Hobbits, dragons and the Flood
From the Bada Valley we make a long road journey to Toraja in South Sulawesi—all journeys are long here; Sulawesi is the eleventh largest island in the world. We spend a couple of days in the area. There is an eerie cult of the dead, which involves digging up the bodies of the deceased once a year, dressing them in new clothes, combing their moldering hair, tidying their coffins and reinterring them. Lifelike effigies of the deceased are also placed in rock-cut shrines high up in cliff faces and there are caves full of bones.
What we’ve come here to see are not the dead but megaliths. This being Toraja, however, the megaliths are all about the dead and, unlike in other parts of the world—and indeed other parts of Indonesia—they aren’t relics of a remote and forgotten past, but part of a living, active, fully functional cult. We visit Bori Parinding, a site dominated by a cluster of tall, needle-like menhirs that might be transplanted without difficulty to any one of a dozen locations in Europe and confidently dated to 5000 years old or more. Yet Bori Parinding is just two hundred years old.
The oldest megalith here was erected in 1817. Each one is a monument to a deceased Torajan notable and new menhirs are still quarried and put in place every year. Those cut from andesite are mined from a nearby deposit and shaped with hammers and metal chisels—a local elder shows me how it’s done. Those cut from limestone, weighing in some cases an estimated 15 tons, are brought from a quarry five kilometers away by teams of hundreds of men working in shifts for more than a week, who haul the menhirs to the site on wooden rollers.
Indonesia, I’m beginning to realize, is a land where ancient traditions live on in fascinating ways and the connection to the remote past is ever present.
That’s a realization that’s brought home to me all the more strongly on our next stop, the island of Flores. We reach it by driving all day from Toraja to Makassar, where we catch a flight to Bali and thence, via Komodo, famous for its large predatory lizards known as “Komodo Dragons,” to Ende, the chief “city” of Flores—a city with a population of just 60,000. In recent times, Flores has attracted fame for the discovery on the island of the remains of Homo floresiensis, an extinct species of human that stood, in adulthood, just 1.1 meters (3.5 feet tall) and has, accordingly, been dubbed “the Hobbit.” I’ll have more to say about these creatures later, but as I land at Ende after that stopover in Komodo I can’t help reflecting that Indonesia is truly a mythical place—the only country in the world today where dragons and hobbits are not the stuff of fantasy but of science.
Figure 70: The island of Flores in its regional context.
Flores is charming—far out on the edge of the world, simple, lacking in many modern conveniences, but with a sweet, gentle spirit. We base ourselves in the town of Bajawa, and in the couple of days we spend here, we visit a number of villages where the tidy bamboo and thatch houses are built upon and around extensive megalithic monuments.
In the village of Bena, about 16 kilometers from Bajawa, with distant glimpses of the Savu Sea and of Mount Inerie, we’re shown around by Joseph, a venerable elder of 88 years. The village has two parallel rows of houses with the high, thatched roofs, triangular in cross section, that are characteristic of the area. The houses are separated by a long and wide public space filled with an incredible assortment of menhirs and dolmens which, as with the menhirs of Toraja, would not look out of place if they were excavated from Neolithic strata in Europe. Joseph tells us that the dolmens aren’t tombs (as is usually the case in Europe), but altars used by members of each of the different clans resident in the village. From time to time buffalo sacrifices are carried out on the altars in honor of deceased notables, and the megaliths have a function in aiding communication with the departed and in connecting the supernatural and earthly realms.
Such ideas don’t syncretise well with Christianity, which is also a part of daily life here; indeed, at the far end of the village there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Joseph tells us that dolmens and menhirs were still being erected when he was a young man, but that this is no longer done and the tradition is dying out. When I ask him about the origins of the megalithic cult, however, he tells me a remarkable story.
“Our ancestors,” he says, “came here in a ship around 12,000 years ago during a great flood.” Indeed it seems that the whole village is laid out in commemoration of that ship, which was propelled not by sails but by an “engine.” Joseph shows me a megalithic chamber, roughly in the middle of the village, that symbolizes the place where the “engine house” was located in the original ship. I ask him where all the megaliths come from and he tells me that they were brought from 20 kilometers away on the slopes of Mount Inerie and moved into position by special “powers” possessed by the ancestors. He adds that “an American scholar, a certain Professor Smith” has confirmed the story.
