Chapter 42

Anachronisms and Enigmas

I looked around the grey-walled chamber of Unas, up and down the long registers of hieroglyphs in which the Pyramid Texts were inscribed. They were written in a dead language. Nevertheless, the constant affirmation, repeated over and over again in these ancient compositions, was that of life—eternal life—which was to be achieved through the pharaoh’s rebirth as a star in the constellation of Orion. As the reader will recall from Chapter Nineteen, (where we compared Egyptian beliefs with those of Ancient Mexico), there were several utterances which voiced this aspiration explicitly:

Oh King, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion ... you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time ...’[949]

Though undeniably beautiful there was nothing inherently extraordinary about these sentiments, and it was by no means impossible to attribute them to a people assessed by the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero as having ‘always remained half savage’.[950] Furthermore, since Maspero had been the first Egyptologist to enter the pyramid of Unas,[951] and was considered a great authority on the Texts, it was hardly surprising that his opinions should have shaped all academic responses to this literature since he began to publish translations from it in the 1880s.[952] Maspero (with a little help from a jackal) had brought the Pyramid Texts to the world. Thereafter, the dominance of his particular prejudices about the past had functioned as a filter on knowledge, inhibiting variant interpretations of the more opaque or puzzling utterances. This seemed to me to be unfortunate to say the least. What it meant was that, despite the technical and scientific puzzles raised by monuments like the Great Pyramid at Giza, scholars had ignored the implications of some striking passages in the Texts.

These passages sounded suspiciously like attempts to express complex technical and scientific imagery in an entirely inappropriate idiom. Maybe it was coincidence, but the result resembled the outcome that we might expect today if we were to try to translate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into Chaucerian English or to describe a supersonic aircraft in vocabulary derived from Middle High German.

Broken images of a lost technology?

Take for example some of the peculiar equipment and accessories designated for the pharaoh’s use as he journeyed to his eternal resting place among the stars:

The gods who are in the sky are brought to you, the gods who are on earth assemble for you, they place their hands under you, they make a ladder for you that you may ascend on it into the sky, the doors of the sky are thrown open to you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you.[953]

The ascending pharaoh was identified with, and frequently referred to, as ‘an Osiris’. Osiris himself, as we have seen, was frequently linked to and associated with the constellation of Orion. Osiris-Orion was said to have been the first to have climbed the great ladder the gods had made. And several utterances left no doubt that this ladder had not extended upwards from earth to heaven but downwards from heaven to earth. It was described as a rope-ladder[954] and the belief was that it had hung from an ‘iron plate’ suspended in the sky.[955]

Were we dealing here, I wondered, simply with the bizarre imaginings of half-savage priests? Or might there be some other explanation for allusions such as these?

In Utterance 261, ‘The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky ...’[956]

Switching to dialogue, Utterance 310 proclaimed,

‘O you whose vision is in his face and whose vision is in the back of his head, bring this to me!’

‘What ferry-boat shall be brought to you?’

‘Bring me: “It-flies-and-alights”.’[957]

Utterance 332, supposedly spoken by the King himself, confided, ‘I am this one who has escaped from the coiled serpent, I have ascended in a blast of fire having turned myself about. The two skies go to me.[958]

And in Utterance 669 it was asked, ‘Wherewith can the King be made to fly-up?’

The reply was given: ‘There shall be brought to you the Hnw-bark [italicized word untranslatable] and the ... [text missing] of the hn-bird [italicized word untranslatable]. You shall fly up therewith ... You shall fly up and alight.’[959]

Other passages also seemed to me worthy of more thorough investigation than they have received from scholars. Here are a few examples:

O my father, great King, the aperture of the sky-window is opened for you.[960]

‘The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you, the gods are glad at meeting you ... May you sit on this iron throne of yours, as the Great One who is in Heliopolis.[961]

O King, may you ascend ... The sky reels at you, the earth quakes at you, the Imperishable Stars are afraid of you. I have come to you, O you whose seats are hidden, that I may embrace you in the sky ...[962]

The earth speaks, the gate of the earth god is open, the doors of Geb are opened for you ... May you remove yourself to the sky upon your iron throne.[963]

O my father the King, such is your going when you have gone as a god, your travelling as a celestial being ... you stand in the Conclaves of the horizon ... and sit on this throne of iron at which the gods marvel ...[964]

The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling. Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic form.[965] Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).[966]

In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal’.[967] The knowledge of iron was thus regarded as yet another gift from the gods ...

Repositories of a lost science?

What other fingerprints might these gods have left behind in the Pyramid Texts?[968]

In my readings—here and there among the most archaic of the Utterances—I had come across several metaphors that seemed to refer to the passage of epochs of precessional time. These metaphors stood out from the surrounding material because they were expressed in what had become a clear and familiar terminology to me: that of the archaic scientific language identified by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill.[969]

The reader may recall that a cosmic ‘diagram’ of the four props of the sky was one of the standard thought tools employed in that ancient language. Its purpose was to assist visualisation of the four imaginary bands conceived as framing, supporting and defining a precessional world age. These were what astronomers call the ‘equinoctial and solstitial colures’ and were seen as hooping down from the celestial north pole and marking the four constellations against the background of which, for periods of 2160 years at a time, the sun would consistently rise on the spring and autumn equinoxes and on the winter and summer solstices.[970]

The Pyramid Texts appear to contain several versions of this diagram. Moreover, as is so often the case with prehistoric myths which transmit hard astronomical data, the precessional symbolism is interwoven tightly with violent images of terrestrial destruction—as though to suggest that the ‘breaking of the mill of heaven’, that is the transition every 2160 years from one zodiacal age to another, could under ill-omened circumstances bring catastrophic influences to bear on terrestrial events.

Thus it was said that

Ra-Atum, the god who created himself, was originally king over gods and men together but mankind schemed against his sovereignty, for he began to grow old, his bones became silver, his flesh gold and his hair [as] lapis lazuli.[971]

When he realized what was happening, the ageing Sun God (so reminiscent of Tonatiuh, the bloodthirsty Fifth Sun of the Aztecs) determined that he would punish this insurrection by killing off most of the human race. The instrument of the havoc he unleashed was symbolized at times as a raging lioness wading in blood and at times as the fearsome lion-headed goddess Sekhmet who ‘poured fire out of herself and savaged mankind in an ecstasy of slaughter.[972]

The terrible destruction continued unabated for a long period. Then at last Ra intervened to save the lives of a ‘remnant’, the ancestors of present humanity. This intervention took the form of a flood which the lioness thirstily lapped up and then fell asleep. When she awoke, she was no longer interested in pursuing the destruction, and peace descended upon the devastated world.[973]

Meanwhile Ra had resolved to ‘draw away’ from what was left of his creation: ‘As I live my heart is weary of staying with Mankind. I have gone on killing them [almost] to the very last one, so the [insignificant] remnant is not my affair ...’[974]

The Sun God then rose into the sky on the back of the sky-goddess Nut who (for the purposes of the precessional metaphor about to be delivered) had transformed herself into a cow. Before very long—in a close analogy to the ‘shaft-tree’ that ‘shivered’ on Amlodhi’s wildly gyrating mill—the cow grew ‘dizzy and began to shake and to tremble because she was so high above the earth.’[975] When she complained to Ra about this precarious state of affairs he commanded, ‘Let my son Shu be put beneath Nut to keep guard for me over the heavenly supports—which exist in the twilight. Put her above your head and keep her there.’[976] As soon as Shu had taken his place beneath the cow and had stabilized her body, ‘the heavens above and the earth beneath came into being’. At the same moment, ‘the four legs of the cow’, as Egyptologist Wallis Budge commented in his classic study The Gods of the Egyptians, ‘became the four props of heaven at the four cardinal points’.[977]

Like most scholars, Budge understandably assumed that the ‘cardinal points’ referred to in this Ancient Egyptian tradition had strictly terrestrial connotations and that ‘heaven’ represented nothing more than the sky above our heads. He took it for granted that the point of the metaphor was for us to envisage the cow’s four legs as positioned at the four points of the compass—north, south, east and west. He also thought—and even today few Egyptologists would disagree with him—that the simple-minded priests of Heliopolis had actually believed that the sky had four corners which were supported on four legs and that Shu, ‘the skybearer par excellence’, had stood immobile like a pillar at the centre of the whole edifice.[978]

Reinterpreted in the light of Santillana’s and von Dechend’s findings, however, Shu and the four legs of the celestial cow look much more like the components of an archaic scientific symbol depicting the frame of a precessional world age—the polar axis (Shu) and the colures (the four legs or ‘props’ marking the equinoctial and solstitial cardinal points in the annual round of the sun).

Moreover, it is tempting to speculate which world age was being signalled here ...

With a cow involved it could have been the Age of Taurus, although the Egyptians knew the difference between bulls and cows as well as anyone. But a much more likely contender—at any rate on purely symbolic grounds—is the age of Leo, from approximately 10,970 to 8810 bc.[979] The reason is that Sekhmet, the agent of the destruction of Mankind referred to in the myth, was leonine in form. What better way to symbolize the troubled birth of the new world age of Leo than to depict its harbinger as a rampaging lion, particularly since the Age of Leo coincided with the final ferocious meltdown of the last Ice Age, during which huge numbers of animal species all over the earth were suddenly and violently rendered extinct.’[980] Mankind survived the immense floods and earthquakes and rapid changes of climate that took place, but very probably in much reduced numbers and much reduced circumstances.

The train of the Sun and the dweller in Sirius

Of course the ability to recognize and define precessional world ages in myth implies that the Ancient Egyptians possessed better observational astronomy and a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the solar system than any ancient people have hitherto been credited with.[981] There is no doubt that knowledge of this calibre, if it existed at all, would have been highly regarded by the Ancient Egyptians, who would have transmitted it from generation to generation in a secretive manner. Indeed, it would have ranked among the highest arcana entrusted to the keeping of the priestly elite at Heliopolis and would have been passed on, in the main, through an oral and initiatory tradition.[982] If, by chance it had found its way into the Pyramid Texts, is it not likely that its form would have been veiled by metaphors and allegories?

I walked slowly across the dusty floor of the tomb chamber of Unas, noting the heavy stillness in the air, casting my eyes over the faded blue and gold inscriptions. Expressed in coded language several millennia before Copernicus and Galileo, some of the passages inscribed on these walls seemed to offer clues to the true heliocentric nature of the solar system.

In one, for example, Ra, the Sun God, was depicted as seated upon an iron throne encircled by lesser gods who moved around him constantly and who were said to be ‘in his train’.[983] Likewise, in another passage, the deceased Pharaoh was urged to ‘stand at the head of the two halves of the sky and weigh the words of the gods, the aged ones, who revolve around Ra.’[984]

If the ‘aged ones’ and the ‘encircling gods’ revolving around Ra should prove to be parts of a terminology referring to the planets of our solar system, the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.[985] The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality. How, therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?

Another (and perhaps related) mystery concerns the star Sirius, which the Egyptians identified with Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris and the mother of Horus. In a passage addressed to Osiris himself, the Pyramid Texts state:

Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus-Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of Horus, dweller in Sept.[986]

Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother.

Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i.e. it is in fact, as the Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand—the dwarf-star which revolves around Sirius A—is absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Its existence did not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced telescopes of the day.[987] How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in one?

In The Sirius Mystery, an important book published in 1976, I knew that the American author Robert Temple had offered some extraordinary answers to this question.[988] His study focused on the traditional beliefs of the Dogon tribe of West Africa—beliefs in which the binary character of Sirius was explicitly described and in which the correct figure of fifty years was given for the period of the orbit of Sirius-B around Sirius-A.[989] Temple argued cogently that this high quality technical information had been passed down to the Dogon from the Ancient Egyptians through a process of cultural diffusion, and that it was to the Ancient Egyptians that we should look for an answer to the Sirius mystery. He also concluded that the Ancient Egyptians must have received the information from intelligent beings from the region of Sirius’.[990]

Like Temple, I had begun to suspect that the more advanced and sophisticated elements of Egyptian science made sense only if they were understood as parts of an inheritance. Unlike Temple, I saw no urgent reason to attribute that inheritance to extra-terrestrials. To my mind the anomalous star knowledge the Heliopolitan priests had apparently possessed was more plausibly explained as the legacy of a lost human civilization which, against the current of history, had achieved a high level of technological advancement in remote antiquity. It seemed to me that the building of an instrument capable of detecting Sirius-B might not have been beyond the ingenuity of the unknown explorers and scientists who originated the remarkable maps of the prehistoric world discussed in Part I. Nor would it have daunted the unknown astronomers and measurers of time who bequeathed to the Ancient Maya a calendar of amazing complexity, a data-base about the movements of the heavenly bodies which could only have been the product of thousands of years of accurately recorded observations, and a facility with very large numbers that seemed more appropriate to the needs of a complex technological society than to those of a ‘primitive’ Central American kingdom.[991]

Millions of years and the movements of the stars

Very large numbers also appeared in the Pyramid Texts, in the symbolic ‘boat of millions of years’, for example, in which the Sun God was said to navigate the dark and airless wastes of interstellar space.[992] Thoth, the god of wisdom (‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the measurer of the earth’) was specifically empowered to grant a life of millions of years to the deceased pharaoh.[993] Osiris, ‘king of eternity, lord of everlasting’, was described as traversing millions of years in his life.’[994] And figures like ‘tens of millions of years’ (as well as the more mind-boggling ‘one million of millions of years’)[995] occurred often enough to suggest that some elements at least of Ancient Egyptian culture must have evolved for the convenience of scientifically minded people with more than passing insight into the immensity of time.

Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar—one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages went by.[996] It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from the gods’.

We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.[997]

The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as ‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky.[998] In the case of Sirius the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly 365.25 days—a mathematically harmonious figure, uncomplicated by further decimal points, which is just twelve minutes longer than the duration of the solar year.[999]

The curious thing about Sirius is that out of an estimated 2000 stars in the heavens visible to the naked eye it is the only one to rise heliacally at this precise and nicely rounded interval of 365 and a quarter days—a unique product of its ‘proper motion’ (the speed of its own movement through space) combined with the effects of precession of the equinoxes.[1000] Moreover, it is known that the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius—New Year’s Day in the Ancient Egyptian calendar—was traditionally calculated at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.[1001]

I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by ‘her name of the New Year’.[1002] Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 669[1003]), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar was at least as old as the Texts themselves,[1004] and their origins stretched back into the mists of distant antiquity. The great enigma, therefore, is this: in such an early period, who could have possessed the necessary know-how to observe and take note of the coincidence of the period of 365.25 days with the heliacal rising of Sirius—a coincidence described by the French mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz as ‘an entirely exceptional celestial phenomenon’?[1005]

We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged observation of the sky.[1006]

It was such a legacy—built out of long centuries of precise observational astronomy and scientific record-keeping—that Egypt seems to have I benefited from at the beginning of the historical period and that was expressed in the Pyramid Texts.

In this, too, there lies a mystery ...

Copies, or translations?

Writing in 1934, the year of his death, Wallis Budge, former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and the author of an authoritative hieroglyphic dictionary,[1007] made this frank admission:

The Pyramid Texts are full of difficulties of every kind. The exact meanings of a large number of words found in them are unknown ... The construction of the sentence often baffles all attempts to translate it, and when it contains wholly unknown words it becomes an unsolved riddle. It is only reasonable to suppose that these texts were often used for funerary purposes, but it is quite clear that their period of use in Egypt was little more than one hundred years. Why they were suddenly brought into use at the end of the Fifth Dynasty and ceased to be used at the end of the Sixth Dynasty is inexplicable.’[1008]

Could the answer be that they were copies of an earlier literature which Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, together with several of his successors in the Sixth Dynasty, had attempted to fix for ever in stone in the tomb chambers of their own pyramids? Budge thought so, and felt the evidence suggested that some at least of the source documents must have been exceedingly old:

Several passages bear evidence that the scribes who drafted the copies from which the cutters of the inscriptions worked did not understand what they were writing ... The general impression is that the priests who drafted the copies made extracts from several compositions of different ages and having different contents ...’[1009]

All this assumed that the source documents, whatever they were, must have been written in an archaic form of the Ancient Egyptian language. There was, however, an alternative possibility which Budge failed to consider. Suppose that the task of the priests had been not only to copy material but to translate into hieroglyphs texts originally composed in another language altogether? If that language had included a technical terminology and references to artefacts and ideas for which no equivalent terms existed in Ancient Egyptian, this would provide an explanation for the strange impression given by certain of the utterances. Moreover, if the copying and translating of the original source documents had been completed by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it was easy to understand why no more ‘Pyramid Texts’ had ever been carved: the project would have come to a halt when it had fulfilled its objective—which would have been to create a permanent hieroglyphic record of a sacred literature that had already been tottering with age when Unas had taken the throne of Egypt in 2356 bc.

Last records of the First Time?

Because we wanted to cover as much of the distance to Abydos as was possible before nightfall, Santha and I reluctantly decided that it was time to get back on the road. Although we had originally intended to spend only a few minutes, the sombre gloom and ancient voices of the Unas tomb chamber had lulled our senses and almost two hours had passed since our arrival. Stooping, we left the tomb and climbed the steeply angled passageway to the exit, where we paused to allow our eyes to adjust to the harsh mid-morning sunlight. As we did so, I took the opportunity to look over the pyramid itself, which had fallen into such a crumbling and thoroughly dilapidated state that its original form was barely recognizable. The core masonry, reduced to little more than a nondescript heap of rubble, was evidently of poor quality, and even the facing blocks—some of which were still intact—lacked the finesse and careful workmanship demonstrated by the older pyramids at Giza.

This was hard to explain in conventional historical terms. If the normal evolutionary processes that govern the development of architectural skills and ideas had been at work in Egypt, one would have expected to find the opposite to be true: the design, engineering and masonry of the Unas Pyramid should have been superior to these of the Giza group, which, according to orthodox chronology, had been built about two centuries previously.[1010]

The uncomfortable fact that this was not the case (i.e., Giza was ‘better’ than Unas and not vice versa) created knotty challenges for Egyptologists and raised questions to which no satisfactory answers had been supplied. To reiterate the central problem: everything about the three stunning and superb pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure proclaimed that they were the end products of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years of accumulated architectural and engineering experience. This was not supported by the archaeological evidence which left no doubt that they were among the earliest pyramids ever built in Egypt—in other words, they were not the products of the mature phase of that country’s pyramid-building experiment but, anomalously, were the creations of its infancy.

A further mystery also cried out for a solution. In the three great pyramids at Giza, Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty had reared up mansions of eternity—unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of stone, hundreds of feet high, weighing millions of tons apiece, which incorporated many extremely advanced features. No pyramids of comparable quality were ever built again. But only a little later, beneath the smaller, shabbier superstructures of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty pyramids, a sort of Hall of Records seemed to have been deliberately created: a permanent exhibition of copies or translations of archaic documents which was, at the same time, an unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpiece of scribal and hieroglyphic art.

In short, like the pyramids at Giza, it seemed that the Pyramid Texts had burst upon the scene with no apparent antecedents, and had occupied centre-stage for approximately a hundred years before ‘ceasing operations’, never to be bettered.

Presumably the ancient kings and sages who had arranged these things had known what they were doing? If so, their minds must have contained a plan, and they must have intended a strong connection to be seen between the completely uninscribed (but technically brilliant)—pyramids at Giza, and the brilliantly inscribed (but technically slipshod) pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.

I suspected, too, that at least part of the answer to the problem might lie in the pyramid-field of Dahshur, which we passed fifteen minutes after leaving Saqqara. It was here that the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids were located. Attributed to Sneferu, Khufu’s father, these two monuments (by all accounts very well preserved) had been closed to the public many years ago. A military base had been built around them and they had for a long while been impossible to visit—under any circumstances, ever ...

As we continued our journey south, through the bright colours of that December day, I was overtaken by a compelling sense that the Nile Valley had been the scene of momentous events for humanity long before the recorded history of mankind began. All the most ancient records and traditions of Egypt spoke of such events and associated them with the epoch during which the gods had ruled on earth: the fabled First Time, which was called Zep Tepi.[1011] We shall delve into these records in the next two chapters.

Chapter 49

The Power of the Thing

On a scale of 1:43,200 the Great Pyramid serves as a model, and map-projection, of the northern hemisphere of the earth. What absolutely excludes the possibility that this could be a coincidence is the fact that the scale involved is keyed in numerically to the rate of precession of the equinoxes—one of earth’s most characteristic planetary mechanisms. It is therefore clear that we are confronted here by the manifestation of a deliberate planning decision: one intended to be recognizable as such by any culture which had acquired (a) an accurate knowledge of the dimensions of the earth and (b) an accurate knowledge of the rate of precessional motion.

Thanks to the work of Robert Bauval, we can now be certain that another deliberate planning decision was implemented in the Great Pyramid (which—it is increasingly apparent—must be understood as a device designed to fulfill many different functions). In this case the plan was a truly ambitious one involving the Second and Third Pyramids as well, but it bears the fingerprints of the same ancient architects and builders who conceived of the Great Pyramid as a scale model of the earth. Their hallmark seems to have been precession—perhaps because they liked its mathematical regularity and predictability—and they used precession to devise a plan which could be understood properly only by a scientifically advanced culture.

Ours is such a culture, and Robert Bauval is the first to have worked out the basic parameters of the plan—a discovery for which he has received public acclaim and will in due course, get the scientific recognition he deserves.[1183] Belgian by nationality, born and brought up in Alexandria, he is tall, lean, clean-shaven, forty-something, and going a little thin on top. His most notable feature is a stubborn lower jaw which characterizes his tenacious, inquiring personality; he speaks with a hybrid French-Egyptian-English accent and is decidedly oriental in manner. He has a first-class mind and is always restlessly accumulating and analysing new data relevant to his interests, finding new ways to look at old problems. In the process, entirely by accident, he has succeeded in transforming himself into a kind of magician of esoteric knowledge.

The Orion Mystery

The roots of Bauval’s discoveries at Giza go back to the 1960s when the Egyptologist and architect Dr. Alexander Badawy and the American astronomer Virginia Trimble demonstrated that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid was targeted like a gun-barrel on the Belt of Orion during the Pyramid Age—around 2600 to 2400 bc.[1184]

Bauval decided to test the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber, which Badawy and Trimble had not investigated, and established that it had been sighted on the star Sirius during the Pyramid Age. The evidence that proved this was provided by the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink as a result of measurements taken by his robot Upuaut in March 1993. This was the robot that had made the startling discovery of a closed portcullis door blocking the shaft at a distance of about 200 feet from the Queen’s Chamber. Equipped with a high-tech on-board clinometer, the little machine had also provided the first-ever completely accurate reading of the shaft’s angle of inclination: 39° 30’.[1185]

As Bauval explains:

I did the calculations and these established that the shaft had been targeted on the meridian transit of Sirius around the epoch 2400 bc. There couldn’t be any doubt about it at all. I also recalculated the Orion’s Belt alignment worked out by Badawy and Trimble with new data that Gantenbrink gave me on the inclination of the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber. He’d measured that at 45 degrees exactly, whereas Badawy and Trimble had worked with Flinders Petrie’s slightly less accurate measurement of 44° 30’. The new data enabled me to refine Badawy’s and Trimble’s date for the alignment. What I found was that the shaft had been precisely targeted on Al Nitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, which crossed the meridian at altitude 45 degrees around the year 2475 bc.[1186]

Up to this point Bauval’s conclusions had been well within the chronological bounds set by orthodox Egyptologists, who normally dated the construction of the Great Pyramid to around 2520 bc.[1187] If anything, the alignments the archaeo-astronomer had come up with suggested that the shafts had been built a little later, rather than earlier, than conventional wisdom allowed.

As the reader is aware, however, Bauval had also made another discovery of an altogether more unsettling nature. Once again it involved the stars of Orion’s Belt:

They’re slanted along a diagonal in a south-westerly direction relative to the axis of the Milky Way and the pyramids are slanted along a diagonal in a southwesterly direction relative to the axis of the Nile. If you look carefully on a clear night you’ll also see that the smallest of the three stars, the one at the top which the Arabs call Mintaka, is slightly offset to the east of the principal diagonal formed by the other two. This pattern is mimicked on the ground where we see that the Pyramid of Menkaure is offset by exactly the right amount to the east of the principal diagonal formed by the Pyramid of Khafre (which represents the middle star, Al Nilam) and the Great Pyramid, which represents Al Nitak. It’s really quite obvious that all these monuments were laid out according to a unified site plan that was modelled with extraordinary precision on those three stars. ... What they did at Giza was to build Orion’s Belt on the ground.’[1188]

There was more to come. Using a sophisticated computer programme[1189] capable of plotting the precessionally induced changes in the declinations of all the stars visible in the sky over any part of the world in any epoch, Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt correlation was general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one:

At 10,450 bc—and at that date only—we find that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I mean it’s a perfect match—faultless—and it cannot be an accident because the entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial events that occurred only at that time. First, and purely by chance, the Milky Way, as visible from Giza in 10,450 bc, exactly duplicated the meridional course of the Nile Valley; secondly, to the west of the Milky Way, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were at the lowest altitude in their precessional cycle, with Al Nitak, the star represented by the Great Pyramid, crossing the meridian at 11° 08’.[1190]

Precession and the stars of Orion’s belt.

The reader is already familiar with the way the earth’s axial precession causes sunrise on the vernal equinox to migrate along the band of the zodiac over a cycle of about 26,000 years. The same phenomenon also affects the declination of all visible stars, producing, in the case of the Orion constellation, very gradual but significant changes in altitude. Thus from its highest point at meridian transit (58° 11’ above the southern horizon as viewed from Giza) it takes Al Nitak about 13,000 years to descend to the low point, last registered in 10,450 bc, that is immortalized in stone on the Giza plateau—i.e. 11° 08’. As another 13,000 years pass, the belt stars very slowly rise again until Al Nitak is back at 58° 11’; then during the next 13,000 years they gradually fall once more to 11° 08’. This cycle is eternal: 13,000 years up, 13,000 years down, 13,000 years up, 13,000 years down, for ever. [1191]

It’s the precise configuration for 10,450 bc that we see on the Giza plateau—as though a master-architect came here in that epoch and decided to lay out a huge map on the ground using a mixture of natural and artificial features. He used the meridional course of the Nile Valley to depict the Milky Way, as it looked then. He built the three pyramids to represent the three stars, exactly as they looked then. And he put the three pyramids in exactly the same relationship to the Nile Valley as the three stars then had to the Milky Way. It was a very clever, very ambitious, very exact way to mark an epoch—to freeze a particular date into architecture if you like ...[1192]

The First Time

I found the implications of the Orion correlation complicated and eerie.

On the one hand, the Great Pyramid’s southern shafts ‘precessionally anchored’ the monument to Al Nitak and Sirius in 2475-2400 bc, dates which coincided comfortably with the epoch when Egyptologists said the monument had been built.

On the other hand the disposition of all three of the pyramids in relation to the Nile Valley eloquently signalled the much earlier date of 10,450 bc. This coincided with the controversial geological findings John West and Robert Schoch had made at Giza, which suggested the presence of a high civilization in Egypt in the eleventh millennium bc. Moreover, the disposition of the pyramids had not been arrived at by any random or accidental process but seemed to have been deliberately chosen because it marked a precessionally significant event: the lowest point, the beginning, the First Time in Orion’s 13,000-year ‘up’ cycle.

I knew that Bauval believed this astronomical event to have been linked symbolically to the mythical First Time of Osiris—the time of the gods, when civilization had supposedly been brought into the Nile Valley—and that his reasoning for this derived from the mythology of Ancient Egypt which directly associated Osiris with the Orion constellation (and Isis with Sirius).[1193]

Had the historical archetypes for Osiris and Isis actually come here in the First Time, twelve and a half thousand years ago?[1194] My research into Ice Age mythologies had persuaded me that certain ideas and memories could linger in the human psyche for many millennia, transmitted from generation to generation by oral tradition. I could therefore see no prima facie reasons why the Osirian mythology, with its strange and anomalous characteristics, should not have originated as far back as 10,450 bc.

However, it was the civilization of dynastic Egypt that had elevated Osiris to the status of the high god of resurrection. That civilization was one that had few known antecedents, and none at all recognizable in the remote epoch of the eleventh millennium bc. If the Osirian mythology had been transmitted across 8000 years, therefore, then what culture had transmitted it? And had this culture also been responsible for both the astronomical alignments proven to have been manifested by the pyramids: 10,450 bc and 2450 bc?

These were among the questions I planned to put to Robert Bauval in the shadow of the pyramids. Santha and I had arranged to meet him at dawn, at the Mortuary Temple of Khafre, so that the three of us could watch the sun come up over the Sphinx.

The pyramids and the belt stars of Orion at 10,450 bc, meridian view.

The platform

Positioned beside the eastern face of the Second Pyramid, the largely ruined Mortuary Temple was a spooky, grey, cold place to be at this hour. And as John West had indicated during our conversation at Luxor, there could be little doubt that it belonged to the same severe, imposing and unadorned style of architecture as the better-known Valley Temple. Here, at any rate, were the same enormous blocks, weighing 200 tons or more each.[1195] And here too was the same intangible atmosphere of vast antiquity and awakening intelligence, as though some epiphany might be at hand. Even in its present, much despoiled state, this anonymous structure, which Egyptologists had called a Mortuary Temple, was still a place of power that seemed to draw its energy from an epoch far in the past.

I looked up at the huge mass of the Second Pyramid’s eastern face just behind us in the pearl-grey dawn light. Again, as John West had pointed out, there was much to suggest that it might have been built in two different stages. The lower courses, up to a height of perhaps thirty feet, consisted largely of cyclopean limestone megaliths like those in the temples. Above this height, however, the remainder of the pyramid’s gigantic core had been formed out of much smaller blocks weighing around two to three tons each (like the majority of the blocks in the Great Pyramid).

Had there been a time when a twelve-acre, thirty-foot-high megalithic platform had stood here on the ‘hill of Giza’, west of the Sphinx, surrounded only by nameless square and rectangular structures such as the Valley and Mortuary Temples? In other words, was it possible that the Second Pyramid’s lower courses might have been built first, before the other pyramids—perhaps long before, in a much earlier age?

The cult

That question was still on my mind when Robert Bauval arrived. After exchanging a few chilly pleasantries about the weather—a cold desert wind was blowing across the plateau—I asked him, ‘How do you account for the 8000-year gap in your correlations?’

‘Gap?’

‘Yes; shafts that seem to have been aligned in 2450 bc and a site-plan that maps star positions in 10,450 bc.’

‘Actually, I see two explanations that both make some kind of sense,’ said Bauval, ‘and I think the answer has to be one or the other of these ... Either the pyramids were designed as a sort of “star-clock” to mark two particular epochs, 2450 and 10,450 bc, in which case we actually can’t say when they were built. Or they were built up over ...’

‘Hang on with that first point,’ I interrupted. ‘How do you mean “star-clock”? How do you mean we can’t say when they were built?’

