Ben Van Kerkwyk is a researcher and creator of UnchartedX, a website and YouTube channel looking into ancient mysteries, presenting new ideas about humanity’s past.
His work is fascinating, especially his foundational hypothesis that history is cyclical and not linear.
Ancient civilisations understood the world in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Ben Van Kerkwyk
Cyclical history?
This is something I’ve wondered about.
Why do we assume that history follows a linear timeline from primitive to advanced, with nothing significant before that? What if history has multiple timelines?
Perhaps it’s conditioning. The Bible begins with ‘in the beginning’ and everything quickly advances after that. This only applies if one believes the literal chronology of Genesis, and many do.
However, Ben doesn’t and presents an intriguing argument about the rise and fall of civilisations.
The mysteries of the ancient past are often hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to ask the right questions.
Ben van Kerkwyk
Ben’s explanatory video
His YouTube channel has the following introductory video giving a pretty solid overview of what you might expect from his research.
If you don’t feel like watching it, his central thesis is that history is cyclical and there is evidence to support this.
Conversation
While many people think that civilisation started around 6,000 years ago, he says that this is probably not true because new discoveries point to the possibility of much more advanced societies.
His ‘Inheritance Model’ says that Egypt’s greatest successes were based on the knowledge and technology that the region received from a civilisation that was more advanced than its own.
In other words, instead of seeing history as a straight line, it might be better to think of it as a cycle, with advanced societies crashing and restarting.
Ben believes that new scientific evidence necessitates a change in the traditional understanding of human history.
It’s a very convincing argument.
If we follow the idea of an older civilisation, therefore, the Pyramids would have already been there before the first dynasty of the ancient Egyptians.
Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt
