Skip to main content

Black Genesis – Robert Bauval & Thomas Brophy ***

A long time ago, the archaeological world was turned on its head by Stonehenge Decoded, a book by an astronomer that suggested Stonehenge was a complex astronomical calculator. The archaeologists didn’t seem too pleased at the intervention of an outsider, but they did eventually take on some of the ideas from the book (it seems to be accepted that other of the ideas were taking astronomical alignments too far).
The same thing seems to have happened with some aspects of Robert Bauval’s theories, excellently laid out in the highly readable The Egypt Code. In that book, Bauval put forward astronomical explanations for the positions and alignments of many Egyptian structures (including the great pyramids), and even for special shafts in the structures that allowed for certain sightings to be taken. Once again, the initial reaction was dismissal, but since then the Egyptologists seem to have grudgingly accepted some of the astronomical data, while still leaving some of it out in the cold.
Now Bauval is back with a co-writer, new structures from ancient Egypt, and another theory to wind up the experts. It has to be said straight away that this book doesn’t work nearly so well as its predecessor. It has too much technical detail, the newly discovered structures are a lot less impressive than those covered in the first book, while his underlying theory is difficult to prove.
Bauval introduces us to a miniature stone circle out in the Sahara that seems to date back to a prehistoric period of Egyptian civilization, the precursor of the ancient Egypt we know and love. Assuming the whole thing isn’t a hoax, it’s both fascinating and saddening to see these relics studied – and messed up by a seeming lack of care from the local authorities that end up with one of the most significant stones smashed into two and the whole stone circle removed from its position.
Some of the alignments and links seem very sensible, but there is always a certain danger when discovering alignments. I was reminded of another book by an image Bauval shows of an alignment fitting with a notch in a hill. This was Alfred Watkins’ book The Old Straight Path, which introduced the concept of ley lines. There are, without doubt, some ancient routes and pathways that can now be represented as ley lines, but many of Watkins’ alignments (which often used notches in hills) simply reflect how easy it is to set up alignments when there are so many objects to choose from. It has recently been pointed out that every postcode in the UK can be put into an alignment with at least 3 ancient structures. Alignments are just going to happen sometimes, and it doesn’t necessarily signify an intention.
The underlying theory of Bauval’s book is that the ancient Egyptians were black, or at least had black ancestors. Of course this has to be true, depending on how far you go back – we all have black ancestors, assuming the ‘out of Africa’ theory is correct. But Bauval highlights various pointers that suggest the ancient Egyptians were more directly descended from black African tribes.
All in all, then, an interesting but not hugely readable book that should intrigue anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt, but that leaves a number of questions unanswered.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur