From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  But the Gateway had never been finished. Something had interrupted the sculptor and snapped the gate in two—and the scattered stone blocks made it obvious that it was an earthquake. Posnansky believed that this catastrophe had occurred in the eleventh millennium BC, temporarily drowning the city of Tiahuanaco. This had been followed by a series of seismic disturbances that had lowered the level of the lake and made the climate colder. And at this point, the survivors had built raised, undulating fields on the land now rescued from under the water. The farming technique, according to a source quoted by Hancock, revealed a remarkable sophistication, so the fields could out-perform fields using modern farming techniques, producing three times as many potatoes as a similar modern plot. Potatoes in experimental plots created in this ancient pattern by modern agronomists also survived frosts and droughts that would normally ruin the crop.

  Hancock clearly suspects that these agricultural innovations—as well as techniques for detoxifying the poisonous potatoes of these high regions—were brought to Tiahuanaco after the ‘catastrophe’ that flooded the city, a speculation that seems to be in line with the notion that Viracocha and his many namesakes—Quetzalcoatl, Kon-Tiki, Votan, Thunupa—arrived after the ‘darkening of the sun’.

  Hancock proceeds to an even bolder speculation. The language of the Indians around Lake Titicaca is called Aymara (while the language spoken by the Incas of Peru was Quechua). Aymara has the interesting characteristic of being so simple and unambiguous in its structures that it can easily be translated into computer-language. ‘Was it just coincidence that an apparently artificial language governed by a computer-friendly syntax should be spoken today in the environs of Tiahuanaco? Or could Aymara be the legacy of the high learning that all the legends attribute to Viracocha?’

  One thing seems clear: that if Viracocha landed on the east coast of Central America, as the Aztec legends affirm, and his influence was equally powerful across the other side of the continent, then the civilisation that he brought must have been as vast as the present-day civilisation of Europe or North America. And it is unlikely that a civilisation as widespread as this would remain confined to one continent: it was probably worldwide—the great maritime civilisation posited by Charles Hapgood.

  Graham Hancock went on to travel all over South and Central America, and his first-hand experience of ancient sites confirmed his belief that he was dealing with a civilisation that preceded the devastation of Tiahuanaco (some time in the eleventh millennium BC), and which was the common ancestor of dynastic Egypt, as well as of the Olmecs, the Mayas and the Aztecs. Let me summarise his main conclusions.

  Again and again he was impressed—and baffled—by the sheer size of the stones used in some of the ancient structures. In the citadel of Sacsayhuaman (not far from Cuzco, Peru)...

  ...I craned my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my route now passed under. Twelve feet high, seven feet across, and weighing considerably more than 100 tons, it was a work of man, not 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 twenty-eight feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons (roughly the equivalent of five hundred family-sized automobiles), it seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out for answers.

  He experienced the same sense of bafflement in Machu Picchu, the ‘lost citadel’ hidden away on the top of a mountain, and forgotten for centuries. The Incas, under their leader Manco Capac, had retreated from the Spaniards in 1533, after Pizzaro’s treacherous murder of Manco’s brother, King Atahualpa. From Machu Picchu—perhaps one of the most beautiful and spectacular sights in the world—they harassed the Spaniards for years, even laying siege to Cuzco. And although they came within a few miles, the Spaniards never discovered their hideout on the inaccessible mountain top. When the Incas finally gave up the struggle, Machu Picchu remained deserted for almost four centuries, until the American explorer Hiram Bingham was'led to it by a local Indian in 1911.

  Machu Picchu was not built by Manco. Although dated by historians to about the end of the fifteenth century AD, Professor Rolf Müller of Potsdam—one of the team who studied Posnansky’s results at Tiahuanaco—concluded from its astronomical alignments that it was built between 4000 and 2000 BC.

