Alien Space Gods Of Ancient Greece and Rome (15 page)

Like Atlantis the greatness of ancient
Athens
was swept away by cataclysm.

‘…the action of a single night of extraordinary rain has crumbled it away and made it bare of soil, when earthquakes occurred simultaneously with the third of the disastrous floods, which preceded the destructive deluge in the time of Deucalion...'

The earthquakes devastating
Yugoslavia
,
Greece
and
Turkey
during our own times support Plato's complaint.

In the 'Timacus' the Egyptian Priests of Sais stated:

'You are ignorant of the fact that the noblest and most perfect race amongst men were born in the land where you now dwell, and from them both you yourself are sprung and the whole of your existing city, out of some little seed, that chanced to be left over, but this has escaped your notice because for many generations the survivors died with do power to express themselves in writing. For verily at one time, Solon, before the greatest destruction by water, what is now the
Athenian
State
was the bravest in war and supremely well organised also in all respects. It is said that it possessed the most splendid works of art and the noblest polity of any nation under heaven of which we have heard tell.'

Deucalion was son of the hero, Prometheus, the Titan, who warred against the Gods and stole fire from heaven in a hollow tube and taught civilisation to men. Our new knowledge of Spaceships suggests that Prometheus stole nuclear secrets, possibly from the planet Jupiter, then returned to defend Earth against invading Spacemen. Later cataclysm ravaged Earth, destroying almost all mankind; Deucalion and his cousin, Pyrrha, built a ship like Noah and floated to safety; their son, Hellen, became a King in Thessaiy, his descendants gave his name to Hellas, that ancient land of Greece.

This wonderful story of
Athens
told by Plato seems confirmed by legends all over the world, recalling a great civilisation long ago, when men on Earth fought Invaders from Space, then suffered calamitous destruction.  What has been, shall be again! In ten thousand years, time will prehistorians deny our modern
London
or swear we did not exist?

Man is much older than historians imagine. Dr. Louis Leakey, the noted anthropologist, whose discoveries of most ancient fossils in Kenya are revolutionising our conception of Man, believed that the split between ape and 'near'-man from a common ancestor occurred between forty and fifty million years ago. Eleven fossilised jaw-fragments from nine individuals found in
Kenya
have been dated by Mr. Jack Miller of
Cambridge
University
as between nineteen and twenty million years old. Hominids of the Oligocene period, twenty-five million years ago, have been excavated by American anthropologists near Fayum in
Egypt
. For a million generations Man has lived on Earth; the first men may not have evolved from an ape-like ancestor as generally believed, cultured Beings could have landed here from some advanced planet to colonise our world or have been 'ship-wrecked' here and marooned like those ill-fated Dropas in the mountains of
China
.

If evolution does proceed by infinitely slow progression and not by sudden mutations caused by cosmic cataclysms or fluctuations in cosmic radiation, then in a few hundred generations our descendants, a little wiser, perhaps a little sadder, will differ only slightly from ourselves. Our ancestors twelve thousand years ago in physique and mentality must surely have closely resembled us; it seems absurd for historians to suggest that for millions of years men lived like animals then suddenly ascended from caves to Space-capsules. Millions of years ago great civilisations could have flourished all over the Earth; continents suffer constant change, are we to deny early Man merely because our archaeologists cannot excavate his cities now under the sea?

In 1962 Professor Walter Matthes of
Hamburg
University
announced a sensational discovery revolutionising current theories of human antiquity. Near the River Elbe German prehistorians found five hundred stones with flint drawings of men's heads at least 200,000 years old depicted with an artistry quite different from the cave-paintings of late Neanderthal times; some of the sketches showed animals of the Ice Age. Rock pictures on cave walls in the Val Cosmonique and the Swiss Alps resemble human beings in space-suits and helmets with antennae, breath-filters or night-sight devices. Similar drawings or figurines like the Japanese dogu have also been found in Australia, Ferghana, Uzbekhistan, and near the city of Navoi in Soviet Central Asia, all suggest association with Oannes, the Teacher of Babylon, and the famous 'Martian' of the Tassili frescoes in the Sahara. Such prehistoric drawings or sculptures evoke those intriguing carvings of noble faces on the lofty desert plateau of Marcahuasi in the
Andes
and the fascinating petroglyphs in the
Grand Canyon
recalling some vanished civilisations of the past, perhaps Visitants from the stars.

Some of the peoples of far Antiquity had an astonishing sophisticated knowledge of the Earth vastly surpassing the narrow horizon of the cavemen. One of the most exact sciences must be cartography; the making of precise maps demands detailed geographical, mathematical and astronomical study presupposing keen, enquiring, adventurous minds, which had already explored the world and mastered the difficult art of mapping it.

It is generally agreed that Christopher Columbus was inspired by a map of the great cartographer, Toscanelli, a fascinating drawing which showed from right to left the coastline of Europe and the unknown Western Ocean extending to the islands of Japan, China and India, inviting adventurous mariners to seek the fabulous Indies by sailing West. After years of frustration
Columbus
finally persuaded Queen Isabella of
Spain
to provide him with three small ships, and in 1492 with a cut-throat crew he braved the
Atlantic
to re-discover
America
. Startling evidence now suggests that though Toscanelli's map did not show
America
,
Columbus
was aware of that continent's existence, a secret shared by a few Initiates and scholars.
Columbus
is said to have been greatly influenced by Seneca's 'Medea' describing the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece with fascinating geographical traditions.

In the early sixteenth century, Piri Reis, a popular Admiral of the Turkish fleet sweeping the
Mediterranean
to challenge Christendom, wrote his memoirs,
'Bahriya, the 'Book of the Sea'
. Piri Reis was a cultured and accomplished nobleman, who spoke many languages and developed that astonishing versatility, so characteristic of his more famous contemporaries in Renaissance times; a great seaman, he contributed heroically to the rise of the
Ottoman Empire
; today he is honoured as a scholar and cartographer, whose astounding maps are suddenly revolutionising our whole conception of Antiquity. We in the West forget that during the Middle Ages science was fostered by the Arabs, who inherited the learning of the Greeks; the capture of Constantinople in 1453 which drove scholars westwards to promote the Renaissance, left the Turks in possession of all the treasures of Byzantium, the greatest libraries in the world with the old and erudite manuscripts from Greece and the countries of
Asia
.

In his '
Bahriya’
, which contained picturesque descriptions of Mediterranean ports and 215 exquisitely drawn maps, Piri Reis claimed to possess about twenty secret and most ancient maps including some from the East, of which only he in the whole of Europe had knowledge. Piri Reis possessed a map actually made by Columbus himself, acquired from a slave who sailed with
Columbus
but was later captured by Piri's uncle, Kemal Reis.

In the '
Bahriya'
Piri Reis stated that Columbus knew precisely where he was going, hence his sublime confidence when his crew nearly mutinied and begged to turn back; Columbus was inspired by an ancient book which depicted the Mare Tenebrosum, Sea of Darkness, bounded by islands in the west; this knowledge had prompted him to beseech aid from most of the monarchs of Europe. The Turkish Admiral claimed that this famous book dated from Alexander the Great, it mentioned that the natives were fond of glass trinkets, so
Columbus
duly pacified them with such gifts. The Egyptian and
Greek
Mystery
Schools
probably did preserve maps of the world before and after the destruction of Lemuria and Atlantis; Initiates of the Secret Wisdom would surely possess some map showing
America
. Seafaring traditions from ancient times told of a vast continent called by the Greeks 'Antichtone', the land of the
Antipodes
, now
Antarctica
. The Phoenicians, those great mariners of Antiquity, must surely have reached
America
, today the
Atlantic
has been crossed in rowing-boats. Hyatt Verrill and other prehistorians claim to have found many traces of Phoenician influences on the coasts of North and
South America
. Discovery of
America
is now generally credited to the Vikings. 

The celebrated Map of Gloreanus dated 1510 in the Library at
Rome
shows not only both the
Americas
from
Canada
to Tierra
del
Fuego but also the North and South Pacific, posing speculations difficult to resolve without admitting world-wide navigation long ago.

Piri Reis, a meticulous and erudite cartographer, drew two maps of the world, one in 1513, the other in 1528 in the reign of Soliman the Magnificent, compiled from those rare and ancient maps in his collection. The Reis Maps on coloured parchment are adorned with fascinating sketches of strange peoples, monsters and ships, annotated in elegant Turkish script; more startling to our modern eyes are the precise delineations of North and
South America
with mountain-ranges in
Canada
and
Alaska
, most astounding of all the coastline of an ice-free
Antarctica
. Both these maps were preserved in the Museums of the
Topkopi
Palace
at
Istanbul
for hundreds of years, apparently lost until 1929 when fragments were found by M. B. Halil Eldem, Director of the
National
Museum
. In 1953 a Turkish naval officer presented a copy to the United States Hydrographical Bureau, where for many years it was studied by Arlington H. Mallery and I. Walters, specialists in ancient maps.