by Colin Wilson
Second, axis E crosses Pisces at the tail of the lower or foremost fish exactly where the spring equinox occurs today.
Third, axis E extended to Virgo’s feet marks the tail of Leo at a point that corresponds by precession to 10,500 BC. All in all, axis E marks the moment of precession when one full cycle ends and a new one begins.
We are currently living through the last two centuries of the full 26,000-year cycle.
As the total pattern came into focus, I recognised that axis E signals this moment of epochal transition in a vivid, intentional way. Whoever designed Dendera was looking ahead in time to our age, when the spring equinox occurs under the tail of the western fish, because this is the time when the entire cycle culminates. With the spring equinox at just that position in Pisces, the axial cross locks into unique alignment with the galaxy.
In the last thirty years, astronomers have determined that the centre of our galaxy lies in line with the tip of the arrow of Sagittarius. Axis E stands at precise right angles to this point.
The half cycle, 12,960 years back from now, gives the date of 10,500 BC so hotly debated in current investigations of prehistory. The half cycle is indicated by the way that Spica, actually positioned 24 degrees from the lion’s tail, is aligned with it by the lie of the axis.
Since the Egyptians were totally capable of representing the star patterns with high accuracy, I assumed that this anomaly was intended. Spica, which I call the pre-cessional star, seems to be the master key to the Dendera zodiac. Axis E reveals an infrastructure based on galactic features only thought to have been known in recent times.
If my inferences are correct, Dendera proves not only that precession was known and applied to a scheme of World Ages, but that the entire cycle of 26,000 years was understood in its formal organisation.
In other words, Lash has shown that precession had been known for thousands of years before the Dendera temple was rebuilt.
Moreover, if Chatelain is correct, then both the Sumerians and the Maya also knew the exact length of the precessional cycle (the Nineveh constant is exactly 240 times this cycle) and the two vast Maya numbers discovered at Quiriga can be divided by the Nineveh constant.
As to the Mayan knowledge of astronomy, Peter Tompkins writes:
The Mayan cycle of 942,890 days, or 2,582 years, turned out to be 130 Saturn–Jupiter conjunctions. (It also covers other cycles: 15 Neptune–Uranus, 1,555 Jupiter–Mars, 2,284 Mars–Venus, 6,522 Venus–Mercury, and 2,720 Saturn–Mars.) Twice this cycle, or 5,163 years, is 260 Saturn–Jupiter conjunctions, which gives a grand cycle with the same number as there are days in the Mayan sacred year.
Furthermore, the Mesopotamians had linked their measures of time and space – in seconds of time and seconds of arc. 34,020 million days is not only the number of days in 3,600 Sumerian precessions of the equinox, but 3,600 tenths of a degree – consisting of 36,000 Egyptian feet of 0.308 meters – is the circumference of the world… The Mesopotamians had not only chosen as a unit of measure a foot that was earth-commensurate, it was also commensurate with the great Platonic year [the precessional cycle] of 25,920 years. Odd would it be if the unit dispensed by Hunab Ku [the Mayan Creator] to the Maya were not equally earth-commeasurable. At Teotihuacan and at Palenque this ancient Middle-Eastern foot fits Cinderella’s shoe as neatly as it did at Cheops.26
We are being asked to accept that the same measurement – based upon the circumference of the earth – was used in ancient Egypt, Sumer, Teotihuacan and Palenque. But, even more incredible, that fairly primitive Indian people, who thought the sun might disappear permanently at the end of every 52 years, had a knowledge of the heavens that would not shame a modern Astronomer Royal. Chatelain says: ‘The Mayas also knew of the precession of the equinoxes and the existence of Uranus and Neptune.’ How did they know about Uranus and Neptune without telescopes, thousands of years before Western astronomers discovered them?
