Hamlet’s Mill (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.

The book is thematically similar to Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God. Its essential premise is that much mythology and ancient literature has been badly misinterpreted and that they generally relate to a sort of monomyth conveying significant scientific and specifically astronomical ideas and knowledge.

The book is based on the following concepts and re-interpretations:

1. “Our ancestors of the high and far-off times were endowed with minds wholly comparable to ours, and were capable of rational processes-always given the means at hand”
2. That they were particularly fascinated by astronomical observations, and that they made many discoveries, particularly:
3. The precession of the axis was discovered long before the accepted date of the Greek discovery, and that this was discovered by an ancient (perhaps as late as 4000 BCE) civilization of unsuspected sophistication.
4. This civilization believed that the world passed through cyclical and Zodiacal stages based on the precession, and that myths which encode this astronomical knowledge symbolically transmit this belief, typically through a story relating to a millstone and a young protagonist

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