Customer Reviews

Ancient Mysteries

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I picked up this book expecting a good scientific overview of many mysteries of the ancient world. It covers such interesting topics as megalithic buildings like Stonehenge and the pyramids, biblical mysteries such as the location of Noah's ark, and curiosities of the New World such as the location of Vinland. The book started off nicely with a chapter looking for the location of Atlantis, which gave a good historical and archaeological argument for placing it at Minoan Crete. I figured even though the book is over 20 years old, it would be a good read.

I quickly became disappointed. For every interesting and well written chapter, there seems to be one that takes giant leaps of fancy. It's almost like the author had a split personality. The other very annoying thing about the book is that while it was published in 1978, most of the few resources listed date to the late 1960s. There are even a number of sources published in the 50s. Even for the time it was published many of Mr. Furneaux's ideas were greatly out-dated.

A perfect example is his discussion of the end of the ancient Mayan civilization. He would lead you to believe that the only two people studying the ancient Maya were Eric Thompson and Sylvanus Morley. Further, the only works he mentions from them date to the 50s. There is no mention of such well-respected Maya scholars such as Kent Flannery, Michael Coe or Tatiana Proskouriakoff to name a few. They were all well-published on the Maya by the mid-1970s, if not the late 60s.

The chapter immediately following the discussion of the collapse of the Maya civilization, is actually an excellent synopsis of the discovery of Lord Pacal's tomb at Palenque (made famous by von Daniken as proof of ancient astronauts). It's this switching back and forth from reasonable scientific explanation and examination to wild leaps of fancy that make the book so frustrating.

The chapter on the shroud of Turin is very good and current to 1978, long before the church allowed scientists to take a sample of the shroud for radio-carbon dating and it was proved to be a medieval forgery. The chapter on the search for Vinland, the Norse settlement in the New world, is also quite well done. However, these chapters are in sharp contrast to the description of Tiahuanaco in the Bolivian highlands, which goes so far afield as to encompass the Phoenicians. Another questionable chapter covers the fall of the Harrappan civilization in India and Pakistan.

The main problem with the book is that it lacks a point of view. In one chapter Mr. Furneaux is sounding like a disciple of Erich von Daniken, then in the next chapter he is taking Mr. von Daniken and his followers to task for not providing proof for their wildly speculative theories.

If you are interested in the topics covered in this book I recommend you look elsewhere. Paul Bahn has written many popular archaeology books that cover some of these same topics, there is also a book with the same title written in 1999 that seems to have a more solid scientific footing. I would even recommend giving some of the various Time-Life books and series a look.

Despite the lack or reviews, I was hoping this book would be a diamond in the rough, but it wasn't. The book has a low-quality feel to it, and its content has been covered by hundreds of better books. It's also not very readable; the style seems like a psudo-science textbook than a read-for-pleasure paperback.

After seeing the first two reviews for this book, I decided to write my own because this is not a two star book. Ancient Mysteries is a very good book to start someone on the path of learning the history of the world. Ancient Mysteries covers many topics, including Atlantis, pyramids, Easter Island, biblical mysteries and many, many more topics. I recommend this book to anyone who wants a quick but thorough introduction to the mysteries of the world.

This is one of those books I've had on my shelf for years but had just never around to reading. This delay only made Ancient Mysteries, published in 1977, even more outdated than it already was. We now know much more about many of the subjects Rupert Furneaux discusses in these pages, and Furneaux himself seemed to rely heavily on books published in the 1950s and 1960s. Honestly, I don't know how the Chicago Tribune could have described the author's research as "impeccable." Furneaux certainly doesn't share much of that research with us. There's no bibliography or list of consulted works (or, for that matter, an index), and the sparse footnotes sprinkled here and there are the product of direct quotes from other works. As far as the material goes, the quality varies -some pretty good, some not so good. The last section of the book is particularly frustrating; in what seems to be a rushed and sometimes contradictory narrative on the subjects of ancient astronauts and the question of extraterrestrial life in the universe, Furneaux criticizes others for introducing unsubstantiated facts and ideas, then proceeds to throw out several wild and unsupported notions of his own.

Ancient Mysteries deals with many of the usual suspects - Atlantis, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, Noah's Ark, Stonehenge, Camelot, etc. Most chapters are twelve to fifteen pages, which tells you that Furneaux isn't going into great detail about any of the subjects he covers. Since most of what he does say is incomplete and outdated, this really should not be considered any type of go-to book for those seeking answers to any of the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything.

I did find value in reading this book, however, and that value lay in Furneaux's discussions of several ancient mysteries I was quite unfamiliar with. For example, there's the "Hairy Ainu," the aboriginal Caucasian natives of the Japanese islands; the Panagyurishte Treasure found in Bulgaria in 1949; the surprisingly ancient tombs and temples found on the island of Malta; and the fantastic stone ruins found in Zimbabwe that point to a highly advanced African civilization. It is also interesting - albeit disturbing - to see how such finds as those in Zimbabwe were disavowed or explained away for decades for purely racist reasons.

All in all, this really isn't a book that those interested in ancient mysteries should seek out; you can find much more information on virtually any of these subjects in any number of more modern sources. If you happen to come by the book, though, it is worth picking up for its chapters on some of the more obscure but nonetheless fascinating mysteries Furneaux discusses.

Ancient mysteries is a very good introduction to the mysteries of the ancient world. Topics include Atlantis, the pyramids, Noah's ark and other biblical mysteries, easter island and many many more. Anyone who wants a quick but thorough introduction to ancient mysteries of the world should read this book.

i havent read this book but it looks pretty good