the myth of the lost land of Kumari Kandam because they said that there were universities there and and advanced scholarship and and an academic tradition that they called the Sangam tradition. And that all of this was flooded, guess when? 11,600 years ago. Exactly the period that Plato gives us for Atlantis. And studies of the ice age sea levels show us that large areas of India were above water until about 11,600 years ago. Down here again, I apologize for the reproduction of the of the image, but this is actually a pyramid in the island of the Maldives. Most people think of the Maldives as places to go sunbathe and they're great for that, but they also have large numbers of small pyramids. Very ancient all over the Maldives. Thor Heyerdahl did some of the excavation and this is a pyramidial structure. That's the rock, the stone blocks that we used to build one of those Maldives pyramids. And again in South India there's recently been quite a bit of press about the so-called Bridge of Rama which which shows up on satellite photographs between Rameswaram and the island of Sri Lanka. Uh Here you can see a a causeway that goes from Rameswaram out to Dhanushkodi and there are ancient blocks of stone in the water there along the side of that causeway. But I'm interested in this area here which was submerged somewhat after 12,000 years ago. Poompuhar and Mahabalipuram. And there I have been diving and done quite extensive diving and there's there's a a gigantic man-made U-shaped structure more than 100 ft underwater off Poompuhar which has been submerged for more than 12,000 years. With very large regular blocks of stone. And off Mahabalipuram, oddly enough I spent my childhood here. I grew up in South India. And my first swimming lessons were off this beach. It turns out that the local fishermen there there are amazing rock-hewn temples along the shore there. The local fishermen told us about underwater ruins off the coast where they would frequently catch their nets and have to send down free divers to to release the nets. And when we asked them if they'd reported this to anybody, they said that they told everybody about it. But that nobody believed them. So we organized an expedition with the Scientific Exploration Society and we went diving off Mahabalipuram and lo and behold the fishermen's stories are true. And these underwater ruins actually continue as much as 5 km off the coast. And they go down to depths in excess of 100 ft underwater which the geology tells us means they've been there for more than 12,000 years. That's the top of a wall sticking up above the sand. Another wall there. I'm putting my diving knife into the gap between two blocks there. Very unmistakably and and definitely submerged ruins. And nearby inland is a place called Tiruvannamalai where there's this hill, the red hill called Arunachala. And there's an ancient tradition of the flood there. It says that this is the place where the rishis go to when the great flood comes to end the Yuga, the world age. And the ground near it is not at all touched by the four oceans that become agitated at the close of the Yuga. When the annihilation of all living beings takes place, all the future seeds are certainly deposited there. Brahmins who resort to the foot of that mountain are called by me after the deluge and I shall make them study the Vedas. As though the Vedas are an antediluvian text which is restudied, repromulgated after the flood and brought again into the realm of human culture. And there's an amazing temple at Tiruvannamalai. One of the great things about India is you're not going to find anything much in India apart from the Indus Valley Civilization which is 5 or 6 thousand years old as such. Because the culture is still alive. It's as though ancient Egypt had continued to live. Yes, they would have continued to build their temples and rebuild them and renovate them and modify them. But that didn't happen in Egypt because Egyptian culture came to an end and everything was frozen at the end of Egyptian civilization. In India, the ancient culture has lived on. And that's why we don't find remotely ancient ruins apart from the Indus Valley Civilization in India because these sites of temples have been temples since time immemorial, but we're seeing the latest incarnation of the temples on those sites. Let's jump over to Indonesia now which again as you can see from this image was a very different looking place during the ice age. Here are the Indonesian islands today, but during the ice age there was a huge continent continent size landmass above water there. And there's some interesting anomalies in Indonesia. I think anybody who's familiar with Latin America would taking a look at this temple which is actually in Central Java called Sukuh would would say that it's a it's a Mexican step pyramid. It looks incredibly like the pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza, uh but in fact it's uh it's Javanese. It's in It's in Indonesia. And um either it's a total coincidence or more I would suggest that there is a remote common ancestor which is affecting both of these widely separated cultures. So, let's go to the city of Bandung. And about 3 hours drive from the city of Bandung is what I regard presently right now as the most exciting archaeological site in the world. And that is the site called Gunung Padang in West Java, uh Indonesia, where a very gutsy geologist called Danny Hilman