82 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A new theory of Ancient Civilization which merits attention, December 31, 2000
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.
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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Obligatory reading for anyone who cares about history..., November 10, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization (Hardcover)
For everyone left in the world who is spellbound by the precision and scale of architectural feats of wonder fashioned centuries ago by enigmatic people, Heaven's Mirror is the pot of gold at the end of the reading rainbow. Not only is this marvellous book packed with breathtaking photography of such sites as Giza, Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuaman and many more, but the accompanying text and diagrams eloquently lay out a theory whose ramifications shake the fundamental assumptions of human history.
Graham Hancock is proposing that the unimaginable amount of effort that went into megalithic structures around the world was NOT merely the result of ego-driven monarchs erecting tombs for themselves and monuments for their gods. For if you stand at these sites (as Hancock and Faiia did) at crucial times during the year (solstices and equinoxes) you can easily see that entire groundplans are oriented with the sun, moon and stars. In fact, Hancock prodigiously documents that many of these sites are exact replicas of constellations known to be of great significance to the civilizations that built them. Further, many sites mirror their respective constellations not as they looked when the sites were built, but in the epoch of 10,500 BC. This in turn requires knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, the apparent shift of the constellations through the sky caused by the wobbling of the earth on its axis. This process takes almost 26,000 years to complete and takes 72 years to shift just one degree.
It just so happens that not only are these ancient megalithic sites exact replicas of constellations in a common, vastly distant epoch, but the sites themselves are separated in relation to each other by units of measurement that also proclaim precessional knowledge. For example, Giza, Egypt (whose three famous pyramids have apexes that reproduce the pattern of stars formed in Orion's belt (Orion was literally thought of as Osiris to the ancient Egyptians) and whose infamous Sphinx faces directly east and would have faced its "reflection" in the constellation Leo just before dawn in 10,500 BC) is located 72 degrees of longitude from Angkor Wat in Cambodia (a site which, seen from above, depicts the constellation of Draco, also in the sky to the north in the epic of 10,500 BC). 72 years, you'll remember, is the amount of time the sky takes to precess one degree.
I hope the foregoing will encourage you to read this book from cover to cover. The above example is really just a tiny piece of the massive amount of evidence contained in this incredibly important book. Graham Hancock deserves praise for being bold enough to continue the controversial search for the truth he began in Fingerprints of the Gods. His attention to quantifiable detail, referral to original sources of scholarly study via endnotes and use of mouthwatering photography and clear diagrams make Heaven's Mirror a huge pleasure to read. What he's suggesting flies in the face of conventional notions about the technological sophistication of the ancients, but then, so do the very edifices that they've cleverly designed to last until now. Far from trying to shroud these ancient sites with an air of mystery, Hancock is trying to unravel some of their secrets by using hard science combined with a knowledge of religious syntax to get at the real significance of the message left by the builders. It now seems that there was indeed a strong reason for making sites that could not be destroyed by the gradual or even the sudden ravages of history.
I won't spoil the message part for you, but suffice to say that if Hancock is correct in his hypotheses, modern civilization could learn some things of great relevance from the ancients.
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90 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderfully Photographed Survey of Man's Spiritual Past, October 8, 1999
This review is from: Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization (Hardcover)
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.
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