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" "Areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow — in fact most of North America and northern Europe — were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometers thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today — on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) — were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations.
Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface — an area of around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles — has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age. That is roughly the equivalent to the combined areas of the United States and the whole of South America. It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined.
What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also — because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes — that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth's surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometers that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth's useful and habitable landspace at that time.
Graham Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer who promotes pseudoarchaeological and other pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. He has been the subject of the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022).
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It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of "writings on stones from before the flood," turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt.
Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]'s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the "Early Primeval Age of the Gods" — and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the "Homeland of the Primeval Ones," in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster — a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...] — overtook this island, where "the earliest mansions of the gods" had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to "wander" the world.
[...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled "channel" surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones — a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as "Poseidon," was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection.
Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timae
Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter