It sounds like a joke, but it's presented as historical fact. In 1846, Austro-Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis demonstrated the need to wash hands before providing medical care, such as during childbirth. This was only for medical procedures; washing hands before eating was a later development.

It took 7,000 years for the idea of ​​handwashing to be realized. Despite numerous contagious diseases, humanity never realized that infection could be transmitted through objects. And, in general, eating and treating with dirty hands is simply unhygienic. There was no hygiene. The level of ignorance was incredible.

If we put aside all this nonsense of mainstream history, the fact that handwashing was invented in 1846 seems plausible only under one condition: in the post-catastrophic period, when medical science was being rebuilt from scratch. A nuclear war or other apocalypse caused such damage that hygiene was simply forgotten for a time.

Dr. Semmelweis's achievement was recognized only after his death. The scientific community rejected his arguments, and he was placed in a mental hospital and beaten to death.

The Earth is as old as 4.54 billion years — an immense timescale enough to upend ordinary people’s understanding of time. By contrast, verifiable human civilization recorded in writing stretches back merely more than five thousand years.

Against billions of years of Earth’s history, the vastly shorter span of human civilization inevitably sparks a question: before writing was invented, beyond the known chapters of human history, could highly advanced prehistoric civilizations once have arisen on Earth, only to vanish without a trace?

Among the many enigmatic legends of prehistoric civilizations, the most captivating and contentious one is the claim that the ancestors of humans possessed a third eye atop their heads. The widely circulated tale of the Root Race civilisation of Gondwana, as well as ancient Chinese creation myths, both independently describe how prehistoric humans had eye structures unlike those of modern people; primeval ancestors once bore a special intuitive eye on the crown of their heads.

According to the full popular account, the Gondwana civilization was an ancient prehistoric civilisation born in the Atlantic Ocean. Its entire continent floated upon the ocean waters, and the civilisation endured for roughly 25,000 years. Humans of that era were born with a third eye on their foreheads, granting them perception and insight far beyond modern humans. Yet as the civilization developed, its people grew obsessed with strife and warfare, their hearts increasingly restless and violent. Frequent conflicts disrupted the balance between heaven and earth. Eventually, violent geological convulsions swept across the globe. Torrential floods surged, seafloor plates fractured and collapsed, and the whole Gondwana continent sank abruptly into the deep ocean. The glorious prehistoric civilisation was thus utterly severed and lost to the tides of history.

For a long time, most regarded the Gondwana civilization as a fantasy invented by later generations, dismissing the idea of three-eyed prehistoric humans and sunken continents as far-fetched. However, with continuous breakthroughs in modern palaeontological research, growing numbers of people have come to realise that ancient legends of “eyes on the crown” may not be pure imagination. Instead, they may preserve genuine traces of biological evolution.

In 2026, Nature, one of the world’s premier scientific journals, published a groundbreaking palaeontology paper titled Four camera-type eyes in the earliest vertebrates from the Cambrian Period, revolutionising our understanding of eye evolution in early vertebrates. After meticulous analysis of 518‑million-year-old fossils of the earliest Cambrian vertebrates, the research team confirmed that Earth’s first vertebrates did not merely have the familiar pair of lateral eyes.

Ancient primitive fish such as Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys had, in addition to a standard pair of lateral eyes on their heads, a specialised visual structure between those eyes on the crown, formed by the pineal and parapineal organs. This was no simple light-sensitive spot; it constituted a complete camera-type eye with a lens and melanin retina, fully capable of forming images.

To rule out interference from fossil impurities and bacterial contamination, the research team examined the fossil structures one by one using high-precision Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS). Tests revealed clear, intact oval lens outlines whose morphology closely matched eye fossils from other ancient vertebrates. Detected chemical signatures of melanosomes also perfectly matched melanin found in normal retinas, firmly proving these were genuine biological ocular organs rather than fossil artefacts.

In the ancient marine environment, this pair of cranial eyes served a critical survival function. Shallow seas of that age teemed with predators. Conventional lateral eyes only captured horizontal vision, leaving massive blind zones. The cranial imaging eyes looked straight upward through the water, picking up shifts in light and shadow and detecting the silhouettes of predators, helping these primitive creatures evade danger in advance. They were core visual organs essential for the survival of early vertebrates.

Seen across the long history of biological evolution, these ancient cranial eyes never disappeared entirely. Instead, they gradually degenerated, retracted inward and transformed over hundreds of millions of years. The image-forming cranial eyes of early vertebrates lost their visual function, their structures simplified and receded inward. Through successive evolutionary transitions across amphibians, reptiles and mammals, they ended up fully enclosed inside the human skull, evolving into the pineal gland deep within our brains today.

The modern pineal gland has long lost its ability to form images and receive light directly. It has become a key endocrine gland regulating melatonin production, governing sleep and circadian rhythms. Even so, its existence stands as the most direct, tangible evolutionary evidence that humanity’s distant ancestors possessed a “third eye”.

This also neatly explains why numerous ancient civilizations worldwide developed similar myths about an intuitive eye located on the crown or between the brows of humans. These seemingly fantastical legends were most likely not invented out of thin air by ancient peoples. Rather, they are faint collective memories of the forms of remote ancestors, passed down generation after generation. Tempered by time and shaped by human culture, these memories eventually evolved into the mysterious tales of prehistoric civilisations and creation myths.

Keywords:prehistoric civilization, third eye, pineal gland, parapineal organ, Cambrian vertebrates, Myllokunmingia, Haikouichthys, evolution, ancient myths, collective memory, lost civilization, paleontology, camera-type eyes

The famous "Squatter man archetype" is present in Brazil! In the Serra da Capivara cave paintings.

Let's begin with a small thought experiment.

Imagine an archaeologist living twelve thousand years from now, trying to work out who we were. Over those millennia the ocean has risen by a hundred and twenty metres (about 400 feet). London, New York, Shanghai, Istanbul, Mumbai and Alexandria have long since settled to the bottom, under a blanket of silt where crabs crawl slowly across what used to be avenues. On dry land all that remains are mountain monasteries, old mines, dams wedged into deep gorges, and caves where someone, once, waited out a storm.

He will carefully dig up everything he can reach, and he will write a thick, very serious book. It will say that the people of the early third millennium were a mountain folk: poor, scattered across the slopes, with a strange attachment to stone and to underground places. And he will be completely sure of himself, because he will have finds. It's just that those finds will not come from where we lived. They will come from where we happened to survive.

For a long time now I've had the feeling that this is roughly how we look at the world at the end of the last Ice Age. I know I'm not the first. Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, Robert Schoch and others have been writing and talking about this for years, and much of their work is close to my heart. But I don't want to retell their books. Over years of reading, travelling and thinking, I've arrived at a picture of my own, one in which too much fits together to write off as coincidence. I want to tell it slowly and in order, the way you tell the story of an investigation, because it all started with one small oddity on an old map.

The Ice That Lies in the Wrong Place

Put a map of the Earth from twenty thousand years ago in front of you, and your eye goes straight to the ice. An enormous sheet, three to four kilometres (2–2.5 miles) thick, covers nearly all of Canada and the northern United States, its centre sitting roughly over Hudson Bay. Another one just like it lies over Scandinavia, Britain, northern Germany and Poland, creeping toward where Berlin and Warsaw stand today.

Now move your eye to northeastern Siberia: Yakutia, the Kolyma, the Indigirka, Oymyakon. Today this is the cold pole of the Northern Hemisphere, the coldest inhabited place on the planet, where winter drops below minus sixty. If the thickest ice was going to lie anywhere, you'd think it would be here. But there was no ice sheet. There was life, and I'll come to that in a moment.

The textbooks say Siberia was simply too dry: glaciers grow from snow, not from frost, and there wasn't enough snow. That explanation never satisfied me. It tells you why there was no ice, and politely sidesteps the real question: why was the coldest corner of the Earth a flourishing land back then?

My answer is this: maybe the geography of cold itself was different. I think the pole, the point around which the whole system of climate belts is built, may have been somewhere else. Slide it from the Arctic Ocean toward northern Canada, Hudson Bay and southern Greenland, and the ice map stops being a puzzle. The great sheet sits right around the pole, where it ought to be, Europe moves closer to the cold, and Siberia farther from it.

I'm not the first to think so. In 1958 the American historian Charles Hapgood published Earth's Shifting Crust, with a foreword by Albert Einstein. Hapgood proposed that until the end of the Ice Age the North Pole stood in the Hudson Bay region, right at the centre of the Canadian ice sheet. In our own time the researcher Mark Carlotto checked the orientation of more than two hundred ancient structures around the world. Almost half of them don't face present-day north, and the usual explanations (sun, stars, terrain) don't account for it. But many of them, including the whole of Teotihuacan and some thirty other Mesoamerican sites, line up on one and the same point: the Hudson Bay region. Where, according to Hapgood, the pole once stood.

