A refutation of Flint Dibble in defense of Graham Hancock

It is not often that I feel an urge to write a public refutation of an archeologist, but as a former student of comparative religion, myth and symbolism, topics closely related to archeology and the process of interpretation, Mr. Dibble’s latest attack of Graham Hancock quite frankly shocked me so much that I had to write a rebuttal.

As you no doubt are aware of, Netflix recently released a TV documentary: Ancient Apocalypse featuring Graham Hancock. A man that has for decades worked on a thesis that our present timeline of history could use some adjustments.

In short, Hancock proposes that the world was hit by a series of comet fragments from the Taurus meteor stream around 10.500 BC – which put an end to the last ice-age and elevated the water levels to where they are today; killing off the megafauna and most of the human population through a global series of disasters. The elevation of water levels, Graham argues, gave rise to the universal flood myth which keeps popping up all over the planet, including cultures that never should have been in contact with each other (e.g south-america vs. the middle-east).

What all the perennial cultures have in common is that their religions and myths speak of individuals that emerged after a great disaster, from which our ancient ancestors were taught the basics of civilization: farming, writing, medicine, construction, mathematics and a religious framework. Keep in mind that Hancock is not pulling this out of thin air, he has meticulously gone through the source-material (e.g translations of the myths that have survived) and he is in fact quoting, not stating. While Hancock is a layperson he is well educated and fully aware of the difference between a thesis and a theory, and he has never claimed to present a theory or working model – he is purely presenting a thesis (read: an idea).

This way of working, by interpolating existing evidence, isolate commonalities -and from that conclude that they derive from a common, mutual source is not uncommon by any means. For example, within research and study of ancient manuscripts (a discipline very much a wing of archeology) this technique is deployed all the time. We have for example 1200 completely different versions of the gospel of John, but since they share more in common than they differ it is concluded that they all derive from a single source. This source is referred to as “document X” since it is presumed destroyed and cannot be verified. Hancock has taken the exact same approach and interpolated between cultural traits, their myths, their construction methods et-al, and arrived at the conclusion that they have too many commonalities to be random or just coincidence. They seem to all derive from an earlier culture of which we know nothing about.

There have been many that have attempted to silence him over the years, but for the most part his critics have little to criticize with regards to his paperwork. His work is largely their work, since he is not presenting new artifacts of dubious origin or making any outlandish claims with regards to the physical evidence already in existence.

The only real difference between the mainstream and accepted archeological model and what Hancock is presenting, is purely in how the evidence is interpreted and the timeframes involved. Emphasis might be on different aspects of a site, but all in all this fight really is about interpretation and dating, nothing more. This is also why archeologists find it difficult to refute him, because there really is very little to arrest him on. Hancock is not some bombastic fringe lunatic like Eric Von Daniken either (although they love trying to place him in that lunatic group. With little success I might add), but rather he is well versed, humble and a reasonable human being. The only errors they have been able to pin on him so far, have largely been getting the month wrong in a date here and there or misspelling somebody’s name. Purely superficial details that ultimately removes no merit from the corpus of work he delivers.

If truth wont work, lies might

Flint Dibble, archaeologist at Cardiff University with focus on ancient Greece.

We live in an age of cancel culture, where people literally can become victims of an anonymous mob of people for as little as a single phrase out of context. While I can only speculate I think most people will agree that this phenomenon is the direct result of social-media and anonymity (read: lack of consequence). Twitter especially have been instrumental in the evolution of cancel culture, where the mob (a.k.a “the twitterati”) can accuse, judge and socially liquidate people without any due process what so ever. People have actually been bullied so much on Social Media that they have committed suicide.

When I studied history in college and we reached what I felt at the time was the pinnacle of stupidity (the Spanish inquisition and consequent murder and violent persecution of women) I often wondered how on earth something like that could have happened. How could something so utterly absurd have taken place? Was there no critical thinking at all during that period of history? Well, after 2 years of Covid lockdowns and 4 years of Donald Trump, I no longer ponder such questions. It would seem that the vast majority of human beings is willing to believe just about anything if it’s said with enough conviction or by a person with some form of authority.

