From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  At the moment, there is so much unexcavated in Teotihuacan that it is impossible to say when the original site was laid out—it may well be that, as in the case of Stonehenge, it was built at widely separated periods. We must take into account the possibility that it may have already been there when the Toltecs came, just as it was when the Aztecs discovered it. All we know is that, like the interior of the Great Pyramid, it seems to have been laid out with a weird and baffling precision. And why did the builders of the Sun Pyramid want to install a layer of mica? The same applies to a building known as the Mica Temple not far from the Sun Pyramid. Under its floor are two enormous sheets of mica, 90 feet square. It is fortunate that Batres was dead by the time the Mica Temple was discovered, for it enabled archaeologists to discover a curious fact: that the chemistry of the mica reveals that it is not local mica, but that it came from Brazil, two thousand miles away. Why? And how were 90-foot sheets of mica transported? Moreover, why was it then placed under the floor? What purpose did it serve there? Graham Hancock points out that mica is used as an insulator in condensers, and that it can be used to slow down nuclear reactions, but it is hard to see how an underfloor layer of mica could serve any scientific purpose.

  Teotihuacan means ‘City of the gods’, or more literally ‘City where men become gods’. This makes it sound as if it served some important ritual purpose, perhaps analogous to Bauval’s notion that the ‘air shafts’ of the Great Pyramid are intended to direct the soul of the pharaoh into the sky, where he becomes a god.

  So, like the Giza complex, the city of Teotihuacan remains a mystery. At the moment, its complex measurements and the arrangement of its strange buildings make no sense. All that seems reasonably certain, once again, is that it was built with astronomical alignments in mind, and that to the Toltecs—or whoever built it—it symbolised some divine mystery, whose nature has been long forgotten.

  The same is true of South America’s most famous enigma, the Nazca lines. These were discovered in 1941 by an American professor of history named Paul Kosok, who happened to be flying over the desert near the town of Nazca, Peru, looking for irrigation channels. What he saw from the air was a series of hundreds of amazing drawings in the sand—giant birds, insects, fishes, animals and flowers, including a spider, a condor, a monkey and a whale. They had never been seen before because they cannot be seen from ground level—200 square miles of plateau. At ground level, they proved to be made by moving the small stones that form the surface of the desert to reveal the hard soil underneath. There are also huge geometrical figures, and long lines stretching to the horizon, some of which end abruptly on mountain tops.

  The Nazca plain is windy, but the stones on its surface absorb sufficient heat to cause rising air, which protects the ground level. Rain is extremely rare. So the giant drawings have remained undisturbed for centuries, possibly millennia. Some organic remains from the area have been carbon dated to a period between AD 350 and 600, and pottery to as early as the first century BC, but the lines themselves cannot be dated.

  Erich von Daniken would later suggest that the long lines were intended as runways for the aircraft of ancient space travellers, but this overlooks the fact that an aeroplane would blast the stones in all directions; the same applies to a spacecraft rising vertically.

  On 22 June 1941, Kosok saw the sun setting at the end of one of the lines stretching into the distance across the desert. It was the midwinter solstice in southern Peru—that is, the time the sun hovers over the Tropic of Capricorn and prepares to return north. This convinced Kosok that the lines had some astronomical purpose.

  But when Gerald Hawkins fed the various alignments into his computer, looking at a period from 5000 BC to AD 1900, he was disappointed; none of the lines pointed conclusively at certain stars at significant times—such as the solstice or equinox. Kosok, it seemed, was wrong.

  But a later investigator, Dr Phyllis Pitluga, of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, discovered that this was not entirely true. Her researches demonstrated that the giant spider was intended as a model of the constellation of Orion, and that the series of straight lines around it were designed to track the three stars of Orion’s Belt. So the Nazca spider, like the Giza pyramids, is associated with Orion’s Belt.

  Tony Morrison, a zoologist who studied the lines with Gerald Hawkins, concludes his book Pathways to the Gods (1978) with a quotation from a Spanish magistrate, Luis de Monzon, who wrote in 1586 about worked stones and ancient roads near Nazca:

  The old Indians say that... they have knowledge of their ancestors, that in very old times, before the Incas ruled over them, there came to the land another people they call Viracochas, not many of them, and they were followed by Indians who came after them listening to their word, and now the Indians say they must have been saintly persons. And so to them they built paths which can be seen today.

  And here, surely, we have the key to the mystery of the Nazca lines: the legendary hero-teacher Viracocha, also called Quetzalcoatl and Kon-Tiki, whose return was still expected when Cortés landed. The old Indians’ constructed the great figures, because they expected Viracocha to return—this time from the air—and the figures were intended as a marker.

  How did they make the figures? Many writers have speculated that the Indians must have possessed hot-air balloons. But even if this were true, it would hardly be of much use to the Indians on the ground. You cannot make a 900-foot figure from a thousand feet above it.

  On the other hand, the construction of giant drawings is not beyond the skill of a group of dedicated workers guided by priests. It is simply a question of constructing a huge version from a small drawing or plan. Ancient Britons faced a similar task when they carved huge figures in the chalk of the Downs, and the same is true of Gutzon Borglum, the artist who carved the giant faces of American presidents at Mount Rushmore. Neither is it entirely true that lines on the desert cannot be seen from ground level—there are many hills and mountains in the Nazca area that would enable the artists to gain a sense of perspective. Tony Morrison has pointed out that although the stones of the Nazca figures are weathered to a dark colour, the tracks left on the desert by a motor car are bright yellow, and the Nazca lines must originally have been highly visible.

  It is unlikely, of course, that the lines and figures were intended solely as markers. They may also have had some significance as fertility figures, and may have been the site of ritual dances. Yet Luis de Monzon’s comment, in 1586, that the Indians built paths to Viracocha, surely offers the most obvious and straightforward explanation of the purpose of the lines.

  We have seen how, at the end of the nineteenth century, many respectable archaeologists believed that the Sphinx was far, far older than the pyramids, and how modern Egyptologists have moved steadily in the direction of caution, substituting a kind of dispassionate classicism for what they feel to be irresponsible romanticism. The same thing happened to South American archaeology. In 1922, Byron Cummings, of the University of Arizona, noticed a large overgrown hill off the road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, covered with a coating of solid lava. He removed the lava cover—often using dynamite—and discovered that it was a truncated pyramid, probably the earliest known. It was the Mexican version of the Step Pyramid of Zoser. A New Zealand geologist placed the age of the lava field between 7,000 and 2,000 years, and Byron Cummings decided that 7,000 years was probably accurate. Modern scholars prefer to date it between 600 BC and AD 200. In his book on archaeology in the Americas, Conquistadores Without Swords (1967), Leo Deuel states that although there may have been human beings in Mexico ten thousand or more years ago, farmers and builders made their appearance around 2000 BC.

  In general he echoes the attitude of most archaeologists: that it is pure romanticism to link the pyramids of South America with those of Egypt, because there are several thousand years between them. Yet, as we have seen, this may be missing the point—which is the question of the age of the tradition to which the Olmecs and Toltecs and Mayas belo
nged. The ruins of Tiahuanaco seem to demonstrate more clearly than others that civilisation in South America may be far older than we suppose.

  Graham Hancock makes the same point when discussing the Maya calendar, which came in turn from the Olmecs (who made the giant negroid heads that curiously resemble the face of the Sphinx). The European calendar estimates the length of the year to be 365¾ days. The correct length is 365.2422. But the Mayas estimated it at 365.2420—immeasurably more accurate than our western calendar. They estimated the time taken by the moon to revolve around the earth almost as accurately as a modern computer—29.528395 days. Their astronomy shows a sophistication comparable to our own. Yet these were the people of whom one scholar asks how they can have failed to grasp the principle of the wheel. The answer, suggests Hancock, is that Maya astronomy was not their own creation, but a legacy from the distant past.