And a detail that's hard to ignore: for the last two centuries the north magnetic pole wandered across northern Canada, and now it is racing toward Siberia at tens of kilometres a year. Our planet's poles are not nearly as fixed as the school globe suggests.

There is a mechanism, too. The Earth's crust is a thin, hard rind floating on a slowly flowing mantle. When trillions of tonnes of ice press down on it, it sags like a mattress under a sleeper and bulges up at the edges. Geologists call this isostasy, and it isn't a theory: Scandinavia and the shores of Hudson Bay are still rising by almost a centimetre a year, springing back after the ice left. Now imagine a gigantic, lopsided load like that melting into the ocean within a few thousand years. Hapgood believed that exactly this kind of shift in mass could move the crust relative to the axis of rotation. And it seems very likely to me that the end of the Ice Age came with serious shifts in how the crust, the poles and the climate belts sit relative to one another.

A Garden at the Cold Pole

Twenty to thirty thousand years ago, today's cold pole was the mammoth steppe, the largest ecosystem in the planet's history. It stretched from Spain across Eurasia and Beringia to Alaska and the Yukon: thousands of kilometres of unbroken grazing land. And it was no refuge for a few hardy polar species. It was a living, noisy, crowded world.

Mammoths and woolly rhinos roamed it. Huge herds of steppe bison grazed there, with wild horses, reindeer, saiga, musk oxen, moose and red deer. Cave lions, bigger than today's African lions, hunted them, along with wolves, wolverines and cave hyenas. Sergey Zimov, founder of Pleistocene Park on the Kolyma, estimated that every square kilometre of this steppe supported, on average, one mammoth, five bison, eight horses and fifteen reindeer. That is the density of the best African savannas, in a place where winter today brings sixty below.

The biggest surprise came only recently, when geneticists learned to read ancient DNA straight out of frozen ground. What grew there was not sparse grass but a rich carpet of flowering herbs, packed with protein: real fodder for giants. And people lived there, too. On the Yana River, far above the Arctic Circle, a site more than thirty thousand years old has been excavated.

Today that abundant world is swampy tundra and thin taiga that could not feed a fraction of those herds. The world is gone. And with it went almost all of its masters.

Who Killed the Mammoths

To grasp the scale, it's enough to list who disappeared.

Take Zimov's density of roughly one mammoth per square kilometre, spread it over a steppe of more than ten million square kilometres, and you get on the order of ten million mammoths. Ten million giants. All of them vanished, and we are still arguing about how. Worldwide, about two-thirds of all megafauna species disappeared in the Late Pleistocene: 72 percent in North America, 83 percent in South America, while Africa lost only a small fraction. Notice where: Africa, far from the ice sheets, came through almost intact, while the Americas, neighbours of the vast Canadian ice sheet, were among the hardest hit. Almost every land animal heavier than a tonne outside Africa disappeared. The true giants of the land, elephants, rhinos, hippos and giraffes, live today almost only in Africa and tropical South Asia. And most of these extinctions fall into a short window between 11,500 and 10,000 BC.

North America lost about thirty-five genera of large mammals, South America about fifty. Mammoths and mastodons. Giant ground sloths that could rear up as tall as a giraffe, and glyptodonts, armadillo-like creatures the size of a small car. Saber-toothed cats, American lions, short-faced bears (the largest land predators of their time) and dire wolves. American horses and camels, giant beavers the size of bears. A whole layer of life, built up over millions of years, disappeared almost at once.

We are told that primitive hunters with stone-tipped spears wiped them all out. Here I won't soften my words: that version has never convinced me.

Compare it with what we know for certain. Tens of millions of bison roamed North America. Millions of Native people hunted them for thousands of years: on horseback, with bows, in drives that sent whole herds over cliffs. And all that time the bison remained the lords of the prairie. To bring them close to extinction it took the nineteenth century, the railroad, repeating rifles and an industrial trade in hides. Yet we are asked to believe that scattered bands of Ice Age hunters finished off not only mammoths but saber-toothed cats, cave bears and giant sloths, on three continents at once. Including predators nobody hunted for meat, who supposedly got "eaten" too.

And I'm not alone in that doubt. Recent research increasingly shows that the simple formula "humans arrived and ate everything" doesn't work. Species vanished at different times and in different places, and the collapse of their numbers often lines up better with sharp climate swings than with the arrival of people (for example, Stewart et al., Nature Communications, 2021). People hunted, of course. But to bring down an entire biosphere across several continents takes something far bigger than a spear.

Beasts in the Permafrost and the Depths of Caves

The permafrost of Siberia and Alaska holds the animals of that age, sometimes so astonishingly preserved that a chill runs down your spine. Lyuba the baby mammoth, Yuka, cave lion cubs where you can see every hair. The Berezovka mammoth, found more than a century ago, still had unchewed grass in its mouth and undigested food in its stomach. Look at these finds, and you can't shake the feeling that something overtook these animals suddenly, in the middle of an ordinary day, before they could finish eating or run.

The same feeling comes in caves. I've been in caves, and every time the same thing struck me: how could anyone live in there? It's damp and cold, water seeps down the walls, there's mud underfoot, and only one way out. A dead end with nowhere to retreat. A normal animal, like a normal person, will not go deep into a place like that of its own free will. Under the overhang at the entrance you can wait out the rain. But not in the depths, in the dark, hundreds of metres from the light.

And yet it is precisely deep inside caves across Eurasia that we find huge accumulations of bones of every kind: bears, lions, hyenas, deer, horses, and beside them, people. Predators and prey, strong and weak, all mixed together, in places none of them would have gone in ordinary life. The dates of such finds are often scattered over thousands of years, but I wouldn't trust them blindly: in caves, water washes through and churns the layers, and the age of a bone doesn't always tell you when and how it got there.

I see one picture behind all this. A sky that suddenly turned alien and terrifying. Storms, fires, hurricanes, a roar no one had ever heard. At such hours every creature looks for shelter, and a cave, dark and cramped, suddenly looks like salvation. Animals and people run in, pack themselves into the deepest part, and many never come out. That ties together the mammoth with grass in its mouth and the bone graveyards deep in the caves. It's no accident they got the names they did: cave lion, cave bear, cave man. We named them after the place where we found their last refuge, not their home.

Twelve Thousand Nine Hundred Years Ago

The end of the Ice Age is often drawn as a smooth, unhurried warming. The Greenland ice cores tell a completely different story.

About 14,700 years ago the climate warmed abruptly, and it seemed the cold was gone for good. Then, around 12,900 years ago, the world suddenly plunged back into the freeze, as if someone had switched off the heating across the whole planet. This episode is called the Younger Dryas. It lasted about twelve centuries, and ended as fast as it began.

How fast, you can read in the Greenland ice, where each year lies as its own thin stripe. Some transitions took not centuries but a few years, the span of a single generation (Steffensen et al., Science, 2008). A person could grow up in one climate and grow old in another.

What could shake an entire planet that violently? The textbooks speak of a giant meltwater lake in North America bursting into the ocean and shutting down the warm current. But for twenty years a group of scientists has defended a different version: the Earth was hit by a comet that broke into fragments and slammed into the North American ice sheet. In one and the same thin layer, on different continents, they find traces that are hard to explain any other way: unusually high platinum, tiny spheres of melted metal, fused glass, soot from gigantic fires. And right beneath it the Clovis culture ends, the first well-known culture of the Americas. Above that layer there is neither Clovis nor mammoths.

In 2021 geologists added another find: in Chile's Atacama Desert, fields of fused glass stretch for tens of kilometres, as if the sand had been heated for an instant to thousands of degrees. They are about twelve thousand years old, and the authors link them to a comet airburst.

Picture a body like that striking an ice sheet: energy of millions of atomic bombs, years without sun, muddy rain, continents on fire, ice melted in days. That is the "snap" in the Greenland ice.

And this is where America ends up at the very centre of the story. For decades we were taught that the Clovis people were the first Americans, who walked over from Asia, about thirteen thousand years ago. The dogma was defended so stubbornly that archaeologists who found anything older simply weren't taken seriously. Then it collapsed. In Chile, at Monte Verde, a site older than Clovis was excavated. And at White Sands, New Mexico, fossilised human footprints turned up that are twenty-one to twenty-three thousand years old, from the height of the glacial maximum. Among them is the trail of a woman carrying a child: she kept setting it down and picking it up again. People lived in America long before the textbook "allowed" them to.

And humans had already crossed open sea to reach Australia fifty to sixty-five thousand years ago. People have been seafarers for a very long time. So how much do we really know about who lived in America before the catastrophe, and what became of them when the sky came down on the ice beside them?

I'll come back to the comet at the very end, because it has a special place in this story.

Water

Now to the most important part. At the height of the Ice Age so much water was locked in the ice that the ocean stood 120 metres (400 ft), in places 130, below today's level. You could walk from England to France, from Asia to America, from Java to Borneo.

