Or was it, perhaps, not so much the birth of a new world as it was the rebirth—the “resurrection” in the language of the Edfu texts—of the former world of the gods?
Signs of the hands
As we have seen, the Edfu texts speak of the Seven Sages, bringers of wisdom to mankind, teachers of science and magic. The Mesopotamian texts also speak of Seven Sages—the Apkallus—whose functions are identical to those of their Egyptian counterparts. We have explored all this in earlier chapters and need not repeat ourselves here. What I was unaware of, however, until I began to investigate the traditions of the Watchers in the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees and elsewhere, is that scholars have discovered close links between the Watchers and the Apkallus.
For example, “figurines of Apkallus were buried in boxes in the foundation deposits in Mesopotamian buildings in order to avert evil … The term massare, Watchers, is used of these sets.”113 Likewise the Apkallus were said to have taught antediluvian sciences to humanity and so, too, were the Watchers.114 As one scholar concludes, however: “The Jewish authors often inverted the Mesopotamian intellectual traditions with the intention of showing the superiority of their own cultural foundations. [Thus] … the antediluvian sages, the Mesopotamian Apkallus, were demonised as the ‘sons of God’ and … appear as the Watchers … illegitimate teachers of humankind before the flood.”115
All in all, what this body of research reveals is a series of links between the Watchers and the Apkallus so close that they might reasonably be supposed to be two different names, or titles, for the same beings.116 There is neither space nor need here to explore this material with all its multiple interconnections in any further detail, but I find it tempting to imagine that it might be these very beings—these Watchers, these Sages—who are depicted on the tall megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe.
Notwithstanding their resemblance to the symbols of Mesopotamian deities (see Chapter Fifteen), the presence of the bag-like objects on the upper register of Pillar 43 in Enclosure D that I first drew attention to in Chapter One continues to intrigue me, since these objects are also so similar to the bags held in the hands of the Apkallu figures in many ancient depictions. And that similarity, as the reader will recall, is not confined to the Near East. In a sculpture from the Olmec site of La Venta, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, a relief of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, the legendary bringer of civilization to the peoples of Central America, carries an identical bag.
Before leaving Turkey in July 2014 we make one more trip back to Göbekli Tepe. I can hardly bear to see it under its horrible, heavy wooden roof, which plunges all four of the main enclosures into a looming sepulchral gloom. But there’s a particular reason why I want to take a final look at Enclosure D, not this time at Pillar 43, but at the two central pillars with their crooked arms and their hands with long fingers that almost meet over their stone bellies.
When I’m satisfied I’ve seen enough we have our driver take us back in to ŞanlIurfa, to the main museum, where numerous artifacts from Göbekli Tepe, thought too precious to leave at the site, are on display. I’ve been here before, too, but there are a number of details I want to remind myself of.
I spend a long time in front of a mesmerizing sculpture of a human figure. It wasn’t found at Göbekli Tepe, but was an accidental discovery made in the 1980s in ŞanlIurfa itself, in the heart of the old town where deep foundations were being dug for a car park. It has been dated to the Göbekli Tepe period—i.e. to around 9000 BC—and is “on its way,” Klaus Schmidt has written, “to become world famous as the oldest completely preserved life-sized statue of mankind.”117
Unlike the megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe where the “heads” are stylized—resembling the upper crossbar of the letter “T”—this figure has a fully formed human head and face with glittering black obsidian eyes, a pronounced chin that gives every impression of being bearded, a pectoral in the form of a large double “V” carved in high relief across its chest, and its arms crooked in the manner of the Göbekli Tepe figures with the fingers almost meeting across the front of the belly.
I move on to the second piece I want to examine, the so-called “Totem Pole.” It’s even eerier than the first. Again it’s about normal human height but it is by no means entirely human. Instead it’s a complex hybrid with multiple different characteristics. The head is badly damaged, but the ears and eyes have been preserved and suggest a predator of some kind, perhaps a bear, or perhaps a lion or leopard. So it’s a therianthrope. Then large serpents wind up along the outside of its legs. They have oversized heads which project forward at about the level of the figure’s groin.
There are two sets of arms and hands that seem to belong to the figure itself. In the case of the upper pair, the arms are crooked in the usual Göbekli Tepe manner and the hands are brought together, with the fingers almost touching across the chest. Then there’s a second pair of what seem to be forearms and hands only, with the fingers again coming together and almost touching across the belly roughly at the level of the navel.
Moving down, at about the level of the genitals, a small head and two further arms protrude outward from the midline of the figure. Again there are those long-fingered hands almost meeting, but this time they appear to be playing a drum. Beside them, but just below them, there is the hint, much damaged, of a further pair of arms and hands.
Much about all this is familiar to me.
Very familiar.
Not from Göbekli Tepe, though, as we’ll see in the next chapter, but from the far side of the world.
Part VII
Distance
Chapter 17
Mountain
It’s October 2013 and I’m on the slopes above the city of Cuzco, in the high Andes of Peru exploring the incredible megalithic site of Sacsayhuaman with Jesus Gamarra, a descendant of the Incas. Gamarra is in his mid-seventies, more than ten years older than me, but you’d never guess it from looking at him. He’s as nimble as a mountain goat, fully acclimatized to the altitude of 3,701 meters (12,142 feet), and fit as an Olympic athlete after years of clambering around the passes and trails of his homeland during a lifetime of research into the origins of Inca culture.
Figure 60
My first visit to Sacsayhuaman was in 1992, and I’ve been back many times since, always learning something new. In Fingerprints of the Gods, published in 1995, I expressed my skepticism of the orthodox theory that practically all of the great monuments of the Andes are the work of the Incas—whose empire was not much more than a century old at the start of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1531. “Since it was known that the Incas made extensive use of Sacsayhuaman,” I wrote in Fingerprints, “I could easily understand why it had been assumed that they had built it. But there was no obvious or necessary connection between these two propositions. The Incas could just as well have found the structures already in place and moved into them.”1 In Heaven’s Mirror (1998) I further developed the argument that the gigantic megalithic and rock-hewn constructions of the Andes, which are by no means confined to Sacsayhuaman but are found all over the region, were not the work of the Incas but of a much earlier, predecessor civilization long lost to history:
In such an event it is not necessary to imagine a complete break in continuity between the hypothesized “elder culture” and the Incas; on the contrary, the latter could have inherited some of the traditions and knowledge of the former and attempted, on a smaller scale, to mimic their cyclopean world.2
I didn’t know Gamarra or his work when I wrote the passages quoted above. Now, as he shows me around Sacsayhuaman, carefully and painstakingly explaining everything he wants me to see, taking me to hidden nooks and corners of the site that I was completely unaware of before, he opens my eyes to all sorts of details that support and reinforce my earlier intuitions. More than that, he presents a solid archaeological case, originally worked out by his father, Alfredo Gamarra, and greatly refined and extended by himself, that would, I feel, be worthy
of serious consideration by mainstream scholars—if, that is, the mainstream were not so locked in to the rigid preconception that all these monuments are just a few hundred years old and entirely the work of the Incas.3
It is notoriously difficult to know, with any useful level of certainty, the age of anonymous, uninscribed stone monuments. Carbon dating of associated organic materials is only useful when we can be absolutely certain that the materials being dated were deposited at the same time as the cutting and placing of the stone we are interested in. In the case of many megalithic structures this is impossible. Surface luminescence dating, which we saw in Chapter Ten has already produced some anomalous results at the Pyramid of Menkaure and at the Sphinx and Valley Temples of Giza, has not yet been widely taken up by the archaeological establishment and has never been applied to the monuments of the Andes. In the absence of useful objective tests, therefore, the next routine strategy is to look at architectural style and methods. Just as different styles of pottery can often provide reliable indications as to what culture in what period made a particular piece, so too with architecture. The rule of thumb is that very different styles and approaches to the construction or creation of stone monuments, even if they stand side by side, are indicative of the involvement of different cultures working at different periods in the past.
Unfortunately this logical and reasonable technique of stylistic dating is not popular with archaeologists studying the monuments of the Andes—perhaps because, if they were to deploy it here, as they do elsewhere, they would be forced to question the established theory that the Incas made everything. Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus—perhaps to a large extent subconsciously—on evidence and arguments that don’t upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.
What Gamarra is showing me as we walk around Sacsayhuaman is that there are three distinctly different styles of architecture here—so different, indeed, that it is extremely difficult to understand why archaeologists insist they are all the work of the same Inca culture, and were all made during the century or so prior to the arrival of the Spanish. It is unnecessary to repeat the detailed descriptions of this site that I have given in my earlier books. In brief, however, Sacsayhuaman stands on a hillside above and overlooking the city of Cuzco and consists of a series of three parallel rows of walls, all about 6 meters (20 feet) high, constructed entirely of gigantic megaliths, some weighing in excess of 360 tons,4 each wall offering a jagged, almost zig-zag profile, built into the side of a slope and arranged in step fashion one above the other. Past the uppermost wall the slope continues to rise toward the south and is littered with the ruins of a number of much smaller buildings; one of these, right at the top, consisting of three concentric circles of nicely-cut blocks, preserved at foundation level only, must have been impressive when it was intact. Beyond it, a valley overgrown with trees and dense bushes slopes steeply down to the south with Cuzco nestling in its floor.
Turning northward, a grassy plateau perhaps 100 meters wide extends from the base of the lowest of the three megalithic walls along its full length of some 400 meters. On the north side of the plateau, a natural rocky knoll of volcanic diorite rises, but it has been cut and shaped into intricate terrace and step formations. This is where Gamarra and I are now standing and he launches into an explanation.
Figure 61: Plan of Sacsayhuaman, zig-zag megalithic walls to the south, shaped rocky knoll to the north.
