The Missing Lands

by Freddy Silva

  Books in possession of Coptic Christians stated how at one time there existed a stela at Giza bearing the inscription, “I, Saurid, built the Pyramids in such and such a time, and finished them in six years. He that comes after me and says he is equal to me, let him destroy them in six hundred years; and yet it is known that it is easier to pluck down than to build. 32

  As to the date of construction, the historian Abu Zeyd el Balkhy once provided an ancient inscription that the Great Pyramid was built when the constellation Lyra was in Cancer, or more to the point, when its brightest star Vega was the pole star. This would have been the era of 12,000 BC. It was still considered the de facto pole star when the astrological Age of Cancer took place somewhere around the end of the ninth millennium, and while the latter cannot be pin-pointed with great certainty due to the discrepancies in calendrical systems, it still places the date of construction around the general epoch of the great flood.

  Chief among the gathered astronomer priests was the god of wisdom Twt — Djehuti, or Thoth to the Greeks — who, upon observing the position of the stars and the impending catastrophe, set about creating an unbreakable repository inside which every book related to knowledge would be preserved from ruin by the impending cosmic collision, reportedly a wealth of knowledge on astronomy, geometry, physics, the use of precious stones, even certain types of machinery.

  Did ancient writers believe the Great Pyramid to be this repository? Hundreds of studies prove beyond doubt that when one dissects the numbers hand-wired into the Great Pyramid a wealth of mathematical information is revealed concerning the measure of the Earth, the sky, even the cycle of Sirius. Early Arab chroniclers add to this list a history of past events and of those yet to come. Commenting in the 12th century, the Iraqi physician Abdul Latif remarked of the Great Pyramid: “The stones were inscribed with ancient characters, now unintelligible. I never met with a person in all Egypt who understood them. The inscriptions are so numerous that copies of those alone which may be seen upon the surface of the two pyramids would occupy above six thousand pages.”33

  In a manner of speaking, the great pyramid was an antediluvian book in itself.

  SERAPEUM. A NO BULL TEMPLE

  But I wonder, did Twt have another building in mind, less conspicuous than a pyramid, resembling more a storage room or vault? Eight miles southeast of Giza there exists such a place, an anomalous underground cavern by the name of Serapeum. Although situated in the vicinity of the temple complex of Saqqara, the Serapeum lies well outside the temple boundary. It is a lone wolf, a meandering repository of tunnels and side chambers uncharacteristically hacked out of solid bedrock with total absence of finesse. Nestled tight inside each chamber sits a basalt or black granite box of preposterous size, twenty-four in total, all meticulously shaped — although machined would be a more suitable adjective, the tolerances are engineered to perfection — each topped with a thirty ton lid, too unnecessary to cover a corpse, but perfectly designed to form an air- or watertight seal.

  Each box weighs up to eighty tons and is believed to have been a sarcophagus for aurochs, the enormous bulls representing the sacred hjpw or Apis. There’s just one problem with this theory: no bulls were ever found inside the boxes or near the Serapeum, and if grave robbers stole the bones, no evidence exists of there ever having been a black market for auroch bones. Even if we accept this preposterous idea, one still needs to explain why it was necessary to carve such cumbersome boxes for these animals when smaller ones would have sufficed.

  When Auguste Mariette rediscovered the Serapeum in 1850 it only contained one human burial, that of Khaemweset, a son of Ramesses II; all other boxes were empty except — suspiciously — one lone bone from a bull. A few bore markings and hieroglyphs. I’ve examined them up close, and it amazes me how no one is bothered by the rough quality of the scribbles, for that’s what they look like in comparison to the refined craftsmanship of the granite boxes. The hieroglyphs are crude, etched using a blunt instrument, as though thousands of years separate the boxes from the inscriptions — as though the fine art of stone engraving had been lost by the time Khaemweset was interred in 1213 BC. Interestingly, this pharaoh was a restorer of historical buildings, tombs and temples. Might he have rediscovered and reused the Serapeum?

