Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries, Brian Haughton [books you need to read .TXT] 📗

HIDDEN HISTORY

LOST

CIVILILATTONS,

SECRET

KNOWLEDGE,

AND

ANCIENT

MYSTERIES

Brian HaughLon

or my mum and dad

Acknowledgments

For help with photographs, I would like to thank Dr. Erich Brenner of the University of Innsbruck, David Hatcher Childress, Carlos A. GomezGallo, Julie Gardiner of Wessex Archaeology, Martin Gray of Sacred Sites, John Griffiths, Paul Haughton, Thanassis Vembos, and Rien van de Weygaert. Many thanks also to Frank Joseph for providing a wonderfully erudite Foreword while going through the traumatizing experience of moving house. Special thanks go to Michael Pye at New Page, and my ever helpful agent Lisa Hagen of Paraview. Finally, I would not have been able to write this book without the encouragement and support of my wife, Dr. A. Siokou, who also read the manuscript.

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Contents

Foreword ................................................... 7

Introduction ................................................ 11

Part I: Mysterious Places ...................................... 13

The Lost Land of Atlantis 15

America's Stonehenge: The Puzzle of Mystery Hill 20

Petra: The Mysterious City of Rock 24

The Silbury Hill Enigma 29

Troy: The Myth of the Lost City 34

Chichen Itza: City of the Maya 39

The Sphinx: An Archetypal Riddle 44

The Knossos Labyrinth and the Myth of the Minotaur 49

The Stone Sentinels of Easter Island 54

The Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria 58

Stonehenge: Cult Center of the Ancestors 63

El Dorado: The Search for the Lost City of Gold 69

The Lost City of Helike 74

The Grand Canyon: Hidden Egyptian Treasure? 79

Newgrange: Observatory, Temple, or Tomb? 83

Machu Picchu: Lost City of the Incas 88

The Library of Alexandria 93

The Great Pyramid: An Enigma in the Desert 98

Part II: Unexplained Artifacts .................................. 103

The Nazca Lines 105

The Piri Reis Map 109

The Unsolved Puzzle of the Phaistos Disc 113

The Shroud of Turin 117

The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica 121

Talos: An Ancient Greek Robot? 125

The Baghdad Battery 129

The Ancient Hill Figures of England 133

The Coso Artifact 138

The Nebra Sky Disc 142

Noah's Ark and the Great Flood 146

The Mayan Calendar 151

The Antikythera Mechanism: An Ancient Computer? 155

Ancient Aircraft 161

The Dead Sea Scrolls 166

The Crystal Skull of Doom 171

The Voynich Manuscript 176

Part III: Enigmatic People ..................................... 181

The Bog Bodies of Northern Europe 183

The Mysterious Life and Death of Tutankhamun 188

The Real Robin Hood 192

The Amazons: Warrior Women at the Edge of Civilization 197

The Mystery of the Ice Man 202

The History and Myth of the Knights Templar 207

The Prehistoric Puzzle of the Floresians 212

The Magi and the Star of Bethlehem 217

The Druids 221

The Queen of Sheba 226

The Mystery of the Tarim Mummies 230

The Strange Tale of the Green Children 234

Apollonius of Tyana: Ancient Wonder Worker 239

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table 244

Part IV. Some Further Mysteries to Ponder ........................ 249

Mysterious Places 251

Unexplained Artifacts 253

Enigmatic People 255

Further Information ......................................... 257

Index .................................................... 26J

About the Author ........................................... 211

Foreword

By Frank Joseph

In response to popular dissatisfaction with mainstream scholars' often inadequate explanations of the world we live in, publishers are fielding a growing number of books posing alternative considerations to prevailing orthodoxy. In confronting official paradigms, their unconventional authors are typically provocative, but usually more imaginative than credible. Brian Haughton differs from his colleagues, because he strives for an accord between evidence accumulated by university-trained scientists and fresh theories postulated by avocational investigators. The result is Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries. It is a balance of fact and theory written with the old integrity of Roman writers, such as Livy and Cicero, who clearly set out the facts and provided leading interpretations, but invited us to come to our own conclusions. Haughton's readers will find themselves engaged in the same kind of participation that challenges their imagination by expanding it. The cause is self-evident: His is a truly encyclopedic work, dealing with 49 historical enigmas from around the globe. His work spans the deep antiquity of Britain's Stonehenge and Egypt's Great Pyramid to current discoveries

about the Shroud of Turin and the Dead Sea Scrolls. As such, Hidden History is at once a superb introduction to these mysteries for anyone unacquainted with them, as well as a sourcebook eclectic investigators will find indispensable.

Haughton begins with Atlantis, widely considered the greatest enigma of all (and among the most controversial). Merely presenting thumbnail sketches of all the theories used to describe it would require a full-length book in itself. But Haughton deftly sorts out the leading arguments for and against the existence and location of Plato's "lost continent," leaving us less bewildered by the plethora of contending opinions than intrigued by the possibilities for a 21st century discovery. Hidden History does not neglect Atlantis's Pacific counterpart, especially in view of recent discoveries made around the Japanese islands. Under the clear waters of Yonaguni, scuba divers recently found a pyramidal structure sitting nearly a hundred feet below the surface. Could this artificial-looking formation of massive stone be the result of a natural process? Or is it the remains of the lost civilization of Lemuria, also known as Mu, mentioned in the Hindu monastery records of Burma and India?

The inhabitants of both Atlantis and Lemuria were said to have possessed a technology far ahead of the times in which they lived, and Haughton presents physical evidence suggesting the former existence of scientific advances at odds with the period of their invention and use. A foremost specimen includes the so-called Baghdad Battery powered by citrus juices to electro-plate statuettes with gold. Although a simple device, it nonetheless suggests that at least the fundamentals of electricity were understood and applied more than 2,000 years before Thomas Edison switched on the first electric light bulb. Haughton's comparison of the Mayan Calendar with Germany's Nebra Disc and the Antikythera Mechanism (dredged up from the bottom of the Aegean Sea), proves that the ancients were computer literate. The Mayan Calendar is well-known for its ominous prediction of global change (scheduled to occur on the winter solstice of 2012), and Haughton explains in clear language the incredibly high-level mathematics that went