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Fingerprints of the Gods

Page 12

by Graham Hancock


  pyramid was probably never going to be understood. All that was certain

  was that it had not been merely decorative or ceremonial. On the

  contrary, it seemed almost as though it might have functioned as some

  kind of arcane ‘device’ or machine. Deep within its bowels, archaeologists

  had discovered a complex network of zig-zagging stone channels, lined

  with fine ashlars. These had been meticulously angled and jointed (to a

  tolerance of one-fiftieth of an inch), and had served to sluice water down

  from a large reservoir at the top of the structure, through a series of

  descending levels, to a moat that encircled the entire site, washing

  against the pyramid’s base on its southern side.6

  So much care and attention had been lavished on all this plumbing, so

  many man-hours of highly skilled and patient labour, that the Akapana

  made no sense unless it had been endowed with a significant purpose. A

  number of archaeologists, I knew, had speculated that this purpose might

  have been connected with a rain or river cult involving a primitive

  veneration of the powers and attributes of fast-flowing water.

  One sinister suggestion, which implied that the unknown ‘technology’

  of the pyramid might have had a lethal purpose, was derived from the

  meaning of the words Hake and Apana in the ancient Aymara language

  5 H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco: The Measuring System of the

  Oldest Civilization, Faber & Faber, London, 1956, p. 16.

  6 For a detailed discussion of the hydraulic system of the Akapana see Tiahuanacu: II,

  pp. 69-79.

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  still spoken hereabouts: ‘Hake means “people” or “men”; Apana means

  “to perish” (probably by water). Thus Akapana is a place where people

  perish ...’7

  Another commentator, however, after making a careful assessment of

  all the characteristics of the hydraulic system, proposed a different

  solution, namely that the sluices had most probably been part of ‘a

  processing technique—the use of flowing water for washing ores,

  perhaps?’8

  Gateway of the Sun

  Leaving the western side of the enigmatic pyramid, I made my way

  towards the south-west corner of the enclosure known as the Kalassaya. I

  could now see why it had been called the Place of the Upright Standing

  Stones for this was precisely what it was. At regular intervals in a wall

  composed of bulky trapezoidal blocks, huge dagger-like monoliths more

  than twelve feet high had been sunk hilt-first into the red earth of the

  Altiplano. The effect was of a giant stockade, almost 500 feet square,

  rising about twice as far above the ground as the sunken temple had

  been interred beneath it.

  Had the Kalasasaya been a fortress then? Apparently not. Scholars now

  generally accept that it functioned as a sophisticated celestial

  observatory. Rather than keeping enemies at bay, its purpose had been to

  fix the equinoxes and the solstices and to predict, with mathematical

  precision, the various seasons of the year. Certain structures within its

  walls, (and, indeed, the walls themselves), appeared to have been lined

  up to particular star groups and designed to facilitate measurement of

  the amplitude of the sun in summer, winter, autumn and spring.9 In

  addition, the famous ‘Gateway of the Sun’, which stood in the north-west

  corner of the enclosure, was not only a world-class work of art but was

  thought by those who had studied it to be a complex and accurate

  calendar carved in stone:

  The more one gets acquainted with the sculpture the greater becomes one’s

  conviction that the peculiar lay-out and pictorialism of this Calendar cannot

  possibly have been the result merely of the ultimately unfathomable whim of an

  artist, but that its glyphs, deeply senseful, constitute the eloquent record of the

  observations and calculations of a scientist ... The Calendar could not have been

  drawn up and laid out in any other way than this.10

  My background research had made me especially curious about the

  Gateway of the Sun and, indeed, about the Kalasasaya as a whole. This

  7 Ibid., I, p. 78.

  8 The Lost Realms, p. 215.

  9 Tiahuanacu, II, pp. 44-105.

  10 The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, pp. 17-18.

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  was so because certain astronomical and solar alignments which we

  review in the next chapter had made it possible to calculate the

  approximate period when the Kalasasaya must originally have been laid

  out. These alignments suggested the controversial date of 15,000 BC—

  about seventeen thousand years ago.

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  Chapter 11

  Intimations of Antiquity

  In his voluminous work Tiahuanacu: the Cradle of American Man, the late

  Professor Arthur Posnansky (a formidable German-Bolivian scholar whose

  investigations at the ruins lasted for almost fifty years) explains the

  archaeo-astronomical calculations which led to his controversial re-dating

  of Tiahuanaco. These, he says, were based ‘solely and exclusively on the

  difference in the obliquity of the ecliptic of the period in which the

  Kalasasaya was built and that which it is today’.1

  What exactly is ‘the obliquity of the ecliptic’, and why does it make

  Tiahuanaco 17,000 years old?