This mention of the name of a foreign researcher—whose identity and bona fides I was not subsequently able to establish—raises the nagging possibility in my mind that the whole tale might not be of indigenous origin at all, but might be an imported concoction, a fantasy even, which Joseph believes to be true. Certainly we were not told the same story in other megalithic villages of Flores. At Wogo Baru, for example, elders spoke of a “giant” called Dhake, who was so huge that he had single-handedly carried the megaliths down from the slopes of Mount Inerie.
What all the accounts seem to have in common, however, is a whiff of wonder and magic.
Queen of the Southern Ocean
Leaving Flores, we fly from Ende via Denpasar in Bali to the city of Palembang in Sumatra, then make a two-day road journey from east to west across south Sumatra. Again our focus is megaliths, but most of what we see, in the form of large sculpted human and anthropomorphic figures, shows the influence of Hindu and Buddhist art and thus is certainly not prehistoric. It’s only when we come to a coffee plantation in the mountains near the city of Pagar Alam that we find something really interesting—a series of gigantic megalithic subterranean chambers (see Plate 81), several of which are painted with swirling designs in striking colors of red ochre and black charcoal, amidst which animal figures can be discerned.
No dating work has been done on them, but similar chambers such as West Kennet Long Barrow in England or Gavrinis in Carnac, Brittany, are more than 5,000 years old, while the painted caves of France and Spain are even older, going back 33,000 years in the case of Chauvet, for example. The Sumatran paintings have much in common with those of southern Europe, being profoundly visionary, with characteristic “entoptic” patterns indicating that the artists were shamans, who had experienced and were depicting visions seen in deeply altered states of consciousness, likely induced by psychedelic plants or fungi.36
Figure 71: The island of Sumatra in its regional context.
We drive on to the city of Bengkulu and fly from there to Jakarta, the massive, sprawling Indonesian capital on the island of Java. Jakarta is like a giant octopus; once it has entangled you in the tentacles of its clogged roadways, it is extremely difficult to get free. Late the same evening, however, we eventually reach our next destination, Pelabuhan Ratu on the southwest coast of Java, facing the Indian Ocean. It’s only an overnight stop—in the morning we’ll be going to another megalithic site inland—but it turns out that Pelabuhan Ratu (which means “Harbor of the Queen”) is of interest in its own right. Indeed the Samudra Beach Hotel where we’re staying has a room—Room 308—that no one is allowed to reserve because it’s permanently set aside for the Queen of the Southern Ocean, a kind of sea fairy or goddess, who rules over a submerged city and occasionally appears on land to interact with mortal humans.
Obviously I’m interested in submerged cities, particularly submerged cities around the islands of Indonesia, which were all part of a giant continent, known to geologists as Sundaland, that was above water and connected to the rest of Southeast Asia until about 11,600 years ago. When sea levels rose cataclysmically at the end of the Younger Dryas, this regio
n lost more habitable land, including a massive, low-lying plain, than almost anywhere else on earth.37 Although it’s close to midnight, I therefore insist on paying a visit to Room 308, which is fully decorated and furnished as a royal boudoir, complete with imaginative paintings of Njai Lara Kidul, the Queen of the Southern Ocean.
It’s a romantic story and, who knows, there may be something to it. Certainly, no attempt to uncover the mysterious origins of human civilization can afford to ignore the rapid drowning of Sundaland, which was fertile and well watered with four major river-systems before it was flooded.38 Indeed it’s because of this, and because much of the flooding occurred around 11,600 years ago, precisely the date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis, that our traveling companion, geologist Danny Natawidjaja, believes Indonesia is Atlantis39 and has made such efforts to investigate the extraordinary megalithic pyramid of Gunung Padang.
Figure 72: The island of Java in its regional context.
