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Fingerprints of the Gods

Page 11

by Graham Hancock


  their reason. It is also recorded that he passed on his teachings to them

  1 South American Mythology, p. 87.

  2 Ibid., p. 44.

  3 Antonio de la Calancha, Cronica Moralizada del Orden de San Augustin en el Peru,

  1638, in South American Mythology, p. 87.

  4 Good summaries of the Plutarch account are given in M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian

  Legends and Stories, Rubicon Press, London, 1990, pp. 24-9; and in E. A. Wallis Budge,

  From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 178-83.

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  by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments.

  While he was gone, however, he was plotted against by seventy-two

  members of his court, led by his brother-in-law Set. On his return the

  conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood

  and gold was offered as a prize to any guest who could fit into it exactly.

  Osiris did not know that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his

  body measurements. As a result, when the assembled guests tried one by

  one to get into it they failed. Osiris lay down comfortably inside. Before

  he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward, nailed the lid

  tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there

  would be no air. The coffer was then thrown into the Nile. It had been

  intended that it should sink, but it floated rapidly away, drifting for a

  considerable distance until it reached the sea coast.

  At this point the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, intervened. Using all the

  great magic for which she was renowned, she found the coffer and

  concealed it in a secret place. However, her evil brother Set, out hunting

  in the marshes, discovered the coffer, opened it and, in a mad fury, cut

  the royal corpse into fourteen pieces which he scattered throughout the

  land.

  Once more Isis set off to save her husband. She made a small boat of

  papyrus reeds, coated with pitch, and embarked on the Nile in search of

  the remains. When she had found them she worked powerful spells to

  reunite the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old

  form. Thereafter, in an intact and perfect state, Osiris went through a

  process of stellar rebirth to become god of the dead and king of the

  underworld—from which place, legend had it, he occasionally returned to

  earth in the guise of a mortal man.5

  Although there are huge differences between the traditions it is bizarre

  that Osiris in Egypt and Thunupa-Viracocha in South America should have

  had all of the following points in common:

  • both were great civilizers;

  • both were conspired against;

  • both were struck down;

  • both were sealed inside a container or vessel of some kind;

  • both were then cast into water;

  • both drifted away on a river;

  • both eventually reached the sea.

  Are such parallels to be dismissed as coincidences? or could there be

  some underlying connection?

  5 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 180.

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  Reed boats of Suriqui

  The air was Alpine cold and I was sitting on the front of a motor launch

  doing about twenty knots across the icy waters of Lake Titicaca. The sky

  above was clear blue, reflecting aquamarine and turquoise tints inshore,

  and the vast body of the lake, glinting in copper and silver tones, seemed

  to stretch away for ever ...

  The passages in the legends that spoke of vessels made of reeds

  needed to be followed up because I knew that ‘boats of totora rush’ were

  a traditional form of transport on this lake. However, the ancient skills

  required to build craft of this type had atrophied in recent years and we

  were now headed towards Suriqui, the one place where they were still

  properly made.

  On Suriqui Island, in a small village close to the lakeshore, I found two

  elderly Indians making a boat from bundled totora rushes. The elegant

  craft, which appeared to be nearly complete, was approximately fifteen

  feet long. It was wide amidships, but narrow at either end with a high

  curving prow and stern.

  I sat down for a while to watch. The more senior of the two builders,

  who wore a brown felt hat over a curious peaked woollen cap, repeatedly

  braced his bare left foot against the side of the vessel to give additional

  leverage as he pulled and tightened the cords that held the bundles of

  reeds in place. From time to time I noticed that he rubbed a length of

  cord against his own perspiring brow—thus moistening it to increase its

  adhesion.

  The boat, surrounded by chickens and occasionally investigated by a

  shy, browsing alpaca, stood amid a litter of discarded rushes in the

  backyard of a ramshackle farmhouse. It was one of several I was able to

  study over the next few hours and, though the setting was unmistakably

  Andean, I found myself repeatedly overtaken by a sense of déjà vu from

  another place and another time. The reason was that the totora vessels of

  Suriqui were virtually identical, both in the method of construction and in

  finished appearance, to the beautiful craft fashioned from papyrus reeds

  in which the Pharaohs had sailed the Nile thousands of years previously.

