Fingerprints Of The GODS | Part 1

chapter one a map of hidden places a letterhead eight reconnaissance technical squadron sac united states air force westover air force base massachusetts 6th july 1960 subject admiral piri reese world map to professor charles h hapgood keene college keene new hampshire dear professor hapgood your request for evaluation of certain unusual features of the piri reese world map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed the claim that the lower part of the map portrays the princess martha coast of queen maudland antarctica and the palmer peninsula is reasonable we find this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map the geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice cap by the swedish british antarctic expedition of 1949 this indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap the ice cap in this region is now about a mile thick we have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513 signed harold z olmeyer lieutenant colonel u.s air force commander despite the dead pan language all meyer's letter is a bombshell if queen maudland was mapped before it was covered by ice the original cartography must have been done an extraordinarily long time ago how long ago exactly conventional wisdom has it that the antarctic ice cap in its present extent and form is millions of years old on closer examination this notion turns out to be seriously flawed so seriously that we need not assume the map drawn by admiral perry rhys depicts queen maudland as it looked millions of years in the past the best recent evidence suggests that queen maudland and the neighboring regions shown on the map passed through a long ice-free period which may not have come completely to an end until about six thousand years ago this evidence which we shall touch upon again in the next chapter liberates us from the burdensome task of explaining who or what had the technology to undertake an accurate geographical survey of antarctica in say 2 million bc long before our own species came into existence by the same token since map-making is a complex and civilized activity it compels us to explain how such a task could have been accomplished even six thousand years ago well before the development of the first true civilizations recognized by historians ancient sources in attempting that explanation it is worth reminding ourselves of the basic historical and geological facts one the pirirhis map which is a genuine document not a hoax of any kind was made at constantinople in ad-1513 two it focuses on the western coast of africa the eastern coast of south america and the northern coast of antarctica three perires could not have acquired his information on this latter region from contemporary explorers because antarctica remained undiscovered until a.d 1818 more than 300 years after he drew the map four the ice-free coast of queen maudland shown in the map is a colossal puzzle because the geological evidence confirms that the latest date it could have been surveyed and charted in an ice-free condition is 4000 bc 5. it is not possible to pinpoint the earliest date that such a task could have been accomplished but it seems that the queen maudland literal may have remained in a stable and glaciated condition for at least nine thousand years before the spreading ice caps swallowed it entirely six there is no civilization known to history that had the capacity or need to survey that coastline in the relevant period between 13 000 bc and 4000 bc in other words the true enigma of this 1513 map is not so much its inclusion of a continent not discovered until 1818 but its portrayal of part of the coastline of that continent under ice-free conditions which came to an end six thousand years ago and have not since recurred how can this be explained perry reese obligingly gives us the answer in a series of notes written in his own hand on the map itself he tells us that he was not responsible for the original surveying and cartography on the contrary he admits that his role was merely that of compiler and copyist and that the map was derived from a large number of source maps some of these had been drawn by contemporary or near contemporary explorers including christopher columbus who had by then reached south america and the caribbean but others were documents dating back to the fourth century bc or earlier perry reese did not venture any suggestion as to the identity of the cartographers who had produced the earlier maps in 1963 however professor hapgood proposed a novel and thought-provoking solution to the problem he argued that some of the source maps the admiral had made use of in particular those said to date back to the 4th century bc had themselves been based on even older sources which in turn had been based on sources originating in the furthest antiquity there was he asserted irrefutable evidence that the earth had been comprehensively mapped before 4000 bc by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization which had achieved a high level of technological advancement it appears he concluded that accurate information has been passed down from people to people it appears that the charts must have originated with a people unknown and they were passed on perhaps by the minoans and the phoenicians who were for a thousand years and more the greatest sailors of the ancient world we have evidence that they were collected and studied in the great library of alexandria in egypt and that compilations of them were made by the geographers who worked there from alexandria according to hapgood's reconstruction copies of these compilations and some of the original source maps were transferred to other centers of learning notably constantinople finally when constantinople was seized by the venetians during the fourth crusade in 1204 a.d the maps began to find their way into the hands of european sailors and adventurers most of these maps were of the mediterranean and the black sea but maps of other areas survived these included maps of the americas and maps of the arctic and antarctic oceans it becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole unbelievable as it may appear the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored antarctica when its coasts were free of ice it is clear too that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately determining longitudes that was far superior to anything possessed by the peoples of ancient medieval or modern times until the second half of the 18th century this evidence of a lost technology will support and give credence to many of the other hypotheses that have been brought forward of a lost civilization in remote times scholars have been able to dismiss most of the evidence as mere myth but here we have evidence that cannot be dismissed the evidence requires that all the other evidence that has been brought forward in the past should be re-examined with an open mind despite a ringing endorsement from albert einstein and despite the later admission of john wright president of the american geographical society that hapgood had posed hypotheses that cry aloud for further testing no further scientific research has ever been undertaken into these anomalous early maps moreover far from being applauded for making a serious new contribution to the debate about the antiquity of human civilization hapgood until his death was cold-shouldered by the majority of his professional peers who couched their discussion of his work in what has accurately been described as thick and unwarranted sarcasm selecting trivia and factors not subject to verification as the basis for condemnation seeking in this way to avoid the basic issues a man ahead of his time the late charles hapgood taught the history of science at keene college new hampshire usa he wasn't a geologist or an ancient historian it is possible however that future generations will remember him as the man whose work undermined the foundations of world history and a large chunk of world geology as well albert einstein was among the first to realize this when he took the unprecedented step of contributing the forward to a book hapgood wrote in 1953 some years before he began his investigation of the pirirhi's map i frequently receive communications from people who wish to consult me concerning their unpublished ideas einstein observed it goes without saying that these ideas are very seldom possessed of scientific validity the very first communication however that i received from mr hapgood electrified me his idea is original of great simplicity and if it continues to prove itself of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth's surface the idea expressed in hapgood's 1953 book is a global geological theory which elegantly explains how and why large parts of antarctica could have remained ice free until 4000 bc together with many other anomalies of earth science in brief the argument is one antarctica was not always covered with ice and was at one time much warmer than it is today two it was warm because it was not physically located at the south pole in that period instead it was approximately two thousand miles further north this would have put it outside the antarctic circle in a temperate or cold temperate climate three the continent moved to its present position inside the antarctic circle as a result of a mechanism known as earth crust displacement this mechanism in no sense to be confused with plate tectonics or continental drift is one whereby the lithosphere the whole outer crust of the earth may be displaced at times moving over the soft inner body much as the skin of an orange if it were loose might shift over the inner part of the orange all in one piece four during the envisaged southwards movement of antarctica brought about by earth crust displacement the continent would gradually have grown colder an ice cap forming and remorselessly expanding over several thousands of years until it attained its present dimensions we'll come to further details of the evidence supporting these radical proposals later in this book orthodox geologists however remain reluctant to accept hapgood's theory although none has succeeded in proving it incorrect it raises many questions of these by far the most important is what conceivable mechanism would be able to exert sufficient thrust on the lithosphere to precipitate a phenomenon of such magnitude as a crustal displacement we have no better guide than einstein to summarize hapgood's findings in a polar region there is continual deposition of ice which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole the earth's rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth the constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced in this way will when it has reached a certain point produce a movement of the earth's crust over the rest of the earth's body the piri reese map seems to contain surprising collateral evidence in support of the thesis of a geologically recent glaciation of parts of antarctica following a sudden southward displacement of the earth's crust moreover since such a map could only have been drawn prior to 4000 bc its implications for the history of human civilization are staggering prior to 4000 bc there are supposed to have been no civilizations at all at some risk of oversimplification the academic consensus is broadly as follows civilization first developed in the fertile crescent of the middle east this development began after 4000 bc and culminated in the emergence of the earliest true civilizations sumer and egypt around 3000 bc soon followed by the indus valley and china about 1 500 years later civilization took off spontaneously and independently in the americas since 3000 bc in the old world at about 1500 bc in the new civilization has steadily evolved in the direction of ever more refined complex and productive forms in consequence and particularly by comparison with ourselves all ancient civilizations and all their works are to be understood as essentially primitive the sumerian astronomers regarded the heavens with unscientific or and even the pyramids of egypt were built by quote technological primitives unquote the evidence of the piri rhys map appears to contradict all this piri reese and his sources in his day perry reese was a well-known figure his historical identity is firmly established an admiral in the navy of the ottoman turks he was involved often on the winning side in numerous sea battles around the mid 16th century he was in addition considered an expert on the lands of the mediterranean and was the author of a famous sailing book the kitabi bahrir which provided a comprehensive description of the coast's harbours currents shallows landing places bays and straits of the aegean and mediterranean seas despite this illustrious career he fell foul of his masters and was beheaded in a.d 1554 or 1555. the source maps perry reese used to draw up his 1513 map were in all probability lodged originally in the imperial library at constantinople to which the admiral is known to have enjoyed privileged access these sources which may have been transferred or copied from even more ancient centers of learning no longer exist or at any rate have not been found it was however in the library of the old imperial palace at constantinople that the piri reese map was rediscovered painted on a gazelle skin and rolled up on a dusty shelf as recently as 1929 legacy of a lost civilization as the baffled olmer admitted in his letter to hapgood in 1960 the piri rhys map depicts the sub glacial topography the true profile of queen maudland antarctica beneath the ice this profile remained completely hidden from view from 4000 bc when the advancing ice sheet covered it until it was revealed again as a result of the comprehensive seismic survey of queen maudland carried out during 1949 by a joint british swedish scientific reconnaissance team if pirrie reese had been the only cartographer with access to such anomalous information it would be wrong to place any great weight on his map at the most one might say perhaps it is significant but then again perhaps it is just a coincidence however the turkish admiral was by no means alone in the possession of seemingly impossible and inexplicable geographical knowledge it would be futile to speculate further than hapgood has already done as to what underground stream could have carried and preserved such knowledge through the ages transmitting fragments of it from culture to culture and from epoch to epoch whatever the mechanism the fact is that a number of other cartographers seem to have been privy to the same curious secrets is it possible that all these map makers could have partaken perhaps unknowingly in the bountiful scientific legacy of a vanished civilization chapter 2 rivers in the southern continent in the christmas recess of 1959-60 charles hatgood was looking for antarctica in the reference room of the library of congress washington dc for several consecutive weeks he worked there lost in the search surrounded by literally hundreds of medieval maps and charts i found he reported many fascinating things i had not expected to find and a number of charts showing the southern continent then one day i turned a page and sat transfixed as my eyes fell upon the southern hemisphere of a world map drawn by orontius phineas in 1531 i had the instant conviction that i had found here a truly authentic map of the real antarctica the general shape of the continent was startlingly like the outline of the continent on our modern maps the position of the south pole nearly in the center of the continent seemed about right the mountain ranges that skirted the coasts suggested the numerous ranges that have been discovered in antarctica in recent years it was obvious too that this was no slapdash creation of somebody's imagination the mountain ranges were individualized some definitely coastal and some not from most of them rivers were shown flowing into the sea following in every case what looked like very natural and very convincing drainage patterns this suggested of course that the coasts may have been ice free when the original map was drawn the deep interior however was free entirely of rivers and mountains suggesting that the ice might have been present there closer investigation of the orontius phineas map by hapgood and by dr richard strachan of the massachusetts institute of technology confirmed the following 1. it had been copied and compiled from several earlier source maps drawn up according to a number of different projections 2. it did indeed show non-glacial conditions in coastal regions of antarctica notably queen maudland enderbyland wilkes land victoria land the east coast of the ross sea and mary birdland as in the case of the piri reese map the general profile of the terrain and the visible physical features matched closely seismic survey maps of the subglacial land surfaces of antarctica concluded appeared to document the surprising proposition that antarctica was visited and perhaps settled by men when it was largely if not entirely unglaciated it goes without saying that this implies a very great antiquity indeed the orontius phineas map takes the civilization of the original map makers back to a time contemporary with the end of the last ice age in the northern hemisphere ross sea further evidence in support of this view arises from the manner in which the ross sea was shown by aurontius phineus where today great glaciers like the beard moor and the scot disgorge themselves into the sea the 1531 map shows estuaries broad inlets and indications of rivers the unmistakable implication of these features is that there was no ice on the ross sea or its coasts when the source maps used by orontius phineas were made there also had to be a considerable hinterland free of ice to feed the rivers at the present time all these coasts and their hinterlands are deeply buried in the mile thick ice cap while on the ross sea itself there is a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick the ross sea evidence provides strong corroboration for the notion that antarctica must have been mapped by some unknown civilization during the extensively ice free period which ended around 4000 bc this is emphasized by the coring tubes used in 1949 by one of the bird antarctic expeditions to take samples of sediment from the bottom of the ross sea the sediments showed numerous clearly demarcated layers of stratification reflecting different environmental conditions in different epochs coarse glacial marine medium glacial marine fine glacial marine and so on the most surprising discovery however was that a number of the layers were formed of fine-grained well-assorted sediments such as are brought down to the sea by rivers flowing from temperate that is ice-free lands using the ionium dating method developed by dr wd yuri which makes use of three different radioactive elements found in seawater researchers at the carnegie institute in washington dc were able to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that great rivers carrying fine-grained well-assorted sediments had indeed flowed in antarctica until about six thousand years ago as the orontius phineas map showed it was only after that date around 4000 bc that the glacial kind of sediment began to be deposited on the ross sea bottom the cores indicate that warm conditions had prevailed for a long period before that mercator and bouash the peri rhys and aurontius phineus maps therefore provide us with a glimpse of antarctica as no cartographer in historical times could possibly have seen it on their own of course these two pieces of evidence should not be sufficient to persuade us that we might be gazing at the fingerprints of a lost civilization can three or four or six such maps however be dismissed with equal justification is it safe or reasonable for example for us to continue to ignore the historical implications of some of the maps made by the 16th century's most famous cartographer gerald kramer otherwise known as mercator best remembered for the mercator projection still used on most world maps today this enigmatic individual who paid an unexplained visit to the great pyramid of egypt in 1563 was reportedly indefatigable in searching out the learning of long ago and spent many years diligently accumulating a vast and eclectic reference library of ancient source maps significantly mercury included the aurontius phineas map in his atlas of 1569 and also depicted the antarctic on several he himself drew in the same year identifiable parts of the then undiscovered southern continent on these maps are cape dart and cape herlacher in mary birdland the amundsen sea thurston island in ellsworth land the fletcher islands in the bellinghausen sea alexander the first island the antarctic palmer peninsula the weddell sea cape norvegia the regular range in queen maudeland as islands the maulik hoffman mountains as islands the prince harold coast the shirazi glacier as an estuary on prince harold coast padder island in the lotzeau home bay and the prince olaf coast in enderbyland in some cases these features are more distinctly recognizable than on the orontius phineas man observed hapgood and it seems clear in general that mercutor had at his disposal source maps other than those used by auronteus phineus and not only mercator philippe bouash the 18th century french geographer was also able to publish a map of antarctica long before the southern continent was officially discovered and the extraordinary feature of bowash's map is that it seems to have been based on source maps made earlier perhaps thousands of years earlier than those used by orontius phineas and mercator what bosch gives us is an eerily precise representation of antarctica as it must have looked when there was no ice on it at all his map reveals the sub-glacial topography of the entire continent which even we did not have full knowledge of until 1958 international geophysical year when a comprehensive seismic survey was carried out that survey only confirmed what bowash had already proclaimed when he published his map of antarctica in 1737 basing his cartography on ancient sources now lost the french academician depicted a clear waterway across the southern continent dividing it into two principal land masses lying east and west of the line now marked by the transantarctic mountains such a waterway connecting the ross weddle and bellinghaus and seas would indeed exist if antarctica were free of ice as the 1958 igy survey shows the continent which appears on modern maps as one continuous landmass consists of an archipelago of large islands with mild thick ice packed between them and rising above sea level the epoch of the map makers as we have seen many orthodox geologists believe that the last time any waterway existed in these ice-filled basins was millions of years ago from the scholarly point of view however it is equally orthodox to affirm that no human beings had evolved in those remote times let alone human beings capable of accurately mapping the land masses of the antarctic the big problem raised by the igy evidence is that those land masses do seem to have been mapped when they were free of ice this confronts scholars with two mutually contradictory propositions which one is correct if we're to go along with orthodox geologists and accept that millions of years have indeed elapsed since antarctica was last completely free of ice then all the evidence of human evolution painstakingly accumulated by distinguished scientists from darwin on must be wrong it seems inconceivable that this could be the case the fossil record makes it abundantly clear that only the unevolved ancestors of humanity existed millions of years ago low-browed knuckle-dragging hominids incapable of advanced intellectual tasks like map making are we therefore to assume the intervention of alien cartographers in orbiting spaceships to explain the existence of sophisticated maps of an ice-free antarctica or shall we think again about the implications of hapgood's theory of earth crust displacement which allows the southern continent to have been in the ice-free condition depicted by bowash as little as 15 000 years ago is it possible that a human civilization sufficiently advanced to have mapped antarctica could have developed by 13 000 bc and later disappeared and if so how much later the combined effect of the piri reese orontius phineas mercator and bourage maps is the strong though disturbing impression that antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands of years as the ice cap gradually spread outwards from the interior increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 bc the original sources for the piri reese and mercator maps must therefore have been prepared towards the end of this period when only the coasts of antarctica were free of ice the source for the irantius phineas map on the other hand seems to have been considerably earlier when the ice cap was present only in the deep interior of the continent and the source for the buash map appears to originate in an even earlier period around 13000 bc when there was no ice in antarctica at all south america were other parts of the world surveyed and accurately charted at widely separated intervals during this same epoch roughly from 13000 bc to 4000 bc the answer may lie once again in the perireus map which contains more mysteries than just antarctica drawn in 1513 the map demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of south america and not only of its eastern coast but of the andes mountains on the western side of the continent which were of course unknown at that time the map correctly shows the amazon river rising in these unexplored mountains and then flowing eastwards itself compiled from more than 20 different source documents of varying antiquity the piri reese map depicts the amazon not once but twice most probably as a result of the unintentional overlapping of two of the source documents used by the turkish admiral in the first of these the amazon's course is shown down to its para river mouth but the important island of maraho does not appear according to hapgood this suggests that the relevant source map must have dated from a time perhaps as much as 15 000 years ago when the para river was the main or only mouth of the amazon and when moraho island was part of the mainland on the northern side of the river the second depiction of the amazon on the other hand does show morocco and in fantastically accurate detail despite the fact that this island was not discovered until 1543 again the possibility is raised of an unknown civilization which undertook continuous surveying and mapping operations of the changing face of the earth over a period of many thousands of years with piri reese making use of earlier and later source maps left behind by this civilization neither the orinoco river nor its present delta is represented on the perireus map instead as hapgood proved two estuaries extending far inland for a distance of about a hundred miles are shown close to the site of the present river the longitude on the grid would be correct for the orinoco and the latitude is also quite accurate is it possible that these estuaries have been filled in and the delta extended this much since the source maps were made although they remained undiscovered until 1592 the falkland islands appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude the library of ancient sources incorporated in the peris map may also account for the fact that it convincingly portrays a large island in the atlantic ocean to the east of the south american coast where no such island now exists is it pure coincidence that this imaginary island turns out to be located right over the sub-oceanic mid-atlantic ridge just north of the equator and 700 miles east of the coast of brazil where the tiny rocks of saints peter and paul now jut above the waves or was the relevant source map drawn deep in the last ice age when sea levels were far lower than they are today and the large island could indeed have been exposed at this spot sea levels and ice ages other 16th century maps also look as though they could have been based on accurate world surveys conducted during the last ice age one was compiled by the turk ahmed in 1559 a cartographer as hapgood puts it who must have had access to some most extraordinary source maps the strangest and most immediately striking feature of ahmed's compilation is that it shows quite plainly a strip of territory almost a thousand miles wide connecting alaska and siberia such a land bridge as geologists refer to it did once exist where the bearing straight is now but was submerged beneath the waves by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age the rising sea levels were caused by the tumultuous melting of the ice cap which was rapidly retreating everywhere in the northern hemisphere by around 10 000 bc it is therefore interesting that at least one ancient map appears to show southern sweden covered with remnant glaciers of the kind that must indeed have been prevalent in these latitudes the remnant glaciers are on claudius ptolemy's famous map of the north originally compiled in the second century a d this remarkable work from the last great geographer of classical antiquity was lost for hundreds of years and rediscovered in the 15th century ptolemy was custodian of the library at alexandria which contained the greatest manuscript collection of ancient times and it was there that he consulted the archaic source documents that enabled him to compile his own map acceptance of the possibility that the original version of at least one of the charts he referred to could have been made around 10 000 bc helps us to explain why he shows glaciers characteristic of that exact epoch together with lakes suggesting the shapes of present day lakes and streams very much suggesting glacial streams flowing from the glaciers into the lakes it is probably unnecessary to add that no one on earth in roman times when ptolemy drew his map had the slightest suspicion that ice ages could once have existed in northern europe nor did anyone in the 15th century when the map was rediscovered possessed such knowledge indeed it is impossible to see how the remnant glaciers and other features shown on ptolemy's map could have been surveyed imagined or invented by any known civilization prior to our own the implications of this are obvious so too are the implications of another map the portolano of yehudi ibn benzara drawn in the year 1487. this chart of europe and north africa may have been based on a source even earlier than ptolemy's for it seems to show glaciers much further south than sweden roughly on the same latitude as england in fact and to depict the mediterranean adriatic and aegean seas as they might have looked before the melting of the european ice camp sea level would of course have been significantly lower than it is today it's therefore interesting in the case for instance of the aegean section of the map to note that a great many more islands are shown than currently exist at first sight this seems odd however if ten or twelve thousand years have indeed elapsed since the era when even benzarra's source map was made the discrepancy can be simply explained the missing islands must have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age once again we seem to be looking at the fingerprints of a vanished civilization one capable of drawing impressively accurate maps of widely separated parts of the earth what kind of technology and what state of science and culture would have been required to do a job like that chapter 3 fingerprints of a lost science we saw that the mercator world map of 1569 included an accurate portrayal of the coasts of antarctica as they would have looked thousands of years ago when they were free of ice interestingly enough this same map is considerably less accurate in its portrayal of another region the west coast of south america then an earlier 1538 map also drawn by mercury the reason for this appears to be that the 16th century geographer based the earlier map on the ancient sources which we know he had at his disposal whereas for the later map he relied upon the observations and measurements of the first spanish explorers of western south america since those explorers had supposedly brought the latest information back to europe mercur can hardly be blamed for following them in so doing the accuracy of his work declined instruments capable of finding longitude did not exist in 1569 that appear to have been used to prepare the ancient source documents mercur consulted to produce his 1538 map the mysteries of longitude let us consider the problem of longitude defined as the distance in degrees east or west of the prime meridian the current internationally accepted prime meridian is an imaginary curve drawn from the north pole to the south pole passing through the royal observatory at greenwich london greenwich therefore stands at zero degrees longitude while new york for example stands at 74 degrees west and canberra australia at roughly 150 degrees east it would be possible to write an elaborate explanation of longitude and of what needs to be done to fix it precisely for any given point on the earth's surface what we're concerned with here however is not so much technical detail as the accepted historical facts about humanity's growing knowledge of the mysteries of longitude among these facts this is the most important until a breakthrough invention in the 18th century cartographers and navigators were unable to fix longitude with any kind of precision they could only make guesses which were usually inaccurate by many hundreds of miles because the technology had not yet been developed to allow them to do the job properly latitude north or south of the equator did not pose such a problem it could be worked out by means of angular measurements of the sun and stars taken with relatively simple instruments but to find longitude equipment of an altogether different and superior caliber was needed which could combine position measurements with time measurements throughout the span of known history the invention of such equipment had remained beyond the capacities of scientists but by the beginning of the 18th century with rapidly increasing sea traffic a mood of impatience and urgency had set in in the words of an authority on the period the search for longitude overshadowed the life of every man afloat and the safety of every ship and cargo accurate measurement seemed an impossible dream and discovering the longitude had become a stock phrase in the press like pigs might fly what was needed above all else was an instrument that would keep the time at the place of departure with perfect accuracy during long sea journeys despite the motion of the ship and despite the adverse conditions of alternating heat and cold wet and dry such a watch as isaac newton told the members of the british government's official board of longitude in 1714 hath not yet been made indeed not the timepieces of the 17th and early 18th centuries were crude devices which typically lost or gained as much as a quarter of an hour per day by contrast an effective marine chronometer could afford to lose or gain that much only over several years it was not until the 1720s that the talented english clockmaker john harrison began work on the first of a series of designs which resulted in the manufacture of such a chronometer his objective was to win the prize of 20 000 pounds offered by the board of longitude for the inventor of any means of determining a ship's longitude within 30 nautical miles at the end of a six weeks voyage a chronometer capable of fulfilling this condition would have to keep time to within three seconds per day it took almost 40 years during which several prototypes were completed and tested before harrison was able to meet these standards finally in 1761 his elegant chronometer number four left britain on board h.m.s deptford bound for jamaica accompanied by harrison's son william nine days into the voyage on the basis of longitude calculations made possible by the chronometer william advised the captain that they would site the madeira islands the following morning the captain offered five to one that he was wrong but agreed to hold the course william won the bet two months later at jamaica the instrument was found to have lost just five seconds harrison had surpassed the conditions set by the board of longitude thanks to the british government's bureaucratic dithering however he was not awarded the twenty thousand pounds prize money until three years before his death in 1776 understandably it was only when he had the funds in his hands that he divulged the secrets of his design as a result of this delay captain james cook did not have the benefit of a chronometer when he made his first voyage of discovery in 1768. by the time of his third voyage however 1778 1778-9 he was able to map the pacific with impressive accuracy fixing not only the correct latitude but the correct longitude of every island and coastline hence forward thanks to cook's care and harrison's chronometer no navigator could have an excuse for failing to find a pacific island or for being wrecked on a coastline appearing from nowhere indeed with their accurate longitudes specific maps must be ranked amongst the very first examples of the precise cartography of our modern era they remind us moreover that the making of really good maps requires at least three key ingredients great journeys of discovery first class mathematical and cartographic skills sophisticated chronometers it was not until harrison's chronometer became generally available in the 1770s that the third of these preconditions was fulfilled this brilliant invention made it possible for cartographers to fix longitude precisely something that the sumerians the ancient egyptians the greeks and the romans and indeed all other known civilizations before the 18th century were supposedly unable to do it is therefore surprising and unsettling to come across vastly older maps which give latitudes and longitudes with modern precision precision instruments these inexplicably precise latitudes and longitudes are found in the same general category of documents that contain the advanced geographical knowledge i've outlined the piri reese map of 1513 for example places south america and africa in the correct relative longitudes theoretically an impossible feat for the science of the time but perry reese was candid in admitting that his map was based on far earlier sources could it have been from one of those sources that he derived his accurate longitudes also of great interest is the so-called dulcet portalano of ad-1339 which focuses on europe and north africa here latitude is perfect across huge distances and the total longitude of the mediterranean and black seas is correct to within half a degree professor hapgood comments that the maker of the original source map from which the dulcet portalana was copied had achieved highly scientific accuracy in finding the ratio of latitude to longitude he could only have done this if he had precise information on the relative longitudes of a great many places scattered all the way from galway in ireland to the eastern bend of the dawn in russia the zeno map of ad1380 is another enigma covering a vast area of the north as far as greenland it locates a great many widely scattered places at latitudes and longitudes which are amazingly correct it is unbelievable asserts haploid that anyone in the 14th century could have found accurate latitudes for these places to say nothing of accurate longitudes the orontius phineas world map also commands attention it successfully places the coasts of antarctica in correct latitudes and relative longitudes and finds a remarkably accurate area for the continent as a whole this reflects a level of geographical knowledge not available until the 20th century the portolano of yehudi ibn benzara is another map notable for its accuracy where relative latitudes and longitudes are concerned total longitude between gibraltar and the sea of azov is accurate to half a degree while across the map as a whole average areas of longitude are less than a degree these examples represent only a small fraction of the large and challenging dossier of evidence presented by hapgood layer upon layer the cumulative effect of his painstaking and detailed analysis is to suggest that we are deluding ourselves when we suppose that accurate instruments for measuring longitude were not invented until the 18th century on the contrary the piri recent other maps appear to indicate very strongly that such instruments were rediscovered then that they had existed long ages before and had been used by a civilized people now lost to history who had explored and charted the entire earth furthermore it seems that these people were capable not only of designing and manufacturing precise and technically advanced mechanical instruments but were masters of a precocious mathematical science the lost mathematicians to understand why we should first remind ourselves of the obvious the earth is a sphere when it comes to mapping it therefore only a globe can represent it in correct proportion transferring cartographic data from a globe to flat sheets of paper inevitably involves distortions and can be accomplished only by means of an artificial and complex mechanical and mathematical device known as a map projection there are many different kinds of projection mercators still used in atlases today is perhaps the most familiar others are dauntingly referred to as azimuthal stereographic mnemonic azimuthal equidistant chordiform and so on but it's unnecessary to go into this any further here we need only note that all successful projections require the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques of a kind supposedly unknown in the ancient world particularly in the deepest antiquity before 4000 bc when there was allegedly no human civilization at all let alone one capable of developing and using advanced mathematics and geometry charles hapgood submitted his collection of ancient maps to the massachusetts institute of technology for evaluation by professor richard strachan the general conclusion was obvious but he wanted to know precisely what level of mathematics would have been required to draw up the original source documents on 18 april 1965 strachan replied that a very high level of mathematics indeed would have been necessary some of the maps for example seemed to express a merkator type projection long before the time of mercator himself the relative complexity of this projection involving latitude expansion meant that a trigonometric coordinate transformation method must have been used other reasons for deducing that the ancient map makers must have been skilled mathematicians were as follows one the determination of place locations on a continent requires at least geometric triangulation methods over large distances of the order of a thousand miles corrections must be made for the curvature of the earth which requires some understanding of spherical trigonometry two the location of continents with respect to one another requires an understanding of the earth's sphericity and the use of spherical trigonometry three cultures with this knowledge plus the precision instruments to make the required measurements to determine location would most certainly use their mathematical technology in creating maps and charts stracken's impression that the maps through generations of copyists revealed the handiwork of an ancient mysterious and technologically advanced civilization was shared by reconnaissance experts from the us air force to whom hapgood submitted the evidence lorenzo burras chief of the eighth reconnaissance technical squadrons cartographic section at west over air base made a particularly close study of the orontius phineas map he concluded that some of the sources upon which it was based must have been drawn up by means of a projection similar to the modern chordiform projection this said burrows suggests the use of advanced mathematics further the shape given to the antarctic continent suggests the possibility if not the probability that the original source maps were compiled on a stereographic or mnemonic type of projection involving the use of spherical trigonometry we are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid and that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient history hapgood was to make one more important discovery a chinese map copied from an earlier original onto a stone pillar in ad-1137 this map incorporates precisely the same kind of high quality information about longitudes as the others it has a similar grid and was drawn up with the benefit of spherical trigonometry indeed on close examination it shares so many features with the european and middle eastern maps that only one explanation seems adequate it and they must have stemmed from a common source we seem to be confronted once again by a surviving fragment of the scientific knowledge of a lost civilization more than that it appears that this civilization must have been at least in some respects as advanced as our own and that its cartographers had mapped virtually the entire globe with a uniform general level of technology with similar methods equal knowledge of mathematics and probably the same sorts of instruments the chinese map also indicates something else a global legacy must have been handed down a legacy of inestimable value in all probability incorporating much more than sophisticated geographical knowledge could it have been some portion of this legacy that was distributed in prehistoric peru by the so-called vera coaches mysterious bearded strangers said to have come from across the seas in a time of darkness to restore civilization after a great upheaval of the earth i decided to go to peru to see what i could find part 2 foam of the sea peru and bolivia chapter 4 flight of the condor i'm in southern peru flying over the nazca lines below me after the whale and the monkey the hummingbird comes into view flutters and unfolds her wings stretches forward her delicate beak towards some imaginary flower then we turn hard right pursued by our own tiny shadow as we cross the bleak scar of the pan american highway and follow a trajectory that brings us over the fabulous snake-necked alcatraz a heron 900 feet long conceived in the mind of a master geometer we circle around cross the highway for a second time pass an astonishing arrangement of fish and triangles laid out beside a pelican turn left and find ourselves floating over the sublime image of a giant condor with feathers extended in stylized flight just as i try to catch my breath another condor almost close enough to touch materializes out of nowhere a real condor this time party as a fallen angel riding a thermal back to heaven my pilot gasps and tries to follow him for a moment i catch a glimpse of a bright dispassionate eye that seems to weigh us up and find us wanting then like a vision from some ancient myth the creature banks and glides contemptuously backwards into the sun leaving our single engine cessna floundering in the lower air below us now there's a pair of parallel lines almost two miles long arrow straight all the way to vanishing point and there off to the right a series of abstract shapes on a scale so vast and yet so precisely executed that it seems inconceivable they could have been the work of men the people around here say that they were not the work of men but of demigods the vera coaches who also left their fingerprints elsewhere in the andean region many thousands of years ago the riddle of the lines the nazca plateau in southern peru is a desolate place seer and unwelcoming barren and profitless human populations have never concentrated here nor will they do so in the future the surface of the moon seems hardly less hospitable if you happen to be an artist with grand designs however these high and daunting planes look like a very promising canvas with 200 square miles of uninterrupted table land and the certainty that your master work won't be carried away on the desert breeze or covered by drifting sand it's true that high winds do blow here but by a happy accident of physics they are robbed of their sting at ground level the pebbles that litter the pamper absorb and retain the sun's heat throwing up a protective force field of warm air in addition the soil contains enough gypsum to glue small stones to the subsurface an adhesive regularly renewed by the moistening effect of early morning jews once things are drawn here therefore they tend to stay drawn there's hardly any rain indeed with less than half an hour of miserly drizzle every decade nazca is among the driest places on earth if you're an artist therefore if you have something grand and important to express and if you want it to be visible forever these strange and lonely flatlands could look like the answer to your prayers experts have pronounced upon the antiquity of nazca basing their opinions on fragments of pottery found embedded in the lines and on carbon results from various organic remains unearthed here the dates conjectured range between 350 bc and ad600 realistically they tell us nothing about the age of the lines themselves which are inherently as undateable as the stones cleared to make them all we can say for sure is that the most recent are at least 1 400 years old but it is theoretically possible that they could be far more ancient than that for the simple reason that the artifacts from which such dates are derived could have been brought to nazca by later peoples the majority of the designs are spread out across a clearly defined area of southern peru bounded by the rio ingenio to the north and the rio nazca to the south a roughly square canvas of dun coloured desert with 46 kilometers of the pan-american highway running obliquely through it from top center to bottom right here scattered apparently at random are literally hundreds of different figures some depict animals and birds a total of 18 different birds but far more take the form of geometrical devices in the form of trapezoids rectangles triangles and straight lines viewed from above these latter resemble to the modern eye a jumble of runways as though some megalomaniac civil engineer had been licensed to act out his most flamboyant fantasies of airfield design it therefore comes as no surprise since humans are not supposed to have been able to fly until the beginning of the 20th century that the nazca lines have been identified by a number of observers as landing strips for alien spaceships this is a seductive notion but nazca is perhaps not the best place to seek evidence for it for example it is difficult to understand why extraterrestrials advanced enough to have crossed hundreds of light years of interstellar space should have needed landing strips at all surely such beings would have mastered the technology of setting their flying sources down vertically besides there's really no question of the nazca lines ever having been used as runways by flying sources or anything else although some of them look like that from above viewed at ground level they are little more than grazes on the surface made by scraping away thousands of tons of black volcanic pebbles to expose the desert's paler base of yellow sand and clay none of the cleared areas is more than a few inches deep and all are much too soft to have permitted the landing of wheeled flying vehicles the german mathematician maria reiki who devoted half a century to the study of the lines was only being logical when she dismissed the extraterrestrial theory with a single pithy sentence a few years ago i'm afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck if not runways for the chariots of alien gods therefore what else might the nazca lines be the truth is that no one knows their purpose just as no one really knows their age they are a genuine mystery of the past and the closer you look at them the more baffling they become it's clear for example that the animals and birds anti-date the geometry of the runways because many of the trapezoids rectangles and straight lines bisect and thus partially obliterate the more complex figures the obvious deduction is that the final artwork of the desert as we view it today must have been produced in two phases moreover though it seems contrary to the normal laws of technical progress we must concede that the earlier of the two phases was the more advanced the execution of the zoomorphic figures called for far higher levels of skill and technology than the etching of the straight lines but how widely separated in time were the earlier and later artists scholars do not address themselves to this question instead they lump both cultures together as the nazcans and depict them as primitive tribesmen who unaccountably develop sophisticated techniques of artistic self-expression and then vanished from the peruvian scene many hundreds of years before the appearance of their better known successors the incas how sophisticated were these nazcan primitives what kind of knowledge must they have possessed to inscribe their gigantic signatures on the plateau it seems for a start that they were pretty good observational astronomers at least according to dr phyllis pitluger an astronomer with the adler planetarium in chicago after making an intensive computer-aided study of stellar alignments at nascar she has concluded that the famous spider figure was devised as a terrestrial diagram of the giant constellation of orion and that the arrow straight lines linked to the figure appear to have been set out to track through the ages the changing declinations of the three stars of orion's belt the real significance of dr pitt lucas discovery will become apparent in due course meanwhile let us note that the nazca spider also accurately depicts a member of a known spider genus requinulae this as it happens is one of the rarest spider genera in the world so rare indeed that it has only been found in remote and inaccessible parts of the amazon rainforest how did the supposedly primitive nascar artists travel so far from their homeland crossing the formidable barrier of the andes to obtain a specimen more to the point why should they have wanted to do such a thing and how were they able to duplicate minute details of rekinulli's anatomy normally visible only under a microscope notably the reproductive organ positioned on the end of its extended right leg such mysteries multiplied nazca and none of the designs except perhaps the condor really seemed quite at home here the whale and the monkey are after all as out of place in this desert environment as the amazonian spider a curious figure of a man his right arm raised as though in greeting heavy boots on his feet and round eyes staring owlishly forward cannot be said to belong to any known era or culture and other drawings depicting the human form are equally peculiar their heads enclosed in halos of radiance they do indeed look like visitors from another planet their sheer size is equally noteworthy and bizarre the hummingbird is 165 feet long the spider 150 feet long the condor stretches nearly 400 feet from beak to tail feathers as does the pelican and a lizard whose tail is now divided by the pan-american highway is 617 feet in length almost every design is executed on the same cyclopean scale and in the same difficult manner by the careful contouring of a single continuous line similar attention to detail is to be found in the geometrical devices some of these take the form of straight lines more than five miles long marching like roman roads across the desert dropping into dried out riverbeds surmounting rocky outcrops and never once deviating from true this kind of precision is hard but not impossible to explain in conventional common sense terms the more puzzling by far are the zoomorphic figures how could they have been so perfectly made when without aircraft their creators could not have checked the progress of their work by viewing it in its proper perspective none of the designs is small enough to be seen from ground level where they appear merely as a series of shapeless ruts in the desert they show their true form only when seen from an altitude of several hundred feet there is no elevation nearby that provides such a vantage point line makers map makers i'm flying over the lines trying to make sense of it all my pilot is rodolfo arias lately of the peruvian air force after a career in jet fighters he finds the little cessna slow and uninspiring and treats it like a taxi with wings once already we've been back to the airstrip at nazca to remove a window so that my partner santa can point her cameras vertically down at the alluring glyphs now we're experimenting with the view from different altitudes at a couple of hundred feet above the plane raquinuli the amazonian spider looks like he's going to rear up and snatch us in his jaws at 500 feet we can see several of the figures at once a dog a tree a weird pair of hands the condor and some of the triangles and trapezoids when we ascend to 1500 feet the zoom offs hitherto predominant are revealed merely as small scattered units surrounded by an astonishing scribble of vast geometric forms these forms now look less like runways and more like pathways made by giants pathways that crisscross the plateau in what seems at first a bewildering variety of shapes angles and sizes as the ground continues to recede however and as the widening perspective on the lines permits more of an eagle's eye view i begin to wonder whether there might not after all be some method to the cuneiform slashes and scratches spread out below me i am reminded of an observation made by maria reichi the mathematician who has lived at nascar and studied the line since 1946 in her view the geometric drawing gives the impression of a cipher script in which the same words are sometimes written in huge letters at another time in minute characters there are line arrangements which appear in a great variety of size categories together with very similar shapes all the drawings are composed of a certain number of basic elements as the cessna bumps and heaves across the heavens i also remember it is no accident that the nazca lines were only properly identified in the 20th century after the era of flight had begun in the late 16th century a magistrate named luis de monzon was the first spanish traveler to bring back eyewitness reports concerning these mysterious marks on the desert and to collect the strange local traditions that linked them to the vera coaches however until commercial airlines began to operate regularly between lima and arequipa in the 1930s no one seems to have grasped that the largest piece of graphic art in the world lay here in southern peru it was the development of aviation that made the difference giving men and women the god-like ability to take to the skies and see beautiful and puzzling things that had hitherto been hidden from them rodolfo is steering the cessna in a gentle circle over the figure of the monkey a big monkey tied in a riddle of geometric forms it's not easy to describe the eerie hypnotic feeling this design gives me it's very complicated and absorbing to look at and slightly sinister in an abstract indefinable way the monkey's body is defined by a continuous unbroken line and without ever being interrupted this same line winds up stairs over pyramids into a series of zigzags through a spiral labyrinth the tail and then back around a number of stair-like hairpin bends it would be a real tour de force of draftsmanship and artistic skill on a sheet of note paper but this is the nazca desert where they do things on a grand scale and the monkey is at least 400 feet long and 300 feet wide we're the line makers map makers too and why were they called the vera coaches chapter 5 the inca trail to the past no artifacts or monuments no cities or temples have endured in recognizable form for longer than the most resilient religious traditions whether expressed in the pyramid texts of ancient egypt or the hebrew bible or the vedas such traditions are among the most imperishable of all human creations they are vehicles of knowledge voyaging through time the last custodians of the ancient religious heritage of peru were the incas whose beliefs and idolatry were extirpated and whose treasures were ransacked during the 30 terrible years that followed the spanish conquest in a.d 1532 providentially however a number of early spanish travelers made sincere efforts to document inca traditions before they were entirely forgotten though little attention was paid at the time some of these traditions speak strikingly of a great civilization that was believed to have existed in peru many thousands of years earlier powerful memories were preserved of this civilization said to have been founded by the vera coaches the same mysterious beings credited with the making of the nazca lines foam of the sea when the spanish conquistadors arrived the inca empire extended along the pacific coast and andean highlands of south america from the northern border of modern ecuador through the whole of peru and as far south as the maori river in central chile connecting the far flung corners of this empire was a vast and sophisticated road system two parallel north-south highways for example one running for 3 600 kilometers along the coast and the other for a similar distance through the andes both these great thoroughfares were paved and connected by frequent links in addition they exhibited an interesting range of design and engineering features such as suspension bridges and tunnels cut through solid rock they were clearly the work of an evolved disciplined and ambitious society ironically they played a significant part in its downfall the spanish forces led by francisco pizarro used them to great effect to speed up their ruthless advance into the inca heartland the capital of the inca empire was the city of cusco a name meaning the earth's navel in the local quechua language according to legend it was established by manco capac and mama okla two children of the sun here though the incas worshiped the sun god whom they knew as inti quite another deity was venerated as the most holy of all this was viracocha whose namesakes were said to have made the nazca lines and whose own name meant foam of the sea no doubt it is just a coincidence that the greek goddess aphrodite who was born of the sea received her name because of the foam afros out of which she was formed besides viracocha was always depicted uncompromisingly as a male by the peoples of the andes that much about him is known for certain no historian however is able to say how ancient was the cult of this deity before the spanish arrived to put a stop to it this is because the cult seemed always to have been around indeed long before the incas incorporated him into their cosmogony and built a magnificent temple for him at cusco the evidence suggests that the high god viracocha had been worshipped by all the civilizations that had ever existed in the long history of peru citadel of viracocha a few days after leaving nazca santa and i arrived in cusco and made our way to the site of the korikansha the great temple dedicated to viracocha in the pre-colombian era the kore cancer was of course long gone or to be more exact it was not so much gone as buried beneath layers of later architecture the spanish kept its superb inca foundations and the lower parts of its fabulously strong walls and had erected their own grandiose colonial cathedral on top walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral i remembered that the inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more than 700 sheets of pure gold each weighing about 2 kilograms and that its spacious courtyard had been planted with fields of replica corn also fashioned out of gold i could not help but be reminded of solomon's temple in far off jerusalem also reputed to have been adorned with sheets of gold and a marvelous orchard of golden trees earthquakes in 1650 and again in 1950 had largely demolished the spanish cathedral of santo domingo which stood on the site of the temple of viracocha and it had been necessary to rebuild it on both occasions its inca foundations and lower walls survived these natural disasters intact thanks to their characteristic design which made use of an elegant system of interlocking polygonal blocks these blocks and the general layout of the place were almost all that was now left of the original structure apart from an octagonal grey stone platform at the center of the vast rectangular courtyard which had once been covered with 55 kilograms of solid gold on either side of the courtyard were anti-chambers also from the inca temple with refined architectural features such as walls that tapered upwards and beautifully carved niches tuned out of single pieces of granite we took a walk through the narrow cobbled streets of cusco looking around i realized it was not just the cathedral that reflected spanish imposition on top of an earlier culture the whole town was slightly schizophrenic spacious balcony pastel shaded colonial homes and palaces towered above me but almost all of them stood on inca foundations or incorporated complete inca structures of the same beautiful polygonal architecture used in the corycatcher in one alleyway known as hatum ramiyuk i paused to examine an intricate jigsaw puzzle of a wall made of countless dry stone blocks all perfectly fitted together all of different sizes and shapes interlocking in a bewildering array of angles the carving of the individual blocks and their arrangement into so complicated a structure could only have been achieved by master craftsmen possessed a very high levels of skill with untold centuries of architectural experimentation behind them on one block i counted 12 angles and sides in a single plane and i could not slip even the edge of a piece of thin paper into the joints that connected it to the surrounding blocks the bearded stranger it seemed that in the early 16th century before the spanish began to demolish peruvian culture in earnest an idol of viracocha had stood in the holy of holies of the korikansha according to a contemporary text this idol took the form of a marble statue of the god a statue described as to the hair complexion features raiment and sandals just as the painters represent the apostle saint bartholomew other accounts of viracocha likened his appearance to that of saint thomas i examined a number of illustrated ecclesiastical manuscripts in which these two saints appeared both were routinely depicted as lean bearded white men past middle age wearing sandals and dressed in long flowing cloaks as we shall see the records confirmed this was exactly the appearance ascribed to viracocha by those who worshipped him whoever he was therefore he could not have been an american indian they are relatively dark-skinned people with sparse facial hair vera coach's bushy beard and pale complexion made him sound like a caucasian back in the 16th century the incas had thought so too indeed their legends and religious beliefs made them so certain of his physical type that they initially mistook the white and bearded spaniards who arrived on their shores for the returning viracocha and his demigods an event long prophesied and which viracocha was said in all the legends to have promised this happy coincidence gave pizarro's conquistadors the decisive strategic and psychological edge that they needed to overcome the numerically superior inca forces in the battles that followed who had provided the model for the vera coaches chapter six he came in a time of chaos through all the ancient legends of the peoples of the andes stalked a tall bearded pale-skinned figure wrapped in a cloak of secrecy and though he was known by many different names in many different places he was always recognizably the same figure viracocha foam of the sea a master of science and magic who wielded terrible weapons and who came in a time of chaos to set the world to rights the same basic story was shared in many variants by all the peoples of the andean region it began with a vivid description of a terrifying period when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into darkness by the disappearance of the sun society had fallen into disorder and the people suffered much hardship then there suddenly appeared coming from the south a white man of large stature and authoritative demeanor this man had such great power that he changed the hills into valleys and from the valleys made great hills causing streams to flow from the living stone the early spanish chronicler who recorded this tradition explained that it had been told to him by the indians he had traveled among on his journeys in the andes and they heard it from their fathers who in their turn had it from old songs which were handed down from very ancient times they say that this man traveled along the highland route to the north working marvels as he went and that they never saw him again they say that in many places he gave men instructions how they should live speaking to them with great love and kindness and admonishing them to be good and to do no damage or injury to one another but to love one another and show charity to all in most places they name him tiki viracocha other names applied to the same figure included wara kocha khan kontiki tunupa tapak tupaka and ila he was a scientist an architect of surpassing skills a sculptor and an engineer he caused terraces and fields to be formed on the steep sides of ravines and sustaining walls to rise up and support them he also made irrigating channels to flow and he went in various directions arranging many things viracocha was also a teacher and a healer and made himself helpful to people in need it was said that whenever he passed he healed all that were sick and restored sight to the blind this gentle civilizing superhuman samaritan had another side to his nature however if his life were threatened as it seems to have been on several occasions he had the weapon of heavenly fire at his disposal working great miracles by his words he came to the district of kanas and there near a village called kacha the people rose up against him and threatened to stone him they saw him sink to his knees and raise his hands to heaven as if beseeching aid in the peril which beset him the indians declare that thereupon they saw fire in the sky which seemed all around them full of fear they approached him whom they had intended to kill and besought him to forgive them presently they saw that the fire was extinguished at his command those stones were consumed by fire in such wise that large blocks could be lifted by hand as if they were cork they narrate further that leaving the place where this occurred he came to the coast and there holding his mantle he went forth amidst the waves and was seen no more and as he went they gave him the name viracocha which means foam of the sea the legends were unanimous in their physical description of viracocha in his summa inauracion for example juan de patanzos a 16th century spanish chronicler stated that according to the indians he had been a bearded man of tall stature clothed in a white robe that came down to his feet and which he wore belted at the waist other descriptions collected from many different and widely separated andean peoples all seemed to identify the same enigmatic individual according to one he was a bearded man of medium height dressed in a rather long cloak he was past his prime with gray hair and lean he walked with a staff and addressed the natives with love calling them his sons and daughters as he traversed all the land he worked miracles he healed the sick by touch he spoke every tongue even better than the natives they called him tunupa or tarpaka viracocha rapacha or pachaka in one legend tunupa viracocha was said to have been a white man of large stature whose heir and person aroused great respect and veneration in another he was described as a white man of august appearance blue eyed bearded without headgear and wearing a kusma a jerking or sleeveless shirt reaching to the knees in yet another which seemed to refer to a later phase of his life he was revered as a wise counselor in matters of state and depicted as an old man with a beard and long hair wearing a long tunic civilizing mission above all else theracocha was remembered in the legends as a teacher before his coming it was said men lived in a condition of disorder many went naked like savages they had no houses or other dwellings than caves and from these they went forth to gather whatever they could find to eat in the countryside viracocha was credited with changing all this and with initiating the long-lost golden age which later generations looked back on with nostalgia all the legends agreed furthermore that he had carried out his civilizing mission with great kindness and as far as possible had absurd the use of force careful instruction and personal example had been the main methods used to equip the people with the techniques and knowledge necessary for a cultured and productive life in particular he was remembered for bringing to peru such varied skills as medicine mythology farming animal husbandry the art of writing said by the incas to have been introduced by viracocha but later forgotten and a sophisticated understanding of the principles of engineering and architecture i had already been impressed by the quality of inca stonework in cusco as my research in the old town continued however i was surprised to discover that by no means all the so-called inca masonry could be attributed with any degree of archaeological certainty to the incas it was true that they had been masters in the manipulation of stone and many monuments in the cusco area were indisputably their work it seemed however that some of the more remarkable structures routinely attributed to them could have been erected by earlier civilizations the evidence suggested that the incas had often functioned as the restorers of these structures rather than their original builders the same appeared to be true of the highly developed system of roads connecting the far-flung parts of the inca empire the reader will recall that these roads took the form of parallel highways running north to south one along the coast and the other through the andes all in all more than 15 000 miles of surfaced tracks had been in regular and efficient use before the time of the spanish conquest and i had assumed that the incas had been responsible for all of them i now learn that it was much more likely that they had inherited the system their role had been to restore maintain and unify a pre-existing network indeed though it was not often admitted no expert could safely estimate how old these incredible highways were or who had built them the mystery was deepened by local traditions which stated not only that the road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ancient in the time of the incas but that both were the work of white auburn-haired men who had lived thousands of years earlier one legend described viracocha as being accompanied by messengers of two kinds faithful soldiers and shining ones their role was to carry their lord's message to every part of the world elsewhere there were phrases such as contiki returned with a number of attendants then summoned his followers who were called viracocha kontiki commanded all but two of the viracocha to go east there came fourth from a lake a lord named contiki viracocha bringing with him a certain number of people thus those vera coaches went off to the various districts which viracocha had indicated for them the work of demons the ancient citadel of saxe juaman lies just north of cusco we reached it late one afternoon under a sky almost occluded by heavy clouds of tarnished silver a cold gray breeze was blowing across the high altitude tundra as i clambered up stairways through lintel stone gates built for giants and walked along the mammoth rows of zigzag walls i cranked my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my root now passed under 12 feet high seven feet across and weighing considerably more than 100 tons it was a work of man not of nature it had been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles manipulated with apparent ease as though it were made of wax or putty and stood on its end in a wall of other huge and problematic polygonal blocks some of them positioned above it some below it some to each side and all in perfectly balanced and well-ordered juxtaposition since one of these astonishing pieces of carefully hewn stone had a height of 28 feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons roughly the equivalent of 500 family-sized automobiles it seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out for answers how had the incas or their predecessors been able to work stone on such a gargantuan scale how had they cut and shaped these cyclopean boulders so precisely how had they transported them tens of miles from distant quarries by what means had they made walls of them shuffling the individual blocks around and raising them high above the ground with such apparent ease these people weren't even supposed to have had the wheel let alone machinery capable of lifting and manipulating dozens of irregularly shaped 100 tonne blocks and sorting them into three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles i knew that the chronicles of the early colonial period had been as perplexed as i was by what they had seen the respected garcilazo de la vega for example who came here in the 16th century had spoken with awe about the fortress of success its proportions are inconceivable when one has not actually seen it and when one has looked at it closely and examined it attentively they appear to be so extraordinary that it seems as though some magic had presided over its construction that it must be the work of demons instead of human beings it is made of such great stones and in such great number that one wonders simultaneously how the indians were able to quarry them how they transported them and how they hewed them and set them one on top of the other with such precision for they disposed of neither iron nor steel with which to penetrate the rock and cut and polish the stones they had neither wagon nor oxen to transport them and in fact there exist neither wagons nor oxen throughout the world that would have sufficed for this task so enormous are these stones and so rude the mountain paths over which they were conveyed garcia lasso also reported something else interesting in his royal commentaries of the incas he gave an account of how in historical times an inca king had tried to emulate the achievements of his predecessors who had built saxe juan the attempted involved bringing just one immense boulder from several miles away to add to the existing fortifications this boulder was hauled across the mountain by more than twenty thousand indians going up and down very steep hills at a certain spot it fell from their hands over a precipice crushing more than three thousand men in all the histories i surveyed this was the only report which described the incas actually building or trying to build with huge