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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

started travelling in Egypt. His guide-book, The Traveller’s Key had been<br />

a brilliant and indispensable introduction to the mysteries of this ancient<br />

land, and we still carried it with us. At the same time his scholarly works,<br />

notably Serpent in the Sky, had opened our eyes to the revolutionary<br />

possibility that Egyptian civilization—with its manifold glimpses of high<br />

science apparently out of place in time—might not have developed<br />

entirely within the confines of the Nile Valley but might have been a<br />

legacy of some earlier, greater and as yet unidentified civilization<br />

‘antedating dynastic Egypt, and all other known civilizations, by<br />

millennia’. 1<br />

Tall and strongly built, West was in his early sixties. He had cultivated a<br />

neatly trimmed white beard, was dressed in a khaki safari-suit and wore<br />

an eccentric nineteenth-century pith helmet. His manner was youthful and<br />

energetic and there was a roguish sparkle in his eyes.<br />

The three of us were sitting on the open upper deck of a Nile cruiser,<br />

moored off the corniche in Luxor just a few yards downstream from the<br />

Winter Palace Hotel. To our west, across the river, a big red sun, distorted<br />

by atmospheric refraction, was setting behind the cliffs of the Valley of<br />

the Kings. To our east lay the battered but noble ruins of the Luxor and<br />

Karnak temples. Beneath us, transmitted through the hull of the boat, we<br />

could feel the lap and flow of the water as it rolled by on its meridional<br />

course towards the far-off Delta.<br />

West had first presented his thesis for an older Sphinx in Serpent in the<br />

Sky, a comprehensive exposition of the work of the French<br />

mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller’s research at the Luxor<br />

Temple between 1937 and 1952 had unearthed mathematical evidence<br />

which suggested that Egyptian science and culture had been far more<br />

advanced and sophisticated than modern scholars had appreciated.<br />

However, as West put it, this evidence had been set out in ‘abstruse,<br />

complex and uncompromising language ... Few readers seem comfortable<br />

with raw Schwaller. It’s a bit like trying to wade directly into high energy<br />

physics without extensive prior training.’<br />

Schwaller’s principal publications, both originally in French, were the<br />

massive three-volume Temple de l’Homme, which focused on Luxor, and<br />

the more general Roi de la théocratie Pharaonique. In this latter work,<br />

subsequently translated into English as Sacred Science, Schwaller made a<br />

passing reference to the tremendous floods and rains which devastated<br />

Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC. Almost as an afterthought, he<br />

added:<br />

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed<br />

over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured<br />

in the rock of the west cliff at Giza—that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for<br />

the head, shows indisputable signs of water erosion.’ 2<br />

1 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt; Serpent in the Sky, p. 20.<br />

2 Sacred Science, p. 96.<br />

403

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