I enjoyed watching this presentation from ‘alternative history’ author Graham Hancock on the topics covered in his books, including the bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods:
It was great to revisit some of these topics that I read in FotG way back in the 90s. Coincidentally I watched this not long after reading a Discovery Magazine story titled “Egypt’s Lost Fleet“, which discussed a recent archaeological excavation which appears to show that the ancient Egyptians “ mastered oceangoing technology and launched a series of ambitious expeditions to far-off lands” – something that Graham concluded in FotG sixteen years ago. Materials discovered in ocean-side caves have led archaeologists to believe that, almost 4000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians built ocean-going boats up to 30 metres long in order to sail to the land of Punt. From the magazine article:
Boston University archaeologist Kathryn Bard and an international team have uncovered six other caves at Mersa Gawasis. The evidence they have found, including the remains of the oldest seagoing ships every discovered, offers hard proof of the Egyptians’ nautical roots and important clues to the location of Punt. “These new finds remove all doubt that you reach Punt by sea,” Baines says. “The Egyptians must have had considerable seagoing experience.”
Readers of Fingerprints of the Gods will know that Graham mentions the 42-meter-long boats buried near the Great Pyramid (some 600 years, at least, before the boats mentioned in the above article). Graham cites Thor Heyerdahl as saying that the boat’s design incorporated “all the seagoing ship’s characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile”, and that it must have been “created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.”