blocks like those employed at success the report suggested that they possessed no experience of the techniques involved and that their attempt had ended in disaster this of course proved nothing in itself but garcia lasso's story did intensify my doubts about the great fortifications which towered above me as i looked at them i felt that they could indeed have been erected before the age of the incas and by some infinitely older and more technically advanced race not for the first time i was reminded of how difficult archaeologists found it to provide accurate dates for engineering works like roads and dry stone walls which contained no organic compounds radiocarbon was redundant in such circumstances thermoduminescence 2 was useless and while promising new tests such as chlorine 36 rock exposure dating were now being developed their implementation was still some way off pending further advances in the latter field therefore expert chronology was still largely the result of guesswork and subjective assumptions since it was known that the incas had made intensive use of sakshwaman i could easily understand why it had been assumed that they had built it but there was no obvious or necessary connection between these two propositions the incas could just as well have found the structures already in place and moved into them if so who had the original builders been vera coaches said the ancient myths the bearded white-skinned strangers the shining ones the faithful soldiers as we traveled i continued to study the accounts of the spanish adventurers and ethnographers of the 16th and 17th centuries who had faithfully recorded the ancient pre-contact traditions of the peruvian indians what was particularly noticeable about these traditions was the repeated emphasis that the coming of the vera coaches had been associated with a terrible deluge which had overwhelmed the earth and destroyed the greater part of humanity chapter seven were there giants then just after six in the morning the little train jerked into motion and began its slow climb up the steep sides of the valley of cusco the narrow gauge tracks were laid out in a series of z shapes we chugged along the lower horizontal of the first zed then shunted and went backwards up the oblique shunt it again and went forward along the upper horizontal and so on with numerous stops and starts following a route that eventually took us high above the ancient city the inca walls and colonial palaces the narrow streets the cathedral of santo domingo squatting atop the ruins of viracocha's temple all looked spectral and surreal in the pearl grey light of a dawn sky a fairy pattern of electric lamps still decorated the streets a thin mist seeped across the ground and the smoke of domestic fires rose from the chimneys over the tiled roofs and countless small houses eventually the train turned its back on cusco and we proceeded for a while in a straight northwesterly direction towards our destination machu picchu the lost city of the incas some three hours and 130 kilometers away i had intended to read but lulled by the rocking motion of the carriage i dropped off to sleep instead 50 minutes later i awoke to find that we were passing through a painting the foreground brightly sunlit consisted of flat green meadows sprinkled with little patches of thawing frost distributed on either side of a stream across a long wide valley in the middle of my view dotted with bushes was a large field on which a handful of black and white dairy cows grazed nearby was a scattered settlement of houses outside which stood small dark-skinned quechua indians dressed in ponchos balaclavas and colorful woolen hats more distant were slopes canopied in fir trees and exotic eucalyptus my eye followed the rising contours of a pair of high green mountains which then parted to reveal folded and even more lofty uplands beyond these soared a far horizon surmounted by a jagged range of radiant and snowy peaks casting down the giants it was with understandable reluctance that i turned at last to my reading i wanted to look more closely at some of the curious links i thought i had identified connecting the sudden appearance of viracocha to the deluge legends of the incas and other andean peoples before me was a passage from father jose de acosta's natural and moral history of the indies in which the learned priests set out what the indians themselves report of their beginning they make great mention of a deluge which happened in their country the indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge and they report that out of lake titicaca came one veracocha who stayed in tiwanako where at this day there are to be seen the ruins of ancient and very strange buildings and from thence came to cusco and so began mankind to multiply making a mental note to find out more about lake titicaca and the mysterious tiwanako i read the following passage summarizing a legend from the cusco area for some crime unstated the people who lived in the most ancient times were destroyed by the creator in a deluge after the deluge the creator appeared in human form from lake titicaca he then created the sun and moon and stars after that he renewed the human population of the earth in another myth the great creator god viracocha decided to make a world for men to live in first he made the earth and sky then he began to make people to live in it carving great stone figures of giants which he brought to life at first all went well but after a time the giants began to fight among themselves and refused to work vera coacher decided that he must destroy them some he turned back into stone the rest he overwhelmed with a great flood very similar notions were of course found in other quite unconnected sources such as the jewish old testament in chapter six of the book of genesis for example which describes the hebrew god's displeasure with his creation and his decision to destroy it i had long been intrigued by one of the few descriptive statements made about the forgotten era before the flood according to the enigmatic language of that statement there were giants in the earth in those days could the giants buried in the biblical sands of the middle east be connected in some unseen way to the giants woven into the fabric of pre-columbian native american legends adding considerably to the mystery was the fact that the jewish and peruvian sources both went on with many further details in common to depict an angry deity unleashing a catastrophic flood upon a wicked and disobedient world on the next page of the sheaf of documents i had assembled was this inca account of the deluge handed down by a certain father molina in the life of mankle capac who was the first inca and from whom they began to boast themselves children of the sun and from whom they derived their idolatrous worship of the sun they had an ample account of the deluge they say that in it perished all races of men and created things in so much that the waters rose above the highest mountain peaks in the world no living thing survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box and when the water subsided the wind carried them to tiwanako where the creator began to raise up the people and the nations that are in that region garcia de la vega the son of a spanish nobleman and an inca royal woman was already familiar to me from his royal commentaries of the incas he was regarded as one of the most reliable chroniclers of the traditions of his mother's people and had done his work in the 16th century soon after the conquest when those traditions had not yet been contaminated by foreign influences he too confirmed what had obviously been a universal and deeply impressed belief after the waters of the deluge had subsided a certain man appeared in the country of tiwanako that man had been beer a coacher wrapped in his cloak he was strong and august of countenance and walked with unassailable confidence through the most dangerous badlands he worked miracles of healing and could call down fire from heaven to the indians it must have seemed that he had materialized from nowhere ancient traditions we were now more than two hours into our journey to machu picchu and the panorama had changed huge black mountains upon which not a trace of snow remained to reflect the sunlight towered darkly above us and we seem to be running through a rocky defile at the end of a narrow valley filled with sombre shadows the air was cold and so were my feet i shivered and resumed reading one thing was obvious amid the confused web of legends i'd reviewed legends which supplemented one another but also at times conflicted all the scholars agreed that the incas had borrowed absorbed and passed on the traditions of many of the different civilized peoples over whom they had extended their control during the centuries of expansion of their vast empire in this sense whatever the outcome of the historical debate over the antiquity of the incas themselves nobody could seriously dispute their role as transmitters of the ancient belief systems of all the great archaic cultures coastal and highland known and unknown that had preceded them in this land and who could say just what civilizations might have existed in peru in the unexplored regions of the past every year archaeologists come up with new finds which extend the horizons further and further back in time so why shouldn't they one day discover evidence of the penetration into the andes in remote antiquity of a race of civilizers who had come from overseas and gone away again after completing their work that was what the legends seem to me to be suggesting legends that most of all and most clearly had immortalized the memory of the man-god viracocha striding the high windswept byways of the andes working miracles wherever he went viracocha himself with his two assistants journeyed north he traveled up the cordillera one assistant went along the coast and the other up the edge of the eastern forests the creator proceeded to urkos near cusco where he commanded the future population to emerge from a mountain he visited cusco and then continued north to ecuador there in the coastal province of manta he took leave of his people and walking on the waves disappeared across the ocean there was always this poignant moment of goodbye at the end of every folk memory featuring the remarkable stranger whose name meant foam of the sea viracocha went on his way calling forth the races of men when he came to the district of puerto viejo he was joined by his followers whom he had sent on before and when he had joined them he put to see in their company and they say that he and his people went by water as easily as they had traversed the land always this poignant goodbye and often a hint of science or magic time capsule outside the window of the train things were happening to my left swollen with dark water i could see the urubamba a tributary of the amazon and a river sacred to the incas the air temperature had warmed up noticeably we had descended into a relatively low-lying valley with its own tropical microclimate the mountain slopes rising on either side of the tracks were densely covered in green forests and i was reminded that this was truly a region of vast and virtually insuperable obstacles whoever had ventured all this way into the middle of nowhere to build machu picchu must have had a very strong motive for doing so whatever the reason had been the choice of such a remote location had at least one beneficial side effect machu picchu was never found by the conquistadors and friars during their days of destructive zeal indeed it was not until 1900 1911 when the fabulous heritage of older races was beginning to be treated with greater respect that a young american explorer hiram bingham revealed machu picchu to the world it was realized at once that this incredible site opened a unique window on pre-columbian civilization in consequence the ruins were protected from looters and souvenir hunters and an important chunk of the enigmatic past was preserved to amaze future generations having passed through a one horse town named agua caliente which means hot water where a few broken down restaurants and cheap bars leered at travellers from beside the tracks we reached machu picchu puentes ruina station at ten minutes past nine in the morning from here a half hour bus ride on a winding dirt road up the side of a steep and forbidding mountain brought us to machu picchu itself to the ruins and to a bad hotel which charged us a nonsensical amount of money for a not very clean room we were the only guests though it had been years since the local guerrilla movement had last bombed the machu picchu train not many foreigners were keen to come here anymore machu picchu dreaming it was two in the afternoon i stood on a high point at the southern end of the site the ruins stretched out northwards in lichen in shrouded terraces before me thick clouds were wrapped in a ring around the mountain tops but the sunlight still occasionally burst through here and there way down on the valley floor i could see the sacred river curled in a hairpin loop right around the central formation on which machu picchu was based like a moat surrounding a giant castle the river showed deep green from this vantage point reflecting the greenness of the steep jungle slopes and there were patches of white water and wonderful sparkling gleams of light i gazed across the ruins towards the dominant peak its name is huanapichu and it used to feature in all the classic travel agency posters of this site to my astonishment i now observed that for a hundred meters or so below its summit it had been neatly terraced and sculpted somebody had been up there and had carefully raked the near vertical cliffs into a graceful hanging garden which had perhaps in ancient times been planted with bright flowers it seemed to me that the entire site together with its setting was a monumental work of sculpture composed in part of mountains in part of rock in part of trees in part of stones and also in part of water it was a heart-achingly beautiful place certainly one of the most beautiful places i have ever seen despite its luminous brilliance however i felt i was gazing down onto a city of ghosts it was like the wreck of the marie celeste deserted and restless the houses were arranged in long terraces each house was tiny with just one room fronting directly onto the narrow street and the architecture was solid and functional but by no means ornate by way of contrast certain ceremonial areas were engineered to an infinitely higher standard and incorporated giant blocks similar to those i had seen at success one smoothly polished polygonal monolith was around 12 feet long by five feet wide by five feet thick and could not have weighed less than 200 tons how had the ancient builders managed to get it up here there were dozens of others like it too and they were all arranged in the familiar jigsaw puzzle walls of interlocking angles on one block i was able to count a total of 33 angles every one of them intermeshed faultlessly with a matching angle on an adjoining block there were massive polygons and perfect ashlars with razor sharp edges there were also natural unhewn boulders integrated into the overall design at a number of points and there were strange and unusual devices such as the inti huatana the hitching post of the sun this remarkable artifact consisted of an elemental chunk of bedrock gray and crystalline carved into a complex geometrical form of curves and angles incised niches and external buttresses surmounted at the center by a stubby vertical prong jigsaw puzzle how old is machu picchu the academic consensus is that the city could not have been built much earlier than the 15th century a.d dissenting opinions however have from time to time been expressed by a number of more daring but respectable scholars in the 1930s for example ralph mueller professor of astronomy at the university of potsdam found convincing evidence to suggest that the most important features of machu picchu possessed significant astronomical alignments from these through the use of detailed mathematical computations concerning star positions in the sky in previous millennia which gradually altered down the epochs as the result of a phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes mueller concluded that the original layout of the site could only have been accomplished during the era of 4000 bc to 2000 bc in terms of orthodox history this was a heresy of audacious proportions if mueller was right machu picchu was not a mere 500 but could be as much as 6 000 years old this would make it significantly older than the great pyramid of egypt assuming of course that one accepted the great pyramid's own orthodox dating of around 2500 bc there were other dissenting voices concerning the antiquity of machu picchu and most like mueller were convinced that parts of the site were thousands of years older than the date favored by orthodox historians like the big polygonal blocks that made up the walls this was a notion that looked as though it might fit with other pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in this case the jigsaw puzzle of a past that didn't quite make sense anymore viracocha was part of that same puzzle all the legends said his capital had been at tiwanako the ruins of this great and ancient city lay across the border in bolivia in an area known as the kalau 12 miles south of lake titicaca we could get there i calculated in a couple of days the lima and la paz chapter 8 the lake at the roof of the world la paz the capital city of bolivia nestles in the uneven bottom of a spectacular hole in the ground more than two miles above sea level this plunging ravine thousands of feet deep was carved in some primeval age by a tremendous downrush of water that carried with it an abrasive tide of loose rocks and rubble provided by nature with such an apocalyptic setting la paz possesses a unique though slightly sleazy charm with its narrow streets dark wall tenements imposing cathedrals garish cinemas and hamburger bars open till late it generates an atmosphere of quirky intrigue which is oddly intoxicating it's hard going for the pedestrian however unless equipped with lungs like bellows because the whole of the central district is built up and down the sides of precipitous hills la paz airport is almost five thousand feet higher than the city itself on the edge of the altiplano the cold rolling uplands that are the dominant topographical feature of this region santa and i landed there well after midnight on a delayed flight from lima in the drafty arrivals hall we were offered coca tea in little plastic cups as a prophylactic against altitude sickness after considerable delay in exertion we extracted our luggage from customs hailed an ancient american-made taxi and clanked and rattled down towards the dim yellow lights of the city far below rumors of a cataclysm around four o'clock the next afternoon we set off for lake titicaca in a rented jeep thought our way through the capitals incomprehensible permanent rush hour traffic jams then drove up out of the skyscrapers and slums into the wide clear horizons of the altiplano at first still close to the city our route took us through a zone of bleak suburbs and sprawling shanty towns where the sidewalks were lined with auto repair shops and scrapyards the more distance we put between ourselves and la paz however the more attenuated the settlements became until almost all signs of human habitation ceased the empty treeless undulating savannas distantly bordered by the snow-covered peaks of the cordillera real created an unforgettable spectacle of natural beauty and power but there was also a feeling of other worldliness about this place which seemed to float above the clouds like an enchanted kingdom although our ultimate destination was tiwanako we were aiming that night for the town of copacabana on a promontory near the southern end of lake titicaca to reach it we had to cross a neck of water by improvised car ferry at the fishing town of dikine then with dusk descending we followed the main highway now little more than a narrow and uneven track up a series of steep hairpin bends and onto the shoulder of a mountain spur from this point the contrasting panorama unfolded the dark dark waters of the lake below appeared to lie at the edge of a limitless ocean drowned in somber shadows and yet the jagged peaks of the snow-capped mountains in the distance were still drenched in dazzling sunlight from the very beginning lake titicaca seemed to me a special place i knew that it lay some 12 500 feet above sea level that the frontier between peru and bolivia passed through it that it covered an area of 3200 square miles and was 138 miles long by about 70 miles wide i also knew it was deep reaching almost a thousand feet in places and had a puzzling geological history here are the mysteries and some of the solutions that have been proposed one though now more than two miles above sea level the area around lake titicaca is littered with millions upon millions of fossilized seashells this suggests that at some stage the whole of the altiplano was forced upwards from the seabed perhaps as part of the general terrestrial rising that formed south america as a whole in the process great quantities of ocean water together with countless myriads of living marine creatures were scooped up and suspended among the andean ranges this is thought to have happened not more recently than about 100 million years ago 2. paradoxically despite the mighty antiquity of this event lake titicaca has retained until the present day a marine ichthyofauna in other words though now located hundreds of miles from any ocean its fish and crustacea feature many oceanic rather than freshwater types surprising creatures brought to the surface in fisherman's nets have included examples of hippocampus the seahorse in addition as one authority has pointed out the various species of al questis hialella inemis etc and other examples of marine fauna leave no doubt that this lake in other periods was much saltier than today or more accurately that the water which formed it was from the sea and that it was dammed up and locked in the andes when the continent rose three so much then for the events which may have created lake titicaca in the first place since its formation this great interior sea and the altaplano itself have undergone several other drastic and dramatic changes of these by far the most noticeable is that the lake's extent appears to have fluctuated enormously indicated by the existence of an ancient strand line visible on much of the surrounding terrain puzzlingly this strand line is not level but slopes markedly from north to south over a considerable horizontal distance at the northernmost point surveyed it is as much as 290 feet higher than titicaca some 400 miles further south it is 274 feet lower than the present level of the lake from this and much other evidence geologists have deduced that the altiplano is still gradually rising but in an unbalanced manner with greater altitudes being attained in the northern part and lesser in the southern the process involved here is thought to have less to do with changes in the level of titicaca's waters themselves although such changes have certainly occurred then with changes in the level of the whole terrain in which the lake is situated four much harder to explain in such terms however given the very long time periods major geological transformations are supposed to require is irrefutable evidence that the city of tiwanaka was once a port complete with extensive docks positioned right on the shore of lake titicaca the problem is that tiwanako's ruins are now marooned about 12 miles south of the lake and more than 100 feet higher than the present shoreline in the period since the city was built it therefore follows that one of two things must have happened either the level of the lake has fallen greatly or the land on which tiwanako stands has risen comparably five either way it is obvious that there have been massive and traumatic physical changes some of these such as the rise of the altiplano from the floor of the ocean certainly took place in remote geological ages before the advent of human civilization others are not nearly so ancient and must have occurred after the construction of tiwanako the question therefore is this when was tiwanako built the orthodox historical view is that the ruins cannot possibly be dated much earlier than ad500 an alternative chronology also exists however which although not accepted by the majority of scholars seems more in tune with the scale of the geological upheavals that have occurred in this region based on the mathematical astronomical calculations of professor arthur poznanski of the university of la paz and of professor ralph mueller who also challenged the official dating of machu picchu it pushes the main phase of construction at tiwa naco back to 15000 bc this chronology also indicates that the city later suffered immense destruction in a phenomenal natural catastrophe around the 11th millennium bc and thereafter rapidly became separated from the lakeshore we should be reviewing poznan's and mueller's findings in chapter 11 findings which suggest that the great andean city of tiwanako flourished during the last ice age in the deep dark moonless midnight of pre-history chapter 9 once and future king during my travels in the andes i had several times re-read a curious variant of the mainstream tradition of viracocha in this variant which was from the area around lake titicaca known as the kolao the deity civilizing hero had been named tunupa appeared on the altiplano in ancient times coming from the north with five disciples a white man of august presence blue-eyed and bearded he was sober puritanical and preached against drunkenness polygamy and war after traveling great distances through the andes where he created a peaceful kingdom and taught men all the arts of civilization tunupa was struck down and grievously wounded by a group of jealous conspirators they put his blessed body in a boat of tortora rush and set it adrift on lake titicaca there he sailed away with such speed that those who had tried so cruelly to kill him were left behind in terror and astonishment for this lake has no current the boat came to the shore at cochamaca where today is the river desguardero indian tradition asserts that the boat struck the land with such force it created the river descordero which before then did not exist and on the water so released the holy body was carried many leagues away to the seacoast at eureka boats water and salvation there are many curious parallels here to the story of osiris the ancient egyptian high god of death and resurrection the fullest account of the original myth defining this mysterious figure is given by plutarch and says that after bringing the gifts of civilization to his people teaching them all manner of useful skills abolishing cannibalism and human sacrifice and providing them with their first legal code osiris left egypt and traveled about the world to spread the benefits of civilization to other nations as well he never forced the barbarians he encountered to accept his laws preferring instead to argue with them and to appeal to their reason it is also recorded that he passed on his teachings to them by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments while he was gone however he was plotted against by 72 members of his court led by his brother-in-law set on his return the conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood and gold was offered a surprise to any guest who could fit into it exactly osiris did not know that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his body measurements as a result when the assembled guests tried one by one to get into it they failed osiris laid down comfortably inside before he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward nailed the lid tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there would be no air the coffer was then thrown into the nile it had been intended that it should sink but it floated rapidly away drifting for a considerable distance until it reached the seacoast at this point the goddess isis wife of osiris intervened using all the great magic for which she was renowned she found the coffer and concealed it in a secret place however her evil brother set out hunting in the marshes discovered the coffin opened it and in a mad fury cut the royal corpse into 14 pieces which he scattered throughout the land once more isis set off to save her husband she made a small boat of papyrus reeds coated with pitch and embarked on the nile in search of the remains when she had found them she worked powerful spells to reunite the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old form thereafter in an intact and perfect state osiris went through a process of stellar rebirth to become god of the dead and king of the underworld from which place legend had it he occasionally returned to earth in the guise of a mortal man although there are huge differences between the traditions it is bizarre that osiris in egypt and to nupa viracocha in south america should have had all the following points in common both were great civilizers both were conspired against both were struck down both were sealed inside a container or vessel of some kind both were then cast into water both drifted away on a river both eventually reached the sea are such parallels to be dismissed as coincidences or could there be some underlying connection read boats of tsuriki the air was alpine cold and i was sitting on the front of a motor launch doing about 20 knots across the icy waters of lake titicaca the sky above was clear blue reflecting aquamarine and turquoise tints in shore and the vast body of the lake glinting in copper and silver tones seemed to stretch away forever the passages in the legends that spoke of vessels made of reeds needed to be followed up because i knew that boats of tortora rush were a traditional form of transport on this lake however the ancient skills required to build craft of this type had atrophied in recent years and we were now headed towards suriki the one place where they were still properly made on suriki island in a small village close to the lakeshore i found two elderly indians making a boat from bundled totora rushes the elegant craft which appeared to be nearly complete was approximately 15 feet long it was wide of midships but narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern i sat down for a while to watch the more senior of the two builders who wore a brown felt hat over a curious peaked woolen cap repeatedly braced his bare left foot against the side of the vessel to give additional leverage as he pulled and tightened the cords that held the bundles of reeds in place from time to time i noticed that he rubbed a length of cord against his own perspiring brow thus moistening it to increase its adhesion the boat surrounded by chickens and occasionally investigated by a shy browsing alpaca stood amid a litter of discarded rushes in the backyard of a ramshackle farmhouse it was one of several i was able to study over the next few hours and though the setting was unmistakably andean i found myself repeatedly overtaken by a sense of deja vu from another place and another time the reason was that the torah vessels of tsuriki were virtually identical both in the method of construction and in finished appearance to the beautiful craft fashioned from papyrus reeds in which the pharaohs had sailed the nile thousands of years previously in my travels in egypt i had examined the images of many such vessels painted on the walls of ancient tombs it sent a tingle down my spine to see them now so colorfully brought to life on an obscure island on lake titicaca even though my research had partially prepared me for this coincidence i knew that no satisfactory explanation had ever been given for how such close and richly detailed similarities of boat design could occur in two such widely separated places nevertheless in the words of one authority in ancient navigation who had addressed himself to this conundrum here was the same compact shape peaked and raised at both ends with rope lashings running from the deck right round the bottom of the boat all in one piece each straw was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry and streamlined elegance while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they look like gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak for and aft the reed boats of the ancient nile and the reed boats of lake titicaca the original design of which local indians insisted had been given to them by the viracocha people had other points in common both for example were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged straddled masts both had also been used for the long distance transport of exceptionally heavy building materials obelisks and gargantuan blocks of stone bound for the temples of giza and luxor and abidos on the one hand and for the mysterious edifices of tiwanako on the other in those far-off days before lake titicaca became more than 100 feet shallower tiwanako had stood at the water's edge overlooking a vista of awesome and sacred beauty now the great port capital city of viracocha himself lay lost amid eroded hills and empty windswept plains road to tiwanaka after returning from tsuriki to the mainland we drove our hired jeep across those plains raising a cloud of dust our route took us through the towns of pukarani and laha populated by aymara indians who walked slowly in the narrow cobbled streets and sat placidly in the little sunlit plazas were these people the descendants of the builders of tiwanaka as the scholars insisted or were the legends right had the ancient city been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here long ages ago chapter 10 the city at the gate of the sun the early spanish travelers who visited the ruined bolivian city of tiwanako at around the time of the conquest were impressed by the sheer size of its buildings and by the atmosphere of mystery that clung to them i asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time of the inca wrote the chronicler pedro cesar de leon they laughed at the question affirming that they were made long before the inca reign and that they had heard from their forebears that everything to be seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night meanwhile another spanish visitor of the same period recorded a tradition which said that the stones had been lifted miraculously off the ground they were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet not long after the conquest a detailed description of the city was written by the historian garcilazo de la vega no looting for treasure or for building materials had yet taken place and though ravaged by the tooth of time the sight was still magnificent enough to take his breath away we must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of tiwanako there is an artificial hill of great height built on stone foundations so that the earth will not slide there are gigantic figures carved in stone these are much worn which shows their great antiquity there are walls the stones of which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put them in place and there are the remains of strange buildings the most remarkable being stone portals hewn out of solid rock these stand on bases anything up to 30 feet long 15 feet wide and six feet thick base and portal being all of one piece how and with the use of what tools or implements massive works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought here that was in the 16th century more than 400 years later at the end of the 20th century i shared garcia lasso's puzzlement scattered around tiwanako in defiance of the looters who had robbed the sight of so much in recent years were monoliths so big and cumbersome yet so well cut that they almost seemed to be the work of super beings sunken temple like a disciple at the feet of his master i sat on the floor of the sunken temple and looked up at the enigmatic face which all the scholars of tiwanako believed was intended to represent viracocha untold centuries ago unknown hands had carved this likeness into a tall pillar of red rock though now much eroded it was the likeness of a man at peace with himself it was the likeness of a man of power he had a high forehead and large round eyes his nose was straight narrow at the bridge but flaring towards the nostrils his lips were full his distinguishing feature however was his stylish and imposing beard which had the effect of making his face broader at the jaws than at the temples looking more closely i could see that the sculptor had portrayed a man whose skin was shaved all around his lips with the result that his moustache began high on his cheeks roughly parallel with the end of his nose from there it curved extravagantly down beside the corners of his mouth forming an exaggerated goatee at the chin and then followed his jawline back to his ears above and below the ears on the side of the head were carved odd representations of animals or perhaps it would be better to describe these carvings as representations of odd animals because they looked like big clumsy prehistoric mammals with fat tails and club feet there were other points of interest for example the stone figure of viracocha had been sculpted with the hands and arms folded one below the other over the front of a long flowing robe on each side of this robe appeared the sinuous form of a snake coiling upwards from ground to shoulder level and as i looked at this beautiful design the original of which had perhaps been embroidered on rich cloth the picture that came into my mind was of viracocha as a wizard or a sorcerer a bearded merlin-like figure dressed in weird and wonderful clothes calling down fire from heaven the temple in which the viracocha pillar stood was open to the sky and consisted of a large rectangular pit like a swimming pool dug out six feet below ground level its floor about 40 feet long by 30 feet wide was composed of hard flat gravel its strong vertical walls were formed from precisely dressed ashlar blocks of varying sizes laid closely against one another without mortar in the joints and interspersed with taller rough hue and steely a set of steps was let into the southern wall and it was down these i had come when i had entered the structure i walked several times around the figure of viracocha resting my fingers on the sun-warmed stone pillow trying to guess its purpose it was perhaps seven feet tall and it faced south with its back to the old shoreline of lake titicaca originally less than 600 feet away ranged out behind this central obelisk furthermore there were two others of smaller stature possibly intended to represent viracocha's legendary companions all three figures being severely functionally vertical cast clean-edged shadows as i gazed at them for the sun was past its i sat down on the ground again and looked slowly all around the temple viracocha dominated it like the conductor of an orchestra and yet its most striking feature undoubtedly lay elsewhere lining the walls at various points and heights were dozens and dozens of human heads sculpted in stone these were complete heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the walls there were several different and contradictory scholarly opinions as to their function pyramid from the floor of the sunken temple looking west i could see an immense wall into which was set an impressive geometrical gateway made of large slabs of stone