  According to the dictionary definition it is ‘the angle between the plane

  of the earth’s orbit and that of the celestial equator, equal to

  approximately 23° 27’ at present’.2

  To clarify this obscure astronomical notion, it helps to picture the earth

  as a ship, sailing on the vast ocean of the heavens. Like all such vessels

  (be they planets or schooners), it rolls slightly with the swell that flows

  beneath it. Picture yourself on board that ship as it rolls, standing on the

  deck, gazing out to sea. You rise up on the crest of a wave and your

  visible horizon increases; you fall back into a trough and it decreases.

  The process is regular, mathematical, like the tick-tock of a great

  metronome: a constant, almost imperceptible, nodding, perpetually

  changing the angle between yourself and the horizon.

  Now picture the earth again. Floating in space, as every schoolchild

  knows, the axis of daily rotation of our beautiful blue planet lies slightly

  tilted away from the vertical in its orbit around the sun. From this it

  follows that the terrestrial equator, and hence the ‘celestial equator’

  (which is merely an imaginary extension of the earth’s equator into the

  celestial sphere) must also lie at an angle to the orbital plane. That angle,

  at any one time, is the obliquity of the ecliptic. But because the earth is a

  ship that rolls, its obliquity changes in a cyclical manner over very long

  periods. During each cycle of 41,000 years the obliquity varies, with the

  precision and predictability of a Swiss chronograph, between 22.1° and

  1 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 89.

  2 Collins English Dictionary, London, 1982, p. 1015. In addition, Dr John Mason of the


  British Astronomical Association defined obliquity of the ecliptic in a telephone interview

  on 7 October 1993: ‘The earth spins about an axis which goes through its centre and its

  north and south poles. This axis is inclined to the plane of the earth's orbit around the

  sun. This tilt is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The current value for the obliquity of

  the ecliptic is 23.44 degrees.’

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  24.5°.3 The sequence in which one angle will follow another, as well as the

  sequence of all previous angles (at any period of history) can be

  calculated by means of a few straightforward equations. These have been

  expressed as a curve on a graph (originally plotted out in Paris in 1911 by

  the International Conference of Ephemerids) and from this graph it is

  possible to match angles and precise historical dates with confidence and

  accuracy.

  Posnansky was able to date the Kalasasaya because the obliquity cycle

  gradually alters the azimuth position of sunrise and sunset from century

  to century.4 By establishing the solar alignments of certain key structures

  that now looked ‘out of true’, he convincingly demonstrated that the

  obliquity of the ecliptic at the time of the building of the Kalasasaya had

  been 23° 8’ 48”. When that angle was plotted on the graph drawn up by

  the International Conference of Ephemerids it was found to correspond to

  a date of 15,000 BC.5

  Of course, not a single orthodox historian or archaeologist was

  prepared to accept such an early origin for Tiahuanaco preferring, as

  noted in Chapter Eight, to agree on the safe estimate of AD 500. During

  the years 1927-30, however, several scientists from other disciplines

  checked carefully Posnansky’s ‘astronomic-archaeological investigations’.

  These scientists, members of a high-powered team which also studied

  many other archaeological sites in the Andes, were Dr Hans Ludendorff

  (then director of the Astronomical Observatory of Potsdam), Dr Friedrich

  Becker of the Specula Vaticanica, and two other astronomers: Professor

  Dr Arnold Kohlschutter of the University of Bonn and Dr Rolf Muller of the

  Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam.6

  At the end of their three years of work the scientists concluded that

  Posnansky was basically right. They didn’t concern themselves with the

  implications of their findings for the prevailing paradigm of history; they

  simply stated the observable facts about the astronomical alignments of

  various structures at Tiahuanaco. Of these, the most important by far was

  that the Kalasasaya had been laid out to conform with observations of the

  heavens made a very long time ago—much, much further back than AD

  500. Posnansky’s figure of 15,000 BC was pronounced to be well within

  the bounds of possibility.7

  If Tiahuanaco had indeed flourished so long before the dawn of history,

  what sort of people had built it, and for what purpose?

  3 J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N. J. Shackleton, ‘Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of

  the Ice Ages’, in Science, vol. 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976, p. 1125.

  4 Anthony F. Aveni, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, University of Texas Press, lago, p.

  103.

  5 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 90-1.

  6 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 47.

  7 Ibid., p. 91.

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  Fish-garbed figures

  There were two massive pieces of statuary inside the Kalasasaya. One, a

  figure nicknamed El Fraile (The Friar) stood in the south-west corner; the

  other, towards the centre of the eastern end of the enclosure, was the

  giant that I had observed from the sunken temple.

