The Atlantis Blueprint (41 page)

After the Moche came conquerors called the Chimu, who built Chan Chan, and were in turn conquered by the Incas, whose civilisation was so vast that it needed two capital cities. But the Inca empire lasted for a mere century before the arrival of the Spaniards, who brought this cycle of great civilisations to an end.

As Heyerdahl stared at the blue-eyed mask, Alva told him of more pyramids, about 130 miles north, at a place called Túcume, and offered to take him there. And so, at dusk on that March day, Heyerdahl found himself looking at seventeen pyramids that might have been mistaken for natural hills, scored into runnels by El Niño. In fact, photographs make them look rather like the giant hills of china clay waste in the St Austell area of Cornwall where I live.

As far as archaeology was concerned, these were virgin territory. Heyerdahl decided there and then that, for the next
year or so, Túcume would be his home, until the pyramids had given up their secrets.

It was a risky venture for the seventy-three-year-old Norwegian. To begin with, Peru was full of terrorist guerrillas who called themselves the Shining Path; they had even stolen the telephone lines connecting Túcume to civilisation. And then the villagers of Túcume regarded the pyramids as their own property; Heyerdahl was an intruder, and a naked dead man, found shot in the head at the foot of one of the pyramids, may have been intended as a warning. They also accused this foreign intruder of being a thief – they were soon telling a story about how Heyerdahl had found a duck and twelve ducklings in pure gold and sold them. As soon as it became clear that Heyerdahl was providing the villagers with the employment they so badly needed, though, hostility turned to friendliness and they even ceased to steal from him.

Heyerdahl and his team found no treasure comparable to that uncovered at Sipan by Ernil and his fellow thieves, but early in 1992 he found something that meant even more to the explorer. One of the archaeologists, Alfredo Narvaez, was told about a small pyramid that had been penetrated by looters. Narvaez found a looters’ pit with two spiny trees growing in its centre. As a workman was clearing these away, he saw that one tree had the form of a cross, which is regarded as sacred by the locals. The workman made an offering to the tree, and asked it to help them find ‘beautiful things’.

One week later, they had uncovered a wall decorated with a frieze showing a raft made of balsa wood. Here was evidence not only that the people who built the pyramids were seafarers, but that they used the same type of raft that had once carried Thor Heyerdahl across the Pacific to Polynesia.

And so, with the balsa frieze of the Moche and the step pyramids of Tenerife, Heyerdahl felt that he had established evidence that ancient voyagers were plying the Pacific and the Atlantic long before Columbus – a view, of course, that accords perfectly with that of Ivar Zapp and George Erikson.

As soon as I read Heyerdahl’s
Pyramids of Túcume
,
⁸
I emailed Rand to ask whether the site had any significance for our Atlantis blueprint. Regrettably, the answer finally turned out to be no. But while searching his atlas for Túcume Rand noticed Trujillo, where Heyerdahl had been staying when he learned of Túcume, and which fits the pattern perfectly. Rand wrote:

By the time of his next email Rand had located Túcume and seen that it is several hours to the north of Trujillo. Trujillo, Peru’s third largest city, is close to the huge Chimu ruins of Chan Chan, covering 11 square miles, as well as the two other major sites of the Huaca Esmeralda and Huaco del Dragon, and 6 miles to the south are the magnificent pyramids of the Sun and Moon, the former the largest in Peru, which were built 700 years earlier by the Moche. Trujillo could indeed be regarded as a major sacred site. What is significant is that Rand had identified Trujillo as a sacred site before he knew of these temples and pyramids, and this sprang out of the discovery he had made while studying the Giza prime meridian.

Heyerdahl had come upon an other equally striking piece of evidence. In September 1976, the mummy of Rameses II, the last of the great Egyptian pharaohs, who died in 1,213
BC,
arrived in Paris, to form the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Museum of Mankind. Rameses had spent much of his life battling the Hittites, and the great hall of columns in the temple at Karnak is perhaps his finest memorial.

When the mummy was examined, it was found to be
deteriorating. Scientists were asked to repair the damage. One of these was Dr Michelle Lescot, of the Natural History Museum, who found herself examining a piece of mummy bandage under an electron microscope.
⁹
To her astonishment, she recognised grains of tobacco, which seemed odd, for tobacco first came to Europe from South America in the time of Christopher Columbus.

The announcement of her find caused a storm. Egyptologists declared that the tobacco grains must have come from the pipe of some modern scientist who was smoking as he studied the mummy, so Dr Lescot took samples from deep inside the mummy. Again she found tobacco grains. Still the ‘experts’ refused to admit it. They said the grains probably came from some other plant, such as henbane, which was a member of the tobacco family. Dr Lescot knew they weren’t, but decided not to press her point.

Fifteen years passed, then, in 1992, German researchers in Munich began studying the materials used by the ancient Egyptians in mummification. Since they wanted to find out whether any drug was present, they turned to a forensic scientist whose expertise had often been called upon by the police in cases of suspicious deaths. Her name was Dr Svetlana Balabanova, of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm.

Dr Balabanova was not asked to study the mummy of anybody as distinguished as a great pharaoh; this was a mere priestess called Henut Taui, who died around 1,000
BC
in Thebes. Her tomb was plundered by robbers in the nineteenth century, and the mummy was sold to Ludwig I, Bavaria’s art-loving monarch, who gave it to the museum in Munich. Dr Balabanova tested the mummy with a method that depends on antibody reactions, and also through a machine that analyses the molecular weights of substances and shows them in the form of a graph. Both methods showed that the mummy not only contained nicotine, but also the drug cocaine.
¹⁰
Cocaine is native to the Andes. When the tired traveller arrives at a hotel in La Paz or Cuzco, he is
given a cup of tea made from coca leaves, which instantly relieves the dizziness resulting from the high altitude. It looked as if the Egyptians had known about its preservative properties more than 3,000 years ago.

Lescot’s findings suggested that the Egyptians must have been in contact with the natives of the east coast of America, but if Balabanova was correct, it looked as if the ancient Egyptians had made it as far as the opposite coast too. As Heyerdahl knew, the ancient Peruvians also mummified their dead.

The reception of Svetlana Balabanova’s analyses was even stormier than in the case of Michelle Lescot. She received abusive and insulting letters, accusing her of being a fantasist. She replied by publishing her figures and graphs, at which the archaeological establishment fell back upon its second line of defence
—
contamination. When Balabanova replied that, as a forensic scientist, that was the first thing she had ruled out, they came up with another explanation: the mummy was a ‘forgery’, a fake concocted by enterprising Arabs. Other tests, including carbon-dating, proved that to be untrue.

Embarrassed by this publicity, the museums concerned were inclined to try and forget the whole thing. But Dr Balabanova refused. She went on testing mummies, and she regularly found traces of tobacco and cocaine. The sceptics continued to insist that it must be some other type of tobacco, native to Europe and long extinct, but that failed to explain the cocaine.

Someone else recalled that in 1975 Roman jars had been found off the coast of Brazil in a bay known as the Bay of Jars.
¹¹
In fact, jars had been turning up there for centuries, almost certainly from a sunken Roman galley. Since Roman historians would probably have mentioned trans-Atlantic voyages if they had known about them, we can probably assume that the galley was swept out to sea by storms and carried across the Atlantic by the same westward currents that had
carried Heyerdahl’s
Ra.
In the case of the Egyptians, the sheer quantity of ‘cocaine mummies’ ruled out this explanation.

Since Egyptologists have found no other signs of tobacco or cocaine in ancient Egypt, we may probably assume that there was no regular trade in these commodities. They must have been brought to Egypt at great expense for preserving the mummies of kings and queens and guaranteeing their immortality. We must face the conclusion that the Egyptian priests were aware of the great continent across 3,000 miles of ocean, and knew that it could be reached by taking advantage of the currents. Unless they landed on the east coast, and trekked across forests and prairies and mountains to reach Peru, we must also assume they sailed around the Cape of Storms (unless they took the even longer route across the Pacific). There could hardly be stronger evidence of Hapgood’s ancient ocean-going civilisation.

While examining the subject of America, it is interesting to consider Hapgood’s
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
for its account of ‘the remarkable map of Hadji Ahmad’, which appeared in Turkey in 1559.

We note that the shape of Europe is not particularly accurate – the Mediterranean, for example, is entirely the wrong shape, and it is not clear whether the body of water running south from it is supposed to be the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. Hapgood points out that the coast of Africa does not compare in accuracy with the Piri Reis map of nearly half a century earlier.

On the other hand, the American continent is so accurate that we could easily mistake it for a modern map. It is hard to believe that Columbus had arrived a mere sixty-seven years earlier. How had the mapmaker gained such accurate knowledge, when the continent was still mostly a vast wilderness? Above all, how had the Pacific coast been drawn with such precision? Pizarro and his Conquistadores had landed on the coast of Peru as recently as 1532, a mere twenty-seven years earlier. There was little time for such knowledge of detail to have been developed.

A further oddity of this Hadji Ahmad map is that it shows Asia and Alaska joined together. It does not, admittedly, show Beringia, the land bridge across the Bering Strait, which was submerged by the sea at the end of the last Ice Age, but if the two continents had been separate, as they are today, it would have been easy enough to indicate this with a narrow gap between them.

Hapgood quoted an Oxford scientist, Derek S. Allan,
¹²
who pointed out that what is now the island of Novya Zemlya is shown as being joined to the Siberian coast, and that what are now the New Siberian Islands are shown as an area of dry land.

Hapgood was, of course, quite certain that portolans such as the Hadji Ahmad map were based on far earlier maps that date back to a long-forgotten civilisation of ‘ancient sea
kings’ – in fact, to Atlantis. Robert Temple disagrees, and in the 1998 edition of
The Sirius Mystery
puts forward his own interesting theory.
¹³
He accepts that ancient maps of Antarctica – such as the Piri Reis map, the Oronteus Finnaeus map, the Philip Buache map – show an Antarctica without ice, but he argues that they were not made by Antarcticans’ (i.e., Atlanteans). His own view is that the maps are ‘survivals of knowledge left by visiting extraterrestrials who were able to detect the true continental outline of Antarctica through the ice’ from their orbiting spacecraft.

Rand has pointed out the objection to this theory. If Temple’s spacemen surveyed Antarctica when it was under its present sheet of ice (say 600
BC),
why did their survey (in the Hadji Ahmad map) show no gap between Asia and Alaska? Surely the most logical answer is that the maps were made when Lesser Antarctica and Beringia were free of ice?

Rand has here drawn attention to an important fact that Hapgood preferred to leave unstated. A map that seems to show Asia and Alaska joined together must have been made long before Hapgood’s ‘worldwide maritime civilisation’ of 7,000
BC;
it would need to have been drawn around 12,000
BC
or earlier. In other words, Hapgood is implying that at least some of the portolans originated before the ‘catastrophe’ that Plato speaks of.

The quest of this book begins, in effect, in 1966, when Hapgood concluded
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
by stating that the portolans established that there must have been a worldwide maritime civilisation in 7,000
BC.
If there was a
worldwide
civilisation 9,000 years ago, then it must have had origins that go back at least some time before that.