Gary Pollard
I love ancient history. The events of the New Testament were the most important in all of history, so I do not mean to cheapen their significance in any way. The period of time that interests me the most is from roughly ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and before (all of the world, too, not just Egypt). A lot of writers have many and varying opinions about these eras, but I’ve come to the conclusion that we simply know very, very little about the life and times of the ancient world. The further back we go, the more interesting it gets. This is probably because mystery is fascinating!
When it comes to the Antediluvian period (a catch-all term for anything that happened prior to the first destruction of the previous age), it’s most fascinating of all. It seems to me there are four main camps of interpretation concerning deep antiquity:
- The Mainstream
- The Alternative (West, Hancock, etc.)
- The Really Alternative (Talbot, Cochrane, Velikovsky, etc.)
- The Weird Alternative (ancient alien crowd)
One does not have to buy their theories hook, line, and sinker to gain some kind of value from each major camp (well, except for that last one). I know faithful, devout Christians who find themselves more or less in at least one of these camps. I’ve read as much of the first three camps’ work as I could get my hands on over the last several years — and the primary sources they base their work on. I’m fallible and subject to bias in ways I may well be blind to, so this is a subjective judgment: none of them can conclusively prove their assertions.
So I’ll give you my opinion in a few sentences — and I can’t stress enough that opinion is all it is. No one asked for it, and it isn’t worth much. But I can see the writing on the wall, and know that the mainstream’s days are numbered, and that vacuum will be filled by one of the other three major alternatives.
Mainstream
To be transparent, this is my least favorite category. At least the ancient alien types, as far-fetched as their ideas are, are intellectually honest about what remains unknown or inadequately accounted for. The mainstream camp posits a linear model of civilization’s development, is rigidly uniformitarian (and openly hostile to the possibility of global cataclysms in recent millennia), and resorts to censorship and dirty tricks when it comes to their opponents. I have no love for gatekeepers or bullies. Despite the glaring mysteries surrounding ancient architecture and some ancient writings, the mainstream camp presents themselves as having figured it all out, with just some tweaks and a couple extra archaeological finds needed to wrap it all up with a bow. One can achieve machine-age precision in megalithic architecture with sand, trying hard, and dolerite pounding stones, apparently. Since the views of the mainstream are readily available and monopolize educational materials, I have merely highlighted two or three of the major flaws in this model.
Alternative
Since the 1980s or so, this camp has been most influenced by John Anthony West, Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and other writers like them. This camp believes that a great, technologically advanced civilization lived before and during the last ice age (dated in their materials to about 12,000 years ago), and was brought to the brink of extinction after a catastrophe (probably a comet or meteor in their view) reset and remodeled the earth. This is an oversimplification of their views, but is generally correct. They believe that our cultural memory of a Golden Age, the great megalithic architecture that defies explanation, and global cataclysm myths come from the survivors of this Golden Age and cataclysm. To the hunter-gatherers who also survived the cataclysm (usually referred to as the Younger Dryas catastrophe), these people were remembered as “sages” who gave them the marks of civilization (agriculture, architecture, laws, language, etc.) in exchange for food and other survival necessities.
For dating, they often point to prominent constructions that appear to be aligned to certain constellations, but only as they would have appeared in the time they posit. Precession of the equinoxes plays a major role in this view. All of these writers use Hamlet’s Mill (de Santillana and von Deschend) as their starting point, especially where archaeoastronomy is concerned. It seems to be from this one prior that all subsequent theories come.
So here are the problems: these researchers reject uniformitarianism in favor of catastrophism (while still seemingly accepting an evolutionary model), but still assume that a) the earth has maintained its current inclination (minus obliquity modification) for all of human history, b) that dating methods, which rely on uniformitarian assumptions, are mostly reliable, c) that the rate of precession has never deviated in any meaningful way, d) that archetypal figures were exclusively human, despite their profound astronomical or celestial tone, e) that monotheism was a much later development, and a few others we don’t have the space for.
This camp does a very good job of highlighting the holes in mainstream dogmatism, but don’t necessarily shrug off all of the baggage of modern scientific dogma. They have contributed greatly to archaeological work outside the mainstream and are totally opposed to the practice of classifying or covering up finds. But I do not find their theories convincing.
Really Alternative
This one is too complicated to adequately summarize, but I will do my best. Most of these writers got their inspiration from Immanuel Velikovsky, whose work likely needs no introduction. The field as it exists today pays homage to Velikovsky, but does not accept his theory. The field is one part plasma physics to one part comparative mythology. Most seem to agree with David Talbot’s theory as put forward in The Saturn Myth and in Thunderbolts of the Gods. So as to not misrepresent their work, I’ll give a stratospheric overview:
The present solar system arrangement is not the same one our ancient predecessors saw. They point to archetypes in all ancient mythologies, ancient rock art, and even major holes in modern gravity-dominant/General Relativity cosmologies (which they replace with a complete, alternative cosmology known as Plasma Cosmology or EU). Their work is difficult to get through for someone like me, but is certainly compelling in many points. I will say, as subjective as this is, that some of their points resolved a couple of nagging questions I’ve had for some years, which no one else seemed to be asking. Beyond this, I cannot go into further detail without misrepresenting their views. Some of their major premises are so different from what we’ve always been taught that I find them very difficult to accept. My official view is to file the relevant data away and consider it possible-but-radical.
So if you aren’t familiar with their work, you’ll have to trust me when I point out the major problem: God is nowhere in their theories. Many of them are scientists and secular mythologists, so they seem to universally reject a Sovereign. This is ironic, considering their cosmology fits, in my opinion, more perfectly with scripture and descriptions of God than any other cosmology today. But they attempt to explain away all of the supernatural events in the Bible (and in other writings considered sacred by the peoples who read them) as merely extreme celestial phenomena. As far as I know, none of them has attempted to account for consciousness, and they — despite rejecting gradualism — still speak of cosmic timescales in terms of billions of years. I’m not opposed to an older earth or universe (and I don’t agree with Bishop Usher’s view that creation took place in 4004 BC at 9:00 in the morning, either), but have yet to see evidence not based on assumptions to support it. The typical arguments against this group are irrelevant to this discussion because those are based on an a priori fealty to the standard model.
Conclusion
We don’t know for certain what exactly happened in the ancient world. Neither the Standard Model nor any of the alternative theories have a monopoly on truth. My approach has been to read as much as I can, and not outright reject anything unless it is wholly incompatible with what the Bible has revealed about God. At this point, I find so little value in the mainstream models of history and cosmology that I use them exclusively for reference or to steel man something else I’m researching. No model that allows for gatekeeping or concealing discoveries is worth anything.
So we should read as much as we can, always using the text of scripture (not peoples’ opinions about the text, but the text itself) as a standard. Be open to everything, but very slow to fully accept anything. This may be useful to remember when the Standard Models collapse, and that vacuum is filled with one of these alternatives. No one has a monopoly on the truth, except the Father — and Christ himself is Truth. When we see him just as he is, and when what is seen only partially is revealed, we will finally Know.
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