Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC or earlier. Like Bauval’s astronomical data, the evidence had always been available but had failed to attract the attention of established Egyptologists. The man responsible for bringing it before the public now was the American scholar, John Anthony West, who argued that the specialists had missed it – not because they had failed to find it, but because they had found it and had failed to interpret it properly.9 West’s evidence focused on certain key structures, notably the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza and, much farther south, the mysterious Osireion at Abydos. He argued that these desert monuments showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in sufficient quantities during the damp ‘pluvial’ period that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC.10 The implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of ‘precipitation induced’ weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and other associated structures were built before 10,000 BC.