  Tourists visiting the Serapeum in 1882, long before the age of pesky vendors.

  Since there is no evidence to prove it was originally intended as a tomb, I wish to propose an outlandish hypothesis: someone working against the clock hastily carved the tunnels and filled them with these air-tight boxes to protect something of far greater importance, such as Twt’s documents, from the cascade of water about to descend upon Egypt, then returned after the event, retrieved the contents and took them elsewhere. Of course, the obvious problem is, how do you locate an underground repository in a landscape transfigured beyond recognition by a global flood?

  One of the colossal granite boxes in the Serapeum. Below: Compared to the boxes’ precision tooling, the etched decoration is of very poor quality.

  Being expert astronomers, the Egyptians were aware of what was about to descend upon them, they would have prepared accordingly. If the Giza pyramids were being erected at this time, two advantages present themselves: first, they weathered the cataclysm; and second, they would have made reliable landmarks. Let’s say you were an astronomer on the high ground at Giza — marked by Menkaure's Pyramid — after the flood in, say, 9650 BC. Standing in front of the pyramid and looking at the southern sky around midnight on the winter solstice you would have observed the Southern Cross standing upright at 143º and right above the Serapeum, like an X marking the spot. Five hours later, just before sunrise, you would have noted the bright star Ankaa rising with its parent constellation above the same location; the name in Arabic means phoenix, and indeed belongs to the constellation of a bird. The symbolism of the retrieval of valuable knowledge and its rise from the ashes of catastrophe would not have not been lost on people for whom the employment of multiple layers of symbolism was an everyday practice.

  But to find any location it is necessary to triangulate by establishing three points of reference.

  The Serapeum's original entrance tunnel is curiously aligned 100º east and misses the equinox by a long shot. Nothing in temple design was done by accident, so the entrance must be referencing something else. At this latitude in the era of 9650 BC it marked the winter solstice sunrise, but whatever terrestrial backsight was used for this alignment is lost, buried, or most likely looted for building material.

  Which leaves the third point of reference. Like the Giza pyramids, those at Dashur and Meidun to the south are attributed to Sneferu c.2600 BC, but why should one pharaoh have required so many mausoleums when he only possessed one body? All the evidence linking Sneferu to this complex is a nearby graffiti written 1200 years after his reign, in which it is stated how the temples “belong to Sneferu,” nothing more.34 The statement does not claim the pharaoh built them, merely that he owned them, much like a monarch might own several cathedrals in his kingdom despite the buildings having been in existence centuries before his time.

  Locating the Serapeum in 9650 BC.

  The Bent Pyramid of Dashur has always been my personal favorite. Up close it has a certain aesthetic quality, in spite of archaeologists believing its two slopes are the result of a mistake. Isolated from Giza it tends to attract few visitors, making every visit personal. Like its neighbors to the north, the Bent Pyramid was not placed where it is by accident. According to Bauval and Gilbert's theory it too forms an integral part of the Orion-Giza matrix established in 10,400 BC and, together with the nearby Red Pyramid, marks the terrestrial counterpart of the Hyades cluster.35

  Like its peers, the Bent Pyramid is aligned to Grid North, making its apex an ideal marker of the celestial pole. Another observer standing at the base and looking north on the winter solstice in 9650 BC would have observed Vega, the nearest to a pole star in that era, appearing at 0º and right above the Serapeu
m at the same time the Southern Cross was referenced from Giza. The third point.

  A GAME OF NUMBERS

  It would seem that a number of structures in and around the Giza Plateau were planned as part of an antediluvian blueprint, and whoever set it up was conversant with celestial mechanics, not to mention molecular structures, because the Bent Pyramid is not the result of miscalculation. A trigonometric formula applied to its two unusual slopes reveals angles common to the hexagon and pentagon36 — 6:5 numerically — thus the Bent Pyramid, like Puma Punku before, reflects the numerical relationship of the Earth’s precessional cycle. Such temples are analogs of their host planet. Incidentally, human DNA is constructed from alternating six-sided and five-sided crystalline bonds, making us a mirror image of our own celestial sphere.

