If you are interested in Ethiopia, this book provides a pictured guide to the country, its history and its sites. The photography is amazing.

This is an incredibly lovely book that shows the various groups of people that make up Ethiopia. A must read, that's informative, educational and thoroughly enjoyable.

This work of art in nothing less than excellent!!

Graham Hancock continues his pursuit of uncovering lost civilizations, this time under the sea. He takes us on a journey through the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Bay of Bengal and the Pacific Ocean around Indonesia, Japan and Taiwan by looking at underwater structures that might be of human origin. I'm pleased to note that the government of India has recently authenticated two of his discoveries off the coast of India. In both cases, these structures are dated between 9000 and 11 000 years before the current era, which supports the hypothesis of a great flood that submerged vast areas of up-to-then habitable land. What I really like about Hancock as author is that he also provides the orthodox view at the same time as his own theories. I cannot but agree with his statement, "There's something wrong with the underpinning of history." Hancock has indicated the most likely places for pre-flood civilizations with the help of Dr. Glen Milne of Durham University who is an expert on glaciation-induced changes in the sea level, and taking into account the plethora of flood-myths found amongst all cultures on all continents. Underworld is lavishly illustrated and well served by a thorough index and extensive bibliography. This gripping text will amply reward the reader who enjoyed Hancock's earlier titles like Keepers of Genesis and Fingerprints of the Gods.

I was highly impressed with Graham Hancock's committment to completing his quest and telling his story. He did so at the cost of his family, which is regretable. I much appriciate his sacrifice for all of us. It is obvious that he put a great deal of time, research and effort into his work. We now have a more clearer story of the "FOUND" Ark of the Covenant of God; "found" because I do believe it is in Ethiopia.

However, I do disagree with a few of Graham's conclusions, specifically with regard to Moses as only being a master magician, educated by the Egyptians, and Jesus as not being the Divine Son of God. I have many ideas and comments on the subject, but with just 1,000 words allowed, I must be brief.

I also wish to contact Graham, to share some of my insights, but I do not have a way of establishing communications with him. I have numerous questions, such as: 1) Has Graham actually read the Book of Enoch; 2) Has he done research on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (for they have a lot of templar type traditions-- and a definite connection with Freemasonry); 3) Has he actually attempted to contact the modern Templars and the Vatican for direct questioning, particularly concerning the true motivation for the Knight's quest for the Ark, and concerning the contact of Pope Clement V with the Ethiopian delegation, just one year prior to the persecution of the Templars; and 4) is Graham himself a Templar?

I am a Christian and have full faith that the scriptures are accurate. I also do not believe that it is inconsistant that a just and loving God would slay the wicked, for disobeying him-- especially on such sacred and important matters as the establishment of God's Law and Gospel to His Children, on earth, through his vessel-- the Ark. It is not unjust for the righteous to slay the wicked. Therefore, I do not classify God as being a psychopathic murderer as Graham had suggested.

This book was the first of Graham Hancock's I ever read. Although the size was, at first, daunting, I quickly was drawn into the book as it contextualizes the history surrounding the Ark of the Covenant to explain where others quests may have gone awry. Hancock enables the reader to retrace the possible/probable trail the Ark may have taken and explains each twist and turn with basic logic. I was able to read it in 3 days and retained enough to retell the tale during 3 a.m. guard duty shifts to my fellow freezing comrades, making the time pass quickly and opening up more lively conversation than you usually find guarding an empty perimeter in the snow. I loaned it to a professor and have yet to get it back. Of course, now my brother has a copy. A great book.

If you are interested in the mystique of the lost Egyptian wisdom, the Ark, Atlantis, mysteries of the Bible, the Knights Templar,or just plain enjoy reading a good book, this one is a must! I believe that Graham Hancock has found the true resting place for the Ark of the Covenant.

After I first read this book, I was inclined to give Hancock and Bauval at least some benefit of the doubt. I believed that at minimum they had succeeded in raising some interesting questions that _might_ suggest an origin for the Great Sphinx some 3000-8000 years before most historians and archaeologists believe it was carved (about 2500 BCE). Hancock and Bauval tell an interesting yarn, with hints of lost civilizations of startling technological and scientific prowess, and of hidden chambers waiting beneath the sands of Giza for a daring Indiana Jones to unearth.

As I read more on the subject of the Sphinx, the pyramids and other great structures of antiquity, however, I am less inclined to view Hancock and Bauval as anything more than incompetent cranks. Their yarn is just that, a yarn and nothing more. Their edifice of "archaeo-astronomical" reasoning is built on extremely shaky grounds, and in arriving at 10,500 BCE as the date of the Sphinx's origin, and as the apex of some great lost civilization, they must ignore a truly enormous amount of careful scientific reasoning. The reader of this book will not be provided with any real feeling for the rationale behind the "conventional" Egyptological views, for if he/she was to have such an understanding, Hancock and Bauval would be revealed for the sad pseudoscientists they are. In point of fact, the polemic of "Message of the Sphinx" is less about a rational basis for reevaluating everything we know of ancient Egypt than it is a retrospective justification for the pre-formed idea that there must be a lost, highly advanced Atlantis-like civilization in the distant past. To Hancock and his ilk, the ends justify the means.

If read by itself, this book will doubtlessly persuade you that what the authors claim has some basis in fact, since it is written so one-sidedly and so deceptively. If you read this book, then, you owe it to yourself and to anyone you foist it on to also read Paul Jordan's recent "Riddles of the Sphinx," which provides a well-written counterpoint to the wild claims of Hancock and Bauval. If all you read is this book, and others by these authors, then you really aren't interested in the Sphinx at all.

How old is the Sphinx? The question, and it's paradigm-busting potential for Egyptology, and history as a whole, is the subject of this compelling book. €Robert Bauval, a Belgian engineer, and Graham Hancock, former East Africa correspondent for the Observer, have authored previous bestsellers on archaeological mysteries of the ancient world. Here they combine forces to question the conventional wisdom regarding Ancient Egypt, and step bravely into the academic no-man's land that lies between history and prehistory. €It was Bauval who made the discovery that the Great Pyramids are exact likenesses, in position and scale, of the three stars in the belt of Orion. Hancock, for his part, claims that the precisely engineered structures of the Gizeh plateau are repositories of complex astronomical data. In The Message of The Sphinx the authors conclude that the Ancient Egyptians were heir to a civilization much greater and older than their own. €The most compelling evidence in this regard was announced in 1993, when evidence was presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than previously thought. €This haunting monument, the authors assert, with its refashioned, possibly once-leonine head, was created in 10,500 BC. The creators of the Sphinx were survivors of a primordial catastrophe that wiped out most of their civilization. € Hancock and Bauval point to the "followers of Horus" in ancient texts as dim memories of these survivors, and suggest the ancient Egyptians were inheritors -- not originators -- of their complex cosmology. The pyramids were completed at a later date than the Sphinx, and the authors present the extraordinary possibility that these enormous stuctures (particularly the great pyramid of Khufu, with its complex galleys and passages) were not meant as tombs at all, but as architectural maps of a region of the heavens known as the "duat", centered in Orion: the cosmogenic realm where souls are spawned and return upon death. The pyramids were used, they theorize, for ritualistic reenactments of astronomical events. €The author's labours have made for a mind-bending read, though Hancock and Bauval's ultimate vindication awaits the archaeologist's spade.

Here is a revolution in Egyptology. The reviews I've read of this book, the ones who have dismissed it only prove how narrow-minded people can be, after being spoon-fed a certain history for all their lives. Hancock and Bauval capture, in comprehensive detail many of the riddles of the origin of the Sphinx and solve many of them. From other recent books, we know that the pyramids mirror the exact position of the constellation Orion in the skies as it was in about 10,500 b.c.,that they are aligned exactly north, and we also know that the Sphinx and the pyramids show signs of water damage in an area that has been arid according to scientists for at least 8,000 years. The question is this, what if the pyramids, and the Sphinx, were built by a civilization far older than Egypt, not 2500 b.c., but in 10,500 b.c.? Egyptologists and the narrow minded scoff at this, of course, because it would mean a radical rewriting of Egyptology, not to mention human history, but consider this: even the best archeology is just guesswork, no matter how educated the academic, no matter how logical the theory sounds. The bottom line is no one really knows why or when the pyramids were truly built, carbon-dating is inaccurate, and the Pyramids of Giza were built with more advanced design methods than any other pyramids in Egypt, not only the ones that came before, but after. In fact, some that came after are mere piles of rubble now on the sands. None of the bodies of the three pharoahs the pyramids were supposedly built for were ever found in any of them and Khufe himself, supposedly the builder of the Great Pyramid, said in his records that he only did repair work on it, was not the one to build it. History attributes the Pyramids to Khufe and his descendents, the pharoahs themselves do not. The three smaller pyramids to the side of the monument were the tombs Khufe actually built for himself and his family. In fact, Egyptian myths themselves attribute the Great Pyramid, not to any of their Pharoahs, but to the more advanced methods of their "Gods of Old." No other pyramids in Egypt, before and after, were built with the same design methods and scale of these three,and Egyptologists have long been baffled as to why the pyramid progression happened as it did. Who built them then? Frankly, I don't think it was aliens, but I don't agree with the traditional historical assumption either. Egyptian chronologies attribute the Age of the Gods, to about 10,500 b.c., the same time frame that Plato places for Atlantis in his dialogues. Now, before critics harp on any mention of Atlantis, accept that humanity has been around as we know it, for at least one hundred thousand years, and that civilization has only risen to it's current status in the last five thousand, and you can see we are missing more than a little of our history. Humanity has risen and fallen many times throughout the ages, with little that the generations before us built remaining. Accept that, and also that the whole of Egyptian civilization, it's pyramids and it's gods, are simply a copy of an earlier civilization, one with far more advanced methods, and all the mysteries, the inconsistencies of the other pyramids, all seem to fall neatly in place. Hancock's and Bauval's theories are as good as any of the others that have been accepted over the last two thousand years. And actually, no one can even say that they are really right or wrong, mostly because none of us were really there, and no one can say for sure.

"Hey, Indy I've found something", Oh, wait, that's a line from the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' isn't it? and 'The Sign & the Seal' is a serious historical, archaelogical account of the search for, and supposed discovery of the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Yes, one is fantasy and the other non-fiction, although after reading some parts of the book, don't be surprised if you find yourself flipping to the backcover to check on the publishing category. For your reference it's 'history/religion/archaeology'

That the book reads like a great adventure novel makes it enjoyable. That it purports to have solved the mystery of not only what happened to the Ark, but also that Hancock says that he knows where it is, makes this a book that deserves serious attention. The author spent considerable time researching this subject and his quest took him to Jerusalem, Egypt, the Chartres Cathedral in France and finally Ethiopia. He read widely and interviewed many people and discusses a wide variety of topics. The Kebra Nagast (the ancient Ethiopian history of the Queen of Sheba), the Templars, the Holy Grail, the biblical story of Solomon and the Babylonian Exile of the Jews all have some bearing on the wherabouts of the Ark. Hancock weaves it all together with style.

Research, genuine interest, enthusiasm and writing style however are insufficient in overcoming the critical flaw of the book. Unlike a movie which can end however it chooses, an investigative history book must prove it's thesis. Hancock neatly dodges producing proof by telling us that the guardian of the Ark won't let anyone see it. In recalling the conversation Hancock remembers saying 'this is a great disappointment for me', to which the guardian philosophically replied 'there are worse things in life than disappointment', to which I say, there are many movies that could use good endings like this but a history book should not be allowed to get away with it.

I started reading this book just after it was first published, in 1992 I trudged on for a hundred or so pages, and then put it down. For 10 years. Heavy reading indeed. Every year or so I would pass by the book on my shelf, and it would glare back at me, calling out "Unbeliever!" "Backslider!" I would respond (silently for the most part) "Oh yeah, if the Ark of the Covenant really is in a Church in Axum, then I think, given the importance and power of the Ark, that it might have been subjected to well publicized, widespread, and modern analysis and study by not only religious scholars, but historical scholars as well.

Well, at least an article in Time or Newsweek.

But I digress.

