Chapter Nine
WHERE THE SUN ALSO RISES
 

"No view epitomizes Stonehenge more than the sight of the Sun’s rays shining through the still-standing megaliths of the Sarcen Circle at sunrise on summer’s longest day, when the Sun in its northern migration seems to hesitate, stop, and begin to return.

 

As fate would have it, only four of those stone pillars remain upright and connected at the top of the curving lintels, forming three elongated windows through which we, as though we were Stonehenge’s long-gone giant builders, can also view - and determine - the beginning of a new annual cycle.
 

"And as fate would have it, somewhere on the other side of the world, another set of three windows in a massive structure of cyclopean stones - built, local lore relates, by giants - also offers a breathtaking view of the Sun appearing through white and misty clouds and direct its rays in precise alignment.

 

That other place of the Three Windows, where the Sun also rises on a crucial calendrical day, is in South America, in Peru.

"Is the similarity just a visual fluke, a mere coincidence? We think not.

"Nowadays the place is called Machu-Picchu, so named after the sharp peak that rises ten thousand feet at a bend of the Urubamba River on which the ancient city is situated.

 

 

"It is now known that it was built long before the Incas, and that it’s olden name was Tampu-Tocco, "Haven of the Three Windows."

 

The place, and its unique windows, are featured in local lore regarding the origins of the Andean civilization when the gods, led by the great creator Viracocha, placed the four Ayar brothers and their four sister-wives in Tampu-Tocco. Three brothers emerged through the three windows to settle and civilize the Andean lands; one of them founded the Ancient Empire that preceded that of the Incas by thousands of years.

The reader may find more on the construction of the Inca ruins on Book Four "The Lost Realms".

click image to enlarge detail

 

 

"....The Temple of the Three Windows (click above image) as Bingham named, has only three walls: the one with the windows facing in an easterly direction, and two sidewalls as protecting wings.

 

The western side is completely open, providing room for a stone pillar, about seven feet high; supported by two horizontally placed, carefully shaped stones, one on each side, the pillar precisely faces the central window.... and we believe that the pillar here served the same purpose as the Heel Stone (at first) at Stonehenge or the Altar Stone (later on here), i.e, as the Seventh Pillar of Gudea to provide the line of sight.

 

Ingeniously, the availability of three windows made possible three lines of sight - to sunrise on midsummer day, equinox day, and midwinter day.

"....Its other principal structure, also three-sided has its longest wall on the Plaza’s (Sacred Plaza) northern end and is without a wall on its southern face.... The central north wall has been so constructed as to create seven false windows - trapezoidal cutouts that imitate the three windows but do not in fact cut through the stone wall.

 

A massive rectangular stone monolith, measuring fourteen by five by three feet, lies on the structure’s floor below these false windows.

"....The suggestion that the structure could have been related to festival days i.e. to the calendar - is intriguing. The false seven windows have six markedly protruding stone pegs above them, so that some kind of counting involving seven and six - as at the Girsu in Lagash - cannot be ruled out....

"....A smaller enclosure.... was built as an adjunct to the Principal Temple.... It can best be described as a roofless room with a stone bench; Bingham assumed that it was the priest’s abode, but there is nothing there to indicate its purpose.

"....Right behind this enclosure there begins a stairway.... it winds its way upward, leading from the Sacred Plaza up a hill which overlooks the whole city. The top of the hill was flattened to enable the construction of an enclosure.

 

There, in the center, where the hill was flattened to form a platform an outcropping of the native stone was left sticking out, then shaped and carved magnificently to create a polygonal base from which a short stone column projects upward. That the stone-on-a-base served astronomical-calendrical purposes is evident from its name: Inti-huatana, which in the local tongue meant "That which binds the Sun."

 

As the Incas and their descendants explained, it was a stone instrument for observing and determining the solstices, to make sure that the Sun be bound and not keep moving away for good without being pulled back to return.

 

"Nearly a quarter of a century passed between the discovery of Machu Picchu and the first serious study of its astronomical connotations. It was only in the 1930s that Rolf Muller, a professor of astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany, began a series of investigations at several important sites in Peru and Bolivia....

"....Muller concluded (Die Intiwatana (Sonnenwarten) im Alten Peru and other writings) that the short pillar atop the base, and the base itself, were cut and shape to enable precise astronomical observations at this particular geographical location and elevation. The pillar served as gnomon and the base as recorder of the shadow. However, the base itself was so shaped and oriented that observations along its grooves could pinpoint sunrise or sunset on crucial days.

 

Muller concluded that those preintended days were sunset, on the day of the winter solstice (June 21 on the southern hemisphere) and sunrise on the day of summer solstice (there, December 23).

 

He furthermore determined that the angles of the rectangular base were such that if one were to observe the horizon along the diagonal sightline connecting protrusions (3 and 1, diagram on book) one would have observed sunset precisely on the equinox days at the time the Intihuatana was carved.

"That, he concluded based on the Earth’s greater tilt at the time, was just over four thousand years ago - sometime between 2100 B.C. and 2300 B.C. This makes the Intihuatana at Machu Picchu contemporaneous with, if not somewhat older than, the Eninnu at Lagash and Stonehenge II.

 

More remarkable perhaps is the rectangular layout for the astronomical function of the Intihuatana’s base, for it imitates the exceptional rectangular layout of the Four Station Stones of Stonehenge I (though, apparently, without its lunar purposes).

"The legend of the Ayar brothers relates that the three brothers from whom the Andean kingdom stemmed.... got rid of the fourth brother by imprisoning him in a cave inside a great rock, where he was turned into a stone. Such a cave inside a cleft rock, with a white vertical stem or short pillar inside, indeed exists at Machu Picchu.

 

Above it one of the most remarkable structures in the whole of South America still stands.... an enclosure which on two sides for perfect walls at a right angle to each other, and on the other two sides curves to form a perfect semicircle. It is know as the Torreon (the Tower) (click image right)

The enclosure, which is reached by seven stone steps, encompasses, as at the Intihuatana, the protruding peak of the great rock on which it was constructed.

As with the Intihuatana, the outcropping here was also carved and given a purposeful shape; except that here no stem was made to act as a gnomon. Instead, the astronomical sightlines that run along grooves and polygonal surfaces of the "sacred rock" lead to two windows in the semicircular wall. Muller, and other astronomers after him.... concluded that the sightlines were oriented to sunrises on the days of the winter and summer solstices - more than four thousand years ago.

But there is another window:

"where the semicircle ended and the straight wall began, had a third window - if one can so call the aperture. It is larger than the other two, its sill is not straight, but is shaped as an inverted stairway, and its top is formed not by a straight lintel stone but by a wedgelike slit, like an inverted V.

"....In addition to the three apertures, there were nine false trapezoidal windows in the straight parts of the enclosing walls. Spaced between these false windows there protrude from the walls stone pegs.... The longer wall which has seven false windows, has six such pegs - duplicating the arrangement in the longer wall of the Principal Temple.

"The number of the windows - actual plus false - twelve, undoubtedly denotes calendrical functions, such as the count of twelve months in a year. The number of false windows (seven) and pegs (six) in the longer wall, as in that of the Principal Temple, may indicate a need to engage in intercalation - a periodic adjustment of the lunar cycle to the solar cycle by adding a thirteenth month every-few years. Combining with the alignments and apertures for observing and determining the solstices and the equinoxes, the false windows with their pegs lead to the conclusion that at Machu Picchu someone had created a complex solar-lunar stone computer to serve as a calendar.

"The Torreon, contemporaneous with the Eninnu and with Stonehenge II.... presents the extremely rare circular shape of a stone structure - extremely rare, that is, in South America, but with an obvious kingship to the stone circles of Lagash and Stonehenge.

"....The Inca Empire was not the first kingdom with a capital at Cuzco in Peru. Researchers now know that the legendary Incas, whom the Spaniards encountered and subjugated, came to power in Cuzco only in A.D. 1021. Long before them one of the Ayar brothers, Manco Capac, founded the city when a golden rod given him by the god Viracocha sunk into the ground to indicate the right location. It happened, by the calculations of Montesinos, circa 2400 B.C. - almost 3,500 before the Incas.

"....When the Spanish conquerors arrived in Cuzco, the Inca capital, in 1533, they were astounded to discover a metropolis with some 100,000 dwelling houses, surrounding a royal-religious center of magnificent palaces....

The Spaniards were amazed at the amount of gold in the empire’s holiest temple.... Cori-cancha, meaning Golden Enclosure....

Coricancha, Cuzco; with the addition built on the Inca structure by the Catholic Priests....

"Chroniclers who had seen the Coricancha before it was vandalized, demolished by the Catholic priests, and built over into a church, reported that the enclosed compound included a main temple, dedicated to the god Viracocha; and shrines or chapels for the worship of the Moon, Venus, a mysterious star called Coyllor, the Rainbow, and the god of Thunder and Lightning.

 

The Spaniards nevertheless called the temple Temple of the Sun, believing that the Sun was the supreme deity worshipped by the Incas.
 

"It is assumed that the idea came to the Spaniards from the fact that in the Holy of Holies of the Coricancha - a semicircular chamber - there hung on the wall above the great altar an "image of the Sun." It was a great golden disk which the Spaniards assumed to represent the Sun. In reality, it had served in earlier times to reflect a beam of light as the Sun’s rays penetrated the dark chamber once a year - at the moment of sunrise on the day of the winter solstice.

"Significantly, the arrangement was akin to that in the Great Temple of Amon in Karnak, in Egypt. Significantly the Holy of Holies was in the extremely rare form of a semicircle, as the Torreon in the Machu Picchu.... And, not surprisingly, careful studies and measurements by Muller showed that the orientation designed to permit the beam of sunlight to travel through the corridor and bounce off the "image of the Sun" was conceived when the Earth’s obliquity was 24º, which chronologically means, he wrote, more than four thousand years earlier.

 

This matches the timetable related by Montesinos, according to which the ancient Empire began circa 2500 - 2400 B.C. and the assertion that the temple in Cuzco was built soon thereafter.

"....A megalithic Age with its colossal structures had obviously preceded the Ancient Empire.... The prize for that should undoubtedly go to the ruins at Sacsahuaman, the promontory that overlooks Cuzco....

"....As with the other megaliths at Machu Picchu, the ones at Sacsahuaman too were brought from a great distance, were given their smooth and beveled faces and polygonal shapes, and remain holding fast together without mortar.

"By whom, when, and why were these structures above ground, and the tunnels, channels, conduits, bored holes, and other odd shapes carved into the living rocks, made and fashioned? Local lore attributed them to "the giants." The Spaniards, as the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega wrote, believed that they were "erected not by men but by demons." Squier wrote that the zigzagging walls represented without doubt the grandest specimens of the style called Cyclopean extant in America," but offered no explanation or theory.

"Recent excavations have uncovered.... one of the most unusual structural shapes in South America: a perfect circle.

"....This, however, was not the only circular structure on the promontory. Assuming that the three tiers of colossal walls were ramparts of a fortress, the Spaniards took it for granted that structural remains in the highest and narrowest part of the promontory, behind and above the walls, belonged to an Inca fortification.... Archaeologists discovered that the area behind and above the three walls was honeycombed with subterranean tunnels and chambers.

 

More important they uncovered there the foundations of a series of connected square and rectangular buildings; in their midst there were the remains of a perfectly circular structure. The natives refer to the structure as the Mayocmarca "The Circular Building"; the archaeologists call it the Torreon - The Tower - the same descriptive name given to the semicircular structure at Machu Picchu, and assumed that it was a defensive tower, part of the Sacsahuaman "fortress."

 

"Archaeoastronomers, however, see in the structure clear evidence of an astronomical function. R.T. Zuidema (Inca Observations of the Solar and Lunar Passages, and other studies) noted that the alignment of the straight walls adjoining the circular structure was such that the north and south points of zenith and nadir could have been determined there.

 

The walls that form the square enclosure within which the circular structure was emplaced are indeed aligned with the cardinal points; but they form only a frame for the circular structure, which consisted of three concentric walls connected by spokes of masonry that divide the outer two circular walls into sections. One such opening - an aperture if the higher courses forming the tower followed the ground plan - does point due south and thus could have served to determine sunset on nadir day.

 

But the four other openings are clearly oriented to the northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest - the unmistakable points of sunset and sunrise on the winter and summer solstice days (in the southern hemisphere).

"If these are, as it appears, the remains of a full-fledged astronomical observatory, it was in all probability the earliest round observatory in South America, perhaps in all the Americas.

"The alignment of this round observatory to the soltices puts it in the same category as the one at Stonehenge and orientationally as that of Egyptian temples. The evidence suggests, however, that after the Megalithic Age and in the era of the Ancient Empire began under the aegis of Viracocha, both the equinoxes and the lunar cycle played the key roles in the Andean calendar.

"....According to the authoritative study The Andean Calendar by L.E. Valcarcel, such a fixing and veneration of the equinoxes was carried into Inca times although they switched from an earlier equinoctial calendar to a solstitial one.

"....The need to adjust the solar calendar over a period of millennia because of the phenomenon of precession and , perhaps, also due to the wavering between a solstitial and an equinoctial New Year, led to repeat reforms of the calendar even in the days of the Ancient Empire....

That such calendar reforms had to do with wavering between solstices and equinoxes is confirmed by the statement that the monarch Manco Capac IV "ordered that the year begin in the spring equinox," a feat possible because he was an Amauta, a "knower of astronomy."

But evidently in doing so he only reinstated a calendar that had once been in use, in earlier times; for, according to Montesinos, the fortieth monarch who had reigned a thousand years before Manco Capac IV, "established an academy for the study of astronomy and determined the equinoxes, which the Indians called Illa-Ri.

"....In his studies of Andean archaeoastronomy Rolf Muller reported that a site called Pampa de Anta, some ten miles west of Sacsahuaman, the sheer rock has been carved into series of steps that form a semicircle or crescent. Since there is nothing to view there except the promontory at Sacsahuaman to the East, Muller concluded that the place served to make astronomical observations along a sightline anchored on the Sacsahuaman promontory - but apparently, linked to appearances of the Moon. The native name for the edifice, Quillarumi, "Moon Stone," suggests such a purpose.

"....In fact the early Spanish chroniclers stated repeatedly that the Incas had an elaborate and precise calendar incorporating both solar and lunar aspects.... The assertion that the Incas observed both solar and lunar cycles is confirmed by the fact that next to the shrine to the Sun in the Coricancha there was a shrine to the Moon.

 

In the Holy of Holies the central symbol was an ellipse flanked by the Sun on the left and the Moon on the right; it was only the ruler Huascar, one of the two half brothers who were fighting over the throne when the Spaniards arrived, who replaced the oval with a golden disk representing the Sun.

"These are Mesopotamian calendrical features; finding them in the remote Andes has baffled the scholars. Even more perplexing has been the certainty that the Incas were familiar with the zodiac - a wholly arbitrary device for dividing the orbital cycle around the Sun into twelve parts - a Sumerian "first" by all accounts.

"E.G. Squier, in his report on Cuzco and the meaning of its name ("Navel of the Earth"), noted that the city was divided into twelve wards arranged around the nucleus or "navel" in an elliptical shape, which is the true orbital circuit. Sir Clemens Markham (Cuzco and Lima: The Incas of Peru) quoted the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega’s information that the twelve wards represented the twelve zodiacal constellations. Stanbury Hagar.... showed that - as in Mesopotamia - the Incas also associated each of the twelve zodiac "houses" with a parallel month in the calendar.... (bearing names resembling their Near Eastern names that originated in Sumer).

"There were other aspects - complex aspects - of the ancient Near Eastern calendars in the calendar that the Incas had retained from the days of the Ancient Empire. The requirement (still in force in the Jewish and Christian calendars) that the spring festival (Passover, Easter) be held when the Sun is in the relevant zodiac house and on or immediately after the first full Moon of that month, forced the ancient priest-astronomers to intercalate the solar and lunar cycles.

 

The studies by R.T. Zuidema and others concluded that only did such intercalation take place in the Andes, but the lunar cycle was additionally linked to two other phenomena: it had to be the first full Moon after the June solstice, and it was to coincide with the first heliacal rising of a certain star. This double correlation is intriguing, for it brings to mind the Egyptian linking of the beginning of their calendrical cycle both to the solar date (rising of the Nile) and the heliacal rising of a star (Sirius).

"Some twenty miles northeast of Cuzco, at a place called Pisac, there are remains of a structure, probably from early Inca times, that appear to have been an attempt to emulate and combine some of the sacred structures at Machu Picchu....

"At a place not far from Sacsahuaman called Kenko, a large semicircle or well-shaped ashlars fronts on a large stone monolith that could have had the shape of an animal (the features are too damaged to be discerned); whether or not this edifice had astronomical-calendrical functions is unknown.

 

These sites added to those of Machu Picchu, Sacsahuaman, and Cuzco, illustrate the fact that in what has been called the Sacred Valley - and only there - religion, the calendar, and astronomy led to the construction of circular or semicircular observatories; nowhere else in South America do we find such structures.

 

 

"Who was it who, at about the same time, applied the same set of astronomical principles and adopted a circular shape for celestial observations in early Britain, at Lagash in Sumer, and in South America’s Ancient Empire?

"All legends, supported by geographical evidence and archaeological finds, point to the southern shores of Lake Titicaca as the place of the South American Beginning - not only of human civilization, but of the gods themselves. It was there, according to the legends, that the repopulation of the Andeans lands began after the Deluge; that the gods, headed by Viracocha, had their abode; that the couples destine to begin the Ancient Empire were given knowledge, route instructions, and the Golden Wand with which to locate the site of the Navel of the Earth - of establishing Cuzco.

"Insofar as human beginnings in the Andes are concerned, the tales connected them to two distinct islands off the southern shore of Lake Titicaca. They were called the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon, the two luminaries having been considered as the two principal helpers of Viracocha; the calendrical symbolism inherent in these tales has been noted by many scholars.

 

The abode of Viracocha was, however, in a City of the Gods on the mainland at the lake’s southern shore. The place, called Tiahuanacu, was settled by the gods (according to local lore) in times immemorial; it was, the legends related, a place of colossal structures that only giants could erect.

"....By the end of the nineteenth century the reports assumed a more scientific accuracy as a result of the visits of researchers.... the most renowned and tenacious researcher of Tiahuanacu, Arthur Posnansky (Tiahuanacu - The Cradle of American Man).

 

Their work and more recent excavations and studies, reviewed at length in The Lost Realms, have led us to conclude that Tiahuanacu was the tin capital of the ancient world, that its extensive above-ground and underground structures were metallurgical facilities, that the huge one-piece multiwalled stone blocks were part of port facilities at the ancient lakeshore, and that Tiahuanacu was founded not by Man but by the Anunnaki "gods" in their search for gold long before Man was taught the uses of tin.

 

 

"Where a narrow and rare plain fanned out from the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, the sight of the once magnificent Tiahuanacu and its port (nowadays called Puma-Punku), only three principal monuments to its past dominate the landscape:

*   the artificial hill of Akapana, believed to have been a step pyramid as a facility for the separation and processing of ores.

*   the "Gate of the Sun," the single stone block from which it was cut and shaped, measured about 10 by 20 feet and weight more than 100 tons.

The most enigmatic and elaborate carvings are on the upper front side, facing due east. There the arch of the gate has been carved to depict in relief a central figure - probably of Viracocha - flanked on each side by three rows of winged attendants.

 

 

"The writings of Posnansky have established that the carvings on the gate represented a twelve-month calendar of a year beginning on the day of spring equinox in the southern hemisphere (September), yet a year where the other major points of the solar year - the autumn equinox and the two solstices - are also indicated by the positions and shapes of the depicted smaller images. It was, he concluded, a calendar of eleven months of thirty days each plus a "great month," a twelfth month of thirty-five days, adding up to a solar year of 365 days.

"A twelve-month year beginning on the day of the spring equinox was, as we now know, first introduced at Nippur, in Sumer, circa 3800 B.C.

"The "Gate of the Sun," archaeologists have discovered, stands at the northwest corner of what was a wall constructed of upright stone pillars that formed a rectangular enclosure within which the third most prominent edifice of the site stood. Some believe that there was originally a similar gate at the southwestern corner of the enclosure, flanking symmetrically a row of thirteen monoliths erected in the precise center of the enclosure’s western wall.

 

That row of monoliths, part of a special platform faced exactly the monumental stairway that was built at the center of the eastern wall, on the enclosure’s opposite side. The monumental stairway which was unearthed and restored, led to a series of raised rectangular platforms that encompassed a sunken courtyard.

Given the name Kalasasaya ("The Standing Pillars"), the edifice was thus oriented precisely along an east-west axis, in the manner of the Near Eastern temples. This was the first clue that it could have served astronomical purposes...

"....The realization that this ancient structure, more than twenty thousand feet up the Andean mountains, in a desolate, narrow plain among snowbound mountains, was a sophisticated calendrical observatory was compounded by discoveries regarding its age.

 

Posnansky was the first to conclude that the angles formed by the lines of sight suggested an obliquity somewhat greater than the present declination of 23.5º; it meant, he himself was astounded to realize, that the Kalasasaya had been designed and built thousands of years before the Common Era.

"....Investigations and thorough measurements left no doubt that the obliquity prevailing at the time of construction was such that the Kalasasaya could have been built circa 4050 B.C. or (as the Earth tilted back and forth) circa 10,050 B.C.

 

Muller, who had arrived at a date of just over 4000 B.C. for the megalithic remains at Machu Picchu, was inclined likewise to date the Kalasasaya - a conclusion with which Posnansky in the end agreed.

"....In The Lost Realms we presented the evidence and arrived at the conclusion that it was the same Anunnaki, those who had come to Earth from Nibiru in need of gold.

 

And, like the men who searched for the golden El Dorado millennia later, they also came to the New World in search of gold. The mines in southeastern Africa were flooded by the Deluge; but the same upheavel uncovered the incredibly rich veins of gold in the Andes.

"We believe that Anu and his spouse Antu, visiting Earth from Nibiru circa 3800 B.C., also went to see for themselves the new metallurgical center on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca.

 

They left by sailing away on the lake from the port facilities of Puma Punku, where the cyclopean chambers, carved and shaped out a single stone blocks, then stood along massive piers.

 

 

T-shaped cutouts in adjoining stones for bronze clamps - Puma Punku

Slab of Puma Punku Pyramid

 

 

"The remains at Puma Punku hold another enigmatic clue to the amazing link between the structures at Lake Titicaca and the unusual temple to Ninurta that Gudea built.

 

To the disbelief of the site’s excavators, they found that the megalithic builders had used bronze clamps, formed to fit T-shaped cutouts in adjoining stones, to hold together the huge stone blocks.

 

Such a clamping method, and such a use of bronze, were unique to the Megalithic Age, having been found only at Puma Punku and at another site of cyclopean megaliths, Ollantaytambu, some forty-five miles northwest of Cuzco in the Sacred Valley.

 

"Yet thousand of miles away, on the other side of the world, at Lagash in Sumer, Gudea used the very same unique method and the very same unique bronze clamps to hold together the stones that, imported from afar, were used in the construction of the Eninnu.

 

Recording in his inscriptions the unusual use of stones and of metals, this is how Gudea lauded his own achievements:

He built the Eninnu with stone,
he made it bright with jewels;
with copper mixed with tin [bronze]
he held it fast.

"It was a feat for which a Sangu Simug, a "priestly smith," was brought over from the "Land of Smelting." It was, we believe, Tiahuanacu in the Andes.

Return

Chapter Ten
IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS
 

"The Great Sphinx of Egypt gazes precisely eastward, welcoming the rising Sun along the 30^th parallel. In ancient times its gaze welcomed the Anunnaki "gods" as they landed at their spaceport in the Sinai peninsula, and later on guided the deceased pharaohs to an Afterlife, when their Ka joined the gods in their heavenly ascents. At some time in between, the Sphinx might have witnessed the departure of a great god - Thoth - with his followers, to be counted among the First Americans.

"...."For the last 50 years, the received wisdom has been that the 11,500-year-old artifacts found at Clovis, New Mexico, were made soon after the first Americans found their way across the Bering land-bridge," Science magazine (21 February 1992 issue) wrote in an update on the debate among scientists; "Those who have dared question the consensus have met with harsh criticism."

 

The reluctance to accept an earlier age and a different arrival route stems primarily from the simple assumption that Man could not have crossed the oceans separating the Old and the New Worlds at such prehistoric times because maritime technology did not yet exist. Notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary, the rock-bottom logic continues to be, if Man couldn’t do it, it didn’t happen.

"The age of the Sphinx has recently emerged as an analogous issue, where scientists refuse to accept new evidence because it implies achievements by Man when Man could not have achieved them; and guidance or assistance by the "gods" - Extraterrestrials - is simply out of consideration.

"In October 1991, some fifteen years after our initial presentation of such evidence in The 12^th Planet, Dr. Robert M. Schoch, a Boston University geologist, reported at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that meteorological studies of the Sphinx and its layering indicated that it was carved out of the native rock "long before the dynasties of the Pharaohs."

 

The research methods included seismic surveying of subsurface rocks by Dr. Thomas L. Dobecki, a geophysicist from Houston, and Egyptologist Anthony West of New York and the study of weathering and watermarks on the Sphinx and its surroundings. The precipitation-induced weathering, Dr. Schoch stated, "indicated that work on the Sphinx had begun in the period between 10,000 B.C. and 5000 B.C., when the Egyptian climate was wetter."

"The conclusion "flies in the face of everything we know about ancient Egypt," the Los Angeles Times added in its report of the announcement. "Other Egyptologists who have looked at Mr. Schoch’s work cannot explain the geological evidence, but they insist that the idea that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than they had thought just simply "does not match up" with what has been known.

 

The newspaper quoted archaeologist Carol Redmount of the University of California at Berkeley: "There’s just no way that could be true . . . The Sphinx was created with technology that was far more advanced than that of other Egyptian monuments of known date, and the people of that region would not have had the technology, the governing institutions or the will to have built such a structure thousands of years earlier."

"....The final argument by the debunkers was the absence of evidence that a civilization advanced enough to carve the Great Sphinx existed in Egypt between 7000 and 5000 B.C. "The people during that age were hunters and gatherers; they didn’t build cities," Dr. Lehner said; and with that the debate ended.

"The only response to this logical argument is, of course, to invoke someone other than the "hunters and gatherers" of the era - the Anunnaki. But admitting that all evidence points to such more advanced beings from another planet is a threshold that not everyone, including those who find the Sphinx to be 9,000 years old, is as yet ready to cross.

 

"The same Fear-of-Crossing (to coin an expression) has blocked for many years not just the acceptance, but even the dissemination, of evidence concerning the antiquity of Man and his civilizations in the Americas.

"The discovery near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1932 of a trove of leaf-shaped, sharp-edged stone points that could be attached to spears and clubs for hunting, and subsequently as other North American sites, led to the theory that big game hunters migrated from Asia to the Pacific northwest some 12,000 years ago, when Siberia and Asia were linked by an icy land-bridge.

 

In time, the theory held, these "Clovis People" and their kindred folk spread over North America and, via Central America, eventually also to South America....

"....As linguistic research and genetic trace-backs joined other investigative tools, the evidence began to mount in the 1980s that humans arrived in the New World some 30,000 years ago - probably in more than one migration, and perhaps not necessarily over an ice-bridge but by rafts or canoes hugging the coastlines.

"....That evidence, whose discovery was not only ignored but even initially suppressed, pertains primarily to two sites where Stone Age tools, crushed animals bones, and even petroglyphs have been found.

"The first of these unsettling settlement sites is Monte Verde, in Chile, on the continent’s Pacific side. There, archaeologists have found remains of clay-lined hearths, stone tools, bone implements, and foundations of wooden shelters - a campsite occupied some 13,000 years ago. This is a date much too early to be explained by a slow southward migration of Clovis People from North America.

 

Moreover, lower strata at this campsite yielded fragmented stone tools that suggest that the site’s human occupation began some 20,000 years earlier. The second site is all the way on the other side of South America, in Brazil’s northeast. At a place called Pedra Furada, a rock shelter contained circular hearths filled with charcoal surrounded by flints; the nearest source of flint is a mile away, indicating that the sharp stones were brought over intentionally.

 

Dating by radiocarbon and newer methods provided readings spanning the period 14,300 to 47,000 years ago.

"....The ongoing challenge to the Clovis theory in regard to the time of arrival has been accompanied by a challenge to the via-the-Bering-strait route as the sole path of arrival. Anthropologists at the Artic Research Center of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., have concluded that the image of animal-skin clad hunters carrying spears across a frozen wilderness (with women and children in tow) is all wrong in thinking of the first Americans.

 

Rather, they were maritime people who sailed in rafts or skinboats to the more hospitable southern shores of the Americas. Others, at the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University, do not rule out a crossing of the Pacific via the islands and Australia (which was settled circa 40,000 years ago).

"....Who was there, tens of thousands of years ago, who possessed the technology required for crossing vast oceans by boat, and how could those prehistoric mariners have known that there was land, habitable land, on the other side?

"This is a question that (also when applied to the Age of the Sphinx) has only one answer: the Anunnaki, showing Man how to cross the oceans, telling him why and whereto - perhaps carrying him over, "on the wings of eagles," as the Bible has described - to a new Promised Land.

"....The latest archaeological discoveries lend credence to memories of early events that are called "myths" and "legends." Invariably, they speak of multiple migrations and always from across the seas. Significantly, they often involve the numbers seven and twelve - numbers that are not a reflection of human anatomy or digital counting, but a clue to astronomical and calendrical knowledge, as well as to links with the Old World.

"One of the best preserved cycle of legends is that of the Nahuatl tribes of central Mexico, of which the Aztecs whom the Spaniards encountered were the latest extant.... The earliest tribes, the oral legends and the tales written down pictorially in books called codices related, came down from Azt-lan, the "White Place," which was associated with the number seven. It was sometimes depicted as a place with seven caves out of which the ancestors had emerged; alternatively, it was painted as a place with seven temples: a central large step-pyramid (ziggurat) surrounded by six lesser shrines.

 

Codex Boturini contains a series of cartoonlike paintings of the early migration by four tribes that began from the place of the seven temples, involved crossing a sea in boats and a landing in a place of cave shelters; the migrants were guided in that journey to the unknown by a god whose symbol was a kind of Seeing-eye attached to an elliptical rod.

 

"The four clans of migrants then trekked inland, passing by and following various landmarks. Splitting into several tribes, one, the Mexica, finally reached the valley where an eagle was perched on a cactus bush - the signal for their final destination and the place where the Nahuatlan capital was to be built.

 

It later developed into the Aztec capital whose symbol remained the eagle perched on a cactus bush. It was called Tenochtitlan, the City of Tenoch.... (as explained in The Lost Realms): according to the Bible Cain, who was banished to a distant "Land of Wandering," built a city and named it after his son Enoch; and Enoch had four descendants from whom there grew four clans.
 

"....Sahagun (Historia de las cosas de la Nueva Espana), whose sources were verbal as well as Nahuatlan tales written down after the conquest, recorded the sea voyage and the name Panotlan, of the landing site; the name simply meant "Place of arrival by sea," and he concluded that it was in what is now Guatemala.

 

His information added the interesting detail that the immigrants were led by four Wise Men, "who carried with them ritual manuscripts and who also knew the secrets of the calendar." We now know that the two - ritual and calendar - were two sides of the same coin, the worship of the gods. It is a safe bet that the Nahuatlan calendar followed the twelve-month arrangement, perhaps even the twelve-zodiac division; for we read (in Sahagun’s chronicles) that the Toltecs, the Nahuatl tribe that preceded and taught the Aztecs, "knew that many are the heavens; they said that there are twelve superimposed divisions" thereof.

"Down south, where the Pacific Ocean lapped the coasts of South America, Andean "myths" did not recall pre-Diluvial migrations but knew of the Deluge.... The legends do speak clearly of new, post-Diluvial arrivals by sea; the first or most memorable of them was one headed by a leader called Naymlap....

"....An ancient relic made of pure gold, now kept in the Gold Museum of Bogota, Colombia, depicts a tall leader with his entourage atop a balsa wood raft. The artwork may well have represented the sea crossing by Naymlap or his like. They were well acquainted, according to the Naymlap legend, with the calendar and worshiped a pantheon of twelve gods.

 

Moving inland where Quito, Ecuador’s capital, is now situated, they built there two temples facing each other: one dedicated to the Sun, the other to the Moon. The Temple of the Sun had in front of its gateway two stone columns and in its forecourt a circle of twelve stone pillars.

"....The veneration of both the Sun and the Moon indicates a solar-lunar calendar, again as the one began in Sumer. A gateway with two stone columns in front of it brings to mind the two columns that were erected at the entrances to temples throughout the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia through western Asia and Egypt. And as if all those links to the Old World were not enough, we find a circle of twelve stone pillars. Whoever had arrived from across the Pacific must have been aware of the astronomical stone circles of Lagash, Stonehenge - or both.

"Several stone objects that are now kept in the National Museum of Peru in Lima are believed to have served the coastal peoples as calendrical computers.

"....Fritz Buck (Inscriptiones Calendarias del Peru Preincaico) who made the subject his specialty, was of the opinion (about a stone object) that the 116 pegholes or indentations in the sixteen squares indicated a link to the calendar of the Mayas of Mexico and Guatemala. That the northern parts of the Andean lands were in close contact with the people and cultures of Mesoamerica - a possibility until recently rejected out of hand - is now hardly disputed.

 

Those who arrived from Mesoamerica undoubtedly included African and Semitic people, as evidenced by numerous stone carvings and sculptures.... and before them Indo-Europeans have been depicted.... Another group may have arrived overland via the Amazon basin and its tributaries; the symbols that were associated with them were identical to the Hittite hieroglyph for "gods."

 

Inasmuch as the Hittite pantheon was an adaptation of the Sumerian pantheon, it perhaps explains the otherwise remarkable discovery of a golden statuette in Colombia of a goddess holding in her hands the emblem of the umbilical cutter - the emblem of Ninharsag, the Mother Goddess of the Sumerians.

"....Scholars find that throughout the millennia the dominant cultural influence on all these peoples was that of Tiahuanacu (Lake Titicaca); it found its most obvious expression in the thousands of clay and metal objects that bore the image of Viracocha as it appears on the Gate of the Sun....

The most prevalent of those symbols or, as Posnansky and others consider them, hieroglyphs, was that of the stairway, which was also used in Egypt, and which was often used on Andean artifacts to denote a "Seeing-eye" tower. Such observations, to judge from the astronomical lines of sight at the Kalasasaya and from the celestial symbols associated with Tiahuanacu, included the Moon....

"On the Pacific side of South America, it thus appears, the calendar and its celestial knowledge followed in the footsteps of the same teachers who had been active in the Near East.

"Commenting on the evidence, earlier discussed, for the much greater antiquity of human presence in the Americas and their routes of arrival, Dr. Niede Guidon, of the French Institute of Advanced Social Studies who participated with Brazilian archaeologists in the Pedra Furada discoveries, said thus: "A transatlantic crossing from Africa cannot be ruled out."
 

"Pedra Furada is just the most studied site in the area.... more than 260 archaeological sites of early occupation are found there, and 240 of them contain rock art. As the carbon dating of the charcoal samples from the prehistoric hearths shows, Man lived there beginning some 32,000 years ago.

 

Throughout the area, such habitation appears to have come to an abrupt end circa 12,000 years ago, concurrently with a marked change in climate. It has been our opinion that the change coincided with the abrupt end of the last ice age by the Deluge, the Great Flood....

"....A hiatus of some two thousand years followed until human occupation of the site resumed, when other and new groups arrived in the area. Their rock art suggests that they had come from a distant land, for animals not native to the area were included in the paintings: giant sloths, horses, an early type of llama, and (according to the excavators’ reports) camels (which, to our eyes, looked more like giraffes).

 

This second phase lasted till about 5,000 years ago and included, in its latter part, the making of decorated pottery. It also included in its art, in the words of Niede Guidon who has led the excavations, "abstract designs" that "seem related to ceremonies or mythical subjects" - a religion, an awareness of the "gods." It is at the end of that phase that the transition to petroglyphs akin to Near Eastern signs, symbols, and scripts make their appearance, leading in such a third phase to the astronomical and calendrical aspects of the markings on the rocks.

 

 

Candelabra or Trident, Paracas, Peru

"....Some scholars, especially in South America, interpret various signs as a kind of cuneiform Sumerian script.

 

The largest petroglyph in that zone is the so-called candelabra or trident that faces whoever reaches South America’s Pacific shore at the Bay of Paracas.

 

According to local lore it is the lightning rod of Viracocha, as seen atop the Gate of the Sun in Tiahuanacu; we have identified it as the Near Eastern emblem of the "Storm God," the younger son of Enlil whom the Sumerians called Ishkur, the Babylonians and Assyrians Adad, and the Hittites Teshub ("The Wind Blower").

"....We have shown some of the Hittite signs to be found in Brazil, but probably much more lies unearthed and unstudied behind such a coincidence as the fact that the hill people of Anatolia were the first to introduce iron in the Old World, and the parallel fact that the country’s name, Brazil, is identical to the Akkadian word for iron, Barzel - a similarity that Cyrus H. Gordon (Before Columbus and Riddles in History) considered to be a significant clue regarding the true identity of early Americans.

 

Other clues are the Indo-European types depicted on the busts found in Ecuador and northern Peru, and the fact that the enigmatic inscriptions found on Easter Island, in the Pacific Ocean opposite Chile, run as the Hittite script did in the "as the ox ploughs" system - beginning on the upper line from left to right, continuing on the second line from right to left, then again from left to right and so on.

"Unlike Sumer, which was situated in an alluvial plain with no stone therein to serve as building materials, the Enlilite domain of Anatolia was all KUR.KI, "mountain land," of which Ishkur/Adad/Teshub was put in charge. The structures and edifices in the Andean lands were also made of stone - from the earlier cyclopean stoneworks through the exquisite ashlars of the Ancient Empire, down to the fieldstone of the Incas and to the present....

"....Making an on-site visit to the ruins or Hattusas, the ancient Hittite capital, and other bastions nearby, some 150 miles northeast of Ankara, the capital of present-day Turkey, one begins to realize that in some respects they represented crude emulations of Andean stoneworks, even including the unique and intricate incisions in the hard stone to create "the stairway motif."

 

"It is odd that in the increasingly heated debate about the First Americans, little if any attention has been given to the question of how much maritime knowledge the ancient peoples possessed.

 

There are many indications that it was quite extensive and advanced; and once again, the impossible can be accepted as possible only if teachings by the Anunnaki are taken into account.

"....Gilgamesh, having been mothered by a goddess went in search of immortality. His adventures precede in time but exceed in drama those of Odysseus, (of whom it is believed that he might have come to America).

"....Gilgamesh is a known historical ruler of ancient Sumer; he reigned in Erech (Uruk) circa 2900 B.C. Centuries later, Sumerian traders reached distant lands by sea routes, exporting the grains, wool, and garments for which Sumer became known and exporting - as Gudea has attested - metals, lumber, construction, and precious stones. Such two-way repeated voyages could not have taken place without navigational instruments.

That such instruments had existed in antiquity can be judged from an object that was found in the eastern Mediterranean off the Aegean island Antikythera at the beginning of this century....

"....The objects and materials raised from the wreck were taken to Athens for examination and study. Among them were a lump of bronze and broken-off pieces that, when clean and fitted together, stunned the museum officials. The "object" appeared to be a precise mechanism with many gears interlocked at various planes inside a circular frame that was in turn held in a square holder, it seemed to be an astrolabe "with spherical projections and a set of rings."

 

After decades-long studies, including its investigation with X rays and metallurgical analysis, it has been put on view in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece (catalog number X.15087). The protective housing bears a plaque that identifies the object as follows:

"The mechanism was found in the sea of Antikythera Island by sponge divers in 1900. It was part of the cargo of a shipwreck which occurred in the first century B.C. The mechanism is considered to be a calendrical Sun and Moon computing machine dated, after the latest evidence, to circa 80 B.C."

 

"....Even medieval astrolabes, more than a millennium after the Antikythera time frame, look like toys compared to the ancient object. Moreover, the medieval and later European astrolabes and kindred devices were made of brass, which is easily malleable, whereas the ancient device was made of bronze - a metal useful in casting but extremely difficult to hone and shape in general and especially to produce a mechanism that is more intricate than modern chronometers.

"Yet the instrument was there; and no matter who provided the science and technology for it, it proves that time-keeping and celestially guided navigation were possible at that early time at an incredible level of sophistication.

"It seems that the reluctance to acknowledge the unacceptable also lies behind the fact that hardly anything concerning early cartography was brought up in the First Americans debate - even with such an opportunity as the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage in 1492.

"....In Istambul.... the Topkapi Museum, [keeps] another find that throws light on ancient navigational capabilities. It is know as the Piri Re’is Map....

"....The Piri Re’is Map attracted particular interest for a number of reasons: first, its accuracy and its sophisticated method of projecting global features on a flat surface; second, because it clearly shows the whole of South America, with recognizable geographic and topographic features of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; and third, because it correctly projects the Antarctic continent.

 

Although cartographed a few years after the Columbus voyages, the startling fact is that the southern parts of South America were unknown in 1513 - Pizarro sailed from Panama to Peru only in 1530, and the Spaniards did not proceed farther down the coast or venture inland to explore the Andean chain until years later. Yet the map shows all of South America, including its Patagonian tip.

 

As to Antarctica, not only how it looks, but its very existence, was unknown until 1820 - three centuries after the Piri Re’is map. Strenuous studies since the map was discovered in 1929 among the Sultan’s treasures have reaffirmed these puzzling features of the map.

"Brief notations on the map’s margins are more fully explained in a treatise titled Bahariyeh ("About the Sea") that the admiral wrote. Regarding such geographic landmarks as the Antilles islands, he explained that he obtained the information from "the maps of the Genoese infidel, Colombo."

 

He also repeated the tale of how Columbus first tried to convince the grandees of Genoa and then the king of Spain that according to a book that he (Columbus) possessed, "at the end of the Western Sea (Atlantic), that is on its western side, there were coasts and islands and all kinds of metals and also precious stones."

 

This detail in the Turkish admiral’s book confirms reports from other sources that Columbus knew quite well in advance where he was going, having come into possession of maps and geographic data from ancient sources.

"In fact, the existence of such earlier maps is also attested to by Piri Re’is. In a subsequent notation, which explains how the map was drawn, he listed maps made by Arab cartographers, Portuguese maps ("which show the countries of Hind, Sind and China"), the "map of Columbus," as well as "about twenty charts and Mappae Mundi; these are charts drawn in the days of Alexander, Lord of the Two Horns."

 

The latter was an Arabic epithet for Alexander the Great, and the statement means that Piri Re’is saw and used maps from the fourth century B.C. Scholars surmise that such maps were kept in the Library of Alexandra and that some must have survived the destruction by fire of the great hall of science by Arab invaders in A.D. 642.

"It is now believed that the suggestion to sail westward on the Atlantic to reach existing coasts was first made not by Columbus but by an astronomer, mathematician, and geographer from Florence, Italy, named Paulo del Pozzo Toscanelli in 1474. It is also recognized that maps, such as the Medicean from 1351 and that of Pizingi of 1397, were available to later mariners and cartographers; the most renown of the latter has been Gerhard Kremer, alias Mercator, whose Atlas of 1569 and methods of projection have remained standard features of cartography to this day.

"One of the odd things about Mercator’s maps of the world is that they show Antarctica, although that ice covered continent was not discovered, by British and Russian sailors, until 250 years later, in 1820!

"As those who had preceded ( and succeeded) him, Mercator used for his Atlas earlier maps drawn by former cartographers. In respect of the Old World, especially the lands bordering on the Mediterranean, he obviously relied on maps that went back to the time when Phoenicians and Carthaginians ruled the seas, maps drawn by Marinus of Tyre that were known to future generations by the astronomer, mathematician, and geographer Claudius Ptolemy who lived in Egypt in the second century A.D. For his information of the New World, Mercator relied both on olden maps and the reports of explorers since the discovery of America.

 

But where did he get the data not only on the shape of Antarctica, but on its very existence?

 

"Scholars agree that his probable source was a Map of the World made in 1531 by Orontius Finaeus.

 

Correctly projecting the Earth’s globe by dividing it into the northern and southern hemispheres, with the north and south pole as epicenters, the map not only shows Antarctica - an amazing fact by itself. It also shows Antarctica with geographical and topographical features that have been buried under and obscured by an ice sheet for thousands of years!

"The map shows in unmistakable detail coasts, bays, inlets, estuaries and mountains, even rivers, where none are now seen because of the ice cap that hides them. Nowadays we know that such features exist, because they were discovered by scientific below-ice probing that culminated with intensive surveys by many teams during the International Geophysical Year, 1958.

 

The depiction (which appears on Mr. Sitchin’s book) on the Finaeus map (click image right) it then became clear, uncannily resembles the true shape of the Antarctic continent and its various geographical features.

"....Charles H. Hapgood (Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) concluded that the Finaeus map was drawn by him based on ancient charts that depicted Antarctica at a time when the continent, after having been freed of its ice covering, began to be covered by ice again on its western parts. That, his research team concluded, was about six thousand years ago, circa 4000 B.C.

"....Presenting his conclusions in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Charles Hapgood wrote: "It becomes clear that ancient voyagers travelled from pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored Antarctica when its coasts were free of ice.

 

It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately determining longitudes that was far superior to anything possessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval, or modern times until the second half of the 18^th century."

Mr. Sitchin continues:

"But those ancient mariners, as we have shown, only followed in the footsteps of the gods.

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