Page 470 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end
of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought
to him a way of ascent to the sky ...
10
Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to
something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the
achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?
We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven’t
tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions
as ‘unhistorical’.
No doubt many are unhistorical. but at the end of the investigation that
underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...

For the benefit of future generations of mankind

Here is a scenario:
Suppose that we had calculated, on the basis of sound evidence and
beyond any shadow of a doubt, that our civilization was soon to be
obliterated by a titanic geological cataclysm—a 30° displacement of the
earth’s crust, for example, or a head-on collision with a ten-mile-wide
nickel-iron asteroid travelling towards us at cosmic speed.
Of course there would at first be much panic and despair.
Nevertheless—if there were sufficient advance warning—steps would be
taken to ensure that there would be some survivors and that some of
what was most valuable in our high scientific knowledge would be
preserved for the benefit of future generations.
Strangely enough, the Jewish historian Josephus (who wrote during the
first century AD) attributes precisely this behaviour to the clever and
prosperous inhabitants of the antediluvian world who lived before the
Flood ‘in a happy condition without any misfortunes falling upon them’:
11
They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned
with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be
lost—upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by
the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water—they
made two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries
upon them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the Flood,
the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit these discoveries to mankind; and
also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them ...
12
Likewise, when the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the
seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed
the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian
king:

10 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.
The Complete Works Of Josephus, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991,
11
p. 27.
12 Ibid.

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