The Atlantis Blueprint

by Colin Wilson

  At this time no one could read cuneiform writing, although a British officer named Henry Rawlinson had made an important start by copying an inscription on a cliff near Behistun, in Persia; it had been carved there by the Persian king Darius, and was in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (which was, more or less, a form of Assyrian). In 1857 Rawlinson published his first translation from the Assyrian language. By this time he had returned to England and was employed by the British Museum, with a young man named George Smith, a banknote engraver who was interested in archaeology, working for him.

  Among the tablets that Smith brought back from Nineveh was one containing huge, preposterously large numbers. No mathematician, Smith did not attempt to find out what they meant, but eventually French scholars translated them into decimals. One Babylonian number contained fifteen digits: 195,955,200,000,000. It fascinated a French communications scientist named Maurice Chatelain,18 who in the 1950s had moved to California after Morocco was plunged into chaos following independence. Chatelain worked for the United States government as an aeronautics engineer, and in due course was drafted into the attempt to reach the moon — the Apollo project.

  In 1963 Chatelain had learned about the incredibly complex Mayan calendar, which is far more accurate than the European calendar. Impressed by the mathematical abilities of the Maya, Chatelain suddenly found himself wondering if there

  161 could have been any connection between the Assyrians of Nineveh and the Maya.

  He soon discovered that the Nineveh number was not as arbitrary as it looked; it was 70 multiplied by 60 to the power of seven.

  What would such an ancient civilisation be doing with such enormous numbers and the mathematical sophistication they imply? We think of these early peoples as farmers and artisans, rather than mathematicians. Chatelain recalled an obscure piece of information: the Sumerians, the inventors of writing, did their calculations in sixties, rather than in tens, as we do. And the Babylonians took their culture wholesale from the Sumerians. And the Assyrians, in turn, conquered the Babylonians.

  The Sumerians were great astronomers, who knew how long it took each of the planets to revolve in its orbit – not just our close neighbours, such as Venus, Mars and Jupiter, but also Uranus and Neptune. The Sumerians also divided the day into 24 hours of 60 minutes each, with each minute containing 60 seconds.

  With a flash of inspiration, Chatelain wondered if the Nineveh number could express time in seconds. On this assumption, he worked it out to 2,268 million days, or something over 6 million years.

  The indefatigable engineer now recalled the precession of the equinoxes, that wobble on the earth’s axis that takes just under 26,000 years to complete its cycle. (also known as a Big Year). He tried dividing this into the Nineveh constant (as he called it), and immediately knew he was on the right track: it proved to be an exact number of precessional cycles: in fact, exactly 240 Big Years.

  Chatelain found himself wondering if the Nineveh constant was what astrologers and occultists had called ‘the great constant of the solar system’, a number that would apply to the revolution of all the bodies in the solar system, including moons. He proceeded to calculate the cycles of the planets in seconds (no doubt using the NASA computer), and found that each was an exact fraction of the Nineveh constant.

  If Chatelain was correct, he had made an awe-inspiring discovery. Our patronising modern view is that these ancient astronomers were only interested in the heavens because of some absurd superstition about human fate being written in the stars, the same belief that makes modern newspaper readers turn to their astrological forecast. In fact, the ‘Chaldean’ astronomers apparently understood our solar system as well as Isaac Newton did, and would have found nothing beyond their comprehension in his Principia.

  If this proposition could be proved, it would offer overwhelming support for the idea that civilisation is many thousands of years older than we assume. If the Sumerians knew the Nineveh constant over 5,000 years ago, their scientific knowledge had to have even earlier origins. Such a high level of intellectual sophistication could not have been achieved overnight.

  Chatelain went a step further. When he divided the Nineveh constant into solar years, then compared this with a modern astronomical table based on a caesium clock (which gives the most accurate estimation of the length of a second), he found a slight discrepancy in the sixth decimal place. It was only a twelve-millionth of a day per year, but it puzzled him. Then he saw the solution. Modern astronomical measurements tell us that the rotation of the earth is slowing down very slightly, so every year is getting shorter by sixteen-millionths of a second.

  The Nineveh constant proved to be totally accurate 64,800 years ago, and that suggested to Chatelain that it was first calculated 64,800 years ago – at a time when, according to anthropologists, our ancestor Cro-Magnon man had only recently appeared in Europe.

  How does Chatelain explain a notion that seems so outrageous? The answer can be found in the title of his book Our Cosmic Ancestors (1987). Like von Däniken, he believes that our earth has been visited by beings from outer space. As a space scientist, he learned that ‘all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and also sometimes quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin… Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence.’ Anyone who is interested in ‘flying saucers’ has heard that claim many times before. But this time it is made by a man who designed the communications system of the moon rockets.

  However his explanations are viewed, it is hard to fault the logic of his deductions about the date the Nineveh constant was first calculated. If Chatelain is correct, it would seem that our distant ancestors possessed a far more sophisticated knowledge than we can explain in terms of conventional history.

  When Chatelain initially heard of the immense Mayan numbers, he at first failed to attach any great significance to them. Years later he came across the notes he had made, and was intrigued by two huge numbers that had been found on steles at Quiriga, in Guatemala, the intellectual centre of the Mayan culture. Both were given (presumably) in days, which was the measure the Maya used. He translated these into years, and found that one number was just under 93 million years, while the other was 403 million years. His work with the Nineveh constant had made him curious, and he tried dividing the numbers by the Nineveh constant. He felt stunned when he realised that 93 million years is exactly 15 times larger than the Nineveh constant, while 403 million is 65 times larger.

  Chatelain published this incredible discovery in a book called Nos Ancêtres Venus du comos (Our Venusian Cosmic Ancestors), published in Paris in 1975. Predictably it failed to make any impact, even when it was discussed by Peter Tompkins in his bestselling Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids (1976). In November 1998 I read a much later version, Our Cosmic Ancestors, published by a small press in Arizona ten years before. The chapter on the Nineveh number contained a vital piece of information for the book I was about to write with Rand Flem-Ath, and Chatelain’s demonstration of the connection between the Maya and the Sumerians staggered me.

  Consider its implications. The Maya, we believe, date from about 1,000 BC. There seems a general agreement that they received their knowledge from the Olmecs, the creators of those giant stone heads, first discovered in the 1860s, which appear to be African, although there are authorities who believe the faces are Chinese – a notion that certainly fits in with the ‘Asian diffusion’ theory.

  But even the Olmecs came thousands of years later than the Sumerians, who may have appeared in Mesopotamia in 4,000 BC or earlier. So how can there have been any contact between them?

  We do not know where the Sumerians originated. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer theorised that they may have been driven from ‘Sundaland’ during the great flood of 6,000 BC and that they made their home in the Indus Valley before moving north to Egypt and Sumer. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996) I pointed out that there is evidence t
hat one of the Vedic hymns, the world’s oldest known scriptures, seems to point to a date of 6,000 BC:

  In the 1980s, a Vedic scholar, David Frawley, observed that the hymns of the Rig-Veda are full of oceanic symbolism that seems to argue that they sprang from a maritime culture – which certainly contradicted the assumption that the Aryans came from somewhere in central Europe. He also noted hymns that spoke of the ‘ancestors’ as coming from across the sea, having been saved from a great flood.

  Studying the astronomical references in the Vedic hymns, Frawley concluded that one reference to a summer solstice in Virgo indicates a date of about 4,000 BC, while a reference to a summer solstice in Libra pointed to about 6,000 BC. He also concluded that the authors of the Vedas were familiar with the precession of the equinoxes. These revolutionary idea were set out in a book called Gods, Sages and Kings (1991).19

  I also mentioned other evidence from the Vedic hymns that they refer to an extremely early period, and concluded: ‘Frawley points out that the Hindu Varuna, the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Ouranos, are all symbolised by [the constellation of] Orion, and that their myths seem to refer to the vernal equinox in Orion around 6,000 BC. ’20

  In From Atlantis to the Sphinx I had also spoken at some length about Hamlet’s Mill by George Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, a study that sets out to demonstrate that the common denominator of all early myths is the idea of a great grinding-mill of the stars (sometimes it is described as churning a sea of milk, the Milky Way). This grinding-mill represents the precession of the equinoxes – which, as we have seen, is the apparent backward movement of the vernal point (the constellation in which the sun rises at the spring equinox) through the constellations. At present the sun rises in Pisces at the spring equinox, so we live in the Age of Pisces, but in about eight centuries’ time it will rise in Aquarius, and our descendants of AD 2,600 will live in the Age of Aquarius. In the normal zodiac of astrology, Aquarius comes before Pisces. Hence ‘precession’ of the equinoxes – they move backwards, in a slow circle in the heavens. This in itself offers proof that civilisation could be thousands of years older than historians and archaeologists believe: it takes 2,160 years for the vernal point to move from one constellation to the next, and 25,920 years for the whole precessional cycle to come around again to the beginning. Santillana and von Dechend make it clear that the Inuit, Icelanders, Norsemen, Native Americans, Finns, Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Persians, Romans, ancient Greeks, ancient Hindus, ancient Egyptians and many others were familiar with the whole cycle of ‘Hamlet’s mill’, the precession of the equinoxes (the book takes its title from the corn grinding-mill of Amlodhi, an Icelandic hero, whose name has come down to us as Hamlet). These ancient peoples, unaware that precession arises from a mere wobble on the axis, regarded the precession of the equinoxes as of tremendous religious significance, largely because they believed that the end of each age brings some immense catastrophe.

  Another book about precession is The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, by Jane B. Sellers.21 She has been kind enough to send us a summary of her thinking.22

  It is possible that as early as the first use of diagonal calendars in 2100 BC, or their apparent ‘misuse’ in the tombs of Seti 1 (c. 1304 BC) and Ramesses IV (c. 1115 BC), the Egyptians had calculated the necessary number of years for the ‘marker stars’ to rise once again on their original dates. This of course involves reading the star calendars in a different way… and giving them a different purpose. This ‘Eternal Return’ would have been far more important for the deceased king than the tracking of the hours of the night, or the days of one year. Certainly by the time of Plutarch, who, after consulting Egyptian priests wrote the first complete telling of the Osiris myth, it would appear that a numerical formula for this return of the sky had been conceived. It is in Plutarch’s story of Osiris that we find all the numbers needed to announce the time of a complete precessional cycle, adding support to the argument that not only was the story of Osiris’ death and rebirth grounded in the observable results of the precession, but at some time in their history the Egyptians had attempted to understand and measure this mysterious complication of the heavens.

  By contrast, John Lash believes that he has found very ancient evidence of precession in a zodiac engraved on the ceiling of the temple of Hanthor at Dendera. This zodiac, dating to about 100 BC, had always fascinated me — I wrote about it for the first time in a book called Starseekers23 in 1980—1 because Schwaller de Lubicz had argued in his Sacred Science24 that it seemed to prove that the ancient Egyptians knew about the precession of the equinoxes in the Age of Taurus, more than 6,000 years ago.

  John West was unconvinced by this particular argument. In his Serpent in the Sky (1979), he comments that the two superimposed circles are too irregular to prove anything. Studying the Dendera zodiac, I could see his point. However in November 1999, when I was a speaker at Andrew Collins’s Questing Conference at the University of London, I heard the author John Lash talking about his work in progress, The Skies of Memory;25 he offered some highly convincing new proofs that the Egyptians indeed understood about precession.

  A zodiac has, of course, two axes, one running from north to south, the other from east to west, so the two superimposed zodiacs of Schwaller had four axes, which he called A,B,C and D. To my delight, John Lash had discovered a fifth axis, which he called E, and which points to our own age.

  I asked him to summarise his results for this book, and he sent me the following:

  The main east—west axis of the Dendera zodiac passes through the middle of the constellation of Aries, corresponding to a date circa 700 BC in precessional terms.

  Dendera was restored for the last time under Augustus (30 BC—AD 14), though the work required is likely to have been ongoing for several centuries. The current temple is a make-over of a far more ancient structure. In fact the French archaeologist, Auguste Mariette, observed with some surprise that the foundations of Dendera were deeper than usual. While Luxor, Karnac and most other Egyptian temples seem to be set right on the surface of the ground (so Mariette noted), Dendera is sunk 20 feet into the earth! The date of 700 BC, attested by Schwaller de Lubicz on the authority of the French astronomer, Jean-Baptiste Biot, is roughly the midpoint of the Arien Age.

  Was the Dendera zodiac originally planned at the time, hence the alignment to the east, traditional point of origin? Whatever the case, at the transition from Aries to Pisces, around 120 BC, the temple was still being renovated.

  The zodiac has two North Poles: one located in the Jackal, known to us as the Little Bear, and the other in Tu-art, the Hippopotamus, known to us as Draco, the celestial Dragon.

  There are two poles because, as we know, the earth’s axis is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to its plane of motion around the sun. The North Pole points currently to the Jackal, as at Dendera, but not to precisely the same place in the Jackal. This is because the terrestrial axis slowly rotates around the axis of the earth’s orbital plane, centred eternally in Draco. This long-term ‘wobble’ marks the precessional cycle of 25,920 years. The inclusion of both poles in the Dendera zodiac may be plain evidence that precession was known to the ancient Egyptians.

  Precession of the equinoxes is supposed to have been discovered around 134 BC by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. He was looking at a star map made by his predecessor Timocharis about 150 years before, and noted that a certain bright star he was studying was positioned incorrectly, 2 degrees away from what should have been its present position. He concluded that the star was moving at a rate of about 1 degree every seventy-five years. (In fact, precession causes a movement of 1 degree every seventy-two years.)

  Schwaller de Lubicz had argued that two hieroglyphs outside the circular zodiac mark a line between Gemini and Taurus, indicating a precessional date about 4,000 BC, which further demonstrates how the Egyptians intended the Dendera artifact to show the shift in precessional Ages. John Anthony West is on record as being unconvinced.

  However
in 1999 I was working on a book about the World Ages when I was struck by an arresting observation. Any zodiac modelled on the four seasons naturally has two axes interlocked at right angles: the line of the equinoxes (east–west) and the line of the solstices (north–south). Clearly evident at Dendera, this ‘axial cross’ has been noted by all scholars.

  The eastern end of axis A, passing through Aries, probably identifies the epoch when the restoration of the temple was inaugurated, circa 700 BC, as noted above. The design of the zodiac also clearly incorporates two other axes, C and D.

  But as I studied the overall design of the zodiac, I realised there was a fifth, as yet undetected axis. My attention was first drawn to its presence by the figure of Virgo, the grain goddess identified with Isis, who holds up a stalk of wheat in a gesture known from Sumerian sources as early as the third millennium BC.

  I knew that the Dendera zodiac is an accurate astronomical model with axes that can be precisely dated according to precession – in short, a working star-clock. However, only two stars have been specifically indicated on it: Sirius, placed between the horns of the sacred cow on axis B, and Spica, the star traditionally identified with Virgo’s sheaf of wheat. This led me to wonder what an axis inscribed from Spica through the Jackal pole would look like.

  At the time Dendera was being restored, Spica had a special significance for astronomers. It so happened that Spica was the bright star initially observed by Timochares, the same one that later led Hipparchus to discover the precessional of the equinoxes.

  Historians confirm that from 600 BC onward there was close contact between Greek and Egyptian astronomers, so we would be justified in assuming that Spica, known as Mena to the Egyptians, was an item in their dialogue. Surely, then, there may have been a specific intention in highlighting Spica at Dendera.

  When I inscribed the fifth axis (E in the figure above), I noted three remarkable features that could not, I imagined, be accidental. First, the axis culminates by bisecting the altar mounted by four ram’s heads, situated on the periphery of the zodiac. This seems to interlock its internal features, represented by the solar zodiac of ecliptic constellations, with the lunar pattern of the decans, 10-degree divisions of the moon’s orbit, running around the periphery.