silhouetted in this gateway by the afternoon sun was the figure of a giant the wall i knew enclosed a parade ground-sized area called the kalasasia a word in the local aymara language meaning simply place of the upright standing stones and the giant was one of the huge time-worn pieces of sculpture referred to by garcilazo de la vega i was eager to take a look at it but for the moment my attention was diverted southwards towards an artificial hill 50 feet high which lay almost directly ahead of me as i climbed the steps out of the sunken temple the hill which had also been mentioned by garcilaso was known as the akapana pyramid like the pyramids at giza in egypt it was oriented with surprising precision towards the cardinal points unlike those pyramids its ground plan was somewhat irregular nonetheless it measured roughly 690 feet on each side which meant that it was a hulking piece of architecture and the dominant edifice of tiwanako i walked towards it now and spent some time strolling around it and clambering over it originally it had been a clean-sided step pyramid of earth faced with large andesite blocks in the centuries since the conquest however it had been used as a quarry by builders from as far away as la paz with the result that only about ten percent of its superb facing blocks now remained what clues what evidence had those nameless thieves carried off with them as i climbed up the broken sides and around the deep grassy troughs in the top of the akapana i realized that the true function of the pyramid was probably never going to be understood all that was certain was that it had not been merely decorative or ceremonial on the contrary it seemed almost as though it might have functioned as some kind of arcane device or machine deep within its bowels archaeologists had discovered a complex network of zigzagging stone channels lined with fine ashlars these had been meticulously angled and jointed to a tolerance of one fiftieth of an inch and had served to sluice water down from a large reservoir at the top of the structure through a series of descending levels to a moat that encircled the entire site washing against the pyramid's base on its southern side so much care and attention had been lavished on all this plumbing so many man hours of highly skilled and patient labor that the akapana made no sense unless it had been endowed with a significant purpose a number of archaeologists i knew had speculated that this purpose might have been connected with a rain or river cult involving a primitive veneration of the powers and attributes of fast flowing water one sinister suggestion which implied that the unknown technology of the pyramid might have had a lethal purpose was derived from the meanings of the words hake and apana in the ancient aymara language still spoken hereabouts hakee means people or men aparna means to perish probably by water thus akapana is a place where people perish another commentator however after making a careful assessment of all the characteristics of the hydraulic system proposed a different solution namely that the sluices had most probably been part of a processing technique the use of flowing water for washing ores perhaps gateway of the sun leaving the western side of the enigmatic pyramid i made my way towards the southwest corner of the enclosure known as the cala sacia i could see now why it had been called the place of the upright standing stones for this was precisely what it was at regular intervals in a wall composed of bulky trapezoidal blocks huge dagger-like monoliths more than 12 feet high had been sunk hilt-first into the red earth of the altiplana the effect was of a giant stockade almost five hundred feet square rising about twice as far above the ground as the sunken temple had been interred beneath it had the colossae have been a fortress then apparently not scholars now generally accepted that it functioned as a sophisticated celestial observatory rather than keeping enemies at bay its purpose had been to fix the equinoxes and the solstices and to predict with mathematical precision the various seasons of the year certain structures within its walls and indeed the walls themselves appeared to have been lined up to particular star groups and designed to facilitate measurement of the amplitude of the sun in summer winter autumn and spring in addition the famous gateway of the sun which stood in the northwest corner of the enclosure was not only a world-class work of art but was thought by those who had studied it to be a complex and accurate calendar carved in stone the more one gets acquainted with the sculpture the greater becomes one's conviction that the peculiar layout and pictorialism of this calendar cannot possibly have been the result merely of the ultimately unfathomable whim of an artist but that its glyphs deeply senseful constitute the eloquent record of the observations and calculations of a scientist the calendar could not have been drawn up and laid out in any other way than this my background research had made me especially curious about the gateway of the sun and indeed about the kalasasia as a whole this was so because certain astronomical and solar alignments which we review in the next chapter had made it possible to calculate the approximate period when the colossae must originally had been laid out these alignments suggested the controversial date of 15 000 bc about 17 000 years ago chapter 11 intimations of antiquity in his voluminous work tiwanako the cradle of american man the late professor arthur poznan a formidable german bolivian scholar whose investigations at the ruins lasted for almost 50 years explains the archaeoastronomical calculations which led to his controversial re-dating of tiwanako these he says were based solely and exclusively on the difference in the obliquity of the ecliptic of the period in which the colossus here was built and that which it is today what exactly is the obliquity of the ecliptic and why does it make tijuanako 17 000 years old according to the dictionary definition it is the angle between the plane of the earth's orbit and that of the celestial equator equal to approximately 23 degrees 27 minutes at present to clarify this obscure astronomical notion it helps to picture the earth as a ship sailing on the vast ocean of the heavens like all such vessels be they planets or schooners it rolls slightly with the swell that flows beneath it picture yourself on board that ship as it rolls standing on the deck gazing out to you rise up on the crest of a wave and your visible horizon increases you fall back into a trough and it decreases the process is regular mathematical like the tick tock of a great metronome a constant almost imperceptible nodding perpetually changing the angle between yourself and the horizon now picture the earth again floating in space as every school child knows the axis of daily rotation of our beautiful blue planet lies slightly tilted away from the vertical in its orbit around the sun from this it follows that the terrestrial equator and hence the celestial equator which is merely an imaginary extension of the earth's equator into the celestial sphere must also lie at an angle to the orbital plane that angle at any one time is the obliquity of the ecliptic but because the earth is a ship that rolls its obliquity changes in a cyclical manner over very long periods during each cycle of 41 000 years the obliquity varies with the precision and predictability of a swiss chronograph between 22.1 degrees and 24.5 degrees the sequence in which one angle will follow another as well as the sequence of all previous angles at any period of history can be calculated by means of a few straightforward equations these have been expressed as a curve on a graph originally plotted out in paris in 1911 by the international conference of ephemerids and from this graph it is possible to match angles and precise historical dates with confidence and accuracy poznan was able to date the kalasasia because the obliquity cycle gradually alters the azimuth position of sunrise and sunset from century to century by establishing the solar alignments of certain key structures that now looked out of true he convincingly demonstrated that the obliquity of the ecliptic at the time of the building of the colossus here had been 23 degrees 8 minutes 48 seconds when that angle was plotted on the graph drawn up by the international conference of ephemerids it was found to correspond to a date of 15000 bc of course not a single orthodox historian or archaeologist was prepared to accept such an early origin for tiwanako preferring as noted in chapter 8 to agree on the safe estimate of ad500 during the years 1927 to 30 however several scientists from other disciplines checked carefully poznanski's astronomic archaeological investigations these scientists members of a high-powered team which also studied many other archaeological sites in the andes were dr hans ludendorff then director of the astronomical observatory of potsdam dr friedrich becker of the specular vaticanuca and two other astronomers professor dr arnold cole shutter of the university of bonn and dr ralph mueller of the astrophysical institute of potsdam at the end of their three years of work the scientists concluded that poznanski was basically right they didn't concern themselves with the implications of their findings for the prevailing paradigm of history they simply stated the observable facts about the astronomical alignments of various structures of tiwanako of these the most important by far was that the kala sacia had been laid out to conform with observations of the heavens made a very long time ago much much further back than ad500 poznan's figure of 15000 bc was pronounced to be well within the bounds of possibility if tiwanako had indeed flourished so long before the dawn of history what sort of people had built it and for what purpose fish garbed figures there were two massive pieces of statuary inside the kalasasia one a figure nicknamed alfreil the friar stood in the southwest corner the other towards the center of the eastern end of the enclosure was the giant that i had observed from the sunken temple carved in red sandstone worn and ancient beyond reckoning alfredo stood about six feet high and portrayed a humanoid androgynous being with massive eyes and lips in its right hand it clutched something resembling a knife with a wavy blade like an indonesian chris in its left hand was an object like a hinged and case-bound book from the top of this book however protruded a device which had been inserted into it as though into a sheath from the waist down the figure appeared to be clad in the garment of fishscapes and as though to confirm this perception the sculpture had formed the individual scales out of rows and rows of small highly stylized fish heads this sign had been persuasively interpreted by poznanski as meaning fish in general it seemed therefore that el frail was a portrayal of an imaginary or symbolic fish man the figure was also equipped with a belt sculpted with the images of several large crustaceans so this notion seemed all the more probable what had been intended i had learned of one local tradition i thought might shed light on the matter it was very ancient and spoke of gods of the lake with fish tales called chulua and umantua in this and in the fish garbed figures it seemed that there was a curious out-of-place echo of mesopotamian myths which spoke strangely and at length about amphibious beings endowed with reason who had visited the land of sumer in remote prehistory the leader of these beings was named oanis or uwan according to the childhood scribe barossas the whole body of oanus was like that of a fish and had under a fish's head another head and also feet below similar to those of a man subjoined to the fish's tail his voice too and language was articulate and human and a representation of him is preserved even to this day when the sun sets it was the custom of this being to plunge again into the sea and abide all night in the deep for he was amphibious according to the traditions reported by barossas awanis was above all a civilizer in the daytime he used to converse with men but took no food at that season and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art he taught them to construct houses to found temples to compile laws and explain to them the principles of geometrical knowledge he made them distinguish the seeds of the earth and showed them how to collect fruits in short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and to humanize mankind from that time so universal were his instructions nothing has been added materially by way of improvement surviving images of the oanus creatures i had seen on babylonian and assyrian reliefs clearly portrayed fish-garbed men fish scales formed the dominant motif on their garments just as they did on those worn by alfrail another similarity was that the babylonian figures held unidentified objects in both their hands if my memory served me right and i later confirmed that it did these objects were by no means identical to those carried by el frail they were however similar enough to be worthy of note the other great idol of the kalasacia was positioned towards the eastern end of the platform facing the main gateway and was an imposing monolith of grey andesite hugely thick and standing about nine feet tall its broad head rose straight up out of its hulking shoulders and its slab-like face stared expressionlessly into the distance it was wearing a crown or headband of some kind and its hair was braided into orderly rows of long vertical ringlets which were most clearly visible at the back the figure was also intricately carved and decorated across much of its surface almost as though it were tattooed like alfrail it was clad below the waist in a garment composed of fish scales and fish symbols and also like el frail it held two unidentifiable objects in its hands this time the left hand object looked more like a sheath than a casebound book and from it protruded a forked handle the right hand object was roughly cylindrical narrow in the center where it was held wider at the shoulders and at the base and then narrowing again towards the top it appeared to have several different sections or parts fitted over and into one another but it was impossible to guess what it might represent images of extinct species leaving the fish garbed figures i came at last to the gateway of the sun located in the northwest corner of the kalasasia it proved to be a freestanding monolith of grey-green andesite about 12 and a half feet wide 10 feet high and 18 inches thick weighing an estimated 10 tons perhaps best envisaged as a sort of arc de triomphe though on a much smaller scale it looked in this setting like a door connecting two invisible dimensions a door between nowhere and nothing the stonework was of exceptionally high quality and authorities agreed that it was one of the archaeological wonders of the americans its most enigmatic feature was the so-called calendar freeze carved into its eastern facade along the top of the portal at its center in an elevated position this freeze was dominated by what scholars took to be another representation of viracocha but this time in his more terrifying aspect as the god king who could call down fire from heaven his gentle fatherly side was still expressed tears of compassion were running down his cheeks but his face was set stern and hard his tiara was regal and imposing and in either hand he grasped a thunderbolt in the interpretation given by joseph campbell one of the 20th century's best known students of myth the meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible i turned my head to right and left slowly studying the remainder of the freeze it was a beautifully balanced piece of sculpture with three rows of eight figures 24 in all lined up on either side of the elevated central image many attempts none of them particularly convincing have been made to explain the assumed calendrical function of these figures all that could really be said for sure was that they had a peculiar bloodless cartoon-like quality and that there was something coldly mathematical almost machine-like about the way they seemed to march in regimented lines towards viracocha some apparently wore bird masks others had sharply pointed noses and each had in his hand an implement of the type the high god was himself carrying the base of the freeze was filled with a design known as the meander a geometrical series of step pyramid forms set in a continuous line and arranged alternately upside down and right side up which was also thought to have had a calendrical function on the third column from the right hand side and more faintly on the third column from the left hand side too i could make out a clear carving of an elephant's head ears tusks and trunk this was unexpected since there are no elephants anywhere in the new world there had been however in prehistoric times as i was able to confirm much later particularly numerous in the southern andes until their sudden extinction around ten thousand bc had been members of a species called cuveeronius an elephant-like proboscis complete with tusks and a trunk uncannily similar in appearance to the elephants of the gateway of the sun i stepped forward a few paces to take a closer look at these elephants each turned out to be composed of the heads of two crested condors placed throat to throat the crests constituting the ears and the upper part of the neck the tusks the creatures thus formed still looked like elephants to me perhaps because a characteristic visual trick the sculptures of tiwanaka had employed again and again in their subtle and other worldly art had been to use one thing to depict another thus an apparently human ear on an apparently human face might turn out to be a bird's wing likewise an ornate crown might be composed of alternate fishes and condors heads an eyebrow a bird's neck and head the toe of a slipper an animal's head and so on members of the elephant family formed out of condors heads therefore need not necessarily be optical illusions on the contrary such inventive composites would be perfectly in keeping with the overall artistic character of the freeze among the riot of stylized animal figures carved into the gateway of the sun were a number of other extinct species as well i knew from my research that one of these had been convincingly identified by several observers as toxodon a three-toed amphibious mammal about nine feet long and five feet high at the shoulder resembling a short stubby cross between a rhino and a hippo like cuvironius toxidon had flourished in south america in the late pliocene 1.6 million years ago and had died out at the end of the pleistocene about 12 000 years ago to my eye this looked like a striking corroboration for the astro archaeological evidence that dated tiwanako to the end of the pleistocene and further undermined the orthodox historical chronology which made the city only 1500 years old since toxidon presumably could only have been modeled from life it was therefore obviously a matter of some importance that no fewer than 46 toxidon heads had been carved into the freeze of the gateway of the sun nor was this creature's ugly caricature confined only to the gateway on the contrary toxodon had been identified on numerous fragments of tijuanak and pottery even more convincingly he had been portrayed in several pieces of sculpture which showed him in full three-dimensional glory moreover representations of other extinct species had been found the species included chele deuterium a diurnal quadruped and macracinia an animal somewhat larger than the modern horse with distinctive three-toed feet such images meant that tiwanaka was a kind of picture book from the past a record of bizarre animals now deader than the dodo expressed in everlasting stone but the record-taking had come to an abrupt halt one day and darkness had descended this too was recorded in stone the gateway of the sun that surpassing work of art had never been completed certain unfinished aspects of the freeze made it seem probable that something sudden and dreadful had happened which had caused the sculpture in the words of poznan to drop his chisel forever at the moment when he was putting the final touches to his work chapter 12 the end of the vera coaches we heard in chapter 10 that tiwanako was originally built as a port on the shores of lake titicaca when that lake was far wider and more than a hundred feet deeper than it is today vast harbour constructions piers and dikes and even dumped cargos of quarried stone at points beneath the old water line leave no doubt that this must have been the case indeed according to the unorthodox estimates of professor poznanski tiwanako had been in active use as a port as early as 15 000 bc the date he proposed for the construction of the kalasasia and had continued to serve as such for approximately another 5 000 years during which great expanse of time its position in relation to the shore of lake titicaca hardly changed throughout this epoch the principal harbour of the port city was located several hundred meters south west of the kalasasia at a site now known as pumapunku literally the puma gate here poznanski's excavations revealed two artificially dredged docks on either side of a true and magnificent pier or wharf where hundreds of ships could at the same time take on and unload their heavy burdens one of the construction blocks from which the pier had been fashioned still lay on site and weighed an estimated 440 tons numerous others weighed between 100 and 150 tons furthermore many of the biggest monoliths had clearly been joined to each other by eye-shaped metal clamps in the whole of south america i knew this masonry technique had been found only on tiwanakan structures the last time i had seen the characteristic notched depressions which proved its use had been on ruins on the island of elephantina in the nile in upper egypt equally thought provoking was the appearance of the symbol of the cross on many of these ancient blocks recurring again and again particularly at the northern approach to pumapunku this symbol always took the same form a double crucifix with pure clean lines perfectly balanced and harmonious deeply recessed into the hard gray stone even according to orthodox historical chronology these crosses were not less than 1 500 years old in other words they had been carved here by a people with absolutely no knowledge of christianity a full millennium before the arrival of the first spanish missionaries on the altiplano welcome to that had the christians obtained their crosses not only from the shape of the structure to which jesus christ was nailed i thought but from some much older source as well hadn't the ancient egyptians for example used a hieroglyph very like a cross the ank or crook sansata to symbolize life the breath of life eternal life itself had that symbol originated in egypt or had it perhaps occurred elsewhere earlier still with such ideas chasing one another around my head i walked slowly around pumapunku the extensive perimeter which formed a rectangle several hundred feet long outlined a low pyramidal hill much overgrown with tall grass dozens and dozens of hulking blocks lay scattered in all directions tossed like matchsticks poznan argued in the terrible natural disaster that had overtaken tiwanaco during the 11th millennium bc this catastrophe was caused by seismic movements which resulted in an overflow of the waters of lake titicaca and in volcanic eruptions it is also possible that the temporary increase in the level of the lake may have been caused in part by the breaking of the bulwarks on some of the lakes further to the north and situated at a greater altitude thus releasing the waters which descended toward lake titicaca in on rushing and unrestrainable torrents poznan's evidence that a flood had been the agent of the destruction of tiwanako included the discovery of la custrain flora paleodestrina culmina and paleodestrina and a cola ankylus titicanensis planorbis titicanensis etc mixed in the eluvia with the skeletons of human beings who perished in the cataclysm and the discovery of various skeletons of orestes fish of the family of the present burgers in the same alluvia which contain the human remains in addition fragments of human and animal skeletons have been found lying in chaotic disorder among wrought stones utensils tools and an endless variety of other things all of this has been moved broken and accumulated in a confused heap anyone who would dig a trench here two meters deep could not deny that the destructive force of water in combination with brusque movements of the earth must have accumulated those different kinds of bones mixing them with pottery jewels tools and utensils layers of elluvium cover the whole field of the ruins and lacquestrine sand mixed with shells from titicaca decomposed feldspar and volcanic ashes have accumulated in the places surrounded by the walls it had been a terrible catastrophe indeed that had overwhelmed tiwanako and if posnanski was right it took place more than 12 000 years ago thereafter though the flood waters subsided the culture of the altiplano did not again attain a high point of development but fell rather into a total and definitive decadence struggle and abandonment this process was hastened by the fact that the earthquakes which had caused lake titicaca to engulf tiwanako were only the first of many upheavals in the area these initially resulted in the lake swelling and overflowing its banks but they soon began to have the opposite effect slowly reducing titicaca's depth and surface area as the years passed the lake continued to drain inch by inch marooning the great city remorselessly separating it from the waters which had previously played such a vital role in its economic life at the same time there was evidence that the climate of the tiwanako area had become colder and much less favorable for the growing of crops than had previously been the case so much less favorable that today staples such as maize cannot ripen properly and even potatoes come out of the ground stunted although it was difficult to piece together all the different elements of the complex chain of events that had occurred it seemed that a period of calm had followed the critical moment of seismic disturbance which had temporarily flooded tiwanaka then slowly but surely the climate worsened and became inclement finally there ensued mass emigrations of the andean peoples towards locations where the struggle for life would not be so arduous it seems that the highly civilized inhabitants of tiwanako remembered in local traditions as the virakocha people had not gone without a struggle there was puzzling evidence from all over the altiplano that agricultural experiments of an advanced and scientific nature had been carried out with great ingenuity and dedication to try to compensate for the deterioration of the climate for example recent research has demonstrated that astonishingly sophisticated analyses of the chemical compositions of many poisonous high-altitude plants and tubers had been undertaken by somebody in this region in the furthest antiquity such analyses furthermore had been coupled with the invention of detoxification techniques which had rendered these otherwise nutritious vegetables harmless and edible there was as yet no satisfactory explanation for the development of these detoxification processes admitted david brahman associate professor of anthropology at washington university likewise in the same period somebody as yet unidentified by scholarship went to great lengths to build raised fields on the newly exposed lands that had so recently been under the waters of the lake a procedure which created characteristic corrugated strips of alternately high and low ground it was not until the 1960s that the original function of these undulating patterns of earthen platforms and shallow canals was correctly worked out still visible today and known as waruwaru by the local indians they proved to be part of a complex agricultural design perfected in prehistoric times which had the ability to outperform modern farming techniques in recent years some of the raised fields were reconstructed by archaeologists and agronomists these experimental plots consistently yielded three times more potatoes than even the most productive conventional plots likewise during one particularly cold spell a severe frost did little damage to the experimental fields the following year the crops on the elevated platform survived an equally ruinous drought then later rode high and dry through a flood that swamped surrounding farmlands indeed this simple but effective agricultural technique invented by a culture so ancient that no one today could even remember its name had proved such a success in rural bolivia that it had attracted the attention of governmental and international development agencies and was now under test in several other parts of the world as well an artificial language another possible legacy of tiwanako and of the vera coaches lay embedded in the language spoken by the local imara indians a language regarded by some specialists as the oldest in the world in the 1980s ivan guzman de rojas a bolivian computer scientist accidentally demonstrated that imara might be not only very ancient but significantly that it might be a made-up language something deliberately and skillfully designed of particular note was the seemingly artificial character of its syntax which was rigidly structured and unambiguous to an extent thought inconceivable in normal organic speech this synthetic and highly organized structure meant that aymara could easily be transformed into a computer algorithm to be used to translate one language into another the imara algorithm is used as a bridge language the language of an original document is translated into aymara and then into any number of other languages was it just coincidence that an apparently artificial language governed by a computer-friendly syntax should be spoken today in the environs of tiwanako or could aymara be a legacy of the high learning that legend attributed to the vera coaches if so what other legacies might there be what other incomplete fragments of an old and forgotten wisdom might be lying scattered around fragments which had perhaps contributed to the richness and diversity of many of the cultures that had evolved in this region during the ten thousand years before the conquest perhaps it was the possession of fragments like these that had made possible the drawing of the nazca lines and enabled the predecessors of the incas to build the impossible stone walls at machu picchu and saxe juan mexico the image i could not get out of my mind was of the vera kocher people leaving walking on the waters of the pacific ocean or going miraculously by sea as so many of the legends told where had these seafarers been going what had their objective been and why come to think of it had they made such dogged efforts to stay in tiwanako for so long before admitting defeat and moving on what had they been trying to achieve there that had been so important to them after several weeks work on the altiplana traveling back and forth between la paz and tiwanaco it became clear that neither the otherworldly ruins nor the libraries of the capital were going to provide me with any further answers indeed in bolivia at least the trail seemed to have gone cold it was not until i reached mexico two thousand miles to the north that i picked up its traces again part three plumed serpent central america chapter 13 blood and time at the end of the world chichen itza northern yucatan mexico behind me towering almost 100 feet into the air was a perfect ziggurat the temple of kukulkan its four stairways had 91 steps each taken together with the top platform which counted as a further step the total was 365. this gave the number of complete days in a solar year in addition the geometric design and orientation of the ancient structure had been calibrated with swiss watch precision to achieve an objective as dramatic as it was esoteric on the spring and autumn equinoxes regular as clockwork triangular patterns of light and shadow combined to create the illusion of a giant serpent undulating on the northern staircase on each occasion the illusion lasted for three hours and 22 minutes exactly i walked away from the temple of kukulkan in an easterly direction ahead of me starkly refuting the oft repeated fallacy that the peoples of central america had never succeeded in developing the column as an architectural feature stood a forest of white stone columns which must at one time have supported a massive roof the sun was beating down harshly through the translucent blue of a cloudless sky and the cool deep shadows this area offered were alluring i passed by and made my way to the foot of the steep steps that led up to the adjacent temple of the warriors at the top of these steps becoming fully visible only after i'd begun to ascend them was a giant figure this was the idol of chakmul it half lay half sat in an oddly stiff and expectant posture bent knees protruding upwards thick calves drawn back to touch its thighs ankles tucked in against its buttocks elbows planted on the ground hands folded across its belly encircling an empty plate and its back set at an awkward angle as though it were just about to lever itself upright had it done so i calculated it would have stood about eight feet tall even reclining coiled and tightly sprung it seemed to overflow with a fierce and pityless energy its square features were thin lipped and implacable as hard and indifferent as the stone from which they were carved and its eyes gazed westwards traditionally the direction of darkness death and the colour black rather lugubriously i continued to climb the steps of the temple of the warriors weighing on my mind was the unforgettable fact that the ritual of human sacrifice had been routinely practiced here in pre-columbian times the empty plate that shaq shackmull held across his stomach had once served as a receptacle for freshly extracted hearts if the victim's heart was to be taken out reported one spanish observer in the 16th century they conducted him with great display and placed him on the sacrificial stone four of them took hold of his arms and legs spreading them out then the executioner came with a flint knife in his hand and with great skill made an incision between the ribs on the left side below the nipple then he plunged in his hand and like a ravenous tiger tore out the living heart which he laid on the plate what kind of culture could have nourished and celebrated such demonic behavior here in chichen itza amid ruins dating back more than 1 200 years a hybrid society had formed out of intermingled maya and toltec elements this society was by no means exceptional in its addiction to cruel and barbaric ceremonies on the contrary all the great indigenous civilizations known to have flourished in mexico had indulged in the ritualized slaughter of human beings slaughterhouses via hermosa tabasco province i stood looking at the altar of infant sacrifice it was the creation of the almex the so-called mother culture of central america and it was more than three thousand years old a block of solid granite about four feet thick its sides bore reliefs of four men wearing curious headdresses each man carried a healthy chubby struggling infant whose desperate fear was clearly visible the back of the altar was undecorated at the front another figure was portrayed holding in his arms as though it were an offering the slumped body of a dead child the olmecs are the earliest recognized high civilization of ancient mexico and human sacrifice was well established with them two and a half thousand years later at the time of the spanish conquest the aztecs were the last but by no means the least of the peoples of this region to continue an extremely old and deeply ingrained tradition they did so with fanatical zeal it is recorded for example that ahuizottal the eighth and most powerful emperor of the aztec royal dynasty celebrated the dedication of the temple of witsilo poshley in tenochtitlan by marshalling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them on this occasion as many as eighty thousand were slain during a single ceremonial rite the aztecs liked to dress up in the flayed skins of sacrificial victims bernardino de sacagan a spanish missionary attended one such ceremony soon after the conquest the celebrants flayed and dismembered the captives they then lubricated their own naked bodies with grease and slipped into the skin trailing blood and grease the gruesomely clad men ran through the city thus terrifying those they followed the second day's right also included a cannibal feast for each warrior's family another mass sacrifice was witnessed by the spanish chronicler diego de duran in this instance the victims were so numerous that when the streams of blood running down the temple steps reached the bottom and cooled they formed fat clots enough to terrify anyone all in all it has been estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the aztec empire as a whole had risen to around 250 000 a year by the beginning of the 16th century what was this manic destruction of human life for according to the aztecs themselves it was done to delay the coming of the end of the world children of the fifth son like the many different peoples and cultures that had preceded them in mexico the aztecs believed that the universe operated in great cycles the priests stated as a matter of simple fact that there had been four such cycles or sons since the creation of the human race at the time of the conquest it was the fifth sun that prevailed and it is within that same fifth sun or epoch that humankind still lives today this account is taken from a rare collection of aztec documents known as the vaticano latin codex first son matlock duration four thousand and eight years those who lived then ate water maize called asitsintli in this age lived the giants the first sun was destroyed by water in the sign matalukli atl ten water it was called apachio hualitzly flood deluge the art of sorcery of the permanent rain men were turned into fish some say that only one couple escaped protected by an old tree living near the water others say that there were seven couples who hid in a cave until the flood was over and the waters had gone down they repopulated the earth and were worshipped as gods in their nations second son coatel duration four thousand and ten years those who lived there made wild fruit known as akkot zintli this sun was destroyed by echoatl wind serpent and men were turned into monkeys one man and one woman standing on a rock were saved from destruction son clay cuyaho duration 4081 years men the descendants of the couple who were saved from the second son ate a fruit called zinko akok this third son was destroyed by fire fourth son zontalic duration 5026 years men died of starvation after a deluge of blood and fire another cultural document of the aztecs that has survived the ravages of the conquest is the sunstone of aksaya cattle the sixth emperor of the royal dynasty this huge monolith was hewn out of solid basalt in ad-1479 it weighs 24.5 tons and consists of a series of concentrically inscribed circles each bearing intricate symbolic statements as in the codex these statements focus attention on the belief that the world has already passed through four epochs or suns the first and most remote of these is represented by ocelot or native the jaguar god during that