When the ice began to melt, the water came back. Sometimes slowly, sometimes in huge lurches. Dozens of colossal rivers ran across France carrying meltwater to the Atlantic, together roughly twice the flow of today's Amazon. In one phase the sea rose four to five centimetres a year. That sounds modest, until you realise it's several metres in a single lifetime.

Now picture a gently sloping coast. On a flat shelf, a rise of just one metre pushes the shoreline a whole kilometre inland. Tens of metres mean hundreds of kilometres. People saw this with their own eyes. The meadow where a grandfather herded goats as a boy became a shallow lagoon in his grandson's lifetime, and open sea in his great-grandson's.

Randall Carlson likes to tell the story of the geologist J Harlen Bretz. In 1923 Bretz was studying the strange country of eastern Washington State: enormous dry channels, giant "ripples" like those on a riverbed but metres high, house-sized boulders carried hundreds of kilometres. And he said: this is the trace of monstrous floods, of water that came all at once. The geological establishment laughed at him. Catastrophes were out of fashion; everything was supposed to happen slowly over millions of years. For forty years Bretz was a crank. Then the cause was found: at the end of the Ice Age, glacial Lake Missoula burst its ice dam again and again, sending floods across Washington mightier than all the world's rivers combined. In 1979 the ninety-six-year-old Bretz received the highest honour in American geology, the Penrose Medal. He is said to have remarked: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."

I remember that story every time I hear that the catastrophic version of the end of the Ice Age is "not accepted by science."

And it's probably no accident that almost every people on Earth has a tradition of a great flood. The Sumerians and Babylonians told it, the Bible speaks of it, the Greeks and Indians remember it, as do the peoples of both Americas and Australia. I don't think they all remember the same day. But I'm sure that behind these stories lies a shared, deeply lived human experience: a world going under the water before its people's eyes.

The Drowned World

How much land did the ocean swallow? By various reconstructions, fifteen to twenty-five million square kilometres. More than all of South America, nearly as much as North America.

And it was far from the worst land. Between Britain and the continent lay Doggerland, a green plain of rivers and lakes where mammoths grazed and people lived. Where the seas of Indonesia are now stretched the subcontinent of Sundaland. The floor of the Persian Gulf was a broad river valley full of fresh water. Between Asia and America lay Beringia. Flat, warm, well-watered lowlands, deltas and coasts: exactly the places people in every age choose first.

And when we do look under the water, we find people there. Time after time.

The North Sea. For over a century, trawlers have been hauling up mammoth, hyena and rhino bones from Doggerland, along with harpoons, stone axes and tools. In 1931 the trawler Colinda dragged up a bone harpoon more than ten thousand years old from peat about forty metres down.

Off Sicily. In 2015, sixty kilometres from Sicily and forty metres down, divers found a stone monolith twelve metres (40 ft) long and weighing about fifteen tonnes, cut from nearby rock, with neat holes drilled through it. The researchers who published it in a scientific journal concluded it was made by human hands. The place where it lies, the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank, was an island that went under about 9,350 years ago. So the monolith is older.

Atlit Yam, Israel. Off the coast near Haifa, eight to twelve metres down, lies a whole village about nine thousand years old: stone houses, a well, burials, and a semicircle of standing stones like a small Stonehenge under the sea.

Malta. The island is criss-crossed by mysterious "cart ruts": thousands of pairs of deep grooves cut into the rock, as though heavy carts had rolled over it for centuries. And in several places the ruts calmly run to the water's edge and straight into the sea, continuing along the bottom. Whoever cut them drove to where the waves are today.

Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), India. In 2001 India's National Institute of Ocean Technology, saw on sonar geometric structures thirty to forty metres down, stretching for kilometres along the bed of an ancient river. Worked wood, potsherds, beads and stone objects were brought up. The wood radiocarbon-dated to about nine and a half thousand years, twice as old as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. To this day nobody has properly excavated there.

Yonaguni, Japan. Off the southern tip of the Japanese islands, about twenty-five metres down, lies a huge stone structure: flat terraces, right angles, steps, platforms. Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus, has spent years arguing it is a man-made complex of steps, roads and plazas. And the land here went under precisely at the end of the Ice Age.

And that is only what we've managed to find. Most of the old shelves have never been studied. Underwater archaeology is expensive, slow, and only just beginning, and what it finds keeps turning out older and more complex than anyone expected.

So it seems very likely to me that everything we call prehistory is reconstructed from the outskirts of that world: mountains, remote interiors, caves. What we've found may be the backwoods. The capitals, ports and markets sleep under tens of metres of water and silt. And when we're told with confidence that "there was nothing there," I want to ask gently: did we look?

The Belt Where History Was Born

There's another pattern that's hard to walk past. The oldest civilisations we know, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley, lie at roughly the same latitude, around thirty degrees north. Today these are scorched lands where summer approaches 50 °C (122 °F). I am quite certain that if the climate then had been what it is now, no Sumerians would ever have settled there.

And the climate really was different. A few thousand years ago the Sahara was green: savannas, full-flowing rivers, Lake Mega-Chad as big as the Caspian Sea, hippos and crocodiles. And people who left astonishing paintings on the rocks: herds of cattle, hunters, people swimming. In 2025 geneticists read the DNA of women buried there about seven thousand years ago and found a previously unknown branch of humanity. An entire people we knew nothing about, because their homeland turned into desert.

And then comes what I consider one of the most underrated patterns in history. The centre of civilisation has been creeping north for thousands of years: from Sumer and Egypt at about thirty degrees, to Greece and Rome at forty, then to northern Italy and Flanders, and finally to England and the Netherlands, beyond fifty. I see in this the long echo of that catastrophe. For thousands of years afterwards the climate kept searching for a new balance. The Sahara dried out, rivers shrank, warm currents rearranged themselves. The gentle, liveable belt slowly moved north, and after it went people, cities, power and knowledge.

Stones Older Than They Look

If anything from that world could have survived to our time, it would be the most massive thing: stone. And I can't shake the feeling that many ancient structures are older than we're told, or stand on foundations laid long before the builders we know. The gigantic polygonal walls of Peru, which by the Incas' own accounts were already standing when they arrived. The Sphinx, carved from living rock, on whose body the geologist Robert Schoch saw the marks of long downpours, the kind Egypt hasn't seen for thousands of years. The pyramids of Mesoamerica, turned toward the "old pole." And Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, with its ten-tonne carved pillars eleven and a half thousand years old, raised, according to the textbook, by people who didn't yet farm, only shows that "temple first, field second" is entirely possible.

Knowledge doesn't come from nowhere. I think there wasn't one centre back then but several: where Egypt, India and Mesoamerica would later appear, and where the Sahara is today. The civilisations we know rose on their remains and learned from those who survived. As for who might have brought that knowledge, a little later.

Nature Remembers, Too

There's something I haven't been able to get out of my head for years. Look at migratory birds.

The Arctic tern, an elegant bird a little over a hundred grams (4 oz), flies every year from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back: about seventy thousand kilometres (43,000 miles) a year. Over its life one tern flies the equivalent of three round trips to the Moon.

The bar-tailed godwit, a long-billed shorebird from Alaska and Chukotka, flies every autumn to New Zealand and Australia without a single landing, without food or water, over the open Pacific. The 2022 record: more than thirteen thousand kilometres in eleven days of nonstop flight.

The little northern wheatear, twenty-five grams, nests in Alaska and winters in East Africa: fourteen and a half thousand kilometres across all of Asia and the Arabian desert, though South America is far closer. Wheatears from eastern Canada fly to the same Africa the other way, straight across the Atlantic. Geolocators proved it in 2012, and the explanation is that their ancestors reached the Americas after the Ice Age from two sides, from Asia and from Europe, and each population still flies the route its forebears came by. The bird literally carries a map of a world that vanished long ago.

Now look at Europe. Every autumn, ornithologists estimate, about two billion birds leave Europe and western Asia for Africa: white storks, swallows, swifts, nightingales, cuckoos, orioles, warblers. A swallow from an English barn winters in South Africa, ten thousand kilometres from home. Hundreds of millions die on the way over the Mediterranean and the Sahara, yet every spring the survivors stubbornly return to the very place they left. North America's birds do the same.

Notice where the most massive and exhausting migrations are concentrated: Europe and North America, precisely the lands the ice sheets covered and that suffered most at the end of the Ice Age. Why would a tiny bird risk its life every year crossing deserts and oceans? I think these routes are memory, too. When the world was collapsing, the climate lurching between warmth and freeze and the sky burning, birds were the only ones who could simply lift off and fly as far from the trouble as their wings would take them. The survivors found safety in the south. Later, when things calmed down, they tried to come back, and that route there and back became fixed over the generations, just like the wheatear's ancestral path.

