This is an
excellent review of the state of the art from the late nineties and it serves
as an excellent review of the sources.
Personally I have read essentially all these and it has informed me of
the wealth of open questions and the outright depth of scholarly ignorance and
simple lack of scientific curiosity. Of
course, who one has grasped the half of it.
My own work
opened up the whole Pleistocene Nonconformity debate after the book of Rand
Athes on the necessity of a crustal shift which I then linked in 2007 to impact
phenomena since identified as a huge targeted comet impact. Science is about halfway there now. This led to my development of key event dates
of 12900 BP, 2400 BC, and 1159 BC in particular for the actual demise of
Atlantis.
More stunning
is my continual expansion of the global scale and scope of the Global Atlantean
civilization from roughly 2400 BC through 1159 BC which coincided with copper
mining at Lake Superior. This is now
been rapidly buttressed with subsea pyramids off Cuba, and the Azores with more
to obviously come and the continuing work in South East Asia and elsewhere on
related structures.
There are now
serious signs that this crypto history is about to transition into the
mainstream from simple weight of hard evidence.
Every local discovery is finding a champion who is no longer about to
allow an academic ignoramus to get away with ignoring the data.
Crypto-History:
The State of the Art
BY RICHARD HEINBERG
—
Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful
empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over
parts of the continent, and besides these they subjected parts of Libya within
the Straits as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.
- PLATO, Timaeus
For as long as there
have been historians, two versions of early human history have competed for
acceptance. One, which is now the official version, says that civilization has
evolved along a more or less smooth incline from barbarism to modernity. The second,
which never really disappeared even when it fell out of fashion, flows from an
idea found in nearly every culture’s early mythology – that there has been a
series of high civilizations reaching back many millennia into the forgotten
past, and that each, in turn, was destroyed by some horrific terrestrial
cataclysm.
The latter idea is to
be found, for example, in the doctrine of the Yugas – or world ages – in the
Mahabharata of India, wherein it is said that the first Yuga, the Krita, was
the best, and that human society has been in decline ever since. The Maya and
the Hopi told of a series of elapsed World Ages which ended, in turn, in flood,
fire, and earthquake. In Western classical literature, Hesiod’s doctrine of the
original Golden Race and the succeeding races of Silver, Brass, Heroes, and
Iron relates essentially the same story. But of all the tales of lost or fallen
worlds, perhaps none has exerted a greater influence on the popular imagination
than Plato’s account of the island of Atlantis.
Writing in about 355
BC at about age seventy, Plato told of a great maritime civilization that had
existed nine thousand years [ 800 years appears to be the correct time span which is ample
time for errors to creep into Egyptian historical accounts – arclein ] earlier, and located its center “beyond the
Pillars of Heracles” (that is, the Strait of Gibraltar). He claimed that the
story originated with the priests of Isis, who had imparted it to the Athenian
statesman Solon during the latter’s trip to Egypt around 590 BC. The
Atlanteans, unsatisfied with ruling their own land, had conquered parts of
the outer “true” continent and much of the Mediterranean region, including
Egypt. But they were defeated in their attempts at conquest by the brave
Athenians, ancestors of Solon. Soon afterward, a great earthquake and flood
caused Atlantis to sink beneath the waters of the ocean “in a single day and
night.” Plato describes the lost city and island of Atlantis in detail and
mentions Socrates’ enthusiasm about the story, which the elder sage termed “no
invented fable but genuine history.”
Plato’s narrative,
contained in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, would eventually inspire
over five thousand books seeking to explain away or to identify the sunken
land. Nearly every place from Palestine to Brazil, from the West Indies to the
North Pole has been suggested by one author or another as the “real” site of
Atlantis.
Historians of the
steady-progress school have argued either that Plato was exaggerating (perhaps,
they say, Atlantis was merely the Greek island of Thera and did not sink 11,500
years ago but was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 1500 BC), or that he made
the story up in order to illustrate his political ideas or to convey through
allegory some item of arcane mathematical or astronomical knowledge. After all,
Plato’s narrative is not supported by any other early Greek or Egyptian
document describing a lost island named Atlantis; moreover, we know that it was
common for authors in his era to put invented speeches in the mouths of famous
historical characters in order to illustrate competing philosophies. Of the
thousands of dialogues surviving from ancient times, few if any are believed to
be accurate transcripts of real discussions.
Plato’s story would likely
never have stirred so much controversy had it not been for certain
intriguing bits of evidence that have nagged at explorers and historians for
centuries – evidence suggesting the existence of an unknown early civilization
with highly developed scientific and engineering capabilities. Since
conventional history supplies no likely candidate as source for such evidence,
theorists have turned again and again to Atlantis.
Secrets of the Stones
The single most
frequently cited item of evidence for a lost high culture is the Great Pyramid
of Giza. Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it is the only survivor. It
consists of over two million blocks of stone, most weighing from two to six
tons, though some are far heavier. Since the Great Pyramid is as tall as a
forty story building, its builders faced the immense problem of lifting or
dragging these blocks ever higher as construction proceeded. We still do not
know quite how they did it, though theories abound. The largest construction
cranes in existence today can barely lift 200-ton blocks, such as the ones in
the core of the neighboring pyramid attributed to the pharaoh Khafre, and there
is no construction company in the world that would undertake the job of
duplicating either of these immense structures. The designers and builders of
the Great Pyramid are conventionally credited with having only a rudimentary
knowledge of mathematics and the most primitive of tools, yet the precision of
their work is truly astounding, judged by any standards: many of the blocks are
fitted to opticians’ tolerances, and the structure as a whole is square and
aligned to true north to an accuracy that would be difficult to improve upon
with even the most up-to-date surveying and construction equipment.
But the mysteries of the
Great Pyramid go far beyond the engineering virtuosity it so magnificently
flaunts. There is also the matter of its design. Historians of science maintain
that the number pi – the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle –
was discovered by the Greeks and worked out to the fourth decimal place by the
Hindu sage Arya-Bhata in the fourth century. Nevertheless, pi is embodied in
the ratio of the Pyramid’s height to the circumference of its base, and to a
precision of five decimal places. The perimeter of the sockets at the base of
the structure equals a half minute of equatorial longitude, or 1/43,200 of the
Earth’s circumference; and the Pyramid’s height, including the stone platform
on which it rests, equals 1/43,200 of the Earth’s polar radius. This
suggests that the Pyramid’s builders had a good idea of the shape and size of
our planet and intended the monument to embody this geodetic information.
Discussions about the
Great Pyramid are inevitably littered with question marks. How? Why? When? Was
the Pyramid built as a royal tomb, as nearly all the textbooks tell us? If so,
why would anyone have gone to such immense lengths to build a permanent,
conspicuous mausoleum, and then leave no epitaph? The tombs of most pharaohs
are covered with hieroglyphs and cartouches; in the Great Pyramid there are no
inscriptions whatever, save for a few workmen’s rough quarry marks on the inner
blocks, from which Egyptologists have inferred that the builder was a
Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh named Khufu. No body was found in the Pyramid, nor any
unequivocal sign that a burial ever occurred in it. Not surprisingly,
crypto-historians have always asserted that the Great Pyramid served purposes
other than that of grave – including initiatory temple, geodetic marker, and signpost
of the survivors from Atlantis.
The Pyramid is
conventionally dated at about 2500 BC, which places its construction in the
early phase of Egyptian history. Egyptologists acknowledge that the artistic
and engineering achievements of the civilization peaked near its beginning; but
given that there is so little evidence of gradual cultural development prior to
the Pyramid Age, one has to wonder how these people so quickly acquired their
skill and knowledge, and why they gradually frittered it away during the
remaining two thousand years of their history. The Egyptians themselves
apparently believed that their civilization had a much greater antiquity than
present experts acknowledge, one that reached thirty millennia or more into the
dim past.
While the Great
Pyramid is perhaps the most spectacular item of evidence suggesting the
existence of a lost high civilization, there are many others. Consider, for
example, the great fortress at Sacsayhuaman, Peru, whose wall contains stones
weighing up to 400 tons, cut with as many as twelve butting faces fitted
precisely with their neighbors; or the 228-foot-high Black Pagoda in India,
capped with a single slab estimated to weigh over 1000 tons; or the platform of
the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon, containing three blocks weighing
750 tons each. In each case we see an instance of a global pattern: the
earliest stone monuments often seem to be the largest and most perfectly
executed.
As if this were not
problem enough for the steady-progress version of history, consider the really
bizarre anomalies that conventional historians disregard altogether: an iron
cup found embedded in an Oklahoma coal mine, a metal tube recovered from a
65-million-year-old chalk bed, a gold chain encased in a lump of Illinois coal,
a grooved metal sphere taken from a Precambrian mineral deposit, a nail
embedded in sandstone in Scotland. The deeper one digs, the more reasons
one finds to think that the standard view of history omits some vitally
important chapter in the human past.
Could the giant
quarried and carved stones of the ancients be a legacy of Plato’s Atlantis?
Unfortunately, while the evidence is suggestive, it is far from being
conclusive. In the case of well-documented lost civilizations – such as those
of the Mayas, the Mycenaean Greeks, or the Babylonians – archaeologists can
point to a geographical homeland, reconstruct a common language and trace
specific contacts with contemporaneous cultures. But with regard to “Atlantis”,
none of this is possible. Connecting the Great Pyramid with Stonehenge or
Macchu Picchu requires a tremendous leap of conjecture. But of conjecture,
among Atlantis theorists, there has been no lack.
[ Actually that is not true at all. It requires an organized sea trade and that
is good enough. Everything else shows local variations wrought with the same
tool kit generally and the application of a base Bronze Age Mathematica that
turns out to be far more productive than anticipated - Arclein ]
Floods of Speculation
While we do not know
for certain where Plato got the idea of Atlantis, its later evolution in
literature is a matter of record. Plato’s famous pupil Aristotle apparently did
not take the Atlantean passages in Critias and Timaeus seriously, though
Poseidonius, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder seem to have done so. By the time of
the Church Fathers, the story was accepted at face value, though rarely
mentioned. During the Middle Ages, rumors circulated widely about lands in or
beyond the Atlantic Ocean, populated by “the Cannibals that each other eat, The
Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Medieval
maps featured legendary lands with names like Antilla, St. Brendan’s Isles, and
Avalon; and, following Columbus’s fateful voyage, rumors of unexplored lands
ran riot. Throughout the Age of Discovery (or the Age of Invasion and Genocide,
depending on your point of view), maps were festooned with newly named islands,
many the result of poor navigation, clouds, or eyestrain: Isle of the Demons,
Drogio, Estotiland, Grocland, Frisland, the Island of Brazil, and so on.
More than a few
people, from Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century to Alexander von Humboldt
in the nineteenth, thought that the Atlantis narrative was an early reference
to America. Eventually, however, it became clear that none of the Native
American civilizations had visited Egypt or Athens, and Atlantis theorists
began to view the Americas merely as yet more colonies of the lost continent.
One of the most
knowledgeable of these theorists was Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), the
first explorer to excavate the Mayan ruins in Yucatan. Le Plongeon pieced
together what he believed was a history of the mother culture in the Atlantic,
the founding of its colonies in Central America, Egypt, and Greece, and its
destruction by earthquake. He based his Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches 11,500 Years Ago on
his own translation of the Troano
Codex, one of the few Mayan books to survive the Inquisition. But Le
Plongeon was derided by the Americanist establishment for his flights of
historical fancy, despite his demonstrated ability to trace the surviving Mayan
Indian culture to its roots by learning the language of the people and
participating in their shamanic rituals.
[ the problem is that this outline is entirely correct but
during the European bronze Age, while 11500 years ago is also a valid time
frame - arclein]
At around the time Le Plongeon
was completing his explorations in Yucatan, American lawyer, newspaper
publisher, and politician Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a
book that would eventually go through over 50 printings and provide fodder for
generations of Atlantis researchers. Donnelly was a man of extraordinary energy
and curiosity: before commencing his writing career he had been
Lieutenant-Governor of Minnesota and member of the U.S. House of
Representatives. After his electoral defeat in 1870, he returned to Minnesota,
wrote books, went on lecture tours, served in the Minnesota state senate,
helped found the Populist Party, and twice ran for Vice President of the United
States on the Populist ticket. In Atlantis,
Donnelly argued that the source of all civilization was an island in the
Atlantic that “perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole
island sank into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants,” though not before
establishing colonies in Egypt and Central America. Unfortunately, though his
scholarship was wide-ranging, it was exceedingly careless, and the academic
community never took Donnelly seriously.
Establishment
historians were even more dismissive of James Churchward, author of The Lost Continent of Mu (1931).
Churchward set out to prove that the ultimate source of civilization lay not in
the Atlantic, but the Pacific Ocean, where a great continent called Mu had
disappeared 13,000 years ago when “gas belts” supposedly underlying the
continents collapsed, causing both Mu and (somewhat later) Atlantis to sink
beneath the waves. Churchward said he had based his conclusions on the study of
two sets of inscriptions, one in India and the other in Mexico. The Indic
tablets were never seen by other researchers, and the Mexican ones – a
collection of 2,600 carved stones found in 1921 by explorer William Niven, a
friend of Churchward – have been virtually ignored by the authorities. A
reconsideration of the significance of the Mexican tablets is long overdue, but
Churchward is partly to blame for their neglect: The Lost Continent of Mu bristles with so many demonstrable
errors in archaeology, history, and linguistics (for example, the frontispiece
shows a “12,500-year-old Muvian jar” bearing an inscription which Sanskrit
scholars recognize as dating from no earlier than the eleventh century) that
the potentially useful material it contains has suffered from guilt by
association.
The Psychic/Occult
Connection
By far the most
colorful writing about Atlantis has come not from explorers or historians, but
from clairvoyants and occultists – of whom the most influential was Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky claimed to
receive telepathically the teachings of a group of Masters or Mahatmas, who for
millennia have maintained a benign oversight of the world from their
headquarters in Tibet and who purportedly showed her the manuscript of
the Book of Dzyan (originally
composed in Atlantis in the forgotten Senzar language). It was on the Book of Dzyan that Blavatsky
would base her magnum opus, The
Secret Doctrine, a vast synthesis of Eastern and Western myth and magic.
According to The Secret Doctrine,
humankind is destined to unfold through seven Root Races, of which we (humanity
in the present era) are the Fifth. The Fourth Root Race was that of the
Atlanteans, and the Third the Lemurians – who were hermaphroditic giants, some
with four arms or an eye in the back of their heads. The people of the First
and Second Root Races, it seems, were not entirely physical. According to
Blavatsky, both Lemuria and Atlantis were destroyed when their populations
resorted to sorcery.
Rudolf Steiner
(1861-1925), the founder of Anthroposophy – an offshoot of Theosophy – expanded
on Madame Blavatsky’s account of the Atlanteans and Lemurians in his own
voluminous writings. The Lemurians, he said, operated on instinct and will
power, by means of which they could control nature in extraordinary ways. The
Atlanteans had better memories than the Lemurians, but did not develop rational
thought (the contribution of our own Root Race); still, they were masters of
the life force, by means of which they operated aircraft and built cities. They
also used the occult power of words to heal and to tame wild beasts.
Edgar Cayce
(1877-1945), “the sleeping prophet,” was famous for his ability, while in
trance, to diagnose illnesses, often without benefit of any direct contact with
the patient. During his “life readings,” in which he described his subjects’
past incarnations, he often referred to Atlantis and the events surrounding its
destruction. The Atlanteans, according to Cayce, had air travel, electricity,
advanced metallurgy and chemistry, detailed knowledge of geography, and
standard units of measure. When it became apparent to Atlantean priests
that their homeland was doomed, they sent colonists to carefully chosen sites
around the globe. A priest named Ra Ta decided upon Egypt and began
construction of the Great Pyramid in 10,490 BC, several centuries before the
cataclysmic end of the Third World Age. Cayce described Atlantis as a group of
large islands in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean, and prophesied that it
would reemerge from the depths in the late twentieth century.
If most scientists
were skeptical about the ideas of Le Plongeon, Donnelly and Churchward, they
were even less inclined to seriously consider those of Blavatsky, Steiner and
Cayce. By the early part of this century, geologists had determined that sea
beds and continents are composed of fundamentally different kinds of rocks, and
that there simply are no large areas of continent-type rock (known as sial for
its silicon-aluminium content) present on the ocean bottom. Why, then, give
credence either to ancient myths or to clairvoyant visions of ancient advanced
civilizations of which there is no conclusive evidence, and that supposedly
lived and perished on lost continents that could not have existed?
Promising Leads,
Sensational Claims
Still, there was the
riddle of the stones. How and why did people in Europe, the Near East, and
South America build astronomically aligned structures many millennia ago using
giant monoliths? Where did they get the necessary engineering know-how?
Throughout the present century, the depth of the mystery has steadily
increased, while the skepticism of the scientific establishment has hardly
abated.
Alsatian philosopher
and mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent the years 1936 to 1951 in
Egypt making painstaking measurements of the Temple of Luxor – which he
characterized in his book, Le
Temple de l’Homme as an architectural image of the human body,
incorporating knowledge of the location of the ductless glands, the Hindu
chakras, and the Chinese acupuncture points. These, together with astronomical
alignments incorporated in the structure, showed symbolically the incarnation
of the universe in human form. De Lubiscz contended that the science of the
Egyptians (their mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and engineering) was far in
advance of what can be explained by a slow, indigenous acquisition of
knowledge, and must have been the legacy of some previous high culture.
In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of
Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age (1966), Charles Hapgood
presented the fruits of his careful study of medieval and Renaissance maps
showing coastlines that had not yet been “discovered.” These well-authenticated
maps, some of which show an ice-free Antarctica as it would have looked many
thousands of years ago, were purported by their creators to be copies of still
older maps – which, Hapgood theorized, may once have been housed in the great
libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople. Hapgood, a professor of
anthropology and the history of science, deduced that the ancient geographical
knowledge embodied in the maps could only have been accumulated by a maritime
civilization prior to the change of sea levels that occurred roughly 11,500
years ago at the end of the last ice age.
In their brilliant and
difficult book Hamlet’s Mill (1969),
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend argued convincingly that the
ancient, worldwide language of myth preserves archaic knowledge of the precession
of the equinoxes – an astronomical phenomenon commonly believed to have been
discovered by Hipparchus in 127 BC. The fact that the full cycle of the
precession completes itself only once every 26,000 years suggests that humans
may have been observing the sky systematically for a very long time indeed.
The work of de
Lubiscz, Hapgood, and de Santillana, though stunning in its implications,
raised only limited interest among scholars. Meanwhile, several popular writers
of the 1960s and ’70s ignited a firestorm debate about crypto-history among the
general public. In The View Over
Atlantis (1969), which is still probably the best-written example
of the Earth-mysteries genre, author John Michell suggested that traditional
sacred sites in Britain (including Stonehenge, Woodhenge, Avebury, Glastonbury,
and the “ley lines” connecting them) were planned according to principles
similar to those encoded in the Great Pyramid, using a universal archaic system
of measure. This, according to Michell, implies “a gigantic work of prehistoric
engineering” laid out across the surface of the planet. In his book, Michell
cited the research carried out by engineering professor Alexander Thom, who
spent decades meticulously surveying the 500 or so stone circles of Britain,
and concluded that their groundplans were based on a precise geometry and
incorporated astronomical alignments related to the extreme positions of the
Sun and Moon and the rising points of stars.
Books like Peter
Tompkins’s Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971)
and Secrets of the Mexican
Pyramids (1976), Brad Steiger’s Mysteries of Time and Space(1973), Otto Muck’s The Secret of Atlantis (1978)
and William R. Fix’s Pyramid
Odyssey (1978) combed over similar data and drew similar
conclusions. But it was the wildly successful Chariots of the Gods (1970) of Erich von Daniken that led
the way in book sales and controversy. By blending flying saucer reports with
ancient stories about the exploits of various local deities, and adding more
than a judicious dash of Earth-mystery lore, von Daniken arrived at the
startling conclusion that God was an astronaut. Perhaps, he posited, Earth was
visited in ancient times by explorers from other star systems, and humankind
was put here as part of a cosmic science experiment. There is no way to
completely disprove such an assertion; indeed, in competent hands it could be
argued rather convincingly. Unfortunately, however, von Daniken heavyhandedly
conflated genuine mysteries – like the Nazca lines of Peru – with phenomena
that are well explained in quite mundane terms – such as the statues of Easter
Island, whose creation has been reconstructed in detail by archaeologists –
monotonously insisting on the same explanation in every case. Critics easily
discredited him.
Zechariah Sitchen,
author of The Twelfth Planet (1976),
took up where von Daniken left off, contributing his impressive ability to
translate Mesopotamian texts. According to Sitchen’s readings, the Sumerian
gods Enlil, Enki, and Inanna were members of a race of ancient astronauts who
came to Earth to mine gold. After genetically engineering human beings as
servants, they interbred with their creations and taught them the arts of
civilization. Eventually, the gods fell to fighting among themselves,
brought on a catastrophe remembered as the biblical Deluge, and left humanity
to cope with the aftermath. Sitchin doggedly ignored all contrary
interpretations of the Sumerian literature, such as those of the late Joseph
Campbell; Sitchin was as relentlessly technological as Campbell was
metaphysical in his approach to the texts – whose “real” meaning is about as
clear as that of a Rorschach ink blot.
[ The biblical deluge was a piece of planned terraforming that
shifted our crust thirty degrees and allowed the ice age to end. Arclein ]
Open Questions
By the late 1970s, the
crypto-historical literature, though uneven, was extremely extensive. Evidence
suggesting the existence of a lost high culture had been prodded and dissected
by scores of authors with a wide range of prejudices and abilities. None – neither
the sober scholars like de Santillana and Hapgood nor the careless
sensationalists like von Daniken – had been able to persuade the scientific
establishment to undertake a fundamental reassessment of the steady-progress
version of history.
For New Age devotees,
no further proof was necessary: Atlantis and Lemuria were already unquestioned
realities, routinely discussed as the backdrop for this or that prior
incarnation. But for those with a more skeptical bent – including the vast
majority of scholars and scientists – it seemed that one last bit of
unequivocal evidence was needed in order to turn the tide. If only someone
could point to a piece of carbon-dated hardware stamped “Made in Atlantis”!
Attempts were made to
uncover the crucial proof. During the mid-’70s, Cayce-inspired explorer Dr.
