I’m working through Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods right now. It’s “work” in the sense that I have to do a lot of mental sparring with Hancock. His hypothesis is that there was some hyper advanced civilization in the distant past, possibly existing before the last interglacial, which had high-tech astronomy, math, and other wisdom. The evidence for this, according to Hancock, is twofold: 1) advanced architecture that native societies like the Inca, Aztecs, and Egyptians could not have made on their own, and 2) lots of accurate astronomical math buried in mythology that is more accurate than anything the Greeks came up with.
I’m not done with the book yet, but I assume Hancock’s conclusion is that ancient astronomy was utilitarian and designed to optimize food based on the weather, and that it might predict another global cataclysm.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that ancient societies could have developed advanced math and astronomy, possibly even some kind of metallurgy. But Hancock has two views that are indefensible: 1) wisdom isn’t easily lost, and 2) ancient science was materialistic. I’ll start with the latter argument.
Hancock’s hypothesis is that the Great Pyramids were not tombs as we have been led to believe, but symbols of advanced mathematics and astronomy. He claims that their precise engineering could not have been produced in the 4000-3000 BC era. Let’s hand this architectural issue off to the architects out there (and there’s no shortage of refutations of Hancock’s claim) and talk about the other half of this point: that the pyramids weren’t tombs.
Many have taken to this not-a-tomb hypothesis, and I can see why. If you’re only looking at Egypt, Guatemala, Peru, and other large civilizations, and if the absense of a body is enough for you, then it’s easy to believe that these societies were on some higher, scientific mission. But most likely they were like any other society, with the same burial practices as anybody. Ancient burial is (or should be) a field unto itself, because I believe it’s the origin of fortresses and cities. As I’ve described in numerous other posts, a tomb isn’t just where the dead are buried. The dead are never really dead in ancient thought, nor are they hovering in some abstract, heavenly domain. The ghosts of the dead tend to be physically located near their corpses. If you move the corpse, you move the ghost’s domain. If you neglect the corpse, the ghost gets mad and causes plague, famine, and infertility. Preserve and propitiate the corpse, the ghost grants health, bounty, and fertility.
Grave robbers are not only attracted to the offerings to the dead (including gold, weapons, and other prized objects the ghost is assumed to use), but might also kidnap the corpse and hold it at ransom.
The burial spot is the problem. In a matrilocal society (like most of native North and South Americans, most of Africa, non-Brahmin India, outskirts of Europe, Siberia, and basically all of Australia) the burial spot is typically held in a communal trust, but under a matrilocal system, foreign grooms enter the tribe and native grooms depart for marriage. Foreign men have no incentive to defend the local burial spot. Which works out fine, as those societies tend not to maintain burial spots, or they hang the corpses out to be eaten, or they carry around jawbones and whatnot.
It’s not until you have patrilocal marriage (where brides come in, and one marries their sisters out to those outside tribes), and inheritance can be passed down locally to one’s biological children. This is the only way one can pass down a building. We tend to think, “That must have been a relief; now the men could build strong fortress housibng.” But that’s not how housing worked. Most housing still remained portable and transferrable, and was still easy to breach. It’s still easy to flee with one’s family during an invasion.
It seems that the fortress wasn’t invented until the tomb took shape. It was designed specifically to prevent robbery, which meant complex designs, large masonry, locked doors, and even a garrison with guards. It would have started with chiefs and other elites, as we see in Shang-era China. Because the tomb was the home of the corpse which was to bestow benefits on its progeny, the tomb kept being innovated to maximize this beneficence. The Chinese geomancer would choose an optimal spot, and the masonry would be formed in an optimal manner to conform to whatever the latest trends in geomancy were. By this logic, the Chinese tomb could be just as architecturally advanced as the Egyptian pyramid. The geomancers had the math to find the optimal plots and design structures. Geomancers also had a perverse incentive to use a lot of numerology to sell royal families on the best plots, but because there was a market of geomancers in China, the family would shop the claim around to other geomancers, who would compare math. This market of hucksters actually produced a lot of good, abstract mathematics. It was for selling snake oil, but the math was great.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Egypt had a similar market of geomancers who were all experts at numerology. Naturally there’s a healthy intersection between the cottage industry of fortune telling and real ecomomics: strong numerology can help predict solstices, tides, and other phenomena which affect the crops.
And so, if I had to put money on it, I would say that, yes, the pyramids were built using advanced math, but this math was the product of a market of geomancers who were trying to make a lot of money selling snake oil, while also making useful prdictions about when and where to plant crops. Various colleges would form around the best technology, as we see with the advanced priestly schools in Rome and Greece. It’s also easy to imagine a priestly college emerging relatively quickly. Let’s say a new instrument is introduced, a polished glass, which would completely change the market of astronomical math, and in less than 100 years all the major priestly colleges would have the same basic theories of solar events, moon cycles, and maybe even the precessions of equinoxes. It wouldn’t take long for a pharaoh to capitalize off this and build a tomb which encapsulates these theories. I believe this was what the Great Pyramids were.
