Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

  Based on geographic position, the site’s elevation, and the Azimuth that indicates true north, they figured that the portal for the Sun’s rays was built when the Earth’s Declination Angle was just under 24.1°. Using Lockyer’s system to determine the date of construction by the angle of declination, they arrived at the date of 3710 B.C. Since the other temples, such as the Ggantija one, were built hundreds of years earlier—the claim for Malta’s “First” in the construction of stone temples followed.

  Figure 68

  This, I must say, sounded far-fetched to me. The dwellers in Malta at that early period were engaged in primitive farming and used stone tools; could they have performed the technological feats ascribed to them? On close examination, it turned out that the photographic evidence in Micaleff ’s book, of the sunray shining on a particular stone, was taken not on Solstice Day but on Equinox Day; it confirmed the orientation of that particular axis to the East—but not more than that.

  And so it was that early on Summer Solstice Day in 1999 I and my Expeditions group set out not only to view sunrise—but also to check out the feasibility of the fourth millennium B.C. dates.

  Our first destination was the Mnajdra lower temple; our measuring tool was the Sun itself. Sunrise, we were told, was due at 6:07:45 a.m. local summer time. We were there ahead of time, straining our eyes and readying our cameras . . . As the minutes passed, the darkened skies to the east-northeast began to light. Our eyes were glued to the indicated aperture in the stone portal (fig. 69). The moment of Heliacal Rising, when the reddish globe of the Sun appears against the background of the still dark-starry skies, was coming. And then a golden ray of the Sun burst through the portal, painting a ray of light on the marker stone, and we managed to commemorate the moment with our cameras (plate 22).

  Figure 69

  This Mnajdra structure was definitely a Solar “Temple”—but when was it built?

  The members of my group were filled with pride of achievement, but I shook my head with doubt: Should the Sun’s ray have struck the marker stone (see S3 in fig. 68) after the passage of 5,689 years, as Micaleff had calculated in 1979?

  As we sat down outside the temple to eat the boxed breakfasts that the hotel provided to us, I reminded my group of what we had seen at Stonehenge. There, even though the marker stone called the Heel Stone was moved, at least once and probably twice, the line of sight has shifted off it (see fig. 59). If Mnajdra is older than Stonehenge by more than a thousand years, should the ancient alignment here still work? In Egypt, I said, a temple orientation to the solstice had to be changed every few centuries; so the fact that we did see the Sun’s rays strike the marker stone might suggest that the temple here is much more recent than it is purported to be. With so many factors needed to arrive at the Declination angle, the slightest change in the calculations made a difference of centuries. The temple’s Very Old Age, I felt, remained in doubt.

  We then walked down to the nearby Hagar Qim. Situated on the island’s southern coast, it offers a spectacular view of the Mediterranean Sea and of a tiny uninhabited island off the coast. It is, after Ggantija, the largest temple complex—situated like it at the water’s edge, yet quite different from it. In addition to the massive natural stone boulders as at Ggantija, here many stone slabs are cut and fashioned, smoothed and shaped, with clear passages and entranceways whose large stone-posts and lintel stones create trilithons. Hagar Qim was undoubtedly built by talented stonemasons, with an artistic touch expressed in artfully shaped and decorated stones that some call “altars.” It was at Hagar Qim that two of the Fat Goddess statues were found.

  The temple’s layout strongly suggested that the main entranceway to the cloverleaf part, with its “Holy of Holies” at the far end, was also purposely oriented to the Sun—in this case, to the southwest, which meant Winter Solstice. With some of us positioned at the strategic points and using strings that we brought with us, we tried to establish astronomical view lines. We ended up convinced that Hagar Qim too was a Sun Temple; and its originally suggested date—between 2400 to 2200 B.C.—made sense to us.

  Our investigative tour of Malta’s temples ended with what all deem the latest of them all—the one at Tarxien. Now surrounded by residential houses not far from Valletta, it has the appearance of an open-air museum, with its beautifully fashioned stonework giving an impression that the craftsmen have only recently left. The stone blocks are ashlar-like, precisely cut and angled; the wall behind the presumed Holy of Holies is perfectly semi-circular; stone blocks are decorated with reliefs and friezes dominated by the spiral motif, and are accurately done. A large statue of the Fat Goddess, of which only the bottom part remains, stands in an open courtyard, right at the main entrance, as if placed there by a museum curator. Tarxien’s archaeologically established date, 2200/2100 B.C., made more sense to us than the exaggerated archaeoastronomical claims.

  So when exactly were all these temples built? Even at the less distant dates, the feat was extraordinary; so who were the builders, and what was the purpose?

  The United Nations, when it declared in the late 1980s seven of these temples as a World Heritage, considered them to have been built between 3000 and 2500 B.C. In my varied writings I have suggested that circa 2200 B.C. a Divine Architect—the god called by the Sumerians Ningishzidda, by the Egyptians Thoth, and by the Mesoamericans Quetzalcoatl—roamed the Earth and taught Man how to erect calendars in stone with which to determine the Zodiacal Age. It was done in the context of a mounting conflict between the Enki and Enlil clans, a conflict that led to the use of nuclear weapons in 2024 B.C.

  It is in that, I still believe, that the explanation for Malta’s Temple Mysteries will be found.

  Before we left Malta, we had to see its other puzzling enigma—the Ruts.

  The dictionary defines rut as “a narrow channel or groove in something, especially one made by wheels of a vehicle.” The dictionary’s definition aptly describes what we saw: parallel grooves cut into the ground. The mystery is that these parallel grooves have been cut into solid stone, and could not have been made by wheels of a vehicle—because neither wheels nor vehicles existed in Neolithic times; and even if they did, no grooves could be made by passing wheels in the hard rocky ground.

  The grooves that are usually referred to in Malta as “cart-ruts” were once visible in many places in Malta, but mostly in its western part and even on Gozo. But urbanization has obscured the ruts in many places, and the one place where we spent considerable time was left as an unoccupied field, fenced off from its surrounding and encroaching buildings (fig. 70)—an amazing relic from an unknown time, for there is no way to verify the date of a groove in a rocky field.

  Figure 70

  The ruts run mostly, but not exclusively, as a pair of parallel grooves—as indeed the parallel wheels of a cart would leave in a muddy trail (plate 23); except that, as stated above, the terrain is neither muddy nor soft in any way, but hard solid rock; oddly, where the soil is softer clay rather than hard limestone, no cart-ruts have been found. The grooves are sometimes a single pair, sometimes manifold. Their width varies—quite substantially, from about 4 inches to more than 20 inches. Their depth varies too—from mere surface markings to some 24 inches deep, and the variations appear even within the groove-run of the same rut. The distance between parallel pairs, though averaging about 55 inches, also varies—not only from pair to pair, but even in the course of the same groove pair.

  If one would assume that discovering from where to where the ruts lead (or have led) would offer an answer to the ruts’ enigma, one is disappointed: They sometimes run in the same direction, but as often as not veer aside, turn, crisscross each other—as in a place nicknamed “Clapham Junction” after a busy railroad hub in England (plate 24). They run up cliffs and down slopes, as if the terrain didn’t matter. Were they related to the temples or somehow made by the temple builders? The ruts’ directions do not lead to any temple sites. They sometimes run for a short distance and abruptly st
op—or seem to run without end, in some cases all the way to the shore and underwater on the sea floor—an indication, some think, that the ruts were made before the sea level rose.

  Of all the unanswered questions of Who, When, By Whom, Why, and so on, the one that seems to defy all reasoning is HOW. No matter whether left by wheeled carts or otherwise, by Neolithic people or Bronze Age men, for this purpose or that—how on Earth were these grooves cut so deeply into solid rock?

  We left Malta without an answer.

