Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia

Book Overview

Hancock continues the quest begun in the bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods, revealing that the cultures thought to be ancient were, in fact, heirs to a far older forgotten civilization. 250 color photos.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609804774
• ISBN13: 9780609804773
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.2" x 1.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Reading it now. The photography is great!

this is a serious archeology book about looking for the roots of civilization on the planet.

See Monuments To Life first, then buy all his tapes

To really appreciate all of Mr. Hancock's materials, I recommend viewing the tape Monuments to Life, which is a lecture he gave at Leeds in 1996. In this tape he presents a wide range of his views, and shows his great insights to the ancient clues that surround us here on earth.One of Mr. Hancock's greatest assets is his contempt for the "stories" we have been told as facts through the years, and his replacement of far more plausible explanations.I would have to rate Mr. Handcock as a guide in the wilderness, and his insights provide a path to a far more acceptable presentation of the ancient world than any other single speaker.While I would assume they don't welcome him in Egypt, I welcome him with open arms, and mind, because he looks and reports what he finds, not what he feels will be accepted.NOTE: The next time you see pyramids with steps, don't think of them as being used to go up, think of them as being used to go down, and see if the picture makes more sense...

A new theory of Ancient Civilization which merits attention

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.

Thought Provoking Theory

Last September I went to England with my British husband to visit his family on the Isle of Wight, after which we rented a car and proceeded on a 1600 mile journey through the ruins of castles, abbeys, and ancient stone circles and henges. What sparked my interest the most was the great antiquity and severe lack of knowledge that surrounded all of the stone circles and other ancient henged sites that we were lucky enough to come across on my "search for the past". When we came back to America I started to do some research on the many prehistoric sites in England that I was privy to see, via the web, books, television, anything I could get my hands on, something to let me know how or why these great megalithic stone circles and henged structures came into being. It was at that time the Discovery Channel just happened to air the three episodes of Graham Hancock's "Quest for the Lost Civilization". I sat intrigued for three nights straight contemplating the possibility of an ancient civilization that was wiped out via flood or some similar catastrophy. Immediately I felt that Hancock's theory could be correct, and that what I was taught in text-book history class, which I found most boring and often skipped, could be wrong. I then bought the book "Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization". I was thirsty for knowledge and read this book vehemetly, most often concurring to Hancock's opinions that an ancient civiliation could have once existed, and due to some tragedy, most likely a flood, was suddenly wiped out of existance. According to Hancock, the most likely catalyst to the demise of this ancient "mother culture" was a great catistrophic flood that affected the whole of the Earth in the year 10,500 BC, of which there were but a few survivors. This notion is brought together by the fact that several ancient cultures including the Egyptians, Olmecs and hence the Myans, Easter Islanders, Cambodians, etc. all had similar belief systems, similar mythologies, similar architecture, similar astronomical calculations and alignments, which is theorized to come from an even more ancient common source. Being that humanity has been around for hundreds of thousands of years with the same brain capacity as ours today, is it so hard to believe that we never used that brain capacity until just 4000 years ago? Keep an open mind when reading this book, for it just might open it further.

Exceptionally refreshing

This book is a must buy for anyone interested in the topic of ancient civilisations, and archaeo-astronomy. The author's arguments are profound, interesting and and totally understandable to anyone whom may be a new comer to this area of research. His theories and observations on the geodetic positioning of ancient sites around the world is refreshinly new in an area of investigation that I feel was beginning to go stale.The writing is first class, as we have come to expect from Mr Hancock, and this coupled with the many coloured and often breath taking photographs, and simple effective diagrams, make this the best book to date that the author has published. It not only helps the reader to understand the nature of the argument, but gives them an almost personal feel for the topic, as if they are traveling alongside Mr. Hancock and making these discoveries together.

Obligatory reading for anyone who cares about history...

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