I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
These people are called the apkallu. The context isn't what Hancock suggests it is and I recommend checking out the relevant Wikipedia page [0]. Here's a little primer on aspects of Sumerian religion the page doesn't get into though:
Sumerians essentially saw themselves as the first civilization. When they reference a prior civilization, what they're referring to is literally the gods themselves because being civilized is very literally the spark of divinity inside humans that separates us from animals. It's the gods who taught humans to be civilized, sending their representatives the seven apkallu (basically everything related to the heavens comes in sevens) to raise humanity from the among the beasts to serve the gods, as we were designed to do when the gods imbued us with their blood. This is referenced again in the epic of Gilgamesh when enkidu is made like a god by a prostitute who teaches him how to be civilized. Other near Eastern religious traditions carried this on as well. You're probably familiar with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become like gods themselves, i.e. are raised from among the animals and are cast out from the garden where the animals reside. This all gets a bit mixed up with the Sumerians having a bunch of ancestor cults going on as various human god-kings tie themselves to powerful lineages and so the gods/apkallu are seen as the ancestors of humanity.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.