  7

  THE ICEMAN OF THE ALPS

  There is one more interesting archaeological site in Malta; called the Hypogeum, it is a maze of underground chambers, hewn out of the rocky ground, that served as a subterranean City of the Dead. The bones of thousands of people were found there; and I and my group skipped the pleasure. But oh how I wished we could get hold of a real fellow from those millennia ago, and find out more!

  The wish, in a manner of speaking, was fulfilled a year later.

  The ultra plump female images—the “Mother Goddess” statues and statuettes—that were found in Malta were not unique. Called by archaeologists (undoubtedly with tongue-in-cheek) “Venus figurines,” they have been found elsewhere in European Neolithic sites, in fact all the way to the eastern Mediterranean. That, and the probably correct assumption that Malta’s early settlers had come from Italy via Sicily, aroused my curiosity to see for myself the Iceman of the Alps.

  High in the Alps mountains of the Tyrol region, where Italy and Austria meet, millions of people cut through the sky-high peaks by using the Brenner Pass, a natural cleft in the otherwise impassable terrain. They do so nowadays by car or train; but thousands of years ago a lone traveler went that way on foot. A storm, an avalanche, or something else caused him to lie down—never to awake.

  It was on September 19, 1991, that two mountain climbers discovered the frozen body in a melting glacier, at l0,500 feet above sea level. The find was notified to the Austrian police, who assumed that it was the body of a recently lost hiker: It was an especially hot summer that year, and the melting ice had already exposed several other corpses of missing climbers. But when they took a good look at the male body, they had a shock: It was utterly mummified; it must have lain frozen in the ice for many decades.

  Police forensic experts, arriving by helicopter, observed that what remained of the man’s clothing seemed very odd. He wore some kind of leather or fur coat lined with straw, and he wore on his neck a necklace made of stones. They wondered whether the man had been buried in the ice for centuries rather than decades.

  Anthropologists from the nearby University of Innsbruck were called in. They checked the man’s clothing and implements. He had a sort of a backpack made of wood; a leather pouch hanging from his belt contained fire flints and a knife with a stone blade. Was he a Stone Age relic? The dead man clutched in his hand a crude axe, and one of the scientists—professor Konrad Spindler—realized that the blade was made of bronze; it was an axe as was used by people in the Bronze Age. Could it be that the man died forty centuries ago?

  Based on the evidence before them, the Austrian scientists announced that the body was that of a Bronze-Age man who lived 4,000 years ago!

  The news, and the photographs the police took, soon made headlines around the world (as this one in the American press, fig. 71): A body found in an Alpine glacier was four thousand years old.

  The find was “of extraordinary scientific significance,” Prof. Spindler told the press as he gave details of the steps taken to preserve the body in a low-temperature container for further examination. But what was then presented as a matter of a few weeks of examination and study turned out to be a series of discoveries over the following years—yes, years, not just weeks or months—with unexpected twists and turns.

  Figure 71

  Once the significance of the find was realized (the body’s mishandling during the first several days is a sad tale in itself ), it was moved to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where it was placed in a special room with a controlled atmosphere similar in temperature and humidity to that of his Alpine icy tomb.

  Within a year, a broad portrait of the Iceman had emerged. He was in his late twenties or early thirties when he died, and was just over 5 feet tall. Presumably an outdoorsman, he was dressed for the Alpine weather. His coat was made of patches of animal fur skins, stitched together in a mosaic-like fashion with threads of animal sinew and repaired with plant fibers. Over this he wore for added warmth and protection a cape made of woven grass. On his feet he wore shoes made of leather and stuffed with hay, and on his head a furry cap.

  He held in his right hand a long wooden staff pointed at the end, like a spear, and had other weapons. They included a stringless bow, and arrows in a leather quiver. The bow was made of yew—wood best suited for the purpose. The arrows, equipped with flint heads, were feathered, revealing a knowledge of aerodynamics. The quiver also contained an untreated sinew, that could be made into a bowstring; a ball of fibrous cord; a sharp thorn of a deer antler that could be used for scraping; and four antler tips. There was also the flint knife with a wooden handle, and the bronze axe earlier mentioned; except that the “bronze”—copper alloyed with tin by an elaborate process—turned out on further examination to be just plain copper.