“This is ‘Hanan Pacha’ work,” he says, indicating the beautifully cut diorite terraces at our feet. “The first world. It was made thousands of years before the time of the Incas. They knew how to shape stone then.” A mischievous grin. “They could do anything they wanted with it. Maybe it was easy for them.” He stoops, beckons for me to look closely at the surface of the rock. “You see?”
I shrug. I’m puzzled. I’m not sure what he wants me to see.
“No tool marks,” he says. He gestures proudly at the whole carved, sculpted artifact, the whole gigantic work of art that the knoll has been transformed into. “No tool marks anywhere.”
“So what did they do? Buff the tool marks off after they’d cut the stone?”
“No,” says Gamarra. “They didn’t need tools. They had another way. It was the same in the second world, too, which I call ‘Uran Pacha.’” He points to the looming megalithic walls opposite. There is some disagreement among the experts about exactly what kind of stone they are made from and where it was quarried. The consensus, although some green diorite porphyry and some andesite are also present, is that a very hard and dense form of local limestone was used for the megaliths themselves. Quarries at 15 kilometers distance and at 3 kilometers distance have been identified as sources for the limestone.5
We scramble down the side of the knoll and across the grassy plaza until we stand beneath the courses of hulking megaliths that have become the definitive image that Sacsayhuaman now projects to the world. As always when I’m here, my first sensation is of wonder. I feel small, diminished, pint-sized. It’s not just that the walls, and the blocks they’re built of, are big. They seem to have—dare I say it?—a personality of their own, and it is the personality of a slumbering giant.
What’s spectacular about these walls, quite apart from their size, quite apart from the fact that there are at least a thousand individual blocks, is the breathtaking virtuoso feat that has been performed in joining them together. I mean, let’s be serious here. When you are building a wall in which the smallest block you plan to use weighs a ton, while the majority weigh over 20 tons, where many weigh 100 tons, some weigh 200 tons and a few weigh more than 300 tons, you have already set yourself a formidable logistical challenge.
But then suppose, just for the hell of it, you decide to up the ante a little more and insist that these walls must be constructed in the form of huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Every block has to be a polygon with anywhere between six and a dozen sides, every polygon has to be different—no two alike—and they must all fit together with one another so tightly that you won’t be able to get a razor blade between the joints.
I can’t speak for the back of the blocks where they lock into other blocks behind them—again, presumably, multi-dimensionally—but the patterns made along their weird cyclopean façades are already complicated enough without considering what’s going on out of sight. It’s obvious, gazing up in stupefied awe at the scale and complexity of the project, that this must have been an incredibly difficult thing to do! Whoever was responsible for Sacsayhuaman’s megalithic phase can only have been top-class professionals with years of experience behind them and a very long tradition of distilled knowledge to draw upon. You can’t conceive, and plan, and build something like this with only a century or two of trial and error behind you—as is supposed to be the case with the Incas. These megaliths of Sacsayhuaman are the mature work of grandmasters of stone.
Moreover, throughout the Andes, there is no evidence of apprentices learning how to do this, no early prototypes that are good but don’t quite succeed. Other structures might not be on the scale of Sacsayhuaman (though many come close) but all of them, whether at Pisac, or Ollantaytambo or Machu Picchu, or at a score of other sites, share the same level of complexity while embracing different challenges—such as extremely difficult locations very far from the quarries—that Sacsayhuaman does not have to overcome. All of them are masterworks from the beginning. All of them are perfect. It’s almost as if, as Gamarra says, “it was easy for them.”
I know he has a theory to explain this. The theory is that gravity was lower during his first two “worlds”—the H
anan Pacha stage and the Uran Pacha stage—and that this made stone lighter and easier to manipulate. The lowered gravity is linked in his mind with the notion that the earth once made much closer orbits around the sun—an orbit of 225 days and an orbit of 260 days—before settling in to its present 365 day path.6 He could be right; new science suggests that the orbits of the planets are not fixed and stable but can be subject to radical changes that, among other things, are capable of increasing the flux of comets into the inner solar system.7
However, this isn’t the part of his theory I’m interested in. Where I feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the Andes—observations that are based on fifty years of his own fieldwork and sixty years of fieldwork by his father. The Gamarras have walked the walk and earned the right to speak out on this matter, and when they speak, though they themselves are of Inca descent, their message is absolutely clear—many of the great architectural works that are attributed to the Incas were not made by the Incas. There are traces of a lost civilization here. Indeed not just one lost civilization, but—if Gamarra’s time-frame is correct—two.
“All the big blocks of Sacsayhuaman are from the Uran Pacha period,” he says. We’re standing in a corner at a junction of a dozen or so of these incredible blocks. Gamarra highlights again the precision of their joints that look as though some modern machine tool has been at work, and the daunting complexity of the patterns they form. Then he draws my attention to something else. Several of the blocks have weird circular hollows and shallow tracks with raised edges scalloped into their faces along with other peculiar, seemingly random, patterns. “No tool marks,” he reiterates. “No chisels. No hammers.”
“So how did they do it?”
Magicians of the Gods Page 36
