Mappa mundi Book

Now for what started out as a stream-of-consciousness criticism of Graham Hancock.

Where Erich Von Daniken is goofy, Hancock is far more insidious. Having meandered through a great part of "Isis Unveiled" a year or two ago, I found some commonalities between Hancock and the old Theosophists like Madame Blavatsky. Not only do they hope to convince their readers through a doorstop of a volume filled with dubious facts and poor analysis, but they have that belief that humans of the most remote ancient times were far more advanced than we give them credit for--which, interestingly, is in opposition to the Ancient Aliens folks, who believe that ancient humans were far too simple to create anything on their own.

While Hancock does often flirt with woo-woo (he entertains the idea of the Pyramid stones being lifted by telepathy, for example), he isn't one of those Ancient Aliens buffoons who go looking for helicopters and light bulbs in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Compared to other pseudoarchaeological works, Hancock's ideas about a globe-spanning, 10,000-year-old civilization are "grounded." Yet he wholesale engages in what is essentially a "God of the gaps" approach against orthodox archaeology, focusing on sites of extreme antiquity like Tiwanaku, the Great Sphinx, the Great Pyramids, etc where archaeological evidence happens to be scant. Ironically what I see as one of Hancock's major failings is what he sees as the failings of archaeologists--they, along with most other scientists, are specific subject-matter experts who aren't necessarily as well-versed in astronomy, geology, astrology, drug use, etc. But Hancock is on the extreme other end of this spectrum in terms of generalism vs specialism. Just like the ancient alien folks, he dances from site to site across the globe, failing to engage with the complex context (thousands of incredibly mundane potsherds, village sites, and artifacts whose photos wouldn't sell books) which provides us with the world history chronology we have today. This leads to, among other things, a deluge of flimsy, generic parallels drawn between the Old Kingdom Ancient Egyptians of around 2500 BC, for example, and Mesoamerican cultures who lived up to 3,000 years after them--with the flimsiest, briefest of justifications for doing so in the first place.

So--the book itself. On my first attempt, I read only about eighty pages of it because of how dishonestly Hancock presents his case studies. He does absolutely zero justice to the orthodox explanations for his case studies such as the Piri Reis map (ignoring such explanations as much as he mischaracterizes them), so in order to actually get an accurate view of why archaeologists mysteriously don't believe the seemingly-logical statements Hancock has put forth, you need to go beyond Hancock's constant flippant descriptions of the orthodox archaeological community being some sort of modern-day Spanish Inquisition, and actually know what the context of these case studies is. For me, that meant having dozens of internet tabs and scholarly articles open while listening to a naively-enraptured Joe Rogan lapping this stuff up on his podcast. Suffice to say, I could only stomach so much of this before the irritation at Hancock's one-sided accounts of archaeological sites trumped the will to continue. Once you start actually double-checking this stuff, you start to feel much less like Hancock is approaching archaeology from a fresh new point of view, and more that you are being deceived. It is curious how Hancock often combats accusations of pseudoscience by stating that he is not a scientist--and yet he fills his books with tons of footnotes and complains about close-mindedness and conspiracy among orthodox archaeologists, two tools that make him seem like a rebellious alternative to orthodox scientific scrutiny.

I have recently succeeded at finishing reading the book upon a second attempt, having created an impromptu book club with some friends of mine who are not historians and thus certainly more "open-minded" than I. Our conclusions were surprising. The Piri Reis map stuff in the beginning of the book, which put me off of the first reading, is probably the "strongest" portion of the book. What occurs thereafter is a travelogue (his sole claim to authority is personally visiting the sites--like thousands of other tourists every year), accompanied by grotesque instances of supposition, misrepresentation, and obfuscation. Indeed, my friends started to lose interest in similar fashion to me during my first attempt. They were intrigued-but-disbelieving of Hancock's maps section which is the first part of the book, but once the travelogue began in earnest, they started noting a marked increase of logical fallacies and deceptions. After a couple hundred pages of this, the bullshit started becoming pedestrian, and distrust of the author suffocated much interest in continuing. I finished it, with the final hundred pages being pure torture, while both of my friends refused to devote more time to it and finish it. Suffice to say, the book is a bunch of hot garbage, and those who defend it, or state that it "survives their rigorous scrutiny," should be embarrassed. Forget scholarly texts-even cursory Wikipedia searches cast doubt on many of Hancock's statements, or exhibit how much information he is conveniently omitting.

This book has pretty fantastic reviews here on Goodreads, which is as disappointing as it is unsurprising. I've often thought that there is some real hubris to those who unhesitantingly buy into, and champion, pseudoarchaeological or pseudohistorical works. I cannot help but imagine a group of people who always thought "mundane" history was boring when they were in grade school. Perhaps they had a poor social studies teacher or two. But then they come upon alternative theories that are far more interesting than the established orthodox views. Theories that allow them to think that not only do they rival the intelligence and education of the necktie-wearing stiffs up in the ivory towers of the college campuses--they surpass them in open-mindedness. Thorough knowledge of any part of the traditional historical context for the last 5000 years is not necessary as long as one can pretend that they're some sort of tragic brilliant Galileo figure against The Sheeple or The Establishment, man. They can't distinguish Corinth from Thebes, or Herodotus from Diodorus Siculus, but they'll be happy to tell you all about the Antikythera mechanism, because they get off on the trappings of having esoteric wisdom. They're only interested in ancient history inasmuch as their cult leaders relay it to them with a counter-cultural veneer. I've seen similar tendencies among ancient aliens fanatics--they'll state with wide-eyed confidence that Alexander the Great's army saw a UFO during the siege of Tyre in 332 BC, but they can't tell you what else Alexander the Great did, where Tyre is, or what role either of them played throughout history.

So there we are. Fingerprints of the Gods. The warning signs were there from the beginning, when Hancock spent 30 pages of talking about the Piri Reis map using Charles Hapgood as a sole source, and described him as one of those aforementioned tragic Galileo types, rather than presenting the opposing views and explaining to his readers why this concept is not accepted by the mainstream. Combine that with a cringe-inducing look at his list of current works, including a book about the Face on Mars (whose existence has since been emphatically debunked), and it's not hard to see a snake-oil salesman.