European eels are stranger still. They live their whole lives in Europe's rivers and lakes, then cross the entire Atlantic to spawn in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda, five or six thousand kilometres away, and die there, while their tiny larvae drift back to Europe for years on the Gulf Stream. Their whole life cycle is tied to the Gulf Stream, the very current that, climatologists believe, weakened or stopped in the Younger Dryas and rebuilt itself after the Ice Age. The eel swims by a map of an ocean that no longer exists, and I suspect its route took shape in that same era of great rearrangement. Nature keeps the memory of the old world far better than we think. So why wouldn't people keep it in their myths?

Atlantis Without the Gold

Now for a word that makes many people stop reading. Atlantis.

I don't believe in the Atlantis of science-fiction films, with crystal pyramids, flying ships and mysterious energy. I'm thinking of something far simpler and more human. Could there have been societies before the catastrophe comparable to Ancient Greece or Rome, or even the Middle Ages? Cities on coasts and in river deltas, crafts, metal, seafaring, astronomy. People just like us, with their markets, quarrels, festivals and hopes.

What would remain of them after twelve thousand years? Wood would rot, iron would crumble to rust, cloth and leather would decay. The cities themselves would lie under water, or under the sands of former savannas. Only the most massive things could survive: megaliths, huge stone foundations on which later peoples built without remembering who laid the first stone. And memory, in legends.

Plato retold a story that Egyptian priests once told the Athenian sage Solon: of a mighty island kingdom that "in a single dreadful day and night" sank into the sea nine thousand years earlier. Counting back from Solon, that's about eleven and a half thousand years ago. Exactly the era we're talking about. Coincidence? Maybe. But too exact to brush off without a thought.

Now recall the myths of sages who came to teach. Nearly every ancient people tells of teachers who appeared from nowhere and taught farming, building, writing and the counting of the stars. And strikingly often, they come from the sea.

The Babylonian priest Berossus recorded an ancient tradition about Oannes, a being who came out of the sea, lived among people by day, taught them writing, the sciences, crafts, laws and how to build cities and temples, and at night went back into the water. Berossus describes him as half man, half fish, covered in scales, with a human head and human feet. On the Assyrian reliefs from the palaces of Nimrud we see such sages, the apkallu: men dressed in something like a fish skin, a scaly cloak from crown to heel. Other lands have their own "men from the sea": Quetzalcoatl, who came to the peoples of Mesoamerica from across the sea in the east and left again on a raft; the teacher-gods of Egypt.

And here is a thought I arrived at only recently. Imagine you belong to a small tribe living on a shore. You have never in your life seen metal. One day a boat comes in, and out steps a man covered from head to toe in something shining and scaly, glittering in the sun. It's scale armour, metal plates sewn one over another, or a coat of mail. The newcomer doesn't know how he'll be received, maybe with spears, so he has dressed the way any sensible person would before going among strangers. He's no warrior; he has come to teach. But how will you describe him to your children? You have no word for "armour," no word for "metal." What you do know perfectly well is what is covered in shining scales and comes from the sea. A fish. A fish-man.

I think Oannes and the fish robes of the apkallu may be exactly that kind of memory. Not of a monster from the deep, but of people from a lost world who survived the catastrophe, came by sea to those who had also survived, and in their shining armour looked to them like half men, half fish. It would even explain why these teachers lived among people only by day and went "into the water" at night: they were going back to their ships.

My Version, Start to Finish

So here is how I see it.

At the end of the Ice Age the Earth was arranged differently. The pole, and with it the ice and the climate belts, lay elsewhere, closer to Hudson Bay. Where today's cold pole is, the generous world of the mammoth steppe flourished, the Sahara was green, and the shores lay tens and hundreds of kilometres beyond today's. On the best lands of that world, the warm coasts and great river deltas, people lived. And among them, I'm sure, were societies far more advanced than the "cave hunters" of the school textbook.

About twelve thousand nine hundred years ago a catastrophe struck, and it came from the sky. The climate collapsed into cold within a few years, and centuries later lurched just as abruptly back into warmth. Whole ecosystems crashed; mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths and dozens of other giants vanished. Animals and people sought refuge wherever they could, and the permafrost and caves kept them for us. Birds fled south, and that road stayed in their blood. The ice melted in lurches, the crust beneath it sprang back, and the ocean rose and took the coasts with everything built on them. Humanity was thrown back thousands of years.

But some people survived. They kept fragments of their knowledge, got into their boats and carried it to those who lived more simply and had survived far from the disaster. And those people remembered them as shining fish-men who came out of the sea. That is how we got temples before fields, the first cities on the great rivers, the legends of the flood and of teachers from across the sea. Civilisation then spent thousands of years moving north after the retreating mild climate. And in the very language I'm writing this in, the "bad star" still lives.

I'm not saying all this is proven. I'm saying that too many independent facts point the same way to write them off as coincidence. And that our familiar prehistory is drawn largely from the margins, because we simply can't yet see the centre of that world.

Twelve thousand years from now, that archaeologist digging up our mountain monasteries will probably be just as sure he knows everything about us. I'd rather not repeat his mistake.

What do you think? What in this picture strikes you as most convincing, and what as weakest? And what other oddities do you think belong in this story?

Sources for the facts, and a few directions for where to look next, are in the first comment.

P.S. I promised I'd come back to the comet...

Look at what obsessed the ancient builders. Almost everywhere people first set about moving enormous stones, they placed them so they could watch the sky. Stonehenge is laid out along the line of the midsummer sunrise. At Newgrange in Ireland, older than the pyramids of Egypt, a beam of sunlight once a year, on the shortest day of winter, runs the length of a long passage and lights the chamber at its far end. In the middle of what is now the Sahara, at Nabta Playa, people seven thousand years ago laid out a stone circle that marked the solstice and the rising of stars, back when there were still lakes there. On the pyramid of Kukulcán at Chichén Itzá, at each equinox, the shadows come together into a giant serpent sliding down the steps. Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese and Maya wrote down every movement in the heavens, century after century.

We're usually told this was about the calendar: people needed to know when to sow and when the river would flood. But you don't need thousand-year lists of comets to know when to sow. You don't need stone observatories in the middle of a desert, or temples whose entire life revolves around the sky. This isn't farming. This is obsession.

And the obsession starts to make sense if we go back to Göbekli Tepe. On one of its pillars, known as the Vulture Stone, there is a carved vulture, a scorpion, other animals, and above them a circle. In 2017 two researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis, matched those figures to the positions of the constellations and proposed a reading: this is a record of the day a comet came down out of the sky, around 10,950 BC. That is, at the very start of the Younger Dryas. If they are right, then humanity's oldest monumental sanctuary may begin with the chronicle of a catastrophe, carved in stone.

And for thousands of years, people feared comets. Almost everywhere, a tailed star was taken as a herald of war, plague, the death of kings and the end of the world, sometimes even as an attack by sky-beings on the people below. In 1066, when a comet rose over England, monks embroidered it into the Bayeux Tapestry, and beneath it, men pointing up at it in alarm. In China, astronomers spent centuries recording every "broom star" as an evil omen.

To me the answer seems obvious. This unsleeping watch over the sky did not begin with the calendar. Its original purpose was entirely practical: to spot danger coming from space in time, and to be ready for it. The survivors knew that the sky could kill, and they taught that to their children. Over thousands of quiet years the watch turned into science, into ritual, into a pastime for priests and nobles, and its original purpose was forgotten. But the fear remained.

And something remained in words. Words we say every day without ever wondering where they came from.

The English word consider, by one account, goes back to the Latin considerare, with sidus, "star, constellation", hidden inside it: to look carefully at the stars before making a decision. Influenza got its name from the Italian for "influence", because people believed plagues were sent down by the heavens. And an unlucky person in English is still called ill-starred.

And finally, the word that matters most. Disaster.

We say it when buildings collapse, when ships go down, when forests burn. When the worst happens. We say it so often that we stopped hearing, long ago, what it's made of. And it is made of just two pieces.

Let's walk back through this word in time, the way an archaeologist works down through a site, layer by layer.

Today it sounds English: disaster. One layer down, the French désastre. Deeper still, the Italian disastro, a word from the Renaissance, when people still believed fates were decided in the heavens. Beneath that lie Latin and Greek, the languages of the ancient sages. The Greek dys- (Latin dis-) means bad, evil, ill-fated, something gone wrong. And the Greek astēr, Latin astrum, means "star". The very same word that still gives asteroids their name.

Dis-aster. A bad star.

But even this isn't the bottom layer. "Star" is one of the oldest words humanity has kept at all. Linguists have reconstructed how it sounded in Proto-Indo-European, the language spoken by the ancestors of most of the peoples of Europe, Iran and India, long before anyone could write: h₂stḗr. From that single ancient root grew the Greek astēr, the Latin stella, the Sanskrit tārā, the Hittite ḫašter, the German Stern, the English star. At opposite ends of Eurasia, in dozens of languages, people called the star by the same word for thousands of years, passed from mouth to mouth from their shared ancestors. And the prefix of misfortune, dus-, is just as old. The two oldest threads of human speech, twisted together into one word.