  In my travels in Egypt I had examined the images of many such vessels

  painted on the walls of ancient tombs. It sent a tingle down my spine to

  see them now so colourfully brought to life on an obscure island on Lake

  Titicaca—even though my research had partially prepared me for this

  coincidence. I knew that no satisfactory explanation had ever been given

  for how such close and richly detailed similarities of boat design could

  occur in two such widely separated places. Nevertheless, in the words of

  one authority in ancient navigation who had addressed himself to this

  conundrum:

  Here was the same compact shape, peaked and raised at both ends with rope

  lashings running from the deck right round the bottom of the boat all in one piece

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  ... Each straw was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry

  and streamlined elegance, while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they

  looked like ... gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak fore and aft.6

  The reed boats of the ancient Nile, and the reed boats of Lake Titicaca

  (the original design of which, local Indians insisted, had been given to

  them by ‘the Viracocha people’7), had other points in common. Both, for

  example, were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged

  straddled masts.8 Both had also been used for the long-distance transport

  of exceptionally heavy building materials: obelisks and gargantuan blocks

  of stone bound for the temples at Giza and Luxor and Abydos on the one

  hand and for the mysterious edifices of Tiahuanaco on the other.

  In those far-off days, before Lake Titicaca became more than one

  hundred feet shallower, Tiahuanaco had stood at the water’s edge

  overlooking a vista of awesome and s
acred beauty. Now the great port,

  capital city of Viracocha himself, lay lost amid eroded hills and empty

  windswept plains.

  Road to Tiahuanaco ...

  After returning from Suriqui to the mainland we drove our hired jeep

  across those plains, raising a cloud of dust. Our route took us through

  the towns of Puccarani and Laha, populated by stolid Aymara Indians who

  walked slowly in the narrow cobbled streets and sat placidly in the little

  sunlit plazas.

  Were these people the descendants of the builders of Tiahuanaco, as

  the scholars insisted? Or were the legends right? Had the ancient city

  been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here,

  long ages ago?

  6 Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, Book Club Associates, London, 1972, pp. 43, 295.

  7 Ibid., p. 43.

  8 Ibid., p. 295.

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  Chapter 10

  The City at the Gate of the Sun

  The early Spanish travellers who visited the ruined Bolivian city of

  Tiahuanaco at around the time of the conquest were impressed by the

  sheer size of its buildings and by the atmosphere of mystery that clung

  to them. ‘I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time

  of the Inca,’ wrote the chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon, ‘They laughed at

  the question, affirming that they were made long before the Inca reign

  and ... that they had heard from their forebears that everything to be

  seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night ...’1

  Meanwhile another Spanish visitor of the same period recorded a

  tradition which said that the stones had been lifted miraculously off the

  ground, ‘They were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet.’2

  Not long after the conquest a detailed description of the city was

  written by the historian Garcilaso de la Vega. No looting for treasure or

  for building materials had yet taken place and, though ravaged by the

  tooth of time, the site was still magnificent enough to take his breath

  away:

  We must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of

  Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations

  so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone ... these

  are much worn which shows their great antiquity. There are walls, the stones of

  which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put

  them in place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most

  remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases

  anything up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 6 feet thick, base and portal being

  all of one piece ... How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive

  works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer

  ... Nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought

  here ...3

  1 Pedro Cieza de Leon, Chronicle of Peru, Hakluyt Society, London, 1864 and 1883, Part

  I, Chapter 87.

  2 Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas, p. 64. See also Feats and Wisdom of the

  Ancients, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1990, p. 55.

  3 Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Book Three, Chapter one. See, for example, version

  published by Orion Press, New York, 1961 (translated by Maria Jolas from the critical

  annotated French edition of Alain Gheerbrant), pp. 49-50.

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  Tiahuanaco.

  That was in the sixteenth century. More than 400 years later, at the end

  of the twentieth century, I shared Garcilaso’s puzzlement. Scattered

  around Tiahuanaco, in defiance of the looters who had robbed the site of

  so much in recent years, were monoliths so big and cumbersome yet so

  well cut that they almost seemed to be the work of super-beings.

  Sunken temple

  Like a disciple at the feet of his master, I sat on the floor of the sunken

  temple and looked up at the enigmatic face which all the scholars of

  Tiahuanaco believed was intended to represent Viracocha. Untold

  centuries ago, unknown hands had carved this likeness into a tall pillar of

  red rock. Though now much eroded, it was the likeness of a man at peace

  with himself. It was the likeness of a man of power ...

