ISBN 9781921869488 (Vol 1, PB, 556pp)
152mm x 229mm

"With Paradise Rediscovered ... Dr. Cahill presents a highly comprehensive reconstruction of the Atlantis culture that he argues may have existed near the Neolithic Black Sea ... Comparative studies of ancient religious and mythological texts such as Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. ... Paradise Rediscovered is presented as "paradigm-breaking conventional prehistoric research"."

- Atlantisforschung.de (German-English translation)

Links

About Paradise Rediscovered:

Mike interviewed by the Wagga Daily Advertiser

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Mike’s Poster on the 6400 BC Black Sea Flood, as presented at the ATLANTIS 2011 conference (25-27 June 2011, Santorini, Greece)

Press release from Charles Sturt University announcing Mike's book

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About Mike:

Mike's Charles Sturt University website

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Sample

From Prelude 2: Cygnus Vision

Now back to Plato and his Egyptian priest. I could summarise his opening statements as follows:

You Greeks are like children.

You have no old traditions because natural disasters repeatedly wipe you out.

You only know history as myth.

In contrast, we Egyptians understand the history behind your myths.

The priest then continues his argument by alluding to the myth of Phaëthon and the chariot of Helios. What can his motive be in this argumentative context? Plato is an expert in the construction of argument, having been trained therein like Solon and all good Athenian aristocrats. As a matter of fact he was among the best of his day, and that is actually what we know him for: as a father of Greek philosophy. So the Phaëthon passage is probably a development of the previous argument. The more I thought about it, the more likely I thought it that the old priest was pulling out one of the Crown Jewels in the Egyptian repository of hoary old tales: one of the earliest events claimed to be fact by the records. He (Plato, the priest?) continues his argument.

As a good old hoary example, take this quick lesson:

Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals. At such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore.

His meaning is quite clear isn’t it? “You think it is a myth,” (he might just as well have been talking to me, 2600 years later) “but it actually refers to bodies in the heavens.” So let’s consider the Myth of Phaëthon. It is the myth behind the constellation of Cygnus, and is really rather tragic.

…

Now let’s take another look at the Egyptian priest’s explanation of this story:

Now this … really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth… At such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore.

The most likely declination of heavenly bodies that matches this story, if it is not myth and we are to take it seriously as a developing connected theme, would be a supernova. The earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field really would protect those in the valleys better than those on the mountaintops, just as it does from the harmful radiation of the sun. I lived for a short while in Canberra, which, because of its elevation and southern longitude nearing the ozone hole, has the highest skin cancer rates in Australia: worse than the tropical coastal resorts of northern Queensland where the sun is much hotter at midday when the surf is up, but where a thicker atmosphere at sea level blocks more ultraviolet radiation. Yet if we are considering a supernova, we would require it to be close enough to have been noticeably bothersome to humans, and to have happened during a time period that the Egyptians or their forebears could have potentially witnessed and been able to remember. This time factor turns out to be rather problematic to imagine for primitive peoples, but more on that later. The putative location of the great celestial conflagration would seem to be clear from the myth that was passed down to us: it concerns the origin of the constellation of Cygnus. Are there any suitable candidate supernova remains in Cygnus, and how many might we expect to find there? If we find one, what is the chance that it is the one?

All the stars visible in the night sky to the unaided eye are in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which is a typical spiral galaxy containing an estimated one hundred billion (1011 or 100 x 109) stars. It is a spiral disk about 80 light years in diameter.[ii] How big is that? It takes two minutes for sunlight to reach the earth, and eighty years for light to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. Big enough? Our sun is located about 2/3 of the way or 27,000 light years from the centre. When light from a star at the centre of the Galaxy left its sun, there were still Neanderthals living here on Earth. Figure P3 shows our view of the Milky Way, looking toward the galactic centre in the infra red and the visible light spectra (infra red light passes through clouds of intragalactic dust that block the view that we see by eye in the visible spectrum). Obviously, most of the stars are clustered close to the centre, and out near us the density of stars in the disc is relatively lower.

Let us assume that, to be damaging to the surface of the earth, a supernova would have to occur within, say, two thousand light years. We are looking for an event that was noticeable, probably uncomfortable, but was no major threat to continued life on the planet. 2000 light years is an arbitrary but conservative value. In order also to be remembered by the Egyptians, let us say it would have had to occur within the last 10,000 years, but before the social consciousness of the Greeks was documented: say before 1,000 B.C.. We would now like to estimate the probability that a recent supernova occurred within this 7,000 year window close to us in the constellation of Cygnus. I am most grateful to Michael Strauss (Project Spokesperson at the Sloane Digital Sky Survey and professor of astrophysics at Princeton University in New Jersey), to Bill Blair (Professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland, and who has photographed Cygnus with the Hubble Space Telescope), to Barbara Jane Margaret Hassall (Course Leader in Astronomy by Distance Learning from Learn Astronomy.com), and to Bernd Pfeiffer (of the German Astronomical Society), for kindly answering correspondence that assisted me in the following calculations; however I must stress that any errors or misinterpretations of their advice are mine alone. I unequivocally bear all responsibility for any mistakes.

…

Considering a sphere of 2,000 light years around the sun, we have probably encompassed about 0.3% and not more than 0.6% of all the one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. We are on the edge of a spiral arm, where the density is a little lower. This means we are considering an area of space with perhaps a mere 300 million stars or so. The actual number is not so important for the reasoning that follows, considering what the errors in the estimated values must be, but within a factor of two is probably OK. We already established the expected supernova frequency at one per 20 years in the Milky Way, or 500 in the last 10,000 years. It follows that if we are considering a sphere containing 0.3% (or perhaps 0.6%) of these events, then we expect about 1.05 (let’s say 1, or perhaps 2) supernovae to have occurred within 2,000 light years of the earth in our 7,000 year window back to 8,000 B.C.. Close and recent supernovae should be relatively rare. So far, so good!

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