Gunung Padang, which I first visited in December 2013 (described in Chapter Two) is 120 kilometers north of us, and we’ll be going back there at the end of this trip. Before we do, however, there’s one more site we want to see. It’s called Tugu Gede, near the village of Cengkuk, 20 kilometers into the mountains north of Pelabuhan Ratu.
We set off in the morning on another of those precipitous and slightly alarming roads that Indonesia has so many of, but once again the trip is worth it. We go as far as the car can take us and then have a long walk, first through a village in the midst of banana plantations, and then into quite dense forest, coming eventually to a mystic glade where a massive central menhir, shaped at its sides, coming to a point like an obelisk, juts 3 meters straight up out of the earth. It is surrounded by a ring of smaller menhirs, some fallen, some still standing, and round about there are huge numbers of further worked stones, many with patterns of cupules carved into them very similar to the cupules at Karahan Tepe in Turkey.
Tugu Gede has been the subject of some cursory excavations, but there appears to be no clear consensus on its antiquity. The megaliths themselves are accepted as prehistoric—“thousands of years old,” although exactly how many thousands no one seems to know—but there are also later occupation layers that have yielded up pottery and artifacts that are only a few hundred years old, and of course the site stands close to (and is impacted by) human settlements to this day. One of the most anomalous finds is a small statue. On no very good grounds, archaeologists suppose it to be a representation of the Hindu god Shiva, but it bears no resemblance to any images of Shiva that I’ve seen and—to my eye at least—looks much more like a crudely worked Ancient Egyptian figure with its crossed hands and distinctive headdress.
Mainstream archaeology does not believe that the Ancient Egyptians could have reached Indonesia, so this possibility has never been considered. However, there is compelling evidence that long-distance oceanic voyages were undertaken from Egypt during Pharaonic times—for example, the presence in nine mummies dated between 1070 BC and AD 395 of cocaine and tobacco, both indigenous American plants not previously thought to have been present in the Old World before the time of Columbus.40
These findings by S. Balabanova, F. Parsche and W. Pirsig have been disputed by other scholars, who regard long-distance Ancient Egyptian sea voyages as a priori impossible. According to Egyptologist John Baines, for example: “The idea that the Egyptians should have traveled to America is overall absurd … and I also don’t know anyone who spends time doing research in these areas, because they’re not perceived to be areas that have any real meaning for the subject.”41 The way I see it, however, this comment by Baines is more indicative of a deep-seated problem within Egyptology itself, and within archaeology in general, than of a problem in the factual findings of Balabanova et al. Archaeology is too much constrained by a rigid reference frame of what is possible and what is not, and tends to ignore, sidestep, or ridicule evidence that challenges that reference frame. This is equally true when it comes to the case for a lost civilization of the Ice Age, which again is dismissed on no good grounds other than that it is considered to be a priori impossible.
Meanwhile, since the validity of Balabanova’s findings has subsequently been vindicated,42 and therefore—we must assume—the Ancient Egyptians did indeed make voyages as far as the Americas, I see no good reason to ignore the possibility that they also made voyages in the other direction, eastward toward Indonesia and beyond. Indeed, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions—though once again disputed—have been found at a wilderness site near the town of Gosford, to the north of Sydney in eastern Australia. I have had the opportunity to study these glyphs myself and do not agree with the mainstream view that they can easily be dismissed as twentieth-century hoaxes. On the contrary, a recent (October 2014) deciphering of the glyphs by hieroglyphics experts Mohamed Ibrahim and Yousef Abd’el Hakim Awyan concluded:
Not only are the Gosford Glyphs legitimate, the scribes accurately used several ancient hieroglyphs and grammatical variations which, crucially, were not even documented in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts until 2012, immediately disproving all long-standing “hoax” theories. The specific style of hieroglyphs used also provides a linguistic time-frame that places an Egyptian presence in Australia at least 2,500 years ago, while the translated text is even so detailed as to identify the ancient scribes, by name and occupation.43
I’m not claiming that the case is settled yet; the Gosford Glyphs may or may not be a hoax; much more work needs to be done to settle the matter. My point, however, is that the use by orthodox archaeologists of a priori assumptions about what happened in the past as a reason not to conduct wide-ranging investigations into what actually did happen in the past is poor scholarship. In my view, therefore, rather than simply ruling out the possibility that the Ancient Egyptians might have reached not only the Americas, but also Indonesia and Australia, we should be asking ourselves why, and over what sort of time span, they might have made such voyages. In particular, I wonder if it is possible that the tradition of a drowned homeland of the gods somewhere in the east that is so strongly expressed in the Edfu Building Texts might be connected to this mystery.
