Page 240 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

concentrates on numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas—
on the structure of numbers, on geometry.’
7
Where could such a language have come from? Hamlet’s Mill is a
labyrinth of brilliant but deliberately evasive scholarship, and offers us no
straightforward answer to this question. Here and there, however, almost
with embarrassment, inconclusive hints are dropped. For example, at one
point the authors say that the scientific language or ‘code’ they believe
they have identified is of ‘awe-inspiring antiquity’. On another occasion
8
they pin down the depth of this antiquity more precisely to a period at
least ‘6000 years before Virgil’ —in other words 8000 years ago or more.
9
What civilization known to history could have developed and made use
of a sophisticated technical language more than 8000 years ago? The
honest answer to this question is ‘none’, followed by a frank admission
that what is being conjectured is nothing less than a forgotten episode of
high technological culture in prehistoric times. Once again, Santillana and
von Dechend are elusive when it comes to the crunch, speaking only of
the legacy we all owe to ‘some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization’
that ‘first dared to understand the world as created according to number,
measure and weight.’
10
The legacy, it is clear, has to do with scientific thinking and complex
information of a mathematical nature. Because it is so extremely old,
however, the passage of time has dissipated it:

When the Greeks came upon the scene the dust of centuries had already settled
upon the remains of this great world-wide archaic construction. Yet something of
it survived in traditional rites, in myths and fairy-tales no longer understood ...
These are tantalising fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those
‘mist landscapes’ of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock,
here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when
the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot
expect to gauge the thought of these remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in
its symbols, since the creating, ordering minds that devised the symbols have
vanished forever.’
11
What we have here, therefore, are two distinguished professors of the
History of Science, from esteemed universities on both sides of the
Atlantic, claiming to have discovered the remnants of a coded scientific
language many thousands of years older than the oldest human
civilizations identified by scholarship. Moreover, though generally
cautious, Santillana and von Dechend also claim to have ‘broken part of
that code’.
12
This is an extraordinary statement for two serious academics to have

7 Ibid., p. 345.
8 Ibid., p. 418.
9 Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 132.
10
11 Ibid., pp. 4-5,348.
12 Ibid., p. 5.

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