Graham Hancock

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[edit] Definition

Graham Hancock is an originator and popularizer of various crank theories in history and archeology. Before 1992, he worked as a foreign correspondent and travel writer, writing a number of books on related issues.

In 1992 he published his first work of pseudohistory, The Sign And the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant, which promised to reveal “the most shattering historical secret of the last three thousand years”.

Since then, Mr Hancock has revealed shattering historical secrets with an almost monotonous regularity, invariably to the complete indifference of real historians.

His first essay in pseudohistory was followed by:

  • Fingerprints of the Gods: A Quest for the Beginning and the End
  • Keepers of Genesis: A Quest For the Hidden Legacy of Mankind
  • Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet
  • Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization
  • Fingerprints of the Gods: The Quest Continues
  • Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age
  • Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith.

The world still awaits a work from his pen entitled:

  • Pretension: Why All My Book Titles Come in Two Parts.

[edit] Discussion

Hancock does not publish, nor, so far as is known, attempt to publish, any of his conjectures in archeological journals, nor, indeed, does he indulge in anything so mundane and laborious as an archeological dig, being one of those who prefers to pursue his “quests” from the comfort of his armchair.

Much of what Hancock writes is a rehash of old themes, but he has also contributed one new idea to pseudohistory in the form of “precessional dating”. He has also lately been touting a particularly strange set of conspiracy theories to explain why the facts are so often found to be at variance with his imagination.

[edit] Old theories rehashed

Practically every bit of ground Hancock goes over has been visited before. We hear again about the pyramids, the Nazca lines and Atlantis, which he believes floated off to become Antarctica. Many of his ideas have been around for so many decades that they were debunked long before he began his “research” in the mid-90s, a fact of which he seems unaware.

Like so many before him, he uses numerology to discover “sacred geometry” in the pyramids, by basically permitting himself to manipulate numbers any way he pleases. The following sample gives an idea of the method:

“The 'ruling' number in the code is 72. To this was frequently added 36, making 108, and it was permissible to divide 108 by 2 to get 54 - which could then be multiplied by 10 and expressed as 540 (or as 54,000, or as 540,000, or as 5,400,000, etc).”

What is obvious in this and other similarly ludicrous passages is that Hancock feels free to attribute to imaginary Egyptian numerologists just those manipulations which he needs to make his sums to work out. He wants to add 36? “36 was frequently added”. He wants to divide by 2? It’s permissible. He wants to multiply by 10? It “could be” done.

Here, according to Hancock, is how to get the number 216 from a chamber 20 cubits by 10.

  1. Imagine a right-angled triangle “with its short dimension (15 cubits) drawn diagonally across the west wall from the lower south-west corner to the upper north-west corner, its median dimension (20 cubits) drawn along the entire length of the floor on the south side of the chamber, and its long dimension (25 cubits) drawn from the upper north-west corner of the chamber to the lower south-east corner.”
  2. Divide the numbers through by 5, giving 3, 4, 5.
  3. Take the cube of each of them, giving 27, 64 and 125.
  4. Add them together.
Voila --- 216!

Having reached his desired number by this tedious labor, he concludes: “we do not think that it found its way into the dimensions of the King's Chamber by accident.” Of course it didn’t get there by accident --- he has gone to considerable lengths to put it there himself.

As with so many of Hancock’s methods, this kind of pointless numerical manipulation has been thoroughly debunked (by Martin Gardner amongst others) long before Hancock entered the field of pseudohistory.

Another case in point is his belief in “flash frozen” mammoths. As this canard has been taken up by creationists, the idea that mammoths preserved in permafrost were “flash frozen” was debunked long before Hancock ever wrote about them.[1]

Again, he exploits the supposed evidence by which creationists attempt to discredit the fossil record: but uses it in exactly the opposite way. Creationists claim to have evidence of humans in the early fossil record, proving to their satisfaction that the early fossil record isn’t early. To Hancock, the same “evidence” proves, on the contrary, that the human race has a history extending back hundreds of millions of years. Again, the “evidence” on which he relies, because of its popularity in creationist circles, was debunked before he even knew it existed.

He follows Erich von Daniken in interpreting some of the more cryptic Mayan carvings as depicting the operation of complex machinery (now vanished entirely from the archaeological record). He seems unaware that following von Daniken's writings, the Mayan hieroglyphs have been interpreted and writing of the Maya, including their own commentary on the “mysterious” carvings, has been read. One would think that anyone with even a faint passing interest in ancient cultures would have heard about this, but the news seems to have passed Mr. Hancock by.

[edit] Precessional dating

Hancock’s own original contribution to pseudohistory is his idea of precessional dating. This assumes as axiomatic that many ancient monument complexes were laid out so as to represent constellations of stars, a notion for which there is not a shred of historical evidence.

Assuming this to be so, we take a set of ancient monuments (say, the pyramids) and decide what group of stars their layout most resembles (Orion’s belt).

The resemblance is not exact. This is where “precession” comes in. The arrangement of the constellations as seen from the Earth changes over time, and it is easy to obtain programs for your home computer which can show you what the night sky looked like at various times in the past. So in order to find when the pyramids were built, it is only necessary to find out when the pattern made by Orion’s belt in the sky is exactly the same as the pattern made by the pyramids on the ground.

Unfortunately, the answer is “never”, so you do the next best thing and find when the two patterns were the most similar. Then you conclude that this is when the pyramids were built.

If your conclusion disagrees with all the historical and archaeological evidence, you are to be congratulated --- you have proved all the evidence wrong. Hancock’s opinion of real archeological evidence is summed up by his extraordinary declaration that: “My reservations about radiocarbon will continue to apply to sites that are primarily megalithic and that […] demonstrate alignments older than the radiocarbon dates”. How graciously he agrees not to quarrel with carbon dating --- unless, by some chance, it should disagree with his own methods! So historians consider his method to be bunk, because it disagrees with all known history; and Hancock considers history to be bunk --- for exactly the same reason.

As with numerology, the problem with this method is that Hancock allows himself way too much latitude. For example:

  • In the case of the pyramids, he allows the pyramids to represent a mirror image of the constellation as it appears in the sky.
  • To stay with the example of the pyramids, he has a whole skyfull of stars to choose from, and only three buildings to match to any group of stars. It would be strange if he couldn't find a rough resemblance somewhere in the night sky.
  • He doesn’t even have to find a match to an entire constellation --- he claims that the pyramids represent Orion’s belt, but his scheme does not require him to find other monuments in the Giza burial complex representing Orion’s trousers.
  • The match he seeks can be as far back in time as he chooses, for his results do not have to agree with history or even with paleontology --- indeed, from his point of view, the greater the discrepancy, the better.
  • As we have noted, he is merely looking for a best fit, not an exact match. The best fit he can come up with for the pyramids is way below the accuracy with which each individual pyramid is aligned to the four points of the compass. Now if you allow the monumental architects any arbitrary degree of imprecision, then the method would be worthless even if the underlying axiom (that buildings represent stars) was perfectly correct.
  • He allows himself to discover in the East maps of constellations only traditional in Western astrology.
  • He feels free to pick and choose, from any complex of monuments, which are to represent stars and which are to be ignored. In the case of the pyramids, the reason for his choice is obvious and excusable: they are the most prominent objects in the Giza funary complex. In other cases, he seems to have gone by the principle that he can select buildings that resemble, in their layout, the stars of some constellation, while ignoring the ones that don’t agree with this interpretation.

It would be interesting to see what conclusions could be reached using Hancock’s methodology if it was applied to a collection of monuments the date of which is very well established: say, the London churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London.

[edit] Conspiracy theories

In recent years Mr Hancock’s imagination has turned, it seems, from a good servant into a poor master. He now alleges the existence of a powerful and wealthy conspiracy, led by devotees of the “medium” Edgar Cayce, to destroy the evidence that his theories are correct, as he revealed on the Art Bell show. According to articles written for the British Daily Mail newspaper, he believes that NASA scientists have “known the truth about the pyramids” since the 1970s, but have been hushing it up, and links these scientists to another sinister NASA plot to conceal ancient monuments on Mars.

It is to be hoped that the increasing eccentricity of his views will exhaust the patience and credulity of all but the most hardcore of his fans.

[edit] The BBC 'Horizon' program "Atlantis Rising"

Made in 1999 and broadcast in 2000, the BBC's flagship science program (which is now in its 41st year) devoted a program to the subject of Atlantis, and in particular, the pseudohistorical theories of Graham Hancock.

The transcript is here

Graham Hancock subsequently complained to the Broadcasting Standards Commission complaining of unfairness and bias in the way his theories were treated. The full adjudication noted the following:

The programme had created the impression that he (Graham Hancock) was an intellectual fraudster who had put forward half baked theories and ideas in bad faith, and that he was incompetent to defend his own arguments.
Adjudication: (The Commission) finds no unfairness to Mr Hancock in these matters.

[edit] References

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