  Here, as in Sacsayhuaman, Hancock was staggered by the sheer Magnitude of the achievement. Whoever built Machu Picchu had deployed the same kind of labour force as the pharaohs who built the pyramids, and had devoted to it the same care and precision—giant blocks laid together with such exactitude that it was often impossible to insert a sheet of paper between them. ‘One smoothly polished polygonal monolith was around twelve 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?’

  From Peru, the Hancocks travelled to Central America. In Chichen Itzá, in Yucatan, Hancock was intrigued by the design of the great pyramid of Kukulcan (one of the many names of Viracocha). It has 365 steps, and in some mysterious way, these are so arranged that on two days of the year—at the spring and autumn equinoxes—patterns of light and shadow combine to create the illusion of a huge serpent writhing up the staircase; it lasts precisely 3 hours and 22 minutes. Such a feat is, in its way, as impressive as the construction of the Great Pyramid. In fact, the great pyramid of the Mayas at Cholula, near Mexico City, is three times as massive as the Great Pyramid of Giza, covering an area of 45 acres—the largest building on earth.

  Thirty miles to the north-east of Mexico City lie the ruins of the sacred Toltec city of Teotihuacan. The first Europeans to see it were Cortés and his soldiers, and the circumstances were—to say the least—unpropitious.

  On 8 November 1519, Cortés had entered the capital city of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), and been awed by its size and beauty. This city of vast pyramids and temples, palaces and canals, was built in the centre of a huge lake, and was as sophisticated as Madrid or Venice. These people were clearly not savages, but the product of an ancient civilisation. The Aztecs declared that it was modelled on the original capital of their lost homeland, standing in the middle of a lake and surrounded by concentric canals—which inevitably brings to mind Plato’s Atlantis.

  Cortés took the first opportunity to seize the friendly emperor Montezuma, who would die as the Spaniards’ captive. It was when they massacred the Aztecs during one of their religious ceremonies that they reaped the whirlwind. It was on the night of 1 July 1520 that the Aztecs caught the Spaniards trying to flee, and slaughtered about five hundred of them and four thousand of their Mexican allies. The Spaniards called it ‘La Noche Triste’—The Night of Sorrows. Cortés and the survivors escaped north, and found themselves in a valley near an Indian village named Otumba; all around them stretched the ruins of an ancient city that seemed to be buried under tons of earth. There they camped between two great mounds.

  Two days later, they found themselves confronting an immense army of Mexican Indians. Here Cortés revealed his military genius. He realised that a richly dressed man in the centre of the enemy must be the chief, and plunged straight at him with his small band of warriors. The sheer ferocity of the attack took the Indians by surprise, and the chief was killed. As the news spread, the Indian armies—who outnumbered the Spaniards by about a hundred to one—fled.

  The city with the buried pyramids was the ancient capital of Teotihuacan. The local Indians knew nothing about its origin—they said that it had already been there when the Aztecs came. The two vast mounds were two pyramids, called the House (or Temple) of the Sun and the House of the Moon. These were joined by a great avenue that the Indians called the Way of the Dead, because the
y thought the mounds on either side of it were tombs. (They proved to be wrong.) Further in the distance there was another great mound, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Charnay had started to excavate it in 1883, but gave up. However, he noticed one thing that was to strike later observers: that the faces portrayed on pottery and masks had an incredible variety: Caucasian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Negro. (A later observer also noted that there were Mongoloid faces, and every kind of white person, particularly Semitic types.) It seemed that, at some point in its history, the land of the Aztecs and the Mayas had been a cosmopolitan centre like Constantinople.

  In 1884, an ex-soldier named Leopoldo Batres persuaded his brother-in-law, the infamous dictator Porfirio Diaz, to appoint him Inspector of Monuments, and allow him to excavate Teotihuacan. Batres was less interested in archaeology than in finding treasure, or pottery and artefacts that could be sold to European museums. He was puzzled by the sheer quantity of earth and rubble that covered the city—as if, he speculated, the inhabitants had deliberately buried it to protect it from sacrilegious invaders. His excavations revealed that the city had probably been abandoned after some catastrophe that had set it on fire; many buildings were full of charred skeletons.