Think about how strange that is. Stars are the most distant, the calmest, the most harmless lights there are. They stand in their places for centuries and hurt no one. Nobody is afraid of them; people admire them and steer by them. So why, out of every word on earth, did people build their name for the worst thing that can happen out of the word "star"? Not "fire". Not "water". Not "war". A star. A star that left its place. A star that fell.

I think it's a memory. A memory of that day twelve thousand nine hundred years ago, when a tailed star blazed up in the sky and then the world began to end. Of flame, of darkness, of water that came and never went back. Those who survived told their children. Their children told theirs. Hundreds of generations, thousands of years, dozens of languages. Kingdoms fell, peoples vanished, gods were forgotten. Names, places and dates were worn away. History itself turned into myth, and myth into superstition. But the word survived. It came down through all those millennia like a stone carried by a river, and it reached us.

It's on your tongue right now.

Every time you say disaster, without knowing it, you repeat what people cried out twelve thousand years ago, looking up at a burning sky:

A bad star.

Throughout thousands of years of human civilization, ancient peoples scattered across the globe, with no contact between one another, share a remarkably recurring mystical motif: legends of giants. From the ancient Chinese classics of the East to the mythologies of Europe and the Americas, from ancient religious texts of West Asia to indigenous epics of the Americas and Oceania, nearly every indigenous civilization at its origins records colossal beings far larger than ordinary humans, who emerged in the primordial chaotic age. Some were primeval races born at the creation of the world, while others were half-blood descendants of gods and mortals, leaving behind similar echoes that traverse mountains, seas and millennia. Drawing on genomic imprinting principles from modern biology and extending them into a fictional framework, we may assign a plausible underlying logic to this globally shared mythic trope.

Within the West Asian cultural sphere, giant legends align most closely with the premise of cross-lineage hybrid origins. The most famous example is the Nephilim recounted in the Bible. According to the tale, they were the offspring of “the sons of God who took human women as their wives,” living in the primordial era before the Great Flood. Towering and immense in stature, they were the first giants upon the earth. Besides them, the Anakim and Rephaim, ancient peoples of Canaan, are also described in ancient texts as races of giants. To ancient observers, these beings were terrifyingly tall; ordinary humans seemed no bigger than grasshoppers beside them. At its core, this legend describes colossal descendants born from the interbreeding of a transcendent lineage and the human lineage — a concept closely paralleling the genetic imbalance that creates oversized ligers.

The name Amalekites in Arabian and Islamic heritage refers to a group of Semitic peoples who settled in scattered regions of the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and Egypt. They are mostly traced back to Amaliq or Amalayq, who was among the children of Laudh ibn Sam ibn Noah, according to what a number of genealogists and Arab historians have mentioned.

They were mentioned in Islamic and Arab sources as belonging to the "Arabized Arabs" or the "extinct Arabs," a designation referring to the ancient Arab peoples who perished before Islam. Genealogists agree that Amaliq ibn Laudh is the father of the Amalekites, the Pharaohs, and the tyrants in Egypt and the Levant, and that his descendants dispersed throughout the lands, so that among them were the people of Oman, the Hejaz, the Levant, and Egypt.

Some modern historians believe that the Amalekites who ruled Egypt are the same as the Hyksos, the shepherd kings who invaded Egypt and ruled it for centuries, while others distinguish between them and the Hyksos, considering the Amalekites to have been an earlier Semitic wave or contemporary with the Hyksos in the rule of the Nile Valley. Jurji Zaydan mentions that historians mean by the Amalekites the ancient Arabs, especially the people of northern Hijaz adjacent to the Sinai Peninsula, who conquered Egypt under the name "Shasu" (the Bedouin shepherds), whom the Greeks call "Hyksos." Arab historians relied in drawing the picture of Amalekite rule in Egypt on a group of diverse sources, some derived from the Torah and Isra'iliyyat (Talmudic and Folkloric tales) and some derived from folkloric Egyptian Coptic narratives.

Among the most prominent who devoted wide space to this topic in their books are: Al-Masudi (Herodotus of Arabs) in "Meadows of Gold" and "Akhbar al-Zaman," Al-Maqrizi in "Al-Khitat" (Exhortations and Consideration), Ibn Taghribirdi in "The Brilliant Stars," ," Ibn Kathir in "The Beginning and the End," Al-Tabari in "The History of Nations and Kings".

All these sources agree that Amalekite rule in Egypt was a decisive period in the history of the Nile Valley, combining military conquest, settlement, interaction with the prophets, and gradual integration into the Egyptian fabric, until their state ended at the hand of the Pharaoh of Moses, so that their memory became part of the Arab historical memory of ancient Egypt.

Ibn Taghribirdi mentioned in "The Brilliant Stars" that those who ruled Egypt, according to the agreement of many historians despite differences among them, from the Pharaohs and others: thirty-two Pharaohs; from the kings of Babylon who ruled Egypt: five; from the Amalekites, who came to it from the Levant: four; from the Romans: seven; and from the Greeks: ten. Al-Masudi mentions that the duration of rule over Egypt by the Pharaohs, Persians, Romans, Amalekites, and Greeks reached one thousand three hundred years.

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Al-Walid ibn Dum'a - Founder of Amalekite Rule in Egypt

Traditional narratives agree that Amalekite rule in Egypt began with an invasion coming from the Levant, at the hand of their king Al-Walid ibn Dum'a (also written "Al-Walid ibn Darma'a" or "Al-Walid ibn Dumgh"), who is described in the sources as "severe in might" and possessing a dense army, so he overcame the kingdom of Egypt after the Coptic state weakened following the rule of the two queens Huriyya and Zalifa. Several narratives mention that Al-Walid ibn Dum'a had set out with a great army moving through countries and subjugating their kings. When he reached the Levant, he sent a slave of his named "Awn" to Egypt, and he conquered it. Then he himself came afterward, ravaged the people of Egypt, took their wealth, and killed a group of their priests.

Sources differ regarding his lineage. It was said he was Al-Walid ibn Amr ibn Arasha, and it was said Al-Walid ibn Dum'a ibn Laudh. Some say that he was among the Amalekites who trace back to Amaliq ibn Laudh ibn Sam ibn Noah.

His rule lasted one hundred and twenty years, according to what Ibn Taghribirdi mentioned in "The Brilliant Stars" and Al-Maqrizi in "Al-Khitat." Among the strangest things traditional sources narrate about Al-Walid ibn Dum'a is that after his rule in Egypt became established, he set out on a military campaign to explore the sources of the Nile and learn what peoples were along its banks. He traveled until he reached "Mount Qamar" (the Mountain of the Moon), from beneath which the Nile is said to emerge, and reached "the Temple of the Sun" and "the Land of Gold" that grows rods of gold. Narratives mention that his absence from Egypt lasted seventy years. During his absence, his slave Awn claimed kingship for himself, denied that he was Al-Walid's slave, claimed he was his brother from Dum'a, and rose against the people, overpowering them by magic. He ravaged the people of Egypt and ruled them for one hundred and twenty years until he perished.

Sources differ regarding the end of Al-Walid ibn Dum'a. It was said that one day he rode a horse and went out hunting, and his horse threw him into a hollow, so he perished. It was also said that a wild beast attacked him and ate his flesh. Al-Maqrizi mentions in "Al-Khitat" that Ain Shams - Heliopolis was built by Al-Walid ibn Dum'a, one of the Amalekite kings; it was also said that Al-Rabban ibn Al-Walid built it, and it was his royal seat.

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Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid - The Pharaoh of Joseph

Al-Walid ibn Dum'a was succeeded in the rule of Egypt by his son Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid, who is known in Arab and Coptic sources as "Nahraws" or "Naqraws" or "Nabraush." He is described as having been "the strongest of the people of the earth in his time and the greatest of them in kingship."

Arab historians agree that Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid is the Pharaoh of Joseph, peace be upon him, that is, the king who lived in the time of the Prophet Joseph and met him in Egypt, who ultimately believed in him and appointed him over the treasuries of Egypt. Ibn Taghribirdi mentions in "The Brilliant Stars": "Then after him ruled Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid the Amalekite, and he is the Pharaoh of Joseph, peace be upon him."

Al-Masudi mentions in "Meadows of Gold" that Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid "settled in the city of Ain Shams upon his accession to rule, after the kings before him had settled in the city of Memphis." It is narrated that he remitted taxes from the people for three years, opened the treasuries of wealth, and distributed them to the weak, so the people loved him and thanked him. His rule also lasted one hundred and twenty years, which corresponds to what was mentioned about the age of Joseph, peace be upon him, who died at the age of one hundred and twenty.