To be specific, could Indonesia, once part of the mainland of Southeast Asia and broken up into more than 13,000 islands by cataclysmic sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age—and perhaps particularly Java with its 45 active volcanoes—have been associated in the Ancient Egyptian mind with the “Isle of Fire,” which R.T. Rundle Clark describes as “the mystic land of origin beyond the horizon?”44
The very same “Isle of Fire,” as we saw in Chapter Eleven, from which Hike, the vital, magical essence was brought by the Phoenix to Heliopolis, the symbolic center and navel of the earth?45
The Isle of Fire with which Horus of Edfu was directly associated46 and where Thoth, the Sage, the Lord of Wisdom, “made shrines for the gods and goddesses?”47
The dead hand of orthodox archaeology
The final leg of our 2014 Indonesia journey takes us back to Gunung Padang, the mysterious pyramid, for so long thought to be a natural hill, that geologist Danny Natawidjaja, through determined efforts, has brought to the attention of the world. I won’t describe it again, since I have already introduced it to the reader in Chapter Two.
We’ve seen how the megalithic site of columnar basalt visible on the uppermost terraces of Gunung Padang is simply the latest episode in its long story and how Danny and his team used seismic tomography, ground-penetrating radar and other remote-sensing technologies to show that the man-made structures go down tens of meters beneath the surface. Core drilling into these buried structures was undertaken producing organic materials with impeccable provenance that yielded ever more ancient carbon dates extending back, ultimately to more than 22,000 years ago—before the end of the last Ice Age, when our ancestors are supposed (according to the orthodox archaeological model) to be have been nothing more than primitive hunter-gatherers, incapable of large-scale construction and engin
eering feats. Intriguingly, as I also reported in Chapter Two, the remote sensing equipment flagged up the presence deep within the pyramid of what appear to be three hidden chambers, so rectilinear in form that they are most unlikely to be natural. The largest of these lies at a depth of between 21.3 and 27.4 meters (70 to 90 feet) and measures approximately 5.5 meters (18 feet) high, 13.7 meters (45 feet) long and 9.1 meters (30 feet) wide.48
On our visit to Gunung Padang in early June 2014, excavations were still being held up by objections from archaeologists but by August, following a decisive intervention by Indonesia’s then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Danny and his team were finally able to proceed for a first short season. Unfortunately, however, the work was halted very soon afterward, in October 2014, when President Yudhoyono completed his second term of office and stepped down. His successor, President Joko Widodo, has thus far not shown the same level of interest in and enthusiasm for the project, perhaps because of objections from Bandung Archaeological Center Chief Desril Shanti, who launched a public attack on the Gunung Padang excavations in late September 2014, complaining that they did not follow the standard methods that are usually applied in archaeological projects. “I’ve yet to go to the site,” she said, “but I can judge it from photographs. An archaeological excavation method shouldn’t have been carried out in that way.”49 She also objected that funding had been allocated to the work. This funding, she felt, should have gone to her own department.50
At the beginning of October 2014, as the reader will recall from Chapter Two, Danny had written to me enthusiastically as follows:
The research progress has been being great. We have excavated three more spots right on top of the megalithic site in the past couple of weeks, which give more evidence and details about the buried structures. We have uncovered lots more stone artifacts from the excavations. The existence of the pyramid-like structure beneath the megalithic site is now loud and clear; even for non-specialists, it is not too difficult to understand if they come and see for themselves. We have found some kind of open hall buried by soil five to seven meters thick; however we have not yet got into the main chamber. We are now drilling to the suspected location of the chamber (based on subsurface geophysic) in the middle of the megalithic site.51
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