Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries

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