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The Great Sphinx of Egypt gazes precisely eastward, welcoming the rising Sun along the 30th 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.
The 500th anniversary of the epochal voyage of Columbus in 1492 has been by now reclassified from discovery to rediscovery, and has intensified the inquiry regarding the true identity of the "First Americans." The notion that settlement of the Americas began with the trekking of family groups from Asia across a frozen land-bridge to Alaska, just before the last ice age abruptly ended, has been grudgingly giving way in the face of mounting archaeological evidence that humans arrived in the Americas many millennia earlier, and that South America, not North America, was the earliest arena of human presence in the New World.
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 New Worlds at such 255 256 WHEN TIME BEGAN 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 previous books of The Earth Chronicles we have presented extensive evidence (to date unrefuted) that the great pyramids of Giza were built not by pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty circa 2600 BC., but by the Anunnaki "Gods" millennia earlier, as components of the landing corridor for the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula.
We arrived at the time frame of circa 10,000 BC. - some 12,000 years ago - for those pyramids; and we showed that the Sphinx, built soon thereafter, had already existed on the Giza plateau when pharaonic reigns began many centuries before the Fourth Dynasty. The evidence we relied on and presented were Sumerian and Egyptian depictions, inscriptions, and texts. In October 1991, some fifteen years after our initial presentation of such evidence in The I2th 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 BC. and 5000 BC., when the Egyptian climate was wetter." The conclusion "flies in the face of everything we know In Their Footsteps 257 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:
In February 1992, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting in Chicago, devoted a session to the subject "How old is the Sphinx?" at which Robert Schoch and Thomas Dobecki debated their findings with two debunkers, Mark Lehner of the University of Chicago and K.L. Gauri of the University of Louisville.
According to the Associated Press, the heated debate which spilled over into a confrontation in the hallway has not focused on the scientific merits of the meteorological findings, but, as Mark Lehner expressed it, on whether it is permissible to "overthrow Egyptian history based on one phenomenon, like a weathering profile." 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 BC.
The only response to this logical argument is, of course, to invoke someone other than the "hunters and gatherers" of that 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 at 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. This neat image of the First Americans retained its exclusive hold in spite of occasional discoveries, even in the southwestern United States, of remains of crushed bones or chipped pebbles - arguably evidence of human presence - dating some 20,000 years before Clovis.
A less doubtful find has been that at Meadowcroft rock shelter, Pennsylvania, where stone tools, animal bones, and, most important, charcoal, have been carbon-dated to between 15,000 and 19,000 years ago - millennia before Clovis, and in the eastern part of the United States to boot. 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 icebridge but by rafts or canoes hugging the coastlines.
The basic tenet - out of northeast Asia into northwest America - has, however, been stubbornly maintained in spite of unsettling evidence from South America. That evidence, whose discovery was not only ignored but even initially suppressed, pertains primarily to two sites where Stone Age tools, crushed animal 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. While most established archaeologists continue to consider the early dates "simply inconceivable," the rock shelter has yielded, at the 10,000 BC. level, petrogylphs (rock paintings) whose age is undisputable. In one, a long-necked animal that looks like a giraffe - an animal nonexistent in the Americas - seems to have been depicted.
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 Arctic 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).
Most others still consider such early crossings by "primitive man" as fantasies; the early dates are shrugged off as instrumental errors, stone "tools" as pieces of fallen rocks, broken animal bones as crushed by rockfalls, not by hunters. The same question that has brought the Age of the Sphinx debate to a dead end has been applied to the First Americans debate: 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 where-to - perhaps carrying him over, "on the wings of eagles," as the Bible has described - to a new Promised Land. There are two instances of planned migrations recounted in the Bible, and in both the deity was the guide.
The first instance was the ordering of Abraham, more than 4,000 years ago, to "get thee out of thy country and out of thy birthplace and from thy father's house." He was to go, Yahweh said, "unto the land which I will show thee." The second instance was the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, some 3,400 years ago. Showing the Israelites the route to take to the Promised Land,
Aided and guided, the people followed in
the footsteps of the Gods - in the ancient Near East as well as in the
new lands across the oceans. The latest archaeological discoveries
lend credence to memories of early events that are called "myths"
and "leg-ends." 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.