(The tombs were probably not power plants. I would look closely at the sources claiming this. I bet those views correlate heavily with beliefs in nephalim, aliens, Jewish space lasers, or all of the above.)
Hancock’s second implication is that wisdom isn’t lost. Not easily, anyway. That the only way to go from advanced astronomy to what he would consider archaic ancient thinking among the native groups listed above, would be for some global cataclysm to cause a collective forgetting. Presumably it would only take a few generations to go from wisdom to idiocy. I want to give two examples that easily falsify what Hancock claims.
The first example is apocalyptic. Assume a nuclear war happens and a barrage of EMPs destroy all technology as we know it. How long would it be before we can re-create Windows 11 on a laptop? Apocalyptic thinkers tend to assume a full reset would put us back to the time of Noah’s ark, which is why they love Enoch and the story of the Watchers. They, like Hancock, believe wisdom would have to come from some kind of divine or alien source, or we would have to develop it over thousands of years of trial and error. But the engineers in a post-nuclear era would still have a memory at how a simple electrical circuit works, and they would be able to quickly fire up a forge, mine some copper, twist some wire, make a filament from tungsten (I believe iron-level forges would be simple to erect, since the kinship system required for them would already be in place in most places), stack some zinc in some water to make a battery, and create the first telegraph. And like that, thousands of years of innovation would be bypassed. Introduce more switches into the circuit to make AND, OR, XAND, XOR, and NAND switches. At least one engineer would know how to configure these to create a circuit that remembers the previous state of the lightbulb, which is the first memory bank allowing you remember 1 bit, which allows you to carry a 1 during binary addition. Bam, another 70 years fast-tracked.
Make an array of these to create a calculator, while also recreating the tech to etch chips to reduce the size of the chips. If you’re crowd-sourcing all this, I bet you’d have an integrated circuit within a year, three max. From there, after a couple years, we’d have Windows 11 running on a laptop. Or Linux or whatever. And along the way they’d probably solve a lot of nagging problems.
Population growth would be easy. Let’s assume the nuclear war killed 99% of people. If each generation has 10-12 kids, assuming a third survive, after 6-10 generations you’re back up to 8 billion people. If meanwhile you’re reinventing the wheel with all technology, you’re actually working out tons of annoying kinks, and I would argue things would be far better as a result.
How many of these cataclysms happened in the distant past? How much of it was totally destroyed by the glacial periods? We don’t really know. There’s not much of a trace of it. Maybe there was nothing going on technologically before the last interglacial ~12,000 years ago, but if a huge scientific revolution happened 10,000 years ago, it could have disappeared with a cataclysm, then reappeared a hundred years later, off again, on again, etc. Maybe that’s what all these ancient monuments are.
(I’ll restate, per my argument in my Kin and Caliber post, that these scientific revolutions are useless if the society doesn’t possess iron. Once the iron revolution hits, you hit paydirt. You can defend your patrilocal system against the matrilocal hoard, who are armed with inadequate weaponry that can’t help them no matter their numbers. If anyone ever hit that stage, we would see a lot of evidence of it. So far, I understand there is none, so in that sense I’m not a Hancockian.)
To summarize, advanced architecture is easily explicable once you understand how markets of geomancers work, and a cataclysm wouldn’t put much of a dent in a truly advanced civilization. So far, it seems that Hancock’s hypothesis is easily falfisiable.
Let’s tackle the last (and most interesting) claim. Let’s say the Pyramids are of technology level X, but Egypt during the 4th Dynasty was only capable of technology Y. Hancock’s claim is that X is far greater than Y, and it makes no sense for a society to regress. Therefore, the only explanation for the Pyramids was that a) they were introduced by a foreign/alien power or b) there was a cataclysmic breach in Egypt which caused them to forget the tech. We’ve covered b), so let’s tackle a). For this, I’m going to simply point to 80s and 90s entertainment.
One thing I remember from the late-90s in high school is that everyone was already nostalgic for the 1985-1989 era. One of the crown jewels of the 80s was the pop band Tears for Fears. They, and many other great bands like the Information Society and the Thompson Twins, recorded their instruments in a physical studio system with metal plates on the walls, creating the reverb that was so iconic for this period.
