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Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

Book by Graham Hancock · 14 quotes · Ice Age Civilizations, Lost Civilizations, Deep Human History

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Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Quotes

“If we accept the generally agreed date of between AD 350 and 550 for the end of the -- at least semi-historical -- 'Third Sangam', then this gives us a fixed reference point on which to anchor the chronology of the myth [...]. The date of 9600 BC for the formation of the First Sangam (or 9800 BC or 9400 BC for that matter) coincides closely enough with Plato's date for the inundation of Atlantis -- also 9600 BC -- to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. And the question continues to be this: how could Plato less than 2500 years ago, or Nakirar less than 1500 years ago, have managed by chance to select the epoch of 9600 BC in which to set, on the one hand, the sinking under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean of the great antediluvian civilization of Atlantis and, on the other, the foundation of the First Sangam in Kumari Kandam -- a doomed Indian Ocean landmass that was itself destined to be swallowed by the sea? If Plato and Nakirar were pure 'fabulists' working independently of any real tradition or real events, then isn't it much more likely that they would have chosen different imaginary epochs in which to set their flood stories? Why didn't they choose 20,000 or 30,000 years ago -- or even 300,000 years ago, or three million years ago -- instead of the tenth millennium BC? And was it just luck that this slot turns out to have been in the midst of the meltdown of the last Ice Age -- the only episode of truly global flooding to have hit the earth in the last 125,000 years?”

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“The fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with 'courses of masonry' plainly visible -- surely a momentous finding 5 kilometers from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted bear by on the sea-bed -- and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth -- the NIO's discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.”

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“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.”

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“In 1988 the German oceanographer Hartmut Heinrich was the first to come up with the firm geological evidence for such a cataclysmic 'iceberg-calving' process during the last Ice Age. By examining deep-sea drill cores sampled at various points across the North Atlantic he demonstrated the existence of widely dispersed layers of 'ice-rafted detritus' -- millions of tonnes of rocks and rocky debris that had once stood on land, that had been clawed up by the ice-sheets and that had ultimately been carried out to sea frozen into huge icebergs: 'As they melted they released rock debris that was dropped into the fine-grained sediments of the ocean floor. Much of this ice-rafted debris consists of limestones similar to those exposed over large areas of eastern Canada today. The Heinrich layers as they have become known, extend 3000 kilometers across the North Atlantic, almost reaching Ireland.' The Heinrich layers record at least six separate discharges of 'stupendous flotillas of ice-bergs' into the North Atlantic -- discharges that are now known, obviously enough, as 'Heinrich Events' and that are thought to have unfolded in concentrated bursts of activity that may, in each case, have lasted less than a century. Because of the progressive thickening of the Heinrich layers towards the western side of the Atlantic and the continuation of this trend into the Labrador Sea in the direction of Hudson Bay, it is obvious to geologists that 'much of the floating ice was sourced from the Laurentide ice-sheet'. However, other debris has been found intermingled in some Heinrich layers that 'could only have come from separate ice-sheets covering not only Canada, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia'. Likewise, research into southern hemisphere ice-caps in the Andes and New Zealand shows that these too 'grew and then collapsed synchronously with the ice-rafting pulses recorded in the North Atlantic'. The implication [...] is that some 'global rather than regional forcing of climate change' must have been at work.”

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“Around 12,800 years ago, it was as though an enchantment of ice had gripped the earth. In many areas that had been approaching terminal meltdown full glacial conditions were restored with breathtaking rapidity and all the gains that had been made since the LGM were simply stripped away: 'Temperatures ... fell back on the order of 8-15 degrees centigrade ... with half this brutal decline possibly occurring within decades. The Polar Front in the North Atlantic redescended to the level of Cabo Finisterre in northwest Spain and glaciers readvanced in the high mountain chains. With respect to temperature the setback to full glacial conditions was nearly complete ...' For human populations at the time, in many except the most accidentally favoured parts of the world, the sudden and inexplicable plunge into severe cold and aridity must have been devastating. And in the Karakoram-Himalayan region, as in other glaciated areas, it is very likely that it was accompanied by a significant readvance of the ice-cap that previously had been in recession for some 7000 years.”