David Zink investigated an underwater stone “road” near the island of Bimini,
finding a tongue-and-groove pavement slab and other curiosities. But it was
impossible to determine the date of construction, and further research was
postponed for lack of funds. Even with this added, tantalizing piece of
information, the contest between the crypto-historians and the defenders of the
steady-progress version of the human past remained at an uneven and uneasy
stalemate.
A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire surface
of the globe. At some period, thousands of years ago, almost every corner of
the world was visited by people with a particular task to accomplish. With the
help of some remarkable power, by which they could cut and raise enormous
blocks of stone, these people created vast astronomical instruments, circles of
erect pillars, pyramids, underground tunnels, cyclopean stone platforms, all
linked together by a network of tracks and alignments, whose course from
horizon to horizon was marked by stones, mounds and earthworks.
- John Michell, The New View Over Atlantis
In Part
I of this article [see New Dawn No. 37] we explored literature and evidence relating
to the question of whether the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indic, and
Central American civilizations were seeded by an advanced antediluvian maritime
culture which perished in some immense convulsion of nature. In this second,
concluding part of the article we pick up the story of the unfolding
investigation where we left off – at the beginning of the 1980s.
New Evidence
In 1979, amateur
Egyptologist John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, later
updated in 1987 and 1993. In it he summarized the ideas and research of
mathematician-Egyptologist R. Schwaller de Lubicz. One chapter in the book,
concerning the Sphinx, would eventually spawn a heated debate in the scientific
community and open a promising new line of inquiry into the origins of Egyptian
civilization.
In the 1950s, de
Lubicz had written that the Sphinx’s body “shows indisputable signs of water
erosion.” Moreover, he suggested that it was built far earlier than the
conventionally ascribed date of 2600 B.C. West decided to investigate. He
showed respected geologist Robert Schoch a detailed photo of the Sphinx and
asked, “What caused this weathering?” Schoch studied the photo carefully and
replied, “Water erosion.” Schoch immediately grasped the implications of what
he had said. Water erosion in the Egyptian desert? Given the climatic history
of the region, the weathering suggested a construction date of at least 5000
B.C. (West himself is convinced that the Sphinx was built some time between 10,000
and 15,000 B.C.)
Most Egyptologists
consider the Sphinx a likeness of the pharaoh Khafre (Chephren); Mark Lehner,
Field Director for the American Research Center in Egypt, went so far as to
“prove” on national television, by way of computer imaging, that the face of
the Sphinx and the face of Khafre are identical. West was skeptical of Lehner’s
methodology and enlisted New York Police forensic artist Frank Domingo to
compare the Sphinx with a statue of Khafre. Domingo concluded that “If the
ancient Egyptians were skilled technicians and capable of duplicating images
then these two works cannot represent the same individual.” He noted, for
example, that the Sphinx face has a distinctive “African,” “Nubian” or
“Negroid” aspect lacking in that of Khafre.
Members of the
Egyptological establishment were furious with West and dismissive of Schoch.
One prominent Egyptologist, Dr. K. Lal Gauri, said that “Neither the subsurface
evidence nor the weathering evidence indicates anything as far as the age is
concerned. It’s just not relevant.”
The Egyptologists’
minds were made up, and no amount of hard scientific data could change them.
The entire incident served to publicize how the methods of Egyptology differ
fundamentally from those used in the natural sciences, and drove a wedge
between the Egyptologists on one hand and physical scientists on the other. At
the 1992 Convention of the Geological Society of America, and again at the 1992
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Schoch
stated his case that the Sphinx presents “a classic, textbook example of what
happens to a limestone structure when you have rain beating down on it for
thousands of years,” and on both occasions geologists by the score expressed
their support for his conclusions. The majority of Egyptologists refused to
budge an inch.
Meanwhile, seismic
analyses of the Sphinx complex carried out by Schoch and architect Thomas L.
Dobecki showed signs of several unexplored cavities under and around the statue.
Cayce-inspired researchers found this significant because in several of his
“life readings” Cayce noted that an Atlantean Hall of Records lies buried under
or near the Sphinx.
There were signs,
also, of at least one unexplored chamber in the Great Pyramid. In 1993, the
Egyptian Antiquities Organization hired robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink to
improve the ventilation in the structure. He first used a miniature robot
(named Upuaut, after the Egyptian god of the “opening of the ways”) to clear
debris from the “air shafts” of the King’s Chamber, then designed another, more
sophisticated robot (Upuaut II) to do the same with the unexplored “air shafts”
of the Queen’s Chamber. Two hundred feet up the southern shaft, he found a
sliding stone door with copper fittings. There was a gap at the base of the
door, and when Gantenbrink directed Upuaut II’s laser spot into the gap, the
beam disappeared into a void, indicating a sizable open space.
New data challenging
the conventional version of the human past have come not just from Egypt, but
from far and wide. In the Americas, the standard view of prehistory has humans
first crossing a land bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago. Numerous finds of
human remains and artifacts apparently dating from much earlier than 10,000
B.C. (recent examples include a spear point lodged in a horse’s hoof,
radiocarbon dated at 34,400 B.C., found in Pendejo Cave near Oro Grande, New
Mexico) have routinely been ignored. However, during the past fifteen years
the evidence has grown to such an extent that the anthropological establishment
is beginning to hedge. The latest data weighing in on the side of an early
arrival consists of genetic reconstructions of evolutionary patterns among
Amerind populations. These studies, carried out by a research team led by Dr.
Antonio Torroni of Emory University, suggest a first settlement date of at
least 30,000 years ago.
According to the
orthodox view, once early humans migrated to their present homelands they
tended to stay put. We should expect to find evidence of the ancient Chinese
only in China, of the Polynesians only in Polynesia, of the Africans only in
Africa, and so on. Yet recent finds suggest that migratory or exploratory
patterns in the distant past were complicated. Well preserved 4000-year-old
bodies of Caucasians have recently been uncovered in China, and coins,
petroglyphs, and other artifacts suggest that Celts, Basques, Libyans, Arabs,
Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese all visited North America at one time
or another.