  It wasn’t just the architects in Egypt and the Andes that deduced and applied this know-how. The 6:5 ratio is also hardwired into the perimeter of the central temple complex at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, whose structures also depict on the ground the constellation Draco as it appeared in the sky in 10,400 BC.37 If this is mere coincidence then consider how Angkor is a corruption of Ankh Hor, an Egyptian phrase meaning Life Eternal of Horus, and that the latitudinal distance between the Bent Pyramid and Angkor is precisely 72º, the root number of the Earth’s precessional cycle.38

  It seems we keep bumping into the same architects reading from the same manual no matter where in the world we touch a stone.

  Speaking of which, take the smallest of the three Giza pyramids, the one that gets the least attention. Look carefully at the original granite casing stones along the base and you'll notice they are covered with the same protruding knobs common to Saqsayhuaman in Peru, whose name means Place of the Satisfied Falcon.

  Consider also how the Viracochas' nickname, Shining Ones, have antediluvian their counterparts in Egypt, the Aku Shemsu Hor, which translates as Shining Ones, Followers of Horus. It seems the same gods were present on different continents before and after the flood.

  Just like Puma Punku and the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat is based on the 6:5 ratio.

  9. THE ITZA, THE KAAN AND THE BALAM

  "Crocodilo! Crocodilo!" the pilot shouted enthusiastically as he steered the motorized canoe closer to the riverbank. Typically when one is within sight of a twenty-foot reptile with gaping jaws, the sensible thing is to turn the outboard motor in the opposite direction. But Juan Carlos was keen to get me as close to the crocodilo as possible. I believe it was a matter of pride.

  We disembarked sensibly a few hundred yards further downstream and onto the mud-laden shore. A short, young woman greeted us and offered a very favorable rate of exchange for gringo money. Further up the bank we came to the immigration point, a wooden shack with multiple layers of bright paint, all different colors, all in various stages of decomposition. A turkey calmly strolled out. Beside the shack, another woman vigorously washed clothes in a large metal bowl. An old Toyota truck rolled up and the rear hatch flipped open, revealing a wide assortment of everything one could need for the jungle home: washing powder, razors, stockings, an assortment of packaged food, and that symbol of western economic prosperity, Coca Cola. A dozen women of various ages and walking ability materialized from nowhere as though by teleportation, surrounded the truck and pointed at things inside.

  "You show passport now, señor."

  This was immigration control Guatemala style. It was simple and honest, my preferred method of travel.

  With evidence already procured from around the Pacific, the Near East, Egypt and the Andes validating the existence of a group of antediluvian individuals possessing extraordinary skills, I wanted to focus on how Central American indigenous people viewed the flood and from where they believe their ancestor gods might have heralded, particularly with regard to the writings of Plato. In Timaeus the Greek scholar outlines the tragic sinking of Atlantis as part oral tradition, part allegory. Most historians dismiss Plato's account as pure fiction, partly because they cannot stomach the idea of an advanced civilization existing prior to the twenty-first century, and mostly because they do not understand the mechanics of myth and its ability to convey important information to audiences then and now.

  Plato acknowledged his source to be Solon, a scholar and lawgiver who traveled the Nile delta and there learned of the story of a sunken antediluvian civilization from the temple priests at Sais. Solon originally wrote down his account for Socrates’ great-grandfather: "I, Solon, was never in my life so surprised as when I went to Egypt for instruction in my youth, and there, in the temple of Sais, saw an aged priest who told me of the island of Atlantis, which was sunk in the sea thousands of years ago… the people were friendly and good and well-affectioned towards all. But as time went on they grew less so, and they did not obey the laws, so that they offended heaven. In a single day and night the island disappeared and sank beneath the sea; and this is why the sea in that region grew so impassable and impenetrable, because there is a quantity of shallow mud in the way, and this was caused by the sinking of a single vast island. This is the tale which the old Egyptian priest told to me."1

  The Egyptians confided in Solon that, prior to a global flood nine thousand years before his time — marking the event around 9600 BC — the Atlantean empire existed beyond the mouth of the Mediterranean, stretched into southern Europe and Egypt, and records of said civilization still existed when the Greek scholar lived in Egypt.

