Graham Hancock's Books: Ancient Civilizations

Graham Hancock is an international best-selling book author well known for his unconventional theories on extinct cultures and the lost civilizations before our time.  His books include The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization, The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind, among many more.  

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Graham Hancock has written for many leading newspapers including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian discussing the mysteries of ancient civilizations, its cultures, and people.  He has co-edited the New Internationalist magazine and the East African correspondent of The Economist.  His early journalism includes Lords of Poverty: Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business. This book takes on the account of abuses and misuses of foreign aid in other countries and begins with Hancock as an outsider, an independent, looking in on how things work around him. This would be the start of his career and investigation, ultimately lending him to seek the mysteries and paranormal phenomena of an ancient life on earth.

A major focal point in all of Graham Hancock’s books is the belief in ancient civilizations and that there are global connections that draw us back to a primary “mother culture”.  His books look at Egyptology, signs from ancient monuments and megaliths, star alignments, and Egyptian mythos—including and particular to Orion Correlation Theory introduced by Egyptian researcher Robert Bauval, who claims belief that the Giza Pyramids were built in alignment with the stars and represented the spiritual beliefs of its Egyptian builders.  This is in connection with Orion’s belt, with which both the 3 stars and the 3 pyramids align.  The ancients believed in the Egyptian god Osiris, god of rebirth and the afterlife, which is why they have purposed them this way. 

In his books, Graham Hancock uses a lot of synthesized data including archaeological research, paired with constellational mythologies, artifacts, and signs of ancient life from over 12,000 years ago to suggest an antediluvian time (a period before the biblical Flood of Noah).  This would suggest that “Atlantis” in some form or another, may have existed, a once large island where man first rose from barbarianism into civilization.

Graham Hancock’s writing success came in 1992 with his book titled The Sign and the Seal. The story began in 1983 when he was given a large sum of money by the corrupt Ethopian government’s dictator, Mingistu Haile Mariam, while documenting its history.   During his investigation he begins to uncover the mysteriousness and location of the lost Arc of the Covenant that is claimed to be held here. His book's research includes accounts both in and out of the bible suggesting the magical properties of the Arc. 

In the sacred city of Axum, Northern Ethiopia, at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Zion, Graham Hancock's book recounts his work with a monk claiming to be the guardian of the Arc.  The book's name is reference to the Arc of the covenant “the sign and the seal of Gods presence on earth”.  The book looks at the knights templar 1100 after Christ and showcases evidence that they were seeking out the Arc of Covenant.  A series of Masonic-templar wall-carvings show that the templar followed a prince from Jerusalem to Ethiopia in search of the venerated and divine monument.

It was these particular studies of the mysterious and mystical object that would have Graham Hancock's books look back even further. In his later books he would come to ask questions on the nature of similar spiritually empowered objects, ones that existed in a time and civilization before that written and described in the Bible. 

The mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids would soon lead Graham Hancock to suggest, beyond conventional belief, that an even more ancient civilization existed that was passed on to the Egyptians.  This civilization, Hancock concludes is one that has been forgotten and so hidden from our common knowledge of ancient history. 

In seeing the pyramids and how they were built, Graham Hancock comes to note this was a long standing tradition, that the Egyptians couldn’t build the pyramids over night, and that what was left of them suggested a legacy, both well developed, and implemented far before our most detailed recordings of history.  Evidence is shown to support this theoretical quandary in his third book Fingerprints of the Gods.  Graham Hancock's books center his thesis for the Fingerprints of the Gods with the concern that at least one major human episode in the history of the earth has been missed.  He states that not only did he think the city of Atlantis existed, but that more lost civilizations existed beyond Atlantis as an inter-continental network of advanced cultures.

- Brandon Petty