From Iraq, Graham Hancock Announces New Book on Mesopotamian Mysteries

Graham Hancock is writing a new book about the history and civilizations of Mesopotamia, according to social media posts by Hancock and by Ammar Karim, an AFP journalist helping Hancock tour Iraq this week. I can’t say I am terribly excited about the book. It’s a natural choice of Hancock, given that Mesopotamian literature contains the oldest extant versions of the Flood myth, his lost civilization ur-text, and the northern reaches of the territory are near enough to Göbekli Tepe for fringe writers like Andrew Collins to conclude that the Sumerians inherited their culture from Göbekli Tepe, whose people were the Nephilim of the Bible. 

​In recent social media posts, Hancock has shared some of his travels around Iraq and complained—bizarrely—that modern archaeologists aren’t doing enough to educate the public about the “entitled behavior and delusional notions of cultural superiority” of nineteenth-century archaeologists, who denuded the country of many of its treasures. This, of course, is a standard part of archaeological education and is exactly the kind of DEI outreach that the Trump Administration has tried to stop because it was so prominent.
 
Today Hancock visited Eridu and posted on social media about exploring the Eridu Genesis, the oldest surviving version of the Mesopotamian flood myth. “So much more to say,” Hancock posted, ​“so many complex Mesopotamian variations (often with different names) of the original Sumerian story, but it will all be in the new book I'm writing.” Hancock is also planning to visit Shuruppak, the home of Ubara-Tutu, the last antediluvian king and the father of Utnapishtim, the version of the flood hero from Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Across Hancock’s itinerary, there has been quite a connection to flood myths and flood heroes, which suggests a theme for his book.
 
Such endeavors also gives Hancock the chance to revisit material he previously wrote about in Magicians of the Gods a decade ago. (See, e.g., chapter 1’s discussion of the Seven Sages and Oannes.) That book contained lengthy discussions of supposed Hermetic wisdom in the Near East, which Hancock traced (wrongly) back to Mesopotamian sources.
 
There is no timeline for when Hancock’s book will be released, and I wasn’t able to find a publication deal announced in the trade publications. Fortunately for me, all of the years I have spent dismantling the Zecharia Sitchin-inspired claims that the Anunnaki gods were secret space aliens or Atlanteans has given me a pretty good command of Mesopotamian literature, and antediluvian/flood legends happen to be a specialty of mine, so it ought to be fairly easy to point out the many ways Hancock’s ideas about Mesopotamia misuse ancient sources. I’ve already done quite a bit of that in my 2015 Magicians of the Gods review, and I suspect that the new book will probably not stray all that far from that template.