‘Well, let’s assume for a moment that the pyramid builders knew precession. Let’s assume they were able to calculate the declination of particular star-groups backwards and forwards in time, just as we can today with computers ... Assuming they could do that then, no matter which epoch they lived in, they’d have been able to make a model of what the skies over Giza looked like in 10,450 bc or 2450 bc as required, just as we could. In other words, if they’d built the pyramids in 10,450 bc they would have had no difficulty in calculating the correct angles of inclination for the southern shafts so that they would be sighted on Al Nitak and Sirius around 2450 bc. Likewise, if they’d lived in 2450 bc they’d have had no difficulty in calculating the correct site-plan to reflect the position of Orion’s Belt in 10,450 bc. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘OK. That’s one explanation. But the second explanation, which I personally favour—and which I think the geological evidence also supports—is that the whole Giza necropolis was developed and built up over an enormously long period of time. I think it’s more than possible that the site was originally planned and laid out at around 10,450 bc, so that its geometry would reflect the skies as they looked then, but that the work was completed, and the shafts of the Great Pyramid aligned, around 2450 bc.’

‘So you’re saying that the ground-plan of the Pyramids could date back to 10,450 bc?

‘I think it does. And I think that the geometrical centre of that plan was located more or less where we’re standing now, right in front of the Second Pyramid ...’

I pointed out the large blocks in the lower courses of the huge edifice: ‘It even looks like it was built in two stages, by two completely different cultures ...’

Bauval shrugged. ‘Let’s speculate ... Maybe it wasn’t two different cultures, Maybe it was one culture, or cult—the cult of Osiris, perhaps. Maybe it was a very long-lived, very ancient cult dedicated to Osiris that was here in 10,450 bc and was still here in 2450 bc. Maybe what happened was that some of the ways that this cult did things changed over time. Maybe they used huge blocks in 10,450 bc and smaller blocks in 2450 bc ... It seems to me there’s a lot here that supports this notion, a lot that says “very ancient cult”, a lot of evidence that has just never been investigated ...’

‘For example?’

‘Well, obviously the astronomical alignments of the site. I’ve been among the first to start looking into those properly. And the geology: the work that John West and Robert Schoch have been involved in at the Sphinx. Here are two sciences—both hard, empirical, evidence-driven sciences—that have never been applied to these problems before. But now that we have started to apply them, we’re beginning to get a whole new reading on the antiquity of the necropolis. And I honestly think we’ve just scratched the surface and that much more will emerge from the geology and the astronomy in the future. In addition, nobody’s yet made a really detailed study of the Pyramid Texts from anything other than the so-called “anthropological” perspective, which means a preconceived notion that the priests of Heliopolis were a bunch of half-civilized witch-doctors who wanted to live for ever ... Actually they did want to live for ever but they certainly weren’t witch-doctors ... They were highly civilized, highly initiated men and they were, in their own fashion, scientists, as we can judge from their works. Therefore I suggest that it’s as scientific or at least quasi-scientific documents that the Pyramid Texts need to be read, not as mumbo-jumbo. I’m already satisfied that they respond to precessional astronomy. There may be other keys too: mathematics, geometry—particularly geometry ... Symbolism ... What’s needed is a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the Pyramid Texts ... and to understanding the pyramids themselves. Astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, engineers, architects, even philosophers to deal with the symbolism—everybody who can bring a fresh eye and fresh skills to bear on these very important problems should be encouraged to do so.’

‘Why do you feel the problems are so important?’

‘Because they have a colossal bearing on our understanding of the past of our own species. The very careful, very precise site-planning and setting-out that appears to have been done here in 10,450 bc could only have been the work of a highly-evolved, probably technological civilization. ...’

‘Whereas no such civilization is supposed to have existed anywhere on earth in that epoch ...’

‘Exactly. It was the Stone Age. Human society was supposed to have been at a very primitive level, with our ancestors wearing skins, sheltering in caves, following a hunting-gathering way of life and so on and so forth. So its rather unsettling to discover that civilized people seem to have been present in Giza in 10,450 bc, who understood the obscure science of precession extremely well, who had the technical capacity to work out that they were witnessing the lowest point in Orion’s precessional cycle—and thus the beginning of the constellation’s 13,000 year upwards journey—and who set out to create a permanent memorial of that moment here on the plateau. By putting Orion’s Belt on the ground in the way they did they knew that they were freezing a very specific moment in time.’

A perverse thought occurred to me: ‘How can we be so sure that the moment that they were freezing was 10,450 bc? After all, Orion’s Belt takes up that same configuration in the southern sky, west of the Milky Way at 11-plus degrees above the horizon, once every 26,000 years. So why shouldn’t they have been immortalizing 36,450 bc or even the precessional cycle that began 26,000 years before that?’

Robert was clearly ready for this question. ‘Some ancient records do suggest that Egyptian civilization had roots going back almost 40,000 years,’ he mused, ‘like that strange report in Herodotus that talks about the sun rising where it once set and setting where it once rose ...’

‘Which is also a precessional metaphor ...’

‘Yes. Precession again. Most peculiar the way it always keeps cropping up ... At any rate, you’re right, they could have been marking the beginning of the previous precessional cycle ...’

‘But do you think they were?’

‘No. I think 10,450 bc is the more likely date. It’s more within the range of what we know about the evolution of homo sapiens. And although it still leaves a lot of years to account for before the sudden emergence of dynastic Egypt around 3000 bc, it isn’t too long a period ...’

‘Too long a period for what?’

‘It’s the answer to your question about the 8000-year gap between the alignment of the site and the alignment of the shafts. Eight thousand years is a very long time but it isn’t too long for a dedicated highly motivated cult to have preserved and nurtured and faithfully passed on the high-knowledge of the people who invented this place in 10,450 bc.’[1196]

The machine

How high was the knowledge of those prehistoric inventors?

‘They knew their epochs,’ said Bauval, ‘and the clock that they used was the natural clock of the stars. Their working language was precessional astronomy and these monuments express that language in a very clear, unambiguous, scientific manner. They were also highly skilled surveyors—I mean the people who originally prepared the site and laid out the orientations for the pyramids—because they worked to an exacting geometry and because they knew how to align the base-platforms, or whatever it was they built, perfectly to the cardinal points.’

‘Do you think they also knew that they were marking out the site of the Great Pyramid on latitude 30° North?’

Bauval laughed: I’m certain they knew. I think they knew everything about the shape of the earth. They knew their astronomy. They had a good understanding of the solar system and of celestial mechanics. They were also incredibly accurate and incredibly precise in everything they did. So, all in all, I don’t think anything really happened here by chance—at least not between 10,450 and 2450 bc. I get the feeling that everything was planned, intended, carefully worked out ... Indeed I get the feeling that they were fulfilling a long-term objective—some kind of purpose, if you like, and that they brought this to fruition in the third millennium bc ...

‘In the form of the fully built pyramids which they then precessionally anchored to Al Nitak and to Sirius at the time of completion?’

‘Yes. And also, I think, in the form of the Pyramid Texts. My guess is that the Pyramid Texts are part of the puzzle.’

‘The software to the Pyramids’ hardware?’

‘Quite possibly. Why not? At any rate it’s certain that there’s a connection. I think what it means is that if we’re going to decode the pyramids properly then we’re going to have to use the Texts ...’

‘What’s your guess?’ I asked Bauval. ‘What do you think the purpose of the pyramid builders really might have been?’

‘They didn’t do it because they wanted an eternal tomb,’ he replied firmly. ‘In my view, they had no doubts at all that they would eternally live. They did it—whoever did it—they have transmitted the power of their ideas through something that is to all intents and purposes eternal. They succeeded in creating a force that is functional in itself, provided you understand it, and that force is the questions it challenges you to ask. My guess is that they knew the human mind to perfection. They knew the game of ritual ... Right? I’m serious. They knew what they were doing. They knew that they could initiate people far ahead in the future into their way of thinking even though they couldn’t be there themselves. They knew that they could do this by creating an eternal machine, the function of which was to generate questions.’

I suppose that I must have looked puzzled.

‘The machine is the pyramids!’ Bauval exclaimed, ‘the whole of the Giza necropolis really. And look at us. What are we doing? We’re asking questions. We’re standing out here, shivering, at an ungodly hour, watching the sun come up, and we’re asking questions, lots and lots of questions just as we’ve been programmed to do. We’re in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols—with the right symbols, with the right questions—they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself ...’

‘Sow the seed ...’

‘Yes. They were sowing the seed. Believe me, they were magicians, and they knew the power of ideas ... They knew how to set ideas growing and developing in people’s minds. And if you start with such ideas, and follow the process of reasoning like I did, you arrive at things like Orion, and 10,450 bc. In short, this is a process that works on its own. When it enters, when it settles into the subconscious, it is a self-willing conversion. Once it’s there you can’t even resist it ...’

‘You’re talking as though this Giza cult, whatever it was—revolving around precession, and geometry, and the pyramids, and the Pyramid Texts—you’re talking as though it still exists.’

‘In a sense it does still exist,’ Robert replied. ‘Even if the driver is no longer at the wheel, the Giza necropolis is still a machine that was designed to provoke questions.’ He paused and pointed up to the summit of the Great Pyramid where Santha and I had climbed, at dead of night, nine months previously. ‘Look at its power,’ he continued. ‘Five thousand years on it still gets you. It involves you whether you like it or not ... It forces you into a process of thinking ... forces you to learn. The minute you ask a question about it you’ve asked a question about engineering, you’ve asked a question about geometry, you’ve asked a question about astronomy. So it forces you to learn about engineering and geometry and astronomy, and gradually you begin to realize how sophisticated it is, how incredibly clever and skilful and knowledgeable its builders must have been, which forces you to ask questions about mankind, about human history, eventually about yourself too. You want to find out. This is the power of the thing.’

The second signature

As Robert, Santha and I sat out on the Giza plateau that cold December morning at the end of 1993, we watched the winter sun, now very close to solstice, rising over the right shoulder of the Sphinx, almost as far south of east as it would travel on its yearly journey before turning north again.

The Sphinx was an equinoctial marker, with its gaze directed precisely at the point of sunrise on the vernal equinox. Was it, too, part of the Giza ‘grand plan’?

I reminded myself that in any epoch, and at any period of history or prehistory, the Sphinx’s due east gaze would always have been sighted on the equinoctial rising of the sun, at both the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes. As the reader will recall from Part V, however, it was the vernal equinox that was considered by ancient man to be the marker of the astronomical age. In the words of Santillana and von Dechend:

The constellation that rose in the east, just before the sun, marked the ‘place’ where the sun rested ... It was known as the sun’s ‘carrier’ and the vernal equinox was recognised as the fiducial point of the ‘system’ determining the first degree of the sun’s yearly cycle ...’[1197]

Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the shape of a giant lion?

In our own lifetimes, the epoch of ad 2000, a more suitable shape for such a marker—should anyone wish to build one—would be a representation of a fish. This is because the sun on the vernal equinox rises against the stellar background of Pisces, as it has done for approximately the last 2000 years. The astronomical Age of Pisces began around the time of Christ.[1198] Readers must judge for themselves whether it is a coincidence that the principal symbol used for Christ by the very early Christians was not the cross but the fish.[1199]

During the preceding age, which broadly-speaking encompassed the first and second millennia bc, it was the constellation of Aries—the Ram—which had the honour of carrying the sun on the vernal equinox. Again, readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that the religious iconography of that epoch was predominantly ram-oriented.[1200] Is it a coincidence, for example, that Yahweh, God of Old Testament Israel, provided a ram as a substitute for Abraham’s offered sacrifice of his son Isaac?[1201] (Abraham and Isaac are assumed by biblical scholars and archaeologists to have lived during the early second millennium bc[1202]). Is it likewise coincidental that rams, in one context or another, are referred to in almost every book of the Old Testament (entirely composed during the Age of Aries) but in not a single book of the New Testament?[1203] And is it an accident that the advent of the Age of Aries, shortly before the beginning of the second millennium bc, was accompanied in Ancient Egypt by an upsurge in the worship of the god Amon whose symbol was a ram with curled horns?[1204] Work on the principal sanctuary of Amon—the Temple of Karnak at Luxor in upper Egypt—was begun at around 2000 bc[1205] and, as those who have visited that temple will recall, its principal icons are rams, long rows of which guard its entrances.

The immediate predecessor to the Age of Aries was the Age of Taurus—the Bull—which spanned the period between 4380 and 2200 bc.[1206] It was during this precessional epoch, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Taurus, that the Bull-cult of Minoan Crete flourished.[1207] And during this epoch, too, the civilization of dynastic Egypt burst upon the historical scene, fully formed, apparently without antecedents. Readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that Egyptians at the very beginning of the dynastic period were already venerating the Apis and Mnevis Bulls—the former being considered a theophany of the god Osiris and the latter, the sacred animal of Heliopolis, a theophany of the god Ra.[1208]

Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the form of a lion?

I looked down the slope of the Giza plateau towards the great leonine body of the Sphinx.

Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh believed by Egyptologists to have carved the monument out of bedrock around 2500 bc, had been a monarch of the Age of Taurus. For almost 1800 years before his reign, and more than 300 years after it, the sun on the vernal equinox rose unfailingly in the constellation of the Bull. It follows that if a monarch at such a time had set out to create an equinoctial marker at Giza, he would have had every reason to have it carved in the form of a bull, and none whatsoever to have it carved in the form of a lion. Indeed, and it was obvious, there was only one epoch when the celestial symbolism of a leonine equinoctial marker would have been appropriate. That epoch was, of course, the Age of Leo, from 10,970 to 8810 bc.[1209]

Why, therefore, should an equinoctial marker have been made in the shape of a lion? Because it was made during the Age of Leo when the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the stellar background of the constellation of the Lion, thus marking the coordinates of a precessional epoch that would not experience its ‘Great Return’ for another 26,000 years.

Around 10,450 bc the three stars of Orion’s Belt reached the lowest point in their precessional cycle: west of the Milky Way, 11° 08’ above the southern horizon at meridian transit. On the ground west of the Nile, this event was frozen into architecture in the shape of the three pyramids of Giza. Their layout formed the signature of an unmistakable epoch of precessional time.

Around 10,450 bc, the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Leo. On the ground at Giza, this event was frozen into architecture in the shape of the Sphinx, a gigantic, leonine, equinoctial marker which, like the second signature on an official document, could be taken as a confirmation of authenticity.

The eleventh millennium bc, in other words, soon after the ‘Mill of Heaven’ broke, shifting sunrise on the spring equinox from Virgo into the constellation of Leo, was the only epoch in which the due east facing Sphinx would have manifested exactly the right symbolic alignment on exactly the right day—watching the vernal sun rising in the dawn sky against the background of his own celestial counterpart ...

Looking due east at dawn on the vernal equinox in 10,450 bc. The Sphinx and the constellation of Leo.

Forcing the question

‘It can’t be a coincidence that such a perfect alignment of the terrestrial and the celestial occurs at around 10,450 bc,’ said Robert. ‘In fact I don’t think coincidence is any longer an issue. To me the real question is why? Why was it done? Why did they go to such lengths to make this enormous statement about the eleventh millennium bc?’

‘Obviously because it was an important time for them,’ suggested Santha.

‘It must have been very, very important. You don’t do something like this, create a series of vast precessional markers like these, carve a Sphinx, put up three pyramids weighing almost 15 million tons, unless you have some hugely important reason. So the question is: what was that reason? They’ve forced this question by making such a strong, imperative statement about 10,450 bc. Really, they’ve forced the question. They want to draw our attention to 10,450 bc and it’s up to us to work out why.’

We fell silent, for a long while as the sun climbed the sky south-east of the Great Sphinx.

Part VIII

Conclusion

Where’s the Body?

Chapter 51

The Hammer and the Pendulum

Although beyond the scope of this book, a detailed exposition of the earth-crust displacement theory is to be found in Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s When the Sky Fell (published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995).

As noted, this geological theory was formulated by Professor Charles Hapgood and supported by Albert Einstein. In brief, what it suggests is a complete slippage of our planet’s thirty-mile-thick lithosphere over its nearly 8000-mile-thick central core, forcing large parts of the western hemisphere southward towards the equator and thence towards the Antarctic Circle. This movement is not seen as taking place along a due north-south meridian but on a swivelling course—pivoting, as it were, around the central plains of what is now the United States. The result is that the north-eastern segment of North America (in which the North Pole was formerly located in Hudson’s Bay) is dragged southwards out of the Arctic Circle and into more temperate latitudes while at the same time the north-western segment (Alaska and the Yukon) swivels northwards into the Arctic Circle along with large parts of northern Siberia.