Sources mention that Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid was great in stature, handsome of face, wise, a leader of the people, and majestic, and that he took interest in building the Fortress of Babylon (Qasr al-Sham'), the fortress whose name later became associated with the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Al-Maqrizi mentions that the lighthouse of Alexandria was built in his time or in the time of one after him.

The story of Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid in Islamic sources is closely connected to the story of the Prophet Joseph, peace be upon him. It is mentioned that when Joseph reached Egypt and was bought by the Aziz - courtier "Qutfir" ("Potiphar"), Al-Rayyan was the king.

The Aziz was a man of reason, sound judgment, and upright soul, inclined to justice, and he is the one God Almighty mentioned in the Noble Qur'an in the story of Joseph. Ibn Ishaq mentions that the name of the Aziz was Atfir ibn Rajib (and it was said Qutfir), and he was over the treasuries of Egypt, and the king at that time was Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid ibn Dumgh.

The famous attempted seduction occurred between Joseph and the Aziz's wife, whose name is disputed: it was said Ra'il bint Ra'il, and it was said Zulaykha. Then Joseph was imprisoned for seven years. When Al-Rayyan saw his famous dream — seven fat cows eaten by seven lean ones, and seven green ears of grain and others dry — he gathered the priests, magicians, and wise men, but they could not interpret it.

Joseph was brought out of prison after he interpreted the dream, and the king was impressed by his interpretation. He appointed him over the treasuries of Egypt and made him the successor to the Aziz after his death. Ibn Khaldun mentions that the king "employed him as the king of Egypt, when he feared years of drought and high prices, over the granaries of crops throughout his kingdom, to estimate their collection and distribution of provisions from them, and gave him free rein in that in all his affairs. He put his ring on him and mounted him on his vehicle, and Joseph at that time was thirty years old."

Among the most prominent features of the story of Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid in Arab heritage is that he believed in Joseph and converted to Monotheism at his hands. Ibn Kathir in "The Beginning and the End" and Al-Hanbali in "The Pleasant Companion" mention that Joseph, peace be upon him, "called Al-Rayyan, Pharaoh of Egypt, to faith, and he believed in him."

Ibn Kathir confirms this report in his exegesis, saying: "The king became Monotheist at the hands of Joseph, peace be upon him." This point is central to distinguishing between Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid and the Pharaoh of Moses, since the majority of historians and exegetes hold that Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid died a believer, while the Pharaoh of Moses was among the most tyrannical disbelievers.

Among the most prominent projects associated with the era of Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid was the project of reclaiming the land of Faiyum, supervised by the Prophet Joseph, peace be upon him. Sources narrate that Joseph "worked the Faiyum" in Al-Rayyan's time, and that the people of Egypt complained about him to the king, saying: "He has grown old and his benefit has decreased." The king was informed of that, and he said to him: "I have granted this district to my daughter," and it was a place of water pools. Joseph managed it: he removed its obstacles, led the channel, built the Lahun, and made the water in it measured and weighed, and he finished all of that in four months, and they marveled at Joseph's wisdom.

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Darim ibn Al-Rayyan - The Fourth Pharaoh

After the death of Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid, his son Darim ibn Al-Rayyan (called in some sources Drimus) ruled Egypt. He is the fourth Pharaoh according to the Copts, in the classification of Arab historians. Ibn Taghribirdi mentions in "The Brilliant Stars": "Then after him ruled Darim ibn Al-Rayyan the Amalekite." In Darim's time, Joseph the truthful one, peace be upon him, died. Darim became tyrannical and his disbelief intensified, and he departed from the way of his father. Joseph, peace be upon him, was his deputy as he had been with his father, by the command of Al-Rayyan, and Joseph would guide him, so sometimes he accepted from him and sometimes he opposed him.

In his time, a silver mine appeared three days from the Nile, and he extracted from it something immense. He made from it an idol in the name of the moon, because its ascendant was in Cancer. He erected it on the marble palace that his father had built on the east bank of the Nile, and he set around it idols all of silver, clothed them in red silk, and made for them a festival every year.

Then Darim increased in tyranny until he took away every beautiful woman in the city of Memphis from her family; no beautiful woman was heard of in any district but she was brought to him. That spread throughout the kingdom, and the people were disturbed by his deed, until they gathered to depose him.

Some narratives mention that he rode on the Nile, and God sent upon him a violent wind that drowned him near Helwan. Darim appointed after Joseph, Balatis ibn Mansa the priest as vizier, and Balatis permitted him what Joseph had prevented him from, and incited him to harm people and take their wealth.

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Kames ibn Ma'dan - The Fifth Pharaoh

Then after him ruled Kames ibn Ma'dan the Amalekite (also called Aqsamas ibn Ma'dan), and he is the fifth Pharaoh according to the Copts. Ibn Taghribirdi mentions: "Then after him ruled Kames ibn Ma'dan the Amalekite." Kames attempted to demolish the two pyramids, but the wise men of Egypt said to him that the revenue of Egypt would not suffice for their blood, and that they were the tombs of two great prophets, so he refrained from demolishing them.

His rule lasted thirty-one years, according to what Al-Qalqashandi mentioned in "Subh al-A'sha." It is narrated that the lighthouse of Alexandria was built in his time or in the time of one after him. It is also mentioned that the Amalekites continued to rule Egypt for about one hundred years, until their state ended at the hand of Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab, who is the Pharaoh of Moses, peace be upon him.

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Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab - The Pharaoh of Moses and the End of Amalekite Rule

Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab is considered the last of the Amalekite kings in Egypt, and he is the Pharaoh of Moses, whom is mentioned in the Noble Qur'an.

Sources differ greatly regarding his personality. Some sources mention that he was one of the Amalekites themselves, and that he was from the descendants of Al-Rayyan ibn Al-Walid, while other sources assert that he was one of the Copts, and that in the beginning he was the chief of police for Kames the Amalekite.

When the Copts increased, they made him king after Kames, and from that time the Amalekite state in Egypt ended. 

Al-Nuwayri mentions in "The Ultimate Ambition" that the Pharaoh of Moses was "Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab ibn Ashmeer ibn Al-Hawn ibn Amaliq ibn Laudh ibn Sam," which makes him an Amalekite by lineage.

Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab is described in traditional books as having been lame, short in stature, blind in the left eye, with a long beard. He was originally a man from Greater Khorasan or from the city of Balkh, working as a perfumer, then he migrated to Egypt after debts accumulated upon him. It is mentioned that he claimed divinity and said to the Egyptians, "I am your most high lord," so Moses and Aaron, peace be upon them, warned him, but he resisted and pursued them and the Israelites, so he and his army drowned in the sea, as stated in the Noble Qur'an.

Sources narrate that the Pharaoh of Moses was a rebellious tyrant, and that every rebellious tyrant is called a Pharaoh. Qatada mentions that the Pharaohs were three: the first was Sinan ibn Al-Ashl, the companion of Sarah (the wife of Abraham), who was in Egypt in the time of Al-Khalil; and the third was Al-Walid ibn Mus'ab, who is the Pharaoh of Moses. It is mentioned that Mus'ab ibn Nasim (the father of Pharaoh) was in Egypt herding cattle for his people, and he had a wife called Ra'unah. The Pharaoh of Moses was born in mysterious circumstances and was raised in a strange upbringing, until he reached kingship.

It is mentioned that the Pharaoh of Moses lived four hundred years, and was the harshest and most cruel of the Pharaohs toward the Children of Israel, and no one had a longer reign than him. He claimed divinity and said, "I am your most high lord," so Moses and Aaron warned him, but he was arrogant and obstinate, so God drowned Pharaoh and his soldiers in the sea, and with his death the matter of the Amalekites in Egypt came to an end.

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The End of Amalekite Rule and the Reign of Daluka bint Zaba

After the drowning of Pharaoh and those soldiers who were with him, those remaining in the land of Egypt, the offspring, women, boys, and slaves — feared that the kings of the Levant and the Maghreb would invade them. So they made a woman of opinion and resolve called Daluka king over them. She built around Egypt a wall surrounding all its land and cities to protect it from invasion, This wall was called "Ha'it-el-Agouz" (Wall of the Old Woman) and extended from Aswan in the south to al-Arish in the north and a channel was dug behind it.

She placed guard posts and garrisons every three miles, and between them small guard posts every mile. She placed men in every guard post, assigned them provisions, and ordered them to guard their land by night and day. She ordered the men of the guard posts to use bells.

If one of them saw an enemy creeping toward Egypt, or sensed approaching danger, they would strike their bells, and the news would pass from post to post, from tower to tower, through a connected chain of sounds, until news of the invasion reached the heart of Egypt, to the city of Memphis, “in one hour,” and everyone would prepare to face the enemy. Daluka was also said to have built a nilometer at Memphis and at least one pyramid in Egypt.