They had calculated the periods of revolution and conjunction of different planets, and discovered… some equivalent astronomical cycles, such as 65 revolutions of Venus, which are equal to 104 solar years, or 327 revolutions of Mercury. They also used the cycle of 33,968 days to predict eclipses, and this cycle was equal to 5 lunar precessions, 93 solar years, 196 eclipses, 150 lunar months… Meanwhile, the Mayas had also discovered a cycle of 1,886,040 days that represented exactly 260 conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, 2,310 of Mars and Jupiter, 2,418 of earth and Mars, and 3,230 of Earth and Venus.27
The great Mayan specialist Sylvanus Griswold Morley observed:
When the material achievement of the ancient Maya in architecture, sculpture, ceramics, the lapidary arts, feather-work, cotton-weaving and dyeing are added to their intellectual achievements – invention of positional mathematics with its concomitant development of zero, construction of an elaborate chronology with a fixed starting point, use of a time-count as accurate as our own Gregorian Calendar, knowledge of astronomy superior to that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians – and the whole judged in the light of their known cultural limitations which were on a par with those of the early Neolithic Age in the Old World [my italics], we may acclaim them, without fear of successful contradiction, the most brilliant aboriginal people on this planet.28
The passage I have italicised underlines the problem. Graham Hancock has an interesting remark about the Maya in Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he talks about their amazing knowledge of astronomy, quoting the Mayan archaeologist Eric Thompson, who in 1954 asked how the Maya had come to chart the heavens yet failed to grasp the principle of the wheel, to count in millions yet never learned to weigh a sack of corn. Perhaps, Hancock suggests, the answer is quite simple: the Maya received their astronomical knowledge from ‘elsewhere’ – from a much older civilisation.
Gordon Eckholm found an intriguing piece of evidence that the Maya did know about the wheel. In an archaeological dig in the 1940s, Eckholm unearthed a Mayan toy – a dog on four wheels, such as Western children have been pulling about the nursery on a string for centuries. Eckholm pointed out the similarity between this toy and a Chinese wheeled toy of the same period (he dates them both about 2,000 years ago). The
Maya had a wheeled toy, yet did not see that wheels could be used on carts or other vehicles. Apparently no one looked at the wheel and had a ‘Eureka’ experience, which seems to suggest that the Maya were indeed, as Thompson said, ‘unremarkable’. This hardly seems to be borne out by their astronomy or by their amazing calendar, with its ‘Long Count’.
Chatelain makes the same point:
It is surely beyond imagination to think that thousands of years ago the Mayas could have, all by themselves, calculated a constant of 147,420 millions of days – a number that had twelve digits. But it is even more surprising to see the same number, only 65 times smaller, and expressed in seconds instead of days, has been used by Sumerians, a nation on the opposite side of the globe. This fact seems to indicate that the Mayas and the Sumerians must have had direct connections with each other, or that they shared a common origin [my italics].29
Since the Sumerians were at the height of their achievement 3,000 years before the Maya, we can probably rule out a ‘direct connection’, even if Hapgood is correct in believing that there was a worldwide maritime civilisation in 7,000 BC. What seems far more likely is that we are dealing with an ancient culture that had been studying the heavens for thousands of years, a culture based on seafaring.
Chatelain, like von Däniken, believes that this knowledge came from space visitors but surely it is far more likely that it was observed by astronomers who had studied the sky for thousands of years. It seems a reasonable speculation that one reason the ancients were so interested in the sky was that they made use of their knowledge of the stars in navigation.
A discovery made in 1997 adds powerful support to this argument. Exploring an ancient lake bed at Mata Menge, on the island of Flores (which is east of Java and Bali), a group of palaeoanthropologists from Australi
a found stone tools. The bed of volcanic ash in which the tools were found by Mike Morwood and colleagues from the University of New England (New South Wales) dated from more than 800,000 years ago, the time of Homo erectus. Animal bones from nearby gave the same date. What was unusual is that Flores is a relatively small island, not known to be a site of ancient man. The nearest such location is the far larger island of Java, the home of Java man, who also belongs to our earliest ancestor, Homo erectus.