Meanwhile, the search
for Atlantis near the island of Bimini has continued into the 1990s,
producing a few significant discoveries – underwater zoomorphic effigy
mounds and hexagonal “paving” stones – as well as neutron-activation analysis
evidence that “roads” discovered in the 1970s are indeed artificial and not
(as some critics argued) natural features of the ocean floor. That these
artifacts are now below sea level suggests either that the area around Bimini
has sunk over the past few centuries, or that the artifacts date from a time
prior to the rise of ocean levels that accompanied the end of the last ice age
roughly 12,000 years ago. If the latter turns out to be the case, then we will
be faced with one more bit of hard evidence for the existence of an
antediluvian high culture.
[As I have posted elsewhere the subsidence that sank the Azores,
Lyonese, Atlantis, Cuba and the Bahamas Bank likely took place in 1159 BC. The
land area involved is stupendous – arclein ]
The Bimini stones
raise an important question: How much more evidence of lost civilizations may
rest on the ocean bottom? After all, people in all historical eras have tended
to live along rivers or on seacoasts. Given that ocean levels rose by up to 300
feet at the end of the last ice age, and that many rivers were then flooded
with the water of melting glaciers, wouldn’t the continental shelves be the
logical places to look for signs of antediluvian settlements? Maybe the fact
that few unequivocal relics of these have been found so far is merely a result
of archeologists looking in the wrong places.
Theoretical
Developments
The past fifteen years
have brought not only new evidence, but new ways of looking at facts already
known.
Engineer Robert
Bauval, author of The Orion
Mystery (Crown, 1994), claims to have found the purpose of the Giza
pyramid complex – as a monument to an archaic star – religion. For the
ancients, Egypt was equivalent to the sky, the Nile to the Milky Way. The three
main pyramids at Giza were the three bright stars on Orion’s belt. Bauval has
shown that the presumed “air shafts” in the King’s and Queen’s chambers of the
Great Pyramid were sighting holes trained on Orion, and that they establish a
construction date of 2450 B.C. But, says Bauval, the overall layout of the Giza
pyramids, and their correlation with the night sky, suggests that the site as a
whole was planned much earlier, around 10,500 B.C. – the Egyptians’ legendary
“Time of the Gods.” Since that was one of those periods that comes along once
every 26,000 years when Orion appears lowest in the night sky, the ancients may
have regarded it as the start of the great precessional cycle (which de
Santillana and von Dechend described inHamlet’s
Mill as the focus of archaic myth).
In their book When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis (Stoddart,
1995), Canadian librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath update the work of Charles
Hapgood, who brought to light medieval maps showing an ice-free Antarctica. How
is it, Hapgood asked, that during much of the last ice age a large part of
North America was under mile-thick glaciers, but a third of Antarctica was not?
Hapgood suggested that perhaps the continents were then in different places
relative to the poles – that the Earth’s crust had shifted over the molten
layers beneath it. But if Antarctica was once further north and partly
ice-free, was it also inhabitable? The Flem-Aths add up the clues and come to a
startling conclusion: Antarctica was Atlantis! They retrace Plato’s description
of the lost island and show that Antarctica fits it at least as well as any
other place ever suggested. According to their reconstruction, Lesser
Antarctica was once the homeland of a great maritime civilization that sent
colonists worldwide. But 13,500 years ago, as certain astronomical cycles
meshed to create a warmer global climate, the asymmetrically distributed weight
of the polar ice packs caused the Earth’s crust to shift. Massive earthquakes
and tidal waves followed, Siberia moved closer to the pole (quick-freezing the
mammoths), the ice sheets covering much of North America melted, ocean levels
rose, many large land animals became extinct, and Atlantis became a polar
wasteland. Refugees from the catastrophe sailed to the most stable and
hospitable areas available – the highlands of South America, the Near East,
Egypt, Southeast Asia, and the Indus Valley – and there tried to preserve as
much of their culture as they could. It was in these places that we find the
earliest known experiments with agriculture and the apparent beginnings of
civilization. According to the Flem-Aths, the disaster of 11,500 B.C. was the
great turning point of history, an event whose memory would persist in the
myths of cultures around the globe.
Graham Hancock, former
East Africa correspondent for The
Economist, is the author of Fingerprints
of the Gods (Crown, 1995) – a summary and popularization of the
work of the Flem-Aths, Bauval, West, and Gantenbrink. In Britain, Hancock’s
book is something of a publishing phenomenon (the 10,000 copy initial printing
was sold out within a week). Fingerprints
of the Gods is written for a popular audience, and in it Hancock
leads us on a globe-circling journey from Macchu Picchu to the Great Pyramid,
describing his first-hand observations with the breathless excitement of a
detective about to crack the biggest case in history. While it contains little
in the way of original theory or research, it is a big, engaging book packed
with up-to-date information.
The date and site of
the earliest archeologically identifiable (i.e., non-“Atlantean”) civilization
are also up for review. In the nineteenth century, historians believed that
Egypt was the earliest civilization; then came the discovery of Sumer, then
Catal Huyuk in Turkey, then Harappa in the Indus Valley. Gradually, the date of
the first civilization has been pushed back from 3000 B.C. to at least 7000
B.C. In their book In Search of
the Cradle of Civilization (Quest, 1995), David Frawley, Subhash
Kak, and Georg Feuerstein explore the implications of the new evidence. They
argue convincingly that civilization began not in the Near East but in the
Indus Valley, and call into question the now-established idea that Hindu
culture came to India by way of an Indo-European invasion; they suggest instead
that the authors of the Rig-Veda were the indigenous heirs of an already
ancient tradition. Frawley, Kak, and Feuerstein also note signs of a tremendous
natural catastrophe that brought what they call the Indus-Sarasvati
civilization to an end, and they propose that we begin to take seriously the
mythic idea of history as a series of World Ages.
Perhaps the most
shockingly unorthodox new book having to do with the human past is Michael
Cremo and Richard Thompson’s The
Hidden History of the Human Race (Govardhan Hill, 1994), a
condensation of their daunting 952-page Forbidden
Archaeology (1993). In both books, the authors collect the evidence
that mainstream archeologists have rejected-bones of anatomically modern humans
in geological formations tens or even hundreds of millions of years old;
artifacts recovered from mines and coal beds; signs of human presence in the
Americas up to 750,000 years ago. They also re-evaluate the accepted evidence
of the human evolutionary past – the bones of Australopithecus, Homo erectus,
and Neanderthal, and show convincingly that this evidence has passed through a
“knowledge filter” whose purpose is to perpetuate a reigning paradigm. Whatever
evidence fits the paradigm (no matter how flimsy) is accepted; whatever doesn’t
(no matter how solid and unequivocal) is suppressed. Along the way, Cremo and
Thompson compare the Australopithecine/Homo erectus data with modern reports of
living ape-men (the Yeti of the Himalayas, the Sasquatch of the Pacific
Northwest, and the Yeren of southern China). Perhaps, they suggest, the ape-men
who lived a couple of million years ago were not our ancestors; they were
merely other primate species who coexisted with Homo sapiens then, just as the
Yeti and Sasquatch do to this day. The authors do far more than push the
temporal borders of civilization back a few thousand years; they question the
basic premises on which we have based all our ideas about the prehistoric human
past. They don’t offer an alternative theory; they merely show that the one
that is dominant today is based on an extreme form of intellectual tunnel
vision.
The Cataclysm
Some sort of consensus
seems to be emerging from the work both of the older generation of theorists
such as Tompkins, Michell, de Lubicz, de Santillana and von Dechend, and
Hapgood, and from that of the current generation of writers such as West,
Hancock, Zink, Bauval, and the Flem-Aths. According to this hybrid scenario, a
complex, technologically and scientifically advanced maritime culture existed
during the last ice age. How long it existed we do not know; nor do we know if
it was unique or merely one of a series of such civilizations. At any rate, it
was destroyed by cataclysm about 13,500 years ago. Migrations that preceded and
followed the cataclysm resulted in the establishment of outposts from which the
historical civilizations of the Americas, the Near East and the Far East would
eventually arise. If this scenario is even partly correct, it would mean that
humankind has a vastly richer, more ancient and more interesting past than
conventional historians have dreamed possible.
Unfortunately, when we
get down to the details of the scenario, disagreements arise. One point of
contention has to do with the nature and cause of the catastrophe. As Hapgood,
Hancock, and the Flem-Aths have it, ice ages result from astronomical
factors-changes in the obliquity of the terrestrial axis, the precession of the
equinoxes, and variations in the shape of the Earth’s orbit. Taken together,
these variables produce what geophysicists call the Croll-Milankovitch effect,
which (according to theory) should produce periodic global climate
fluctuations. According to Hapgood and his followers, the asymmetrical buildup
of ice at the poles occasionally leads to a crust displacement. While the
Hapgood model of a shifting crust has not been given much consideration by
orthodox scientists, the Croll-Milankovitch effect (on which it is partly
based) is widely accepted as real.
But in his 1981
book Ice: The Ultimate Human
Catastrophe, astronomer Fred Hoyle skewered the idea that the
Croll-Milankovitch effect could explain ice ages. True, combined axial and
orbital effects unbalance the hemispheres climatically – with a gain or loss of
solar radiation to each hemisphere alternating every 11,500 years or so – and
also make for a cyclical one percent change in the distribution of solar energy
between polar and equatorial regions. But, Hoyle pointed out, since about half
the energy that heats the polar regions comes from water vapor that evaporated
from tropical areas, the effect at the poles of the Croll-Milankovitch
variation would be moderate. The ice pack would increase or decrease slightly
and gradually, not significantly or suddenly. What is needed to explain the
beginnings and endings of ice ages is some more dramatic event with global
repercussions. For this, Hoyle proposed occasional comet or meteor impacts
powerful enough to send millions of tons of dust into the upper atmosphere,
reflecting a significant percentage of incoming solar radiation and creating a
years-long winter over Earth’s entire surface.
In the fifteen years
since Hoyle published his critique of the Croll-Milankovitch theory of the ice
ages, the idea that Earth experienced severe cometary bombardment episodes in
the relatively recent past has been taken up by others. Victor Clube, currently
Dean of Astrophysics at Oxford University, has published two books in
collaboration with fellow astronomer Bill Napier (The Cosmic Serpent, 1982, and The Cosmic Winter, 1990), in which he discusses evidence for
periodic bombardment episodes over the past 2.5 million years. On the basis of
computations of Earth-crossing comet and asteroid orbits and observed cratering
rates, Clube estimates a strong likelihood of a collision of several megatons
energy somewhere on Earth every 200 years or so, and one of 50,000 megatons
energy every 100,000 years on average. Such an impact would certainly have
severe short-term climatic effects, perhaps triggering the onset of an ice age.
Clube also notes that “Within the past 500 million years…there have been about
fifty collisions of energy more than seven million megatons, ten of more than
100 million megatons, and one or two of energy in excess of three or four
billion megatons.” It was these latter immense impacts, he believes, that
resulted in the mass extinctions revealed in the fossil record.
There is plenty of
mythological evidence as well, for bombardment episodes: ancient humans around
the globe feared capricious sky-gods who, they believed, occasionally rained destruction
on hapless humanity; and the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Native
Americans all represented deities by way of comet symbols.
Both Clube and the
followers of Hapgood say that Earth is accident-prone; they merely disagree
about the agent or process of destruction. Perhaps the two scenarios – one
based on cometary and asteroid impacts and the other on crust displacement –
are not mutually exclusive; it is possible that the first phenomenon is capable
of triggering the second. At present, there seems to be more hard evidence for
impact events than for crustal shifts (which would be quite different in
character from the well-attested phenomenon of gradual continental drift), and
no geologist is now working publicly to prove or disprove Hapgood’s theory. In
any case, there are good reasons for assuming that humanity was deeply
traumatized by events that occurred just prior to the appearance of
agriculture.
If Victor Clube is
right and sizable comet or asteroid impacts have occurred every few thousand
years on average, then we have yet another reason for taking a closer look at
the mythic idea of World Ages. Have there been several “Atlantises”? Cremo and
Thompson open the door to extraordinary possibilities: if anatomically modern
human beings have been on Earth for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions
of years, what were they doing all that time? The downside to catastrophes
(aside from the inconvenience caused to their direct victims) is that they tend
to erase signs of whatever preceded them. Thus it may forever be impossible for
us to accurately reconstruct the antediluvian past. We have the myths, of
course, but they paint a garbled picture. Perhaps the best we can hope for
would be the discovery of some bit of evidence of the immediate survivors of
the Deluge-ideally, a manuscript from 13,500 years ago written by witnesses to
the events!
On the Verge of a
Breakthrough?
Such a find is at
least remotely possible.
The discoveries of
West, Schoch, and Gantenbrink, and the theories of Bauval, are illuminating,
and more revelations appear to be in store. What lies in that unexplored
chamber in the Great Pyramid, or the cavities under and around the Sphinx?
Cayce predicted that an Atlantean Hall of Records would be found under the
Sphinx. Yet if the “Atlanteans” were literate, why have we so far failed to
find examples of their writing?
It is also possible
that the Bimini researchers (now organized under “The Atlantis Project,” which
includes a few archeologists and geologists among its ranks) may come across
definitive proof a Pleistocene civilization. A recent aerial survey indicated
the presence of thirty possible megalithic sites around Bimini. And other areas
in the Bahamas may also yield important finds.
Then there is the
Flem-Aths’ theory that Atlantis was Antarctica. If it holds true, then sonar
explorations of Lesser Antarctica should turn up something interesting-perhaps
a street plan of downtown Atlantis. While no detailed, large-scale sonar
surveys are now under way there, in a recent issue of Omnimagazine (August 1994), in an
article devoted to the “face” and “pyramids” many people claim to see in
photographs of the surface of Mars, NASA aerial photographer Michael Malin was
quoted as saying: “I’ve done a lot of work in Antarctica, and there are lots of
pyramidal shapes cut by ice. …there are far stranger things in Antarctica than
I have seen on Mars.”
Since the implications
of finding such a significant forgotten chapter in the human past would be
immense, one might expect that archeologists would be champing at the bit to do
field work in Antarctica, Bimini, or Giza. This, however, is hardly the case. Most
are sitting on the sidelines and throwing stones. After all, there are careers
and established doctrines to be protected. Mainstream Egyptologists appear to
be the least imaginative and most vitriolic of the lot. Ironically, two of the
leaders of the establishment opposition to West, Schoch, and Bauval – Mark
Lehner and Zahi Hawass (Director of Antiquities of the Giza Plateau and
Sakkara) – are both former Cayce-ites. Lehner once published a book
titled The Egyptian Heritage,
based on the Edgar Cayce Readings, in which he wrote: “If the readings’ story
of 10,500 B.C. approaches truth (it is the author’s premise that it does on
several levels of significance) then we should consider seriously the
implications of this epoch being the motivating center of the Egyptian mandala
– the real legacy of ancient Egypt.” These days he makes statements like the
following: “When you say something as complex as the Sphinx dates to 9000 or
10,000 B.C., it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that
was capable of producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an
archeologist has to ask, therefore, is this: If the Sphinx was made at that
time, then where is the rest of this civilization, where is the rest of this
culture?” That, of course, is exactly what West, Bauval, et al., want to find
out. But the Egyptological establishment is putting up road blocks at every
step. One suspects that Lehner and Hawass may be exhibiting the psychological
reactions of “reformed” cult members, and may therefore be acting on the basis
of motives that however understandable, nevertheless compromise their
objectivity and obstruct new discoveries.
Meanwhile, Schoch is
seeking to open a department for the search for lost civilizations at Boston
University, and Gantenbrink has distanced himself from West in an effort to
gain permission from the authorities to investigate the chamber he discovered
in the Great Pyramid. One way or another, it seems that important news may be
in store within the next few years.
Discoveries about
vanished civilizations have a certain poignancy these days, as our own
civilization goes about destroying itself through environmental ruin,
overpopulation, and economic predation. Perhaps at this unique moment in time
we have some important lesson to learn from our distant ancestors. Were their
civilizations as power-driven, politically unstable, and ecologically
unsustainable as ours? How sad and ironic it would be if we were to attain the
sophistication finally to open long-dormant time capsules from our counterparts
in past millennia, and to decode their final warnings – or merely their
note-in-a-bottle messages that “We were here!” – just as our own civilization
succumbs to a catastrophe of its own making. Or is it possible that their legacy
will consist of the realization of the inevitability of terrestrial cataclysms
beyond human control? These lines of thought may be somewhat depressing, but
they help us see the problems and achievements of our era from a larger
perspective. One wonders:
What will we leave
behind for archeologists ten thousand years from now?
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