Uriel's Machine - The Ancient Origins of Science

Arrow Books, 2000, illustrated, softback, 580 pages, index, conditipon: as new.

The last few years have seen literally dozens of books challenging our beliefs about history and archaeology, each of them seeking to show that the past was quite different from what standard books tell us. With Uriel's Machine, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas move away from their previous books about the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the strange chapel at Rosslyn in Scotland, and turn their attention instead to the much more distant past. The authors believe that Earth was hit by a comet in 7640 B.C., and by another one in 3150 B.C., each time resulting in great devastation. From their study of Stone Age monuments around Britain, and of the nonbiblical Book of Enoch, they conclude that Enoch visited Britain some time before 3150 B.C. to learn how to construct a megalithic celestial calculator that, amongst other things, could be used to forecast the arrival of comets. In the end, of course, there can be no absolute proof of this or any other rewriting of history--or indeed of more orthodox versions of history. Knight and Lomas's conclusions are controversial, but that in itself is no bad thing. Existing paradigms in every discipline should be challenged, and this is what they are doing.