#142 - Graham Hancock, Duncan Trussell

Okay.

Should be. It's okay. Okay. How do I even begin this one? The Internet has been a very fascinating thing for me in the many years that I've been on it. But one of the most fascinating things about it is ability to get in touch with people that if you were like a long time ago, there was no chance I would be able to sit down with you and do a conversation. You would just be some author whose books I admired. But now, because of this crazy thing, this podcast, here we are sitting down. Graham Hancock has joined us. And if you don't know who Graham Hancock is, Graham Hancock is probably the one guy who's influenced my view of history more than anybody ever. And it's from this book, fingerprints of the gods. And fingerprints of the gods is, what is it sold like 5 million copies or something crazy like that?

Round about that, yeah.

Is an amazing book that basically challenges our view of history. And you have spent an enormous chunk of your life uncovering all these different structures and all these different monuments and all these different things that you attribute to a lost era of humanity. And one of my favorite terms that you use is that we're a species with hypnosis or, excuse me, with amnesia.

With amnesia, yeah.

And that, please tell me, how did all this get cracking? How did this get started for you?

Well, everything that's happened in my life has happened kind of by a series of accidents. I never planned out anything except I kind of knew when I was young that I had one gift, which was some ability to write. And the other thing about me was it's when all through my childhood, I always felt I was on the edge of things. Not in the middle of things. Other people were in the middle. I was on the edge. I just always felt that way. And when I got through university, I kind of drifted towards writing current affairs journalism. And it was while following journalistic stories. My last journalistic role was as the east african correspondent for the Economist, quite, quite a. A serious newspaper. And I was based in Nairobi in Kenya, and I was covering wars and famines and politics and all of that stuff. And on my beat was Ethiopia. And I used to go to Ethiopia quite regularly. It was in the news a lot. And on one journey to Ethiopia, I flew into a city that the time was in the middle of a war zone in a DC three that kind of dived down out of the sky to avoid the machine gun nests in the surrounding hills and landed in the airport. And this was ancient city called Axum, and it had incredible history it had obelisks, it had a palace, supposedly, of the queen of Sheba, had an ancient cathedral, the most ancient christian cathedral in Africa, dating back to 300 after Christ. And in the grounds of that cathedral, in a chapel outside the chapel, I meet a monk, and he tells me in the conversation we have that he's got the ark of the covenant. In that was. I had heard that the ark of the covenant was important to Ethiopia. But now I'm sitting in front of a monk with cataracts in his eyes, and he's telling me, behind him in that chapel, but I can't go. There is the ark of the covenant. And I said, can I go? Can I see it? And he said, no, nobody can see it. Even the former emperors were never allowed to see the ark of the covenant. The raiders of the lost ark movie had come out only like a couple of years before this. This was in the early 80s. So I left that place, impressed by this man, but not really believing it. And then I started to look into it, and I discovered that actually, Ethiopia is the only country in the world which has a living veneration, almost worship, of the ark of the covenant. Ethiopia has ancient Christianity, but it also has ancient Judaism. There's the jewish community in Ethiopia called the Felashas. They call themselves the Beta Israel. How did they get there? They practice a very ancient form of Judaism. They don't have rabbis, they have priests. They perform sacrifice. Other judaic peoples do not. It's like an old Testament world frozen in the highlands of Ethiopia. So I started to get interesting. This is weird, and this is exciting. And what can I find out about this? Then I went to the academics, and they said, it's all rubbish. Those Ethiopians, they just made it up to make themselves look big. Okay, but then why is it the case that in every single church in Ethiopia, more than 20,000 churches, there's a replica of the ark of the Covenant in the holy of holies.

What does it look like?

Well, mostly it's a box. And sometimes, actually, they reduce the replica to simply two tablets, which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the ark of the Covenant. But the ark of the Covenant is not a christian object. It's a pre christian object. What's it doing in all these churches? Where does this all come from? Why do we have the black Jews of Ethiopia practicing their very ancient form of Judaism? So I really started to dig, and I kind of was the first time I realized that you don't want to listen to academics all the time. Professor X and Dr. Y may be very, very impressive people with their credentials, but they have prejudices. They have a fixed view of the past, which they're going to stick to come what may. And as I started to investigate this, this is what drew me out of current affairs and into ancient mysteries. I found that here was a real investigation, a story that had never been told. Could this remote country in the Horn of Africa really have the Ark of the Covenant? And if so, how could it have got there? And I spent several years of my life trying to answer those questions. And by the time I got to the end of that investigation, I had left current affairs behind.

You were hooked.

I was hooked on the past.

Did you ever wonder if you were going crazy? Like, here I am really investigating if some people in Ethiopia actually have some crazy thing from a book. No, it makes no sense. I never really thought it was real.

It wasn't that I thought it was real. I neither thought nor didn't think that. I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves. And I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it. And the fact that here, after thousands of years, this object disappeared from the Bible at the time, well, around about 650 years before Christ. It's not mentioned again in the Bible after that. It vanishes. And yet here is its worship in 20th century Ethiopia today. How do we explain this? And as I dug deeper, I began to realize that actually there was a real possibility they did have the ark of the covenant. And that it is connected to the mystery of the ethiopian Jews. And that the story they themselves tell about it, which connects it, it's a very romantic and lovely story. They say in brief, that the queen of Sheba, famous queen of Sheba, was an ethiopian queen. And that when she traveled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, which is described in the Bible, big episode in the Bible, she didn't only exchange wisdom with him, she also exchanged bodily fluids. And she became pregnant with King Solomon's son, who was to be called Menelik, which actually means the son of the wise man. And pregnant. She left Jerusalem, returned to Ethiopia, gave birth to her son Menelik there. At the age of 20 or 21. He wanted to visit his famous father in Jerusalem. He traveled north, went to Jerusalem, spent a year there, and at the end of the year, contrived to steal the ArK of the Covenant from Jerusalem and take it off to Ethiopia. And there it's been ever since. That's the ethiopian story. I believe behind that legend, there's a true history of how it really got there. And that's, in the end, what I ended up writing my first book of historical mysteries about, which was the sign of the seal.

And wasn't the speculation about the ArK of the Covenant that it was some sort of a technological device that was actually radioactive?

Yes. I got into that speculation myself at some length because as I started to investigate this subject, not only was the ethiopian side of it fascinating and mysterious, but the object itself is quite extraordinary. I mean, it dominates the Bible. At the beginning of the story. From the time they're in Sinai, the exodus, there's a tremendous role for the Ark of the covenant. And they follow it through the wilderness and it's marched around the city of Jericho. It knocks down the walls of Jericho. It's hugely important. The Temple of Solomon is built with only one function, and that's to serve, and this is a quote, as an house of rest for the Ark of the covenant of the Lord. That's the only reason that the temple of Solomon is built. It's like at a certain point it's got to be placed out of the public view. It's always a dangerous object as they're carrying it. It strikes people dead. If somebody touches it by chance, bolt of fire comes out of it, actually. I mean, Spielberg and the Indiana Jones movie, the way they portrayed the ark was spot on how it's described in the Old Testament, as an absolutely devastating, deadly instrument. So the Israelites use it in battle. There's accounts of it flying into the air, rushing towards the enemies of Israel, emitting a moaning sound. They all fall down dead. Then there's a later account where the Philistines capture the Ark of the covenant. They take it off to the city of Ashdod, then they make the huge mistake of opening it and they treat it like a tourist object. People walk by and the Bible says 50,000 died. And how did they die? Cancerous tumors. That's what's actually described in the Bible.

The Ark of the Covenant is supposed to contain within it what's left of the Ten