Most useful part of book: Hancock's historical research is very interesting. He made the Bible become an historical record, as opposed to the Holy Book. I had never really though of the Bible as an attempt to lay out a historical narrative, and this book really made it easy to see the Bible in that light. He did a lot of research in a lot of areas for this book. But, I would be really interested in seeing what true scholars make of his sources and conclusions. I don't think many people have the depth of knowledge to truly assess the credibility of those sources and his conclusions. For all we know, the people and sources in his footnotes might be considered a little "wacky" by scholars.

I picked the book up again a few months ago, determined to finish what I started, and finally solve the great Mystery of the Ages (and I don't mean the location of Atlantis, or that Isis and Thoth and Moses were Masons). I got very close to putting it down for another 10 years during Part IV. But I am determined to finish it yet. I feel that I might get in trouble, in a religious sense, if I don't.

The Sign and the Seal is a very admirable attempt to track down the lost Ark of the Covenant. Hancock's research is excellent and he believes in his quest so much that he puts his life in danger at times. After reading this book I can safely say that if the Ark of the Covenant still exists then it is most likely in Axum, Ethiopia, as Hancock claims. There is a steady and persuasive line of evidence pointing directly to Ethiopia that only a true cynic would not take seriously. Prior to reading this book I doubted whether biblical characters like Moses, David and Solomon even existed, but I doubt that no longer. This is no fairy tale; there was an Ark, there was a Temple, and the Ark mysteriously disappeared from that Temple. For those interested in the Knights Templar, the militant monks of the Crusades, Hancock provides some interesting speculation regarding their involvement in seeking the Ark (most likely going all the way to Ethiopia to look for it). Any fan of history and archeology will love this book. Hancock is not without a sense of humor, knowing he would be compared to Indiana Jones and joking about it; he even admits that seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired him to begin his own real-life quest. But unlike the Hollywood version, the actual search for the Ark is extremely difficult and leads to a rather ambiguous conclusion, but that does not mean that the journey was not fascinating!

I wanted to give this book one star, but, I think the huge amount of research employed merits it at least two. It could however easily have got five only for its poor analysis of the evidence presented. Andrew Collins biggest mistake in my opinion is that he doesn't want to say anything thats out of step with the "academic view" - he even says it himself.

In his effort to distance himself from any theological position and make himself, as if it were, acceptable to mainstream academic thought, he constructs the greatest shoe-string argument I've ever seen. I don't understand why some people feel the need to write books with one hand tied behind their backs.

The book starts brilliantly and continues well for the first 200 pages but then the prejudices he brought into the book start to close him in and in the end its a bit of an anti-climax. He seems to be very unaware - (maybe intentionally unaware) of the biblical evidence; he mentions Gen:6v1-4, and Og of Bashan, but doesn't explore the cryptic teem running through the bible, he doesn't explore Josephus either.

However, he can't be faulted for his research into minority religions in the Iran-Iraq-Kurdistan area and the tentitive links to an Eygptian elder culture, the colossal structures such as the sphinx and the valley temples might well be what remains of the "mighty men of old...the men of renown", even though he never says it.

For those familiar with the explorations of alternative archaelogists the word "nephilim" should be no new acquaintance. The debate about their origin though seems to carry on and on.
Andrew Collins has delivered here an extraordinary book when one considers the painstaking research he's invested in it. I do feel however, that he's probably arrived to the wrong conclusions.
Collins professes that the Nephilim were the giant offspring of a preancient gigantic humanlike being that mated with humans and his research focuses on the Watchers (the Nephilim's ancestors) and the territories they lived. Remarkably, if not shockingly, he arrives at the conclusion that the Watchers originated somewhere in ancient Kazahkstan but he fails to explain their strange (to put it very mildly) features: burning, sometimes red eyes, massive in size compared to humans and with very possibly "special qualities, which again humans did not and do not, possess.
What makes this book great -whether you agree or not with its conclusions- is that the trek it takes you for is full of priceless revelations and a plethora of incredible facts ranging from Asia to eastern Europe to northern Africa, revelations and facts that will put certain questions in a new perspective while they leave others still open.
I, for one, dont agree with the final analysis of "From the Ashes of Angels" but was astounded with what i read in it.There were certain things i read for the very first time allthough i spend quite a lot of my reading on alternative archaelogy. That should speak for itself.
On the downside, the back and forths in time that Collins uses in his book work mostly to a disadvantage as the reader finds it difficult to keep up with the historical references, or for that matter, to keep up with what Collins is trying to argumentate. This has to do mostly with the bulk of information provided (and this is one serious bulk of data) than with the technique of writting itself.
I found myself comparing notes in my head with Sitchin's findings on this matter and i thought that Sitchin makes a better more convincing argument alltogether.
However, Collins is a must-read as his other works are just as interesting and he makes a tremendous contribution to the field of alternative history.

