If ever a book was going to receive a caning from established academia, it is this one. Published in 2012, and followed by a sequel (To the ends of the Earth, and back again) in 2015, it unabashedly challenges the taught history, not only for the nation of New Zealand, but Australia, and other countries too.
Regardless of its foreword and support by Professor David Bellamy, (the popular English botanist and author), Hill’s 370 pages of collated data, facts and opinion immediately raised the hackles of politicians and academics alike because it implies that Maori are not the indigenous people of New Zealand, by a long shot.
Subtitled, ‘Did the Greeks circumnavigate the world and settle New Zealand before the birth of Christ?’, the book received further support from an surprising source, from the Maori Ngapuhi tribe leader, David Rankin, who said that such books presented “clear evidence” that some of New Zealand’s earliest residents likely arrived before the Polynesians. He pointed to numerous Maori oral histories which referred to people being here when the first Maori arrived, including fair-skinned people.
“If we believe our histories, then we as Maori are not the indigenous people of New Zealand.”
According to the author and Gary Cook and Noel Hilliam who co-authored the content, ‘To the Ends of the Earth’, reveals evidence that the Greeks, and Spanish were the first Europeans to set foot on New Zealand, along with the Egyptians and not Captain James Cook or Abel Tasman as the current history ascribes.
The book shows ancient maps detailing the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand first drawn before the birth of Christ. Skeletons, rock carvings, stone buildings and monuments in New Zealand and an oral tradition that all attest to people of European origin being present for centuries before the arrival of Polynesians.
The Great Greek Explore
The book further explains how the ancient Greeks landed in the Americas and circumnavigated the world more than 1300 years before the voyage of Magellan. This great expedition was recorded and the resultant maps and scrolls stored in the Great Library of Alexandria. Some survived the great fire and many years later were rediscovered and made available for study.
A Greek Celestial Clock
One of Hill’s major investigations was an unusual rock carving discovered on a farm in Northland of New Zealand. It is described as having an ancient Greek celestial calendar carved into it and along with other artefacts across the land such as a Celtic carving found in the Taupo area and various stone constructs and European skeletons, the growing evidence supports his hypothesis.
It makes sense
Alarm bells regarding the first people in New Zealand rang out when the Kaimanawa Wall, (a large stone structure in the Kaimanawa Forest near Lake Taupo) was discovered. The wall was known about much earlier but partially excavated about 20 years ago and found to extend upon a plinth in a straight line.
The government quickly covered the dig and placed a moratorium on the site., unwilling to dig up what could be many stone structures, possibly of Greek or even older origin.
It makes sense though that the fertile forest islands of New Zealand would have been visited long before 1350AD (when the first Maori are said to have arrived). And regardless of the desire by some to conceal the truth, for whatever reason, there is growing evidence, as has been assembled in ‘To the Ends of the Earth’, that the history of New Zealand’s human habitation reaches much further back in time than we are led to believe.