The best books on the hi-tech world of our distant ancestors

I was well on with my book before I discovered Christopher Dunn, an English Aerospace engineer working in America. I give Dunn credibility because, as an engineer, he has got his hands dirty by physically checking out most of what I am talking about. This book is a very detailed, well-illustrated, look at the engineering aspect of the ancient world. His findings prove conclusively that many items found in Egypt can only have been made using technology that is only just being developed today. 

Flinders Petrie was the first, and remains, the greatest of all those who have studied Giza. Over many years he physically measured and surveyed the entire Giza site. It is those mathematical results that prove the complex was put there as a message for generations to come, rather than the more favoured ideas of burial complexes for obscure kings. He identifies tiny details, that I too identified on a visit to the Cairo museum, that just could not be done. The necessary lasers suitable are only just being developed over 100 years later.

Hapgood was a lecturer who used the bright young minds of some of his graduate students to make a detailed study of a pre-Columbian map drawn in 1513 by a Turkish Admiral by the name of Pirie Re’is. Rei’is had drawn his map using source maps made by Alexander the Great and even earlier peoples. It is of the Atlantic showing the Americas correctly drawn and placed. There is an ice-free Antarctica where the correct outline of the coast of Queen Maude land is less than 7 miles out of place. Hapgood’s similar analysis of other maps shows that there had been a global civilization on this planet sometime in the past.

Corless spent his life trawling through old magazines and scientific journals and recording articles about ancient artefacts that baffled the author at the time. He makes no comment on the articles, some of which reveal amazing discoveries. For example, the one about an iron cup that was found in a coal mine in Oklahoma. The coal had formed around it some 300m years ago and yet there it was—man-made but by whom. He outlines many other baffling discoveries as described in articles going back to the 19th century.

From a secular point of view, and deliberately ignoring all religious content, the Holy Bible is the only contemporaneous account of the very ancient world. Add the omitted Book of Enoch, which sits in the Bodleian, and you get a remarkable account of our communal past. No one knows just how far back we must go when discussing Genesis but within that chapter lie some very interesting thoughts on the possible answer to all the problems outlined above. Enoch, especially, describes in great detail what might have happened and, if proven to be correct, would alter our complete understanding of our origins. A very good read.