Wilson's bestseller explores the mysteries of the pyramids and how they were built by a highly advanced archaic civilization.

Recent discoveries of ancient water damage to the Sphinx have thrown the scientific world into a tizzy with the suggestion that Egypt's legendary monuments might be thousands of years older than previously believed. In his astonishing new bestseller, Colin Wilson delves into these explosive new findings and takes us on a grand tour of the knowledge amassed by researchers over the centuries. He explores mysteries that have puzzled humanity since Plato: Was there an ancient civilization, destroyed by a great catastrophe, whose survivors built the Sphinx some 10,500 years before Christ? Did they possess a knowledge system that could orchestrate the transport of stones weighing thousands of tons, an accomplishment that still baffles modern engineers? Wilson's tour takes us to the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnons, the tortuous interior shafts of the pyramids, the Upper Amazon, and the Gilbert Islands, touching on sources from Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the I-Ching, to get to the ultimate nature of human consciousness.