![]() ![]() As Dibble states, such claims reinforce white supremacist ideas. Don’t get too big for your boots, in other words.īut Hancock – who describes himself as a journalist presumably to avoid being called a pseudo-scientist – takes the story to a new controversial level in suggesting that survivors of such a deluge were the instigators of the great works of other civilisations, from Egypt to Mexico and Turkey to Indonesia. Atlantis was destroyed by the gods who had grown angry with the hubris displayed by its inhabitants and so destroyed it. It is a basic tale of a rise and fall that can be corralled and exploited for all sorts of causes. As a result, Himmler set up an SS unit, the Ahnenerbe – or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage – in 1935 to find out where people from Atlantis had ended up after the deluge had destroyed their homeland.Īnd that, in part, explains why the myth of an ancient, lost civilisation is so useful. Many swore by the idea that a white Nordic superior race – people of “the purest blood” – had come from Atlantis. ![]() In 1882, the maverick US congressman and popular writer Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World which argued that a highly complex, sophisticated culture had been wiped out by a flood 10,000 years ago and claimed that its survivors had spread round the world teaching the rest of humanity the secrets of farming and architecture. Nor is Hancock the first to suggest the destruction of a once great civilisation led to the flowering of culture elsewhere. The theories of Graham Hancock, presenter of the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, have been criticised by archaeologists. The confrontation is intriguing and raises many issues of which the most basic is the simple question: why has the story of Atlantis – compared with other ancient myths – maintained its popularity for so long? What is the essential attraction of the tale?įor answers we only have to look at the works of Tolkien, CS Lewis, HP Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Brecht and a host of science fiction writers who have all found the myth an irresistible inspiration.Īs to the suggested location of this lost civilisation, these have ranged from the Sahara to the Antarctic and countless places in between. “It is simply that we strongly believe he is wrong,” says Dibble in an article in The Conversation last week. Archaeologists don’t hate him, as he claims. These stark claims have helped the series reach the top of viewing lists on both sides of the Atlantic, to the chagrin of archaeologists who, for their part, have denounced Ancient Apocalypse on the grounds that it provides little evidence to support its grandiose claims and for promoting conspiracy theories dressed up as science.įlint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University, described Hancock’s basic thesis as “flawed thinking”. We owe everything to these near godlike individuals, it is claimed.įor good measure, Hancock – who has been promoting these ideas in his books for decades – argues that archaeologists have deliberately covered up this catastrophic vision of civilisation’s spread and accuses mainstream academia of its “extremely defensive, arrogant and patronising” attitudes. Presented by the author Graham Hancock, the programme argues that a once sophisticated culture was destroyed by floods triggered by a giant comet which crashed on Earth, a disaster that inspired the legend of Atlantis, it is claimed.Īccording to Hancock, survivors of the calamity spread round the world – which was then populated by simple hunter-gatherers – bringing them science, technology, agriculture and monumental architecture. ![]()
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