  He had a high forehead, and large, round eyes. His nose was straight,

  narrow at the bridge but flaring towards the nostrils. His lips were full.

  His distinguishing feature, however, was his stylish and imposing beard,

  which had the effect of making his face broader at the jaws than at the

  temples. Looking more closely, I could see that the sculptor had

  portrayed a man whose skin was shaved all around his lips with the result

  that his moustache began high on his cheeks, roughly parallel with the

  end of his nose. From there it curved extravagantly down beside the

  corners of his mouth, forming an exaggerated goatee at the chin, and

  then followed his jawline back to his ears.

  Above and below the ears, on the side of the head, were carved odd

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  representations of animals. Or perhaps it would be better to describe

  these carvings as representations of odd animals, because they looked

  like big, clumsy, prehistoric mammals with fat tails and club feet.

  There were other points of interest. For example, the stone figure of

  Viracocha had been sculpted with the hands and arms folded, one below

  the other, over the front of a long, flowing robe. On each side of this robe

  appeared the sinuous form of a snake coiling upwards from ground to

  shoulder level. And as I looked at this beautiful design (the original of

  which had perhaps been embroidered on rich cloth) the picture that came

  into my mind was of Viracocha as a wizard or a sorcerer, a bearded,

  Merlin-like figure dressed in weird and wonderful clothes, calling down

  fire from heaven.

  The ‘temple’ in which the Viracocha pillar stood was open to the sky

  and consisted of a large, rectangular pit, like a swimming pool, dug out

  six feet below ground level. Its floor, about 40 feet long by 30 feet wide,

  was composed of hard, flat gravel. Its strong vertical walls were formed

  from precisely dressed ashlar blocks of varying sizes laid closely against

  one another without mortar in the joints and interspersed with taller,

  rough-hewn stelae. A set of steps was let into the southern wall and it

  was down these I had come when I had entered the structure.

  I walked several times around the figure of Viracocha, resting my

  fingers on the sun-warmed stone pillar, trying to guess its purpose. It was

  perhaps seven feet tall and it faced south, with its back to the old

  shoreline of Lake Titicaca (originally less than six hundred feet away).4

  Ranged out behind this central obelisk, furthermore, there were two

  others, of smaller stature, possibly intended to represent Viracocha’s

  legendary companions. All three figures, being severely, functionally

  vertical, cast clean-edged shadows as I gazed at them, for the sun was


  past its zenith.

  I sat down on the ground again and looked slowly all around the

  temple. Viracocha dominated it, like the conductor of an orchestra, and

  yet its most striking feature undoubtedly lay elsewhere: lining the walls,

  at various points and heights, were dozens and dozens of human heads

  sculpted in stone. These were complete heads, protruding three

  dimensionally out of the walls. There were several different (and

  contradictory) scholarly opinions as to their function.

  Pyramid

  From the floor of the sunken temple, looking west, I could see an

  immense wall into which was set an impressive geometrical gateway

  made of large stone slabs. Silhouetted in this gateway by the afternoon

  sun was the figure of a giant. The wall, I knew, enclosed a parade-ground

  4 Bolivia, p. 156 (map).

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  sized area called the Kalasasaya (a word in the local Aymara language

  meaning simply ‘Place of the Upright Standing Stones’5). And the giant

  was one of the huge time-worn pieces of sculpture referred to by

  Garcilaso de la Vega.

  I was eager to take a look at it, but for the moment my attention was

  diverted southwards towards an artificial hill, 50 feet high, which lay

  almost directly ahead of me as I climbed the steps out of the sunken

  temple. The hill, which had also been mentioned by Garcilaso, was known

  as the Akapana Pyramid. Like the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, it was

  oriented with surprising precision towards the cardinal points. Unlike

  those pyramids its ground-plan was somewhat irregular. Nonetheless, it

  measured roughly 690 feet on each side which meant that it was a

  hulking piece of architecture and the dominant edifice of Tiahuanaco.

  I walked towards it now, and spent some time strolling around it and

  clambering over it. Originally it had been a clean-sided step-pyramid of

  earth faced with large andesite blocks. In the centuries since the

  conquest, however, it had been used as a quarry by builders from as far

  away as La Paz, with the result that only about ten per cent of its superb

  facing blocks now remained.

  What clues, what evidence, had those nameless thieves carried off with

  them? As I climbed up the broken sides and around the deep grassy

  troughs in the top of the Akapana, I realized that the true function of the

 

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