  One pearl of wisdom imparted by the priests to Solon concerns an occasion deep in prehistory when the Earth rotated backwards, which led to an Ice Age: "I mean the change in the rising and the setting of the Sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set.... At certain periods [the Earth] revolves in the reverse direction...of all the changes which take place in the heavens, this reversal is the greatest and most complete."2

  Enough ink has been poured on the subject of Atlantis to fill an entire continent — an incomplete catalogue of literature lists 1700 titles, and that was back in 1929 3 — so I feel it unnecessary to regurgitate Plato's well-known story. Suffice it to say the Egyptian priests acquainted Solon with the history of the world as it really is rather than how academics prefer to interpret it. They had kept meticulous records extending deep into prehistory — the King List in the Turin Papyrus alone spans 36,000 years — not for the sake of record-keeping per se but as a warning to future generations not to be complacent about the world they live in, to realize that cataclysms are cyclical and bound to come around and undermine the ill-prepared. The achievements and pitfalls of their predecessors became the guideposts for future generations.

  I wondered what the Guatemalans might have to say on the matter.

  The people generally associated with this region — which includes the Yucatan peninsula — are the K'iche' and the Maya. When gold-hungry Conquistadores arrived in the sixteenth century they were astonished to find sprawling temple cities complete with astronomical towers. Everywhere they plundered they saw a people obsessed with the mapping of the sky and the charting of extraordinary spans of time. For example, the Maya employed a number of calendars for tracking the synodic cycle of Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, along with the cyclic phenomena of eclipses, solstices, and equinoxes. There was a cycle related to the 266-day female gestation cycle, a general 365-day solar cycle, and a 52-year calendar round when the same beginning point in the previous two calendars coincided. Each one interlocks at critical points, demonstrating the interrelationship of the cosmos. Supplemental calendars included a 819-day count, the multiplication of sacred numbers 7, 9 and 13, a 584-day Venus transit that aligns with the Earth and Sun, and Great Cycles comprising 2160 years. Such calculations could only come from incredibly long periods of observation, therefore the Maya or their progenitors must be incalculably old.

  The Maya also had absolute knowledge of thirteen dimensions or states of consciousness, and on one l
evel, the development of such intricate calendars was due to this intimate experience, all of which defined their existence on this material plane.4

  By contrast, the arriving Spanish still believed the Earth to be at the center of a solar system around which rotated the Sun, and thus got by from day to day with a simple solar calendar. Maya cosmology must have reeked of witchcraft. Even to the modern mind their vast astral knowledge seems otherworldly, excessive, unwarranted.

  Or is it? Another example is the Maya long count calendar that spans 26,000 years and comes with markers. One marker, the Third World, began c.9600 BC, the period of the great flood; another began around 3113 BC when the maize God directed a group of other gods to set the Universe to order once again, ushering the Fourth World (coincidentally the same period when the first pharaoh of purely human blood is said to have ascended the throne in Egypt). That World reached its apex in 2012 AD and humanity would have a window of thirty years either side to adapt to the changes marking the transit to the next World.5

  One point of view concerning the origin of the word maya is that it derives from a star in the Pleiades seen at its heliacal rising over Yucatan c.3113 BC, heralding the era of the people who took on this collective name.6 Maya, like Maori or Waitaha, refers not so much to genetics or race but to a way of thinking, it is an overarching principle defining a group of people. According to my good friend, the Maya teacher Miguel Angel Vergara, maya refers to a person who has raised their consciousness through the understanding and application of sacred knowledge, it is an allegory, a statement of spiritual consciousness. One is not born maya, one becomes maya. Such a title is adopted as a collective noun when a group of people share the same spiritual ideal or aspiration.7 This explains why elders claim the roots of Maya to be much, much older, and the people from whom they descend had different names which reflected the period or World in which they existed.