Here are 100 books that The Lost Land of Lemuria fans have personally recommended if you like
The Lost Land of Lemuria.
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Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
One of the first books written about scientific discoveries of Cities in the Sea was this by Nic Flemming and it is a great read. Impassioned, exciting, personal, you cannot fail to be swept along as the author describes his discovery of Pavlopetri, still acknowledged as the world’s earliest-known underwater city. Written before the world knew about climate change, this book is not in any sense forward-looking but rather a celebration of the discovery of once-inhabited undersea places that lit the way ahead for a whole generation of people curious about human pasts.
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Ever since deep-sea fishing vessels started to bring up artifacts and the bones of extinct land animals from the floor of the North Sea (UK), there has been a suspicion that a once-inhabited submerged land lay there. Named Doggerland, this land has now been investigated in more detail than any other. We know how people lived there, what the topography and vegetation were like, what animals roamed there. And we know that about 8000 years ago, Doggerland – the last land link between the British Isles and the rest of Europe – became submerged. A gripping and hugely compelling account.
This excellent book, which deserves a wide readership, reports on the work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project, which has been researching the fascinating lost landscape of Doggerland which until the end of the last Ice Age connected Britain to the continent in the North Sea area. It aims to make the findings available to a general readership, and show just how impressive they have been, with nearly 23,000km2 mapped. The techniques used to reconstruct the landscape are explained, and conclusions and speculation about the climate and vegetation of the area in the Mesolithic offered. It also tells the story…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
In the late 1990s when this book was published, it seems no scientist had ever given serious thought to the consequences for human evolution of the submergence of Sundaland in the aftermath of the last ice age. There is compelling scientific evidence, compiled and analyzed here in compendious detail, that Sundaland was a heartland of human innovation and that its drowning may have led to the spread of rice agriculture, pottery making, and even tales of lands being ‘fished up’ (as by the Pacific demigod Maui). An astonishing read that today I still regard as largely credible.
At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half-sunken continent is the Sunda shelf of Sundaland. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from Creation stories, myths and…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Written in the 1950s by a museum curator-geologist, Sunken Cities is one of the earliest expositions of ‘myth and legend’ and their plausible geological meanings. The author marries his deep knowledge of Welsh traditions about submerged places with contemporary geological understandings. Of course, geology was transformed the following decade but North’s book remains insightful and grounded in ways that many more recent accounts are not. If I lived in Wales, I would be off every weekend with it in hand!
I have always been interested in ancient civilizations and have studied extensively from Egypt to Hebrew. One of the great mysteries is why all of our ancestors seem to be so concerned with powerful gods from other realms. Do such other realms exist? Did the ancients experience physical or spiritual phenomena? It remains a great mystery. However, as I read the ancient stories it became clear that perhaps our normal ways of interpreting their own experiences may not be entirely accurate. Perhaps they deserve another reading with a fresh set of eyes.
Zecharia Sitchin makes a lot of crazy-sounding claims. He talks about faraway planets and NASA-style rocketry. He doesn't provide references, and he doesn't make convincing logical arguments. Nevertheless millions of people believe his claims. My own research shows that most of Sitchin's conclusions are pretty unfounded—but, there is a thread of evidence within the ancient literature that seems to indicate that at least some of Sitchin's core ideas might be at least partly correct.
Over the years, startling evidence has been unearthed, challenging established notions of the origins of Earth and life on it, and suggesting the existence of a superior race of beings who once inhabited our world. The product of thirty years of intensive research, The 12th Planetis the first book in Zecharia Sitchin's prophetic Earth Chroniclesseries--a revolutionary body of work that offers indisputable documentary proof of humanity's extraterrestrial forefathers. Travelers from the stars, they arrived eons ago, and planted the genetic seed that would ultimately blossom into a remarkable species...called Man. The 12th Planetbrings to life the Sumerian civilization, presenting millennia-old…
William Ophuls served as a Foreign Service Officer in Washington, Abidjan, and Tokyo before receiving a PhD in political science from Yale University in 1973. His Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity published in 1977 laid bare the ecological, social, and political challenges confronting modern industrial civilization. It was honored by the Kammerer and Sprout awards. After teaching briefly at Northwestern University, he became an independent scholar and author. He has since published a number of works extending and deepening his original argument, most prominently Requiem for Modern Politics in 1997, Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology in 2011, and Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail in 2013.
Tainter makes a powerful and almost irrefutable case for complexity as the key to understanding both the rise and the fall of civilizations. In essence, complexity builds and builds until it is no longer manageable, so collapse ensues. That Tainter does not sufficiently appreciate the role that ecological limits, physical constraints, moral decline, and practical bungling can also play in the process does not detract from the power and utility of his argument. For these latter factors, see my own Immoderate Greatness.
Any explanation of political collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all complex societies in both the present and future. Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.
I've been fond of the Homeric poems since my youth. I followed classical studies in the high here in Rome, so I studied Latin and Greek before graduating in nuclear engineering. Then, in addition to my professional activity, I've devoted myself to the study of The Iliad and the Odyssey, with their huge contradictions between geography and their traditional Mediterranean setting. The book I published on this topic was translated and published into eight foreign languages (as The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales), and has given rise to many scientific discussions. I also published The Mysteries of the Megalithic Civilization, a Bestseller here in Italy.
Based on the "radiocarbon revolution" as a method of dating archaeological finds, the great English archaeologist Sir Colin Renfrew redraws the map of the dawn of civilization in the Mediterranean basin and in Europe. The result is a new framework, in which the idea of a single cradle, located between Egypt and the Middle East, from which civilization would have spread to the rest of Europe, is replaced by the identification of different places where it started, scattered throughout the continent.
The refinement of radiocarbon dating using the information form tree-ring counts has raised serious doubts about the accepted theoretical frameowkr of European prehistory. Monuments in Central and Western Europe have proved to be considerably older than their supposed Near-Eastern forerunners, and the record must be almost completely rewritten in the light of these new dates. Before Civilsation is a preliminary attempt to do this with the help of analogies from more recent and well-documented primitive societies. The more glaring inconsistencies in the old theory are re-examined and Professor Renfrew shows convincingly how the baffling monuments of prehistoric Europe, like Stonehenge,…
There’s a surging Western school of thought which claims that there’s no Asia. Really? Just look at my personal cultural connections with all corners of Asia. As a Hindu Sindhi Singaporean, I can relate directly to India and Southeast Asia, which has an Indic base. My name, “Mahbubani”, has Arabic/Persian roots. “Mahbub” means “beloved”. My mother took me to Buddhist temples when I was a boy, too, giving me an intimate connection with China, Japan, and Korea. In short, Asia is intimately connected. The goal of my ten books has been to give voice to the larger Asian story in a world imprisoned by Western perspectives.
As the great Asian renaissance gathers momentum in the 21st century, many young Asians will begin to rediscover their own cultures and civilizations, just as the West did in its first cultural renaissance in the 15th century. Few understand classical Indian civilization as well as Amartya Sen does.
Since Asian cultures are associated with despotism and Western cultures with individual liberties, Sen says, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.” Living up to the spirit of the title of his book, Sen demonstrates in this book that he’s an argumentative Indian and Asian. Argumentative Asians will eventually win the argument with the West.
From Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity brings together an illuminating selection of writings on contemporary India.
India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly different convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints.
Out of these conflicting views spring a rich tradition of skeptical argument and cultural achievement which is critically important, argues Amartya Sen, for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the removal of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of sub-continental peace.
I’ve been interested in ancient Egypt ever since I read Asterix and Cleopatra when I was a boy. The hilarious moment of Obelix accidentally knocking off the Sphinx’s nose has always stayed with me in particular. By my early twenties, I was reading authors like Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and Colin Wilson, who showed me that what we think we know about ancient Egypt is not wholly correct. For instance, there’s little evidence that the Great Pyramid’s purpose was to be a tomb and the Sphinx seems to be much older than Egyptologists believe. In 2010, at thirty-four years old, I finally got to visit the wonders of Egypt myself.
Much of the key stuff that’s mentioned in the books above are contained in Heaven’s Mirror by the great Graham Hancock and his wife Santha Faiia. So, the book’s a great place to start if you’re new to all this rethinking ancient Egypt malarkey. Heaven’s Mirror also covers other civilizations like the Mayans and Incas. For me, this book is so special because it contains some absolutely glorious and spellbinding photos of key ancient sites in Egypt, such as Karnak, Dendera, Abydos, and the pyramids of Giza, Dashur, and Saqqara, which I was lucky enough to visit myself and which I wrote about in The Road To Purification.
This is the sequel to the international bestseller, "Fingerprints of the Gods". In very different parts of the world, evidence exists of a common legacy - shared by cultures separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. From Mexico to Iceland, Cambodia to Easter Island, China to Egypt, we are finding a common astronomical wisdom handed down from a time before history, a time perhaps before the 'Great Flood'. This book addresses a common wisdom from a lost civilisation which might hold the key to our own identity on earth. "Heaven's Mirror" is a personal quest for the answer - the…
As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
You don’t find the right book; sometimes, it finds you.
I stumbled upon a Graham Hancock lecture in the early 1990s, and he came across as reasonable, sincere, well-researched, and highly intelligent. Reading his books–which occupy the realm between history, travelogue, and science–inspired me to visit South America and Ethiopia. They also inspired me to keep an open mind and chase new ideas.
Decades later, with a hit Netflix series under his belt, Hancock gets a lot of flak for his theories of alternative archeology and history, but his popular books continue to challenge popular wisdom while providing curious readers a literary ticket to exotic destinations.
With over 5 million copies sold worldwide of Fingerprints of the Gods, its New York Times bestselling sequel Magicians of the Gods brings new evidence supporting Hancock's thesis that a global cataclysm wiped out a great global civilization.
On the heels of the very successful hardcover edition, Hancock returns with this paperback version including three new chapters brimming with recent reporting of fresh scientific advances (ranging from DNA to astrophysics) that substantially support his case.
Twenty years ago, Graham Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods an astonishing, deeply controversial investigation of the mysteries of and the evidence for Earth's lost…