Fast-forward to the 2000s, and the mixing industry basically goes down the pipe. Digital almost completely replaces analog, and the reverb of the 80s is synthesized using various plug-ins, none of which can fully replicate the depth of the 80s mixes. The high-concept texture is gone. This is often by design. Music producers often deliberately avoided reverb, feeling it was too impersonal for the listener, who was more often listening through headphones, never through an amp on a home sound system (who even has those now?). To this day, mixers swear that it’s impossible to replicate the reverb and other recording standards that were part and parcel to 80s pop culture.
For anyone who worked through the early-2000s, the transition was painful but still gradual. Record companies hired lots of college grads to monitor Excel sheets and keep budgets down (especially as file sharing cut into their profits). Analog systems, effects, and libraries were phased out in favor of cheaper, digital ones. All analog media, even magnetic “digital” tape, was phased out. Everything was converted to 1s and 0s. By the late 2000s, the transition was mostly complete. Audiophiles cared, and they were free to master in the old, analog way, but none of their fans would listen on analog equipment, so whatever dynamic range they achieved in the old way would be chopped at the knees anyway. No record studio would support the old style.
In a thousand years, our society will be far more advanced than anyone can imagine. What will music sound like? What will it even be? Most likely nothing like Tears for Fears. Maybe far more symbolic and personalized, something speaking directly to your cortical channels to trigger your emotions at exactly the right times. Perhaps there will be some groups that identify with certain signatures, others with other signatures. It will probably feel atomizing, as everything already does today. A Graham Hancock could come along in that environment and, after hearing the glory of 80s reverb contrasted with whatever super-personalized, atomized stuff they listen to in the future, posit that the only way such ancient music could have existed during the Cold War was through the intervention of some alien species or race.
Compare 80s anime to late-2000s anime. The heyday of Manga was Ninja Scroll, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, the Ghibli films, and hundreds of other works of art that are impossible to reproduce. In the 2000s, one would have expected the digital revolution to build upon what worked, but instead it produced a muted, less contrast-y color palette that (frankly) looked cheap. To a futuristic Hancock, the only way to achieve something like Akira is if the Watchers themselves visited Japan and possessed them to create something that will (for whatever reason) literally be impossible in the distant future.
With action movies, Terminator 2 is impossible to make today. To make a coherent plot lasting 150 minutes starring a muscleman who is somehow funny and a physical marvel at the same time, a 12-year-old nobody, and a female lead doing super-manly action in 1991 seems impossible. Everyone wants to remake Terminator 2, with its humor, hard-as-balls action, genius storyline and Oscar-level acting, but nobody can do it. In a thousand years, it too will look like alien technology.
Comedy. Why can’t anyone stand on camera for 90 minutes, walk from point A to point B, and make the audience laugh now? Why is there always some marketing expert shoehorning a brand deal or bad joke into it? Why are producers demanding writers write new (bad) jokes at the last minute? Why does the music have to ruin everything? A feature-length comedy like The Pink Panther Strikes Again, or Airplane!, or Young Frankenstein should be doable today, but the only person who has even tried was Mike Cheslik with Hundreds of Beavers. The only way to make a comedy now is with top-level, expensive comic actors who can drive a feature length plot with the spoken word. The hive has been overrun with unfunnies and nobody can get them out. So the funny people leave and try to go indie, but they don’t have the capital to make a comedy, so they become dour and make dark thrillers. So all of the great comedies will feel like they were made by demons that came out volcanoes.
All that said, I enjoy the present era. I can still do whatever I want. I’ve made a cult feature film for $5k, silent action comedies, a viral hit series in my garage, and a mocap studio from nothing that got hired to do the biggest games in the world. I’ve written two books, I read 85 pages per day, I get a full night’s sleep every night, I work out 6 days a week, and I’m a single dad with full custody of my three boys. People ask me, “How is that possible?”
I have time because I don’t waste my time on new media. I still catch myself wasting some time on IG and X. I could easily recoup 30-60 minutes per day there, but I don’t consume news, binge shows, or game. I spend all that time creating, catching up with people, parenting, or sleeping. Only you know how much time you waste.
Recently on the JRE Action Bronson reported that Mike Tyson said you should never talk badly to yourself because your subconscious can’t take a joke. We like to think that, in our self-esteem culture, we’re building people up with words of encouragement, but out the other side of the mouth we’re calling ourselves animals, specks of dust, a random assortment of particles, meaningless clumps of cells. I think our brain is taking this seriously and responding with malaise. I spoke against this in my first book. In my second book, Badass on a Budget, I again uphold the human capacity to create and denounce all attempts to denigrate humans. It makes for bad art.
The Graham Hancock of the future will look back at our strokes of genius and say, “Those couldn’t have been made by mere humans.” But they were. He just doesn’t believe humans are a real, tangible thing.