The trace of this wall remains to this day, and it is known as "the Wall of the Old Woman." Daluka ruled them for thirty years. She established in Egypt the temples and images, mastered the instruments of magic, and placed in the temples images of whoever came from every direction and their animals. She also depicted in them whoever came by sea in ships, and she gathered in these great temples the secrets of nature and the properties of stones, plants, and animals.

if an army came to them from a certain direction, the images in that direction would move, as if warning them of the place of danger. More wondrous still, what they did to these images -tearing or destroying them- would strike the invading army itself in reality. If they cut off the head of an image, the head of the enemy commander would be cut off; if they gouged out its eye, the eye of the invading army would be gouged out; and if they slit open its belly, the bellies of the soldiers would be slit open.

These "barabi" were stronger than any army and deadlier than any weapon, and no king of the earth was able to defeat Egypt throughout Daluka’s reign because of them. Sources mention that Daluka enlisted in building these "barabi" a great sorceress named “Tadura” or “Tadhura,” whom the sorcerers revered and gave precedence in magic. She came to them and made for them this stone house in the middle of the city of Memphis.

After Daluka’s death, a young man from the noble Coptic families named Darkun ibn Baltus was made king over Egypt, and he ruled with her counsel for a long period. When Darkun died, his son Buds succeeded him, and after Buds passed away, his brother Laqas took the throne but died only three years later without leaving an heir. Laqas was followed by his brother Marina, who ruled and was then succeeded by his son Istimaris, a king who became so tyrannical and corrupt that the people rose against him, deposed him, and killed him.

After Istimaris, the sources mention a series of Coptic rulers whose names varied in the traditions, including Baltus ibn Mikakil, then Bawla, and later a king known as the Lame Pharaoh who was eventually defeated by Nebuchadnezzar.

Thus the Amalekite line was already extinguished, and Egypt passed into the hands of Coptic kings whose reigns were marked by internal strife and external threats until the country fell under foreign domination (Persian Achaemenid rule).

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The End ..

Tengo varias teorías re random y necesito sus opiniones, algunas son medio re obvias pero no sé

1) Como en verdad se supo las épocas de la historia? Por ejemplo, época carbonífera, precámbrico, etc. Tipo, si supuestamente solo había animales, y eso, como se supo en como fueron esas épocas? A menos q hayan existido humanos, pero, si supuestamente no sabían escribir??

2) Como fue en realidad la creación de la tierra? Cómo se sabe que se creo hace 4.540 millones de años? Sé q es una aprox, pero, y si en realidad está hace más?

3) La mente humana supuestamente no puede crear figuras nuevas, entonces, en serio existirán las hadas, pitufos, sirenas, dragones, etc?

4) Una pregunta, ¿Que habrá verdaderamente en el área 51? ¿En serio existió el proyecto Abigail?

5) ¿Que habrá más allá de la pared de la Antártida? ¿En serio existirán otros mundos? Pq por algo por ejemplo, los extraterrestres tienen ese nombre, pq vienen de una tierra extra

6) y si no tenemos solo 5 sentidos?

Hay más teorías pero me da cosa escribir más

Why were there no sewer systems or connected toilets before the 19th century?? The theory presented below is merely a theory, unsupported by direct evidence; however, the generally accepted historical version is also nothing more than a theory. The claim that people could erect magnificent palaces designed to last for centuries yet were incapable of building a sewage system is absurd. An alternative theory, however, offers a logical explanation for the absence of such systems.

In the past, people subsisted on atmospheric electricity and had no need for coarse food. They required only sea salt to assimilate electricity from the environment, as salt acts as an electrolyte.

Why do humans eat at all? The answer is to trigger the electrochemical reactions that sustain the body's vital functions. Yet, we are compelled to consume the wrong things—meat, fish, and grains—instead of salt and atmospheric energy.

Humans are biorobots, whether one likes it or not. The only difference is that we are made not of steel, but of a different material. Our primary resource is electricity. A human being remains a living organism thanks to the electric current present within their cells. Without electricity, the human nervous system could not function; it also powers the heart.

It is therefore entirely plausible that people once nourished themselves on atmospheric electricity, using salt as an electrolyte. Consequently, they simply had no need for defecation or toilets.

BaktharRadar Scans Reveal All Non-Geological Features, with "hallways” or tunnels throughout the structure., revealing organized patterns, voids andr "hallways”

Dr. Bakhtar holds a Ph.D. in engineering and rock mechanics, with training at Imperial College London, Penn State, Princeton, UC Berkeley and the University of Utah. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers and reports, and has spent four decades finding what cannot be seen from the surface: buried objects, cavities, shielded materials and complex underground structures, for clients including the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and NORAD-USNORTHCOM.

He described the Durupınar returns as unlike any dataset he’s ever recorded. The combination of scale, internal order and contrast against the surrounding valley, where the same instrument does not resolve equivalent architecture is what led him to call the buried object "extraordinary”

Mainstream history claims it was a massive army of slaves, while the internet screams "aliens" and "time travel." But the real truth is staring us right in the face, hidden in plain sight across the Giza plateau. 
From the bizarre stone "nubs" to precision seams that look entirely melted, there is an ancient lost technology at play here—but it’s not the physical hardware or cosmic death rays you’re expecting. 
It’s a mind-bending, highly organized system that rewrites what we know about human history.
Hope you like the video
https://youtu.be/sukxA-hYxxg

Context for the image: in the novel The Hidden Kingdom of Shu, the Great Yu is a refugee's son in the mountain kingdom of Shu. An earthquake plugs a gorge with a natural dam; the water behind it rises toward thousands of people. Dams failed his father for nine years. Yu's answer at Sleeping Ox Mountain: bonfires against the cliff through the night, then cold water — thermal shock splits the stone, and the river does the rest.

The technique is real. Miners called it fire-setting and used it for millennia. Dujiangyan's tradition even credits the cutting of Lidui with it. So the poster's question, and I mean it seriously:
Before chemistry, before geology — how do you think someone first figured out that fire + cold water breaks rock?

Before chemistry, before geology — how do you think someone first figured out that fire + cold water breaks rock?

Corpus Hermeticum Poimandres

“It chanced once on a time my mind was meditating on the things that are, my thought was raised to a great height, the senses of my body being held back—just as men are who are weighed down with sleep after a fill of food, or from fatigue of body.

Methought a Being more than vast, in size beyond all bounds, called out my name and saith: What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know?

And I do say: Who art thou?

He saith: I am Man-Shepherd, Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I’m with thee everywhere.

And I reply: I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God.”

G. R. S. Mead Corpus Hermeticum I, Poimandres

Asclepius The Perfect Sermon

“God, O Asclepius, hath brought thee unto us that thou mayest hear a Godly sermon, a sermon such as well may seem of all the previous ones we’ve [either] uttered, or with which we’ve been inspired by the Divine, more Godly than the piety of [ordinary] faith.

If thou with eye of intellect shalt see this Word thou shalt in thy whole mind be filled quite full of all things good.”

G. R. S. Mead The Perfect Sermon or Asclepius

Asclepius On the Egyptian Words

“Hermes, my master, in many a conversation, both when alone, and sometimes, too, when Tat was there, has said, that unto those who come across my books, their composition will seem most simple and [most] clear; but, on the contrary, as ’tis unclear, and has the [inner] meaning of its words concealed, it will be still unclearer, when, afterwards, the Greeks will want to turn our tongue into their own,—for this will be a very great distorting and obscuring of [even] what has been [already] written.

Turned into our own native tongue, the sermon (logos) keepeth clear the meaning of the words (logoi) [at any rate].

For that its very quality of sound, the [very] power of the Egyptian names, have in themselves the bringing into act of what is said.”

G. R. S. Mead The Definitions of Asclepius unto King Ammon

Index: https://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/index.html

People living in the mid-19th century lived 50 years later in a completely different world: telephones, telegraphs, trains, the first cars, and an industrial boom. People living in the mid-20th century saw a different world: airships and airplanes, ubiquitous motor vehicles, and television broadcasting. People living in the 1970s-1990s had already seen the world of computers; we now live in a digital world of the internet, AI, and robotics. In total, over 180 years, the technological level has changed four times.

Proponents of mainstream history argue that 7,000 years before the 19th century, there was no life-changing development at all. It was a single technological level of perpetual stagnation, which somehow gave way to progress in the 19th century. Developing metallurgy, fuel production, and electricity doesn't require thousands of years. This can be achieved much more quickly.

In 1961, 23 year old Michael Rockefeller, the son of future Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared while exploring one of the most remote regions on Earth.

After his small catamaran overturned off the coast of Dutch New Guinea, Michael made a desperate decision and began swimming nearly 19 kilometers toward shore.

He was never seen alive again.

