Graham Hancock Searches for His Lost Civilization in the Sahara

​In social media postings earlier this week, Graham Hancock said that his new book, set to be published in the spring of 2027, will explore the claim that evidence for an advanced lost civilization can be found beneath the Sahara Desert, which was a fertile plain five thousand years ago. “I'm baffled by mainstream archaeology’s lack of curiosity regarding the prehistory of the Sahara,” Hancock wrote following a trip to the Egyptian Sahara this month. After opining that the desertification of the Sahara correlated with the beginning of Dynastic Egypt, Hancock added that “there are many mysterious connections -- to ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, India, China and South America -- that make this part of a much bigger story.”

Graham Hancock's Sahara "infographic" posted Nov. 24.

​Hancock accused archaeologists of not doing enough to survey and excavate the Saraha Desert—complaining that only 0.1% of the desert’s 9.2 million square kilometers (3.55 million square miles) had been excavated. This isn’t entirely accurate. Worldwide, less than one one-thousandth of one percent of the Earth’s land has been fully excavated, while around 0.1% has been fully surveyed worldwide. The Saraha has had plenty of archaeological interest, but Hancock is applying global figures to imply a lack of interest that is untrue.
 
More to the point, however, is that Hancock’s ideas about the Sahara being home to a pre-dynastic civilization that fed into Egypt and one that had global connections is not original to him and is instead a common claim among writers of esoterica over the past two centuries.
 
Consider, for instance, the “esoteric” history that David Childress published in his books from the 1980s and 1990s in which he identified this Saharan culture as the “Osirian” civilization. This is from Lost Cities of Atlantis ​(1996), but was repeated in several later books and draws on material he first published in less complete form in Lost Cities of Ancient Lemuria in 1988: 

The Osirian Civilization, according to esoteric tradition, was an advanced civilization contemporary with Atlantis. In the world of about 15,000 years ago, there were a number of highly developed and sophisticated civilizations on our planet, each said to have a high degree of technology. Among these fabled civilizations was Atlantis, while another highly developed civilization existed in India. This civilization is often called the Rama Empire.
 
What is theorized is a past quite different from that which we have learned in school. It is a past with magnificent cities, ancient roads and trade routes, busy ports and adventurous traders and mariners. Much of the ancient world was civilized, and such areas of the world as ancient India, China, Peru, Mexico and Osiris were thriving commercial centers with many important cities. Many of these cities are permanently lost forever, but others have been or will be discovered!
 
It is said that at the time of Atlantis and Rama, the Mediterranean was a large and fertile valley, rather than a sea as it is today. The Nile River came out of Africa, as it does today, and was called the River Styx. However, instead of flowing into the Mediterranean Sea at the Nile Delta in northern Egypt, it continued into the valley, and then turned westward to flow into a series of lakes, to the south of Crete. The river flowed out between Malta and Sicily, south of Sardinia and then into the Atlantic at Gibraltar (the Pillars of Hercules). This huge, fertile valley, along with the Sahara (then a vast fertile plain), was known in ancient times as the Osirian civilization.
 
The Osirian civilization could also be called “Pre-Dynastic Egypt,” the ancient Egypt that built the Sphinx and pre-Egyptian megaliths such as the Osirion at Abydos. In this outline of ancient history, it was the Osirian Empire that was invaded by Atlantis, and devastating wars raged throughout the world toward the end of the period of Atlantis’s warlike imperial expansion.

This sounds exactly like what Hancock is proposing to “discover” in his new book.
 
Of course, these wild claims were not original to Childress. Indeed, coming a year after Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods, Childress was riffing off of Hancock as he repackaged some of his earlier ideas her first published in 1988. Nevertheless, while there is some circularity between the two authors, the “esoteric tradition” Childress cites is really (as he himself admitted in Lemuria​) the mythology invented by the Lemurian Fellowship, with which Childress was once heavily influenced. The specific form Childress used came from The Ultimate Frontier by Eklal Kueshana (a.k.a. Richard Kieninger), which he read as a young man, and the teachings of the Stelle Group, Kieninger’s offshoot of the Lemurian Fellowship to which Childress belonged.
 
(In addition to an advanced prehistoric civilization, Kieninger, incidentally, also advocated for an apocalypse on May 5, 2000, the same date Graham Hancock also endorsed in Fingerprints of the Gods before backtracking when it didn’t happen.)
 
Kieninger’s claims were not original to him, either, and are derivative of James Churchward and Theosophy, both of which proclaimed the glories of a sunken island civilization that once ruled the world. However, regarding the specific claim about the Sahara being home to a predynastic civilization derived from Atlantis or something similar, that comes from Helena Blavatsky. In The Secret Doctrine, she explained that “There was a time when the whole of the Sahara Desert was a sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then, only after another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that other wilderness, the Desert of Shamo or Gobi.” She added that this land is a remnant of Atlantis. In another spot, she specifically claimed that the ”Atlantean Giants”—i.e., the Nephilim—traveled the fertile plains of what is now the Sahara.
 
Nevertheless, while Blavatsky’s esoteric nonsense inspired the recent lineage of claims, her ideas in turn, derived from a mistake by French archaeologists. Gaston Maspero, Francois Lenormant, and others of their time argued that the Great Sphinx was the work of a pre-dynastic civilization, based on the mistaken belief that the Ptolemaic Inventory Stela was instead an Old Kingdom document proving the Sphinx to predate Khufu. Accepting this false claim—as everyone from Helena Blavatsky to Graham Hancock has done at one point or another—thus renders it trivial to infer from Maspero’s conclusion that the Follower of Horus built the Sphinx centuries or millennia before Khufu that they came from a once-fertile Sahara.
 
At any rate, Hancock’s current interest is a lineal descendant of all of these earlier claims, and at some point it stretches credulity to think that each of his books just happens to draw on different sets of nineteenth century speculation by utter coincidence.