5
" Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
15
" Even if we admit that running-survey and compass techniques were somehow being used on ships to produce sea-charts as early as the thirteenth century (which most historians of science would rule out) we still come against the unexplained enigma of the miraculous and fully formed de novo appearance of the Carta Pisane. As we've seen, not a single chart pre-dates it that demonstrates in any way the gradual build-up of coastal profiles across the whole extent of the Mediterranean that must have occurred before a likeness as perfect as this could have been resolved.
It is possible, of course, through the vicissitudes of history, that all the evidence for the prior evolution of portolans before the Carta Pisane has simply been lost. If that were the case, however -- in other words if the Carta Pisane is a snapshot of a certain moment in the development of an evolving genre of maps, and if we accept that all earlier 'snap-shots' have been lost, wouldn't we nevertheless expect that such an 'evolving genre' would have continued to evolve after the date of the earliest surviving example?
Whether we set the date of the Pisane between 1270 and 1290 [...] or a little later -- between 1295 and 1300 -- as other scholars have argued, we've seen that there was no significant evolution afterwards.
Now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the enigmatic Pisane is an unsigned chart and scholars have no idea who the cartographer might have been. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
16
" In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions -- at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Colombus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri's note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil:
'Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Colombus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, 'Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places.' They said, 'Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
17
" If we impose on a map of the earth a 'world grid' with Giza (not Greenwich) as its prime meridian, then hidden relationships become immediately apparent between sites that previously seemed to be on a random, unrelated longitudes. On such a grid, as we've just seen, Tiruvannamalai stands on longitude 48 degrees east, Angkor stands on longitude 72 degrees east and Sao Pa stands out like a sore thumb on longitude 90 degrees east -- all numbers that are significant in ancient myths, significant in astronomy (through the study of precession), and closely interrelated through the base-3 system.
So the 'outrageous hypothesis' which is being proposed here is that the world was mapped repeatedly over a long period at the end of the Ice Age -- to the standards of accuracy that would not again be achieved until the end of the eighteenth century. It is proposed that the same people who made the maps also established their grid materially, on the ground, by consecrating a physical network of sites around the world on longitudes that were significant to them. And it is proposed that this happened a very long time ago, before history began, but that later cultures put new monuments on top of the ancient sites which they continued to venerate as sacred, perhaps also inheriting some of the knowledge and religious ideas of the original navigators and builders. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
18
" Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow -- we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely -- through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.
Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of 'world ages' of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
20
" Areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow -- in fact most of North America and northern Europe -- were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometers thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today -- on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) -- were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations.
Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface -- an area of around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles -- has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age. That is roughly the equivalent to the combined areas of the United States and the whole of South America. It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined.
What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also -- because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes -- that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth's surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometers that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth's useful and habitable landspace at that time. "
― Graham Hancock , Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
