CHOLULA: THE WORLD’S LARGEST PYRAMID
Cholula is a four-hour bus journey north from Monte Albán, through a wild mountain area. From Mexico City it is two hours south, across the altiplano. When the Spanish conquistadors found this colossal pyramid they pillaged the facing stones to build their own city at Pueblo. When the raw earth was exposed by this looting, first grass then trees grew over the mound, so it came to resemble a natural hill. The deception was completed when the Spanish built a chapel on top, among the trees. A range of tunnels has been dug into the interior, nearly eight miles of them, through which visitors trudge today. The base was originally 1,475 feet across, twice the size of the base of Cheops but almost precisely the size of the base of Emperor Qin’s pyramid at Xian.
Cholula’s claim to fame was its superb pottery, probably the world’s finest, first produced when the site was inhabited about the same time as Monte Albán, around 1500 B.C. This sublime pottery was exported all over the Olmec and Mayan world (to be described in more detail later). Cholula people also developed eggshell-thin pottery, which was exported to China by Zheng He’s fleets.
TEOTIHUACÁN
I first visited Teotihuacán, on the altiplano an hour north of Mexico City, in 1972, accompanied by Miguel, an old and very knowledgeable guide. On a beautiful summer’s evening I watched the sun set from the Pyramid of the Moon and vowed to return to try to discover the site’s secrets. Teotihuacán is much the same age as Cholula and Monte Albán, but the complex was built on a grander scale. Teotihuacán was a heavyweight political and military state at its apogee, around 600 A.D., with a population of 125,000, where Aztecs later came to venerate their ancestors. It was about ten times the size of London in the same era. Its culture was influenced by the Olmec and its architecture was copied in later Mayan sites, notably Tikal.
In the 1970s an American civil engineer, Hugh Harleston Jr., took about nine thousand measurements at Teotihuacán. He found that along the center line of the complex, markers were placed to correspond with the orbital distances of the inner planets around the sun—the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (Pyramid of the Sun), Uranus (Pyramid of the Moon); Neptune and Pluto were represented by two mounds farther north. He found the front wall of the Pyramid of the Sun is exactly perpendicular to the point on the horizon where the sun sets at the equinoxes. The rest of the buildings were laid out at right angles to the Pyramid of the Sun.
From the wealth of evidence, Harleston deduced a series of numbers that to him meant that the builders knew the precession of the Earth’s axis over a period of twenty-six thousand years—a matter that will be referred to later when we consider the Dresden Codex of the Maya.
The presence of Chinese artifacts at Teotihuacán was discussed by James Churchward in 1926, who also noted the studies of anthropologist William Niven.
Churchward described a tomb he examined at the nearby Haluepantla
which contain the finest artefacts I have ever seen in Mexico. I am inclined to think the room was thirty feet square, its walls were made of concrete and crushed down to within a foot of their bases. Below was a tomb. In the center, on a raised rectangular platform, also of concrete, lay the skull and some of the bones of a man who could not have been more than five feet in height. His arms were very long, reaching almost to the knees, and his skull was decidedly of a Mongolian type. Around his neck had been a string of green jade beads. Green jade is not a Mexican mineral.
Lying beside the body was a string of 597 pieces of shell. I say string, but the buckskin thong which had once borne them was long since rotted to dust, and the wampum, or money, lay as if it had fallen from a string. With this money lay the greatest find of all—the little Chinaman.1
CHICHEN ITZA
Chichen Itza is far to the south, in the center of the Yucatán Peninsula about eighty miles east of Mérida. While it is a very beautiful site, the pyramids are of the same era as Gothic cathedrals in Europe, to give you an idea of their relative youth. Other Mayan and Olmec pyramids are two thousand years older—built earlier than the temples of Greece and Rome. The brilliant mathematicians and astronomers of those early pyramids seem to have been forgotten. Chichen Itza symbolizes elegant decay and death.
The central pyramid at Chichen Itza, Kukulkan, was built by the Toltec in the late tenth century, when the Maya were collapsing. It is a superb, graceful pyramid of white stone. The setting is accentuated by a carpet of smooth lawn, around which are a series of elegant stone buildings, notably a large ball court, the largest such ancient site in the Americas.
Relevant to our discussion of astronomy is the caracol—meaning “shell” in Spanish—a round observatory with small windows aligned both to the sun’s position at the equinoxes and to the position of Venus at various important times—notably when emerging from behind the sun, as will be discussed later.
COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF OLMEC AND MAYAN PYRAMIDS IN CENTRAL AMERICA
These visits and observations, combined with research, open us to certain clear conclusions. First of all, the complexes looked the same—stepped pyramids with flat tops surrounded by satellite pyramids for burials of lesser chiefs. The central pyramid was a burial mound and also aligned in such a way as to be used as an astronomical platform. The principal pyramid had a burial chamber at its base, reached by interior passageways that were always painted in red cinnabar. The tomb held the body of the king, surrounded by goods to accompany him into the next life. In that respect, the Central American pyramids resembled Egyptian, but their shape was totally different from the Egyptian trapezoidal—these were much flatter, with more emphasis given to the surrounding plazas and palaces. All were of rammed earth, originally faced with stone, and were positioned with mountains or hills as a backdrop. The whole complex was aligned on a north-south axis.
I was greatly interested in the precise alignment of the pyramids because it seemed to me this might establish the type of astronomy practiced there. As mentioned in Hugh Harleston’s study of Teotihuacán, was meridian passage of the sun studied? To this end I planned to arrive at noon, when the sun should be at its highest. By studying the shadows I assumed I could determine when this moment had arrived. Then I could place a pole due south and use my watch to establish the alignment by setting the twelve o’clock hand to south.
Alas! I had forgotten we were in the tropics and that the sun was virtually ahead at noon with almost no shadow. As navigators we used to be taught a method called “ex-mer” to account for this, but I had forgotten how ex-mer worked, so I had to abandon use of the sun! I waited for nightfall instead so that I could use Polaris, the North Star, to point at due north.
Many Mexican archaeological sites are closed at sunset but sound and light shows came to our rescue, notably at Uxmal—a particularly beautiful demonstration a few minutes’ walk from the Jungle Lodge where we were staying. Here I found the principal pyramid was aligned at about 15 degrees, which seemed to make no sense whatsoever since it appeared to have no relationship to the sun’s position at equinoxes or solstices.
Almost all of the sites have Olmec or Mayan writing and dates (dots and dashes), which makes it possible to obtain an approximate building date for each—I say approximate since the majority of sites were built over a long period. At Tikal, for example, huge pyramids were built in the jungle over a one-thousand-year span. Many sites had later structures built on top of earlier ones. The great pyramid at Cholula was the final overlay of six previous smaller pyramids buried beneath (the smallest of course being the oldest).
In any case, I could get a reasonable approximation of the dates and could compile a table of age against alignment. This brought the fascinating disclosure that the oldest pyramid at La Venta pointed 4 degrees west of north—356 degrees—while the newest, Uxmal, was substantially east of north—15 degrees. (I disregarded Chichen Itza because it was built by the conquering Toltec and not by Maya.)
The era when the principal pyramid pointed due north—zero degrees—was when Moral-Reforma,
an Olmec/Mayan crossover site in modern-day Tabasco state, with a double pyramid, was built, around 1000 B.C. In fact, there was a fairly even progression: the alignment gradually shifted eastward about 3.5 degrees every one thousand years. The next step was obvious—use software to establish Polaris’s position at 1000 B.C. I found it was nowhere near the North Pole but the star Kochab was. I tracked Kochab’s apparent shifting position and found the Olmec and Mayan pyramid alignment tracked Kochab from 1400 B.C. until 900 A.D. Why was this?
Speed 16 degrees over c. 2,800 years or 6 degrees over first 2,000 years, then a sudden jump around 600-800 A.D.
ALIGNMENT OF PYRAMIDS
Why the Pole Star Changes–Kochab to Polaris–Precession of Earth–Celestial North
The Earth’s rotation causes a slight bulge around the equator, so the Earth is not a perfect sphere but is slightly flattened—an oblate spheroid. The sun’s mass is attracted to this bulge and gives the Earth a nudge, which makes it wobble like a top (called precession). This wobble means the Earth’s axis does not point to the same celestial pole all the time, but the axis draws out a spherical circle in the heavens over a 26,000-year period, the radius of the circle being 23°30'—that is, every 13,000 years the Earth’s axis changes from a position 23°30' west of the former celestial pole to one 23°30' east, a total of 47 degrees in 13,000 years or 3.6 degrees every 1,000 years.
In short, looking at the celestial pole one sees a different piece of sky over a 13,000-year cycle, which then repeats.
Assuming the pyramid builders were using Kochab as their marker for the north celestial pole, the change of alignment over 2,000 years from La Venta c. 1400 B.C. to Copan c. 600 A.D., a change of 8 degrees (from 356 to 004) is accounted for by the Earth’s precession of 3.6 degrees every 1,000 years.
Then there is a big leap to Uxmal (014 degrees), far more than could be accounted for by the Earth’s precession. It could be caused by the pyramid builders shifting to another star, not Kochab, or by a “nudge” to the Earth’s precession caused by a comet impact after about 600 A.D. There is considerable argument among astronomers about whether the Earth’s axis does change orientation more than 3.6 degrees every thousand years. Consider the motion of a slowing, wobbly top. Sudden changes are perhaps due to a comet impact—the same effect as nudging a gyroscope.
Diagram illustrating the precession of the Earth's axis.
I have no doubt Kochab was the guiding star for the alignment of these pyramids. Did the Olmec and Maya decide on this for themselves (which seems quite an obvious possibility if they knew where true north was) or did they get their inspiration from abroad? The first thing I needed to examine was the alignment of Emperor Qin’s pyramid near Xian, which is guarded by the terra-cotta warriors. I had climbed this pyramid in 1990. It could be dated accurately since Chinese records show it was started in Qin’s lifetime—210 B.C. Qin’s pyramid was aligned at 1 degree, based on Kochab in 210 B.C.! What about other Chinese pyramids that could be accurately dated?2
I also learned that nine Chinese emperors built mausoleums similar to Qin’s over their burial tombs beside the Wei River, overlooking the then-capital city of Chang An (now Xian).3 Of these, Emperor Jing’s and Empress Wang’s could be dated accurately and the alignment determined at 002 degrees, once again tracking Kochab, as having been built about the same time as Monte Albán with the same alignment. In great excitement I set the plans for Monte Albán against those of Qin’s mausoleum. The results were fascinating. Although they were of different sizes, their layout appeared to mirror each other, with similar form and function.
A FURTHER COMPARISON BETWEEN MONTE ALBÁN AND EMPEROR QIN’S TOMB
It is evident that the construction of mausoleums was of central importance to the emperors of ancient China. Their construction “consumed as much as one third of state revenue during the Han dynasty and involved tens of thousands of convicts and others sentenced to forced labor in lieu of fines,” according to Professor Thomas Bartlett of La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, whom I had met when lecturing at La Trobe in 2006.4
Like the mausoleum of the First Emperor, Han Royal burial chambers were also covered by large above-ground mounds. These were centered at the center of funerary gardens which, in turn, were enclosed within rammed earth walls. The Emperor and Empress of each region were placed in separate burial chambers, with their own funerary garden within the same mausoleum. Buildings for holding ceremonies were constructed inside or near the funerary gardens . . . many smaller burial mounds were erected nearby. These satellite burials belonged to members of the royal family and high officers, who were honored by becoming the emperor’s attendants in the after-life.5
Bartlett’s descriptions can be applied quite closely to Monte Albán. Comparing Monte Albán and Bartlett’s description of Qin’s mausoleum, we find that both structures are flat-topped pyramids with the same angled slopes. They are set in similar surroundings with a backdrop of mountains and are made of rammed earth faced with stone. Both are sacred places with areas set aside for religious ceremonies in relatively similar positions. Each is dominated by the tomb pyramid and the tomb is reached by internal passages and stairways, painted in cinnabar red, leading to a burial chamber where the deceased was surrounded by objects of everyday life.
Satellite mounds and ceremonial halls were in the same position relative to the burial pyramid. The site was reserved for priests and dignitaries, out of bounds to working people. Both had areas for offerings to the gods. The sites in both cases were surrounded by rich farmland. And finally, both had similar alignment with Kochab.
By now I was thoroughly hooked, just as was the British scientist and historian Joseph Needham fifty years ago when he wrote of his visit to Central America: “This adventure, indeed, had some of the quality of the déjà vu.6 And I was deeply impressed during my stay with the palpable similarities between many features of the high Central American civilizations and those of East and South East Asia.”
Needham, a fellow of the Royal Society and a noted Sinologist, was “particularly struck by the similarity between the pyramids and enclosed courtyards of the Mesoamerican ceremonial centers and the sacred enclosures and steeped pyramidal platforms of Peking and often traditional Chinese capitals [viz Xian]. Like the Mesoamerican pyramids which were used for making sacrifices, the Chinese platforms were surrounded by areas designated for offerings to the gods. . . .”7
In short, as I stated earlier, Monte Albán appears to be a half-scale replica of Emperor Qin’s tomb, built in the same era.
Emboldened, I decided to compare Olmec and Mayan astronomy with Chinese astronomy of the same era, meaning the Shang and Han eras, described in some detail by Needham, James Jacobs, and Ernst Förstemann.
As we mentioned earlier, the Spanish bishop of the Yucatán, Diego de Landa Calderón, burned every Mayan and Olmec book he could lay his hands on. Fortunately four escaped, notably the Dresden Codex. We also have inscriptions on the stelae themselves, the oldest of which is at San José Mogote in the Oxaca valley near Monte Albán, with signs dating from 600 B.C. Stelae twelve and thirteen at Monte Albán date to 500–400 B.C. and contain details of calendars. The two earliest Maya dates—using the same dot and dash as the Olmecs—are from 292 and 320 A.D.
The Dresden Codex, dating as early as 1000 A.D., apparently survived destruction because it had already been sent to Europe, where its thirty-nine double-sided sheets surfaced in 1739. The codex gives a detailed account of Mayan astronomy. The Maya, like the Olmec, observed and recorded the repetitive motions of the moon and planets to predict where they would be in the future. To allow for these predictions they developed their numbering system, based on twenty (compared with our base, ten), as described earlier. With these tools they could count and predict thousands of years into the future. The observations were made by priests to enable rulers to decide on propitious dates to launch wars and other important enterprises. The Dresden Codex includes ephemeris tables that pred
ict eclipses, tables for the rise and transit of Venus, and a similar ephemeris table for Mars. The calendar was based upon the moon; months alternated between twenty-nine and thirty days.
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF PREHISTORIC ASTRONOMIC KNOWLEDGE8
The German scholar Ernst Förstemann identified Venus in the Dresden Codex with the number 584. This is the period of Venus’s journey around the sun and the eclipse intervals when Venus could not be seen from Earth since it was behind the sun.
In 1917, Herbert Spinden concluded that the Paris Codex, one of the other surviving Mayan books, depicted a zodiac of thirteen constellations. In 1937, Alexander Pogo compared dates in the Dresden Codex with actual observations in the Mayan lands and concluded the tables predicted lunar not solar eclipses.
So by the 1930s it was generally accepted by astronomers that the civilizations of Mesoamerica had developed advanced astronomic knowledge thousands of years ago. Inscriptions at the Temple of the Sun at Palenque in Chiapas state enabled John Temple to show the Maya had a diary based upon the moon. Inscriptions on stelae at Copan record the vernal equinox and the winter solstice, while an autumnal equinox is recorded at Yaxchilan. The 26,000-year precession cycle described earlier is evidenced in various forms. Alonso Mendez and Edwin L. Barnihart have analyzed inscriptions at Palenque that they think equate to a solar year of 365.242203 days—fantastically accurate.
Ephemeris tables of the moon were also extremely accurate, according to John Justenson in 1989. Evidence of lunar dates are first recorded in 357 A.D. at Uaxactun. The eclipse cycle is evidenced at the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, dedicated in 692 A.D. The ratio of 81 moons in 2,392 days is equal to the ratio in the later Dresden Codex: The whole-number ratio is 29.530864 days from new moon to new moon—an error of less than ten seconds. Later astronomers claim the Maya were even more accurate—calculating the moon’s lunation to within one second.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 11
