Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill, published by Gambit in 1969, is a wide ranging and highly speculative comparative mythology essay arguing that many world myths encode ancient knowledge of the earth's axial precession. Its authority is limited: it was not written as, and has not been received by classicists or historians of astronomy as, a rigorous scholarly demonstration, and this atlas cites it specifically as the traceable origin of the claim that ancient traditions assigned precession a rate of 72 years per degree, a figure the book states that no ancient source actually gives and that is itself inaccurate, since the real rate is closer to 71.6 years. Cite it only for what it originated and for what it itself asserts, never as evidence that the claim is true.