Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, by Giorgio de Santillana of MIT and Hertha von Dechend of Frankfurt, published by Gambit in 1969, and the source of the precessional-code argument that runs through the alternative literature.
The thesis
That a single archaic body of technical knowledge, concerning the Precession of the Equinoxes, was encoded worldwide in myth by a lost scientific culture, and that a family of numbers, above all 72, the years the equinoctial sunrise takes to move one degree, together with 2,160, 4,320 and 432,000, was planted deliberately in king-lists, yugas and architecture as a carrier.
The reception the alternative literature does not report
It was received poorly by specialists on publication. Edmund Leach, in the New York Review of Books, called the thesis of a single archaic system spanning the civilised world pure fantasy and judged most of the text to rest on Indo-European etymological argument that would have looked old-fashioned in 1870; Jaan Puhvel, in the American Historical Review, allowed it flashes of insight and concluded it was not a serious scholarly work on the problem of myth; H. R. Ellis Davidson judged the Scandinavian material amateurish. Philip Morrison and Harald Reiche were sympathetic. Fingerprints of the Gods reports the argument at length and the reception not at all.
Connections
Precession of the Equinoxes · Fingerprints of the Gods · Graham Hancock · Orion Correlation Theory · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Robert Bauval · Maya Long Count · Charles Hapgood