To reach Flores, these primitive men would have had to sail from island to island, making crossings of around a dozen miles. Moreover, Morwood argues, the organising ability required by a fairly large group to cross the sea suggests that Homo erectus possessed some kind of linguistic ability.
This was a conclusion that I had reached when, in A Criminal History of Mankind (1983), I discussed the finds made in caves near Chou-kou-tien, in China, in 1929: fourteen skulls of Homo erectus, which had a sloping forehead and receding chin. All the skulls were mutilated at the base, as if the brain had been scooped out. Peking man, as he came to be labelled, was a cannibal — for we presume that he was killed (and roasted and eaten) by other Peking men, approximately half a million years ago.
Cannibalism is seldom a matter of nourishment; even as practised in recent times, it is mainly ritualistic, based upon the belief that the strength and vitality of a dead enemy can be absorbed by eating him. Peking man apparently had plenty of other meat, as suggested by the many animal bones in his caves. If he practised ritualistic cannibalism, then we must assume he had some kind of language, since it is hard to imagine a ritual without language.
Homo erectus was the first man we recognise as our ancestor, the first to walk upright all the time. His heart had to work harder to increase the supply of blood to his brain, which increased the size of his brain and also his intelligence. It seems at least a reasonable assumption that his brain had a ‘language matrix’, just as a bird’s has a flight matrix.
This, at all events, seems to be one important implication of the traces of Homo erectus found on Flores. We cannot imagine even a chimpanzee building a raft, because it cannot communicate linguistically.
Why should Homo erectus want to move to Flores from Java? Presumably in search of that basic instinctive requirement of all animals – territory. He would have been able to see other islands from Java mountain tops, and if the competition for food or aggressive neighbours were making life hard, then he may have decided to move on, taking his family with him. But if he was able to build a raft, then he must have been far more intelligent than his predecessors.
Another recent discovery, described by science writer John McCrone,30 adds weight to this notion that Homo erectus was possibly more intelligent than we give him credit for, in that he was using fire as long ago as 1.6 million years. From the 1970s onwards, many anthropologists have supported the view held by Louis Leakey that man learned to make fire a mere 40,000 years ago. In Leakey’s view, man became a warlike creature as a result of sitting around a fire at night, telling stories of battle and heroism. So fire was responsible for the ‘cultural explosion’ that created Homo sapiens.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, evidence of campfires was uncovered at Koobi Fora and Chesowanja in Kenya. ‘Lenses’ of orange earth were found in association with the bones and stone tools of Homo erectus, and similar lenses – about 18 inches across – were found beneath the campfires of local people. In 1999, a study by Ralph Rowlett of the University of Missouri–Columbia established beyond doubt that these lenses were made by campfires, not bush fires caused by lightning.
Rowlett’s colleague Randy Bellomo made an interesting use of earth magnetism to demonstrate that such fires had been made over many years. As Hapgood had noted, iron in the soil aligns with the magnetic pole, and heating ‘perman-ises’ this alignment like a compass. Bellomo found that the Koobi Fora iron sediments had several slightly different magnetic alignments, implying repeated visits of a nomadic tribe over a long period.
Brian Ludwig of Rutgers University studied 40,000 or so flint artifacts and the debris of tool-making, trying to determine if tool-making methods had remained static. He found dimples known as potlid fractures – fractures due to exposure to fire – on tools from 1.6 million years ago.
So again, we have evidence that Homo erectus was a more intelligent being than any anthropologist had dared to suggest. And this again suggests that he possessed some form of language.
And if he could communicate in language and build a raft, then the next question becomes self-evident: could it be that Homo erectus was not only the first man but the first longdistance sailor? The upright posture is ideal for scanning the horizon at sea. And he had plenty of time – half a million years or more – to develop from island-hopping to sailing the open sea. He also had plenty of time to develop his obsession with the stars.
