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'It seemed to me then, as I overlooked the mathematical city of
the gods from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, that our species
could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the
dark period so blithely and dismissively referred to as 'prehistory'
might turn out to conceal unimagined truths about our own past.'[1]
With their superior architecture, and the
advanced mathematical knowledge involved one would imagine that
the high civilizations of the Americas would also have been advanced
in many other ways. Curiously however, the cultures of those about
which we know are accepted to be fairly unremarkable. Adrian Gilbert
sums the mystery of the Maya up in the beginning of the book he
wrote with Maurice Cotterell, The Mayan Prophecies:
The pattern that is emerging is of a people
very different from ourselves. Unlike us the Maya had few personal
possessions other than the bare necessities of life. They cultivated
the earth using the simplest of tools to grow maize and a few other
staples. Meanwhile their gorgeously attired rulers performed strange
and painful rituals on themselves to ensure the fertility of the
land. It was a stratified society, in which both rulers and peasants
knew their place, but there was one great difference between it
and the sort of Dark Age societies that were its contemporaries
in Europe: the Maya were expert astronomers.[2]
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The Maya's advanced astro-calendrical knowledge puzzled a leading
authority on the archeology of Central America. In 1954 J. Eric
Thompson asked:
"What mental quirks led the Maya intelligensia
to chart the heavens, yet fail to grasp the principle of the wheel;
to visualize eternity, as no other semi-civilized people have ever
done, yet ignore the short step from corbelled to true arch; to
count in millions, yet never learn to weigh a sack of corn?"
The Maya used a sophisticated calendrical
system to plot the earth's rotation around the sun, one which is
widely recognized to be more accurate than the famous Gregorian
calendar used in Europe from 1582 to the present day. Their calendars
plotted the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth with an accuracy
that can only be matched by the finest of modern methods. They were
also skilled in predicting solar and lunar eclipses. Unlike the
Ancient Greeks, but like the Ancient Egyptians, the Maya understood
that Venus was both the morning star and the evening star, which
they also ingeniously incorporated into their calendar. The combination
of their interlocking systems ensured that the calendar was virtually
error-free, over vast expanses of time.
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The
interlocking Maya calendrical system
The most amazing part of the Mayan calendrical
system is the so-called 'Long Count'. The function of the Long Count
was to record the elapse of time since the beginning of the current
Great Cycle.
'They believed that they were living in the fifth age of the sun;
that prior to the creation of modern men there had been four previous
races and four previous ages. These had all been destroyed in great
cataclysms, leaving few survivors behind to tell the tale. According
to Mayan chronology, the present age started on 12 August 3114 BC
and is to end on AD 22 December 2012. At that time the earth as
we know it is again to be destroyed by catastrophic earthquakes.'[2]
The Maya themselves were quick to point out
that they had received their calendrical system, more or less intact,
from an earlier culture called the Olmecs, who had used it over
a thousand years before them. Little is known of the Olmecs except
that they appeared from nowhere, carried out advanced engineering
works, and left an artistic legacy that involved the (quarrying,
transporting and) carving of massive basalt heads depicting a bewildering
variety of clearly negroid heads, some of them weighing more than
twenty tons.
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The
Olmecs also left behind carved stele of bearded men. Nobody knows
when the heads were carved. Indians don't grow beards, and there
is no further evidence that sub-Saharan Africans reached the New
World anytime before Columbus. Most of the giant negroid heads had
further been meticulously buried in pits with other, ritually mutilated
artifacts. Pieces of charcoal found in the pits were carbon-dated
to between 1500 and 1100 BC, but as Hancock points out, that only
tells us the age of the charcoal.
The question is then, where did the Olmecs get the calendrical system
they passed on to the Maya from? And if they did get it from some
other, older civilization, who were they to devise such a sophisticated
calendar, and what drove them to such lengths to do so?
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To
delve further into the source of the Olmec-Mayan calendrical system
we must turn to the oral tradition and mythology of the pre-conquest
Indians. We must turn to remains of the tradition that, despite
having being devastated in the religious conquest of Mexico, is
emphatic about the the source of Mayan knowledge. According to the
Spanish chronicler Las Casas:
'The natives affirmed that in ancient times there came to Mexico
twenty men, the chief of whom was called Kukulkan ... They wore
flowing robes and sandals on their feet, they had long beards and
their heads were bare ... Kukulkan instructed the people in the
arts of peace and caused various important edifices to be built
...'
Juan de Torquemada recorded an even more specific
tradition concerning the bearded strangers:
'They were men of good carriage, well-dressed,
in long robes of black linen, open in the front, and without capes,
cut low at the neck, with short sleeves that did not come to the
elbow ... These followers of Quetzalcoatl were men of great knowledge
and cunning artists in all kinds of fine work.'
According to the Popul Vuh, these were the
first men, who had handed gifts of civilization to the Mayan forefathers.
Whether Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl and their Andean counterpart Viracocha
are the same individual is a matter debated, but it certainly appears
they were connected or of the same group of civilizers. They were:
' ... endowed with intelligence; they saw
and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing; they
succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things
hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move ...
Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the
rocks, the lakes, the seas, the mountains, and the valleys. In truth,
they were admirable men ... They were able to know all, and they
examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky,
and the round face of the earth.'
Quetzalcoatl was depicted as having brought to Mexico all the skills
and sciences necessary to create a civilized life, thus ushering
in a golden age. He was believed to have introduced the knowledge
of writing to Central America, to have invented the calendar, and
to have been a master builder and teacher of the secrets of masonry
and architecture. Quetzalcoatl was the father of mathematics, metallurgy,
and astronomy and was said to have 'measured the earth'. He also
founded productive agriculture, and was reported to have discovered
and introduced corn, taught the people the mysteries of the properties
of plants and was the patron healers, diviners and craftsmen. He
forbade the grisly practice of human sacrifice during his period
of ascendancy in Mexico, which held until he once again left, when
the bloody rituals were reintroduced with a vengeance.[1]
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At first it sounds like all the stories of the 'civilizer' gods
we have read about in Egyptian, Sumerian, and Hindu mythology, and
it becomes tempting to write the attributes of Quetzalcoatl off
as another 'myth'. Yet something about the story arrests this temptation.
In the words of the Mayan academic, Sylvanus Griswold Morley:
"The great god Kukulkan, or Feathered
Serpent, was the Mayan counterpart of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the
Mexican god of light, learning and culture. In the Maya pantheon
he was regarded as having been the great organizer, the founder
of cities, the former of laws and the teacher of the calendar. Indeed
his attributes and life history are so human that it is not improbable
that he may have been an actual historical character, some great
lawgiver and organizer, the memory of whose benefactions lingered
long after death, and whose personality was eventually deified."
'There
is a mystery still unsolved on the plateau of Lake Titicaca, which,
if the stones could speak, would reveal a story of deepest interest.
Much of the difficulty in the solution to this mystery is caused
by the nature of the region, in the present day, where the enigma
still defies explanation.'
So wrote Sir Clemens Markham in 1910.
'Such a region is only capable of sustaining a scanty population
of hardy mountaineers and laborers. The mystery consists in the
existence of the ruins of a great city at the southern side of the
lake, the builders being entirely unknown. The city covered a large
area, built by highly skilled masons, and with the use of enormous
stones.'[6]
A more modern source describes the following;
'Anyone who attempts the 4,350 meter climb
up the rough winding road to Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian Andes
gasps as the thin mountain air evades their lungs. But the struggle
is worth it, for at the summit lies a mysterious lake. Only the
graceful reed boats of the native people who still fish its depths
and the restless winds of the past disturb the calm surface of this,
the highest major lake in the world. The Inca claim that their ancestors
came here in the remote past to construct the great city of Tiahuanaco
with its massive Temple of the Sun. The city was built from massive
boulders, comparable to those of the Egyptian Pyramids. But the
construction is incomplete, as if it had been abruptly abandoned.'[3]
When Graham Hancock visited Lake Titicaca
he was intrigued to see that the reed boats of the local Indians
looked exactly like those he had seen in Egypt; local Indians declared
that the design had been given to them by the Viracocha people.
'The city of Tiahuanaco was once a port, as
is revealed by its vast docks - one wharf big enough to take hundreds
of ships. The port is now twelve miles south of the lake and more
than a hundred feet higher. The old port is located at a place called
Puma Punku (Puma Gate), and dozens of huge blocks lying around in
chaos indicate that it had been subject to some earthquake or other
disturbance.'[4]
Just as in Egypt, Hancock was astonished by
the sheer size of the building stones, many 30 feet long and 15
feet wide. One of the construction stones weighed 440 tons - more
than twice as much as the gargantuan stones of the Sphinx Temple
in Giza. Accounts of how the city was built in a single night and
another of how the stones had been transported through the air by
the 'sound of trumpets' have come from Spanish chroniclers who had
recorded the traditions of the Incas.
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None
have spent more time or effort studying Tiahuanaco's ruins than
a Polish researcher, Arthur Posnansky, who spent almost 50 years
at the site. He writes:
'At the present time, the plateau of the Andes
is inhospitable and almost sterile. With the present climate, it
would not have been suitable in any period as the asylum for great
human masses' of the 'most important prehistoric centre of the world.'
Endless agricultural terraces of the people who lived in this region
in pre-Inca days can still be recognized. 'Today this region is
at a very great height above sea level. In remote periods it was
lower.'
The terraces rise to a height of 15,000 feet, twenty-five hundred
feet above Tiahuanacu, and still higher, up to 18,400 feet above
sea level, or to the present line of eternal snow on Illimani.[5]
It was while studying the astronomical alignment
of the Temple of the Sun that Posnansky came to the remarkable conclusion
that it had been built in 15,000 BC. The estimate stunned his academic
colleagues, who maintained it was built in AD 500. Posnansky was
soon written off and derided as a crank. A later study by the high-powered
team of the German Astronomical Commission, who didn't concern themselves
with the further implications of the findings, confirmed after three
years' study that the Temple of the Sun was an observatory, and
concluded that Posnansky's figure of 15,000 BC was well within the
bounds of possibility. In making his peace with the academic establishment,
Posnansky later revised the possible date to 10,500 BC.
Archeologists continue to dismiss the notion
as a fantasy. 'It is simply not possible, in their view, for a civilization
to have existed at such an early date. This would be four thousand
years older than Sumeria (the 'first' civilization of world archeology).
Posnansky's research has consequently been ignored and his calculations
have never been tested by other researchers.'[3]
Posnansky's view has been given a recent boost
by the idea that the Sphinx of Giza may be much older than the proposed
beginning of Egyptian civilization. Whatever the case, the fact
that a people built a vast port using cyclopean stones 4,350 meters
up in the mountains should also strike us as somewhat mysterious.
In a book called Moon, Myths and Man, the author Bellamy may help
explain this. He writes:
'Near Lake Titicaca we find a very interesting
phenomenon: an ancient strand-line which is almost 12,000 feet above
sea level. It is easily verifiable as an ancient littoral (coast
line) because calcareous deposits of algae have painted a conspicuous
white band upon the rocks, and because shells and shingle are littered
about there. What is even more remarkable is that on this strand
line are situated the cyclopean ruins of the town of Tiahuanaco,
enigmatic remains which show five distinct landing-places, harbours
with moles, and so on, while a canal leads far inland.'
There are two credible theories regarding
Tiahuanaco's altitude, and Charles Darwin himself pondered them
long. Either the oceans were once two miles above the present sea-level,
or the Andes themselves have risen more than two miles. The presence
of sea-creatures such as sea horses in Lake Titicaca leave no doubt
that it was once part of the sea. The consensus amongst geologists
appears to be that the Andes have risen. Immanuel Velikovsky's Earth
in Upheaval argues exactly this convincingly, and sums up:
Sometime in the remote past the entire Altiplano
with it's lakes rose from the bottom of the ocean. At some other
time point a city was built there and terraces were laid out on
the elevation around it; then in another disturbance the mountains
were thrust up and the area became uninhabitable.[5]
If this is right Tiahuanaco was being constructed
as a port before the Andes rose above sea level - at sometime between
15,000 BC and 10,500 BC. This is, of course, a suggestion that has
frequently given orthodox archeologists a fit. But mythology backs
the extreme age and catastrophic circumstances of the geological
evidence. The tradition comes from the Aymara, who still live on
the shores of Lake Titicaca.
The Aymara are a very ancient and proud race. More than two and
a half million people speak the Aymara language, raise llamas, and
grow potatoes on the lake's shore - just as their ancestors have
done for thousands of years. Even the renowned Inca Empire borrowed
heavily from their ancient customs of sun worship, agriculture,
and the use of llamas.
The Aymara tell of strange events at Titicaca after the Great Flood.
Strangers attempted to build a great city on the lake. An Aymara
myth retold by a Spanish visitor tells of how their ancestors crossed
over Lake Titicaca and with their warriors " ... waged such
a war on the people of which I speak that he killed them all."
Surviving the Great Flood and coming to build their city on the
shores of Lake Titicaca, the strangers were suddenly engaged in
a war with another cataclysmic force - the hand of fellow man. Whether
it was before or after this time that the earthquake which interrupted
Tiahuanaco's
completion struck remains a mystery, but interrupted it was, just
as the magnificent monolith of the Gateway of the Sun nearby was
left unfinished. Something had interrupted the sculptor and snapped
the gate in two - and the scattered stone blocks made it obvious
that it was an earthquake.
The only other myths relating to the period of 15,000 BC to 10,500
BC - and that coincide with global cataclysms - infringe on possibly
the most contentious of subjects for archeologists, Egyptologists,
historians, anthropologists, and much of the the rest of the academic
establishment - the myths of an advanced maritime culture which
lost its homeland in a long series of violent global catastrophes.
A people whose origins lay in the World Ocean, 'beyond the Pillars
of Hercules.'
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Let
me leave with the haunting impression Hancock shares with of us
regarding the ancient past as he stood atop the Pyramid of the Sun
at Teotihuacan, Mexico:
'What is prehistory, after all, if not a time
forgotten - a time for which we have no records? What is prehistory
if not an epoch of impenetrable obscurity through which our ancestors
passed but about which we have no conscious remembrance? It was
out of this epoch of obscurity, configured in mathematical code
along astronomical and geodetic lines, that Teotihuacan with all
its riddles was sent down to us. And out of that same epoch came
the great Olmec sculptures, the inexplicably precise and accurate
calendar the Mayas inherited from their predecessors, the inscrutable
geoglyphs of Nazca, the mysterious Andean city of Tiahuanaco ...
and so many other marvels of which we do not know the provenance.
It is almost as though we have awakened into the daylight of history
from a long and troubled sleep, and yet continue to be disturbed
by the faint but haunting echoes of our dreams ...'[1]
CONTINUE
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