Debatable
Book Reviews
"These books...have flushed out academics from their ivory towers in droves to confront the challenges that we put before them".
The following reviews are on books that are highly controversial. We suggest buying them if you are interested to read them for yourself.
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The
Earth Cronicles
by Zechariah Setchin
In these books, Sitchin claims that Baalbek and Sinai peninsula were spaceports of Gods. Pyramids were designed for directioning of spaceships as for precise measurements of the planet, forming his arguments after studying ancient texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.If we trust Sitchen's translation abilities (and he did master the Sumarian language), we must be prepared for the imminent return of an alien race who created us some 3,600 years ago. He researched the material for the Earth Chronicles for over 30 years before he picked up a pen to begin writing, and his books are overflowing with specific references to evidence supporting his arguments.
The
Orion Mystery : Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids
by Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert (Contributor), Peter Ginna (Editor)
Taken From
Kirkus Reviews:
This fascinating archaeological detective story argues that the great
pyramids of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600-2400 b.c.) were vast astronomically
sophisticated temples, rather than the pharaonic tombs depicted by conventional
Egyptology. In March 1993, a tiny remote-controlled robot created by Rudolf
Gantenbrink, a German robotics engineer, traveled up airshafts within
the Great Pyramid of Giza and relayed to scientists video pictures of
a hitherto unknown sealed door within the pyramid. Bauval, a British engineer
and writer who has been investigating the pyramids for more than ten years,
and Gilbert, a British publishing consultant, use Gantenbrink's tantalizing
discovery as a launching pad for an extended analysis of the purpose of
the mysterious airshafts, which lead from the Great Pyramid's chambers
to its exterior, and of the placement of other Fourth Dynasty pyramids.
They were sited, the authors argue, to coincide with the key stars of
Orion, a constellation that had religious significance for the Egyptians.
Bauval and Gilbert claim that the shafts were pointed directly at important
stars in Orion--that is, at those stars as they were placed in ancient
times. Using astronomical data about stellar movement, they argue that
the Orion stars coincide exactly with the pyramids' positions in approximately
10,400 b.c.--a period the Egyptians called the First Time, when they believed
the god Osiris ruled the Earth. The authors also speculate that the mysterious
space within the Great Pyramid discovered by Gantenbrink contains the
mythical Benben stone, which the Egyptians linked to the creation of the
world. The book's contentions are sometimes far-fetched and certainly
unlikely to put scholarly controversy about the pyramids to rest. Still,
this is an enjoyably radical rethinking of the mystery of the pyramids,
with some ingenious arguments made in lucid style. (Taken from Amazon.com.
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.)
Heaven's
Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilisation
by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia
Hancock argues in all his books that at around the end of the last Ice Age - earlier than 12,000 years ago -it is possible that a culturally advanced maritime civilisation flourished around the globe, primarily inhabiting protected coastlines close to the oceans. The main argument in this book is that numerous ancient sites and monuments (the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt, the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the monuments of Yonaguni in the Pacific, and the megaliths of Peru and Bolivia) are situated in such a way, geodetically, that they point towards some separate and uniform influence, some lost civilization or "invisible college" of astronomer-priests. And that civilization, as evidenced in the mathematics and architecture of the sites, points towards some gnosis, or body of knowledge, that would allow humanity to transcend the trap of mortality, a worldview in which the knowledge-giving serpent of Eden is not a villain but a hero.
The
Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind
by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval
In this account of historical and archaeological investigation, the authors argue that the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and the other monuments at Giza are of far more ancient origin than previously believed. Complete with details of a conspiracy between the Egyptology establishment and various confidential organizations to keep the secrets of the Pyramids from the world. The book also claimes that the Sphinx goes back in history even further than the oldest proposed dates of the Pyramids at Giza. Through computer animation, the Sphinx has been shown to point directly at the Leo star constellation as far back a 10,500BC. They attribute signs of erosion on the Sphinx to great flood before 8000BC and state geological evidence for it.
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So, what do Egyptologists have to say about these theories?
"New
Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are denigrating
the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we
say they were primitive...Well, actually there's a certain irony here,
because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations
and societies that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't
the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really
denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools,
bakeries that we actually find."
-MARK LEHNER, Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum. Quoted from a PBS NOVA Interview with him.
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