Fingerprints of the Gods

In Fingerprints of the Gods Graham Hancock embarks on a worldwide quest to put together the pieces of a vast and mysterious jigsaw-puzzle of mankind's prehistory. In ancient ruins as far apart as Egypt's Great Sphinx, the strange Andean temples at Tiahuanaco and Mexico's awe-inspiring Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, he reveals not only the clear fingerprints of an unknown people who flourished during the last ice age, but also disquieting signs of high intelligence, technological sophistication and details scientific knowledge of the cosmos aeons before any previous known civilisation.

Through the memory-banks of universal myth and legend - which store much of our species' prehistoric records - Hancock uncovers traces of a precise scientific language, encoding the results of thousands of years of accurate astronomical observations. He studies ancient maps, incorporating spherical trigonometry, showing how the earth would have looked 12,000 years ago - and with levels of accuracy not achieved by our own cartographers until the nineteenth century. Finally, he uses the most up-to-date techniques of geology and astronomy to show that the conventionally accepted dating of a number of intriguing archaeological sites around the world cannot possible be correct and that they must be considered far, far older than was previously thought.

Hancock's extraordinary findings form the core of what could be an intellectual revolution, a dramatic and irreversible change in the way that we understand our past - and thus ourselves.

But there is something more, a warning maybe. Some of the most disturbing issues raised by Fingerprints of the Gods concern the type and extent of planetary catastrophe that would have had to occur in order to obliterate almost all traces of a large civilisation. The evidence for such a catastrophe, and indeed for more than one of them, is surprisingly strong. [Click here for more catastrophism sources]

Publishing details

Published 1995 by William Heinemann Ltd
Hardback: ISBN 0 434 31336 X. Paperback: 0 434 00179 1

Book Contents

Part I Introduction: The Mystery of the Maps
1. A Map of Hidden Places
2. Rivers in the Southern Continent
3. Fingerprints of a Lost Science

Part II Foam of the Sea: Peru and Bolivia
4. Flight of the Condor
5. The Inca Trail to the Past
6. He Came in a Time of Chaos.
7. Where There Giants Then?
8. The Lake at the Roof of the World
9. Once and Future King
10. The City at the Gate of the Sun
11. Intimations of Antiquity
12. The End of the Viracochas

Part III Plumed Serpent: Central America
13. Blood and Time at the End of the World
14. People of the Serpent
15. Mexican Babel
16. Serpent Sanctuary
17. The Olmec Enigma
18. Conspicuous Strangers
19. Adventures in the Underworld, Journeys to the Stars
20. Children of the First Men
21. A Computer for Calculating the End of the World
22. City of the Gods
23. The Sun and the Moon and the Way of the Dead

Part IV The Mystery of Myths: 1. A Species with Amnesia
24. Echoes of Our Dreams
25. The Many Masks of the Apocalypse
26. A Species Born in the Earth's Long Winter
27. The Face of the Earth was Darkened and a Black Rain Began to Fall

Part V The Mystery of Myths: 2. The Precessional Code
28. The Machinery of Heaven
29. The First Crack in an Ancient Code
30. The Cosmic Tree and the Mill of the Gods
31. The Osiris Numbers
32. Speaking to the unborn

Part VI The Giza Invitation: Egypt 1
33. Cardinal Points
34. Mansion of Eternity
35. Tombs and Tombs Only?
36. Anomalies
37. Made by Some God
38. Interactive Three-Dimensional Game
39. Place of the Beginning

Part VII Lord of Eternity: Egypt 2
40. Are There Any Secrets Left in Egypt?
41. City of the Sun, Chamber of the Jackal
42. Anachronisms and Enigmas
43. Gods of the First Time
45. The Works of Men and Gods
46. The Eleventh Millenium BC
47. Sphinx
48. Earth Measures
49. The Power of the Thing

Part VIII Conclusion: Where's the Body?
50. Not a Needle in a Haystack?
51. The Hammer and the Pendulum
52. Like a Thief in the Night

References
Selected Bibliography
Index.