From Atlantis to the Sphinx (23 page)

Harleston went on to work out that the basic unit used in Teotihuacan was 1.059 metres. Noting also the frequency of the figure 378 metres (for example, between boundary markers along the Way of the Dead), Harleston observed that 1.059 multiplied by 378, then by 100,000, gives a very accurate figure for the Polar radius of the earth, and seems to support Le Plongeon’s speculation that the pyramids were designed as scale models of the earth.

All this sounds like an argument in favour of von Daniken’s space visitors. But what Schwaller de Lubicz and John West and Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval are all suggesting is rather less controversial: that ancient peoples probably
inherited
their knowledge from a civilisation that knew a great many things. Whether these things were originally brought to earth by ‘Nommo’ from the stars is, for our purposes, irrelevant. If ever any evidence for it turns up, then it might become relevant. But for the moment, there is a far more fascinating problem: what these remote people knew, and how they applied their knowledge. This
is
something we can investigate.

But where Teotihuacan is concerned, our investigations still leave the subject steeped in mystery. We do not know the date it was built.
If
it was built by the Toltecs, then its date could be anything between AD 500 and 1100. But some carbon dating has yielded a date at the beginning of the Christian era—which is earlier than the Toltecs. The Aztecs themselves declared that Teotihuacan was built at the beginning of the Fifth Age, in 3113 BC, by Quetzalcoatl. Their previous four ages (or ‘suns’) lasted, respectively, 4008 years, 4010 years, 4081 years and 5026 years, which adds up to 17,125 years before the beginning of the Fifth Sun. In other words, the Aztecs date the ‘beginnings’ of civilisation back to 20,238 BC. (They also anticipated its end, in violent earthquakes, on 24 December 2012.)

At the moment, there is so much unexcavated in Teotihuacan that it is impossible to say when the original site was laid out—it may well be that, as in the case of Stonehenge, it was built at widely separated periods. We must take into account the possibility that it may have already been there when the Toltecs came, just as it was when the Aztecs discovered it. All we know is that, like the interior of the Great Pyramid, it seems to have been laid out with a weird and baffling precision. And why did the builders of the Sun Pyramid want to install a layer of mica? The same applies to a building known as the Mica Temple not far from the Sun Pyramid. Under its floor are two enormous sheets of mica, 90 feet square. It is fortunate that Batres was dead by the time the Mica Temple was discovered, for it enabled archaeologists to discover a curious fact: that the chemistry of the mica reveals that it is not local mica, but that it came from Brazil, two thousand miles away. Why? And how were 90-foot sheets of mica transported? Moreover, why was it then placed
under
the floor? What purpose did it serve there? Graham Hancock points out that mica is used as an insulator in condensers, and that it can be used to slow down nuclear reactions, but it is hard to see how an underfloor layer of mica could serve any scientific purpose.

Teotihuacan means ‘City of the gods’, or more literally ‘City where men become gods’. This makes it sound as if it served some important ritual purpose, perhaps analogous to Bauval’s notion that the ‘air shafts’ of the Great Pyramid are intended to direct the soul of the pharaoh into the sky, where he becomes a god.

So, like the Giza complex, the city of Teotihuacan remains a mystery. At the moment, its complex measurements and the arrangement of its strange buildings make no sense. All that seems reasonably certain, once again, is that it was built with astronomical alignments in mind, and that to the Toltecs—or whoever built it—it symbolised some divine mystery, whose nature has been long forgotten.

The same is true of South America’s most famous enigma, the Nazca lines. These were discovered in 1941 by an American professor of history named Paul Kosok, who happened to be flying over the desert near the town of Nazca, Peru, looking for irrigation channels. What he saw from the air was a series of hundreds of amazing drawings in the sand—giant birds, insects, fishes, animals and flowers, including a spider, a condor, a monkey and a whale. They had never been seen before because they cannot be seen from ground level—200 square miles of plateau. At ground level, they proved to be made by moving the small stones that form the surface of the desert to reveal the hard soil underneath. There are also huge geometrical figures, and long lines stretching to the horizon, some of which end abruptly on mountain tops.