This Book is among the best 10 books written of all time in my opinion. Why? Because not only is the thesis of evidence step by step made carefuly by author Andrew Collins that Angels are real, but his research is quite relative to modern and Ancient Culture. He made me feel as if he were an angel to lead the reader and I literally walked in the foot steps of the Biblical Patriarch Enoch as he really saw the events LIVE. This Book is a most excellent companion to the Gnostic Book of Enoch with new eyes and understanding to read. The Scholarship of Andrew Collins is 2nd to none. He belongs in the ranks of Barbara G. Walker, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and Sir Laurence Gardner as a major contributor to divine connections to our own divine history. Andrew Collins has no time for fiction and tells it like it is. The field of Mythology research is now more enriched in revelation for the average reader. This Book is enough to create a solid foundation in ones personal religious beliefs in way never conceived before. Andrew Collins has proven that at one time "Heaven" was a place on Earth and perhaps some day when enough people read this book, then again Heaven on Earth will be here again only if this becomes required reading in the High Schools Colleges of tomorrow.

It's not a hard task to find flaws and half truths in Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" and many reviewers have done so. Hancock seems to have acquired only as much familiarity with the subjects of mythology, sacred art and symbolism, egyptology, religion, geology and astronomy as was necessary to dress up his theory of a lost mother civilization from Antarctica bringing the gift of its own civilization to different peoples in South America, Mesopotamia and Egypt after a worldwide catastrophe has destroyed the original cultures in these places and forced the surviving communities into forgetfulness and savagery. Hancock has woven together a great number of fascinating facts but may have left out more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle than he thinks. For example, how will his theory accomodate the extremely old traditions handed down through Hinduism, traditions barely mentioned in his book?

It is also disconcerting to see myths and sacred symbols interpreted as coded descriptions of physical realities (don't expect to find anything truly attributed to God in this book) while it should really be the other way around. Just as in genuinely spiritual alchemy, the physical appearances of things (including the constellations above us) serve as supports and symbols for entirely abstract realities. Thus, a pole stuck into the ground, regardless of its eventual practical or magical uses, actually and much more importantly symbolizes a number of levels of reality (psychic or spiritual as the case may be), anywhere from a vertebral column to Immutability itself. Likewise, flood myths are not quasi-literal eyewitness accounts of what happened physically to our forefathers on some specific occasion or what will happen to our progeny in the near future (though many such things probably did and might again happen), but is rather an allegorical way of teaching us about the principle of cosmic cycles and, ultimately, to allow us to transpose this same notion to analogical realities pertaining to our own spiritual constitution. In this lies the true meaning and usefulness of such symbols. In short, history and empirical facts can add nothing to sacred symbols and myths since the latter were formulated to express the essence of the former and not to depict any odd number of contingencies.

But let us not miss all the good parts in Hancock's exciting hunt for a meaning in prehistoric sites. The book reads well and at times can be hard to put down. Above all, Hancock has a rare and precious talent for applying an all-too-rare common sense to simple, observable facts, such as when he asks us why builders supposedly unassisted by heavy machinery would go to the trouble of handling 200-ton blocks when their stoneworking skills indicate they could as easily have cut them down to brick size, or why the largest and most skillfully erected constructions in the world (the pyramids at Giza) feature corridors one cannot stand up in, or how half-savage artisans could have hollowed out and worked the inside of perfect and almost indestructible stone recipients, or even why ancient farming peoples would have created enormous stone calendars for predicting dates which they must have had fixed before they brought in the first boulder and which any country-born person is able to determine well enough for agricultural purposes.

Thus, I have located tens of instances where Hancock's common sense has been put brilliantly to use raising issues to which specialists have never given us anything but rather puerile explanations. So while "Fingerprints of the Gods" may be superficial in several of the complex disciplines it necessarily encompasses, drawing conclusions much too fast and one-sidedly, it clearly outstrips a great many experts in its overall common sense approach to a bulk of "anomalous" evidence whose consequences these experts have unforgivably turned a blind eye to. It's all very well for experts to shake their heads at Hancock's attempts at erudition, but maybe they should apply their privileged minds to answering the riddles posed by the intriguing level of perfection inherent in the prehistoric engineering works Hancock has so laboriously sampled for our appreciation.

"Fingerprints of the Gods" is a very intruiging piece of work. Like most people, I find myself awestruck by the achievements of some of prehistory's supposedly primitive civilizations, but never really felt, that from watching documentries or reading essays, articles and books, that I actually KNEW anything about those civilizations. Even the scholars and "experts" seem in the dark about many of the most fundamental facts about those cultures. However, Hancock with this book, presents some seemingly quite plausible explanations about the great structures erected by our ancient civilizations.

The pyramids of Giza are a great mystery to us, as are other ancient structures. Long-held and popular theories about those structures have limited the speculation and study done on them, and with this book, Hancock reveals a significant new theory which may strike very close to the truth of Earth's ancient people.

The thing to remember is, of course, this book is presenting a theory. With any new theory, there has to be a lot of speculation involved, and not everything will fit snugly in place. Until new studies are done and a new perspective is adopted by a significant portion of both laypeople and professional historians, this book may seem too radical for many people to accept, despite how convincing the evidence may be. I believe what may be the flaw of this book, is that it's written in a style of self-discovery, a very personal style, that appeals to the common layman perhaps moreso than a studied expert, and since this book challenges the base theories scholars have held as near-truth for so long, it becomes difficult for many people to accept Hancock's studies as a serious and worthy of consideration. The references to a possible coming catastrophe don't help matters either, and give the book a slight air of sensationalism, but were integral to some of Hancock's theories, and it would have made no sense to leave them out of the book. I don't feel Hancock is doing anything like screaming apocalypse... he simply makes the point that that's what some of our ancestors might have been doing because of their own catastrophic memories.

Overall, this is a very good book in my opinion, and fully intend on making a bit of research of my own into some of the details of what Hancock says to see if his speculation is as plausible as it seems. It's not the kind of book you can put down and easily stop thinking about.

"Fingerprints" was my first introduction to Graham Hancock. I enjoyed his writing style. It was as if I had tagged along with him on an investigative journey for a lost advanced civilization. Beautiful and illustrative photographs by Santha, his spouse, brought life to the trip.

The author brings together an incredible amount of scholarly research to support his argument and presents it in a very readable and enjoyable fashion. It will keep you turning the pages. Whether or not you accept the author's theories, he has put forth questions that can no longer be ignored by the orthodox scientific community.

Anyway, as an "aficionado" to the quest for lost civilizations of remote antiquity, I am already half way into Graham's "The Message of the Sphinx" (coauthor Robert Bauval) ordered through Amazon.com, of course!

Hancock's basic premise is that an ancient civilization built monuments around the world that are astronomically aligned to the year 10,500BC (thus backdating human history several thousand years.) And somehow these monuments are linked to the search for immortality.

Hancock and his wife travel around the world and try to tie a lot of historical sites together with magic numbers (72 being the most prevalent but any even number being almost as good.) The problem I had was that the linking of the monuments to stars degrades as the book moves along. The link is clear in Egypt, possibly present in Mexico, requires squinting in Cambodia, and then devolves to a lot of "as ifs" and "rough alignments".

The pictures in the book are pretty even if they don't always offer the clearest view of the idea the book is trying to convey. Most of the diagrams involving star alignments are oversimplified and practically useless.

This book barely advances the ideas put forth in "Fingerprints of the Gods". It mainly takes the format of "Message of the Sphinx" and applies it to other mysterious places around the earth.