  All that we know of the civilisations of Central and South America suggests that they did not grow up in isolation from the rest of the world. There was a point when they were connected with Europe and the Middle East, perhaps even with India. The legends suggest that civilisation was brought to South America by white men, soon after some great catastrophe that obscured the sun. Documents and traditions suggest that such a catastrophe occurred around 10,500 BC.

  If we cannot be dogmatic about the date of the catastrophe that struck Tiahuanaco in the Andes, we do know the date of a catastrophe that struck Egypt. Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture began several millennia before the age we usually assign to the first farmers. Before 1300 BC, sickle blades and corn-grinding stones appear in late Paleolithic tool-kits. The absence of fish remains at this period suggests that man had learned to feed himself by agriculture. Then, it seems, a series of natural disasters, including tremendous floods down the Nile Valley, put an end to the ‘agricultural revolution’ in about 10,500 BC. This is the date when, West speculates, the destruction of ‘Atlantis’ occurred, and survivors came to Egypt and built the earliest version of the Sphinx. This is the date when, according to Bauval, the ‘proto-Egyptians’ planned, and possibly began building, the Giza pyramids. This is also the date given by Nature in 1971 and The New Scientist in 1972 as that of the last reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles.

  All this at least suggests that the date when the ‘white gods’ came from the east to Mexico was 10,500 BC. If that is true, and the tradition that Viracocha founded the sacred city of Teotihuacan has a basis in fact, then Teotihuacan was also at least ‘planned’ at the same time as the Giza pyramids, and whatever knowledge is embodied in its geometrical lay-out was brought from a civilisation in the throes of destruction.

  Now we know that the Egyptians attached special importance to the dog star Sirius, and to the constellation of Orion, at whose heel it stands. We also know that the Abbé Brasseur was convinced that Sirius was the sacred star of the Maya. We have reason to believe that the spider on the Nazca plain represents the constellation of Orion, which was of equal importance to the Egyptians. As ‘coincidences’ like these continue to pile up, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the civilisations of North Africa and Central and South America had some common origin, and that this common origin lies so deep in the past that our only chance of understanding it lies in deciphering the faint—almost invisible—signs it has left behind.

  6 The Antiquity of Man

  The small town of Altdorf, near Nuremberg, is ignored in most encyclopaedias and gazetteers, which include only its better-known namesake in Switzerland, where William Tell shot an arrow from his son’s head. Yet it has an even more remarkable distinction. It is the place where modern man first began to suspect that his ancestry might extend back for millions of years.

  The man responsible, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, would have been horrified at the very idea. He was a devout Christian who believed that every word of the Bible is literally true. And it was while trying to prove this that he unleashed the flood that would become modern palaeontology, the science of ancient, extinct organisms.

  The year seems to have been 1705—Scheuchzer never bothered to record the exact date—and he was taking a walk with a friend named Langhans. Both young men were students, and they had climbed Gallows Hill, at the top of which stood the town gibbet, and paused to survey the surrounding landscape, with its fields of hops illuminated by the golden evening sunlight. Then Scheuchzer’s attention was drawn to a large rock at his feet. The rock itself was grey, but clearly visible in it were a number of black vertebrae. Scheuchzer pointed at it.

  ‘Look! There’s a proof that the Flood really took place! That backbone is human.’

  Langhans surveyed the rock with distaste.

  ‘I’m sure it is—some poor devil who was hanged centuries ago. For God’s sake put it down!’

  And he knocked the rock out of Scheuchzer’s hand. It bounced down the hillside, hit another rock, and smashed. Scheuchzer chased after it with a howl of anguish. The impact had scattered fragments of the grey rock over a wide area, and Scheuchzer had to scrabble in the dust for a few minutes before he succeeded in finding two of the blackened vertebrae. Breathless, he carried them back to the gibbet.

  ‘Look, human bones! And you saw them inside the rock. How could the bones of a hanged man get inside a rock? These have been here for thousands of years, since Noah’s Flood.’

  ‘Why are they black?’

  ‘Because he was one of the sinners that God intended to destroy, like the inhabitants of Sodom.’

  Ignoring his friend’s protest, Scheuchzer dropped the vertebrae into the capacious pockets of his frock-coat. It was his doctor’s coat, and he liked to wear it on walks, for he often picked up fragments of old bone or flint, to add to his collection of oddments that were supposed to prove the truth of the Bible.

  Five years later, now the chief physician in Zurich, and a canon of the Church, Scheuchzer wrote a pamphlet to prove that the Flood had really taken place. He pointed out that many rocks with the shape of fishes inside them had been found hundreds of miles inland, and argued that they had been left high and dry when the Flood subsided. Then he went on to describe the two vertebrae he had found on Gallows Hill, embedded in a stone. How had they got inside the stone?

  The pamphlet caused a considerable stir, and clergymen quoted it from their pulpits to prove the truth of the Bible. But scientists were hostile. Fossils had been known for centuries—a learned Arab named Avicenna had written about them around the year 1000, and explained that they were literally jokes—freaks of a mischievous Nature, which enjoyed imitating living forms, just as clouds imitate faces. Three centuries later, Leonardo—who often dug up fossils while directing the construction of canals—had suggested they were the remains of living animals, but no one took him seriously. Now scientists declared that Scheuchzer’s vertebrae were really pieces of rock.

  But what enraged Scheuchzer most was a book recently published by a mineralogist named John Bajer, which contained a picture of some vertebrae exactly like those discovered under the Altdorf gallows. And Bajer had labelled them fish vertebrae. Scheuchzer published a pamphlet attacking Bajer, but Bajer stuck to his opinion. It would be more than another century before science proved them both wrong, and identified the bones as those of an ichthyosaurus, a sort of prehistoric crocodile that flourished in the Jurassic era, around two hundred million years ago.

  Scheuchzer was determined to prove that fossils were the bones of Flood victims, and he had many disciples, who called themselves Floodists (or Diluvians). Sixteen years later, in 1726, the Floodists were triumphant when Scheuchzer produced conclusive proof of the reality of the Flood. This was a rock from the limestone quarries of Oningen, in Baden, and it contained some indisputably humanoid remains, with an almost complete skull, a spine, and a pelvic bone. Again, the pamphlet about it became something of a bestseller. And again, time would prove Scheuchzer to have been mistaken; long after his death, his early human proved to be the skeleton of a lizard.
r />   Yet it had served its purpose. Scheuchzer’s pamphlet had caused widespread debate, and his supporters grew in number. They mostly agreed with Archbishop James Ussher, who, in the time of James I, had worked out that the world was created in 4004 BC (by adding together all the dates in the Bible), and constructed all kinds of amazing creatures from the bones and fragments they dug up, including a unicorn and a dragon. But some of the more perceptive noticed that fossils found at different depths were often quite unlike one another, which seemed to suggest that creatures might change from age to age...

  Scheuchzer died in 1733, at the age of 61, still totally convinced that the Bible contained the full story of creation—as, indeed, was most of the Christian world of his time. Yet even by the early eighteenth century, one remarkable man of genius had grasped the truth. His name was Benoit de Maillet, and he was a French diplomat, born in 1656. In 1715, Maillet wrote a book called Telliamed (his own name spelt backwards) which suggested that the germ of life came from outer space, and gradually developed into marine organisms in the ocean. Fish had crawled on to the land, and developed into birds and animals. All this had happened over millions of years. But Maillet decided against publishing the book in his own lifetime, in case it jeopardised his standing as a government official. It appeared eleven years after his death, in 1749. But it had been read in manuscript by many cultured people, and widely discussed. Malilet—who is now forgotten—should be regarded as the creator of the theory of evolution.

  Voltaire derided Malilet’s theory, as he also derided the notion that fossils are the remains of prehistoric organisms. His view was that fish fossils found in mountains were the remains of travellers’ meals. He did not try to explain why the bones had fossilised in rocks instead of rotting away. Voltaire’s type of scepticism was widespread in the late eighteenth century.