The Nazca plain is windy, but the stones on its surface absorb sufficient heat to cause rising air, which protects the ground level. Rain is extremely rare. So the giant drawings have remained undisturbed for centuries, possibly millennia. Some organic remains from the area have been carbon dated to a period between AD 350 and 600, and pottery to as early as the first century BC, but the lines themselves cannot be dated.

Erich von Daniken would later suggest that the long lines were intended as runways for the aircraft of ancient space travellers, but this overlooks the fact that an aeroplane would blast the stones in all directions; the same applies to a spacecraft rising vertically.

On 22 June 1941, Kosok saw the sun setting at the end of one of the lines stretching into the distance across the desert. It was the midwinter solstice in southern Peru—that is, the time the sun hovers over the Tropic of Capricorn and prepares to return north. This convinced Kosok that the lines had some astronomical purpose.

But when Gerald Hawkins fed the various alignments into his computer, looking at a period from 5000 BC to AD 1900, he was disappointed; none of the lines pointed conclusively at certain stars at significant times—such as the solstice or equinox. Kosok, it seemed, was wrong.

But a later investigator, Dr Phyllis Pitluga, of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, discovered that this was not entirely true. Her researches demonstrated that the giant spider was intended as a model of the constellation of Orion, and that the series of straight lines around it were designed to track the three stars of Orion’s Belt. So the Nazca spider, like the Giza pyramids, is associated with Orion’s Belt.

Tony Morrison, a zoologist who studied the lines with Gerald Hawkins, concludes his book
Pathways to the Gods
(1978) with a quotation from a Spanish magistrate, Luis de Monzon, who wrote in 1586 about worked stones and ancient roads near Nazca:

The old Indians say that... they have knowledge of their ancestors, that in very old times, before the Incas ruled over them, there came to the land another people they call Viracochas, not many of them, and they were followed by Indians who came after them listening to their word, and now the Indians say they must have been saintly persons. And so to them they built paths which can be seen today.

And here, surely, we have the key to the mystery of the Nazca lines: the legendary hero-teacher Viracocha, also called Quetzalcoatl and Kon-Tiki, whose return was still expected when Cortés landed. The old Indians’ constructed the great figures, because they expected Viracocha to return—this time from the air—and the figures were intended as a marker.

How did they make the figures? Many writers have speculated that the Indians must have possessed hot-air balloons. But even if this were true, it would hardly be of much use to the Indians on the ground. You cannot make a 900-foot figure from a thousand feet above it.

On the other hand, the construction of giant drawings is not beyond the skill of a group of dedicated workers guided by priests. It is simply a question of constructing a huge version from a small drawing or plan. Ancient Britons faced a similar task when they carved huge figures in the chalk of the Downs, and the same is true of Gutzon Borglum, the artist who carved the giant faces of American presidents at Mount Rushmore. Neither is it entirely true that lines on the desert cannot be seen from ground level—there are many hills and mountains in the Nazca area that would enable the artists to gain a sense of perspective. Tony Morrison has pointed out that although the stones of the Nazca figures are weathered to a dark colour, the tracks left on the desert by a motor car are bright yellow, and the Nazca lines must originally have been highly visible.

It is unlikely, of course, that the lines and figures were intended solely as markers. They may also have had some significance as fertility figures, and may have been the site of ritual dances. Yet Luis de Monzon’s comment, in 1586, that the Indians built paths to Viracocha, surely offers the most obvious and straightforward explanation of the purpose of the lines.

We have seen how, at the end of the nineteenth century, many respectable archaeologists believed that the Sphinx was far, far older than the pyramids, and how modern Egyptologists have moved steadily in the direction of caution, substituting a kind of dispassionate classicism for what they feel to be irresponsible romanticism. The same thing happened to South American archaeology. In 1922, Byron Cummings, of the University of Arizona, noticed a large overgrown hill off the road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, covered with a coating of solid lava. He removed the lava cover—often using dynamite—and discovered that it was a truncated pyramid, probably the earliest known. It was the Mexican version of the Step Pyramid of Zoser. A New Zealand geologist placed the age of the lava field between 7,000 and 2,000 years, and Byron Cummings decided that 7,000 years was probably accurate. Modern scholars prefer to date it between 600 BC and AD 200. In his book on archaeology in the Americas,
Conquistadores Without Swords
(1967), Leo Deuel states that although there may have been human beings in Mexico ten thousand or more years ago, farmers and builders made their appearance around 2000 BC.

In general he echoes the attitude of most archaeologists: that it is pure romanticism to link the pyramids of South America with those of Egypt, because there are several thousand years between them. Yet, as we have seen, this may be missing the point—which is the question of the age of the
tradition
to which the Olmecs and Toltecs and Mayas belonged. The ruins of Tiahuanaco seem to demonstrate more clearly than others that civilisation in South America may be far older than we suppose.

Graham Hancock makes the same point when discussing the Maya calendar, which came in turn from the Olmecs (who made the giant negroid heads that curiously resemble the face of the Sphinx). The European calendar estimates the length of the year to be 365¾ days. The correct length is 365.2422. But the Mayas estimated it at 365.2420—immeasurably more accurate than our western calendar. They estimated the time taken by the moon to revolve around the earth almost as accurately as a modern computer—29.528395 days. Their astronomy shows a sophistication comparable to our own. Yet these were the people of whom one scholar asks how they can have failed to grasp the principle of the wheel. The answer, suggests Hancock, is that Maya astronomy was not their own creation, but a legacy from the distant past.

All that we know of the civilisations of Central and South America suggests that they did not grow up in isolation from the rest of the world. There was a point when they were connected with Europe and the Middle East, perhaps even with India. The legends suggest that civilisation was brought to South America by white men, soon after some great catastrophe that obscured the sun. Documents and traditions suggest that such a catastrophe occurred around 10,500 BC.

If we cannot be dogmatic about the date of the catastrophe that struck Tiahuanaco in the Andes, we
do
know the date of a catastrophe that struck Egypt. Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture began several millennia before the age we usually assign to the first farmers. Before 1300 BC, sickle blades and corn-grinding stones appear in late Paleolithic tool-kits. The absence of fish remains at this period suggests that man had learned to feed himself by agriculture. Then, it seems, a series of natural disasters, including tremendous floods down the Nile Valley, put an end to the ‘agricultural revolution’ in about 10,500 BC. This is the date when, West speculates, the destruction of ‘Atlantis’ occurred, and survivors came to Egypt and built the earliest version of the Sphinx. This is the date when, according to Bauval, the ‘proto-Egyptians’ planned, and possibly began building, the Giza pyramids. This is also the date given by
Nature
in 1971 and
The New Scientist
in 1972 as that of the last reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles.

All this at least suggests that the date when the ‘white gods’ came from the east to Mexico was 10,500 BC. If that is true, and the tradition that Viracocha founded the sacred city of Teotihuacan has a basis in fact, then Teotihuacan was also at least ‘planned’ at the same time as the Giza pyramids, and whatever knowledge is embodied in its geometrical lay-out was brought from a civilisation in the throes of destruction.

Now we know that the Egyptians attached special importance to the dog star Sirius, and to the constellation of Orion, at whose heel it stands. We also know that the Abbé Brasseur was convinced that Sirius was the sacred star of the Maya. We have reason to believe that the spider on the Nazca plain represents the constellation of Orion, which was of equal importance to the Egyptians. As ‘coincidences’ like these continue to pile up, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the civilisations of North Africa and Central and South America had some common origin, and that this common origin lies so deep in the past that our only chance of understanding it lies in deciphering the faint—almost invisible—signs it has left behind.

The small town of Altdorf, near Nuremberg, is ignored in most encyclopaedias and gazetteers, which include only its better-known namesake in Switzerland, where William Tell shot an arrow from his son’s head. Yet it has an even more remarkable distinction. It is the place where modern man first began to suspect that his ancestry might extend back for millions of years.