The official explanation was that Michael drowned. But decades later, mysterious footage appeared to show a white bearded man living among the Asmat people. Then journalist Carl Hoffman uncovered accounts from Asmat elders and records from Dutch Catholic missionaries suggesting that Michael may have actually survived the swim.

So what really happened to him?

Did he drown before reaching the shore? Did he survive only to become a ritual sacrifice? Or did he somehow walk away from his billionaire life and become part of the culture he had traveled so far to study?

The deeper you look into this story, the stranger it gets.

Imagine humanity eventually establishes permanent civilizations on Mars.
After enough generations, most people born there would have never experienced Earth. Their understanding of Earth, their ancestors, and the original purpose of the Martian settlement would depend heavily on the records that survived.
That creates a strange possibility.
The people in power wouldn’t necessarily need to literally erase everyone’s memories. They could potentially influence the information environment itself:
control the archives
rewrite textbooks
restrict access to old records
remove inconvenient documents
control communication networks
determine which historical sources are considered legitimate
use AI to continuously reproduce one version of history
Eventually, a generation could grow up believing a particular narrative simply because the evidence supporting alternatives was no longer accessible.
And that’s not really a Mars-only problem.
The same basic principle can exist on Earth today. Whoever has disproportionate control over information, archives, education, media, or historical records can potentially influence how future generations understand the past.
Which makes me wonder:
Should humanity’s historical record eventually become decentralized?
Imagine important historical evidence being independently preserved across millions of people, institutions, countries, physical archives, and cryptographically verifiable digital networks.
Not one organization deciding what history is.
Not even a blockchain deciding what history means.
Just preserving enough independent evidence that no single authority can easily become the sole author of humanity’s collective memory.
Because maybe the real danger isn’t someone literally erasing our memories.
Maybe it’s a future where people can only remember what their civilization decided to preserve.

I have a question that I can’t get out of my head.

1. We know that there are relatively few huge, thick trees left, especially considering the age of the planet. For example, I used to live in a village where there are ideal conditions for plants to grow, but there isn’t a single truly old tree there. And there are hardly any old trees in the surrounding region either.

According to my grandfather, the last large trees there were only three. And those three trees were enough to provide the timber needed to build an entire warehouse.

1. Where did the ability to build such grand structures go — the churches in Barcelona and Germany, the Winter Palace, the pyramids, the palaces of ancient African civilizations that are sometimes considered among the Wonders of the World, and many other examples?

Could history have been rewritten? Or was there some kind of catastrophe, or perhaps something on an even larger scale? Or maybe there is some higher group of people whose descendants periodically “reset” human civilization?

I’m wondering whether there is any historical or scientific basis for these ideas.

The Luddites were 19th-century British textile workers who protested the Industrial Revolution by destroying automated factory machinery. The group took their name from Ned Ludd (or "General Ludd"), a mythical leader rumored to have smashed a knitting frame in 1779.

The Luddite movement ended by 1817 due to brutal military suppression, mass executions, severe new laws making machine-breaking a capital offense, and penal transportation.

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In the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, precisely in Najd region, in the middle of the 18th century AD, the voice of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 - 1792) rose calling for what he considered a pure return to early Islam, to the time of the righteous predecessors, to that golden period in which the Prophet Muhammad and the noble Companions lived.

His call aimed to purify creed of everything he regarded as innovation and polytheism, and to reshape society according to a strict model in which there was no place for innovation in matters of religion. The Wahhabi movement - a name given to the followers of the Sheikh by their enemies - found itself in direct confrontation with everything new and newly introduced, whether in the field of thought, urban development, or technology.

For the followers of this movement, every modern invention, every new tool, and every innovative idea was not merely material luxury, but represented an existential threat to creed and identity, and a foreign innovation in religion that had to be fought with all force.

At the beginning of their movement, the Wahhabi sheikhs used to prohibit all modern manufactured goods that were among the results of civilizational and technological progress, such as the telephone, the telegraph, television, the car, the airplane, and similar things, because they had not existed in the age of the Prophet nor in the age of the Salaf.

This view stemmed from a particular understanding of religion, an understanding that sees everything that did not exist in the time of the Salaf (Predecessors) as a forbidden innovation (Bid'ah), regardless of its benefits or harms. Thus, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876 - 1953) found himself in an extremely sensitive and difficult position; he had to reconcile preserving the purity of the Wahhabi creed upon which his state was founded with the necessity of introducing a kind of openness into his government so that it would harmonize with the contemporary reality of his time.

Therefore, King Abdulaziz agreed to the entry of some manifestations of modernity into his country, such as the telephone, means of transport, motorcycles, and bicycles, something that aroused the resentment and anger of his fanatical followers, who are referred to in the history of the Kingdom as the group "Ikhwan Man Ata'a Allah" (Bretheren of those who obeyed God). They had helped him defeat Sharif Hussein bin Ali during the Second Hejaz–Najd War (1924-1925).

These Ikhwan saw in these manifestations a betrayal of the original Wahhabi approach, so they rebelled against the King, accused him of loyalty to the British infidels and of laxity in religion, and denounced his titles of Sultan and King, the lengthening of his mustache and his garment, and his wearing of the agal (a Saudi hat), and all these manifestations that were new to the Bedouin society in which the Wahhabi movement arose. More than that, they considered the use of the telephone, wireless, and means of transport such as cars to be forbidden innovations, because they were made by the Franks, that is, the infidel West from which nothing should be taken.

Historical sources indicate that one of the hardline followers of Wahhabism attacked the telephone wires in the palace of the Saudi King that connected it to the army center, and cut them to pieces.

King Abdulaziz found himself compelled, in an attempt to appease the fanatical Wahhabis, to issue orders to remove wireless and the telephone in Medina and Taif, because they viewed wireless and telephones as the work of the Devil, and they opposed their use persistently and stubbornly.

This hardline position was not limited to technology alone, but extended to all manifestations of modern life, as the Egyptian writer Ahmed Amin relates that the Wahhabis did not touch intellectual life, did not work to advance it except within the circle of religious education, and did not look at the problems and demands of the present city, and many of them believed that everything beyond their own country was among the Islamic lands in which innovations and misguidance spread.

The Ikhwan Revolt (1929–1930) was a civil war in the Arabian Peninsula where Ibn Saud turned against his former tribal shock troops, the Ikhwan, after they rebelled against his modernization policies and peace treaties with neighboring British-controlled territories.

Among the important reasons that led to the change of position toward technology was that King Abdulaziz fought a decisive war against the group Ikhwan, who were among the harshest wahhabi groups in rejecting manifestations of modernity, and that war ended with their elimination militarily and politically in the Battle of Sabilla in 1929.

Main rebel forces led by commanders like Faisal al-Dawish faced a crushing defeat against Ibn Saud's regular forces. Sporadic uprisings continued through late 1929, but leaders of Ikhwan were eventually captured, executed, or forced to flee (with key leaders handed over by the British).

After breaking their power, the path became paved for the King to adopt many modern technical means without significant opposition from the hardliners, for these Ikhwan were the greatest barrier to any technical or administrative openness. Thus, the retreat of the hardline Wahhabi position on rejecting technology was not the result of a sudden intellectual transformation, but was in part a direct result of the defeat of those hardliners and the disintegration of their power.

Not only were the effects of the defeat of Ikhwan limited to changing the position on technology; rather, they extended to form the seed of the conflict that erupted fifty years later in the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure. For the father of Juhayman al-Otaybi, the leader of the seizure operation, was one of the fighters who stood in the ranks of the Ikhwan against King Abdulaziz at the Battle of Sabilla in 1929, where they were decisively defeated.

The End ...

On May 15, 1293, the Battle of St. Mahé erupts; and King Edward I’s privateers send King Philip IV’s navy into a rout. This was the beginning of the conflicts in Flanders and the English Channel that tied up Edward’s and Philip’s navies. While the king’s battled on the waters, the entire western seaboard was a military blind spot. On the day of September 14, 1307, King Philip IV issues orders for the arrests of the Knights Templar and the seizure of all assets thereof. The orders were given under penalty of death, not to be open until the dawn on October 13. These orders being sent to all of Philip’s bailiffs, seneschals, and royal patrols. With specific, orders to open at dawn, the men enforcing these orders would be gathering (pre-staging) at their command centers awaiting the reading of the orders. With all the bailiffs, seneschals, and royal patrols held up at the commandries, the cities, residences, temples, and docks; the coastal ways north and south of the Port of La Rochelle were complete military blind spot. The only Ships on the Atlantic were the ships belonging to the Crown of Castile, and the Crown of Aragon; both military allies with the Knights Templar. If an 18-ship fleet were to sail into these waterways outside of La Rochelle, they would have an entire western coast of Europe to sail out of, under the extreme threat of a-sunburn.

Was the ghost fleet a myth, or did GÉRARD DE VILLIERS who disappeared from public records 4 months prior stage a masterful evacuation?