The earliest tribes, the oral legends and the tales written down pictorially in books called codices related, came from Aztlan, 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 Seeingeye attached to an elliptical rod (Fig. 126a). The four clans of migrants then trekked inland (Fig. 126b), passing by and following various landmarks. Splitting into several tribes, one, the Mexico, finally reached the valley where an eagle was perched upon a cactus bush - the signal for their final destination and the place where the Nahuatlan capital was to be built.
Figures 126a and 126b
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. Those earliest migrants were called Tenochites, the People of Tenoch; in The Lost Realms we detailed the reasons why they might have been the descendants of Enoch, the son of Cain, who still suffered the sevenfold avenging of their forefather's crime of fratricide.
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. The Spanish chronicler Friar Bernardino de 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 ar-rangement, 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.
He led his people across the Pacific in a fleet of boats
made of balsa wood, guided by an "'idol," a green stone through
which the Great God delivered navigational and other instructions.
The landfall was at the point where the South American continent
juts out the most westward into the Pacific Ocean, at what is
nowadays called Cape Santa Helena in Ecuador. After they had landed,
the Great God (still speaking through the green stone) instructed
the people in farming, building, and handicrafts.
Figure 127
Moving inland to settle 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 familiarity with the sacred number twelve - the hallmark of the Mesopotamian pantheon and calendar - be-speaks a calendar not unlike the one that originated in Sumer.
The veneration of both the Sun and the Moon indicates a
solar-lunar calendar, again as the one begun 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, or Stonehenge - or both.
Figure 128
Fritz Buck (Inscriptiones Calendarias del Peru Preincaico) who made the subject his specialty, was of the opinion 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 re-jected 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 (Fig. 129a). Before them there arrived by sea people that were depicted as Indo-Europeans (Fig. 129b); and sometime in between there landed on these coasts helmeted "Bird people" (Fig. 129c) who were armed with metal weapons.
Figures 129a, 129b, and 129c
Another group may have arrived overland via the Amazon basin and its tributaries; the symbols that were associated with them (Fig. 130) 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 re-markable 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 (Fig. 131).
Figure 130
Figure 131
The north-central Andean coast and ranges of South America were peopled by Quechua-speaking peoples, named, for want of a better source, after the main rivers along which they flourished. The Incas, it turned out, formed their empire and laid out their famous highways upon the ruins of those earlier inhabitants. Down south, from about where Lima (the capital of Peru) is situated, along the coast and mountains that face Lake Titicaca, and on southward toward Chile, the dominant tribal language was that of the Aymaras.
They too recalled in their legends early arrivals, on the Pacific coast by sea and by land from the territory east of Lake Titicaca. The Aymara considered the former as unfriendly invaders; the latter were called Uru, meaning "Olden people," who were a people apart and whose remnants still exist in the Sacred Valley as a group with its own customs and traditions. The possibility that they were Sumerians, arriving at Lake Titicaca when Ur was Sumer's capital (the last time between 2200 and 2000 BC.), must be taken seriously.
The fact is that the province that connects the Sacred Valley, the eastern shores of Lake Titicaca, and western Brazil is still called Madre del Dios - "Mother of the Gods,'' which is what Ninharsag was. A mere coincidence? Scholars find that throughout the millennia the dominant cultural influence on all these peoples was that of Tiahuanacu; 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, in decorations (including on the magnificently woven cloth in which mummies were wrapped) that emulated the symbols on the Gate, and in their calendar.
The most prevalent of those symbols or, as Posnansky and others consider them, hieroglyphs, was that of the stairway (Fig. 132a), which was also used in Egypt (Fig. 132b) and which was often used on Andean artifacts to denote a "Seeing-eye" tower (Fig. 132c). Such observations, to judge from the astronomical lines of sight at the Kalasasaya and from the celestial symbols associated with Tiahuanacu, included the Moon (whose symbol was a circle between crescents, Fig. 132d). 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.
Figures 132a, 132b. 132c. and 132d
Commenting on the evidence, earlier discussed, for the much greater antiquity of human presence in the Americas In Their Footsteps 269 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."
The discovery of "the oldest pottery in the Americas," announced by an archaeological team of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in the December 13, 1991, issue of Science magazine, "overturned the standard as-sumptions" regarding the peopling of the Americas and especially the view that the Amazon basin, where the discovery was made, was "simply too poor in resources to have supported a complex prehistoric culture."
Contrary to long held opinions, "the Amazon basin had soil as fertile as the flood plains of the Nile, the Ganges and other great river basins of the world," said Dr. Anne C. Roosevelt, the team's leader. The red-brown pottery fragments, some decorated with painted patterns, have definitely been dated by the latest technologies to be no less than seven thousand years old.
They were found at a site called Sabtarem in mounds of shells and other trash discarded by the ancient residents, a fishing people. The date, and the fact that the pottery was painted with linear designs, put it on a par with similar pottery that appeared in the ancient Near East, in the mountains bordering on the plain where the Sumerian civilization blossomed out. In The Lost Realms we presented the evidence of Sumerian traces in the Amazon basin and through it in the gold and tin-producing areas of Peru.
The latest discovery, by fixing the pottery's date unquestionably and by coming at a time when early arrivals are a more acceptable possibility, serves mainly to corroborate previously unorthodox conclusions: in antiquity, people from the Near East reached America also by crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Arrivals from such a direction have not been without calendrical remains. The most dramatic and enigmatic of them were discovered in the northeastern part of the Amazon basin, near the Brazil-Guyana border.
There, rising in the great plain, is an egg-shaped rock that rises some 100 feet and is some 300 by 250 feet in diameter. A natural cavity on its top has been carved out to form a pond whose waters flow on and into the gigantic rock through channels and conduits. A cavelike cavity has been enlarged to form a large rock shelter, further carved out to form grottoes and platforms at various levels.
The entrance into the rock's innards has painted above it a snake that is about twenty-two feet long, its mouth formed of three openings into the rock that are surrounded by enigmatic and undeciphered inscriptions; inside and out, the rock is filled with hundreds of painted signs and symbols. Intrigued by reports by earlier explorers and local lore that the grottoes contained skeletons of "giants whose faces were European in expression," Professor Marcel F. Hornet (Die Sohne der Sonne) explored the rock in the 1950s and provided more accurate data about it than had been known.
He found that the three facades of the Pedra Pintada point in three directions: the large facade is oriented on an east-west line, and the two smaller ones are oriented south southeast and south-southwest. His observation was that "Externally, in its structural orientation... this monument follows the exact identical rules of the ancient European and Mediterranean cultures." He considered many of the signs and symbols painted on the meticulously polished surfaces of the rock to be "impeccably regular numerals which are not based on the decimal system" but "belong to the oldest known eastern Mediterranean cultures."
He thought that surfaces filled with dots represented tables of multiplication, such as 9 times 7 or 5 times 7 or 7 times 7, and 12 times 12. The highlight of the rock's ancient artifacts, because of which some earlier explorers had called it the Place of the Stone Books, were dolmens - large flat stones laid across supporting stones - weighing between fifteen and twenty tons each. They were elaborately painted on their faces; and two larger ones were cut into precise shapes - one as a pentagon (Fig. 133a) and the other as an oval (Fig. 133b).
Figures 133a and 133b
As at the entrance, both appear to depict a serpent as the dominant symbol, and this and other signs brought to Hornet's mind ancient Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Since many of the dolmens were placed at the levels and the entrances of burial grottoes in the depths of the rock, he concluded that, as the Indian legends held, this was a sacred place for the burial of leaders or other notables "by civilized people who were here, just as they were in Tiahuanacu, the great city of the Andes long, long ago - perhaps thousands of years before the birth of Christ."