Natawijaya, PhD from Cornell University, is the senior geologist at Indonesia's Geotechnology Center. And he has done a massive survey of Gunung Padang. And I'm going to go into some of the details of that. And his conclusion is it's older than 9,000 years, and it could be up to 20,000 years. It's a strong case, but not an easy one. We're up against the world's belief. Not only that, but up against vested interests in mainstream archaeology, who when Danny came out with his results, which are based on on carbon dating and very extensive remote sensing surveys, when he came out with his results, they petitioned the government of Indonesia to stop all work on Gunung Padang. No further work should be allowed on Gunung Padang because it cannot possibly be true that it is more than 9,000 years old and perhaps as much as 20,000 years old. This is a distant view of Gunung Padang. And what you're looking at is a man-made pyramid about 100 m high, 300 plus feet high. And the site that is known to archaeology and has been known to archaeology is up at the top there. And there I am in December with Danny Hilman, that geologist, and with my friend Robert Schoch. Robert Schoch is the professor of geology at Boston University. I find geologists much more open-minded on the issue of the antiquity of civilization. He's the man who did the work on the redating of the Sphinx back in the '90s based on the erosion patterns in the body of the Sphinx. And he and I went together to uh Gunung Padang uh in December last year. And uh here Danny is showing us various results of their remote sensing work. And this is what Gunung Padang looks like. This is the bit known to archaeology. Unbelievably, although they tell us that it is about 2,500 years old, the mainstream archaeologists, there's never been any detailed carbon dating there. Just a tiny little bit of carbon dating has been done at a very shallow level. And on the basis of that they attribute the whole site to 2,500 years ago. But the site is, we now know, much more complicated than that. Now, it's made of these of This is called columnar basalt. It's a kind of basalt that forms naturally, but it's obviously being used here as a building block. On a very large scale with pyramidial mounds. Remember, all of this is at the top of a site that's actually 300 feet deep. And the new findings relate to that deeper site. The previous research has only been done on the top. And this is where mainstream archaeology, I I believe, has made a huge mistake with regard to Gunung Padang. And that's the the little bit of carbon dating that the mainstream archaeologists have done that make them attribute the site to 2,500 years before the present. But even with the naked eye, you can see that there's much more to the site than what we find just on the top of it. Those three Those Those five terraces sit on top of a pyramid really. And so Danny and his team, who call themselves the Independent Integrated Multidisciplinary Team, have done a lot of remote sensing, surface geology. They've done archaeology. They've done geomagnetic survey, ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity, seismic tomography, drill core sampling. They've done lab lab work, and they've done architectural analysis. And this is some of the the photography of their work in situ at the site before they were stopped in 2013 by a cabal of mainstream archaeologists who said, "You have no right to work on this site. We've already established that this site is just 2,500 years old. And please don't damage it." They were very careful not to damage it, but they were stopped working on it. Uh nevertheless, their results uh are very extensive and are produced using the latest uh technology. And I just want to show some of the images to to make you understand that Danny and his team have done very extensive work on Gunung Padang. Uh and a lot of it has been about imaging what's inside that pyramid using remote sensing uh equipment. And here's the carbon dating from their deep drill cores. And what h --- s Borobudur again. Let's go closer. It's a kind of It's not stretching things to say that it is a pyramidial monument built in a series of levels. Um and just an interesting side point, we do know from historical records that Borobudur took about 90 years to build. It is a tiny fraction of the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is supposed to have been built in just 20 years. Uh I think that raises questions over the whole argument about the Great Pyramid, but what I want to focus on in in um Borobudur uh is the possibility that although it was built in a known period of history, 800 AD or so, uh that it incorporates a much more ancient system of ideas. And it does so in particular in the terms of a series of numbers that are expressed in Borobudur. There are 72 stupas around the central dome of Borobudur. These are a few of those stupas. And each one of them contains a Buddha statue. In some cases, those Buddha statues have been exposed by during the 19th and early 20th century. Uh and in some cases, you can you can see the Buddha statue still in still inside the dome. Altogether, there's 504 Buddha statues at Borobudur. 432 are on the square terraces that make up the pyramidial form and the other 72 are on the circular terraces at the top. 432 + 72 gives you 504. Please keep those numbers in mind because I've been banging on about this for a very long time. And uh I want to make this point again here that there appears to be a relationship in terms of degrees of longitude between a number of sacred sites around the world. And those sites include Tiruvannamalai in South India, where we were earlier in the talk. They include Pohnpei in Micronesia. And they also include Angkor in Cambodia. Uh and if we go to Angkor, we find that there are 72 major temples at Angkor. Uh as I often point out, Angkor actually means life to the Horus in the ancient Egyptian language. Again, I'm not Its side lengths vary by as much as 7 in. It is 3/60 of a single degree of true north. That's incredibly accurate work. But I don't think it's work that requires the level of technology that you would need to cross into stellar space. I think it's human work. What I think it speaks of is a lost civilization uh rather than of an alien visitation. That's just my personal point of view. I'm I'm not putting the alien hypothesis down. I just it doesn't do the work for me. It doesn't explain what I see on the ground. And again, those numbers that the Great Pyramid turns out to be a scale model of the northern hemisphere of the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200. Take the height, multiply by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the earth. Take the equatorial circumference sorry, take the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid, multiply by the same number 43,200 and you get the equatorial circumference of the earth. And these are all numbers based on 72, which we find turning up so frequently at Borobudur. Uh and what they speak of is the precession of the earth's axis, which unfolds at the rate of 1° every 72 years and changes the pole star and changes the stars that rise on the horizon at the equinox. Uh and uh 72 is the heartbeat of that cycle. Half of 72 is 36. 72 + 36 is 108. 108 / 2 is 54. That's why there's 504 Buddhas on the temple of Borobudur. We find those numbers in the Mayan calendar. We find them in myths and traditions all around the world going back to the remotest antiquity. And what I'm suggesting is that the knowledge of a lost civilization is being passed down in these myths and traditions. The Great Sphinx also an equinoctial marker like the Temple of Angkor in Cambodia gazing at the rising sun at dawn on the spring equinox. And that's where this mysterious diagram that we have at Giza where if you take the sky on the spring equinox around 12 and 1/2 thousand years ago you get the constellation exactly at the moment of dawn you get the when the the sun breaks the horizon you get the constellation of Orion lying due south with the three belt stars in the pattern of the three great pyramids as my friend Robert Bauval long ago pointed out in his book The Orion Mystery and you get the constellation of Leo rising in the east housing the sun and mirrored on the ground by the Great Sphinx. It seems to me that a knowledge of the heavens is being used to speak to a remotely ancient date at Giza and that's the date that we call between 10,000 and 11,000 BC in our calendar. The same thing is done at the Hoover Dam just to say that this is not a completely crazy idea. It's done in modern times. There's a huge piece of sculpture at the Hoover Dam which freezes the skies over the Hoover Dam at the moment the dam was completed and Oscar Hansen who put that there said that he believed that in remote ages to come intelligent people with knowledge of precession would be able to discern the astronomical time of the dam's dedication. In other words, you don't want if you want to send a message to the future you don't want to use a time limited language which nobody may be able to speak in 10,000 years. You want to use a language which is expressed in universals like mathematics and astronomy that any intelligent culture will be able to decode. And that is the suggestion of what is happening at Giza. Now the astronomy only says that Giza speaks of the early date but the geology and Robert Schoch's work on the Sphinx says that Giza at least some aspects of the site are actually 12,000 plus years old. And I've gone into this many times before but it's these deep erosion channels in the trench around the Sphinx and on the body of the Sphinx itself that speak of exposure to thousands of years of heavy rainfall. And you have to go back to the end of the Younger Dryas to find that that kind of rain in the Neolithic Subpluvial that could have weathered the Sphinx in the way that it is Sphinx that that that we see it. So there's a suggestion from geology that the Sphinx might be more than 12,000 years old a suggestion that has been absolutely rejected by mainstream archeology. There's something else in Egypt which I which I haven't shown before but this is off Alexandria. Now it's well known that there are submerged ruins off Alexandria and those submerged ruins are of a recent historical period. They were caused by landslip and their Ptolemaic temples and they date from the time of Cleopatra. That's what we're looking at on the left here. But on the right what we're looking at is a site that we were taken to by Ashraf Eshaal this gentleman here who used to be a technical diver with the Egyptian Navy. And he discovered this site and after more than a week of searching we rediscovered it and it's a huge megalithic site about 110 feet underwater in deep water off the coast of Alexandria. That means it's more than 12,000 years old as well. But the argument was how could the Sphinx possibly be 12,000 years old because there is no other site in the world that is known to be 12,000 years old certainly no other megalithic site. Our ancestors 12,000 years ago were just supposed to be hunter-gatherers. And that's why Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is another one of those sites that is rewriting history. By the way it is 7.2° of latitude north of Giza. Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is like Gunung Padang a site that is causing even the most stuck in the mud mainstream archeologists to rethink their view of the past. Because this site is more than 12,000 years old. And Göbekli Tepe was built more than 12,000 years ago. It was deliberately buried 10,000 years ago and it stayed buried for the next 10,000 years until this gentleman I'm talking to here Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute stumbled across the site excavated it and found a series of enormous stone circles on the scale of Stonehenge deliberately buried by whoever created this site and because it's been deliberately buried you have some some of the megaliths this one was left in situ in the quarry because a natural fracture was found in that T-shaped megalith. Some of them weigh up to 50 tons and this work is being done undoubtedly 12,000 years ago. And it cannot be explained by the mainstream model of history that has our ancestors as simple disorganized hunter-gatherers at that period. This requires an organized effort to to do a site like this particularly since ground penetrating radar as Klaus Schmidt is telling me here reveals that the stone circles they've so far excavated are just a tiny part of the story and that there's perhaps 50 times as much remaining to be excavated under the ground. So the the work on Göbekli Tepe in a way is only just beginning. And none of that work was known when Robert Schoch was arguing that the Sphinx was 12,000 plus years old back in the early 1990s. So it it it obliges us to take seriously the possibility that the Sphinx is indeed 12,000 plus years old. It's going to require us I think to look again at many megalithic sites such as the Temple of Mnajdra in Malta. And such as the T-shaped megaliths of Menorca in the Balearic Islands which are virtually identical in form to the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe. Continuing west the Piri Reis map has been the subject of so much controversy over the years because of it supposedly shows Antarctica but I'm really interested in this island off the coast of Florida which doesn't exist today but did exist 12,000 years ago when the Grand Bahama Banks were exposed. And the fact is that this ancient map which the mapmaker himself tells us in his own handwriting is based on more than a hundred older source maps that have not come down to us preserves a memory of a series of a row of megaliths running down the middle of that island. So this puts a whole new light on the so-called Bimini Road which looks exactly like that megalithic structure on that island now submerged underwater. Let's go west again to Paracas in Peru which is also on that longitudinal grid. And there we find the amazing Candelabra of the Andes. It's a kind of extension of the Nazca Lines. Again I'm sorry that it's not reproducing very well in this light but there's a huge structure carved out of the desert at Paracas exactly on that grid. And uh just inland from there the Nazca Lines. Again I'm sorry we're not getting very good reproduction of the images. There's the Nazca spider. And there are also pyramids at Nazca the pyramids of Cahuachi. If we jump north from Nazca we come into the area of so-called Inca civilization. This was a very important Inca site on the Island of the Moon. It was where the future brides of the Inca the Inca King Incas is not Inca is actually not the name of a people it's the name of the the ruler was called the Inca. And his future brides were kept in this place. It was a very important site to them and this is what Inca stonework looks like. So it's puzzling that incredible megalithic architecture in the same area is also attributed to the Incas by mainstream archeology such as the walls of Sacsayhuaman near Cusco where you get this incredible jigsaw puzzle effect with megaliths weighing in the range of 100 to 150 tons. There is no evidence at all that the Inca made these walls but mainstream archeology has handed them over to the Incas without question. In fact there are many different types of architecture up there. If you look at these rock hewn structures at Sacsayhuaman they're different again. And here in this in this cave we find this beautifully cut andesite block and then over here this rather inferior architecture. Why should we conclude that both are built by the same culture? --- ady knew how to do agriculture, who were doing it somewhere else, not there in Turkey. So to close, this is our uh beautiful planet. This is NASA satellite imagery. And this imagery is normally taken to to remind us of the effects of electricity and how how it shows the the developed areas of the world. See how bright Europe is compared with Africa. Uh how how bright North America is compared with South America. But what this image says to me, what it speaks to me about is the fragility of our civilization. That our that our civilization we take it all for granted. Uh that it's here, that it's technological, that it's solved all these problems, that it's just always always always going to go on. But if we were to be confronted with a cataclysm on the scale of the cataclysm that caused the Younger Dryas, all those lights would go out and they wouldn't come back on again. And you know the people who would survive? It's the people who are living in the dark areas. Who haven't had to live with technological specialization, who who have learned to fend for themselves and know how to do it. Our Western civilization is incredibly interconnected and integrated and based on specialisms. And none of us know how to do everything anymore. All of us know how to do our little bit. Um food into the cities would run out in three or four days in the event of a cataclysm. Civilization is very fragile. The history of the remote past tells us that civilization is a fragile gift and that it can be taken away at the whim of the gods. And much worse in our case, our own behavior, our own incredible arrogance and pride and stupidity as a species, not cherishing and nurturing the gift of thousands of years of accumulated civilization but fighting one another and filled with hatred and envy and competition and greed. Uh the the horrendous proliferation of of of nuclear weapons, the real danger of a of of a nuclear war breaking out much more likely I believe today than it ever was during the the Cold War. Um we could bring it all to an end ourselves. And somehow for me the message of the lost civilization is a message to cherish what we have. And uh and and to realize that it's a fragile gift and that it's that it's up to us if we move forward in in a positive direction or if we if we let it all go. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think Thank you. We We're we're running a little bit late, but I think we could take 5 minutes or so for for questions if there's a um a mic around. 5 or 10 minutes for questions. And then and then I can take questions individually over there where I'll be sitting behind the table. So anybody got any questions? Well, there's an aspect of this talk that I didn't go into tonight, which is that the figures in Tiwanaku Who asked me that question by the way? You're up there. The figures in Tiwanaku those are actually This is very controversial, but what they're what they're holding in their hands are actually snuff trays. And they're that form of snuff tray still exists in the Amazon. And it's DMT. It's a It's a DMT snuff. So I think it was their stash. The Sorry, the question again? Well, the pineal gland is this little gland in the center of the brain which actually produces DMT. The the human The life is a dream. I agree. It is, but I hope it's a nice dream rather than a nightmare. Would I talk about my latest ayahuasca experience? Well, that's a whole That's a whole other talk. Um Actually, uh the last time I drank ayahuasca was in January 2013. Um I've had more recent experiences with smoked DMT in the form of changa. Um Look, I mean these have been life-changing experiences for me. I've been working with ayahuasca for well, more than a decade now since since 2003. I I suppose I've had in excess of 50 journeys with ayahuasca. Uh ayahuasca has caused me to rethink just about everything in my life. My relationships with others, how I function as a human being, my addictions, um and the the nature of reality because because ayahuasca has has shown me at the level of experience uh that this reality that we live in day-to-day is just one part of a much larger whole. And that we can't possibly get to grips with day-to-day life if we don't get to grips with the hidden reality behind it. Ayahuasca has brought that home to me in a very in a very real and compelling way. It's challenged me and healed me on all sorts of all sorts of levels. I do need to say the reason that I've taken a pause since January 2013. And it is a pause. I will be drinking Ayahuasca again. Is is some some very challenging experiences that happened in January 2013. I believe that Ayahuasca is totally a spirit of love. And that and that it is about bringing love and and self-realization into the world and that is waking people up all around the world in in an incredible and remarkable way. But there is a dark side to it. The dark side is not to Ayahuasca itself. It's a dark side of humanity and perhaps a dark side in the spirit realm as well. When you open the veil, when you draw back the veil, which is what Ayahuasca does, it doesn't only draw back the veil to the forces of light. It also draws back the veil to the forces of darkness. And we as human beings have to be very careful how we function in those realms. And we have to be very clear about intent and about choice about what we do. Just as there is good and evil in this realm, there is also good and evil in the what I would call the spirit world. And that's the role of the shaman. The shaman's role is really to keep those forces at bay. And it's why I don't urge people to experiment with Ayahuasca in their kitchen. I think that we have a we in the West need to sit at the feet of shamanic cultures and and learn from them ways to manage this powerful medicine and to benefit from it. And certainly nobody in their right mind would drink Ayahuasca recreationally anyway. It's such an ordeal. But but I think it has to be approached with reverence, with respect and in a spirit of love. There were some there were some incidents that occurred which I've described in an article in in January 2013 which have caused me to take a pause. But I will be back. I have more work to do with Ayahuasca. Does that answer the question? Yeah, on my website. It's called Letters from the Farside. It's on my website, grahamhancock.com. It's called Letters from the Farside. And it was written in about February or March of 2013. Yes. Yeah, I've been hearing about I don't know. The the internet is such a it's such a paradox the internet because it's you know, there's so much truth and so much lies as well. People just make stuff up. Sorry, I just asked I read an an article in the newsfeed on Graham's website about new megalithic structures that they have found in Siberia and South Siberia, place called Gornaya Shoria. But it's really hard to find more information about it and see if it's true. They're like 1,300 The Siberian the Siberian information looks plausible to me. There there are they're not ancient but explorers' illustrations from the mid-19th century which show those megaliths. I think they're I think they're real. On the other hand, the glass pyramids at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle a total hoax. Yeah, that's This is the problem. Go and go and check out Siberia and tell us what it's about. Yeah, I would say Siberia is the place to go. And the the other thing that's I found really annoying recently is lots of stuff on the internet about a pyramid dating back to the dinosaur age found in Crimea which is supposed to be the cause of the tensions in in Ukraine. I don't believe it. I don't believe it, not for a minute. I think it's all fantasy. Sorry, can I just ask about Bosnia as well? Have you been there and do you believe that's Going there in July. I I know Semir Osmanagić quite well, but I reserve my judgment on the Bosnian pyramids until I see them myself. And we're going to make a field trip there in July. Yeah. Yes. Hi. What what are your thoughts on the Egypt situation when the Germans scraped the the thing on the pyramid? I would really like to know your thoughts about the whole situation. Mhm. My friend Robert Bauval has been the person who's been most on on top of what's happened with the hieroglyph with the so-called scraping of the hieroglyph. First of all, those German guys didn't scrape the so-called Khufu hieroglyph at all. They did take some tiny fragments of paint from other hieroglyphs in the upper relieving chamber above the King's Chamber. One of the there's actually very little evidence which ties the Great Pyramid to the period of 2500 BC except for that one hieroglyph, that one inscription in the relieving chambers. And that inscription purports to carry the name of Khufu, the pharaoh who supposedly built the Great Pyramid in 20 years of his reign. The possibility's been considered for a long time that that hieroglyph is a forgery. This idea was explored extensively by by Zecharia Sitchin in his in his books. And Howard Vyse, the British explorer who discovered that inscription, had strong motivations to forge it. He needed a discovery. One of his craftsmen was seen going in and out with paint. And there are there are orthographic problems in the inscription itself which it seems to date it seems to mix up two or three different periods of ancient Egyptian writing. It really does look like a forgery. And it's in plain view. It could have been forged in the 19th century. And I think that's what the Germans were were interested in finding out, but they didn't actually sample the hieroglyph itself which complicates the problem. What I found in the relieving chambers which I did find convincing was that if you go and shine a light a bright light into the gaps between the blocks, you can see that hieroglyphs do actually continue back into the gaps between the blocks. They're very simple basic hieroglyphs. They look like very old kingdom hieroglyphs. And they and they do go back into a place where no forger could reach. So I think in my own view is that the the Great Pyramid, the completion of the Great Pyramid, the work on the King's Chamber was done during the pharaonic period, was done during the Old Kingdom. But I think it's possible that that hieroglyph doesn't have to have been done by Khufu. I think it's possible that the hieroglyph is a forgery. That one. But others could not have been could not have been forged. Well, the Germans have been there's a whole there's a whole series of issues and problems involving Zahi Hawass who was the once and future king of Giza, the the director general of the Giza Plateau, minister of culture, this and that. Got into trouble when Mubarak fell because his main sponsor was Suzanne Mubarak, the the wife of President Mubarak. He's Teflon man, Zahi. Nothing sticks to him and he's and he's looks like he's getting back into into power now. And he made a big fuss on the internet about this hieroglyph, about how the Germans had stolen the hieroglyph and about how Robert Bauval had hired them to do that. Which is all complete rubbish. But it may cover up other damage that was done to the hieroglyph at a certain period perhaps by the Egyptian authorities themselves. It's a very murky, messy, unpleasant story. But if those German guys go back to Egypt, they're going to go to jail. That's how it stands at the moment. Graham, we have to finish there. It's been absolutely fantastic talk. Please give Graham a warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.