sun lived the giants that had been created by the gods but were finally attacked and devoured by jaguars the second son is represented by the serpent head of echecoat the god of the air during that period the human race was destroyed by high winds and hurricanes and men were converted into monkeys the symbol of the third sun is a head of rain and celestial fire in this epoch everything was destroyed by a rain of fire from the sky and the forming of lava all houses were burnt men were converted into birds to survive the catastrophe the fourth sun is represented by the head of the water goddess charts uttarku destruction came in the form of torrential rains and floods the mountains disappeared and men were transformed into fish the symbol of the fifth son our current epoch is the face of tonatiuh the sun god himself his tongue fittingly depicted as an obsidian knife juts out hungrily signaling his need for the nourishment of human blood and hearts his features are wrinkled to indicate his advanced age and he appears within the symbol olin which signifies movement why is the fifth son known as the son of movement because the elders say in it there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish and when will this catastrophe strike soon according to the aztec priests they believed that the fifth son was already very old and approaching the end of its cycle hence the wrinkles on the face of tonatiuh ancient mesoamerican traditions dated the birth of this epoch to the remote period corresponding to the 4th millennium bc of the christian calendar the method of calculating its end however had been forgotten by the time of the aztecs in the absence of this essential information human sacrifices were apparently carried out in the hope that the impending catastrophe might be postponed indeed the aztecs came to regard themselves as a chosen people they were convinced that they had been charged with a divine mission to wage war and offer the blood of their captives to feed tonatiuh thereby preserving the life of the fifth son stuart feidel an authority on the pre-history of the americas summed up the whole issue in these words the aztecs believed that to prevent the destruction of the universe which had already occurred four times in the past the gods must be supplied with a steady diet of human hearts and blood this same belief with remarkably few variations was shared by all the great civilizations of central america unlike the aztecs however some of the earlier peoples had calculated exactly when a great movement of the earth could be expected to bring the fifth sun to an end lightbringer no documents only dark and menacing sculptures have come down to us from the olmec era but the mayas justifiably regarded as the greatest ancient civilization to have arisen in the new world left behind a wealth of calendrical records expressed in terms of the modern dating system these enigmatic inscriptions convey a rather curious message the fifth sun it seems has an expiry date somewhere around 21 december the winter solstice a.d 2012 despite the apparent precision what was intended here was to signal an epoch of danger extending roughly from 1960 to 2040 with the year 2012 in our calendar forming the rough center point in the rational intellectual climate of our times it is unfashionable to take doomsday prophecies seriously the general consensus is that they are the products of superstitious minds and can safely be ignored as i traveled around mexico however i was from time to time bothered by a nagging intuition that the voices of the ancient sages might deserve a hearing after all i mean suppose by some crazy off chance they weren't the superstitious savages we'd always believe them to be suppose they knew something we didn't most pertinent of all supposed that their projected date for the end of the fifth son turned out to be correct suppose in other words that some truly awful geological catastrophe is already unfolding deep in the bowels of the earth as the wise men of the maya predicted in peru and bolivia i have become aware of the obsessive concern with the calculation of time shown by the incas and their predecessors now in mexico i discovered that the maya who believed that they had worked out the date of the end of the world had been possessed by the same compulsion indeed for these people just about everything boiled down to numbers the passage of the years and the manifestations of events the belief was that if the numbers which lay beneath the manifestations could be properly understood it would be possible to predict successfully the timing of the events themselves i felt disinclined to ignore the obvious implications of the recurrent destructions of humanity depicted so vividly in central american traditions coming complete with giants and floods these traditions were eerily similar to those of the far off andean region meanwhile however i was keen to pursue another related line of inquiry this concerned the bearded white-skinned deity named quetzalcoatl who was believed to have sailed to mexico from across the seas in remote antiquity quetzalcoatl was credited with the invention of the advanced mathematical and calendrical formulae that the maya were later to use to calculate the date of doomsday he also bore a striking resemblance to viracocha the pale god of the andes who came to tiwanako in the time of darkness bearing the gifts of light and civilization chapter 14 people of the serpent after spending so long immersed in the traditions of viracocha the bearded god of the distant andes i was intrigued to discover that quetzalcoatl the principal deity of the ancient mexican pantheon was described in terms that were extremely familiar for example one pre-columbian myth collected in mexico by the 16th century spanish chronicler twanda torkamada asserted that quetzalcoatl was a fair and ready complexioned man with a long beard another spoke of him as era hombre blanco a large man broad brown with huge eyes long hair and a great rounded beard la baba grande redonda another still described him as a mysterious person a white man with strong formation of body broad forehead large eyes and a flowing beard he was dressed in a long white robe reaching to his feet he condemned sacrifices except of fruits and flowers and was known as the god of peace when addressed on the subject of war he is reported to have stopped up his ears with his fingers according to a particularly striking central american tradition this wise instructor came from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles he was a tall bearded white man who taught people to use fire for cooking he also built houses and showed couples that they could live together as husband and wife and since people often quarreled in those days he taught them to live in peace viracocha's mexican twin the listener will recall that viracocha in his journeys through the andes went by several different aliases quetzalcoatl did this too in some parts of central america notably among the kiche maya he was called elsewhere a chichen itza for example he was known as kukul khan when both these words were translated into english they turned out to mean exactly the same thing plumed or feathered serpent this was also the meaning of quetzalcoatl there were other deities among the maya in particular whose identities seemed to merge closely with those of quetzalcoatl one was votan a great civilizer who was also described as pale skin bearded and wearing a long robe scholars could offer no translation for his name but his principle symbol like that of quetzalcoatl was a serpent another closely related figure was itamana the mayan god of healing who was a robed and bearded individual his symbol too was the rattlesnake what emerged from all this as the leading authorities agreed was that the mexican legends collected and passed on by spanish chroniclers at the time of the conquest were often the confused and conflated products of extremely long oral traditions behind them all however it seems that there must lie some solid historical reality in the judgment of sylvanus griswold morley the doyenne of maya studies the great god kukul khan or feathered serpent was the mayan counterpart of the aztec quetzalcoatl the mexican god of light learning and culture in the maya pantheon he was regarded as having been the great organizer the founder of cities the former of laws and the teacher of the calendar indeed his attributes and life history are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character some great law giver and organizer the memory of whose benefactions lingered long after his death and whose personality was eventually deified all the legends stated unambiguously that quetzalcoatl cuckoo khan goku mats votan itsamana had arrived in central america from somewhere very far away across the eastern sea and that amid great sadness he had eventually sailed off again in the direction whence he had come the legends added that he had promised solemnly that he would return one day a clear echo of viracocha it would be almost perverse to ascribe to coincidence in addition it will be recalled that vera coach's departure across the waves of the pacific ocean had been portrayed in the andean traditions as a miraculous event quetzalcoatl's departure from mexico also had a strange feel about it for he was said to have sailed away on a raft of serpents all in all i felt molly was right in looking for a factual historical background behind the mayan and mexican myths what the tradition seemed to indicate was that the bearded pale-skinned foreigner called quetzalcoatl or kukulkan or whatever had been not just one person but probably several people who had come from the same place and had belonged to the same distinctively non-indian ethnic type bearded white skinned etc this wasn't only suggested by the existence of a family of obviously related but slightly different gods sharing the symbol of the snake quetzalcoatl kukulkan itsamana was quite explicitly portrayed in many of the mexican and mayan accounts as having been accompanied by attendance or assistance certain myths set out in the ancient mayan religious texts known as the books of chilembalam for instance reported that the first inhabitants of yucatan were the people of the serpent they came from the east in boats across the water with their leader itsamana serpent of the east a healer who could cure by laying on hands and who revived the dead kukulkan stated another tradition came with 19 companions two of whom were gods of fish two others gods of agriculture and a god of thunder they stayed ten years in yucatan kukulkan made wise laws and then set sail and disappeared in the direction of the rising sun according to the spanish chronicler las casas the natives affirm that in ancient times there came to mexico 20 men the chief of whom was called kukulkan they wore flowing robes and sandals on their feet they had long beards and their heads were bare kukulkan instructed the people in the arts of peace and caused various important edifices to be built meanwhile juan de tocquevada recorded this very specific pre-conquest tradition concerning the imposing strangers who had entered mexico with quetzalcoatl they were men of good carriage well-dressed in long robes of black linen open in front and without capes cut low at the neck with short sleeves that did not come to the elbow these followers of quetzalcoatl were men of great knowledge and cunning artists in all kinds of fine work like some long-lost twin of viracocha the white and bearded andean deity quetzalcoatl was depicted as having brought to mexico all the skills and sciences necessary to create a civilized life thus ushering in a golden age he was believed for example to have introduced the knowledge of writing to central america to have invented the calendar and to have been a master builder who taught the people the secrets of masonry and architecture he was the father of mathematics mythology and astronomy and was said to have measured the earth he also founded productive agriculture and was reported to have discovered and introduced corn literally the staff of life in these ancient lands a great doctor and master of medicines he was the patron of healers and diviners and disclosed to the people the mysteries of the properties of plants in addition he was revered as a law giver as a protector of craftsman and as a patron of all the arts as might be expected of such a refined and cultured individual he forbade the grisly practice of human sacrifice during the period of his ascendancy in mexico after his departure the blood-spattered rituals were reintroduced with a vengeance nevertheless even the aztecs the most vehement sacrifices ever to have existed in the long history of central america remembered the time of quetzalcoatl with a kind of nostalgia he was a teacher recalled one legend who taught that no living thing was to be harmed and that sacrifices were to be made not of human beings but of birds and butterflies cosmic struggle why did quetzalcoatl go away what went wrong mexican legends provided answers to these questions they said that the enlightened and benevolent rule of the plumed serpent had been brought to an end by tescatilpoken a malevolent god whose name meant smoking mirror and whose cult demanded human sacrifice it seemed that a near cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness had taken place in ancient mexico and that the forces of darkness had triumphed the supposed stage for these events now known as tula was not believed to be particularly old not much more than a thousand years anyway but the legends surrounding it linked it to an infinitely more distant epoch in those times outside history it had been known as tolan all the traditions agreed that it had been at tolan that test kathy poker had vanished quetzalcoatl and forced him to quit mexico fire serpents tula hidalgo province i was sitting on the flat square summit of the unimaginatively named pyramid bee the late afternoon sun was beating down out of a clear blue sky and i was facing south looking around at the base of the pyramid to the north and east were murals depicting jaguars and eagles feasting on human hearts immediately behind me were arranged four pillars and four fearsome granite idols each nine feet tall ahead and to my left lay the partially unexcavated pyramid sea a cactus covered mound about 40 feet high and further away were more mounds not yet investigated by archaeologists to my right was a ball court in that long eye-shaped arena terrible gladiatorial games had been staged in ancient times teams or sometimes just two individuals pitted against each other would compete for possession of a rubber ball the losers were decapitated the idols on the platform behind me had a solemn and intimidating aura i stood up to look at them more closely their sculpture had given them hard implacable faces hooked noses and hollow eyes and they seemed without sympathy or emotion what interested me most however was not so much their ferocious appearance as the objects that they clutched in their hands archaeologists admitted that they didn't really know what these objects were but had tentatively identified them anyway this identification had stuck and it was now received wisdom that spear throwers called atlatls were held in the right hands of the idols and spears or arrows and incense bags in the left hand it didn't seem to matter that the objects did not in any way resemble atlatls spears arrows or incense bags as i studied the objects themselves i had the distinct sense that they were meant to represent devices which had originally been made out of metal the right hand device which seemed to emerge from a sheath or hand guard was lozen-shaped with a curved lower edge the left-hand device could have been an instrument or weapon of some kind i remembered legends which related that the gods of ancient mexico had armed themselves with zihu corato fire serpents these apparently emitted burning rays capable of piercing and dismembering human bodies was it fire serpents that the tula idols were holding what for that matter were fire serpents whatever they were both devices looked like pieces of technology and both in certain ways resembled the equally mysterious objects in the hands of the idols in the kalasasia at tiwanako serpent sanctuary santa and i had come to tula tolan because it had been closely associated both with quetzalcoatl and with his arch enemy tescatilpoca the smoking mirror ever young omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient test kettlepoker was associated in the legends with knight darkness and the sacred jaguar he was invisible and implacable appearing to men sometimes as a flying shadow sometimes as a dreadful monster often depicted as a glaring skull he was said to have been the owner of a mysterious object the smoking mirror after which he was named which he made use of to observe from afar the activities of men and gods scholars quite reasonably suppose that it must have been a primitive obsidian scrying stone obsidian had an especial sanctity for the mexicans as it provided the sacrificial knives employed by the priests the spanish chronicle bernal diaz states that they called this stone tescat promit mirrors were also manufactured as divinatory media to be used by wizards representing the forces of darkness and rapacious evil tesca poker was said in the legends to have been locked in a conflict with quetzalcoatl that had continued over an immense span of years at certain times one seemed to be gaining the upper hand at certain times the other finally the cosmic struggle came to an end when good was vanquished by evil and quetzalcoatl driven out from tolan thereafter under the influence of tescatilpoca's nightmarish cult human sacrifice was reintroduced throughout central america as we have seen quetzalcoatl was believed to have fled to the coast and to have been carried away on a raft of serpents one legend says he burned his houses built of silver and shells buried his treasure and set sail on the eastern sea preceded by his attendants who had been changed into bright birds this poignant moment of departure was supposedly staged at a place called koatsacoalkos meaning serpent sanctuary there before taking his leave quetzalcoatl promised his followers he would return one day to overthrow the cult of test cattle poker and to inaugurate an era when the gods would again accept sacrifices of flowers and cease their clamor for human blood chapter 15 mexican babel we drove southeast from tula bypassing mexico city on an anarchic series of fast freeways that dragged us through the creeping edge of the capitals eye-watering lung searing pollution our route then took us up over pine covered mountains past the snowy peak of papaka capital and thence along tree-lined lanes amid fields and farmsteads in the late afternoon we arrived at cholula a sleepy town with eleven thousand inhabitants and a spacious main square after turning east through the narrow streets we crossed a railway line and pulled to a halt in the shadow of clachik walter petal the man-made mountain we had come here to see once sacred to the peaceful cult of quetzalcoatl but now surmounted by an ornate catholic church this immense edifice was ranked among the most extensive and ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken anywhere in the ancient world indeed with a base area of 45 acres at a height of 210 feet it was three times more massive than the great pyramid of egypt though its contours were now blurred by age and its sides overgrown with grass it was still possible to recognize that it had once been an imposing ziggurat which had risen up towards the heavens in four clean angled steps measuring almost half a kilometer along each side at its base it had also succeeded in preserving a dignified but violated beauty the past though often dry and dusty is rarely dumb sometimes it can speak with passion it seemed to me that it did so here bearing witness to the physical and psychological degradation visited upon the native peoples of mexico when the spanish conquistador hernan cortes almost casually beheaded a culture as a passerby might sweep off the head of a sunflower in cholula a great center of pilgrimage with a population of around a hundred thousand at the time of the conquest this decapitation of ancient traditions and ways of life required that something particularly humiliating be done to the man-made mountain of quetzalcoatl the solution was to smash and desecrate the temple which had once stood on the summit of the ziggurat and replace it with a church cortes and his men were few the cholulans were many when they marched into town however the spaniards had one major advantage bearded and pale skinned dressed in shining armor they looked like the fulfillment of a prophecy had it not always been promised that quetzalcoatl the plumed serpent would return from across the eastern sea with his band of followers because of this expectation the naive and trusting cholulans permitted the conquistadors to climb the steps of the ziggurat and enter the great courtyard of the temple their troops of gayley bedecked dancing girls greeted them singing and playing on instruments while stewards moved back and forth with heaped platters of bread and delicate cooked meats one of the spanish chroniclers an eyewitness to the events that follow reported that the adoring townsfolk of all ranks unarmed with eager and happy faces crowded in to hear what the white men would say realizing from this incredible reception that their intentions were not suspected the spaniards closed and guarded all the entrances drew their weapons of steel and murdered their hosts six thousand died in this horrible massacre which matched in its savagery the most blood-stained rituals of the aztecs those of cholula were caught unawares with neither arrows nor shields did they meet the spaniards just so they were slain without warning they were killed by pure treachery it was ironic i thought that the conquistadors in both peru and mexico should have benefited in the same way from local legends that prophesied the return of a pale bearded god if that god was indeed a deified human has seemed likely he must have been a person of high civilization an exemplary character or more probably two different people from the same background one working in mexico and providing the model for quetzalcoatl the other in peru being the model for viracocha the superficial resemblance that the spanish bore to those earlier fair-skinned foreigners opened many doors that would otherwise certainly have been closed unlike their wise and benevolent predecessors however pizarro in the andes and cortez in central america were ravening wolves they ate up the lands and the peoples and the cultures they had seized upon they destroyed almost everything tears for the past their eyes scaled with ignorance bigotry and greed the spanish erased a precious heritage of mankind when they arrived in mexico in so doing they deprived the future of any detailed knowledge concerning the brilliant and remarkable civilizations which once flourished in central america what for example was the true history of the glowing idol that rested in a sacred sanctuary in the mixtec capital at yatlan we know of this curious object through the writings of a 16th century eyewitness father bugawa the material was of marvelous value for it was an emerald of the size of a thick pepper pod upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest skill and with the same skill a small serpent coiled ready to strike the stone was so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame it was a very old jewel and there is no tradition concerning the origin of its veneration and worship what might we learn if we could examine this very old jewel today and how old was it really we shall never find out because father benito the first missionary of achiotlan seized the stone from the indians he had it ground up although a spaniard offered three thousand lookouts for it stirred the powder in water poured it upon the earth and trod upon it equally typical of the profligate squandering of the intellectual riches concealed in the mexican past was the shared fate of two gifts given to cortes by the aztec emperor montezuma these were circular calendars as big as cartwheels one of solid silver and the other of solid gold both were elaborately engraved with beautiful hieroglyphs which may have contained material of great interest cortes had them melted down for ingots on the spot more systematically all over central america vast repositories of knowledge accumulated since ancient times were painstakingly gathered keeped up and burned by zealous friars in july 1562 for example in the main square of mani just south of modern merida in yucatan province father diego delander burned thousands of maya codices story paintings and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled up deerskins he also destroyed countless idols and altars all of which he described as works of the devil designed by the evil one to delude the indians and to prevent them from accepting christianity elsewhere he elaborated on the same theme we found great numbers of books written in the characters of the indians but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all which the natives took most grievously and which gave them great pain not only the natives should have felt this pain but anyone and everyone then and now who would like to know the truth about the past many other men of god some even more ruthlessly efficient than diego delanda participated in spain's satanic mission to wipe clear the memory banks of central america notable among these was juan de zumaraga bishop of mexico who boasted of having destroyed 20 000 idols and 500 indian temples in november 1530 he burned a christianized aztec aristocrat at the stake for having allegedly reverted to worship of the rain guard and later in the marketplace at texcoco built a vast bonfire of astronomical documents paintings manuscripts and hieroglyphic texts which the conquistadors had forcibly extracted from the aztecs during the previous 11 years as this irreplaceable storehouse of knowledge and history went up in flames a chance to shake off at least some of the collective amnesia that clouds our understanding was lost to mankind forever what remains to us of the written records of the ancient peoples of central america the answer thanks to the spanish is less than 20 original codices and scrolls we know from hearsay that many of the documents which the friars reduced to ashes contained records of ages past what did these lost records say what secrets did they hold gigantic men of deformed stature even while the orgy of book burning was still going on some spaniards began to realize that a truly great civilization had once existed in mexico prior to the aztecs oddly enough one of the first to act on this realization was diego delander he appears to have undergone a damascus road experience after staging his otto dafe of mani in later years determined to save what he could of the ancient wisdom he had once played such a large part in destroying he became an assiduous gatherer of the traditions and oral histories of the native peoples of the yucatan bernardino de sahagun a franciscan friar was a chronicler to whom we owe much a great linguist he is reported to have sought out the most learned and often the oldest natives and asked each to paint in his aztec picture writing as much as he could clearly remember of aztec history religion and legend in this way sahagan was able to accumulate detailed information on the anthropology mythology and social history of ancient mexico which he later sat down in a learned 12 volume work this was suppressed by the spanish authorities fortunately one copy has survived though it is incomplete diego de geran a conscientious and courageous collector of indigenous traditions was yet another franciscan who fought to recover the lost knowledge of the past he visited cholula in a.d 1585 a time of rapid and catastrophic change there he interviewed a venerated elder of the town said to have been more than 100 years old who told him this story about the making of the great ziggurat in the beginning before the light of the sun had been created this place cholula was in obscurity and darkness all was a plane without hill or elevation encircled in every part by water without tree or created thing immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature who possessed the land enamored of the light and beauty of the sun they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky having collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with which they speedily commenced to build the tower and having reared it to the greatest possible altitude so that it reached the sky the lord of the heavens enraged said to the inhabitants of the sky have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither being enamored of the light of the sun and his beauty come and confound them because it is not right that they of the earth living in the flesh should mingle with us immediately the inhabitants of the sky sullied forth like flashes of lightning they destroyed the edifice and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth it was this story almost but not quite the biblical account of the tower of babel which was itself a reworking of a far older mesopotamian tradition that had brought me to cholula the central american and middle eastern tales were obviously closely related indeed the similarities were unmissable but there were also differences far too significant to be ignored of course the similarities could be due to unrecorded pre-columbian contacts between the cultures of the middle east and the new world but there was one way to explain the similarities and the differences in a single theory suppose that the two versions of the legend had evolved separately for several thousands of years but prior to that both had descended from the same remotely ancient ancestor remnants here's what the book of genesis says about the tower that reached to heaven throughout the earth men spoke the same language with the same vocabulary now as they moved eastwards they found a plane in the land of shinar where they settled there they said to one another come let us make bricks and bake them in the fire for stone they used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen come they said let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven let us make a name for ourselves so that we may not be scattered about the entire earth now yahweh the hebrew god came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built so they are all a single people with a single language said yahweh this is but the start of their undertakings there will be nothing too hard for them to do come let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another yahweh scattered them vents over the whole face of the earth and they stopped building the tower it was named babel therefore because there yahweh confused the language of the whole earth the verse which most interested me suggested very clearly that the ancient builders of the tower of babel had set out to create a lasting monument to themselves so that their name would not be forgotten even if their civilization and language were was it possible that the same considerations could have applied at cholula only a handful of monuments in mexico were thought by archaeologists to be more than 2000 years old cholula was definitely one of them indeed no one could say for sure in what distant age its ramparts had first begun to be heaped up but thousands of years before development and extension of the site began in earnest around 300 bc it looked as though some other older structure might have been positioned at the spot over which the great ziggurat of quetzalcoatl now rose there was a precedent for this which further strengthened the intriguing possibility that the remnants of a truly ancient civilization might still be lying around in central america waiting to be recognized for example just south of the university campus of mexico city off the main road connecting the capital to cuernavaca stands a circular step pyramid of great complexity with four galleries and a central staircase it was partially excavated in the 1920s from beneath a mantle of lava geologists were called to the site to help date the lava and carried out a detailed examination to everyone's surprise they concluded that the volcanic eruption which had completely buried three sides of this pyramid and then gone on to cover about sixty square miles of the surrounding territory must have taken place at least seven thousand years ago this geological evidence seems to have been ignored by historians and archaeologists who do not believe that any civilization capable of building a pyramid could have existed in mexico at such an early date it is worth noting however that byron cummings the american archaeologist who originally excavated the site for the national geographical society was convinced by clearly demarcated stratification layers above and below the pyramid laid down both before and after the volcanic eruption that it was the oldest temple yet uncovered on the american continent he went further than the geologists and stated categorically that this temple fell into ruins some eight thousand five hundred years ago pyramids upon pyramids going inside the cholula pyramid really did feel like entering a man-made mountain the tunnels and there were more than six miles of them were not old they had been left behind by the teams of archaeologists who had burrowed here diligently from 1931 until funds ran out in 1966 somehow these narrow low ceiling corridors had borrowed an atmosphere of antiquity from the vast structure all around them moist and cool they offered an inviting and secretive darkness following a ribbon of torchlight we walked deeper inside the pyramid the archaeological excavations had revealed that it was not the product of one dynasty as was thought to have been the case with the pyramids of giza in egypt but that it had been built up over a very long period of time two thousand years or so at a conservative estimate in other words it was a collective project created by an intergenerational labor force drawn from the many different cultures olmec and aztec that had passed through cholula since the dawn of civilization in mexico though it was not known who had been the first builders here as far as it had been possible to establish the earliest major edifice on the site consisted of a tall conical pyramid shaped like an upturned bucket flattened at the summit where a template stood much later a second similar structure was imposed on top of this primordial mound in other words a second inverted bucket of clay and compacted stone was placed directly over the first raising the temple platform to more than 200 feet above the surrounding plane thereafter during the next 1500 years or so an estimated four or five other cultures contributed to the final appearance of the monument this they did by extending its base in several stages but never again by increasing its maximum height in this way almost as though a master plan were being implemented the man-made mountain of cholula gradually attained its characteristic four-tier ziggurat shape today its sides at the base are each almost 1500 feet long about twice the length of the sides of the great pyramid at giza and its total volume has been estimated at a staggering 3 million cubic meters this makes it as one authority succinctly states the largest building ever erected on earth why why go to all that trouble and what sort of name for themselves were the peoples of central america trying to make walking through the network of corridors and passageways inhaling the cool loamy air i was uncomfortably conscious of the great weight and mass of the pyramid pressing down upon me it was the largest building in the world and it had been placed here in honor of a central american deity of whom almost nothing was known we had the conquistadors and the catholic church to thank for leaving us so deeply in the dark about the true story of quetzalcoatl and his followers the smashing and desecration of his ancient temple at cholula the destruction of idols altars and calendars and the great bonfires made out of codices paintings and hieroglyphic scrolls had succeeded almost completely in silencing the voices of the past but the legends did offer us one graphic and powerful piece of imagery a memory of the gigantic man of deformed stature who was said to have been the original builders chapter 16 serpent sanctuary from cholula we drove east past the prosperous cities of puebla orizaba and cordoba towards veracruz and the gulf of mexico we crossed the mist and shrouded peaks of the sierra madre oriental where the air was thin and cold and then descended towards sea level onto tropical plains overgrown with lush plantations of palms and bananas we were heading into the heartlands of mexico's oldest and most mysterious civilization that of the so-called almex whose name meant rubber people dating back to the second millennium bc the almex had ceased to exist fifteen hundred years before the rise of the aztec empire the aztecs however had preserved haunting traditions concerning them and were even responsible for naming them after the rubber producing area of mexico's gulf coast where they were believed to have lived this area lies between modern veracruz in the west and ciudad del carmen in the east in it the aztecs found a number of ancient ritual objects produced by the olmecs and for reasons unknown they collected these objects and placed them in positions of importance in their own temples looking at my map i could see the blue line of the koatikoacos river running into the gulf of mexico more or less at the midpoint of the legendary olmec homeland the oil industry proliferates here now where rubber trees once flourished transforming a tropical paradise into something resembling the lowest circle of dante's inferno since the oil boom of nineteen seventy three the town of coastal archos once easy going but not very prosperous had mushroomed into a transport and refining center with air-conditioned hotels and a population of half a million it lay close to the black heart of an industrial wasteland in which virtually everything of archaeological interest that had escaped the depredations of the spanish at the time of the conquest had been destroyed by the voracious expansion of the oil business it was therefore no longer possible on the basis of hard evidence to confirm or deny the intriguing suggestion that the legends seem to make that something of great importance must once have occurred here i remembered that kawasako archos meant serpent sanctuary it was here in remote antiquity that quetzalcoatl and his companions were said to have landed when they first reached mexico arriving from across the sea in vessels with sides that shone like the scales of serpent's skins and it was from here too that quetzalcoatl was believed to have sailed on his raft of serpents when he left central america serpent sanctuary moreover was beginning to look like the name for the olmec homeland which had included not only koatzakowakos but several other sites in areas less blighted by development first at tres zapotes west of koatsaco archos and then at san lorenzo and laventa south and east of it numerous pieces of characteristically olmec sculpture had been unearthed all were monoliths carved out of basalt and similarly durable materials some took the form of gigantic heads weighing up to 30 tons others were massive steely engraved with encounter scenes apparently involving two different races of mankind neither of them american indian whoever had produced these outstanding works of art had obviously belonged to a refined well-organized prosperous and technologically advanced civilization the problem was that absolutely nothing remained except the works of art from which anything could be deduced about the character and origins of that civilization all that seemed clear was that the olmecs the archaeologists were happy to accept the aztec designation had materialized in central america around 1500 bc with their sophisticated culture fully of all santiago tushla passed the night at the fishing port of alvarado and continued our journey east the next day the road we were following wound in and out of fertile hills and valleys giving us occasional views of the gulf of mexico before turning inland we passed green meadows filled with flame trees and little villages nestled in grassy hollows here and there we saw private gardens where hulking pigs grubbed amongst piles of domestic refuse then we crested the brava hill and looked out across a giant vista of fields and forests bound only by the morning haze and the faint outlines of distant mountains some miles further on we dropped into a hollow at its bottom lay the old colonial town of santiago tushla the place was a riot of color garish shop fronts red tile roofs yellow straw hats coconut palms banana trees kids in bright clothes several of the shops and cafes were playing music from loudspeakers in the zocalo the main square the air was thick with humidity and the fluttering wings and songs of bright-eyed tropical birds a leafy little park occupied the center of this square and in the centre of the park like some magic talisman stood an enormous grey boulder almost 10 feet tall carved in the shape of a helmeted african head full lipped and strong nosed its eyes serenely closed and its lower jaw resting squarely on the ground this head had a somber and patient gravity here then was the first mystery of the olmecs a monumental piece of sculpture more than two thousand years old which portrayed a subject with unmistakable negroid features there were of course no african blacks in the new world two thousand years ago nor did any arrive until the slave trade began well after the conquest there is however firm paleoanthropological evidence that one of the many different migrations into the americas during the last ice age did consist of peoples of negroid stock this migration occurred around 15000 bc known as the kobata head after the estate on which it was found the huge monolith in the zocalo was the largest of 16 similar olmec sculptures so far excavated in mexico it was thought to have been carved not long before the time of christ and weighed more than 30 tons tres zapotes from santiago tushla we drove 25 kilometers southwest through wild and lush countryside to tres sapotes a substantial late ormic center believed to have flourished between 500 bc and ad100 now reduced to a series of mounds scattered across maize fields the site had been extensively excavated in 1939 to 40 by the american archaeologist matthew stirling historical dogmatists of that period i remembered had held tenaciously to the view that the civilization of the myers was the oldest in central america one could be precise about this they argued because the mayan dot and bar calendrical system which had recently been decoded made possible accurate dating of huge numbers of ceremonial inscriptions the earliest date ever found on a mayan site corresponded to a.d 228 of the christian calendar it therefore came as quite a jolt to the academic status quo when sterling unearthed a stellar at trey zapote's which bore an earlier date written in the familiar bar and dot calendrical code used by the maya it corresponded to 3 september 32 bc what was shocking about this was that tres sapotes was not a maya site not in any way at all it was entirely exclusively unambiguously olmec this suggested that the almex not the maya must have been the inventors of the calendar and that the almex not the maya ought to be recognized as the mother culture of central america despite determined opposition from gangs of furious mayanists the truth which sterling spade had unearthed that tres zapote's gradually came out the olmecs were much much older than the maya they'd been a smart civilized technologically advanced people and they did indeed appear to have invented the bar and dot system of calendrical notation with the enigmatic starting date of 13 august 3114 bc which predicted the end of the world in the epoch of a.d 2012. lying close to the calendar stella at tres zapotes sterling also unearthed a giant head i sat in front of that head now dated to around 100 bc it was approximately six feet high 18 feet in circumference and weighed over 10 tons like its counterpart in santiago tushla it was unmistakably the head of an african man wearing a close-fitting helmet with long chin straps the lobes of the ears were pierced by plugs the pronounced negroid features were furrowed by deep frown lines on either side of the nose and the entire face was concentrated forwards above thick down curving lips the eyes were open and watchful almond shaped and cold beneath the curious helmet the heavy brows appeared beetly and angry stirling was amazed by this discovery and reported the head was a head only carved from a single massive block of basalt and it rested on a prepared foundation of unworked slabs of stone cleared of the surrounding earth it presented an awe-inspiring spectacle despite its great size the workmanship is delicate and sure the proportions perfect unique in its character among aboriginal american sculptures it is remarkable for its realistic treatment the features are bold and amazingly negroid in character soon afterwards the american archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery at tres zapotes children's toys in the form of little wheeled dogs these cute artifacts conflicted head-on with prevailing archaeological opinion which held that the wheel had remained undiscovered in central america until the time of the conquest the dogmobiles proved at the very least that the principle of the wheel had been known to the olmecs central america's earliest civilization and if a people as resourceful as the olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel it seemed highly unlikely that they would have used it just for children's toys chapter 17 the olmec enigma after tres sapotes our next stop was san lorenzo an olmec site lying south west of koatsacoaacos in the heart of the serpent sanctuary the legends of quetzalcoatl made reference to it was at san lorenzo that the earliest carbon dates for an almex site around 1500 bc had been recorded by archaeologists however all mech culture appeared to have been fully evolved by that epoch and there was no evidence that the evolution had taken place in the vicinity of san lorenzo in this they lay a mystery the olmecs after all had built a significant civilization which had carried out prodigious engineering works and had developed the capacity to carve and manipulate vast blocks of stone several of the huge monolithic heads weighing 20 tons or more had been moved as far as 60 miles over land after being quarried in the tushler mountains so where if not at ancient san lorenzo had their technological expertise and sophisticated organization been experimented with evolved and refined strangely despite the best efforts of archaeologists not a single solitary sign of anything that could be described as the developmental phase of all mech society had been unearthed anywhere in mexico or for that matter anywhere in the new world these people whose characteristic form of artistic expression was the carving of huge negroid heads appeared to have come from nowhere san lorenzo we reached san lorenzo late in the afternoon here at the dawn of history in central america the olmecs had heaped up an artificial mound more than 100 feet high as part of an immense structure some four thousand feet in length and two thousand feet in width we climbed the dominant mound now heavily overgrown with thick tropical vegetation and from the summit we could see from miles across the surrounding countryside a great many lesser mounds were also visible and around about were several of the deep trenches the archaeologist michael coe had dug when he had excavated the site in 1966 koh's team made a number of fines here which included more than 20 artificial reservoirs linked by a highly sophisticated network of basalt line troughs part of this system was built into a ridge when it was rediscovered water still gushed forth from it during heavy rains as it had done for more than three thousand years the main line of the drainage ran from east to west into it linked by joints made to an advanced design three subsidiary lines were channeled after surveying the site thoroughly the archaeologists admitted that they could not understand the purpose of this elaborate system of sluices and waterworks nor were they able to come up with an explanation for another enigma this was the deliberate burial along specific alignments of five of the massive pieces of sculpture showing negroid features now widely identified as olmec heads these peculiar and apparently ritualistic graves also yielded more than 60 precious objects and artifacts including beautiful instruments made of jade and exquisitely carved statuettes some of the statuettes had been systematically mutilated before burial the way the san lorenzo sculptures had been interred made it extremely difficult to fix their true age even though fragments of charcoal were found in the same strata as some of the buried objects unlike the sculptures these charcoal pieces could be carbonated they were and produced readings in the range of 1200 bc this did not mean however that the sculptures had been carved in 1200 bc they could have been but they could have originated in a period hundreds or even thousands of years earlier than that it was by no means impossible that these great works of art with their intrinsic beauty and an indefinable numinous power could have been preserved and venerated by many different cultures before being buried at san lorenzo the charcoal associated with them proved only that the sculptures were at least as old as 1200 bc it did not set any upper limit on their antiquity la venta we left san lorenzo as the sun was going down heading for the city of via hermosa more than a hundred and fifty kilometers to the east in the province of tabasco to get there we rejoined the main road running from acai khan to via hermosa and bypassing the port of kawasaki in a zone of oil refineries towering pylons and ultra modern suspension bridges the change of pace between the sleepy rural backwater where san lorenzo was located and the pock marked industrial landscape around koatsacoarkos was almost shocking moreover the only reason that the time-worn outlines of the olmec site could still be seen at san lorenzo was that oil had not yet been found there it had however been found at laventa to the eternal loss of archaeology we were now passing la vinta due north off a slip road from the freeway this sodium-lit petroleum city glowed in the dark like a vision of nuclear disaster since the 1940s it had been extensively developed by the oil industry an airstrip now bisected the site where a most unusual pyramid had once stood and flaring smokestacks darkened the sky which all makes stargazers must once have searched for the rising of the planets lamentably the bulldozers of the developers had flattened virtually everything of interest before proper excavations could be conducted with the result that many of the ancient structures had not been explored at all we will never know what they could have said about the people who built and used them matthew sterling who excavated tressapertes carried out the bulk of the archaeological work done at laventa before progress and oil money erased it carbon dating suggested that the olmecs had established themselves here between 1500 and 1100 bc and had continued to occupy the site which consisted of an island lying in the marshes to the east of the tanala river until about 400 bc then construction was suddenly abandoned all existing buildings were ceremonially defaced or demolished and several huge stone heads and other smaller pieces of sculpture were ritually buried in peculiar graves just as had happened at san lorenzo the laventa graves were elaborate and carefully prepared lined with thousands of tiny blue tiles and filled up with layers of multicolored clay at one spot some fifteen thousand cubic feet of earth had been dug out of the ground to make a deep pit its floor had been carefully covered with serpentine blocks and all the earth put back three mosaic pavements were also found intentionally buried beneath several alternating layers of clay and adobe lavente's principal pyramid stood at the southern end of the site roughly circular at ground level it took the form of a fluted cone around its sides consisting of ten vertical ridges with gullies between the pyramid was 100 feet tall almost 200 feet in diameter and had an overall mass in the region of 300 000 cubic feet an impressive monument by any standards the remainder of the site stretched for almost half a kilometer along an axis that pointed precisely eight degrees west of north centred on this axis with every structure in flawless alignment with several smaller pyramids and plazas platforms and mounds covering a total area of more than three square miles there was something detached and odd about lavente a sense that its original function had not been properly understood archaeologists referred to it as a ceremonial center and very probably that is what it was if one were honest however one would have to admit that it could also have been several other things the truth is that nothing is known about the social organization ceremonies and belief systems of the olmecs we do not know what language they spoke or what traditions they pass to their children we don't even know what ethnic group they belong to the exceptionally humid conditions of the gulf of mexico mean that not a single olmec skeleton has survived in reality despite the names we have given them and the views we've formed about them these people are completely obscure to us it is even possible that the enigmatic sculptures they left behind which we presume depicted to them were not their work at all but the work of a far earlier and forgotten people not for the first time i found myself wondering whether some of the great heads and other remarkable artifacts attributed to the olmecs might not have been handed down like heirlooms perhaps over many millennia to the cultures which eventually began to build the mounds and pyramids at san lorenzo and laventa if so then who are we speaking of when we use the label olmec the mound builders or the powerful and imposing men with negroid features who provided the models for the monolithic heads fortunately some fifty pieces of almec monumental sculpture including three of the giant heads were rescued from laventa by carlos pelicer camara a local poet and historian who intervened forcefully when he discovered that oil drilling by the pemex company jeopardized the ruins by determined lobbying of the politicians of tabasco within which laventa lies he arranged to have the significant fines moved to a park on the outskirts of the regional capital via hermosa taken together these finds constitute a precious and irreplaceable cultural record or rather a whole library of cultural records left behind by a vanished civilization but nobody knows how to read the language of those records deus ex machina via hermosa tabasco province i was looking at an elaborate relief that had been dubbed man in serpent by the archaeologists who found it at laventa according to expert opinion it showed an olmec wearing a headdress and holding an incense bag enveloped by a feathered serpent the relief was carved into a slab of solid granite measuring about four feet wide by five feet high and showed a man sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him as though he were reaching for pedals with his feet he held a small bucket shaped object in his right hand with his left he appeared to be raising or lowering a lever the headdress he wore was an odd and complicated garment to my eye it seemed more functional than ceremonial although i could not imagine what its function might have been on it or perhaps on a console above it were two x-shaped crosses i turned my attention to the other principle element of the sculpture the feathered serpent on one level it did indeed depict exactly that a plumed or feathered serpent the age-old symbol of quetzalcoatl whom the almex therefore must have worshipped or at the very least recognized scholars do not dispute this interpretation it is generally accepted that quetzalcoatl's cult was immensely ancient originating in prehistoric times in central america and thereafter receiving the devotion of many cultures during the historic period the feathered serpent in this particular sculpture however had certain characteristics that set it apart it seemed to be more than just a religious symbol indeed there was something rigid and structured about it that made it look almost like a piece of machinery whispers of ancient secrets later that day i took shelter in the giant shadow cast by one of the olmec heads carlot palisia kamara had rescued from laventa it was the head of an old man with a broad flat nose and thick lips the lips were slightly parted exposing strong square teeth the expression of the face suggested an ancient patient wisdom and the eyes seem to gaze unafraid into eternity like those of the great sphinx at giza in lower egypt it would probably be impossible i thought for a sculptor to invent all the different combined characteristics of an authentic racial type the portrayal of an authentic combination of racial characteristics therefore implied strongly that a human model had been used i walked around the great head a couple of times it was 22 feet in circumference weighed 19.8 tons stood almost eight feet high had been carved out of solid basalt and displayed clearly an authentic combination of racial characteristics indeed like the other pieces i had seen at santiago tuschler and at tres zapotes it unmistakably and unambiguously showed a negro my own view is that the olmec heads present us with physiologically accurate images of real individuals of necroid stock charismatic and powerful african men whose presence in central america three thousand years ago has not yet been explained by scholars nor is there any certainty that the heads were actually carved in that epoch carbon dating of fragments of charcoal found in the same pits tells us only the age of the charcoal calculating the true antiquity of the heads themselves is a much more complex matter it was with such thoughts that i continued my slow walk among the strange and wonderful monuments of laventa they whispered of ancient secrets the secret of the man in the machine the secret of the negro heads and last but not least the secret of a legend brought to life for it seemed that flesh might indeed have been put on the mythical bones of quetzalcoatl when i found that several of the lavender sculptures contained realistic likenesses not only of negroes but of tall tin featured long nosed apparently caucasian men with straight hair and full beards wearing flowing robes chapter 18 conspicuous strangers matthew sterling the american archaeologist who excavated laventa in the 1940s made a number of spectacular discoveries there the most spectacular of all was the steely of the bearded man the plan of the ancient olmec site as i've said lay along an axis pointing eight degrees west of north at the southern end of this axis a hundred feet tall loomed the fluted cone of the great pyramid next to it at ground level was what looked like a curb about a foot high enclosing a spacious rectangular area one quarter the size of an average city block when the archaeologists began to uncover this curb they found to their surprise that it consisted of the upper parts of a wall of columns further excavation through the undisturbed layers of stratification that had accumulated revealed that the columns were 10 feet tall there were more than 600 of them and they had been set together so closely that they formed a near impregnable stockade tuned out of solid basalt and transported to laventa from quarries more than 60 miles distant the columns weighed approximately two tons each why all this trouble what had the stockade been built to contain even before excavation began the tip of a massive chunk of rock had been visible jutting out of the ground in the center of the enclosed area about four feet higher than the illusory curb and leaning steeply forward it was covered with carvings these extended down out of sight beneath the layers of soil that filled the ancient stockade to a height of about nine feet sterling and his team worked for two days to free the great rock when exposed it proved to be an imposing steely 14 feet high seven feet wide and almost three feet thick the carvings showed an encounter between two tall men both dressed in elaborate robes and wearing elegant shoes with turned up toes either erosion or deliberate mutilation quite commonly practiced on all mech monuments had resulted in the complete defacement of one of the figures the other was intact it so obviously depicted a caucasian male with a high bridged nose and a long flowing beard that the bemused archaeologists promptly christened it uncle sam i walked slowly around the 20-ton steely remembering as i did so that it had lain buried in the earth for more than 3 000 years only in the decades since sterling's excavation had it seen the light of day again what would its fate be now would it stand here for another 30 centuries as an object of ore and splendor for future generations to gaup at and revere or in such a great expanse of time was it possible that circumstances might change so much that it would once again be buried and concealed perhaps neither would happen i remembered the ancient calendrical system of central america which the olmecs had initiated according to them and to their more famous successes the mayas there just weren't any great expanses of time left let alone three millennia the fifth sun was all used up and a tremendous earthquake was building to destroy humanity in the epoch of a.d 2012. i turned my attention back to the stealing two things seem to be clear the encounter seen it portrayed must for some reason have been of immense importance to the olmecs hence the grandeur of the steely itself and the construction of the remarkable stockade of columns built to contain it and as was the case with the negro heads it was obvious that the face of the bearded caucasian man could only have been sculpted from a human model the racial verisimilitude was too good for an artist to have invented it the same went for two other caucasian figures i was able to identify among the surviving monuments of laventa one was carved in low relief on a heavy and roughly circular slab of stone about three feet in diameter dressed in what looked like tight-fitting leggings his features were those of an anglo-saxon he had a full pointed beard and wore a curious floppy cap on his head in his left hand he extended a flag or perhaps a weapon of some kind his right hand which he held across the middle of his chest appeared to be empty around his slim waist was tied a flamboyant sash the other caucasian figure this time carved on the side of a narrow pillar was similarly bearded and attired who were these conspicuous strangers what were they doing in central america when did they come and what relationship did they have with those other strangers who had settled in this steamy rubber jungle the ones who had provided the models for the great negro heads some radical researchers who rejected the dogma concerning the isolation of the new world prior to 1492 had proposed what looked like a viable solution to the problem the bearded thin featured individuals could have been phoenicians from the mediterranean who had sailed through the pillars of hercules and across the atlantic ocean as early as the second millennium bc advocates of this theory went on to suggest that the negroes shown at the same sites were the slaves of the phoenicians picked up on the coast of west africa prior to the transatlantic run the more consideration i gave to the strange character of the lavender sculptures the more dissatisfied i became with these ideas probably the phoenicians and other old world peoples had crossed the atlantic ages before columbus there was compelling evidence for that although it is outside the scope of this book the problem was that the phoenicians who had left unmistakable examples of their distinctive handiwork in many parts of the ancient world had not done so at the olmec sites in central america neither the negro heads nor the reliefs portraying bearded caucasian men showed any signs of anything remotely phoenician in their style handiwork or character indeed from a stylistic point of view these powerful works of art seem to belong to no known culture tradition or genre they seemed to be without antecedents either in the new world or in the old they seemed ruthless and that of course was impossible because all forms of artistic expression have roots somewhere hypothetical third party it occurred to me that one plausible explanation might lie in a variant of the hypothetical third-party theory originally put forward by a number of leading egyptologists to explain one of the great puzzles of egyptian history and chronology the archaeological evidence suggested that rather than developing slowly and painfully as is normal with human societies the civilization of ancient egypt like that of the olmecs emerged all at once and fully formed indeed the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight and with no apparent antecedents whatever for example remains of the pre-dynastic period around 3500 bc show no trace of writing soon after that date quite suddenly and inexplicably the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of ancient egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state far from being mere pictures of objects or actions this written language was complex and structured at the outset with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was in common usage by the dawn of the first dynasty what is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated and the same is true of mathematics medicine astronomy and architecture and of egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religious mythological system even the central content of such refined works as the book of the dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period the majority of egyptologists will not consider the implications of egypt's early sophistication these implications are startling according to a number of more daring thinkers john anthony west an expert on the early dynastic period asks how does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one there is no mistaking the process of development but in egypt there are no parallels everything is right there at the start the answer to the mystery is of course obvious but because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking it is seldom considered egyptian civilization was not a development it was a legacy west has been a thorn in the flesh of the egyptological establishment for many years but other more mainstream figures have also confessed puzzlement at the suddenness with which egyptian civilization appeared walter emery late edwards professor of egyptology at the university of london summed up the problem at a period approximately 3 400 years before christ a great change took place in egypt and the country passed rapidly from a state of neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to one of well-organized monarchy at the same time the art of writing appears monumental architecture and the arts and crafts developed to an astonishing degree and all the evidence points to the existence of a luxurious civilization all this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture one explanation could simply be that egypt received its sudden and decisive cultural boost from some other known civilization of the ancient world sumer on the lower euphrates in mesopotamia is the most likely contender despite many basic differences a variety of shared building techniques and architectural styles do suggest a link between the two regions but none of these similarities is strong enough to infer that the connection could have been in any way causal with one society directly influencing the other on the contrary as professor emery writes the impression we get is of an indirect connection and perhaps the existence of a third party whose influence spread to both the euphrates and the nile modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area however a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to egypt and mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations among other things this theory sheds light on the mysterious fact that the egyptians and sumerian people of mesopotamia appear to have worshipped virtually identical lunar deities who were among the oldest in their respective pantheons thoth in the case of the egyptians sin in the case of the sumerians according to the eminent egyptologists or e a wallis budge the similarity between the two gods is too close to be accidental it would be wrong to say that the egyptians borrowed from the sumerians or the sumerians from the egyptians but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source the question therefore is this what was that common but exceedingly ancient source that hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area that advanced third party to which both budge and emery refer and if it left a legacy of high culture in egypt and in mesopotamia why shouldn't it have done so in central america it's not good enough to argue that civilization took off much later in mexico than it had in the middle east it is possible that the initial impulse could have been felt at the same time in both places but that the subsequent outcome could have been completely different on this scenario the civilizers would have succeeded brilliantly in egypt and in sumer creating lasting and remarkable cultures there in mexico on the other hand as also seems to have been the case in peru they suffered some serious setback perhaps getting off to a good start when the gigantic stone heads and reliefs of bearded men were made but going rapidly downhill the light of civilization would never quite have been lost but perhaps things didn't pick up again until around 1500 bc the so-called olmec horizon by then the great sculptures would have been hoary with age ancient relics of immense spiritual power their all but forgotten origins wrapped in myths of giants and bearded civilizers if so we may be gazing at faces from a much more remote past than we imagine when we stare into the almond eyes of one of the negro heads or into the angular chiseled caucasian features of uncle sam it is by no means impossible that these great works preserved the images of peoples from a vanished civilization which embraced several different ethnic groups that in a nutshell is the hypothetical third party theory as applied to central america the civilization of ancient mexico did not emerge without external influence and it did not emerge as a result of influence from the old world instead certain cultures in the old world and in the new world may both have received a legacy of influence and ideas from a third party at some exceedingly remote date via hermosa to ohaka before leaving via hermosa i visited saikom the center for investigation of the cultures of the omex and maya i wanted to find out from the scholars there whether there were any other significant hormec sites in the region to my surprise they suggested that i should look further afield at monte alban in oaxaca province hundreds of kilometers to the south west archaeologists had apparently unearthed all mechoid artifacts and a number of reliefs thought to represent the olmecs themselves south and i had intended to drive straight on from via hermosa into the yucatan peninsula which lay northeast the journey to monte alban would involve a huge detour but we decided to make it in the hope that it might shed further light on the olmecs besides it promised to be a spectacular drive over immense mountains and into the heart of the hidden valley where the city of oaxaca lies we drove almost due west past the lost site of laventa past kawasako archos once again and on past sayula and loma bonita to the road junction town of tuschtepec in so doing by degrees we left behind countryside scarred and blackened by the oil industry crossed long gentle hillsides carpeted in lush green grass and ran between fields ripe with crops at tuschtepec where the sierras really began we turned sharply south following highway 175 to oaxaca on the map it looked barely half the distance that we had driven from via hermosa the road however proved to be a complicated nerve-wracking muscle-wrenching apparently endless zigzag of hairpin bends narrow winding and precipitous which went up into the clouds like a stairway to heaven it took us through many different layers of alpine vegetation each occupying a specialized climatological niche until it brought us out above the clouds in a place where familiar plants flourished in giant forms like john wyndham's trifids creating a surreal and alien landscape it took 12 hours to drive the 700 kilometers from via hermosa to oaxaca by the time the journey was over my hands were blistered from gripping the steering wheel too tight for too long around too many hairpin bends my eyes were blurred and i kept having mental retrospectives of the vitigenous chasms we had skirted on highway 175 in the mountains where the triffids grew the city of oaxaca is famous for magic mushrooms marijuana and d.h lawrence who wrote and set part of his novel the plumed serpent here in the 1920s there is still a bohemian feel about the place and until late at night a current of excitement seems to ripple among the crowds filling its bars and cafes narrow cobbled streets old buildings and spacious plazas we checked into a room overlooking one of the three open courtyards in the hotel lasca laundrinus the bed was comfortable there were starry skies overhead but tired as i was i couldn't sleep what kept me awake was the idea of the civilizers the bearded gods and their companions in mexico as in peru they seemed to have confronted failure that was what the legends implied and not only the legends as i discovered when we reached monte alban the next morning chapter 19 adventures in the underworld journeys to the stars the hypothetical third party theory explains the similarities and the fundamental differences between ancient egypt and ancient mesopotamia by proposing that both received a common legacy of civilization from the same remote ancestor no serious suggestions have been made as to where that ancestral civilization might have been located its nature or when it flourished like a black hole in space it cannot be seen yet its presence can be deduced from its effects on things that can be seen in this case the civilizations of sumer and egypt is it possible that the same mysterious ancestor the same invisible source of influence could also have left its mark in mexico if so we would expect to find certain cultural similarities between mexico's ancient civilizations and those of sumer in egypt we would also expect to be confronted by immense differences resulting from the long period of divergent evolution which separated all these areas in historical times we would however expect the differences to be less between sumer and egypt which were in regular contact with each other during the historical period than between the two middle eastern cultures and the cultures of far off central america which enjoyed at most only haphazard slight and intermittent contacts prior to the discovery of the new world by columbus in ad1492 eaters of the dead earth monsters star kings dwarves and other relatives for some curious reason that has not been explained the ancient egyptians had a special liking and reverence for dwarves so too did the civilized peoples of ancient central america write back to olmec times in both cases it was believed that dwarves were directly connected to the gods and in both cases dwarves were favored as dancers and were shown as such in works of art in egypt's early dynastic period more than 4500 years ago and any ad of nine omnipotent deities was particularly adored by the priesthood at heliopolis likewise in central america both the aztecs and the myers believed in an all-powerful system of nine deities the popol vu the sacred book of the ancient quiche maya of mexico and guatemala contains several passages which clearly indicate a belief in stellar rebirth the reincarnation of the dead as stars after they had been killed for example the hero twins named as hunapu and ishbalanke rose up in the midst of the light and instantly they were lifted into the sky then the arch of heaven and the face of the earth were lighted and they dwelt in heaven at the same time ascended the twins 400 companions who had also been killed and so they again became the companions of hunapu and zubalanke and they were changed into stars in the sky the majority of the traditions of the god king quetzalcoatl as we have seen focus on his deeds and teachings as a civilizer his followers in ancient mexico however also believed that his human manifestation had experienced death and that afterwards he was reborn as a star it is therefore curious at the very least to discover that in egypt in the pyramid age more than 4 000 years ago the state religion revolved around the belief that the deceased pharaoh was reborn as a star ritual incantations were chanted the purpose of which was to facilitate the dead monarch's rapid rebirth in the heavens o king you are this great star the companion of orion who traverses the sky with orion you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due season and rejuvenated in your due time we have encountered the orion constellation before on the plains of nazca and we shall encounter it again meanwhile let us consider the ancient egyptian book of the dead parts of its contents are as old as the civilization of egypt itself and it serves as a sort of vedic for the transmigration of the soul it instructs the deceased on how to overcome the dangers of the afterlife enables him to assume the form of several mythical creatures and equips him with the passwords necessary for admission to the various stages or levels of the underworld is it a coincidence that the peoples of ancient central america preserved a parallel vision of the perils of the afterlife there it was widely believed that the underworld consisted of nine strata through which the deceased would journey for four years overcoming obstacles and dangers on the way the strata had self-explanatory names like place where the mountains crash together place where the arrows are fired mountain of knives and so on in both ancient central america and ancient egypt it was believed that the deceased's voyage through the underworld was made in a boat accompanied by paddler gods who ferried him from stage to stage the tomb of double calm an 8th century ruler of the mayan city of tikal was found to contain a representation of this scene similar images appear throughout the valley of the kings in upper egypt notably in the tomb of thutmosis iii and 18th dynasty pharaoh is it a coincidence that the passengers in the bark of the dead pharaoh and in the canoe in which double comb makes his final journey include in both cases a dog or dog-headed deity a bird or bird-headed deity and an ape or ape-headed deity the seventh stratum of the ancient mexican underworld was called the place where beasts devour hearts is it a coincidence that one of the stages of the ancient egyptian underworld the hall of judgment involved an almost identical series of symbols at this crucial juncture the deceased's heart was weighed against a feather if the heart was heavy with sin it would tip the balance the god thoth would note the judgment on his palate and the heart would immediately be devoured by a fearsome beast part crocodile part hippopotamus part lion that was called the eater of the dead finally let us turn again to egypt of the pyramid age and the privileged status of the pharaoh which enabled him to circumvent the trials of the underworld and to be reborn as a star ritual incantations were part of the process equally important was a mysterious ceremony known as the opening of the mouth all was conducted after the death of the pharaoh and believed by archaeologists to date back to pre-dynastic times the high priest and four assistants participated wielding the passion cafe a ceremonial cutting instrument this was used to open the mouth of the deceased god king an action thought necessary to ensure his resurrection in the heavens surviving reliefs and vignettes showing this ceremony leave no doubt that the mummified corpse was struck a hard physical blow with the passion care in addition evidence has recently emerged which indicates that one of the chambers within the great pyramid giza may have served as the location for the ceremony all this finds a strange distorted twin in mexico we have seen the prevalence of human sacrifice there in pre-conquest times is it coincidental that the sacrificial venue was a pyramid that the ceremony was conducted by a high priest and four assistants that a cutting instrument the sacrificial knife was used to strike a hard physical blow to the body of the victim and that the victim's soul was believed to ascend directly to the heavens sidestepping the perils of the underworld as such coincidences continue to multiply it is reasonable to wonder whether there may not be some underlying connection this is certainly the case when we learned that the general term for sacrifice throughout ancient central america was parchi meaning to open the mouth could it be therefore that what confronts us here in widely separated geographical areas and at different periods of history it's not just a series of startling coincidences but some faint and garbled common memory originating in the most distant antiquity it doesn't seem that the egyptian ceremony of the opening of the mouth influenced directly the mexican ceremony of the same name or vice versa for that matter the fundamental differences between the two cases rule that out what does seem possible however is that their similarities may be the remnants of a shared legacy received from a common ancestor the peoples of central america did one thing with that legacy and the egyptians another but some common symbolism and nomenclature was retained by both this is not the place to expand on the sense of an ancient and elusive connectedness that emerges from the egyptian and central american evidence before moving on however it is worth noting that a similar connectedness links the belief systems of pre-columbian mexico with those of sumer in mesopotamia again the evidence is more suggestive of an ancient common ancestor than of any direct influence take the case of oanus for example oanus is the greek rendering of the sumerian who are the name of the amphibious being described in part two believed to have brought the arts and skills of civilization to mesopotamia legends dating back at least five thousand years relate that iwan lived under the sea emerging from the waters of the persian gulf every morning to civilize and tutor mankind is it a coincidence that muana in the mayan language means he who has his residence in water let us also consider tiamat the sumerian goddess of the oceans and of the forces of primitive chaos always shown as a ravening monster in mesopotamian tradition tiamat turned against the other deities and unleashed a holocaust of destruction before she was eventually destroyed by the celestial hero marduk she opened her mouth tiamat to swallow him he drove in the evil wind so that she could not close her lips the terrible winds filled her belly her heart was seized she held her mouth wide open he let fly an arrow it pierced her belly her inner parts he clothed he split her heart he rendered her powerless and destroyed her life he felt her body and stood upright on it how do you follow an act like that mardup could contemplating his adversary's monstrous corpse he conceived works of art and a great plan of world creation began to take shape in his mind his first move was to split tiamat's skull and cut her arteries then he broke her into two parts like a dried fish using one half to roof the heavens and the other to surface the earth from her breasts he made mountains from her spittle clouds and he directed the rivers tigris and euphrates to flow from her eyes a strange and violent legend and a very old one the ancient civilizations of central america had their own version of this story here quetzalcoatl in his incarnation as the creator deity took the role of marduk while the part of tiamat was played by sepaktli the great earth monster quetzalcoatl seized sepaktly's limbs as she swam in the primeval waters and wrenched her body in half one part forming the sky and the other the earth from her hair and skin he created grass flowers and herbs from her eyes wells and springs from her shoulders mountains are the peculiar parallels between the sumerian and mexican myths pure coincidence or could both have been marked by the cultural fingerprints of a lost civilization if so the faces of the heroes of that ancestral culture may indeed have been carved in stone and passed down as heirlooms through thousands of years sometimes in full view sometimes buried until they were dug up for the last time by archaeologists in our era and given labels like olmec head and uncle sam the faces of those heroes also appear at monte alban where they seem to tell a sad story monte alban the downfall of masterful men a site thought to be about 3000 years old monte alban stands on a vast artificially flattened hilltop overlooking oaxaca it consists of a huge rectangular area the grand plaza which is enclosed by groups of pyramids and other buildings laid out in precise geometrical relationships to one another the overall feel of the place is one of harmony and proportion emerging from a well-ordered and symmetrical plan following the advice of saikom whom i had spoken to before leaving via hermosa i made my way first to the extreme southwest corner of the monte alban site there stacked loosely against the side of a low pyramid where the objects i had come all this way to see several dozen engraved steely depicting negroes and caucasians equal in life equal in death if a great civilization had indeed been lost to history and if these sculptures told part of its story the message conveyed was one of racial equality no one who has seen the pride or felt the charisma of the great negro heads from laventa could seriously imagine that the original subjects of these magisterial sculptures could have been slaves neither did the lean-faced bearded men look as if they would have bent their knees to anyone they too had an aristocratic demeanor at monte alban however there seemed to be carved in stone a record of the downfall of these masterful men it did not look as if this could have been the work of the same people who made the leventa sculptures standard of craftsmanship was far too low for that but what was certain whoever they were and however inferior their work was that these artists had attempted to portray the same negroid subjects and the same goaty bearded caucasians as i had seen at leventa there the sculptures had reflected strength power and vitality here at monte alban the remarkable strangers were corpses all were naked most were castrated some were curled up in fetal positions as though to avoid showers of blows others lay sprawled slackly archaeologists said the sculptures showed the corpses of prisoners captured in battle what prisoners from where the location after all was central america the new world thousands of years before columbus so wasn't it odd that these images of battlefield casualties showed not a single native american but only and exclusively old world racial types for some reason orthodox academics did not find this puzzling even though by their reckoning the carvings were extremely old dating to somewhere between 1 000 and 600 bc as at other sites this time frame had been derived from tests on associated organic matter not on the carvings themselves which were incised on granite steely and therefore hard to date objectively legacy and as yet undeciphered but fully elaborated hieroglyphic script had been found at monte alban much of it carved on the same steely as the crude caucasian and negro figures experts accepted that it was the earliest known writing in mexico it was also clear that the people who had lived here had been accomplished builders and more than usually preoccupied with astronomy an observatory consisting of a strange arrowhead-shaped structure lay at an angle of 45 degrees to the main axis which was deliberately tilted several degrees from north south crawling into this observatory i found it to be a warren of tiny narrow tunnels and steep internal stairways giving sight lines to different regions of the sky the people of monte alban like the people of tres cepotes left definite evidence of their knowledge of mathematics in the form of bar and dot computations they had also used the remarkable calendar introduced by the olmecs and much associated with the later maya which predicted the end of the world in the epoch of a.d 2012. if the calendar and the preoccupation with time had been part of the legacy of an ancient and forgotten civilization the maya must be ranked as the most faithful and inspired inheritors of that legacy time as the archaeologist eric thompson put it in 1950 was the supreme mystery of maya religion a subject which pervaded my a thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind as i continued my journey through central america i felt myself drawn ever more deeply into the labyrinths of that strange and awesome riddle chapter 20 children of the first man palenque chiapas province evening was settling in i sat just beneath the northeast corner of the mayan temple of the inscriptions and gazed north over the darkening jungle where the land dropped away towards the floodplain of the usu machinta the temple consisted of three chambers and rested on top of a nine stage pyramid almost 100 feet tall the clean and harmonious lines of this structure gave it a sense of delicacy but not of weakness it felt strong rooted into the earth enduring a creature of pure geometry and imagination looking to my right i could see the palace a spacious rectangular complex on a pyramidal base dominated by a narrow four-story tower thought to have been used as an observatory by maya priests around about me where bright feathered parrots and macaws skimmed the treetops a number of other spectacular buildings lay half swallowed by the encroaching forest these were the temple of the foliated cross the temple of the sun the temple of the count and the temple of the lion all names made up by archaeologists so much of what the maya had stood for cared about believed in and remembered from earlier times was irretrievably lost though we'd long ago learned to read their dates we were only just beginning to make headway with the deciphering of their intricate hieroglyphs i stood and climbed the last few steps into the central chamber of the temple set into the rear wall were two great grey slabs and inscribed on them in regimented rows like pieces on a checkerboard were 620 separate mayan glyphs these took the form of faces monstrous and human together with a writhing bestiary of mythical creatures what was being said here no one knew for sure because the inscriptions a mixture of word pictures and phonetic symbols had not yet been fully decoded it was evident however that a number of the glyphs referred to epochs thousands of years in the past and spoke of people and gods who had played their parts in prehistoric events paccarl's tomb to the left of the hieroglyphs led into the huge flagstones of the temple floor was a steep descending internal stairway this led to a room buried deep in the bowels of the pyramid where the tomb of lord pakal lay stairs of highly polished limestone blocks were narrow and surprisingly slippery and moist adopting a crabbed sideways stance i switched on my torch and stepped gingerly down into the gloom steadying myself against the southern wall as i did so this damp stairway had been a secret place from the date when it was originally sealed in ad 683 until june 1952 when the mexican archaeologist alberto roose lifted the flagstones in the temple floor although a second such tomb was found at palenque in 1994 roose had the honor of being the first man to discover such a feature inside a new world pyramid the stairway had been intentionally filled with rubble by its builders and it took four more years before the archaeologists cleared it out completely and reached the bottom when they had done so they entered a narrow core bell vaulted chamber spread out on the floor in front of them where the muldering skeletons of five or possibly six young victims of sacrifice a huge triangular slab of stone was visible at the far end of the chamber when it was removed rose was confronted by a remarkable tomb he described it as an enormous room that appeared to be graven in ice a kind of grotto whose walls and roof seemed to have been planed in perfect surfaces or an abandoned chapel whose cupola was draped with curtains of stalactites and from whose floor arose thick stalagmites like the dripping of a candle the room also roofed with a corbel vault was 30 feet long and 23 feet high around the walls in stucco relief could be seen the striding figures of the lords of the night the eniad of nine deities who ruled over the hours of darkness center stage and overlooked by these figures was a huge monolithic sarcophagus lidded with a five ton slab of richly carved stone inside the sarcophagus was a tall skeleton draped with a treasure trove of jade ornaments a mosaic death mask of 200 fragments of jade was affixed to the front of the skull these supposedly were the remains of pacqual a ruler of palenque in the 7th century a.d the inscription stated that this monarch had been 80 years old at the time of his death but the jade draped skeleton the archaeologists found in the sarcophagus appeared to belong to a man half that age having reached the bottom of the stairway some 85 feet below the floor of the temple i crossed the chamber where the sacrificial victims had lain and gazed directly into pakal's tomb the air was dank full of mildew and damp rot and surprisingly cold the sarcophagus set into the floor of the tomb had a curious shape flared strikingly at the feet like an ancient egyptian mummy case these were made of wood and were equipped with wide bases since they were frequently stood upright but piccar's coffin was made of solid stone and was uncompromisingly horizontal why then at the mayan artifices gone to so much trouble to widen its base when they must have known that it served no useful purpose could they have been slavishly copying a design feature from some ancient model long after the reson d'etre for the design had been forgotten like the beliefs concerning the perils of the afterlife might pakal's sarcophagus not be an expression of a common legacy linking ancient egypt with the ancient cultures of central america in shape the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus was ten inches thick three feet wide and twelve and a half feet long it too seemed to have been modeled on the same original as the magnificent engraved blocks the ancient egyptians had used for this exact purpose indeed it would not have looked out of place in the valley of the kings but there was one major difference the scene carved on top of the sarcophagus lid was unlike anything that ever came out of egypt lit in my torch beam it showed a clean-shaven man dressed in what looked like a tight-fitting bodysuit the sleeves and leggings of which were gathered into elaborate cuffs at the wrists and ankles the man lay semi-reclined in a bucket seat which supported his lower back and thighs the nape of his neck resting comfortably against some kind of headrest and he was peering forward intently his hands seem to be in motion as though they were operating levers and controls and his feet were bare tucked up loosely in front of him was this supposed to be pakal the maya king if so why was he shown operating some kind of machine the maya weren't supposed to have had machines they weren't even supposed to have discovered the wheel yet with its side panels rivets tubes and other gadgets the structure prakal reclined in resembled a technological device much more strongly than it did the transition of one man's living soul to the realms of the dead as one authority claimed or the king falling back into the fleshless jaws of the earth monster as another argued i remembered man in snake the olmec relief described in chapter 17. it too had looked like a naive depiction of a piece of technology furthermore man in snake had come from laventa where it had been associated with several bearded figures apparently caucasians pacal's tomb was at least a thousand years younger than any of the laventa treasures nevertheless a tiny jade statuette was found lying close to the skeleton inside the sarcophagus and it appeared to be much older than the other grave goods also placed there it depicted an elderly caucasian dressed in long robes with a goatee beard pyramid of the magician yucatan on a stormy afternoon 700 kilometers north of palenque i began to climb the steps of yet another pyramid it was a steep building oval rather than square in plan 240 feet long at the base and 120 feet wide it was moreover very high rising 120 feet above the surrounding plane since time out of mind this edifice which did look like the castle of a necromancer had been known as the pyramid of the magician and also as the house of the dwarf these names were derived from a maya legend which asserted that a dwarf with supernatural powers had raised the entire building in just one night the steps as i climbed them seemed more and more perversely narrow my instinct was to lean forward flatten myself against the side of the pyramid and cling on for dear life instead i looked up at the angry overcast sky above me flocks of birds circled screeching wildly as those seeking refuge from some impending disaster and the thick mass of low-lying cloud that had blotted out the sun a few hours earlier was now so agitated by high winds that it seemed to boil the pyramid of the magician was by no means unique in being associated with the supernatural powers of dwarves whose architectural and masonry skills were widely renowned in central america construction work was easy for them asserted one typical maya legend all they had to do was whistle and heavy rocks would move into place a very similar tradition as we may recall claimed that the gigantic stone blocks of the mysterious andean city of tiwanako had been carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet in both central america and in the far-off regions of the andes therefore strange sounds had been associated with the miraculous levitation of massive rocks what was i to make of this maybe through some fluke to almost identical fantasies could have been independently invented in both these geographically remote areas but that didn't seem very likely equally worthy of consideration was the possibility that common recollections of an ancient building technology could have been preserved in stories such as these a technology capable of lifting huge blocks of stone off the ground with miraculous ease could it be relevant that memories of almost identical miracles were preserved in ancient egypt there in one typical tradition a magician was said to have raised into the air a huge vault of stone 200 cubits long and 50 cubits broad the sides of the stairway i was climbing were richly decorated with what the 19th century american explorer john lloyd stevens described as a species of sculptured mosaic oddly although the pyramid of the magician had been built long centuries before the conquest the symbol most frequently featured in these mosaics was a close approximation of the christian cross indeed there were two distinct kinds of christian crosses one the wide port croate favored by the knights templar and other crusading orders in the 12th and 13th century the other the x-shaped saint andrews cross after climbing a further shorter flight of steps i reached the temple at the very top of the magician's pyramid it consisted of a single corbel vaulted chamber from the ceiling of which large numbers of bats hung suspended like the birds and the clouds they were visibly distressed by the sense of a huge storm brewing in a furry mass they shuffled restlessly upside down folding and unfolding their small leathery wings i took a rest on the high platform that surrounded the chamber from here looking down i could see many more crosses they were everywhere literally all over this bizarre and ancient structure i remembered the andean city of tiwanako and the crosses that had been carved there in distant pre-columbian times on some of the great blocks of stone lying scattered around the building known as pumapunku man in snake the all-neck sculpture from laventa had also been engraved with two saint andrews crosses long before the birth of christ and now here at the pyramid of the magician in the mayan site of ushmal i was confronted by crosses yet again bearded men serpents crosses how likely was it to be an accident that symbols as distinctive as these should repeat themselves in widely separated cultures and at different periods of history why were they so often built into the fabric of sophisticated works of art and architecture a science of prophecy not for the first time i suspected that i might be looking at signs and icons left behind by some cult or secret society which had sought to keep the light of civilization burning in central america and perhaps elsewhere through long ages of darkness i thought it notable that the motifs of the bearded man the plumed serpent and the cross all tended to crop up whenever and wherever there were hints that technologically advanced and as yet unidentified civilization might once have been in contact with the native cultures and there was a sense of great age about this contact as though it took place at such an early date that it had been almost forgotten i thought again about the sudden way the olmecs had emerged around the middle of the second millennium bc out of the swirling mists of opaque prehistory all the archaeological evidence indicated that from the beginning they had venerated huge stone heads and steely showing bearded men i found myself increasingly drawn to the possibility that some of these remarkable pieces of sculpture could have been part of a vast inheritance of civilization handed down to the peoples of central america many thousands of years before the second millennium bc and thereafter entrusted to the safe keeping of a secret wisdom cult perhaps the cult of quetzalcoatl had been lost nevertheless the tribes of this region in particular the maya the builders of palenque and ushma had preserved something even more mysterious and wonderful than the enigmatic monoliths something which declared itself even more persistently to be the legacy of an older and a higher civilization we see in the next chapter that it was the mystical science of an ancient stargazing folk a science of time and measurement and prediction a science of prophecy even that the maya had preserved most perfectly from the past with it they inherited memories of a terrible earth-destroying flood and an idiosyncratic legacy of empirical knowledge knowledge of a high order which they shouldn't really have possessed knowledge that we have only reacquired very recently chapter 21 a computer for calculating the end of the world the maya knew where their advanced learning originated it was handed down to them they said from the first men the creatures of quetzalcoatl whose names had been jaguar with the sweet smile bala jaguar of the night the distinguished name and ikibalam jaguar of the moon according to the papal vu these forefathers were endowed with intelligence they saw and instantly they could see far they succeeded in seeing they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world the things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move great was their wisdom their sight reached to the forests the rocks the lakes the seas the mountains and the valleys in truth they were admirable men they were able to know all and they examined the four corners the four points of the arch of the sky and the round face of the earth the achievements of this race aroused the envy of several of the most powerful deities it is not well that our creatures should know all upon these gods must they perchance be the equals of ourselves their makers who can see afar who know all and see all must they also be gods obviously such a state of affairs could not be allowed to continue after some deliberation an order was given and appropriate action was taken let their sight reach only to that which is near let them see only a little of the face of the earth then the heart of heaven blew mist into their eyes which clouded their sight as when a mirror is breathed upon their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close only that was clear to them in this way the wisdom and all the knowledge of the first men were destroyed anyone familiar with the old testament will remember that the reason for the expulsion of adam and eve from the garden of eden had to do with similar divine concerns after the first men had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and good and evil the lord god said behold the man has become as one of us to know good and evil now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever let us send him forth from the garden of eden the pophole vu is accepted by scholars as a great reservoir of uncontaminated pre-columbian tradition it is therefore puzzling to find such similarities between these traditions and those recorded in the genesis story moreover like so many of the other old world new world links we have identified the character of the similarities is not suggestive of any kind of direct influence of one region on the other but of two different interpretations of the same set of events thus for example the biblical garden of eden looks like a metaphor for the state of blissful almost god-like knowledge that the first men of the popovu enjoyed the essence of this knowledge was the ability to see all and to know all was this not precisely the ability adam and eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil finally just as adam and eve were driven out of the garden so were the four first men of the popol vu deprived of their ability to see far thereafter their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close both the papal vu and genesis therefore tell the story of mankind's fall from grace in both cases this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred god-like powers on those who possessed it the bible adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice calls it the knowledge of good and evil and has nothing further to add the papal vu is much more informative it tells us that the knowledge of the first man consisted of the ability to see things hidden in the distance that they were astronomers who examined the four corners the four points of the arch of the sky and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring the round face of the earth geography is about maps in part one we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date could the popul vu be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the first men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed geography is about maps and astronomy is about stars very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea going voyages of discovery and long sea going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps is it accidental that the first men of the popple vu were remembered not only for studying the round face of the earth but for their contemplation of the arch of heaven and is it a coincidence that the outstanding achievement of mayan society was its observational astronomy upon which through the medium of advanced mathematical calculations was based a clever complex sophisticated and very accurate calendar knowledge out of place in 1954 j eric thompson a leading authority on the archaeology of central america confessed to a deep sense of puzzlement at a number of glaring disparities he had identified between the generally unremarkable achievements of the mayas as a whole and the advanced state of their astro calendrical knowledge what mental quirks he asked led the maya intelligentsia to chart the heavens yet fail to grasp the principle of the wheel to visualize eternity as no other semi-civilized people has ever done yet ignore the short step from corbell to true arch to count in millions yet never to learn to weigh a sack of corn perhaps the answer to these questions is much simpler than thompson realized perhaps the astronomy the deep understanding of time and the long-term mathematical calculations were not quirks at all perhaps they were the constituent parts of a coherent but very specific body of knowledge that the maya had inherited more or less intact from an older and wiser civilization such an inheritance would explain the contradictions observed by thompson and there is no need for any dispute on this point we already know that the maya received their calendar as a legacy from the olmecs a thousand years earlier the olmecs were using exactly the same system the real question should be where did the old max get it what kind of level of technological and scientific development was required for a civilization to devise a calendar as good as this take the case of the solar year in modern western society we still make use of a solar calendar which was introduced in europe in 1582 and is based on the best scientific knowledge then available the famous gregorian calendar the julian calendar which it replaced computed the period of the earth's orbit around the sun at 365.25 days pope gregory the 13th reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation 365.2425 days thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days the gregorian calendar therefore incorporates a very small plus error just north point naught naught naught three of a day pretty impressive accuracy for the 16th century strangely enough though its origins are wrapped in the mists of antiquity far deeper than the 16th century the mayan calendar achieved even greater accuracy it calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days a minus error of only north point north north north two of a day similarly the maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days extremely close to the true figure of 29.53058 days computed by the finest modern methods the mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for the prediction of lunar and solar eclipses and were aware that these could occur only within plus or minus 18 days of the node when the moon's path crosses the apparent path of the sun finally the maya were remarkably accomplished mathematicians they possessed an advanced technique of metrical calculation by means of a checkerboard device we ourselves have only discovered or rediscovered in the last century they also understood perfectly and used the abstract concept of zero and were acquainted with place numerations these are esoteric fields as thompson observed the cipher naught and place numerations are so much parts of our cultural heritage and seems such obvious conveniences that it is difficult to comprehend how their invention could have been long delayed yet neither ancient greece with its great mathematicians nor ancient rome had any inkling of either nought or place numeration to write 1848 in roman numerals requires 11 letters m d c c c x l v i i i yet the maya had a system of place value notation very much like our own at a time when the romans were still using their clumsy method isn't it a bit odd that this otherwise unremarkable central american tribe should at such an early date have stumbled upon an innovation which otto nergibar the historian of science has described as one of the most fertile inventions of humanity someone else's science let us now consider the question of venus a planet that was of immense symbolic importance to all the ancient peoples of central america who identified it strongly with quetzalcoatl or gukumats or kukulkan as the plume serpent was known in the maya dialects unlike the ancient greeks but like the ancient egyptians the maya understood that venus was both the morning star and the evening star they understood other things about it as well the synodical revolution of a planet is the period of time it takes to return to any given point in the sky as viewed from earth venus revolves around the sun every 224.7 days while the earth follows its own slightly wider orbit the composite result of these two motions is that venus rises in exactly the same place in the earth sky approximately every 584 days whoever invented the sophisticated calendrical system inherited by the maya had been aware of this and had found ingenious ways to integrate it with other interlocking cycles moreover it is clear from the mathematics which brought these cycles together that the ancient calendar masters had understood that 584 days was only an approximation and that the movements of venus are by no means regular they had therefore worked out the exact figure established by today's science for the average synodical revolution of venus over very long periods of time that figure is 583.92 days and it was knitted into the fabric of the mayan calendar in numerous intricate and complex ways for example to reconcile it with the so-called sacred year the sulkin of 260 days which was divided into 13 months of 20 days each the calendar called for a correction of four days to be made every 61 venus years in addition during every fifth cycle a correction of eight days was made at the end of the 57th revolution once these steps were taken the sulkin and the synodical revolution of venus were intermeshed so tightly that the degree of error to which the equation was subject was staggeringly small one day in 6 000 years and what made this all the more remarkable was that a further series of precisely calculated adjustments kept the venus cycle and the sulkin not only in harmony with each other but in exact relationship with the solar year again this was achieved in a manner which ensured that the calendar was capable of doing its job virtually error-free over vast expanses of time why did the semi-civilized maya need this kind of high-tech precision or did they inherit in good working order a calendar engineered to fit the needs of a much earlier and far more advanced civilization consider the crowning jewel of maya calendrics the so-called long count this system of calculating dates also expressed beliefs about the past notably the widely held belief that time operated in great cycles which witnessed recurrent creations and destructions of the world according to the maya the current great cycle began in darkness on four aha eight kamku a date corresponding to thirteen august three thousand 3114 bc in our own calendar as we've seen it was also believed that the cycle would end amid global destruction in the epoch of a.d 2012 in our calendar the function of the long count was to record the elapse of time since the beginning of the current great cycle literally to count off one by one the years remaining to our present creation the long count is perhaps best envisaged as a sort of celestial adding machine constantly calculating and recalculating the scale of our growing debt to the universe so at any rate thought the maya calculations on the long count computer were not of course done in numbers the maya used their own notation which they had derived from the olmecs who had derived it from nobody knows this notation was a combination of dots signifying ones or units or multiples of twenty bars signifying fives or multiples of five times twenty and a shell glyph signifying zero spans of time were counted by days kin periods of 20 days uinar computing years of 360 days tun periods of 20 toons known as cartoon and periods of 20 cartoons known as baktun there were also 8 000 tun periods piktun and 160 000 tun periods collaptun to mop up even larger calculations all this should make clear that although the maya believed themselves to be living in one great cycle that would surely come to a violent end they also knew that time was infinite and that it proceeded with its mysterious revolutions regardless of individual lives or civilizations as thompson summed up in his great study on the subject in the maya scheme the road over which time had marched stretched into a past so distant that the mind of man cannot comprehend its remoteness yet the maya undauntedly re-trod that road seeking its starting point a fresh view leading further backward unfolded at every stage the mellowed centuries blended into millennia and they into tens of thousands of years as those tireless inquirers explored deeper and still deeper into the eternity of the past on estella at quiriga in guatemala a date over 90 million years ago is computed on another a date over 300 million years before that is given these are actual computations stating correctly day and month positions and are comparable to calculations in our calendar giving the month positions on which easter would have fallen at equivalent distances in the past the brain reels at such astronomical figures isn't this all a bit avant-garde for a civilization that didn't otherwise distinguish itself in many ways it's true that mayan architecture was good within its limits but there was precious little else that these jungle-dwelling indians did which suggested they might have had the capacity or the need to conceive of really long periods of time it's been a good deal less than two centuries since the majority of western intellectuals abandoned bishop usher's opinion that the world was created in 4004 bc and accepted that it must be infinitely older than that in plain english this means that the ancient maya had a far more accurate understanding of the true immensity of geological time and of the vast antiquity of our planet then did anyone in britain europe or north america until darwin propounded the theory of evolution so how come the maya got handy with big periods like hundreds of millions of years was it a freak cultural development or did they inherit the calendrical and mathematical tools which facilitated and enabled them to develop this sophisticated understanding if an inheritance was involved it's legitimate to ask what the original inventors of the mayan calendar's computer-like circuitry had intended it to do what had they designed it for had they simply conceived of all its complexities to concoct a challenge to the intellect a sort of tremendous anagram as one authority claimed or could they have had a more pragmatic and important objective in mind we've seen that the obsessive concern of mayan society and indeed of all the ancient cultures of central america was with calculating and if possible postponing the end of the world could this be the purpose the mysterious calendar was designed to fulfill could it have been a mechanism for predicting some terrible cosmic or geological catastrophe chapter 22 city of the gods the overwhelming message of a large number of central american legends is that the fourth age of the world ended very badly a catastrophic deluge was followed by a long period during which the light of the sun vanished from the sky and the air was filled with a tenebrous darkness then the gods gathered together at teotihuacan the place of the gods and wondered anxiously who was to be the next son only the sacred fire the material representation of the god who gave life its beginnings could be seen in the darkness still quaking following the recent chaos someone will have to sacrifice himself throw himself into the fire they cried only then will there be a son a drama ensued in which two deities nana huwatsin and takiste cattle immolated themselves for the common good one burned quickly in the center of the sacred fire the other roasted slowly on the embers at its edge the gods waited for a long time until eventually the sky started to glow red as a dawn in the east appeared the great sphere of the sun life-giving and incandescent it was at this moment of cosmic rebirth that quetzalcoatl manifested himself his mission was with humanity of the fifth age he therefore took the form of a human being a bearded white man just like viracocha in the andes the era coach's capital was tiwinako in central america quetzalcoatls was the supposed birthplace of the fifth son teotihuacan the city of the gods the citadel the temple and the map of heaven 50 kilometers northeast of mexico city i stood in the airy enclosure of the citadel and looked north across the morning haze towards the pyramids of the sun and the moon set amid grey green scrub country and ringed by distant mountains these two great monuments played their parts in a symphony of ruins strung out along the axis of the so-called street of the dead the citadel lay at the approximate midpoint of this wide avenue which ran perfectly straight for more than four kilometers the pyramid of the moon was at its northern extreme the pyramid of the sun offset somewhat to its east in the context of such a geometric site an exact north-south or east-west orientation might have been expected it was therefore surprising that the architects who had planned teotihuacan had deliberately chosen to incline the street of the dead 15 degrees 30 minutes east of north there were several theories as to why this eccentric orientation had been selected but none was especially convincing growing numbers of scholars however were beginning to wonder whether astronomical alignments might have been involved one for example had proposed that the street of the dead might have been built to face the setting of the pleiades at the time when it was constructed another professor gerald hawkins had suggested that a serious pleiades access could also have played a part and stansberry hagar secretary of the department of ethnology at the brooklyn institute of the arts and sciences had suggested that the street might represent the milky way indeed hagar went further than this seeing the portrayal of specific planets and stars in many of the pyramids mounds and other structures that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the street of the dead his complete thesis was that ayati wakan had been designed as a kind of map of heaven it reproduced on earth a supposed celestial plan of the sky world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead during the 1960s and 1970s hagar's intuitions were tested in the field by hugh holliston jr an american engineer resident in mexico who carried out a comprehensive mathematical survey of tayatawa khan harleston reported his findings in october 1974 at the international congress of americanists his paper which was full of daring and innovative ideas contained some particularly curious information about the citadel and about the temple of quetzalcoatl located at the eastern extreme of this great square compound the temple was regarded by scholars as one of the best preserved archaeological monuments in central america this was because the original prehistoric structure had been partially buried beneath another much later mound immediately in front of it to the west excavation of that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now confronted me it stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of 82 000 square feet still bearing traces of the original multicolored paints which had coated it in antiquity the exposed temple was a beautiful and strange sight the predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining the sides of the massive central stairway the elongated jaws of these oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs and the upper lips with a sort of handlebar moustache each serpent's thick neck was ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers the unmistakable symbol of quetzalcoatl what harleston's investigations had shown was that a complex mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal structures lined up along the street of the dead and indeed beyond it this relationship suggested something extraordinary namely that teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale model of the solar system at any rate if the center line of the temple of quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the street of the dead seem to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets the asteroid belt jupiter saturn represented by the so-called sun pyramid uranus by the moon pyramid and neptune and pluto by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometers further north if these correlations were more than coincidental then at the very least they indicated the presence of teotihuacan of an advanced observational astronomy one not surpassed by modern science until a relatively late date uranus remained unknown to our own astronomers until 1787 neptune until 1846 and pluto until about 1930 even the most conservative estimate of teotihuacan's antiquity by contrast suggested that the principal ingredients of the site plan including the citadel the street of the dead and the pyramids of the sun and the moon must date back at least to the time of christ no known civilization of that epoch either in the old world or in the new is supposed to have had any knowledge at all of the outer planets let alone to have possessed accurate information concerning their orbital distances from each other and from the sun egypt and mexico more coincidences after completing his studies of the pyramids and avenues of teotihuacan stansberry hagar concluded we have not yet realized either the importance or the refinement or the widespread distribution throughout ancient america of the astronomical cult of which the celestial plan was a feature and of which teotihuacan was one of the principal centers but was this just an astronomical cult or was it something approximating more closely to what we might call a science and whether cult or science was it realistic to suppose that it had enjoyed widespread distribution only in the americas when there was so much evidence linking it to other parts of the ancient world for example archaeoastronomers making use of the latest star mapping computer programs had recently demonstrated that the three world famous pyramids on egypt's giza plateau formed an exact terrestrial diagram of the three belt stars in the constellation of orion nor was this the limit of the celestial map the ancient egyptian priests had created in the sands on the west bank of the nile included in their overall vision as we shall see in parts six and seven there was a natural feature the river nile which was exactly where it should be had it been designed to represent the milky way the incorporation of a celestial plan into key sites in egypt and in mexico did not by any means exclude religious functions on the contrary whatever else they may have been intended for it is certain that the monuments of tayata wakan like those of the giza plateau played important religious roles in the lives of the communities they served thus central american traditions collected in the 16th century by father bernardino de sahagun gave eloquent expression to a widespread belief that teotihuacan had fulfilled at least one specific and important religious function in ancient times according to these legends the city of the gods was so known because the lords therein bury after their death did not perish but turned into gods in other words it was the place where men became gods it was additionally known as the place of those who had the road of the gods and the place where gods were made was it a coincidence i wondered that this seemed to have been the religious purpose of the three pyramids at giza the archaic hieroglyphs of the pyramid texts the oldest coherent body of writing in the world left little room for doubt that the ultimate objective of the rituals carried out within these colossal structures was to bring about the deceased pharaoh's transfiguration to throw open the doors of the firmament and to make a road so that he might ascend into the company of the gods the notion of pyramids as devices designed presumably in some metaphysical sense to turn men into gods was it seemed to me too idiosyncratic and peculiar to have been arrived at independently in both ancient egypt and mexico so too was the idea of using the layout of sacred sites to incorporate a celestial plan moreover there were other strange similarities that deserved to be considered just as at giza three principal pyramids had been built at teotihuacan the pyramid temple of quetzalcoatl the pyramid of the sun and the pyramid of the moon just as at giza the site plan was not symmetrical as one might have expected but involved two structures in direct alignment with each other while the third appeared to have been deliberately offset to one side finally at giza the summits of the great pyramid and the pyramid of kafrin were level even though the former was a taller building than the latter likewise at teotihuacan the summits of the pyramids of the sun and the moon were level even though the former was taller the reason was the same in both cases the great pyramid was built on lower ground than the pyramid of kefrin and the pyramid of the sun on lower ground than the pyramid of the moon could all this be coincidence was it not more logical to conclude that there was an ancient connection between mexico and egypt for reasons i have outlined in chapters 18 and 19 i doubted whether any direct causal link was involved at any rate within historic times once again however as with the mayan calendar and as with the early maps of antarctica was it not worth keeping an open mind to the possibility that we might be dealing with a legacy that the pyramids of egypt and the ruins of teotihuacan might express the technology the geographical knowledge the observational astronomy and perhaps also the religion of a forgotten civilization of the past which had once as the papal vu claimed examined the four corners the four points of the arch of the sky and the round face of the earth there was widespread agreement amongst academics concerning the antiquity of the giza pyramids thought to be about 4500 years old no such unanimity existed with regard to teotihuacan neither the street of the dead nor the temple of quetzalcoatl nor the pyramids of the sun and the moon had ever been definitively dated the majority of scholars believed that the city had flourished between 100 bc and ad600 but others argued strongly that it must have risen to prominence much earlier between 1500 and 1000 bc there were others still who sought largely on geological grounds to push the foundation date back to 4000 bc before the eruption of the nearby volcanoes italy amid all this uncertainty about the age of tayatawa khan i had not been surprised to discover that no one had the faintest idea of the identity of those who had actually built the largest and most remarkable metropolis ever to have existed in the pre-columbian new world all that could be said for sure was this when the aztecs on their march to imperial power first stumbled upon the mysterious city in the 12th century a.d its colossal edifices and avenues were already old beyond imagining and so densely overgrown that they seemed more like natural features than works of man attached to them however was a thread of local legend passed down from generation to generation which asserted that they had been built by giants and that their purpose had been to transform men into gods hints of forgotten wisdom leaving the temple of quetzalcoatl behind me i re-crossed the citadel in a westerly direction there was no archaeological evidence that this enormous enclosure had ever served as a citadel or for that matter that it had any kind of military or defensive function at all like so much else about teotihuacan it had clearly been planned with painstaking care and executed with enormous effort but its true purpose remained unidentified by modern scholarship even the aztecs who had been responsible for naming the pyramids of the sun and the moon an attribution which had stuck though no one had any idea what the original builders had called them had failed to invent a name for the citadel it had been left to the spaniards to label it as they did an understandable conceit since the 36-acre central patio of la ciudadella was surrounded by massively thick embankments more than 23 feet high and some 1 500 feet long on each side my walk had now brought me to the western extreme of the patio i climbed a steep set of stairs that led to the top of the embankment and turned north onto the street of the dead once again i had to remind myself that this was almost certainly not what the teotihuacanos whoever they were had called the immense an impressive avenue the spanish name calle de los muertos was of aztec origin apparently based on speculation that the numerous mounds on either side of the street were graves which as it happened they were not we have already considered the possibility that the way of the dead may have served as a terrestrial counterpart of the milky way of interest in this regard is the work of another american alfred e schlemmer who like hugh holliston jr was an engineer schlemmer's field was technological forecasting with specific reference to the prediction of earthquakes on which he presented a paper at the 11th national convention of chemical engineers in mexico city in october 1971 schlemmer's argument was that the street of the dead might never have been a street at all instead it might originally have been laid out as a row of linked reflecting pools filled with water which had descended through a series of locks from the pyramid of the moon at the northern extreme to the citadel in the south as i walked steadily northwards towards the still distant moon pyramid it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favor for a start the street was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be seen moreover the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south hydraulic flow since the base of the moon pyramid stood on ground that was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the citadel the partition sections could easily have been filled with water and might indeed have served as reflecting pools creating a spectacle far more dramatic than those offered by the taj mahal or the fabled shalimar gardens finally the teotihuacan mapping project financed by the national science foundation in washington dc and led by professor rene milion of the university of rochester had demonstrated conclusively that the ancient city had possessed many carefully laid out canals and systems of branching waterways artificially dredged into straightened portions of a river which formed a network within teotihuacan and ran all the way to lake texcoco now 10 miles distant but perhaps closer in antiquity there was much argument about what this vast hydraulic system had been designed to do schlemmer's contention was that the particular waterway he had identified had been built to serve a pragmatic purpose as a long-range seismic monitor part of an ancient science no longer understood he pointed out that remote earthquakes can cause standing waves to form on a liquid surface right across the planet and suggested that the carefully graded and spaced reflecting pools of the street of the dead might have been designed to enable teotihuacanos to read from the standing waves formed there the location and strength of earthquakes around the globe thus allowing them to predict such an occurrence in their own area there was of course no proof of schlemmer's theory however when i remembered the fixation with earthquakes and floods apparent everywhere in mexican mythology and the equally obsessive concern with forecasting future events evident in the maya calendar i felt less inclined to dismiss the apparently far-fetched conclusions of the american engineer if schlemmer were right if the ancient teotihuacanos had indeed understood the principles of resonant vibration and had put them into practice in seismic forecasting the implication was that they were the possessors of an advanced science and if people like hagar and harveston were right if for example a scale model of the solar system had also been built into the basic geometry of teotihuacan this too suggested that the city was founded by a scientifically evolved civilization not yet identified i continued to walk northwards along the street of the dead and turned east towards the pyramid of the sun before reaching this great monument however i paused to examine a ruined patio the principal feature of which was an ancient temple which concealed a perplexing mystery beneath its rock floor chapter 23 the sun and the moon and the way of the dead some archaeological discoveries are heralded with much fanfare others for various reasons are not among this latter category must be included the thick and extensive layer of sheet mica found sandwiched between two of the upper levels of the tertiwakan pyramid of the sun when it was being probed for restoration in 1906 the lack of interest which greeted this discovery and the absence of any follow-up studies to determine its possible function is quite understandable because the mica which had a considerable commercial value was removed and sold as soon as it had been excavated the culprit was apparently leopoldo bartras who had been commissioned to restore the time worn pyramid by the mexican government there has also been a much more recent discovery of micah at teotihuacan in the mica temple and this too has passed almost without notice here the reason is harder to explain because there has been no looting and the mica remains on site one of a group of buildings the mica temple is situated around a patio about a thousand feet south of the west face of the pyramid of the sun directly under a floor paved with heavy rock slabs archaeologists financed by the viking foundation excavated two massive sheets of mica which had been carefully and purposively installed at some extremely remote date by a people who must have been skilled in cutting and handling this material the sheets are 90 feet square and form two layers one laid directly on top of the other mica is not a uniform substance but contains trace elements of different metals depending on the kind of rock formation in which it is found typically these metals include potassium and aluminium and also in varying quantities ferrous and ferric iron magnesium lithium manganese and titanium the trace elements in teotihuacan's mica temple indicate that the underfloor sheets belong to a type which occurs only in brazil some two thousand miles away clearly therefore the builders of the temple must have had a specific need for this particular kind of mica and were prepared to go to considerable lengths to obtain it otherwise they could have used the locally available variety more cheaply and simply mica does not leap to mind as an obvious general-purpose flooring material it's used to form layers underneath the floor and thus completely out of sight seems especially bizarre when we remember that no other ancient structure in the americas or anywhere else in the world has been found to contain a feature like this it is frustrating that we will never be able to establish the exact position let alone the purpose of the large sheet that bartres excavated and removed from the pyramid of the sun in 1906 the two intact layers in the mica temple on the other hand resting as they do in a place where they had no decorative function look as though they were designed to do a particular job let us note in passing that mica possesses characteristics which suit it especially well for a range of technological applications in modern industry it is used in the construction of capacitors and is valued as a thermal and electric insulator it is also opaque to fast neutrons and can act as a moderator in nuclear reactions erasing messages from the past pyramid of the sun teotihuacan having climbed more than 200 feet up a series of flights of stone stairs i reached the summit and looked towards the zenith it was midday 19 may and the sun was directly overhead as it would be again on 25 july on these two dates and not by accident the west face of the pyramid was oriented precisely to the position of the setting sun a more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes 21 march and 21 september then the passage of the sun's rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western facade the whole process from complete shadow to complete illumination took exactly 66.6 seconds it had done so without fail year in year out ever since the pyramid had been built and would continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust what this meant of course was that at least one of the many functions of the pyramid had been to serve as a perennial clock precisely signaling the equinoxes and thus facilitating calendar corrections as and when necessary for a people apparently obsessed like the maya with the elapse and measuring of time another implication was that the master builders of teotihuacan must have possessed an enormous body of astronomic and geodetic data and referred to this data to set the sun pyramid at the precise orientation necessary to achieve the desired equinox effects this was planning and architecture of a high order it had survived the passage of the millennia and it had survived the wholesale remodeling of much of the pyramid's outer shell conducted in the first decade of the 20th century by the self-styled restorer leopoldo bartras in addition to plundering precious evidence that might have helped us towards a better understanding of the purposes for which the enigmatic structure had been built this repulsive lackey of mexico's corrupt dictator porfirio diaz had removed the outer layer of stone mortar and plaster to a depth of more than 20 feet from the entire northern eastern and southern faces the result was catastrophic the underlying adobe surface began to dissolve in heavy rains and to exhibit plastic flow which threatened to destroy the whole edifice although the slippage was halted with hasty remedial measures nothing could change the fact that the sun pyramid had been deprived of almost all its original surface features by modern archaeological standards this was of course an unforgivable act of desecration because of it we will never learn the significance of the many sculptures inscriptions reliefs and artifacts that had almost certainly been removed with those 20 feet of the outer shell nor was this the only or even the most regrettable consequence of bartra's grotesque vandalism there was startling evidence which suggested that the unknown architects of the pyramid of the sun might have intentionally incorporated scientific data into many of the key dimensions of the great structure this evidence had been gathered and extrapolated from the intact west face which not accidentally was also the face where the intended equinox effects could still be seen but thanks to bartres no similar information was likely to be forthcoming from the other three faces because of the arbitrary alterations imposed upon them indeed by drastically distorting the original shape and size of so much of the pyramid the mexican restorer had possibly deprived posterity of some of the most important lessons teotihuacan had to teach eternal numbers the transcendental number known as pi is fundamental to advanced mathematics with a value slightly in excess of 3.14 it is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference in other words if the diameter of a circle is 12 inches the circumference of that circle will be 12 inches times 3.14 equals 37.68 likewise since the diameter of a circle is exactly double the radius we can use pi to calculate the circumference of any circle from its radius in this case however the formula is the length of the radius multiplied by 2 pi as an illustration let us take again a circle of 12 inches diameter its radius will be 6 inches and its circumference can be obtained as follows 6 inches by 2 by 3.14 equals 37.68 inches similarly a circle with a radius of 10 inches will have a circumference of 67.8 inches 10 inches by 2 by 3.14 and the circle with a radius of 7 inches will have a circumference of 43.96 inches 7 inches by 2 by 3.14 these formulae using the value of pi for calculating circumference from either diameter or radius applied to all circles no matter how large or how small and also of course to all spheres and hemispheres they seem relatively simple with hindsight yet their discovery which represented a revolutionary breakthrough in mathematics is thought to have been made late in human history the orthodox view is that archimedes in the 3rd century bc was the first man to calculate pi correctly at 3.14 scholars do not accept that any of the mathematicians of the new world ever got anywhere near pi before the arrival of the europeans in the 16th century it is therefore to discover that the great pyramid of giza built more than 2 000 years before the birth of archimedes and the pyramid of the sun at tayatu akan which vastly predates the conquest both incorporate the value of pi they do so moreover in much the same way and in a manner which leaves no doubt that the ancient builders on both sides of the atlantic were thoroughly conversant with this transcendental number the principal factors involved in the geometry of any pyramid are one the height of the summit above the ground and two the perimeter of the monument at ground level where the great pyramid is concerned the ratio between the original height 481.3949 feet and the perimeter 3023.16 feet turns out to be the same as the ratio between the radius and the circumference of a circle i.e 2 pi thus if we take the pyramid's height and multiply it by 2 pi as we would with a circle's radius to calculate its circumference we get an accurate readout of the monument's perimeter 481.3949 feet times two times 3.14 equals 3023.16 feet alternatively if we turn the equation around and start with the circumference at ground level we get an equally accurate readout of the height of the summit 3023.16 feet divided by two divided by 3.14 equals 481.394 feet since it is almost inconceivable that such a precise mathematical correlation could have come about by chance we're obliged to conclude that the builders of the great pyramid were indeed conversant with pi and that they deliberately incorporated its value into the dimensions of their monument now let us consider the pyramid of the sun at teotihuacan the angle of its size is 43.5 degrees as opposed to 52 degrees in the case of the great pyramid the mexican monument has the gentler slope because the perimeter of its base at 2932.8 feet is not much smaller than that of its egyptian counterpart while its summit is considerably lower approximately 233.5 feet prior to bartra's restoration the two-pie formula which worked at the great pyramid does not work with these measurements a four pi formula does thus if we take the height of the pyramid of the sun 233.5 feet and multiply it by four pi we once again obtain a very accurate readout of the perimeter 233.5 feet times 4 times 3.14 equals 2932.76 feet a discrepancy of less than half an inch from the true figure of 2932.8 feet this surely can no more be a coincidence than the pie relationship extrapolated from the dimensions of the egyptian monument moreover the very fact that both structures incorporate pie relationships when none of the other pyramids on either side of the atlantic does strongly suggests not only the existence of advanced mathematical knowledge in antiquity but some sort of underlying common purpose as we've seen the desired height perimeter ratio of the great pyramid 2 pi called for the specification of a tricky and idiosyncratic angle of slope for its sides 52 degrees likewise the desired height perimeter ratio of the pyramid of the sun 4 pi called for the specification of an equally eccentric angle of slope 43.5 degrees if there had been no ulterior motive it would surely have been simpler for the ancient egyptian and mexican architects to have adopted for 45 degrees which they could easily have obtained and checked by bisecting a right angle what could have been the common purpose that led the pyramid builders on both sides of the atlantic to such lengths to structure the value of pi so precisely into these two remarkable monuments since there seems to have been no direct contact between the civilizations of mexico and egypt in the periods when the pyramids were built is it not reasonable to deduce that both at some remote date inherited certain ideas from a common source is it possible that the shared idea expressed in the great pyramid and the pyramid of the sun could have to do with spheres since these like pyramids are three-dimensional objects while circles for example have only two dimensions the desire to symbolize spheres in three-dimensional monuments with flat surfaces would explain why so much trouble was taken to ensure that both incorporated unmistakable pie relationships furthermore it seems likely that the intention of the builders of both these monuments was not to symbolize spheres in general but to focus attention on one sphere in particular the planet earth it will be a long while before orthodox archaeologists are prepared to accept that some peoples of the ancient world were advanced enough in science to have possessed good information about the shape and size of the earth however according to the calculations of livio catullos tacini an american professor of the history of science and an acknowledged expert on ancient measurement the evidence for the existence of such anomalous knowledge in antiquity is irrefutable stecchini's conclusions which relate mainly to egypt are particularly impressive because they are drawn from mathematical and astronomical data which by common consent are beyond serious dispute a fuller examination of these conclusions and of the nature of the data on which they rest is presented in part seven at this point however a few words from stecchini may shed further light on the mystery that confronts us the basic idea of the great pyramid was that it should be a representation of the northern hemisphere of the earth a hemisphere projected on flat surfaces as is done in map making the great pyramid was a projection on four triangular surfaces the apex represented the pole and the perimeter represented the equator this is the reason why the perimeter is in relation to pi to the height the great pyramid represents the northern hemisphere on a scale of one to forty three thousand two hundred in part seven we shall see why this scale was chosen mathematical city rising up ahead of me as i walked towards the northern end of the street of the dead the pyramid of the moon mercifully undamaged by restorers had kept its original form as a four-stage ziggurat the pyramid of the sun too had consisted of four stages but bartras had whimsically sculpted in a fifth stage between the original third and fourth levels there was however one original feature of the pyramid of the sun that bartres had been unable to despoil a subterranean passageway leading from a natural cave under the west face after its accidental discovery in 1971 this passageway was thoroughly explored seven feet high it was found to run eastwards for more than 300 feet until it reached a point close to the pyramid's geometrical center here it depouched into a second cave of spacious dimensions which had been artificially enlarged into a shape very similar to that of a four-leaf plover the leaves were chambers each about 60 feet in circumference containing a variety of artifacts such as beautifully engraved slate discs and highly polished mirrors there was also a complex drainage system of interlocking segments of carved rock pipes this last feature was particularly puzzling because there was no known source of water within the pyramid the sluices however left little doubt that water must have been present in antiquity most probably in very large quantities this brought to mind the evidence for water having once run in the street of the dead the sluices and partition walls i had seen earlier to the north of the citadel and schlemmer's theory of reflecting pools and seismic forecasting indeed the more i thought about it the more it seemed that water had been the dominant motif at teotihuacan though i had hardly registered it that morning the temple of quetzalcoatl had been decorated not only with effigies of the plumed serpent but with unmistakable aquatic symbolism notably an undulating design suggestive of waves and large numbers of beautiful carvings of seashells with these images in my mind i reached the wide plaza at the base of the pyramid of the moon and imagined it filled with water as it might have been to a depth of about ten feet it would have looked magnificent majestic powerful and surreal the akapana pyramid in far off tiwanako had also been surrounded by water which had been the dominant motif there just as i now found it to be at teotihuacan i began to climb the pyramid of the moon it was smaller than the pyramid of the sun indeed less than half the size and was estimated to be made up of about one million tons of stone and earth as against two and a half million tons in the case of the pyramid of the sun the two monuments in other words had a combined weight of three and a half million tons it was thought unlikely that this quantity of material could have been manipulated by fewer than fifteen thousand men and it was calculated that such a workforce would have taken at least thirty years to complete such an enormous task sufficient laborers would certainly have been available in the vicinity the teotihuacan mapping project had demonstrated that the population of the city in its heyday could have been as large as two hundred thousand making it a bigger metropolis than imperial rome of the caesars the project had also established that the main monuments visible today covered just a small part of the overall area of ancient teotihuacan at its peak the city had extended across more than 12 square miles and had incorporated some 50 fifty thousand individual dwellings in two thousand apartment compounds six hundred subsidiary pyramids and temples and five hundred factory areas specializing in ceramic figurine lapidiary shell basalt slate and ground stonework at the top level of the pyramid of the moon i paused and turned slowly around across the valley floor which sloped gently downhill to the south the whole of teotihuacan now stretched before me a geometrical city designed and built by unknown architects in the time before history began in the east overlooking the arrow straight street of the dead loomed the pyramid of the sun eternally printing out the mathematical message it had been programmed with long ages ago a message which seemed to direct our attention to the shape of the earth it almost looked as though the civilization that had built teotihuacan had made a deliberate choice to encode complex information in enduring monuments and to do it using a mathematical language why a mathematical language perhaps because no matter what extreme changes and transformations human civilization might go through the radius of a circle multiplied by 2 pi or half the radius multiplied by 4 pi would always give the correct figure for that circle circumference in other words a mathematical language could have been chosen for practical reasons unlike any verbal tongue such a code could always be deciphered even by people from unrelated cultures living thousands of years in the future not for the first time i felt myself confronted by the dizzying possibility that an entire episode in the story of mankind might have been forgotten indeed it seemed to me then as i overlooked the mathematical city of the gods from the summit of the pyramid of the moon that our species could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the dark period so blightly and dismissively referred to as prehistory might turn out to conceal unimagined truths about our own past what is prehistory after all if not a time forgotten a time for which we have no records what is prehistory if not an epoch of impenetrable obscurity through which our ancestors passed but about which we have no conscious remembrance it was out of this epoch of obscurity configured in mathematical code along astronomical and geodetic lines that teotihuacan with all its riddles was sent down to us and out of that same epoch came the great olmec sculptures the inexplicably precise and accurate calendar the mayans inherited from their predecessors the inscrutable geoglyphs of nazca the mysterious andean city of tiwanako and so many other marvels of which we do not know the provenance it is almost as though we have awakened into the daylight of history from a long and troubled sleep and yet continue to be disturbed by the faint but haunting echoes of our dreams you

Channel: Jason Torres

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Keywords: fingerprints of the gods, fingerprints, fingerprints of god, magicians of the gods, fingerprints of the gods (book), gods, chariots of the gods, the, twilight of the gods, the roots of tanuki, lamb of god, when the sky fell, the fibonacci sequence in nature, the spirit molecule, pain and suffering, anthropic principle, experiments, words, sound healing, answers in genesis, wingmen ministries, bangover, interview, spherical, Graham Hancock, Lost Civilization, Pseudoarchaeology, audiobook

Id: w-9noHL1k3c

Length: 379min 22sec (22762 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021