In the southern hemisphere, Hapgood’s model shows the landmass that we now call Antarctica, much of which was previously at temperate or even warm latitudes, being shifted in its entirety inside the Antarctic Circle. The overall movement is seen as having been in the region of 30 degrees (approximately 2000 miles) and as having been concentrated, in the main, between the years 14,500 bc and 12,500 bc—but with massive aftershocks on a planetary scale continuing at widely-separated intervals down to about 9500 bc.

According to the earth-crust displacement theory, large parts of Antarctica were positioned outside the Antarctic circle prior to 15,000 bc and thus could have been inhabited, with a climate and resources suitable for the development of civilization. A cataclysmic slippage of the crust then shifted the continent to the position it occupies today—dead centre within the Antarctic circle.

Suppose that, before the displacement of the earth’s crust, a great civilization had grown up in Antarctica, when much of it was located at green and pleasant latitudes? If so, that civilization might easily have been destroyed by the effects of the displacement: the tidal waves, the hurricane-force winds and electric storms, the volcanic eruptions as seismic faults split open all around the planet, the darkened skies, and the remorselessly expanding ice-cap. Moreover, as the millennia passed, the ruins left behind—the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and the engineering works of the destroyed civilization—would have been ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.

Little wonder, if the earth-crust displacement theory is correct, that all that can be found today, scattered around the world, are the tantalizing fingerprints of the gods. These would be the traces, the echoes of the works and deeds, the much misunderstood teachings and the geometrical edifices left behind by the few survivors of Antarctica’s former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...

Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.

Fact?

Or fiction?

Possibility?

Or impossibility?

Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?

Is Antarctica movable?

A lifeless polar desert

‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe an important geological theory that has become increasingly well understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on the earth’s surface. Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The time-scale according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense: continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words, very, very slowly.[1216]

Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece displacements which had no effect on the relationships between individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of spin).

Continental drift?

Earth-crust displacement?

Both?

Some other cause?

I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.

Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole, remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).

Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60 degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of cold-tolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or near-total darkness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants laconically: ‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi, algae and bacteria ...’[1217]

In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year ‘historical’ period.

Was it always so?

Exhibit 1

Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17: ‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles north of the South Pole.

‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest, living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil trees. “The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’[1218]

Exhibit 2

Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million years ago.)[1219] And if we go as far back as the Cambrian (c. 550 million years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reef-building Archaeocyathidae: ‘Millions of years later, when these marine formations had appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a luxuriant vegetation in Antarctica. Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during the Byrd expedition of 1935, geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the lofty sides of Mount Weaver, in latitude 86° 58’ S., about the same distance from the Pole and about two miles above sea level. These included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents (Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species ...’[1220]

Exhibit 3

Admiral Byrd’s own comment on the significance of the Mount Weaver finds: ‘Here at the southernmost known mountain in the world, scarcely two hundred miles from the South Pole, was found conclusive evidence that the climate of Antarctica was once temperate or even sub-tropical.’[1221]

Exhibit 4

‘Soviet scientists have reported finding evidence of tropical flora in Graham Land, another part of Antarctica, dating from the early Tertiary Period (perhaps the Paleocene or Eocene) ... Further evidence is provided by the discovery by British geologists of great fossil forests in Antarctica, of the same type that grew on the Pacific coast of the United States 20 million years ago. This of course shows that after the earliest known Antarctic glaciation in the Eocene [60 million years ago] the continent did not remain glacial but had later episodes of warm climate.’[1222]

Exhibit 5

‘On 25 December 1990 geologists Barrie McKelvey and David Harwood were working 1830 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres [250 miles] from the South Pole in Antarctica. The geologists discovered fossils from a deciduous southern beach forest dating from between two and three million years ago’.[1223]

Exhibit 6

In 1986 the discovery of fossilized wood and plants showed that parts of Antarctica may have been ice free as little as two and a half a million years ago. Further discoveries showed that some places on the continent were ice-free 100,000 years ago.[1224]

Exhibit 7

As we saw in Part I, sedimentary cores collected from the bottom of the Ross Sea by one of the Byrd Antarctic Expeditions provide conclusive evidence that ‘great rivers, carrying down fine well grained sediments’ did flow in this part of Antarctica until perhaps as late as 4000 bc. According to the report of Dr Jack Hough of the University of Illinois: ‘The log of core N-5 shows glacial marine sediment from the present to 6000 years ago. From 6000 to 15,000 years ago the sediment is fine-grained with the exception of one granule at about 12,000 years ago. This suggests an absence of ice from the area during that period, except perhaps for a stray iceberg 12,000 years ago.’[1225]

Exhibit 8

The Orontaeus Finnaeus World Map reviewed in Part I accurately depicts the Ross Sea as it would look if it were free of ice and, in addition, shows Antarctica’s ranges of lofty coastal mountains with great rivers flowing from them where only mile-deep glaciers are to be found today.[1226]

Charles Hapgood, The Path Of The Pole, 1970, page 111ff: ‘It is rare that geological investigations receive important confirmation from archaeology; yet in this case, it seems that the matter of the deglaciation of the Ross Sea can be confirmed by an old map that has somehow survived many thousands of years ... It was discovered and published in 1531 by the French geographer Oronce Fine [Oronteus Finnaeus] and is part of his Map of the World ...

It has been possible to establish the authenticity of this map. In several years of research the projection of this ancient map was worked out. It was found to have been drawn on a sophisticated map projection, with the use of spherical trigonometry, and to be so scientific that over 50 locations on the Antarctic continent have been found to be located on it with an accuracy that was not attained by modern cartographic science until the 19th century. And, of course, when this map was first published, in 1531, nothing at all was known of Antarctica. The continent was not discovered in modern times until about 1818 and was not fully mapped until after 1920 ...’[1227]

Exhibit 9

The Buache Map, also reviewed in Part I, accurately depicts the subglacial topography of Antarctica.[1228] Does it do so by chance or might the continent indeed have been entirely ice-free recently enough for the cartographers of a lost civilization to have mapped it?

Exhibit 10

The reverse side of the coin. If the lands presently inside the Antarctic Circle were once temperate or tropical, what about lands inside the Arctic Circle? Were they affected by the same dramatic climate changes, suggesting that some common factor might have been at work?

· ‘On the island of Spitzbergen (Svalbard), palm leaves ten and twelve feet long have been fossilized, along with fossilized marine crustaceans of a type that could only inhabit tropical waters. This suggests that at one time the temperatures of the Arctic Ocean were similar to the contemporary temperatures of the Bay of Bengal or the Caribbean Sea. Spitzbergen is half way between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole, at a latitude of 80 degrees N. Today, ships can reach Spitzbergen through the ice only about two or at the most three months during the year.’[1229]

· There is firm fossil evidence that stands of swamp cypress flourished within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene [between 20 million and 6 million years ago], and that water-lillies flourished in Spitzbergen in the same period: ‘The Miocene floras of Grinnell Land and Greenland, and Spitzbergen, all required temperate climatic conditions with plentiful moisture. The water lillies of Spitzbergen would have required flowing water for the greater part of the year. In connection with the flora of Spitzbergen it should be realized that the island is in polar darkness for half the year. It lies on the Arctic Circle, as far north of Labrador as Labrador is north of Bermuda.[1230]

· Some of the islands in the Arctic Ocean were never covered by ice during the last Ice Age. On Baffin Island, for example, 900 miles from the North Pole, alder and birch remains found in peat suggest a much warmer climate than today less than 30,000 years ago. These conditions prevailed until 17,000 years ago: ‘During the Wisconsin ice age there was a temperate-climate refuge in the middle of the Arctic Ocean for the flora and fauna that could not exist in Canada and the United States.’[1231]

· Russian scientists have concluded that the Arctic Ocean was warm during most of the last Ice Age. A report by academicians Saks, Belov and Lapina covering many phases of their oceanographic work highlights the period from about 32,000 to about 18,000 years ago as being one during which particularly warm conditions prevailed.[1232]

· As we saw in Part IV, huge numbers of warm-blooded, temperate adapted mammal species were instantly frozen, and their bodies preserved in the permafrost, all across a vast zone of death stretching from the Yukon, through Alaska and deep into northern Siberia. The bulk of this destruction appears to have taken place during the eleventh millennium bc, although there was an earlier episode of large-scale extinctions around 13,500 bc.[1233]

· We also saw (Chapter Twenty-seven) that the last Ice Age came to an end between 15,000 and 8000 bc, but principally between 14500 and 12,500 bc, with a further outburst of extraordinarily intense activity in the eleventh millennium bc. During this geologically brief period of time, glaciation up to two miles deep covering millions of square miles which had taken more than 40,000 years to build-up suddenly and inexplicably melted: ‘It must be obvious that this could not have been the result of the gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to explain ice ages ... The rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...’[1234]

The icy executioner

Some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...

Was it a 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere that abruptly terminated the Ice Age in the northern hemisphere (by pushing the most heavily glaciated areas southwards from the northern pole of the spin axis)? If so, why shouldn’t the same 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere have swivelled a largely deglaciated six-million-square-mile southern hemisphere continent from temperate latitudes to a position directly over the southern pole of the spin axis?

On the issue of the movability of Antarctica, we now know that it is movable and, more to the point, that it has moved, because trees have grown there and trees simply cannot grow at latitudes which suffer six months of continual darkness.

What we do not know (and may never know for certain) is whether this movement was a consequence of earth-crust displacement, or of continental drift, or of some other unguessed-at factor.

Let us consider Antarctica for a moment.

We have already seen that it is big. It has a land area of 5.5 million square miles, and is presently covered by something in excess of seven million cubic miles of ice weighing an estimated 19 quadrillion tons (19 followed by 15 zeros).[1235] What worries the theorists of earth-crust displacement is that this vast ice-cap is remorselessly increasing in size and weight: ‘at the rate of 293 cubic miles of ice each year—almost as much as if Lake Ontario were frozen solid annually and added to it.’[1236]

The fear is that when it is coupled with the effects of precession, obliquity, orbital eccentricity, the earth’s own centrifugal motion, and the gravitational tug of the sun, moon and planets, Antarctica’s huge, ever-expanding burden of glaciation could provide the final trigger-factor for a massive displacement of the crust:

The growing South Pole ice-cap [wrote Hugh Auchincloss Brown, somewhat colourfully, in 1967] has become a stealthy, silent and relentless force of nature—a result of the energy created by its eccentric rotation. The ice-cap is the creeping peril, the deadly menace and the executioner of our civilization.[1237]

Did this ‘executioner’ cause the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere by setting in motion a 7000-year shift of the crust between 15,000 bc and 8000 bc—a shift that was perhaps at its most rapid, and would have had its most devastating effects, between 14,500 bc and 10,000 bc?[1238] Or were the sudden and dramatic climate changes experienced in the northern hemisphere during this period the result of some other catastrophic agency simultaneously capable of melting millions of cubic miles of ice and of sparking off the worldwide increase in volcanism that accompanied the melt-down?[1239]

Modern geologists are opposed to catastrophes, or rather to catastrophism, preferring to follow the ‘uniformitarian’ doctrine: ‘that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes’. Catastrophism, on the other hand, holds that ‘changes in the earth’s crust have generally been effected suddenly by physical forces.’[1240] Is it possible, however, that the mechanism responsible for the traumatic earth changes which took place at the end of the last Ice Age could have been a geological event both catastrophic and uniform?

The great biologist Sir Thomas Huxley remarked in the nineteenth century:

To my mind there appears to be no sort of theoretical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism; on the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action. Good timekeeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of a clock is essentially a catastrophe. The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the force or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action, and we might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.[1241]

Could continental drift be the pendulum?

Could earth-crust displacement be the hammer?

Mars and earth

Crustal displacements are thought to have taken place on other planets. In the December 1985 issue of Scientific American, Peter H. Schultz drew attention to meteorite impact craters visible on the Martian surface. Craters in polar areas have a distinctive ‘signature’ because the meteorites land amid the thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate there. Outside the present polar circles of Mars, Schultz found two other such areas: ‘These zones are antipodal; they are on opposite faces of the planet. The deposits show many of the processes and characteristics of today’s poles, but they lie near the present-day equator ...’

What could have caused this effect? Judging from the evidence, Shultz put forward the theory that the mechanism appeared to have been ‘the movement of the entire lithosphere, the solid outer portion of the planet as one plate ... [This movement seems to have taken place] in rapid spurts followed by long pauses.’[1242]

If crustal displacements can happen on Mars, why not on earth? And if they don’t happen on earth, how do we account for the otherwise awkward fact that not a single one of the ice-caps built up around the world during previous Ice Ages seems to have occurred at—or even near—either of the present poles.[1243] On the contrary, land areas bearing the marks of former glaciation are very widely distributed. If we cannot assume crustal shifts, we must find some other way to explain why the ice-caps appear to have reached sea level within the tropics on three continents: Asia, Africa and Australia.[1244]

Charles Hapgood’s solution to this problem is simple, extremely elegant and does not affront commonsense:

The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica. This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously, because Antarctica is at the pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun’s heat, no galactic dust, no volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea currents account for the fact. We may conclude that the best theory to account for an ice age is that the area concerned was at the pole. We thus account for the Indian and African ice sheets, though the areas once occupied by them are now in the tropics. We account for all ice sheets of continental size in the same way.[1245]

The logic is close to inescapable. Either we accept that the Antarctic ice cap is the first continent-sized ice sheet ever to have been situated at a pole—which seems improbable—or we are obliged to suppose that earth-crust displacement, or a similar mechanism, must have been at work.

Memories of the polar dawn?

Our ancestors may have preserved in their most ancient traditions memories of a displacement. We saw some of these memories in Part IV: cataclysm myths that appear to be eyewitness accounts of the series of geological disasters which accompanied the end of the last Ice-Age in the northern hemisphere.[1246] There are other myths too, which may have come down to us from that epoch between 15,000 and 10,000 bc. Among these are several which speak of lands of the gods and of former paradises, all of which are described as being in the south (for example, the Ta-Neteru of the Egyptians) and many of which seem to have experienced polar conditions.

The great Indian epic, Mahabaratha, speaks of Mount Meru, the land of the gods:

At Meru the sun and moon go round from left to right every day, and so do all the stars ... The mountain by its lusture, so overcomes the darkness of night, that the night can hardly be distinguished from the day. ... The day and night are together equal to a year to the residents of the place ...[1247]

Similarly, as the reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five, Airyana Vaejo, the mythical paradise and former homeland of the Avestic Aryans of Iran, seems to have been rendered uninhabitable by the sudden onset of glaciation. In later years it was spoken of as a place in which: ‘the stars, the moon and the sun are only once a year seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day.’[1248]

In the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient Indian text, we read, ‘The gods behold the sun, after it has once arisen, for half a year.’[1249] The seventh Mandala of the Rigveda contains a number of ‘Dawn’ hymns. One of these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of the sun that followed it.[1250] Another passage states, ‘many were the days between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise’.[1251]

Are these eyewitness accounts of polar conditions?

Although we can never be sure, it may be relevant that in Indian tradition the Vedas are believed to be revealed texts, passed down from the time of the gods.[1252] It may also be relevant that in describing the processes of transmission, all the traditions refer to the pralayas (cataclysms) which occasionally overtake the world and claim that in each of these the written scriptures are physically destroyed. After each destruction, however, certain Rishis or ‘wise men’ survive who

repromulgate, at the beginning of the new age, the knowledge inherited by them as a sacred trust from their forefathers in the preceding age ... Each manvantara or age thus has a Veda of its own which differs only in expression and not in sense from the antediluvian Veda.[1253]

An epoch of turmoil and darkness

As every schoolboy geographer understands, true north (the North Pole) is not quite the same thing as magnetic north (the direction compass needles point). Indeed the magnetic north pole is presently situated in northern Canada, about 11 degrees from the true North Pole.[1254] Recent advances in the study of palaeomagnetism have proved that the earth’s magnetic polarity has reversed itself more than 170 times during the past 80 million years ...[1255]

What causes these field reversals?

While he was teaching at the University of Cambridge the geologist S. K. Runcorn published an article in Scientific American which made a pertinent point:

There seems no doubt that the earth’s magnetic field is tied up in some way to the rotation of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth’s rotation itself ... [The unavoidable conclusion is that] the earth’s axis of rotation has changed also. In other words, the planet has rolled about, changing the location of the geographical poles.[1256]

Runcorn appears to be envisaging a complete 180-degree flip of the poles, with the earth literally tumbling—although similar palaeomagnetic readings would result from a slippage of the crust over the geographical poles. Either way, the consequences for civilization, and indeed for all life, would be unimaginably dreadful.

Of course, Runcorn may be wrong; perhaps field reversals can occur in the absence of any other upheavals.

But he may also be right.

According to reports published in Nature and New Scientist, the last geomagnetic reversal was completed just 12,400 years ago—during the eleventh millennium bc.[1257]

This is of course the very millennium in which the ancient Tiahuanacan civilization in the Andes seems to have been destroyed. The same millennium is signalled by the alignments and design of the great astronomical monuments on the Giza plateau, and by the erosion patterns on the Sphinx. And it was in the eleventh millennium bc that Egypt’s ‘precocious agricultural experiment’ suddenly failed. Likewise it was in the eleventh millennium bc that huge numbers of large mammal species all around the world vanished into extinction. The list could continue: abrupt rises in sea level, hurricane-force winds, electrical storms, volcanic disturbances, and so on.

Scientists expect the next reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles to occur around ad 2030.[1258]

Is this an intimation of planetary disaster? After 12,500 years of the pendulum, is the hammer about to strike?

Exhibit 11

Yves Rocard, Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris: ‘Our modern seismographs are sensitive to the ‘noise’ of limited agitation at every point in the earth, even in the absence of any seismic wave. One may in this noise discern a man-made vibration (for example, a train four kilometers away, or a big city ten kilometers off) and also an atmospheric effect (from changing pressure of the wind on the soil) and sometimes one registers also the effects of great storms at a distance. Yet there remains a continued rolling noise of cracklings in the earth which owes nothing to any [such] cause ...’[1259]

Exhibit 12

‘The North Pole moved ten feet in the direction of Greenland along the meridian of 45 degrees west longitude during the period from 1900 to 1960 ... a rate of six centimetres (about two and a half inches) a year. [Between 1900 and 1968, however,] the pole moved about twenty feet. [The pole therefore] moved ten feet between 1960 and 1968, at a rate of about ten centimetres (four inches) a year ... If both these observations were accurate when made, as we have every right to expect in view of the eminence of the scientists involved, then we have here evidence that the lithosphere may be in motion at the present time [and that it is experiencing] a geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion ...[1260]

Exhibit 13

USA Today, Wednesday 23 November 1994, page 9D:

‘INTERACTIVE IN ANTARCTICA: Students Link With South Pole Scientists

‘A live remote broadcast from the South Pole featuring Elizabeth Felton, a 17-year-old graduate of Chicago public schools, will take place Jan 10. Felton will use US Geological Survey data to reposition the copper marker designating the Earth’s geographic South Pole to compensate for the annual slippage of the ice sheet.’[1261]

Is it just the ice sheet that is slipping, or is the entire crust of the earth in motion? And was it just an ‘unusual interactive education project’ that took place on 10 January 1995, or was Elizabeth Felton unknowingly documenting the continued geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion of the crust?

Scientists do not think so. As we shall see in the final chapter, however, the coming century is signalled in a remarkable convergence of ancient prophecies and traditional beliefs as an epoch of unprecedented turmoil and darkness, in which iniquity will be worked in secret, and the Fifth Sun and the Fourth World will come to an end ...

Exhibit 14

Kobe, Japan, Tuesday 17 January 1995: ‘The suddenness with which the earthquake struck was almost cruel. One moment we were fast asleep, an instant later the floor—the entire building—had turned to jelly. But this is no gently undulating liquid motion. This is jarring, gut-wrenching shuddering of awesome proportions ...

‘You are in bed, the safest place in the world. Your bed is on the floor, what you used to think of as solid ground. And with no warning the world has turned into a sickening roller-coaster ride, and you want to get off.

‘Possibly the most frightening part is the sound. This is not the dull rumble of thunder. This is a deafening, roaring sound, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and it sounds like the end of the world.’ (Eyewitness report on the Kobe earthquake by Dennis Kessler, Guardian, London, 18 January 1995. The tremor lasted 20 seconds, registering 7.2 on the Richter scale, and killed more than 5000 people.)

Chapter 52

Like a Thief in the Night

There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to consider [the implications of these mysteries.

We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of mankind, whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it, because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.

Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural artefact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym for delusion.

Suppose it is not delusion?

Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what had happened in early times’.[1262] Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 of the Christian era?

It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’.[1263] Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a ‘mythical’ account something like this:

The flames of the Brahmastra-charged missiles mingled with each other and surrounded by fiery arrows they covered the earth, heaven and space between and increased the conflagration like the fire and the Sun at the end of the world ... All beings who were scorched by the Brahmastras, and saw the terrible fire of their missiles, felt that it was the fire of Pralaya [the cataclysm] that burns down the world.[1264]

And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era? Isn’t it possible, probable even, that they might preserve traditions of ‘celestial cars’ and ‘heavenly chariots’ and ‘spacious flying machines’, and even of ‘aerial cities’.[1265] If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:

· ‘Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come to you—and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will look like a deity.’[1266]

· ‘Visvakarma, the architect among the Gods, built aerial vehicles for the Gods.’[1267]

· ‘Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that all-traversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced me with weapons.’[1268]

· ‘He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.’[1269]

· ‘The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33 divine beings.’[1270]

All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Purana and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:

The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky ...[1271]

Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?

We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven’t tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions as ‘unhistorical’.

No doubt many are unhistorical. but at the end of the investigation that underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...

For the benefit of future generations of mankind

Here is a scenario:

Suppose that we had calculated, on the basis of sound evidence and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that our civilization was soon to be obliterated by a titanic geological cataclysm—a 30° displacement of the earth’s crust, for example, or a head-on collision with a ten-mile-wide nickel-iron asteroid travelling towards us at cosmic speed.

Of course there would at first be much panic and despair. Nevertheless—if there were sufficient advance warning—steps would be taken to ensure that there would be some survivors and that some of what was most valuable in our high scientific knowledge would be preserved for the benefit of future generations.

Strangely enough, the Jewish historian Josephus (who wrote during the first century ad) attributes precisely this behaviour to the clever and prosperous inhabitants of the antediluvian world who lived before the Flood ‘in a happy condition without any misfortunes falling upon them’:[1272]

They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost—upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water—they made two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries upon them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the Flood, the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit these discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them ...[1273]

Likewise, when the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian king:

The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling down and striking one another with a terrible noise ... And he awaked with great feare, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt ... He related the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge. The king said, will it come to our country? They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the Pyramids ... And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise men, as also all profound sciences—the science of Astrology, and of Arithmeticke, and of Geometry, and of Physicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes their characters and language ...[1274]

Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval.

Could this be so? And what are we to make of other strange traditions that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory?

What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh, which speaks in veiled language about a great secret of the human past: a long-forgotten golden age when everything was possible—a magical time of scientific progress and enlightenment when the ‘First Men’ (who were ‘endowed with intelligence’) not only ‘measured the round face of the earth’ but ‘examined the four points of the arch of the sky’.

As the reader will recall, the gods became jealous at the rapid progress made by these upstart humans who had ‘succeeded in seeing, succeeded in knowing, all that there is in the world.’[1275] Divine retribution quickly followed: ‘The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes ... In this way all the wisdom and all the knowledge of the First Men [together with their memory of their] origin and their beginning, were destroyed.’[1276]

The secret of what happened was never entirely forgotten because a record of those distant First Times was preserved, until the coming of the Spaniards, in the sacred texts of the original Popol Vuh. The abuses of the conquest made it necessary for that primordial document to be concealed from all but the most highly-initiated sages and replaced with a watered-down substitute written ‘under the law of Christianity’:[1277] ‘No longer can be seen the book of Popol Vuh which the kings had in olden times ... The original book, written long ago, existed—but now its sight is hidden to the searcher and to the thinker ...’[1278]

On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden secrets. In the Puranic version of the universal flood story, shortly before the deluge was unleashed, the fish god Vishnu warned his human protégé that he ‘should conceal the Sacred Scriptures in a safe place’ to preserve the knowledge of the antediluvian races from destruction.[1279] Likewise, in Mesopotamia, the Noah figure Utnapishtim was instructed by the god Ea ‘to take the beginning, the middle and the end of whatever was consigned to writing and then to bury it in the City of the Sun at Sippara’.[1280] After the waters of the flood had gone, survivors were instructed to make their way to the site of the City of the Sun ‘to search for the writings’, which would be found to contain knowledge of benefit to future generations of mankind.[1281]

Strangely enough, it was the City of the Sun in Egypt, Innu, known by the Greeks as Heliopolis—which was regarded throughout the dynastic period as the source and centre of the high wisdom handed down to mortal men from the fabled First Time of the gods. It was at Heliopolis that the Pyramid Texts were collated, and it was the Heliopolitan priesthood—or rather the Heliopolitan cult—that had custody of the monuments of the Giza necropolis.

More than just Kilroy was here

Let us return to our scenario:

1 we know that our late twentieth-century, post-industrial civilization is about to be destroyed by an inescapable cosmic or geological cataclysm;

2 we know—because our science is pretty good—that the destruction is going to be near-total;

3 mobilizing massive technological resources, we put our best minds to work to ensure that at least a remnant of our species will survive the catastrophe, and that the core of our scientific, medical, astronomical, geographical, architectural and mathematical knowledge will be preserved;

4 we are of course aware how slim are our chances of succeeding on both counts; nevertheless, galvanized by the prospect of extinction, we make an almighty effort to build the Arks or Vars or strong enclosures in which the chosen survivors can be protected, and we focus our considerable ingenuity on ways to transmit the essence of the knowledge we have accumulated during the 5000 years of our recorded history.

We start by preparing for the worst. We assume that there will be survivors but that they will be blasted back into the Stone Age by the cataclysm. Realizing that it may take ten or twelve thousand years for a civilization as advanced as our own to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes, one of our top priorities is to find a way to communicate with that postulated future civilization. At the least we would want to say to them: Kilroy was here! and to be sure they got the message no matter what language they spoke or what ethical, religious, ideological, metaphysical or philosophical leanings their society might exhibit.

I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want, for example, to tell them—those distant grandchildren of ours—when we had lived in relation to their time.

How would we do that? How would we express, say, ad 2012 of the Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we express chronology?

One obvious solution would be to make use of the beautiful predictability of the earth’s axial precession, which has the effect of slowly and regularly altering the declination of the entire star-field in relation to a viewer at a fixed point, and which equally slowly and regularly revolves the equinoctial point in relation to the twelve zodiacal constellations. From the predictability of this motion it follows that if we could find a way to declare: we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces we would provide a means of specifying our epoch to within a single 2160-year period in every grand precessional cycle of 25,920 years.

The only drawback to this scheme would become evident if a civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12,000 or even 20,000 years of the cataclysm, but took much longer—perhaps as much as 30,000 years. In that case, a monument or calendrical device declaring ‘we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces’ would no longer be unambiguous. If discovered by a high culture flourishing at the very beginning of a future Age of Sagittarius for example it could be read as meaning ‘we lived 4320 years before your time’—that is, two full precessional ‘months’ prior to the Sagittarian Age (the 2160-year ‘months’ of Aquarius and Capricorn). But it could also mean ‘We lived 30,240 years before your time’, that is those two ‘months’ plus the full previous precessional cycle of 25,920 years. The Sagittarian archaeologists would not only have to use their wits to work out the meaning of the message (i.e. we lived when the vernal equinox was in Pisces), but would need to decide from other clues which Age of Pisces we had lived in: the most recent, or the one in the previous precessional cycle, or perhaps even the cycle before that.

Geology would naturally be of assistance in making such broad judgements ...

The civilizers

If we could find a way of saying we lived in the age of Pisces, and could specify the altitude above the horizon of certain identifiable stars in our own epoch (say, the prominent belt stars of the Orion constellation), we would be able to signal our dates to future generations with greater precision. Alternatively we could do as the builders of the Giza pyramids appear to have done and lay out our monuments in a pattern on the ground reflecting exactly the pattern of the stars in the sky in our time.

There would be several other options and combinations of options open to us, depending on our circumstances, on the level of technology available to us, on the extent of the early warning we were given, and on which chronological facts we wanted to transmit.

Suppose, for example, that there was not time to make proper preparations prior to the catastrophe. Suppose that the disaster, like ‘the Day of the Lord’ in 2 Peter 3, crept up on us unseen ‘as a thief in the night?’[1282] What prospects might humanity be faced with?

Whether as the result of an asteroid strike or an earth-crust displacement or some other cosmic or geological cause, let us assume:

1 massive devastation all around the world;

2 the survival of only relatively small numbers of people, the majority of whom rapidly revert to barbarism;

3 the presence, among this remnant, of a minority of well-organized visionaries—including master-builders, scientists, engineers, cartographers, mathematicians, medical doctors and the like—who dedicate themselves to salvaging what they can and finding ways to transmit the knowledge to the future for the benefit of those who might eventually understand it.

Let us call these hypothetical visionaries ‘the civilisers’. As they banded together—at first to survive, later to teach and to share ideas—they might take on something of the manner and belief systems of a religious cult, developing a clear sense of mission and of shared identity. No doubt they would make use of powerful and easily recognizable symbols to strengthen and express this sense of common purpose: the men might wear distinctive beards, for example, or shave their heads, and certain archetypal imagery like the cross and the serpent and the dog might be used to link the members of the cult together as they set out on their civilizing missions to relight the lamps of knowledge around the world.

I suspect, if the situation were bad enough after the cataclysm, that many of the civilizers would fail, or meet with only limited success. But let us suppose that one small group had the skill and dedication sufficient to create a lasting and stable beach-head, perhaps in a region which had suffered relatively little damage in the disaster. Then let us suppose that some other unexpected disaster were to occur—an aftershock or series of aftershocks from the original catastrophe perhaps—and the beach-head was almost totally annihilated.

What might happen next? What might be salvaged from this wreckage of a wisdom cult which had itself been salvaged from a greater wreck?

Transmitting the essence

If the circumstances were right it seems possible that the essence of the cult might survive, carried forward by a nucleus of determined men and women. I suspect, too, with the proper motivation and indoctrination techniques, plus a means of recruiting new members from among the half-savage local inhabitants, that such a cult might perpetuate itself almost indefinitely. This could happen, however, only if its members (like the Jews awaiting the Messiah) were prepared to bide their time, for thousands and thousands of years, until they felt confident that the moment had come to declare themselves.

If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have

succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth, intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only by the fully worthy ...[1283]

What might the mysterious ‘books of Thoth’ have been? Is it necessary to suppose that all the information they were purported to contain should have been transmitted in book form?

Is it not worth wondering, for example, whether Professors de Santillana and von Dechend might have earned their place among the ‘fully worthy’ when they decoded the advanced scientific language embedded in the great universal myths of precession? In so doing, is it not possible that they might have stumbled upon one of the metaphorical ‘books’ of Thoth and read the ancient science inscribed upon its pages?

Likewise, what about Posnansky’s discoveries at Tiahuanaco, and Hapgood’s maps? What about the new understanding that is dawning concerning the geological antiquity of the Sphinx at Giza? What about the questions raised by the gigantic blocks used in the construction of the Valley and Mortuary Temples? What about the secrets now being teased, one by one, from the astronomical alignments and dimensions and concealed chambers of the pyramids?

If these, too, are readings from the metaphorical books of Thoth, it would seem that the numbers of the ‘fully worthy’ are increasing, and that new and even more startling revelations may soon be at hand ...

To return briefly and for the last time to our evolving scenario:

1 at the beginning of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, near the cusp of the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, civilization as we know it is destroyed;

2 among the devastated survivors a few hundred or a few thousand individuals band together to preserve and transmit the fruits of their culture’s scientific knowledge into a distant and uncertain future;

3 these civilizers split into small groups and spread across the globe;

4 by and large they fail, and perish; nevertheless, in certain areas, some do succeed in making a lasting cultural impression;

5 after thousands of years—and perhaps several false starts—a branch of the original wisdom cult influences the emergence of a fully fledged civilization ...

Of course the parallel for this last category is once again to be found in Egypt. I would seriously propose as a hypothesis for further testing that a scientific wisdom cult, made up of the survivors of a great, lost, maritime civilization, could perhaps have established itself in the Nile Valley as early as the fourteenth millennium bc. The cult would have been based at Heliopolis, Giza and Abydos, and perhaps at other centres as well, and would have initiated Egypt’s early agricultural revolution. Later, however, beaten down by the huge floods and other disturbances of the earth which took place in the eleventh millennium bc, the cult would have been obliged to cut its losses and withdraw until the turmoil of the Ice Age was over—never knowing whether its message would survive the subsequent dark epochs.

Under such circumstances, the hypothesis suggests that a huge and ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and encoded through and through with the cult’s message, there would be hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the cult had by then long since ceased to exist.

The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on the Giza plateau are all about:

1 that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in our own chronology of between 10,970 bc and 8810 bc;

2 that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 bc.

This is a pretty effective means of ‘specifying’ the epoch of the eleventh millennium bc by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been rightly described as the ‘only true clock of our planet’.[1284] Confusingly, however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts ‘locked in’ to Orion’s Belt and Sirius at around 2450 bc.[1285] The hypothesis resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 bc. Naturally, the hypothesis also suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8000 missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and ‘fully formed’ emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.

What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders, who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. If so, we might also ask why these highly civilized and technically accomplished architects and navigators were obsessed with charting the gradual glaciation of the enigmatic southern continent of Antarctica from the fourteenth millennium bc—when Hapgood calculates that the source map referred to by Phillipe Buache was drawn up—down to about the end of the fifth millennium bc?

Could they have been making a permanent cartographical record of the slow obliteration of their homeland?

And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the future through a variety of different media—myths, maps, buildings, calendar systems, mathematical harmonies—have been connected to the cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss?

An urgent mission

The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep, or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves. We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors.

Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us in the form of bona fide ‘historical records’? And is it arrogance or ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating ‘history’ from ‘prehistory’ at about 5000 years before the present—defining the records of ‘history’ as valid testimony and the records of ‘prehistory’ as primitive delusions?

At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means unreasonable. My research has filled me with respect for the logical thinking, high science, deep psychological insights, and vast cosmographical knowledge of the ancient geniuses who composed those myths, and who, I am now fully persuaded, descended from the same lost civilization that produced the map-makers, pyramid builders, navigators, astronomers and earth-measurers whose fingerprints we have been following across the continents and oceans of the earth.

Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that they will certainly occur again.

What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous ‘Suns’ (or sometimes of the three previous ‘Worlds’) passed down in the Americas since time immemorial? By the same token, what might be the function of the great myths of precession which speak not just of previous cataclysms but of cataclysms to come and which (through the metaphor of the cosmic mill) link these earthly disasters to ‘disturbances in the heavens’? Last but by no means least, what burning motive impelled the pyramid builders to erect, with such care, the powerful and mysterious edifices on the Giza plateau?

Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here’.

And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.

Of these things I have no doubt.

I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency—of a vitally important mission—that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.

I go on intuition again, not on evidence.

It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when ‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted and shaken ...” ’[1286] These words are from the Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been foretold in all the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of the present epoch of the world—an epoch, as the reader will recall, in which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish.’[1287]

The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:

The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December ad 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six ...[1288]

In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth.

In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upon us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania: ‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before the Flood ... Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is near ...’[1289]

Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that around the year 2000: ‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.’[1290]

Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium bc coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.

And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:

A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ... [1291]

Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation, and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?

We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens. Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in the universe:

Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other and reduces it to helplessness ...[1292]

In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when—and why—the hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think, after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to devote more of our resources to studying the signs and messages that have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia which our species calls prehistory.

A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites. The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx.[1293] Likewise, if the will is there, then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx, that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in 1993.[1294]

Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the sub-glacial landscapes of Antarctica—much the most likely continent to hide the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.

In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian view that ‘all things will continue as they have done since the beginning of creation.’[1295] But I am also aware that such ‘scoffers in the last days’[1296] are those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our forgotten ancestors. As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind from time to time, that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly, without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it will certainly recur at some point in the future, obliging us—unless we are well prepared—to begin again like orphaned children in complete ignorance of our true heritage.

Walking in the last days

Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994: Across the high plains of Arizona, for days and days and days, a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove across those plains towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over in my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels, my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky breaks, the moments when everything had come together, the moments when everything seemed about to fall apart.

I had travelled a long road to get here, I realized—far longer than the 300-mile freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands from Phoenix, the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great degree of enlightenment.

Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy is still believed to be alive among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced by attrition and misery to barely 10,000.[1297] Like the Ancient Maya whose descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little),[1298] the Hopi believe that we are walking in the last days, with a geological sword of Damocles hanging over us.[1299] According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-four:

The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...’[1300]

I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...

The end of the world

The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the highs and the lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a medical-surgical nurse from Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed had worked on the reservation for a while, and it was thanks to his contacts that we were now here. On my right was Paul Sifki, a ninety-six-year-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.

‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is coming. Is this true?’

Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in colour, dressed in jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once looked at me, but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for a familiar face in a distant crowd.

Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply: ‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’

I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that I felt a sense of urgency: ‘My research has convinced me that there was an advanced civilization—long, long ago—that was destroyed in a terrible cataclysm. I fear that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar cataclysm ...’

There followed a long exchange in Hopi, then this translation: ‘He said that when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that exploded—a star that had been up there in the sky for a long while ... And he went to his grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His grandfather replied: “This is the way our own world will end—engulfed in flames ... If people do not change their ways then the spirit that takes care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he will punish the world with flames and it will end just like that star ended.” That was what his grandfather said to him—that the earth would explode just like that exploding star ...’

‘So the feeling is that this world will end in fire ... And having viewed the world for the past ninety years, does he believe that the behaviour of mankind has improved or worsened?’

‘He says it has not improved. We’re getting worse.’

‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’

‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen ... He said that nowadays nothing but the wind blows and that all we do is have a weapon pointed at one another. That shows how far apart we have drifted and how we feel towards each other now. There are no values any more—none at all—and people live any way they want, without morals or laws. These are the signs that the time has come ...’

Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account: ‘This terrible wind. It dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it, this kind of climate is a consequence of how we’re living today—not just us, but your people as well.’

I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking. ‘I have a cornfield,’ she continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the sky and try to pray for rain, but there is no rain, no clouds even ... When we’re like this we don’t even know who we are.’

There was a long moment of silence and the wind rocked the trailer, blowing hard and steady across the mesa as evening fell around us.

I said quietly, ‘Please ask your grandfather if he thinks that anything can now be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind?’

‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she had heard his answer, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they may be able to help themselves and to help others. They have to hold on to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their memories. These are the most important things ... But my grandfather wants to tell you also, and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an intelligent being, a spirit—a creative and intelligent spirit that has designed everything to be the way it is. My grandfather says that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident—whether good or bad—and that there is a reason for everything that takes place ...’

At the millstone grinding

When human beings from around the globe, and from many different cultures, share a powerful and overwhelming intuition that a cataclysm is approaching, we are within our rights to ignore them. And when the voices of our distant ancestors, descending to us through myths and sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical obliteration of a great civilization in remote antiquity (and tell us that our own civilization is in jeopardy), we are entitled, if we wish, to stop our ears ...

So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world: ‘For in those days, before the Flood, people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, right up to the moment that Noah went into the Ark, and they suspected nothing till the flood came and swept all away.’[1301]

In the same manner it has been prophesied that the next global destruction will fall upon us suddenly ‘at an hour we do not suspect, like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west ... The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken ... Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left ...’[1302]

What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again.

And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun ...

Selected Bibliography

Aldred, Cyril, Akhenaton, Abacus, London, 1968.

——Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, London, 1988.

Ancient America, Time-Life International, 1970.

Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (trans. R. O. Faulkner), British Museum Publications, 1989. Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (trans. R. O. Faulkner), Oxford University Press, 1969.

Antoniadi, E. M., L’Astronomie egyptienne, Paris, 1934.

Apocryphal Old Testament (ed. H. F. D. Sparks), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989.

Arguelles, José, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, Bear & Co., Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1987.

Atlas of Mysterious Places (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987.

Aubet, Maria Eugenia, The Phoenicians and the West, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Aveni, Anthony F., Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, University of Texas Press, 1990.

Aztec Calendar: History and Symbolism, Garcia y Valades Editores, Mexico City, 1992.

Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1992.

Bailey, James, The God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1972.

Baines, John and Malek, Jaromir, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1990.

Bauval, Robert and Gilbert, Adrian, The Orion Mystery, Wm. Heinemann, London, 1994.

Bellamy, H. S., Built Before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanaco Ruins, Faber & Faber, London, 1943.

——and Allan, P., The Calendar of Tíahuanaco: The Measuring System of the Oldest Civilization, Faber & Faber, London, 1956.

Berlitz, Charles, The Lost Ship of Noah, W. H. Allen, London, 1989.

Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vintage Books, London, 1991.

Bethon, Simon and Robinson, Andrew, The Shape of the World: The Mapping and Discovery of the Earth, Guilt Publishing, London, 1991.

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[1] Letter reproduced in Charles H. Hapgood FRGS, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton Books, Philadelphia and New York, 1966, p. 243.

[2] Ibid., pp. 93-98, 235. The period lasted from about 13000 bc to 4000 bc according, for example, to the findings of Dr Jack Hough of Illinois University, supported by experts at the Carnegie Institution, Washington DC. John G. Weiphaupt, a University of Colorado specialist in seismology and gravity and planetary geology, is another who supports the view of a relatively late ice-free period in at least parts of Antarctica. Together with a number of other geologists, he places that period in a narrower band than Hough et al.—from 7000 bc to 4000 bc.

[3] Ibid., preface, pp. 1, 209-211.

[4] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, I:440.

[5] Maps of The Ancient Sea Kings, p. 235.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Historians recognize no ‘civilizations’ as such prior to 4000 bc.

[8] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, pp. 220-4.

[9] Ibid., p. 222.

[10] Ibid., p. 193

[11] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (revised edition), Turnstone Books, London, 1979, preface.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., foreword. See also F. N. Earll, foreword to C. H. Hapgood, Path of the Pole, Chilton Books, New York, 1970, p. viii.

[14] From Einstein's foreword (written in 1953) to Charles H. Hapgood, Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958, pp. 1-2.

[15] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966 ed., p. 189.

[16] Ibid., p. 187.

[17] Ibid., p. 189.

[18] Einstein's foreword to Earth's Shifting Crust, p. 1

[19] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, pp. 209-11.

[20] Ibid., p. 1.

[21] Ibid., pp. 76-7 and 231-2.

[22] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (henceforth Maps), p. 79.

[23] Ibid., p. 233.

[24] Ibid., p. 89.

[25] Ibid., p. 90. These maps were made in 1958, International Geophysical Year, by survey teams from several different nations.

[26] Ibid., p. 149.

[27] Ibid., p. 93-6.

[28] Ibid., p. 97.

[29] For a detailed description of the process see Maps, P. 96.

[30] Ibid., page 98.

[31] He left his graffito there. See Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, p. 38, 285.

[32] Maps, p. 102.

[33] Ibid., pp. 103-4.

[34] Ibid., p. 93.

[35] For a fuller discussion of the evidence behind this theory see Part VIII of this book and Hapgood's Earth's Shifting Crust.

[36] Maps, p. 68.

[37] Ibid., p. 222.

[38] Ibid., pp. 64-5.

[39] Ibid., p. 64.

[40] Ibid., p. 65.

[41] Ibid., p. 69.

[42] Ibid., p. 72.

[43] Ibid., p. 65.

[44] Ibid., p. 99.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid., p. 164.

[47] Ibid., p. 159.

[48] See Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989

[49] Maps, p. 159.

[50] Ibid., p. 164.

[51] Ibid., p. 171

[52] Ibid., pp. 171-2.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid., pp. 176-7.

[55] Maps, p. 107.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Simon Bethon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World: The Mapping and Discovery of the Earth, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 117.

[58] Ibid., p. 121.

[59] Ibid., p. 120.

[60] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:289.

[61] Shape of the World, pp. 123-4.

[62] Ibid., p. 125.

[63] Ibid., p. 131.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Maps, pp. 1, 41.

[66] Ibid., p. 116.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., pp. 149-58.

[69] Ibid, p. 152.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Ibid., p. 98.

[72] Ibid., p. 170.

[73] Ibid., p. 173.

[74] Ibid., p. 225ff.

[75] Ibid., p. 228.

[76] Ibid., pp. 244-5.

[77] Ibid., p. 135.

[78] Ibid., p. 139.

[79] Ibid., pp. 139, 145.

[80] Tony Morrison with Professor Gerald S. Hawkins, Pathways to the Gods, Book Club Associates, London, 1979, p. 21. See also The Atlas of Mysterious Places, (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 100.

[81] Pathways to the Gods, p. 21.

[82] Personal communications with Dr Pitluga.

[83] Firm identification of the Nazca spider with Ricinulei was first made by Professor Gerald S. Hawkins. See Gerald S. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge, Arrow Books, London, 1977, p. 143-4.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Ibid., p. 144.

[86] Maria Reiche, Mystery on the Desert, Nazca, Peru, 1989, p. 58.

[87] Luis de Monzon was the corregidor, or magistrate, of Rucanas and Soras, near Nazca, in 1586. Pathways to the Gods, p. 36; Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 100.

[88] See, for example, Father Pablo Joseph, The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru (translated from the Spanish by L. Clark Keating), University of Kentucky Press, 1968.

[89] This is the view of Fernando Montesinos, expressed in his Memorias Antiguas Historiales del Peru (written in the seventeenth century). English edition translated and edited by P. A. Means, Hakluyt Society, London, 1920.

[90] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 6:276-7.

[91] Paul Devereux, Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places, Blandford Books, London, 1992, p. 76. See also Peru, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1991, p. 168.

[92] The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend, London and Oxford, 1988, p. 657.

[93] Macrobius, cited in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, David R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, 1992, p. 134. See also A. R. Hope Moncreiff, The Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, BCA, London, 1992, p. 153.

[94] Peru, p. 181.

[95] Tan. Terumah, XI; also, with slight variations, Yoma 39b. Cited in The Jewish Encyclopaedia, Funk and Wagnell, New York, 1925, vol. II, p. 105.

[96] Peru, p. 182.

[97] The Facts on File Encyclopaedia ..., p. 658.

[98] See, for example, H. Osborne, South American Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1968, p. 81.

[99] For further evidence and argument in this regard, see Constance Irwin, Fair Gods and Stone Faces, W. H. Allen, London, 1964, pp. 31-2.

[100] J. Alden Mason, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p. 135. See also Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Orion Press, New York, 1961, pp. 132-3, 147-8.

[101] South American Mythology, p. 74.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Arthur Cotterell, The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends, Guild Publishing, London, 1989, p. 174. See also South American Mythology, p. 69-88.

[104] Francisco de Avila, 'A Narrative of the Errors, False Gods, and Other Superstitions and Diabolical Rites in Which the Indians of the Province of Huarochiri Lived in Ancient Times', in Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (trans, and ed. Clemens R. Markhem), Hakluyt Society, London, 1873, vol. XLVIII, p. 124.

[105] South American Mythology, p. 74.

[106] Ibid., p. 74-6.

[107] Ibid., p. 78.

[108] Ibid., p. 81.

[109] John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1993, p. 97.

[110] South American Mythology, p. 87.

[111] Ibid., p. 72.

[112] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 26:42.

[113] Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1882, p. 394.

[114] From the 'Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del Piru', reported in The Facts on File Encyclopaedia ..., p. 657.

[115] Pears Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends: Oceania, Australia and the Americas, (ed. Sheila Savill), Pelham Books, London, 1978, pp. 179-80.

[116] South American Mythology, p. 76.

[117] Ibid.

[118] The Conquest of the Incas, p. 191.

[119] Royal Commentaries of the Incas, p. 233.

[120] Ibid., p. 237.

[121] José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Book I, Chapter four, in South American Mythology, p. 61.

[122] Ibid., p. 82.

[123] D. Gifford and J. Sibbick, Warriors, Gods and Spirits from South American Mythology, Eurobook Limited, 1983, p. 54.

[124] Genesis 6:4.

[125] Fr.. Molina, 'Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas', in South American Mythology, p. 61.

[126] Royal Commentaries of the Incas.

[127] The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 237.

[128] Juan de Batanzos, 'Suma y Narracion de los Incas', in South American Mythology, p. 79.

[129] The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 163.

[130] Cited in Zecharia Sitchin, The Lost Realms, Avon Books, New York, 1990, p. 164.

[131] Another scholar, Maria Schulten de D'Ebneth, also worked with mathematical methods (as opposed to historical methods which are heavily speculative and interpretive). Her objective was to rediscover the ancient grid used to determine Machu Picchu's layout in relation to the cardinal points. She did this after first establishing the existence of a central 45° line. In the process she stumbled across something else: ‘The sub-angles that she calculated between the central 45° line and sites located away from it ... indicated to her that the earth's tilt ("obliquity") at the time this grid was laid out was close to 24° o’. This means that the grid was planned (according to her) 5125 years before her measurements were done in 1953; in other words in 3172 bc.’ The Last Realms, pp. 204-5.

[132] Professor Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man, Ministry of Education, La Paz, Bolivia, 1957, volume III p. 192. See also Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Pocket Books, New York, 1977, pp. 77-8: ‘Investigation into the topography of the Andes and the fauna of Lake Titicaca, together with a chemical analysis of this lake and others on the same plateau, has established that the plateau was at one time at sea level, 12,500 feet lower than it is today ... and that its lakes were originally part of a sea-gulf ... Sometime in the past the entire Altiplano, with its lakes, rose from the bottom of the ocean ...’

[133] Personal communication with Richard Ellison of the British Geological Survey, 17 September 1993. Ellison is the author of the BGS Overseas Geology and Mineral Resources Paper (No. 65) entitled The Geology of the Western Corriera and Altiplano.

[134] Tiahuanacu, III, p. 192.

[135] Tiahuanacu, J. J. Augustin, New York, 1945, volume I, p. 28.

[136] Ibid.

[137] See, for example, H.S. Bellamy, Built Before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanaco Ruins, Faber & Faber, London, 1943, p. 57.

[138] Ibid., p. 59.

[139] Tiahuanacu, III, pp. 192-6. See also Bolivia, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1992, p. 156.

[140] Ibid. See also Harold Osborne, Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952, p. 55.

[141] Earth In Upheaval, p. 76: ‘The conservative view among evolutionists and geologists is that mountain-making is a slow process, observable in minute changes, and that because it is a continuous process there never could have been spontaneous upliftings on a large scale. In the case of Tiahuanaco, however, the change in altitude apparently occurred after the city was built, and this could not have been the result of a slow process ...’

[142] See, for example, Ian Cameron, Kingdom of the Sun God: A History of the Andes and Their People, Guild Publishing, London, 1990, pp. 48-9.

[143] Tiahuanacu II, p. 91 and I, p. 39.

[144] South American Mythology, p. 87.

[145] Ibid., p. 44.

[146] Antonio de la Calancha, Cronica Moralizada del Orden de San Augustin en el Peru, 1638, in South American Mythology, p. 87.

[147] Good summaries of the Plutarch account are given in M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian Legends and Stories, Rubicon Press, London, 1990, pp. 24-9; and in E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 178-83.

[148] From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 180.

[149] Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, Book Club Associates, London, 1972, pp. 43, 295.

[150] Ibid., p. 43.

[151] Ibid., p. 295.

[152] Pedro Cieza de Leon, Chronicle of Peru, Hakluyt Society, London, 1864 and 1883, Part I, Chapter 87.

[153] Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas, p. 64. See also Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1990, p. 55.

[154] Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Book Three, Chapter one. See, for example, version published by Orion Press, New York, 1961 (translated by Maria Jolas from the critical annotated French edition of Alain Gheerbrant), pp. 49-50.

[155] Bolivia, p. 156 (map).

[156] H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco: The Measuring System of the Oldest Civilization, Faber & Faber, London, 1956, p. 16.

[157] For a detailed discussion of the hydraulic system of the Akapana see Tiahuanacu: II, pp. 69-79.

[158] Ibid., I, p. 78.

[159] The Lost Realms, p. 215.

[160] Tiahuanacu, II, pp. 44-105.

[161] The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, pp. 17-18.

[162] Tiahuanacu, II, p. 89.

[163] Collins English Dictionary, London, 1982, p. 1015. In addition, Dr John Mason of the British Astronomical Association defined obliquity of the ecliptic in a telephone interview on 7 October 1993: ‘The earth spins about an axis which goes through its centre and its north and south poles. This axis is inclined to the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. This tilt is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The current value for the obliquity of the ecliptic is 23.44 degrees.’

[164] J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N. J. Shackleton, ‘Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’, in Science, vol. 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976, p. 1125.

[165] Anthony F. Aveni, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, University of Texas Press, lago, p. 103.

[166] Tiahuanacu, II, p. 90-1.

[167] Tiahuanacu, II, p. 47.

[168] Ibid., p. 91.

[169] Ibid., I, p. 119.

[170] Ibid., II, p. 183.

[171] Myths from Mesopotamia, (trans, and ed. Stephanie Dalley), Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 326.

[172] Fragments of Berossus, from Alexander Polyhistor, reprinted as Appendix 2 in Robert K. G. Temple, The Sirius Mystery, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1987, pp. 250-1.

[173] Ibid.

[174] Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, 1992, pp. 46, 82-3.

[175] Figures and measurements from The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 92.

[176] Ibid.

[177] Ibid.

[178] See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Paladin Books, London, 1988, p. 145.

[179] Ibid., p. 146.

[180] The calendrical function of the Gateway of the Sun is fully described and analysed by Posnansky in Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man, volumes I-IV.

[181] Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, Paul S. Martin, Richard G. Klein, eds. The University of Arizona Press, 1984, p. 85.

[182] Ibid.

[183] See The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, p. 47. Posnansky's work is also replete with references to Toxodon.

[184] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 11:878.

[185] Ibid., 9:516. See also Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 64-5.

[186] The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, pp. 47-8.

[187] Tiahuanacu, III, p. 57, 133-4, and plate XCII.

[188] Ibid., I, pp. 137-9; Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 64-5.

[189] Tiahuanacu, II, p. 4.

[190] Tiahuanacu, II, p. 156ff; III, p. 196.

[191] Ibid., I, p. 39: ‘An extensive series of canals and hydraulic works, dry at present, but which are all in communication with the former lake bed, are just so many more proofs of the extension of the lake as far as Tiahuanacu in this period.’

[192] Ibid., II, p. 156.

[193] Bolivia, p. 158.

[194] The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 93.

[195] Ibid.

[196] For example on the paving blocks above the Nilometer at Elepantine Island, Aswan. I am indebted to US film maker Robert Gardner for pointing this similarity out to me.

[197] The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt ed. Margaret Burson), Facts on File, New York and Oxford, 1991, p. 23.

[198] Tiahuanacu, I, p. 55.

[199] Ibid., I, p. 39.

[200] Ibid., III, pp. 142-3.

[201] Ibid., I, p. 57.

[202] Ibid., I, p. 56, and II, p. 96.

[203] Quoted in Earth in Upheaval, citing Sir Clemens Markham, pp. 75-6.

[204] Tiahuanacu, III, p. 147.

[205] Ibid.

[206] David L. Browman, ‘New Light on Andean Tiahuanaco’, in American Scientist, volume 69, 1981, pp. 410-12.

[207] Ibid., p. 410. According to Browman: ‘Plant domestication in the Altiplano required the simultaneous development of detoxifying techniques. The majority of the plants [which were in regular use in ancient Tiahuanaco] contain significant levels of toxins in an untreated state. For example, the potato species that are most resistant to frost and that grow best at high altitudes also contain the highest levels of glycoalkaloid solanine. In addition, the potato contains an inhibitor for a wide range of digestive enzymes necessary for breaking down proteins—a particularly unfortunate trait at high altitudes where differential partial oxygen pressure already impairs the chemistry of protein breakdown ...’

The detoxification technique developed at Tiahuanaco to make these potatoes edible also had a preservative effect. Indeed, each of these two important qualities was a by-product of the other. ‘Altiplano farmers’, explains Browman, ‘have, for several thousand years produced the freeze-dried potato, or ch’uno, by a process of freezing, leaching, and sun drying. The initial explanation for this process was that it produced a food product that could be stored for long periods of time ... six years or more ... But we can now suggest another rationale. Leaching and sun-drying are necessary to remove the majority of the solanine and to lower excessive nitrate levels, and the subsequent cooking of freeze-dried products destroys the inhibitors of digestive enzymes. Rather than arguing that freeze-drying was motivated only by a desire to produce a secure food base, one could hold that this technology was mandatory to make the potato available as a usable nutritive source. Both factors are clearly present.

‘The other plants identified as early domesticates at the Titicaca sites have similar levels of toxins, and all require the use of various detoxification techniques to make them suitable for human consumption. Oca has significant amounts of oxalates; quinoa and canihua have high levels of hydrocyanic acid and the alkaloid saponin; amaranth is a nitrate accumulator and has high levels of oxalates; tarwi contains the poisonous alkaloid lupinine; beans contain varying levels of the cyanogenetic glycoside phaseolunatin; and so on ... In some cases the detoxifying procedures serendipitously result in an end-product that has excellent storage features, multiplying the beneficial effects of the technology. Where the detoxification technology does not have this added effect—for example, in the case of quinoa, amaranth and tarwi—the plants generally already have excellent natural storage characteristics. There is as yet no satisfactory explanation for the development of these detoxification processes ...’ ‘New Light on Andean Tiahuanaco’.

[208] At the heart of the system were ‘the earthen platforms about 3 feet high, 30-300 feet long and 10-30 feet wide. These elevated earthworks are separated by canals of similar dimensions and built out of the excavated soil. Over time the platforms were periodically fertilized with organic silt and nitrogen-rich algae scooped from the bottom of the canals during the dry season. Even today ... the sediment in the old canals is much richer in nutrients than the soil of the surrounding plains.

‘But the platform-canal system was not merely a way of enriching infertile ground. It also appears to have created a climate that both extended the high-altitude growing season and helped crops survive hard times. During the area’s frequent periods of drought, for example, the canals provided vital moisture, while the higher level of the platforms raised plants above the worst effects of the region’s frequent floods. Moreover the canal water may have acted as a kind of thermal storage battery absorbing the sun’s heat during the day and radiating it back into the freezing night, to create a blanket of relatively warm air over the growing plants.’ Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients, pp. 56-7.

[209] Ibid.

[210] Evan Hadingham, Lines to the Mountain Gods, Harrap, London, 1987, p. 34.

[211] ‘Aymara is rigorous and simple—which means that its syntactical rules always apply, and can be written out concisely in the sort of algebraic shorthand that computers understand. Indeed, such is its purity that some historians think it did not just evolve, like other languages, but was actually constructed from scratch.’ Sunday Times, London, 4 November 1984.

[212] M. Belts, ‘Ancient Language may Prove Key to Translation System’, Computerworld, vol. IX, No. 8, 25 February 1985, p. 30.

[213] Mexico, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1992, pp. 839.

[214] Ronald Wright, Time Among the Maya, Futura Publications, London, 1991, pp. 343.

[215] Friar Diego de Landa, Yucatan before and after the Conquest (trans, with notes by William Gates), Producción Editorial Dante, Merida, Mexico, 1990, p. 71.

[216] Joyce Milton, Robert A. Orsi and Norman Harrison, The Feathered Serpent and the Cross: The Pre-Colombian God-Kings and the Papal States, Cassell, London, 1980, p. 64.

[217] Reported in Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1992, p. 105.

[218] Ibid., p. 103.

[219] The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, p. 55.

[220] Mary Miller and Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp. 96.

[221] From the Vaticano-Latin Codex 3738, cited in Adela Fernandez, Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, Panorama Editorial, Mexico City, 1992, pp. 21-2.

[222] Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, p. 332. See also Aztec Calendar: History and Symbolism, Garcia y Valades Editores, Mexico City, 1992.

[223] Ibid.

[224] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

[225] Peter Tompkins, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, Thames & Hudson, London, 1987, p. 286.

[226] John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1990, p. 134.

[227] World Mythology, (ed. Roy Willis, BCA, London, 1993, p. 243.

[228] Stuart J. Fiedel, The Prehistory of the Americas, (second edition), Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 312-13.

[229] Professor Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, pp. 275-6. Herbert Joseph Spinden’s correlation gives a slightly earlier date of 24 December, ad 2011. See Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 286.

[230] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 286.

[231] World Mythology, p. 240. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 9:855, and Lewis Spence, The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, Rider, London, 1922, pp. 49-50.

[232] Juan de Torquemada, Monarchichia indiana, volume I, cited in Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 37-8.

[233] North America of Antiquity, p. 268, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 165.

[234] The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 161.

[235] See Nigel Davis, The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 152; The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 141-2.

[236] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 98-9.

[237] Ibid, p. 100.

[238] Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs (introduction by Eric S. Thompson), Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1975, pp. 16-17.

[239] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1989, pp. 437, 439.

[240] Ibid., p. 437.

[241] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 62.

[242] Not only obviously related but specifically related. Votan, for example, was often referred to as the grandson of Quetzalcoatl. Itzamana and Kukulkan were sometimes confused by the Indians who transmitted their legends to Spanish chroniclers shortly after the conquest. See Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 100.

[243] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 347.

[244] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 439.

[245] James Bailey, The God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1972, p. 206.

[246] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 37-8.

[247] According to the sixteenth century chronicler Bernardino de Sahagun: ‘Quetzalcoatl was a great civilizing agent who entered Mexico at the head of a band of strangers. He imported the arts into the country and especially fostered agriculture. In his time maize was so large in the head that a man might not carry more than one stalk at a time and cotton grew in all colours without having to be dyed. He built spacious and elegant houses, and inculcated a type of religion which fostered peace.’

[248] The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 57.

[249] Mexico, pp. 194-5.

[250] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 185, 188-9.

[251] Ibid.

[252] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 437.

[253] The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, pp. 52-3.

[254] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 436.

[255] The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, p. 51.

[256] World Mythology, p. 237.

[257] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 437.

[258] Ibid.

[259] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 139-40.

[260] The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, pp. 35, 66.

[261] Figures from Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 56.