Hornet's observation regarding the mathematical system that seemed to underlie the markings on the surfaces, "not based on the decimal system" but on that of "the oldest known eastern Mediterranean cultures," is a roundabout way of describing the Sumerian sexagesimal system whose use prevailed throughout the ancient Near East.
His other conclusions about links on the one hand lo the "eastern Mediterranean" and on the other hand to Tiahuanacu "thousands of years before the birth of Christ" are truly remarkable. Although the drawings on these two particular dolmens remain undeciphered, they do hold, in our view, a number of important clues.
The pentagonal one no doubt records some coherent tale, perhaps, as with the later Mesoamerican picture books, a tale of migration and the route taken. At its four corners the tablet depicts four types of people; in that it could have been a precursor of a well known Mayan painting on the cover of the Codex Fejervary that showed the four quarters of the Earth and (in different colors) their diverse races of people.
As on the pentagonal dolmen, the Mayan depiction also has a geometric central panel. Except for the central panel, which in Brazil is pentagonal, the dolmen's face is covered with what appears to be an unknown script. We find similarities between it and a script from the eastern Mediterranean known as Linear A; it was a precursor of the script of the island of Crete, and also of that of the Hittites of Anatolia (today's Turkey). The dominant symbol on the pentagonal dolmen is the serpent, also a well-known symbol of the pre-Hellenic culture of Crete and ancient Egypt.
In terms of the ancient Near Eastern pantheon, the serpent was the symbol of Enki and his clan. On the oval dolmen it is depicted as a heavenly cloud, which brings to mind the the serpent symbol on Mesopotamian kudurru (Fig. 92), where it represented the Milky Way. Many of the symbols that frame the central panel on this dolmen are familiar Sumerian and Elamite designs and emblems (such as the swastika).
The larger images within the oval frame are even more revealing. If we consider the central uppermost symbol as a script element, precisely twelve symbols are left. In our view, they represent the twelve signs of the zodiac. That not all the symbols are identical to those that originated in Sumer is not unusual, since in various lands (such as China) the zodiac (which means "animal circle") was adapted to local fauna.
But some of the symbols on this oval dolmen, such as that of the two fishes (for Pisces), the two human images (the twins of Gemini) and the female holding a stalk of grain (Virgo, the Virgin) are identical to the zodiacal symbols (and their names) that originated in Sumer and were adopted throughout the Old World. The significance of the Amazonian depiction can, therefore, hardly be exaggerated. As we have pointed out, the zodiac was an entirely arbitrary division of the celestial circle into twelve groups of stars; it was not the result of simple observation of natural phenomena, such as the day-night cycle, the waxing and waning of the Moon, or the Sun's seasonal changes.
To find the concept and knowledge of the zodiac, and moreover to have it represented by Mesopotamian symbols, must be taken as evidence of someone with Near Eastern knowledge in the Amazon basin. No less astounding than the decorative symbols and the zodiacal signs around the oval dolmen's face is the depiction in the center of the pentagonal dolmen. It shows a circle of stones surrounding two monoliths, between which there appears a partly erased drawing of a human head whose eye is focused on one of the monoliths.
Such a
"head with sighting eye" can be found in Mayan astronomical
codices, in which the sign depicts astronomer-priests. All that,
plus the astronomical orientations of the rock's three surfaces,
bespeaks the presence of someone familiar with celestial
observations. Who was that "someone"? Who could have crossed the
ocean at such an early time? The crossing, admittedly, could not
have taken place unaided. And whether those who were led or
transported to the South American shores already possessed
calendrical-astronomical knowledge, or were taught it in the new
lands, none of that could have come about without the "Gods."
The principal river of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, the Urubamba, is but a tributary of the Amazon River; so are other Peruvian rivers that flow eastward from sites whose mind-boggling remains indicate they were metallurgical processing centers. The known sites, only a fraction of what is there to be discovered if proper archaeological work were carried out, support the veracity of local traditions that people from across the Atlantic landed on those coasts and journeyed via the Amazon basin to obtain the gold and tin and other treasures of the Andes.
In what used to be called British Guiana alone, more than a dozen sites have been discovered where the rocks are covered with carved pictures. At a site near Karakananc in the Pacaraima mountains, the petroglyphs (Fig. 134a) depict stars with different numbers of rays or points (a Sumerian "first"), the crescent of the Moon and solar symbols, and what could have been a viewing device next to a stairway.
Figures 134a, 134b, 134c, 134d
At a place called Marlissa a long range of granite rocks along a river bank is covered with numerous petroglyphs; some of them adorned the cover of the journal of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana {77 mehri, issue 6 of 1919) (Fig. 134b). The peculiar person with raised hands and a helmetlike head with one large "eye" appears on the rock next to what looks like a large boat (Fig. 134c).
The tightly clothed and haloed beings, shown many times over (Fig. 134d), are of giantlike proportions: in one instance thirteen feet tall and in another close to eight feet. In neighboring Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, in the area of the Frederik Willem IV Falls, the petroglyphs are so numerous that researchers have found it necessary to assign numbers to the sites, to each group of petroglyphs at each site, and to individual symbols within each group.
Some of them (Fig. 135) would today be deemed to rep-resent UFOs and their occupants, as would a petroglyph (Fig. 136) at site 13 at the Wonotobo Falls, where the previously seen depiction of tall and haloed beings has been converted into a domed contraption with a ladder coming down out of its opening; a mighty person is standing in that opening.
Figure 135
Figure 136
The message conveyed by such petroglyphs is that while some people were seen arriving by boats, other Godlike ones arrived in "flying saucers," At least two of the symbols among these petroglyphs can be recognized as Near Eastern script-signs, and specifically so from Hittite inscriptions in Anatolia. One, which appears as the determinative-sign next to a helmeted and horned face (Fig. 137a), unmistakably resembles the hieroglyphic Hittite sign meaning "great" (Fig. 137b).
This hieroglyphic sign was most often used in Hittite inscriptions in combination with the sign for "king, ruler" to mean "great king" (Fig. 137c); and exactly such a combined hieroglyph has been found several times among the petroglyphs near the Wonotobo cataracts in Suriname (Fig. 137d).
Figures 137a, 137b, 137c, 137d
Petroglyphs, indeed, cover rocks large and small throughout South America; their spread and images tell Man's story in that part of the world, a story that is yet to be fully deciphered and understood. For more than a hundred years explorers have shown that the South American continent can be crossed by foot, on horseback, by canoes and rafts.
One major route begins in northeastern Brazil/Guyana/Venezuela and uses principally the Amazon river system to enter Peru's north and central parts; the other begins in Brazil somewhere near Sao Paulo and winds its way westward through the Mato Grosso region to Bolivia and Lake Titicaca, and thence northward into cither central Peru (the Sacred Valley) or the coastal regions - two places where the two routes meet.
As the discoveries earlier discussed in this chapter
show, Man arrived in the Americas, and especially in South America, tens of thousands of years ago. The migrations, to judge by the
petroglyphic evidence, came in three recognizable phases. The
extensive work at the Pedra Furada in north-eastern Brazil offers a
good example of those phases as far as the continent's Atlantic side
is concerned.
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. The rock art of that long period was naturalistic; the artists of the time depicted what they saw around them: local animals, trees and other vegetation, people.
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 signs" 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 script make their appearance, leading in such a third phase to the astronomical and calendrical aspects of the markings on the rocks.
These petroglyphs can be found at both landfall zones and along the two major cross-continent routes. The more they belong to the third phase, the more pronounced are the celestial symbols and connotations. The more they are found in the continent's southern parts, be it in Brazil or Bolivia or Peru, the more are they reminiscent of Sumer, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia.
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 (Fig. 138a). 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" (Fig. 138b), the younger son of Enlil whom the Sumerians called ishkur, the Babylonians and Assyrians Adad, and the Hittites Teshub ("The Wind Blower").
Figures 138a and 138b
While the Sumerian presence or at least influence can be documented in many, though small, ways, as we have done in The Lost Realms, no attempt has been made to date to arrive at a comprehensive picture of the Hittite presence in South America.
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" sys-tem - 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 stones 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 earliest cyclopean stone-works through the exquisite ashlars of the Ancient Empire, down to the fieldstone buildings of the Incas and to the present.
Who was there in the Andean lands knowledgeable in the use of stone for construction before the lands were popu-lated, before Andean civilization began, before the Incas? We suggest they were stonemasons from Anatolia, who quite usefully were also expert miners - for Anatolia was an important source of metal ores in antiquity and one of the first places to begin mixing copper with tin to make bronze.
Making an on-site visit to the ruins of 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 rep-resented crude emulations of Andean stoneworks, even including the unique and intricate incisions in the hard stone to create the "stairway motif" (Fig. 139). One has to be an expert in ancient ceramics to be able to distinguish between some of the Anatolian and Andean pottery, especially the burnished and polished deep ocher-red kind from the bronze age.
Figure 139
One need not, however, be an expert to notice the similarity between strange warriors depicted on Peruvian artifacts from the coastal areas (Fig. Figure 139 140a) and pre-Hellenic warriors depicted on artifacts from the eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 140b).
Figures 140a and 140b
Regarding the latter
similarity, it should be borne in mind that the home of the early
Greeks, Ionia, was not in Greece but in the western parts of
Anatolia (Asia Minor). The myths and legends of early times,
recorded in such works as Homer's Iliad, deal in fact with locations
that were in Anatolia. Troy was there and not in Greece. So was the
famed Sardis, capital of Croesus, king of Lydia, who was renowned
for his golden treasures. Perhaps the belief by some that the
travels and travails of Odysseus also brought him to what we now
call America, are not so farfetched.
Meskiaggasher went into the western sea and came forth toward the mountains." How such a cross-oceanic voyage was accomplished without some kind of navigational aids, if none yet existed, is left unexplained by scholars. Centuries later, Gilgamesh, having been mothered by a Goddess, went in search of immortality. His adventures precede in time but exceed in drama those of Odysseus. On his last journey he had to cross the Waters or Sea of Death, which was possible only with the assistance of the boatman Urshanabi.
No sooner did the two start the crossing, than Urshanabi accused Gilgamesh of breaking the "stone things" without which the boatman could not navigate. The ancient text records the lament of Urshanabi about the "broken stone things" in three lines that are unfortunately only partly legible on the clay tablet; the three begin with the words "I peer, but I cannot..." which strongly suggests a navigational device. To correct the problem, Urshanabi instructed Gilgamesh to go back ashore and cut long wooden poles, 120 of them.
As they sailed off, Urshanabi instructed Gilgamesh to discard one pole at a time, in groups of twelve. This was repeated ten times until all of the 120 poles were used up: "At twice-sixty Gilgamesh had used up the poles," reaching their destination on the other side of the sea. Thus did a specific number of poles, arranged as instructed, substitute for the "stone things" that could no longer be used to peer with.
Gilgamesh is a known historical ruler of ancient Sumer; he reigned in Erech (Uruk) circa 2900 BC. Centuries later, Sumerian traders reached distant lands by sea routes, exporting the grains, wool, and garments for which Sumer became known and importing - 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. Sailing through the ancient sea route from the eastern to the western Mediterranean between the islands of Crete and Kythera, two boats of sponge divers discovered the wreck of an ancient ship lying on the sea's bottom.
The wreck
yielded artifacts, including marble and bronze statues, dated to the
fourth century BC. The ship itself has been dated to some time
after 200 BC.; amphorae, vessels containing wine, olive oil, and
other foodstuffs, were dated to about 75 BC. That the ship and its
contents date to a time before the beginning of the Christian era
thus seems certain, and so is the conclusion that it had taken on
its load at or near the coast of Asia Minor.
Figure 141
After decades-long studies, including its investigation with X rays and metallurgical analysis, it has been put on view in the National Archaeological Mu-seum 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 BC.
The mechanism is considered to be a calendrical Sun and Moon computing machine dated, after the latest evidence, to circa 80 BC. One of the most thorough studies on the subject is the book Gears from the Greeks by Professor Derek de Sola Price of Yale University. He found that the three broken-apart sections contained gears and dials and graded plates that in turn were assembled from at least ten separate parts.
The gears were linked one to the other on a basis of several differentials - a sophistication which we now find in auto-matic gearshift boxes in cars - that incorporated the cycle of the Sun and the Metonic (nineteen-year) cycle of the Moon. The gears were fitted with tiny teeth and moved on varied axles; markings on circular and angular parts were accompanied by inscriptions in Greek that named a number of zodiacal constellations.
The instrument was without doubt the product of a high technology and sophisticated scientific knowledge. Nothing coming even close to it in intricacy has been found in subsequent or preceding times, in spite of the guess offered by de Sola Price that it could have been made - or perhaps just repaired - at the School of Posidonios on the island of Rhodes after the model of planetarium devices used by Archimedes.
Though he "sympathized with the shock one may feel at revising upwards the estimation of Hellenistic technology," he wrote, he could not agree with the "radical interpretation" by some "that the complexity of the device and its mechanical sophistication put it so far beyond the scope of Hellenistic technology that it could only have been designed and created by alien astronauts coming from outer space and visiting our civilization."
Yet the fact is that nothing coming even close to the instrument's intricacy and precision has been found any-where in any of the centuries preceding or following the time of the shipwreck. Even medieval astrolabes, more than a millennium after the Antikythera time frame, look like toys (Fig. 142a) compared to the ancient object (Fig. 142b).
Figures 142a and 142b
Moreover, the medieval and later European astro-labes 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.
Just across the Aegean Sea from Athens and the Kythera islands, in Istanbul (the previous Ottoman capital and the Byzantine one), in a converted palace now known as the Topkapi Museum, there is kept another find that throws light on ancient navigational capabilities. It is known as the Piri Re'is Map, after the Turkish admiral who had it made, and bears the Moslem year equivalent to a.d. 1513 (Fig. 143a).
One of several mapas mundi (world maps) that have survived from that Age of Discovery, it attracted particular interest for a number of reasons: first, its ac-curacy and its sophisticated method of projecting global features on a flat surface; second, because it clearly shows (Fig. 143b) the whole of South America, with recognizable geographic and topographic features on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; and third, because it correctly projects the Antarctic continent.
Figures 143a and 143b
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 BC. Scholars surmise that such maps were kept in the Library of Alexandria and that some must have survived the destruction by fire of that great hall of science by Arab invaders in AD. 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 In Their Footsteps 289 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 1367, were available to later mariners and cartographers; the most renowned 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 to 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 made known to future generations by the astronomer, mathematician, and geographer Claudius Ptolemy who lived in Egypt in the second century AD.
For his information on 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 (Fig. 144a).
Correctly projecting the Earth's globe by dividing it into the northern and southern hemispheres, with the north and south poles 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.
Figures 144a and 144b
Nowadays we know that such features exist, because they were discovered by scientific below-ice probings that culminated with intensive surveys by many teams during the International Geophysical Year, 1958. The depiction on the Finaeus map, it then became clear, uncannily resembles the true shape of the Antarctic continent and its various geographical features (Fig. 144b). In one of the most thorough studies of the subject, 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 in its western parts.
That, his research team concluded, was about six thousand years ago, circa 4000 BC. Subsequent studies, as that by John W. Weihaupt (Eos, the Proceedings of the American Geophysical Union, August 1984), corroborated the earlier findings. Recognizing that "even crude mapping of a large continent would require a knowledge of navigation and geometry presumably beyond the ken of primitive navigators," he was nevertheless convinced that the map was based on data obtained some time between 2,600 and 9,000 years ago.
The source of such data, he stated, remains an unanswered puzzle. Presenting his conclusions in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Charles Hapgood wrote:
But those ancient mariners, as we have shown, only followed in the footsteps of the Gods.
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