Childress then discusses the inventions of the Chinese, drawing on Robert Temple (yes, the ancient astronaut theorist) and his book The Genius of China. Rendel Harris, the early-twentieth-century scholar, without acknowledging Harris’ own “alternative” ideas, including his belief that all ancient myths were descended from one story of cosmic twins, remnants of a great seafaring empire of which no evidence exists. He describes various forms of toilets and how the ancient disposed of fecal waste. Relying largely on sources from the 1940s-1960s as well as mass-market books, Childress outlines the history of irrigation and plumbing in the ancient world, studded with lengthy (and presumably not paid for) excerpts from his source books. We next have to suffer through a length discussion of the “Bathrooms of the Gods.” I am not kidding. He describes the destruction of ancient libraries, deems this “suppression” of ancient knowledge (by evil secularists, scientists, and “Moslems”), and speculates that the lost books contained technological secrets about plumbing. to provide an argumentum ad populum that associates his ideas with the borrowed acclaim of others.

This program prevented Robert Schoch’s re-dating of the Sphinx, which Childress only vaguely understands, relying on the TV show to tell him everything he knows about the controversy before complaining via a quote from James Joyce’s wife that scholars write stuff normal folk can’t read.Ĭhildress sprinkles his text with phrases like “highly rated,” “popular,” “famous,” etc. To “prove” an ancient civilization pre-dated Egypt, Childress uses John Anthony West’s 1993 NBC-TV documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx, narrated by Charlton Heston. Worse, Childress states upfront that he plans to “recap” information he’s already delivered in innumerable other collections that in turn reported on other alternative theorists’ earlier plagiarisms and crackpot ideas. Childress’s evidence includes the long-debunked ancient astronaut standbys, the Denderah “light bulb” (actually an image of a lotus flower) and the Colombian “airplanes” (fewer than a half-dozen stylized pieces of jewelry cherry-picked from hundreds of examples to because they vaguely resembled airplanes). Few alternative writers support this hypothesis now (even Childress jumped on the alien bandwagon), but in the wake of Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), it was all the rage around the time Childress wrote this book. Things don’t start well when Childress begins by trying to establish whether Egypt received its civilization from an ancient, more advanced earlier civilization. Instead, I’m going to discuss the types of evidence he uses and the way he constructs his arguments.

First off, I’m not going to be going through Childress’s claims one by one at more than 350 pages that would be impossible.

Technology of the gods david childress