  Carved in red sandstone, worn and ancient beyond reckoning, El Fraile

  stood about six feet high, and portrayed a humanoid, androgenous being

  with massive eyes and lips. In its right hand it clutched something

  resembling a knife with a wavy blade like an Indonesian kris. In its left

  hand was an object like a hinged and case-bound book. From the top of

  this ‘book’, however, protruded a device which had been inserted into it

  as though into a sheath.

  From the waist down the figure appeared to be clad in a garment of fish

  scales, and, as though to confirm this perception, the sculptor had

  formed the individual scales out of rows and rows of small, highlystylized fish-heads. This sign had been persuasively interpreted by

  Posnansky as meaning fish in general.8 It seemed, therefore, that El Fraile

  was a portrayal of an imaginary or symbolic ‘fish man’. The figure was

  also equipped with a belt sculpted with the images of several large

  crustaceans, so this notion seemed all the more probable. What had been

  intended?

  I had learned of one local tradition I thought might shed light on the

  matter. It was very ancient and spoke of ‘gods of the lake, with fish tails,

  called Chullua and Umantua’.9 In this, and in the fish-garbed figures, it

  seemed that there was a curious out-of-place echo of Mesopotamian

  myths, which spoke strangely, and at length, about amphibious beings,

  ‘endowed with reason’ who had visited the land of Sumer in remote

  prehistory. The leader of these beings was named Oannes (or Uan).10

  According to the Chaldean scribe, Berosus:

  The whole body of [Oannes] was like that of a fish; and had under a fish’s head

  another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the

  fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a

  representation of him is preserved even to this day ... When the sun set, it was the

  custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep;

  for he was amphibious.11

  According to the traditions reported by Berosus, Oannes was, above all, a

  civilizer:

  In the day-time he used to converse with men; but took no food at that season;

  8 Ibid., I, p. 119.

  9 Ibid., II, p. 183.

  10 Myths from Mesopotamia, (trans, and ed. Stephanie Dalley), Oxford University Press,

  1990, p. 326.

  11 Fragments of Berossus, from Alexander Polyhistor, reprinted as Appendix 2 in Robert

  K. G. Temple, The Sirius Mystery, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1987, pp. 250-1.

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  and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art. He

  taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and

  explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them

  distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect fruits; in short,

  he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and to

  humanise mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing

  has been added materially by way of improvement ...12

  Surviving images of the Oannes creatures I had seen on Babylonian and

  Assyrian reliefs clearly portrayed fish-garbed men. Fish-scales formed the

  dominant motif on their garments, just as they did on those worn by El

  Fraile. Another similarity was that the Babylonian figures held

  unidentified
objects in both their hands. If my memory served me right

  (and I later confirmed that it did) these objects were by no means

  identical to those carried by El Fraile. They were, however, similar enough

  to be worthy of note.13

  The other great ‘idol’ of the Kalasasaya was positioned towards the

  eastern end of the platform, facing the main gateway, and was an

  imposing monolith of grey andesite, hugely thick and standing about

  nine feet tall. Its broad head rose straight up out of its hulking shoulders

  and its slab-like face stared expressionlessly into the distance. It was

  wearing a crown, or head-band of some kind, and its hair was braided

  into orderly rows of long vertical ringlets which were most clearly visible

  at the back.

  The figure was also intricately carved and decorated across much of its

  surface almost as though it were tattooed. Like El Fraile, it was clad below

  the waist in a garment composed offish-scales and fish symbols. And,

  also like El Fraile, it held two unidentifiable objects in its hands. This time

  the left-hand object looked more like a sheath than a case-bound book,

  and from it protruded a forked handle. The right-hand object was roughly

  cylindrical, narrow in the centre where it was held, wider at the shoulders

  and at the base, and then narrowing again towards the top. It appeared to

  have several different sections, or parts, fitted over and into one another,

  but it was impossible to guess what it might represent.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia,

  British Museum Press, 1992, pp. 46, 82-3.

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  Assyrian relief of fish-garbed figure.

  Images of extinct species

  Leaving the fish-garbed figures, I came at last to the Gateway of the Sun,

  located in the north-west corner of the Kalasasaya.

  It proved to be a freestanding monolith of grey-green andesite about

  12½ feet wide, 10 feet high and 18 inches thick, weighing an estimated

  10 tons.14 Perhaps best envisaged as a sort of Arc de Triomphe, though

  on a much smaller scale, it looked in this setting like a door connecting

  14 Figures and measurements from The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 92.

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