  Batres’s highly profitable excavations continued for more than two decades. He managed to represent himself as a serious archaeologist by publishing a dozen or more worthless books arguing with fellow archaeologists, but continued to plunder wherever he got the chance.

  His one indisputable contribution to archaeology was his excavation of one of the great triangular mounds under which Cortés had camped nearly four hundred years earlier. He hired large gangs of workmen at a few cents a day—even his skilled stonemasons were only paid 25 cents a day—with donkeys and baskets, and they were soon moving up to a thousand tons of earth a day. Later, he even laid a railway at the bottom of the mound, and hauled the earth away in wagons. And what soon began to emerge was a magnificent step pyramid, the area of whose base was roughly the same as that of the Great Pyramid at Giza (although it was only half as high). Between two of the upper levels of the pyramid, Batres found two layers of mica—a glass-like mineral which can be split into extremely fine sheets. Since this vast quantity was worth a great deal of money, Batres lost no time in removing it and selling it.

  The pyramid left no doubt that tales of sacrifice were true. In each corner of each ‘step’ the seated skeleton of a six-year-old child was found, buried alive; most crumbled to dust as soon as they were unearthed.

  On the flat top of the pyramid there were the remains of a temple, now virtually destroyed by centuries of vegetable growth. Under the rubble he found a large number of human figures carved out of jade, jasper, alabaster and human bone, which convinced him that this was a sun temple dedicated to the god Quetzalcoatl (or Viracocha). He also found a kind of flute that produced a seven-note scale unlike the European scale.

  Batres’s idea of excavation would make any modern archaeologist weep. His aim was simply to create an impressive-looking monument. But the builders of the Sun Pyramid had not—like the builders of the Giza pyramids—used solid blocks; they had used a mixture of adobe and stones. In their enthusiasm, Batres’s workmen often hacked straight through what had probably been the outer wall, with the result that three of the faces of the pyramid are half a dozen metres further in than they should be.

  Fortunately, Batres was unable to finish his work of vandalism. The pyramid was intended to be finished in time to celebrate the dictator’s re-election in 1910, but work had still some way to go when Diaz was overthrown, and had to flee to France. Batres soon found himself vigorously denounced by archaeologists and scholars, particularly an American lady named Zelia Nuttal, who—now Diaz was deposed—was able to detail the sins of Leopoldo Batres with a wealth of embarrassing detail that came from years of observation. Like his brother-in-law the President, the Inspector of Monuments had a great fall, and—mercifully—vanished from the history of archaeology.

  Further excavation of Teotihuacan has made it clear that the site is as mysterious as Giza. The first and most obvious observation is that the actual lay-out of its three major monuments—the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl—has much in common with the curious lay-out of the pyramids of Cheops, Chefren and Menkaura. The great square of the ‘Citadel’ (or religious complex) and the Temple of the Sun are in a direct line along the so-called Street of the Dead, while the Temple of the Moon is at the end of the Street, and therefore out of alignment with the other two.

  Graham Hancock visited Teotihuacan, and pondered on its mysteries. Like many recent authorities, he had no doubt that the lay-out is astronomical. Gerald Hawkins, author of Stonehenge Decoded, points out in Beyond Stonehenge that, while the streets are laid out on a grid system (four miles across), they intersect at angles of 89 degrees instead of 90. Moreover, the grid is not, as you might expect, aligned to the four points of the compass, but is twisted sideways so that the Street of the Dead runs north-north-east, pointing at the setting of the Pleiades.