Keeping cancel culture and a veneer of authority in mind, Flint Dibble is well aware of the situation with Graham and also knows that going after Graham on the merit of his craftmanship would be futile. Instead he takes a different route, namely that of racism. He knows full well that an accusation of racism or white supremacy will forever taint the person being accused. So when he set out to describe the danger of Graham Hancock’s documentary, he avoids getting into specifics about the actual research that Hancock has done, and instead focuses on something that Hancock has never been involved in at all, namely theories of white supremacy. Not only have Hancock never even mentioned such things, he is even married to a wonderful woman of color which he openly shows tremendous affection for – bordering on worshipping the ground she walks on. A woman with whom he has children and a family.

The benefit of an accusation of racism, is that it forces Graham to defend himself against things he has never done. A battle that if engaged, cannot be won. And this is exactly what Mr. Dibble hoped to achieve, but it has so far backfired miserably on him.

In his post Mr. Dibble goes all in to try and paint Hancock as some sort of white supremacist, making it appear as though Graham is using material that has long since been debunked in his books. He also pulls in some of the more morbid concoctions of nazi Germany, where they would literally copy and paste together their insane doctrine from bits and pieces of mythology. The nazis were unique in that they literally cherry picked and made things up as they went along, largely driven by notions made popular by theosophical fortune tellers such as Madame Blavatsky. It is from her humbug the idea of “root races” came from. Any student of comparative religion can tell you that all that deranged woman really did, was to pervert and concretize the symbolism of the chakra system, turning them into races rather than states of mind. Mr. Dibble would have known this if he had bothered to study comparative religion to help him interpret his archeological findings.

There is only one problem. Graham Hancock has never referenced any of these absurd and indeed debunked theories from the scrapheap of history in his books. Quite the opposite. Mr. Dibble’s pulling them into his argument against Hancock is quite simply a desperate attempt to see if it sticks.

This technique is called “the straw-man trap”, to first establish a false claim giving the illusion of winning an argument that never existed in the first place. It also speaks volumes about Mr. Dibble’s moral standing and his character. When you have to lie to win an argument – you have already lost.

Graham has for the past 40 years been an ardent defender of indigenous people and their accomplishments, and an avid critic of the British empire; any empire, but his hate for what the British have done to the indigenous people around the world remains razor sharp to this day. To even entertain the idea that Hancock, which has firmly been on side of the victims all his life, is some kind of white supremacist — or even more belittling, that he somehow doesn’t know that he is playing around with absurd colonial theories that have been long since debunked, is absolutely preposterous.

Keep in mind that Mr. Dibble is an archeologist that specialize in ancient Greek culture. Plato is taught more or less at every college and university the world over – and I have never, ever, in my 49 years seen anyone try to connect Plato to white supremacy. The accusation being that some deranged nazis imagined that they were originally from Atlantis (or something to that effect) is utterly irrelevant, because the same insane and evil individuals also believed in Hyperborea, that the Jewish people murdered Christ (talk about concretizing a symbol, sigh) and that they were the descendants of the knights of the round table (!). How exactly does Mr. Dibble care to proceed here? Should the legend of king Arthur be erased from British literature because some skinhead cooked up a fairytale in his mother’s basement? Should Plato be stricken from the ex-phil and ex-fac curriculums in college because the ompalompas of tyranny attempted to pervert it? Should graphic novels like Conan the barbarian be rounded up and burned perhaps, and Robert Ervin Howard be exhumed and burned with them?

I must say there are some peculiar synergies between Mr. Dibble’s reasoning and the Spanish inquisition here.

I would suggest that the explanation is much simpler. Namely that Mr. Dibble and his cadre found it so difficult to debate Hancock on the level of data that they dug 80 years into the past and put together a monstrous accusation tailored for cancel culture, hoping they could sink Hancock’s argument by proxy.

The alternative is that Mr. Dibble is a blundering idiot. The mind truly boggles at the logic in play here, this truly is reason in ruin.

Is Mr. Dibble masking his own racism?

Without intending it Mr. Dibble has accidentally placed a spotlight on racism within the ranks of archeology. Because a theory that has survived since the British colonial era, one that we might argue is the foundation for the very idea of white supremacy (and consequently the culmination of nazi doctrine), is one that Mr. Dibble himself studied as a part of his curriculum. Namely, the Aryan invasion theory.

This theory proposes that tribes of predominantly caucasian “white” warriors invaded the Indus valley around 1500 BC, and brought civilization with them (1500 BC to 500 BC). Before the arrival of the aryans, or so Mr. Dibble and his ilk teach, the Indian subcontinent was a poorly developed “shanty town” of illiterate primitives. Until the white heroes in shining armor swooped in to save the poor brown people from themselves so to speak (and yes I am well aware of Mr. Witzel’s counter arguments for this, which has been debunked. Yet magically Wikipedia has locked the page so nobody can correct the false information it shows). This theory was in fact the excuse used by the British to invade India, justifying the mass murders, torture and pillage that came with it.

The British Empire used the same arguments as we find in the Aryan invasion theory to justify genocide and exploitation

Mr. Dibble is careful not to mention this theory, which is still taught in universities today. Despite having been refuted by Indian scholar’s who dare to examine the evidence more closely. The falsification of evidence by the British in order to provide an excuse to annex India into the British Empire is rarely spoken of, but it is there to see for anyone who dares to look.

Anyone who has studied Hindu religion at any depth, especially Saivism, Vaishnavism and the ever present tantric oral tradition that the later outer, ritualistic religions were constructed around – know full well that Saivism contained all the sciences fully evolved long before the fabled Aryans are said to have arrived. One can even propose that what has been defined as an invasion, is in fact an exportation of religious ideas and the establishment of centers of learning that brought to India students from far and wide. Conflict was without a doubt there, but the concept of invasion is once again an interpolated interpretation of what has been found in the ground at a certain depth. This is a wildly complicated subject that is out of scope for this post to deal with. Raj Vedam does a good job in deconstructing the theory, making it painfully visible that there are more than a few false flags in this material.

Mr. Dibble makes the mistake of accusing Hancock of playing with theories that promote white supremacy, which he has not done even once – while he himself is a representative of the very foundation for white supremacy. One really should be careful when throwing stones in a house of glass.

Strawmen everywhere

Already in the second paragraph Mr. Dibble begins to plant his strawmen:

“Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilization, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis.”

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseudoscience/

While this is superficially true (if we completely ignore the point of Graham’s thesis) the concept of Atlantis is not Graham’s point. Grahams outlines that the story of Atlantis is just one of many such myths that all share a common message. The reason he mention Atlantis has to do with source material. Plato is well documented in academic circles, easily available at all major book stores, and is (to my knowledge) the only person who provides a name and date for said lost civilization. A date which just happens to be spot-on the end of the last ice-age. The notion that there existed a mighty empire in ancient times, one that vanished in a massive cataclysm, is not isolated to Plato alone. It is a universal myth, meaning that it appears in one form or another in every civilization that emerges after the last ice-age. The names are different between cultures, appearances likewise differ, but the message is always the same. Personally I wince by the mere mention of Atlantis because that word has been abused to the point of no return by all manner of fringe groups for the past 100 years. But to quote Plato has nothing to do with white supremacy, although that would have been a very convenient way to get rid of Hancock.

Plato places the island outside the pillars of Hercules, which would make it below the south of Spain, roughly en-par with north Africa. Hardly the “Scandinavian white” Mr. Dibble hope to convince us of. As if skin pigments matter. If you have enough IQ to open a door, skin pigments are utterly irrelevant.

“From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilization. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.”

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseudoscience/

This is absolute rubbish, something that can only work on people who have either not seen his documentary, nor read his books and looked closely at the source-material and references he provides.

Hancock’s point is simply this: If someone dug up a church 2000 years in the future and had no idea what Christianity is, they might conclude that Christianity as a whole was only 2000 years old and restricted to that particular region. The purpose of Hancock’s visits to the different sites around the world, is to demonstrate that there exists a set of common ideas (as well as building techniques) that spans most of the globe. One such commonality is pyramid building, but also a strange obsession with particular parts of the night sky that the ancients memorialized in stone.

Continuing our parallel: If people suddenly found crosses and Christian iconography at every corner of the globe, it would stand to reason that the ideas represented by a cross was in fact much more widely adopted. The shape and form of churches are rarely the same, but common symbolism like the cross would at the very least warrant a possibility that the ideas involved (e.g. the Christian faith) was in fact a global doctrine, rather than just a local phenomenon.

It is this that archeologists refuse to entertain. We have what can only be called a global pyramid building perennial culture, spanning from Asia to Egypt, and further to South-America. When we dive into the religion underpinning these seemingly separate cultures, we find matches in their thousands. Yet for some reason archeology insists that there simply could have been no contact between these cultures, and absolutely no similarities in religious doctrine. Even thought it’s quite frankly evident to any sane, rational human being that they are wrong.

To give you an example of the synergies at play here, consider the following:

• Standing in front of the pyramid at Giza is a sphinx, this is a familiar motif that most human beings have seen. The pyramid texts themselves describe the pyramid as the mountain of God (mound of atum, the self-begotten). But also as the place where “men become gods”.
• If we go to India we find that God Shiva (Mahadeva, the god of gods) is said to live on mount Kalash, the sacred mountain. The temples dedicated to lord Shiva are all designed as copies of this sacred mountain. And guarding the entrance to his temples, is a Sphinx. The first thing you will see as you approach a Shiva temple is the bull Nandi, his steed and vehicle, but just at the entrance you will find a Sphinx.
• If we now jump to the old testament, we find Moses going up the sacred mountain (Sinai), and at the foot of the mountain there is a bull, just like the temple of Shiva.
• If we go to south america we find the exact same symbolism but culturally adapted (domesticated cattle were introduced to the south america in 1493 by Christopher Columbus), so their pyramids are guarded by a winged serpent. What I would speculate is a depiction of the kundalini serpent. The same serpent that Moses used to heal people in the Jewish import of Saivism. Latin america also used the Llama as a symbol serving the same function.
• In greece they re-imported Shiva as Dionysus when Zeus had become impotent as a symbol. The god of the mountain (Nyssa), with his sacred animal Damaris, the calf.

This is why comparative religious studies are so important. It is the discipline of tracking and understanding the ideas behind symbols and artifacts and how they morph through time. In this case the underlying Tantric body of knowledge beneath the narrative.

Guarding the “mountain of Shiva” is a sphinx. Shiva is the oldest deity in the world. His worship is so old it vanishes in the mist of pre-recorded history.

Since we know that Saivism (the worship of lord Shiva) is a tantric and esoteric religion where the mountain is predominantly associated with the human head; a religion which practice Tantrayana (using mantras and resonance to produce deep psychological and cognitive changes, “the word” that Christians always talk about yet seem to utterly fail at grasping) it is not a huge leap to conclude that the doctrine of the ancients, the disciplina arcani as it was called by the first Christians, was universally practiced around the world in the ancient past. And that doctrine and it’s exact and methodical approach is simply too complex to have arisen spontaneously around the world. We can also look to Saivism to better understand the function of rites from extinct cultures and (if one is so inclined) experience these things ourselves. A concept that seems to scare the living daylight out of the establishment.

I can also mention that the association of the sacred mountain with the human skull is echoed in Christianity. Golgotha literally means “place of the skull”. People are in generally blissfully unaware of the antiquity of religious traditions, and how they morph and re-emerge in new clothing as the ages turn. Not to mention that the landscape of these texts have nothing to do with actual, physical history, but rather the human body and it’s aggregates.

But to return from our digression: Hancock has visited a diverse range of sites in his documentary where the dating has been inconclusive or where third party organizations or individual researcher have contested the results. In some of the more extreme examples the established timeline is broken by several thousand years. This the mainstream archeologists disregard as pure coincidence, if not outright falsification.