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“We know from Glenn Milne's inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form as an archipelago of three islands (with little Comino in between) until around 11,000 years ago. Accordingly, if the medieval tradition of Malta and Gozo as one big island is not a complete invention -- and why should it be? -- then, 'fantastic' though it may seem, it somehow preserves a memory of Malta as it appeared more than 11,000 years ago. It is well known that most medieval mapmakers were only copyists reproducing older maps and [...] I believe we cannot exclude the possibility that the single large island called Gaulometin of Galonia leta that has somehow survived on certain medieval maps may indeed be a representation of Malta in a much earlier time. A mental leap is required in order even to consider such a possibility. It is necessary to set aside all preconceptions about the past, and all unexamined notions of how societies evolve. Above all, we have to rid ourselves of the ingrained conviction that (despite some setbacks) the basic story of human civilization has been steadily and reassuringly onwards and upwards from the very beginning. It may not have been so. There may be tremendous gaps, of which we are blissfully unaware, in the evidence presently available to us concerning the origins and progress of civilization. In particular, there has been no sustained or serious search for very ancient underwater ruins along the millions of square kilometres of continental shelves flooded at the end of the Ice Age. So it is possible, and within the bounds of reason, that a civilization of some sort might have flourished during the closing millennia of the Ice Age and might not yet have been detected by archaeologists. A civilization not necessarily at all like our own but still advanced enough to have mastered complex skills such as seafaring and navigation (that do not call for a large material or industrial base) and to have left behind memories of the world as it looked before the flood and at various stages during the rising of the seas. The sort of civilization, perhaps, that would have built with megaliths and aligned them with navigational precision to the path of the sun. Maybe even a civilization that measured the earth, mapped it and netted it with a latitude and longitude grid. Until such a lost civilization has been entirely ruled out -- and we are far from that -- it is rational to keep our minds open to the possibility, however extraordinary it may seem, that certain ancient maps have indeed carried down to us broken images of the antediluvian world.”

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“The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away all traces of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the Vedas can be repromulgated for future mankind after each pralaya the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them -- the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts possessed of unerring memories and supernatural powers, practitioners of yoga, performers of the ancient rituals and sacrifices, ascetics, spiritual visionaries, vigilant in the battle against evil, great teachers, knowledgeable beyond all imagining, who reincarnate from age to age as the guides of civilization and the guardians of cosmic justice.”

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“We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms -- floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions -- all occurring at the same time.”

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“The suspicion that certain ancient authorities possessed good knowledge of the real shape of the Atlantic and its islands, and of the lands on both sides of it, must also arise from any objective reading of Plato's world-famous account of Atlantis. [...], this story is set around 11,600 years ago -- a date that coincides with a peak episode of global flooding at the end of the Ice Age. The story tells us that 'the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished', that this took place in 'a single dreadful day and night' and that the event was accompanied by earthquakes and floods that were experienced as far away as the eastern Mediterranean. But of more immediate interest to us here is what Plato has to say about the geographical situation in the Atlantic immediately before the flood that destroyed Atlantis: 'In those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait [the Strait of Gibraltar] which you [the Greeks] call the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For the sea within the strait we are talking about [i.e. the Mediterranean] is like a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent ... On this land of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings who ruled the whole island; and many other islands as well, and parts of the continent ...' Whether or not one believes than an island called Atlantis ever existed in the Atlantic Ocean, Plato's clear references to an 'opposite continent' on the far side of it are geographical knowledge out of place in time. It is hard to read in these references anything other than an allusion to the Americas, and yet historians assure us that the Americas were unknown in Plato's time and remained 'undiscovered' (except for a few inconsequential Viking voyages) until Colombus in 1492.”

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“I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically they tell a story of a warning from the gods, the sound of thunder in the sky, terrifying earthquakes, the pouring down of a wall of water which engulfs mankind, and the survival of a remnant who had either fled to mountain tops or who floated to safety on some sort of improvised vessel. To provide just one example (from the Ami tribe of central Taiwan), we hear how the four gods of the sea conspired with two gods of the land, Kabitt and Aka, to destroy mankind. The gods of the sea warned Kabitt and Aka: 'In five days when the round moon appears, the sea will make a booming sound: then escape to a mountain where there are stars.' Kabitt and Aka heeded the warning immediately and fled to the mountain and 'when they reached the summit, the sea suddenly began to make the sound and rose higher and higher'. All the lowland settlements were inundated but two children, Sura and Nakao, were not drowned: 'For when the flood overtook them, they embarked in a wooden mortar, which chanced to be lying in the yard of their house, and in that frail vessel they floated safely to the Ragasan mountain.' So here, handed down since time immemorial by Taiwanese headhunters, we have the essence of the story of Noah's Ark, which is also the story of Manu and the story of Zisudra and (with astonishingly minor variations) the story of all the deluge escapees and survivors in all the world. At some point a real investigation should be mounted into why it is that furious tribes of archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists continue to describe the similarities amongst these myths of earth-destroying floods as coincidental, rooted in exaggeration, etc., and thus irrelevant as historical testimony. This is contrary to reason when we know that over a period of roughly 10,000 years between 17,000 and 7000 years ago more than 25 million square kilometres of the earth's surface were inundated. The flood epoch was a reality and in my opinion, since our ancestors went through it, it is not surprising that they told stories and bequeathed to us their shared memories of it. As well as continuing to unveil it through sciences like inundation mapping and palaeo-climatology, therefore, I suggest that if we want to learn what the world was really like during the meltdown we should LISTEN TO THE MYTHS.”

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“Having a shared common source, or deriving from different but closely similar sources, provides a simple explanation for why the Cantino and Reinal maps are so much alike in almost all respects and also, crucially, why both contain similar mistakes. As I was already aware from Sharif Sakr's first report [...] these mistakes include the absence of the Kathiawar peninsula with its characteristic Gulfs of Kutch and Cambay; a distinct bulge in the north-west corner of India; enlargement of many small island groups, and a south-westerly orientation (with what Sharif describes as 'distinct lips') of the southern tip of India. In his e-mail of 23 February 2001 he then makes the crucial observation that: 'While these deviations are all errors relative to a modern map of India, they in fact match up extremely well with Glenn Milne's map of India 21,300 years ago at LGM. This inundation map shows a large indent at the mouth of the Indus, a bulge obscuring completely the Kathiawar peninsula, enlarged Lakshadweep and Maldives islands, and, most surprisingly, a SW-pointing 'mouth' shape at India's southern tip that is virtually identical to that shown by Reinal.' It seems to me that these correlations, and the others that Sharif reported [...], are obvious, striking and speak for themselves. The only questions that need to be asked about them are: (1) do they result from the workings of coincidence? Or (2) are they there because the source maps for Cantino and Reinal were originally drawn at the end of the Ice Age -- perhaps not as far back as the LGM but certainly before the final inundation of the Gulfs of Kutch and Cambay which created the Kathiawar peninsula around 7700 years ago?”

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“On 16 January 2002 India's Minister of Science and Technology released the first results of carbon-dating of the artefacts from the flooded cities of the Gulf of Cambay. The results date the artifacts to 9500 years ago -- 5000 years older than any city so far recognized by archaeologists.”

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“The Red Hill was referred to in the most ancient surviving work of Tamil literature, the Tolkappiyam, which itself makes reference to an even earlier work now lost to history which in turn had supposedly been part of a library of archaic texts, all now also vanished, the compilation of which was said to have begun more than 10,000 years previously. This had been the library of the legendary First Sangam -- or 'Academy' -- of the lost Tamil civilization of Kumari Kandam, swallowed up, as Captain Narayan put it, 'by a major eruption of the sea'.”

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