  Another discovery of Hawkins may strike us as even more significant. Feeding the data into his computer, he discovered an alignment with the dog star Sirius—which, as we saw earlier, is associated in Egypt with Isis, and which the Dogon of Mali know to have an invisible companion, Sirius B. And in his book The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple points out that the ‘Nommo’—the amphibian gods from whom the Dogon claim to have acquired their knowledge of Sirius B—sound very like the alien amphibians whom the historian Berosus claims founded Babylonian civilisation, and whose leader was called Oannes. We have already noted the observation made by Le Plongeon regarding the similarity between this god’s name and the Mayan word ‘oaana’, meaning ‘He who has his residence in water’. If he is correct, this would seem to argue a connection between Central America and the lands of the Middle East. If we also recollect Robert Temple’s suggestion that the Dogon derived their knowledge from ancient Egypt, then we once more have what looks like a plausible link between Egypt and South America.

  Le Plongeon had also noted that many of the pyramids of Yucatan were 21 metres in height, and that their vertical planes (i.e. the plane that would be formed if the pyramid was sliced in half with a huge knife) could be inscribed in a semi-circle—in other words, that the height was the radius of a circle whose diameter was the base. This led him to suspect that these pyramids were intended to represent the earth—or rather, the upper half of the globe. We have already noted John Taylor’s discovery that the height of the Great Pyramid, when compared with its base, is precisely the radius of a half-sphere compared to the circumference of its base, and his speculation that the Pyramid was intended as a representation of the earth. In other words, the Maya method would seem to be cruder, but is just as effective a method of suggesting the earth.

  Hawkins learned of Teotihuacan from a scholar named James Dow, who theorised that the city was built on a ‘cosmic framework’. Another scholar, Stansbury Hagar, has also suggested that Teotihuacan is a ‘map of heaven’, and that the Street of the Dead is intended to play the part of the Milky Way—as, according to Robert Bauval, does the Nile with reference to the Orion ‘stars’ of the Giza pyramids. (Graham Hancock speculates that the Way of the Dead was originally filled with water, which would have made it even more like the Nile.) And an engineer named Hugh Harleston, who surveyed Teotihuacan in the 60s and 70s, concluded that it might well be a model of the solar system, with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl as the sun, and the planets all represented at proportionally correct distances, right out to some so-far unexcavated mounds representing Neptune and Pluto. This, of course, sounds totally absurd, with its suggestion that the builders of Teotihuacan—perhaps AD 500, but perhaps even as long ago as 2000 BC—might have known not only the relative distances of the planets, but even about planets not then discovered. Yet it is no more nor less absurd than Temple’s observation that the Dogon knew that Sirius was a double star, that the moon was dry and dead
, and that Saturn had a ring around it.

  Harleston went on to work out that the basic unit used in Teotihuacan was 1.059 metres. Noting also the frequency of the figure 378 metres (for example, between boundary markers along the Way of the Dead), Harleston observed that 1.059 multiplied by 378, then by 100,000, gives a very accurate figure for the Polar radius of the earth, and seems to support Le Plongeon’s speculation that the pyramids were designed as scale models of the earth.

  All this sounds like an argument in favour of von Daniken’s space visitors. But what Schwaller de Lubicz and John West and Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval are all suggesting is rather less controversial: that ancient peoples probably inherited their knowledge from a civilisation that knew a great many things. Whether these things were originally brought to earth by ‘Nommo’ from the stars is, for our purposes, irrelevant. If ever any evidence for it turns up, then it might become relevant. But for the moment, there is a far more fascinating problem: what these remote people knew, and how they applied their knowledge. This is something we can investigate.

  But where Teotihuacan is concerned, our investigations still leave the subject steeped in mystery. We do not know the date it was built. If it was built by the Toltecs, then its date could be anything between AD 500 and 1100. But some carbon dating has yielded a date at the beginning of the Christian era—which is earlier than the Toltecs. The Aztecs themselves declared that Teotihuacan was built at the beginning of the Fifth Age, in 3113 BC, by Quetzalcoatl. Their previous four ages (or ‘suns’) lasted, respectively, 4008 years, 4010 years, 4081 years and 5026 years, which adds up to 17,125 years before the beginning of the Fifth Sun. In other words, the Aztecs date the ‘beginnings’ of civilisation back to 20,238 BC. (They also anticipated its end, in violent earthquakes, on 24 December 2012.)