Mr. Dibble also seem to scoff at the use of astronomy to pinpoint dates for temples and sacred sites (as is also evident by his endless rants on Twitter), but he is really going against his own discipline there. Astronomical chronology as a tool has become commonplace in our time, and it helps us pinpoint when ancient texts or buildings were constructed that would otherwise be forever assigned to “myth”. What we typically see is that the older generation of archeologists ignore or scoff at this, while the younger generation has embraced it as a useful tool.

“Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which he is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.”

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseudoscience/

Again Mr. Dibble misses the point or obscures Grahams work intentionally. The native american monuments is not purely a matter of dating, but rather the symbolism involved. Just like the mountain of God symbolism can be tracked from India to Egypt and further to the Jewish levant, the native american monuments carry symbolism and alignments that match those found elsewhere.

Hancock’s visit to Malta was due to a claim that the megalithic buildings were purely the work of modern man. But what Hancock demonstrates is that there is no actual evidence that modern man erected the temples aligned with Sirius. After the official dating of the various megalithic temples on Malta, a cave was discovered with teeth from Neanderthals, proving that modern man were not the first to inhabit the island, but the archeologists have been reluctant to factor this into the equation. In fact, they were adamant that Neanderthals had never even been there (!). When proven wrong they get upset when that is mentioned, even though they hold no scruples about ridicule and mockery before those teeth came to light. I suppose criticism should only go one way?

So the visit to Malta was not about refuting modern man’s existence there, but rather to underline that we have no evidence that the megalithic structures were erected by modern man – or if we in fact took them over from Neanderthals. A very different situation than what Mr. Dibble describe and criticize.

“While skin color is not brought up in Ancient Apocalypse, the repetition of the story of a “bearded” Quetzalcoatl (an ancient Mexican deity) parrots both Donnelly’s and Hancock’s own summary of a White and bearded Quetzalcoatl teaching Native people knowledge from this ‘lost civilization’ “

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseudoscience/

Skin color has never been of any interest to Hancock, nor has he demonstrated any inclination of going down such as route in any of his books. As for the white Quetzalcoatl, it would appear that Mr. Dibble is unaware of the use of colors in religious iconography, which I find very strange considering his title.

The virgin goddess Tara dons different colors depending on her function. Christ likewise donned different color robes. These colors are also common for Egyptian, Hindu and south American deities.

In more or less all religions in the world you will find the use of specific colors on deities, typically used to denote their function. When the ancient texts mention white, they are not referring to caucasian or skin pigment of any sort. But rather, white as in wall paint white. The primary colors you will find in every religion, universally on the planet and deployed more or less uniformly throughout history, are: black, red, white, blue, ocre (yellow) and green.

Tibetan Buddhism is a good example of this, where you find the virgin goddess in her many forms as Green Tara, White Tara, Red Tara (and so fourth). Tibetan Buddhism is basically Saivism without a notion of god (singular). They even kept Shiva as Bhairava, Maya (illusion), shakti (life force, spirit) and hiranjagharba (virgin womb) as Tara. The Dalai Lama takes part in the Kumb-mela festivals in India, where each lineage of Hinduism meet every 8 years roughly.

The fact that Mr. Dibble attempts to drag this debate and these colors down to a level of racism, just underlines that he has an agenda. A sinister one considering he is a representative for the Aryan invasion theory, indirectly supporting the foundation that gave rise to the holocaust.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Cowboy archeology

One of the examples that Mr. Dibble brings up, is that of Hawass, a well known Egyptologist. Hawass made it his personal mission to expose Robert Beauval, the man that looked at the mathematics of the pyramid at Giza, and discovered that the shafts were aligned with Sirius and Orion. Two locations which are inexplicably linked to the goddess Isis and the god Osiris, the Egyptian divine couple.

Hawass like to pretend he is Indiana Jones, but he is ultimately a glorified thief which lost his job.

Beauval worked closely with Hancock for a number of years, and as you would expect – Hawass went after these with everything he could muster. Accusations and ad-hominem attacks flying left and right. One of these accusations was that Beuval was a thief, which turned out to be a case of instant karma, because Hawass suddenly found himself in a court of law accused of stealing artifacts. Something he was even convicted for, and consequently lost his job (!).

To quote The Smithsonian:

“It is not as dramatic as the collapse of an ancient Egyptian dynasty, but the abrupt fall of Zahi Hawass is sending ripples around the planet. The archaeologist who has been in charge of Egypt’s antiquities for nearly a decade has been sacked”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fall-of-zahi-hawass-32319337/

To a reader that has not followed Beauval or Hancock, mentioning Hawass might give the appearance of credibility and authority, but scratch but a little on the surface and the pretty paint falls to the ground. Hawass demonstrates above anything else how much control money have over disciplines such as Egyptology.

It is also not without some irony that Egyptology is slowly catching up with Beauval and the work he did decades ago. They recently discovered that the pyramids do have astronomical alignments, but they are just starting to unwind the data. They no doubt instinctively know that Beauval is correct, but saying so would mean losing face, so it will probably take another 30 years for them to “discover” the exact same alignments and mathematical groundwork that Beauval has done.

Conclusion

If you are going to debunk laypeople such as Graham Hancock, then by all means do so on the merit of data, and make sure you include all the data. Mr. Dibble leaves out more or less all the aspects of the data that explains why Graham included it to begin with — but his resorting to accusation of racism is just utterly unfounded. It is beyond an ad hominem attack and borders on outright evil.

I used to respect Mr. Dibble and those working within the field of ancient Greece, but I must admit that all such respect has now vanished completely. This type of behavior is utterly unacceptable. Period.

Looking at how unaware Mr. Dibble is regarding the function of Delphi, Greece in his own published papers, which served as a miniature Varanasi for the better part of 2000 years, complete with Shivalinga worship (Greek: Omphalos) – I would also question if he is suited for working in that field at all. I have the utmost respect for archeologists in general, but it is also a profession where people of a “symbolically blind disposition” can fortify and stay without ever having contributed significantly to human knowledge and understanding. The tantric nature of Greek religion, which typically establish cult centers only to vanish and later re-appear, seems unknown to Flint Dibble. Dionysus and his bachantes (sanskrit: bhaktis, devotes) and his mountain (nyssa) is fairly easy to map. If you know what to look for and understand what religion truly is. You will find his wine-press 3 fingerwidths below the belly-button on the left side of the body. The human body is the ultimate pharmacy, and the ancient quest to perfect mankind, to re-wire our psycosomatic framework, comes into play here. A quest which was completed in prehistoric times but then lost, only to be rekindled. A quest that was nothing less than the transformation of human biology and consciousness as a final step of evolution. These were no illiterate savages. It is we that are the savages here Mr Dibble. If not strangers to who we are and what we are capable of.

“I stand before the masters who witnessed the transformation of the body of a man into the body in spirit, who were witnesses to resurrection when the corpse of Osiris entered the mountain and the soul of Osiris walked out shining. And they are Ra, the light of divinity, and Shu, the breath of god. He gathered his thigh, his heel and his leg. He gathered his arms and backbones. He gathered the dreams crackling inside the dark cave of his skull. He knitted himself together in secret. He came forth from death, a shining thing, his face white with heat”

Book of the dead, 11 Triumph through the Cities.

Hancock’s criticism of mainstream archeology is not unfounded either as Mr Dibble like to think. Hancock does not set himself up as any sort of victim. The way he has been treated for the past 40 years would turn most of us into angry, spiteful, if not outright vengeful individuals. Considering that Hancock retains his composure and argues on the level of data, while the so-called “experts” are more busy with personal attacks and slander of the worst sort – speaks volumes.

To imagine that we are the pinnacle of evolution and the best of human history is an arrogance we should be very careful with. Sadly, Mr. Dibble has thrown all caution to the wind and is exposing the ugly underbelly of his discipline.

Mr. Dibble might not see it now, but I believe he will come to regret taking part in this witch hunt.