All this raises another pertinent question. If our ancestors were sailing the seas 800,000 years ago, why did it take man another 792,000 years (the first recognised civilisation, Jericho, is dated at 8,000 BC) to start building civilisation? The answer must be that it didn’t take so long. Our problem is that we do not recognise the signs of civilisation when we see them – such as the stone balls of Costa Rica that suggest that man was navigating thousands of miles of ocean ‘before civilisation’. But if there was no civilisation, why should he bother? Men sail the ocean largely for trading purposes. Surely it is more likely that Hapgood is correct, and that a worldwide maritime civilisation existed in 100,000 BC?
Again, there is evidence that our ancestors of 400,000 years ago – by then Homo sapiens – were more intelligent than we give them credit for. In Timescale, Nigel Calder states: ‘Piagetian tests applied to stone tools from Isimila, Tanzania, which may be as much as 330,000 years old [by uranium-series dating] are said to indicate that the makers were as intelligent as modern humans.’31 Raising this question in From Atlantis to the Sphinx, I commented that the reason civilisation had not developed much sooner was because human beings tend to live mechanically, doing today what they did yesterday and last year. There are probably millions of human beings in the world today whose intelligence is as great as the famous scientists, artists and intellectuals in our history books, yet they remain unknown because they fail to make any determined attempt to pull themselves out of their daily routine.
When I wrote these comments, Mike Morwood and his team from New South Wales had not yet discovered the tools in the lake bed in Flores that indicated that Homo erectus was sailing the seas 800,000 years ago. This, in turn, altered my view about human language. Like most people, I had begun by assuming that man developed language in the past 30,000 years or so. The discovery that Peking man was a cannibal had made me revise that opinion to the extent of believing that he was intelligent enough to possess some kind of ritual, and therefore language. I was inclined to believe that the ‘brain explosion’ that has occurred in the past 500,000 years – the sudden increase in man’s brain size – was the result of the development of language.
But the Flores discovery throws doubt on my assumption. It suggests that man had enough language 800,000 years ago to co-operate in raft-building and sailing. That in turn led me to wonder whether language may not be as natural to man as the upright posture, and that men may have been talking to one another for perhaps a million years. In which case, it seems inconceivable that he developed civilisation only in the past 10,000 years. The Mayan knowledge of mathematics and astronomy alone makes the idea seem absurd. Even if we have our doubts about Chatelain’s evidence on the Nineveh constant and the two gigantic numbers discovered at Quiriga, we are still left with an achievement that seems utterly beyond what we regard as the normal human capabilities.
I would suggest that there is only one logical solution: civilisation is thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years older than we think. But in that case, where is the proof? Where are the ruins of this older civilisation?
This was the challenge thrown down
by the Giza plateau authority when John West and Robert Schoch suggested that the Sphinx may be at least twice as old as Egyptologists believe. ‘Show us the intervening civilisation.’ But any evidence of such a civilisation may be buried beneath the desert sand, as that strange, monolithic structure called the Oseirion was buried under the sand below the temple of Seti I – a structure whose bleak, massive blocks and lack of ornamentation suggest some older stage of Egyptian civilisation.32 Other evidence may lie beneath the sea, or beneath the ice of Antarctica. When we consider such evidence as Hapgood’s ‘ancient sea kings’, or the Nineveh constant and the Quiriga numbers, it becomes hard not to acknowledge that there is something oddly wrong with our present limited view of human history.
Equally convincing, I would suggest, is the evidence that Rand Flem-Ath has amassed in his study of ancient religious sites and their curiously precise placing on the face of the earth.
7
Fallen Angels
AND THEIR FACES shone like the sun, and their eyes were ‘A-like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers: their feet were purple, their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow.’1
This was the sight that greeted Enoch, Noah’s greatgrandfather, when he was awakened one night by two tall, shining creatures. The strangers flew Enoch to the sky, from where, he tells us, ‘they showed me a very great sea, much bigger than the inland sea where I lived’.2 Since Enoch lived somewhere in the Middle East, this inland sea is probably the Mediterranean and the ‘much bigger sea’ may have been the Atlantic Ocean, or ‘real ocean’ referred to in Plato’s account of Atlantis.
