Hamlet's Mill
1st hardcover edition, dust cover art
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| Author | Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend |
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| Cover artist | William Barss (1st hardcover edition, Gambit, 1969); Sara Eisenman (1st paperback edition, 1977) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Mythology and Astronomy |
| Publisher | Gambit Incorporated (1969, hardcover, 1st edition, 1st printing); Harvard University Press (1969, hardcover); David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. (1977, softcover) |
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Publication date
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November 1969 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages |
505 (1st paperback edition; includes the 25 chapters, 39 appendices, bibliography and indices) |
| ISBN | (Harvard) LCCN 69013267 (Gambit) ISBN (Godine) |
505 (1st paperback edition; includes the 25 chapters, 39 appendices,
Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969) by Giorgio de Santillana (a professor of the history of science at MIT) and Hertha von Dechend (a scientist at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität) is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy. It is mostly about the claim of a Megalithic era discovery of axial precession, and the encoding of this knowledge in mythology.
The book was not well received by critics, in spite of the admission of occasional "flashes of insight" it may contain.
Santillana had previously published, in 1961, The Origins of Scientific Thought, on which Hamlet's Mill is substantially based. Compare various statements in Hamlet's Mill to this quotation from The Origin of Scientific Thought: "We can see then, how so many myths, fantastic and arbitrary in semblance, of which the Greek tale of the Argonaut is a late offspring, may provide a terminology of image motifs, a kind of code which is beginning to be broken. It was meant to allow those who knew (a) to determine unequivocally the position of given planets in respect to the earth, to the firmament, and to one another; (b) to present what knowledge there was of the fabric of the world in the form of tales about 'how the world began'."
Feyerabend (2000) explains: "There are two reasons why this code was not discovered earlier. One is the firm conviction of historians of science that science did not start before Greece and that scientific results can only be obtained with the scientific method as it is practised today (and as it was foreshadowed by Greek scientists). The other reason is the astronomical, geological, etc., ignorance of most Assyriologists, Aegyptologists, Old Testament scholars, and so on: the apparent primitivism of many myths is just the reflection of the primitive astronomical, biological, etc., etc., knowledge of their collectors and translators. Since the discoveries of Hawkins, Marshack, Seidenberg, van der Waerden (Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations, New York, 1983) and others we have to admit the existence of an international paleolithic astronomy that gave rise to schools, observatories, scientific traditions and most interesting theories. These theories, which were expressed in sociological, not in mathematical terms, have left their traces in sagas, myths, legends, and may be reconstructed in a twofold way, by going forward into the present from the material remains of Stone Age astronomy such as marked stones, stone observatories, etc., and by going back into the past from the literary remains which we find in sagas, legends, myths. An example of the first method is A. Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, New York, 1972. An example of the second is de Santillana-von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, Boston, 1969." Further influences can be found in the work of Leo Frobenius. Leach 1970 mentions particularly Die Mathematik der Oceaner (1900) and Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904).
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