Graham Hancock: evaluation

Transcript context

…So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations. It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It’s inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was an overwhelming presence. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it’s hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun over the course of the solar year is month by month rising against the background of different constellations. And then there’s a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac. I think it would’ve been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention, but that the constellations were there I think was very clear. And that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to. Well, but detecting the procession of the equinox is hard because especially they don’t have any writing systems, they don’t have any mathematical systems. So everything is told through words.…

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