Much of what Hancock presented in FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS appears
here, but there is also much that is new -- notably the celestial
alignments of the Yonaguni underwater monument and the beautiful
photography of Santha Faiia from exotic and important sites around the
world. The book has, however, one major failing -- that of paying
homage to the Inquisition-inspired portrayal of the Americas as
populated by savages. Hancock states, "...the great mystery of
Central America is that a culture of such unmitigated ferocity was
also a vehicle for profound religious ideas." He should know
better but Hancock has mixed together truly ancient Mexico --
populated for thousands of years before Christ by Olmecs and the
people who built Teotihuacan -- with the Mexico Cortez encountered in
the 16th C., populated by the barbaric Aztecs. The Aztecs were
relative latecomers to the Valley of Mexico, arriving as little as 300
years before Columbus. They built inferior pyramids -- mostly from
broken stones and boulders of earlier constructions, they borrowed
earlier spiritual beliefs -- including knowledge of Quetzalcoatl (who
advocated the sacrifice only of flowers and butterflies), and they
conducted the mass sacrifices so gleefully related by the historians
under pay of the Church of the Inquisition. Were the Aztecs, as
Hancock seems to say, contributors to the spirituality of Central
America? No, they never got to Central America, and they marked a
confused dead-end to thousands of years of pre-Columbian culture in
Mexico. And although some savagery may have marked the decadent years
of the Maya who did flourish in Central America and Mexico's Yucatan,
it must be remembered that most of the Mayan city-states were built
without defensive walls and with interconnecting canals and roads
(sacbeob), signs of cooperative civilization, not the barbarism that
marked the fortified cities of the Mediterranean and European
regions.

This is no mere picture book and Hancock is no Velikovsky. This book has a message of pivotal importance to all humans. It rolls back the horizon of human knowledge to unknown epochs, to a prior high-civilization with technological skills we may not even possess today. Hancock's claim is no less than that. He proves that the monumental layouts of ancient Tiwanaku, Gizeh and Ankor are actually based on star-patterns from 10,500 B.C. and that they contain the coded numbers of the earth's 26,000 year precessional zodiac cycle. Talk about ante-diluvian amnesia! If this theory is correct, then a high civilization existed at or before the 11th Millennium B.C., located in the equatorial regions, with the ability to travel world-wide, while most other humans were still in the stone age. One may ask why are there no inscriptions in stone from this civilization? That mystery may be resolved in due course. More importantly, I think this basic hypothesis is very plausible. With new dating techniques, we must now reevaluate the entire basis of pre-history which, until now, been based on stale eurocentric + mid-eastern cultural preconceptions limited to notions about ice caps and Cro-Magnons inexplicably leading to the rise of the Sumerians, Babylonians, through a series of Indus valley migrations. These findings will surely force the world's archeologists to reappraise those areas of the planet not covered by ice in the period 20,000 to 10,000 BC. I predict that the impact of this theory over the long term may mirror that of Darwin's Origin of the Species. Heaven's Mirror is a disturbing master-work in every respect. My sincere wish is that conventional archeologists should hold back from scorning Mr. Hancock. I ask them to open up to the new evidence with equanimity and address it with a scientific rather than emotive response.

In his book Lords of Poverty, Mr. Graham Hancock offers a very detailed account of the so-called Aid Industry. Unfortunately, the case study he presents is completely out of date (the 80's). This is the year 2000 and, hence, fresh figures, new dates and new names are needed.

The other flaw of his book is that, like every one else who has written on the subject of foreign aid, Mr. Hancock bases his account on his experiences in India and in some other regions of Africa. But what about the rest of the world. What we need is a much broader and deeper look of the foreign aid industry as the self perpetuating industry that it actually is, particularly with regard to the secret internal modus operandi of bureaucratic institutions such as the UN, World Bank, OAS, USIAD, etc, etc. In other words, we want the true inside story. It is the only way to really know what's going on.

Few people are aware that these organizations are ran mainly by "political rejects" who after having been thrown out from their own countries accused of becoming political trouble makers, or misfits, they find "haven" in those international aid organizations. Sort of like "dying and going to haven".

The fact that the head of the World Bank or the Secretary General of the UN might have been a head of state before he was rewarded with the current top job does not mean in any way that he is fit for the job that he is holding now. Those top positions and other of lesser importance, are usually regarded as political favors. The same holds true of those professionals who are looking for a place to land a good paying job that requires little or no work at all. To keep a good paying job with private industry, professionals would be required to work very hard, something that many of them don't have to do at the UN or any other international aid organization. These are the "technicians", the "experts" who come to poor third world countries to "straighten things out", as they say, when in fact all they are doing is enjoying officially sponsored vacations with all their expenses paid for with taxpayers money from the industrialized nations. That, I believe, is one of the reasons for the high rate of failure of such organizations: bureaucratic incompetence. It is for this reason that I also believe that some form of tight government control and public scrutiny should be implemented in order to make foreign aid agencies fully accountable for every dime they spend. Otherwise they will continue to function as international clubs of free-loaders.

I guarantee that any American taxpayer would be infuriated to know that the great majority of the employees of these international aid organizations headquartered in the U.S.A. do not, I repeat, do not pay any form of local and/or federal income tax because these organizations (UN, OAS, PAHO, IDB, etc.) are not required by law to report salaries paid to their employees. Therefore, the IRS does not have any way to know who's earning what and who owes what. But even those employees who, by some special circumstance, must file a tax return will do so with the understanding that the organization will not only compute their own taxes, but will also issue them a check for taxes owed on their income. Oh yes, no matter how you cut it, "working" in any of those international organizations is like dying and going to haven; or almost like wining the lottery.

V.P.Reyna Guatemala, Guatemala Mepolly@xela.net.gt

Lords of Poverty presents a very coherent argument, backed up by lots of specific experiences *and* data. It is by no means sensationalistic.

People (such as myself) who have grown up overseas, and have moved in expatriate circles have encountered many examples of abuses and stupidity in the name of `development`. It is widely known and acknowledged that this is a serious problem. But Mr. Hancock has gone beyond giving a handful of anecdotes as examples of what is typical: he has investigated the entire infrastructure supporting this corruption and stupidity. He gets to the heart of the problem and exposes it, rather than just showing a few symptoms. I highly recommend this book. It is intelligently written, for the intelligent reader. Yes it may have a tone of anger at times, but it would be heartless not to be angry at the way in which the peoples of less developed nations are abused and used to make `aid` workers rich.

Furthermore, solutions *are* given, at least if you *look* for them. The author points out that smaller independent aid organizations--generally grassroots community or church-based groups--*are* effective. They are not without faults, of course, but nothing of the magnitude that typifies the large government run agencies.

While I have not worked with large government run agencies, I do know of a professor here at U of M who has worked for them, who admitted to a close friend of mine that the claims of this book are true.

Read the book and see for yourself if the argument stand up. And if you still doubt it, do some investigation. What you'll find will amaze you.

Hancock's aim is to encourage the reader to question the real motivations behind aid to "developing" countries. When we give, who are we really benefitting the most. Through careful and well referenced accounts of some truly amazing failures of the aid industry (and after reading this book you will gain an appreciation of the awesome size of this global conglomerate) Hancock takes us to a point where we are forced to question the very nature of charity and aid and consider its disempowering effect upon its recipients. His main offensive is against the UN and its subsidiary aid organizations who'se facility for spending money on self perpetuation seems less than matched by their ability to do any real good. The World Bank does not escape his attentions and Hancock spares us little in his account of their annual get together which bears more than a passing resemblance to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. If you want to know how, during the famine of the late 80's, Somalia was given huge supplies of slimming products and frostbite medicine, then read Lords of Poverty.

I am a hugh fan of Graham Hancock and have read 3 of his previous books, "The Sign and the Seal", "Fingerprints of the Gods" and "Message of the Sphinx"......this was by far the weakest of them. It seems that Mr. Hancock is treading on ground that he is not as familiar with. Indeed, after reading Hoagland's "Monuments of Mars", this books seems weak. But none the less, he adds valuable material to the subject of an ancient connection between ancient ruins on Earth and anomilies on Mars. What I found most interesting was the section on asteroids and comets. This was tangential to the basic theme of the book, but it made me think. This needs more scholarly study. Graham Hancock knows that current Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ancient History has "missed the boat" in many areas. He proposes a key to unlock many of these mysteries. This book adds to that key. I hope his next book is better written.

This book doesn't give any real answer to the Mars mystery, but still on ok book to read.

Excellent book, All I can say is that if your interested in Mars or the true or possible history of man this book will bend your mind in a totally new directions. A Very cool book, a very cool edition to any personal library.