It's not unreasonable [...] to suppose that some kind of cosmic "sky-ground" religion lay behind the alignments to the solstices and the equinoxes at… - Graham Hancock

I knew that the first Europeans to arrive in Ethiopia had addressed the monarchs of that country as 'Prester John.' This use of the sacred relic as a war palladium – and as an effective one at that – was not, according to Archpriest Solomon [Gabre Selassie, Head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Britain], just something that had happened in Ethiopia's distant past. On the contrary: 'As recently as 1896 when the King of Kings Menelik the Second fought against the Italian aggressors at the battle of Adowa in Tigray region, the priests carried the Ark of the Covenant into the field to confront the invaders. As a result of this, Menelik was very victorious and returned to Addis Abada in great honour.'

I re-read this part of the reply with considerable interest because I knew that Menelik II had indeed been 'very victorious' in 1896. In that year, under the command of General Baratieri, 17,700 Italian troops equipped with heavy artillery and the latest weapons had marched up into the Abyssinian highlands from the Eritrean coastal strip intent on colonizing the whole country. Menelik's forces, though ill prepared and less well armed, had met them at Adowa on the morning of 1 March, winning in less than six hours what one historian had subsequently described as 'the most notable victory of an African over a European army since the time of Hannibal.' In a similar tone, the London Spectator of 7 March 1896 commented: 'The Italians have suffered a great disaster… greater than has ever occurred to white men in Africa.

It was Cesare Emiliani who first drew serious attention to the possibility of post-glacial superfloods. In a paper published in Science magazine in 1975, he and a group of colleagues presented startling evidence from deep-sea cores from the north-eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence revealed 'a 2.4 per cent isotopic anomaly between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago', which the authors correctly interpreted as having been caused by 'the occurrence of major flooding of ice meltwater into the Gulf of Mexico ... centring at about 11,600 years before the present'.

Pope had made it illegal across large parts of Europe for lay persons to possess any of the books of the Old and New Testament "with the exception of the Psalter, the Breviary and the Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin."