Reviews for Voyages of the Pyramid Builders

The average rating for Voyages of the Pyramid Builders based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-14 00:00:00 Cindy Stanley I entered the Great Pyramid of Giza about ten years ago, and my view of the world changed in a heartbeat. And since that time, I've become fascinated in a "true history" of humans. Here, the main idea that Schoch proposes in his final chapters is civilization is far older than most of us think, and perhaps the first languages were in the "Sundaland" area, most of which is now underwater but today consist of Sumatra, Java, Borneo and other islands/countries in that area. Schoch states that Sundaland existed at the end of the last ice age, around 18000 BC. and languages moved west to east originally. The author points out that there are at least 500 flood stories (like Noah's) in human's history, and that Noah's flood happened in or around 7553 B.C. (There is a ton of data from the study of tree rings and ice cores from all over the world.) And as far as actual humans that we know today, Schoch writes that we arose from 18 women in Africa "approximately 144,000" years ago. Overall, Schoch's point is that there have been civilizations (rising and falling) all over the world far, far older than we have previously understood/supposed and that a great amount of knowledge has been lost. He begins his story with pyramids appearing all over the world at different time points, and there is no way to put them all in chronological order. It's all very interesting, just as interesting as "Guns, Germs and Steel" which won a Pulitzer Prize about 17 years ago. Is Schoch's ideas any more substantial than Jared Diamond's in "Guns"? I'll leave that up to you to investigate. You're a reader: read away! The world is hiding many mysteries. Besides, why do we think that a civilization with nuclear weapons is the be all/end of of civilization? I'd like to think that a peaceful society in which no one is hungry or hurting or without shelter is the best definition of "civilization." Maybe I should write my own book with my own theories.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-03 00:00:00 James Willingham This book argues two primary theses. The first is that evidence suggests that human civilizations antedate the rise of Sumer and Egypt. The second is that there was far more contact between the earliest civilizations in the Old and New Worlds than is commonly believed. In support of these theses the author, an academic geophysicist, adduces a host of cataclysmic events (volcanism, cometary and meteoric collisions, tectonic and climate shifts) to hypothetically account for the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, both known and hypothetical. While drawing on such revisionists as Graham Hancock and Colin Wilson, Schoch is a bit more concerned about addressing counterclaims than the non-academics, a little more hesitant about drawing bold conclusions, except perhaps in his strong advocacy for a very early (ca. 5000 BCE) dating of the Sphinx, the subject of one of his previous books. Despite the title and an introductory section about the global distribution of pyramidal structures, this book is not really much about pyraminds, nor does its argument much depend upon their distribution. That, I suspect, was a gimmick.