  The Iceman was not from the Bronze Age—he was from the earlier Copper Age. His age shifted back from 4,000 years to 4,400, then to 4,800. Radiocarbon dating of the wood and leather objects established an even earlier date: 5,300 years ago. The uniqueness of the find was amazing: Here was the intact body of a fully dressed and equipped European man from 3300 B.C.!

  That was more than half a millennium after the start of the Sumerian civilization, but a time that predated the start of pharaonic civilization in Egypt by two centuries. In the context of the study of the rise and spread of human civilizations, it was a find that aroused my curiosity; it was included as one objective of an Earth Chronicles Expedition after the one to Malta.

  The Expedition, however, was not to Austria but to Italy . . .

  To which country the unique find belonged was an issue that had its roots in the events of the discovery’s first week. It is a tale that makes one wonder about the whole subject of the treatment of OOPs and the fate of other significant finds.

  The couple who had stumbled upon the corpse-in-the-ice, Mr. Helmut Simon and his wife, were German tourists staying in a nearby Alpine hamlet. They hurried back to report the find, and the owner—uncertain of jurisdiction—called the police on both sides of the border. An Austrian policeman showed up the next day; the Italians never did. He tried to free the frozen body by using a jackhammer, but gave up and left. Over the weekend that followed, curiosity seekers flocked to the site, doing their best to break the ice and pluck pieces off the body and its garments. On Monday a team of police investigators arrived from Austria. Using pickaxes, they managed to free the corpse and took it to Innsbruck, where it was deposited in a local morgue. Lying unprotected, the body was shown to local reporters. It was only then that Dr. Spindler, director of the Innsbruck Institute of Prehistory, arrived at the morgue (the report that he flew to the discovery site by helicopter, seems to be a later glorified version; but it was he who had realized the uniqueness of the find).

  The exposed corpse, by then almost a week out of its protective ice tomb, was beginning to show a fungal infection on its skin. Spindler’s team treated the body with fungicides, wrapped it in plastics, covered it with chipped ice, and moved it to a cooled room at the university. It was thus that the Iceman was saved from rotting disintegration.

  It was then that the international media, alerted by Dr. Spindler’s statements that an intact body of Bronze Age man had been discovered, became immensely curious; and it was only then that the Italians awoke to the scientific and touristic potentialities of the find. They demanded a determination on which side of the Italian-Austrian border the body was actually found. When a joint survey team decided that the site
was 100 yards from the border—on the Italian side—the Italians demanded the immediate transfer of the corpse to Italy. The Austrians said, in effect, Finders Keepers.

  The compromise that was worked out allowed the Austrians to keep the Iceman—named by them Oetzi after the glacier’s name—and conduct tests for three years; then he was to be handed over to the Italian authorities of South Tyrol. In fact, the transfer occurred only in 1998, when the Italians were ready to keep the body and its accoutrements in a former bank building converted to a specially equipped museum—the Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol in Bolzano, the regional capital.

  It was there that I and my Earth Chronicles Expeditions group went in March 2000.

  We left rainy Milan in the morning, and arrived in dry and chilly Bolzano, by train, in the afternoon. The rooms in our hotel (Hotel Alpi) had small balconies, enabling one to take in the Alpine view—towering mountains that seemed to compete with each other for altitude. The Museum required groups to come in by advance appointment only, and ours was for 10 a.m. the next morning.

  We arrived somewhat ahead of time, and were made to wait until the doors opened. But the English-language “Record Guides” (electronic gadgets that speak into your ears explanations near each display), that were also reserved in advance, were there for us; and we were free to roam the Museum during our allotted time.