Among the troves of evidence compiled by early geologists and resurrected by Allan and Delair are Asian bone caves filled with diverse species of recent prehistoric animals from around the world. These carcasses could have been driven to their final resting places only by vast amounts of water moving across the globe. In light of Allan and Delair’s work, other evidence such as India’s Deccan trap, a vast triangular plain of lava several thousand feet thick covering 250,000 square miles, and the Indo-Gangetic trough, a gigantic crack in Earth’s surface stretching from Sumatra through India to the Persian Gulf, can be interpreted as evidence of a cataclysm that ruptured Earth’s crust, submerged various landmasses, and caused the great extinction.
Other titillating fragments of anomalous evidence suggest a pervasive if not advanced seafaring or even airborne culture having once existed in ancient India—for example, the identical nature of the Indus Valley script to that found at Easter Island on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Initial reports suggest, it should be noted, that the script found recently in the Gulf of Cambay resembles the Indus Valley script. According to certain south Indian researchers, the indecipherable scripts are written in a proto-Tamil language, which would link the culture of distant Easter Island and its famous megalithic statues with ancient southern India, Kumari Kandam—an idea echoed in the lore of Easter Islanders about a lost continent to the West from which their people originated.
With the recent advent of underwater archeology, records of the past are being rewritten. More research is needed, as well as more expeditions into treacherous waters and the depths of the world’s oceans; but more than ever, textbook scenarios of prehistory are drowning of their own weight while scenes of a more glorious past rise to the surface via acoustic imaging. Past being prologue, those images are of interest not to academics alone, but to all who would solve the mystery of human origins.
11 Pushing Back the Portals of Civilization
For John Anthony West, the Quest for Evidence of Advanced Prehistoric Civilization Is Bearing New Fruit
J. Douglas Kenyon
“Just as an athlete’s ego is bound up in winning and he feels miserable at losing the Super Bowl,” chuckles John Anthony West, “the egos of scholars and scientists are tied up in being right. They don’t have much money and much fame and there’s no glamour in it, and when someone comes along, like me, from out of left field they react like scalded cats.”
Tormenting the reigning breed of cats remains a favorite source of amusement to this self-appointed scourge of the “Church of Progress.” For West, the modern Western version of civilization, with “its hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste,” is no match for its long-buried predecessors (both historic and otherwise), and scholars who disrespect the legacy of our ancient forebears West considers to be, at the very least, “idiotic.”
When the saga of Atlantis Rising magazine began in November 1994, our cover story, “Getting Answers from the Sphinx,” featured the brewing storm surrounding research by West and the Boston University geologist Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., indicating that the Sphinx of Giza was rain-weathered and thus thousands of years older than had been maintained by the Egyptological establishment. The controversy has hardly subsided.
Since that time, the writers Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval have joined the fray with enormous internationally best-selling books underscoring West’s contentions and adding their own concerning the astronomical purposes of the Giza monuments. And while all four remain persona non grata among most professional Egyptologists, their ideas—publicized worldwide in numerous media accounts—have achieved an unprecedented notoriety and forced the establishment to break from its standard practice of simply ignoring impudent notions and actually, on occasion, to argue the merits of them.
The result has not been particularly encouraging to the Church of Progress. The September 16, 2002 Fox TV/ National Geographic special entitled “Opening the Lost Tombs: Live from Egypt” aired live from Giza in prime time was but the latest of many broadcasts to give major time to the heretical views of West, Schoch, Hancock, and Bauval. Despite all efforts of the debunkers, support for their notions continues to snowball.
At the heart of the controversy are the mysteries surrounding the birth of civilization. Did we, as the academic establishment insists, emerge from the Stone Age about five thousand years ago and only then begin the slow and painful ascent to our present “lofty” heights? Or was there, in remotest antiquity, a fountainhead of civilization that rose to levels of sophistication equal if not superior to our own, and yet which vanished so completely that hardly a trace of it remains?
If the latter is true and can be proved, the implications are profound indeed, if not earthshaking. That West and Schoch may be producing the first scientifically irrefutable evidence for the existence of that progenitor culture could be one of the most important scholarly achievements of our time, and one that could rain convincingly on the parade of the Church of Progress.
Atlantis Rising talked with John West about his ongoing struggle with the establishment and new evidence he has accumulated to buttress and perhaps clinch his case for the existence of a sophisticated prehistoric civilization. He also talked about his debt to an obscure Alsatian archeologist whose contribution to our understanding of ancient Egypt is only beginning to be appreciated.
THE LEGACY OF SCHWALLER DE LUBICZ
The master plan to understanding the wisdom of ancient Egypt is already in place, West believes, but does not, as you might expect, come from within the precincts of the Egyptological establishment. The massive work of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, assembled during an exhaustive study of the Temple at Luxor from 1937 to 1952, amounts to nothing less than “a unified field theory” of the philosophy and science of ancient Egypt. Schwaller de Lubicz is best known for his comprehensive, seminal work on ancient Egypt entitled The Temple of Man. He founded the “symbolist” school of Egyptology, of which West is currently the most outspoken proponent. West’s book, Serpent in the Sky, remains the most complete commentary in English on Schwaller de Lubicz’s work.
Schwaller de Lubicz was looking for evidence of ancient insight into the principles of harmony and proportion. In particular he was looking for knowledge of the Golden Section (a ratio mathematically expressed as 1 plus the square root of 5 over 2), which has been credited to the Greeks but not the Egyptians. Using measurements that were then in the process of determination by a French team of architects and archeologists, Schwaller de Lubicz was able to demonstrate that, indeed, the Golden Section was applied at Luxor and with a complexity and sophistication never achieved by the Greeks.
Here was irrefutable evidence of advanced mathematical development existing more than a thousand years before Pythagoras. “Obviously this did-n’t spring out of nowhere,” says West. “New Kingdom Egypt (Luxor was built by Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century B.C.E.) is in the tradition of Middle and Old Kingdom Egypt, so by extension, Schwaller de Lubicz pretty much proved that Egypt understood harmony and proportion from the reputed very beginnings of its existence, back to 3000 B.C.E. or a bit earlier.” All of which suggests the likelihood of still older developments, coinciding nicely with the theories of West and Schoch about the age of the Sphinx, which, interestingly, were based upon a casual observation by Schwaller de Lubicz that the Sphinx had been weathered by water.
“Egypt was in no way a kind of magnificent dry run for Greece, which in turn gave rise to our brilliant civilization,” says West. “The Greeks themselves acknowledged the greater fount and source of the wisdom that came later. In other words, civilization has been on a downhill slide since ancient Egypt. In fact, ancient Egypt itself was on a downhill trip from its very beginnings because, strangely enough, it reached its absolute peak—the height of its prowess and sophistication—fairly early in the Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. . . . and pretty much everything thereafter was a lesser accomplishment, even the fabulous temples of the New Kingdom.”
“But, . . . �
�� the question has always persisted, “if there was an advanced civilization in prehistory, where are the artifacts?” That is a question that John West has long sought to answer, and with the discoveries at the Sphinx he has made a significant first step.
But the undeniable physical remains of that mother culture, he insists, are in no way limited to the Sphinx. Several sites, potentially as compelling, provide evidence that thousands of years before the oldest acknowledged remnants of the so-called Old Kingdom, Egypt was host to a highly developed civilization. One previously unnoticed site West now believes might well make his case.
SECRETS OF THE RED PYRAMID
Usually attributed to the fourth-dynasty pharaoh Snefru, the Red Pyramid of Dahshur is part of a military reservation and was until recently closed to the public. A near equal in total volume to the Great Pyramid (credited to Snefru’s son Cheops), the Red Pyramid (so named for its pink granite) slopes a bit more gently. Fairly accessible now, it offers visitors the opportunity to climb a steep staircase on the northern face and then descend the 138 steps of a long, sloping corridor to the first of two high-gabled chambers that, though horizontal, resemble the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid.
At the end of the second chamber are wooden steps, provided by the Egyptian antiquities department, leading to still a third gabled chamber, which, rising to a height of fifty feet, is at right angles to the first two. Standing on a wooden balcony, the visitor is able to look down into a kind a pit surrounded by a jumble of worked stones. No sign of a burial of any kind has ever been found in the Red Pyramid.
When this writer first looked at that place, several points seemed obvious. The stones in the pit were clearly of a different type from those of the structure above. Moreover, while the pyramid had been built with great precision, the arrangement of the pit was chaotic. And even though the stones were doubtless cut artificially, their edges had been rounded in a way that suggested water weathering. I remarked to West that I thought the place must be part of a much older site, over which the Red Pyramid had been built, possibly to memorialize a sacred spot. Whatever weathering had occurred clearly had been brought to a halt by the sheltering pyramid. In making these observations, I thought I was doing no more than stating the obvious, but to my amazement, John West became very excited. “I think you’re absolutely right,” he exclaimed. “I don’t see any other possible explanation.”
As it turned out, this was not the first time he had wondered about the meaning of that chamber. “I’d been into that Red Pyramid half a dozen times since it reopened a couple of years ago,” he recalled, “puzzling over this strange, so-called burial chamber, which didn’t look as though it had been plundered . . .”
John West continues, “Why is it in that state of disarray? It looks as though it’s been taken apart, but then it doesn’t look as though it’s been taken apart. Not once did it occur to me that, hey, this was once outside—not inside. Yes, these are old, deeply weathered stones. The trick now is to get the geologists over there and see just what kind of stones they are.”
The experts, like Schoch, West believes, will also find ways of dating the place. Currently West is of the opinion that the stones are hard limestone, and very old indeed. “I think it was a sacred spot to the very ancient Egyptians,” he said, “and they built the whole Red Pyramid around it.”
Throughout the rest of our tour, West referred again and again to what he said he felt was a “truly important discovery,” even dubbing the chamber Kenyon’s Cavern, and adding that he felt the place might serve, as nothing had yet, to “clinch” his case.
“The opposition is always saying,” complains West, “how can the Sphinx be the only evidence of this earlier civilization? Well, it isn’t. But then they go selectively deaf when I start pointing out the other pieces of evidence.” Before the discovery in the Red Pyramid, he looked at the Mastaba Fields, southwest of the Sphinx, where a structure once served as the tomb of Khentkaus, the queen of Menkaure—the builder, it is said, of the third and smallest Giza pyramid. The ruined southwest corner of the structure reveals that the 4,500-year-old repair covers blocks that are obviously much older and which bear the same telltale signs of water weathering that caused all the furor at the nearby Sphinx.
And there are other anomalies, “The two-stage construction of the Khafre pyramid (the Greek historian Herodotus is our only source for the attribution)—the giant blocks on the bottom and on the paving, the slabs around the base—are absolutely out of sync with the other Old Kingdom masonry that constitutes that pyramid. The same applies to the Menkaure pyramid. And there’s the deeply weathered shaft east of the midpoint of the Saqqara pyramid.”
He also sees strange inconsistencies between the valley temple near the Sphinx and other constructions supposedly by Chephren. Moreover, West believes that the so-called Osirion at Abydos, with its massive undecorated granite blocks, is certainly much older and of a style completely alien to the neighboring temple of Osiris built by Seti I in the New Kingdom: “To attribute these two temples to the same builder is like saying the builders of the Chartres cathedral also built the Empire State Building.” West is hopeful that the many feet of Nile silt strata that once covered the Oseirion, and which still surround it, will eventually be carbon-dated and that this will put the matter to rest.
West’s evidence is not confined to architecture. In the Cairo Museum, for instance, is a small vase associated with the dawn of the Old Kingdom. Made from the hardest of diorite, the precision of its form and its perfectly hollowed interior are impossible to explain in terms of any known tooling techniques of the time. It could be much older, as could many similar vases that have been discovered.
And, of course, there are the pyramid texts carved into the walls of fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids. The consensus among experts is that the texts were copied from much older sources. Just how much older is the question. On that same trip to Egypt, West was accompanied by Clesson H. Harvey, a physicist and linguist who has spent the better part of forty years translating the pyramid texts. The texts, Harvey believes, reveal that the Egyptian religion originates not millennia, but rather tens of millennia before the Old Kingdom. West thinks Harvey is on the right track.
Despite the weight of the evidence, though, West is not expecting established Egyptology to give ground quickly. “It’s very similar to the Church of the Middle Ages and its rejection of Galileo’s heliocentric solar system. The centrality of humanity in God’s scheme wasn’t something they were prepared to give up easily. . . . Now, the idea of a much more ancient source of civilization is a very hard thing for Egyptologists to acknowledge. And it’s not just that civilization is older—but that it was sophisticated and capable of producing technological feats that we can’t reproduce.”
TOWARD A PROPER EGYPTOLOGY
When it comes to proposing a suitable course for Egyptology, West is not ungenerous with his advice. Ph.D.’s in the field, he feels, would be better earned on challenges more meaningful than inventorying Tutankhamen’s underwear. In fact, he can reel off dozens of suitable projects for more enlightened research. He would, for example, like to see the kind of meticulous architectural studies that Schwaller de Lubicz did on the temple of Luxor done elsewhere.
Studies of that type, he feels, should be applied to certain temples to determine the harmonics, proportions, measures, and so on. “The temples have been surveyed, but nobody’s looked at their geometric breakdowns—how they grow from the core sanctuary into the finalized temple. It’s through that kind of study that you would come to understand the esoteric doctrine, mathematical, geometric, harmonic, et cetera, attached to each of the gods or principles.”
West also believes that a study of gestures in temple art would yield much insight. Another possible line of research has to do with the systematic effacements on temple walls. He has observed that the careful selection, in many temples, of certain images to efface indicates not the work of later religious fanatics, but indeed the carefully con
sidered actions of Egyptian priests who saw one era ending and another dawning and were taking the appropriate measures.
So far, though, there appears to be no rush to pick up his gauntlet. Yet, if the present surge of interest in what he and Schwaller de Lubicz might call “a return to the source” continues, an emerging generation of scholars, equipped with new information and deeper insight, may soon venture into terrain where few of their predecessors have dared to go.
12 New Studies Confirm Very Old Sphinx
Orthodox Protests Notwithstanding, Evidence for the Schoch/West Thesis Is Growing
Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.
For the past ten years, I have been working closely with John Anthony West on the redating of the Great Sphinx of Giza. The traditional date for the statue is circa 2500 B.C.E., but based on my geological analysis, I am convinced that the oldest portions of the Sphinx date back to at least circa 5000 B.C.E. (and John West believes that it may be considerably older still). Such a chronology, however, goes against not just Classical Egyptology, but also many long-held assumptions concerning the dating and origin of early civilizations. I cannot recall how many times I have been told by erstwhile university colleagues that such an early date for the Sphinx is simply impossible because humans were technologically and socially incapable of such feats that long ago. Yet, I must follow where the evidence leads.
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