[262] Ibid., p. 12.

[263] Ibid., pp. 3-4.

[264] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.

[265] Mexico, p. 224.

[266] Contemporary account cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.

[267] The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, pp. 228-9.

[268] Ibid.

[269] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 7.

[270] Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 9. See also Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 20.

[271] Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 104.

[272] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 21.

[273] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 34.

[274] Ibid.

[275] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.

[276] Yucatan before and after the Conquest.

[277] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 24.

[278] Diego de Duran, ‘Historia antiqua de la Nueve Espana’, (1585), in Ignatius Donelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 200.

[279] Genesis 11:1-9.

[280] Reported in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, p. 199. See also The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 54, and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 207.

[281] Byron S. Cummings, ‘Cuicuilco and the Archaic Culture of Mexico’, University of Arizona Bulletin, volume IV:8, 15 November 1933.

[282] Mexico, p. 223. See also Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 190.

[283] The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 190.

[284] Ibid.

[285] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 126.

[286] Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 50.

[287] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 139-40.

[288] Ibid., p. 125.

[289] Mexico, p. 637. See also The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 24.

[290] Ibid.

[291] Mexico, p. 638.

[292] Matthew W. Stirling, ‘Discovering the New World’s Oldest Dated Work of Man’, National Geographic Magazine, volume 76, August 1939, pp. 183-218 passim

[293] Matthew W. Stirling, ‘Great Stone Faces of the Mexican Jungle’, National Geographic Magazine, volume 78, September 1940, pp. 314, 310.

[294] The Prehistory of the Americas, pp. 268-71. See also Jeremy A. Sabloff, The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 35. Breaking the Maya Code, p. 61.

[295] The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.

[296] Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 158.

[297] ‘Olmec stone sculpture achieved a high, naturalistic plasticity, yet it has no surviving prototypes, as if this powerful ability to represent both nature and abstract concepts was a native invention of this early civilization.’ The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 15; The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55: ‘The proto-Olmec phase remains an enigma ... it is not really known at what time, or in what place, Olmec culture took on its very distinctive form.’

[298] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 36.

[299] The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.

[300] Ibid., pp. 267-8. The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55.

[301] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 30.

[302] Ibid., p. 31.

[303] The Prehistory of the Americas, pp. 268-9.

[304] Ibid., p. 269.

[305] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 28.

[306] The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 37.

[307] The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 270.

[308] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 144.

[309] Ibid., p. 141-42.

[310] Fair Gods and Store Faces, passim. See also Cyrus H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers Inc, New York, 1971.

[311] See, for example, (a) Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West, Cambridge University Press, 1993; (b) Gerhard Herm, The Phoenicians, BCA, London, 1975; (c) Sabatino Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians, Cardinal, London, 1973.

[312] This can be confirmed in any of the works cited in note 4.

[313] W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin Books, London, 1987, p. 192.

[314] Ibid., p. 38. See also The Egyptian Book of the Dead (trans. E.A. Wallis Budge), British Museum, 1895, Introduction, pp. xii, xiii.

[315] John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky, Harper and Row, New York, 1979, p. 13.

[316] Archaic Egypt, p. 38.

[317] Ibid., pp. 175-91.

[318] Ibid., pp. 31, 177.

[319] Ibid., p. 126.

[320] E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, p. 155.

[321] See, for example, The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 69-70; also Jean-Pierre Hallet, Pygmy Kitabu, BCA, London, 1974, pp. 84-106.

[322] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 82.

[323] Ibid., The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 69-70, and Pygmy Kitabu, pp. 84-106.

[324] Ibid.

[325] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 85.

[326] The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 148.

[327] Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, (English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the translation by Adrian Recinos), University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 163.

[328] Ibid., 164.

[329] Ibid., p. 181; The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 147.

[330] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, (trans. R. O. Faulkner), Oxford University Press, 1969. Numerous Utterances refer directly to the stellar rebirth of the King, e.g. 248, 264, 265, 268, and 570 (‘I am a star which illumines the sky’), etc.

[331] Ibid., Utt. 466, p. 155.

[332] The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, (trans. R. O. Faulkner), British Museum Publications, 1989.

[333] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 37.

[334] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 128-9.

[335] Reproduced in National Geographic Magazine, volume 176, Number 4, Washington DC, October 1989, p. 468: ‘Double Comb is being taken to the underworld in a canoe guided by the “paddler twins”, gods who appear prominently in Maya mythology. Other figures—an iguana, a monkey, a parrot, and a dog—accompany the dead ruler.’ We learn more of the mythological significance of dogs in Part V of this book.

[336] Details are reproduced in John Romer, Valley of the Kings, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, London, 1988, p. 167, and in J. A. West, The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1989, pp. 282-97.

[337] In the case of Ancient Egypt the dog represents Upuaut, ‘the Opener of the Ways’, the bird (a hawk) represents Horus, and the ape, Thoth. See The Traveller’s Key To Ancient Egypt, p. 284, and The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, pp. 116-30. For Ancient Central America see note 15.

[338] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 40.

[339] The Egyptian Book of the Dead (trans. E. A. Wallis Budge), Arkana, London and New York, 1986, p. 21.

[340] See, for example, R. T. Rundle-Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, London, 1991, p. 29.

[341] Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 134. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, e. g. Utts. 20, 21.

[342] Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery, Wm. Heinemann, London, 1994, pp. 208-10, 270.

[343] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 40, 177.

[344] Maya History and Religion, p. 175.

[345] Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 326; Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, 1992, pp. 163-4.

[346] Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 41.

[347] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 169; The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 234.

[348] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 53-4.

[349] Ibid., p. 54.

[350] Ibid. See also Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 177.

[351] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 59; Inga Glendinnen, Aztecs, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 177. See also The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 144.

[352] Mexico, p. 669.

[353] The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 53.

[354] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 53; Mexico, p. 671.

[355] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 53-4; The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 50.

[356] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 54.

[357] Mexico, pp. 669-71.

[358] For further details, see The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 17: ‘These buildings probably confirm knowledge of a large body of star lore.’

[359] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 53.

[360] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 350.

[361] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 44-5.

[362] J. Eric Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Carnegie Institution, Washington DC, 1950, p. 155.

[363] The Atlas of Mysterious Places (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 70.

[364] The Times, London, 4 June 1994.

[365] Quoted in The Atlas of Mysterious Places, pp. 68-9.

[366] Ibid. Michael D. Coe, The Maya, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991, pp. 108-9.

[367] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 94-5.

[368] The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 70.

[369] Time Among the Maya, p. 298.

[370] Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 95-6.

[371] Mexico: Rough Guide, Harrap-Columbus, London, 1989, p. 354.

[372] The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 8. Maya History and Religion, p. 340.

[373] See Chapter Ten.

[374] E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, The Medici Society Ltd., 1911, volume II, p. 180.

[375] John. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1841, vol. II, p. 422.

[376] See Chapter Twelve.

[377] Popol Vuh, p. 167.

[378] Ibid., pp. 168-9.

[379] Ibid., p. 169.

[380] Ibid.

[381] Genesis, 4:22-4

[382] Popol Vuh, Introduction, p. 16. See also The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, p. 250ff.

[383] Popol Vuh, pp. 168-9.

[384] Ibid.

[385] J. Eric Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, Pimlico, London, 1993, p. 13.

[386] William Gates’s notes (p. 81) to Diego de Landa’s Yucatan before and after the Conquest.

[387] This is evident from the Dresden Codex. See, for example, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs, p. 32.

[388] The Maya, p. 176; Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 291; The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 173.

[389] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 287.

[390] The Maya, p. 173.

[391] The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 178-9.

[392] Cited in The Maya, p. 173.

[393] World Mythology, p. 241.

[394] The Maya, p. 176.

[395] The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 170; Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 290.

[396] The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 170.

[397] Ibid., 170-1.

[398] Ibid., 169.

[399] Breaking The Maya Code, p. 275.

[400] Ibid., pp. g, 275.

[401] José Arguelles, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, Bear and Co., Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1987, pp. 26; The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 50.

[402] The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 13-14, 165.

[403] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:214.

[404] The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 168.

[405] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, pp. 25-6.

[406] Ibid., pp. 26-7.

[407] Ancient America, Time-Life International, 1970, p. 45; Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 54; Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

[408] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.

[409] Beyond Stonehenge, pp. 187-8.

[410] Cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 220-1.

[411] Ibid.

[412] Hugh Harleston Jr., ‘A Mathematical Analysis of Teotihuacan’, XLI International Congress of Americanists, 3 October 1974.

[413] Richard Bloomgarden, The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, Editur S. A. Mexico, 1993, p. 14.

[414] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 215.

[415] Ibid., pp. 266-9.

[416] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.

[417] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 221.

[418] The Orion Mystery.

[419] Ibid.

[420] Bernardino de Sahagun, cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.

[421] Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 216.

[422] The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 158.

[423] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

[424] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utt. 667A, p. 281.

[425] The Ancient Kingdoms Of Mexico, p. 74; The Traveller’s Key To Ancient Egypt, pp. 110-35.

[426] See, for example, Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids, University of Chicago Press, 1969.

[427] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 230-3.

[428] Ibid.

[429] The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 282.

[430] Mysteries of ‘the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 11-12.

[431] Ibid.

[432] Ibid., p. 213.

[433] Ibid.

[434] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 72.

[435] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 271-2.

[436] Ibid., p. 232.

[437] Ibid., p. 272.

[438] Ibid.

[439] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 202.

[440] Ibid. The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.

[441] The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.

[442] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8:90, and The Lost Realms, p. 53.

[443] The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.

[444] Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 217.

[445] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 252.

[446] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9:415.

[447] I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin, London, 1949, p. 87.

[448] Ibid.

[449] Ibid., p. 219.

[450] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 55.

[451] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 87, 219.

[452] The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 74.

[453] Mexico, p. 201; The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 156.

[454] The most accessible presentation of Stecchini’s work is in the appendix he wrote for Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 287-382.

[455] See The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 95.

[456] Stecchini, in appendix to Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378. The perimeter of the Great Pyramid equals exactly one-half minute of arc—see Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 279.

[457] The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 20.

[458] Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 335-9.

[459] Ibid.

[460] The Riddle of the Pyramids, pp. 188-93.

[461] The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 281. See also The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 178 and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 226-36.

[462] The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics, London, 1988, p. 61.

[463] Ibid., p. 108.

[464] Ibid., and Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 110.

[465] Myths from Mesopotamia, pp. 112-13; Gilgamesh, pp. 109-11; Edmund Sollberger, The Babylonian Legend of the Flood, British Museum Publications, 1984, p. 26.

[466] Gilgamesh, p. 111.

[467] Ibid.

[468] Extracts from the Book of Genesis, Chapters Six, Seven and Eight:

God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart ... And God said, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence ... And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life from under heaven; and everything that is in the earth shall die.

Saving only Noah and his family (whom he instructed to build a great survival ship 450 feet long x 75 feet wide x 45 feet high), and ordering the Hebrew patriarch to gather together breeding pairs of every living creature so that they too might be saved, the Lord then sent the flood:

In the selfsame day entered Noah and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the wives of his sons with them, into the Ark—they and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto Noah into the Ark, two and two of all flesh wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded, and the Lord shut them in.

And the flood was upon the earth; and the waters increased and bare up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered ... And every man was destroyed, all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

In due course, ‘in the seventh month in the seventeenth day of the month, the Ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month’:

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth.

And he stayed yet another seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off; so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth ... And Noah went forth ... and builded an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled the sweet savour ...

[469] Maya History and Religion, p. 332.

[470] Sir J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law (Abridged Edition), Macmillan, London, 1923, p. 107.

[471] Lenormant, writing in Contemporary Review, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 99.

[472] Popol Vuh, p. 90.

[473] Ibid., p. 93.

[474] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 440; Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 105.

[475] Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 104.

[476] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 445.

[477] Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 105.

[478] Ibid., p. 101.

[479] John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1988, p. 165.

[480] Ibid., pp. 165-6.

[481] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 426.

[482] Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 111-12.

[483] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 431.

[484] Ibid., pp. 428-9; Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 115. In this version the character of Michabo is called Messou.

[485] From Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 117.

[486] Frederick A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered: A Review of the Evidences of Geology, Archaeology, Ancient Literature and the Bible, Pickering and Inglis Ltd., London, 1970, p. 58. Andree was an eminent German geographer and anthropologist. His monograph on diluvial traditions is described by J. G. Frazer (in Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 46-7) as ‘a model of sound learning and good sense set forth with the utmost clearness and conciseness ...’

[487] Reported in Charles Berlitz, The Lost Ship of Noah, W. H. Allen, London, 1989, p. 126.

[488] World Mythology, pp. 26-7.

[489] Ibid., p. 305.

[490] Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 81.

[491] Ibid.

[492] World Mythology, p. 280.

[493] E. Sykes, Dictionary Of Non-Classical Mythology, London, 1961, p. 119.

[494] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 460, 466.

[495] C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames & Hudson, London, 1974, pp. 226-9.

[496] Ibid.

[497] World Mythology, pp. 130-1.

[498] The Gods of the Greeks, pp. 226-9.

[499] World Mythology, pp. 130-1.

[500] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 362.

[501] Ibid., Satapatha Brahmana, (trans. Max Muller), cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 87.

[502] Ibid. See also Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 78-9.

[503] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 7:798. The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, London, 1981, pp. 100-1.

[504] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 48.

[505] From the Theban Recension of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 198.

[506] Genesis, 6:11-13.

[507] 2 Peter 3:3-10.

[508] See H. Murray, J. Crawford et al., An Historical and Descriptive Account of China, 2nd edition, 1836, volume I, p. 40. See also G. Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise, 1875, p. 740.

[509] Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 322.

[510] Ibid.

[511] Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, p. 178.

[512] Worlds in Collision, p. 35.

[513] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:53.

[514] World Mythology, p. 26. Details of the Hopi world destruction myths are in Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi, Penguin, London, 1977.

[515] The Bundahish Chapters I, XXXI, XXXIV, cited in William F. Warren, Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1885, p. 282.

[516] Vendidad, Fargard I, cited in Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Tilak Publishers, Poona, 1956, pp. 340-1.

[517] Vendidad, Fargard II, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 300, 353-4.

[518] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 320.

[519] West, Pahlavi Texts Part I, p. 17, London, 1880.

[520] Ibid.; Justi, Der Bundahish, Leipzig, 1868, p. 5.

[521] The Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 390ff.

[522] The Mythology of South America, pp. 143-4

[523] Ibid., p. 144.

[524] Popol Vuh, p. 178.

[525] Ibid., p. 93.

[526] The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 41.

[527] Maya History and Religion, p. 333.

[528] See Chapter Twenty-four.

[529] Ibid.

[530] National Geographic Magazine, June 1962, p. 87.

[531] The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 79.

[532] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 481.

[533] The Mythology of all Races, Cooper Square Publishers Inc., New York, 1964, volume X, p. 222.

[534] See particularly the writings of Hyginus, cited in Paradise Found, p. 195. See also The Gods of the Greeks, p. 195.

[535] The Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, p. 15-17.

[536] The Iranian Bundahish tells us that the planets ran against the sky and created confusion in the entire cosmos.

[537] The Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, p. 17.

[538] Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 101.

[539] Maya History and Religion, p. 336.

[540] The Mythology of South America, pp. 140-2.

[541] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 275-7.

[542] Maya History and Religion, p. 332.

[543] Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1984, p. 74.

[544] Donald C. Johanson and Maitland C. Eddy, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Paladin, London, 1982, in particular, pp. 28, 259-310.

[545] Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, pp. 47-49, 53-6; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:27-8.

[546] Human Evolution, p. 76.

[547] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 18:831.

[548] Human Evolution, p. 76.

[549] Ibid., p. 72.

[550] Ibid., p. 73.

[551] Ibid., p. 73, 77.

[552] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 12:712.

[553] Path of the Pole, p. 146.

[554] Ibid., p. 152; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:712.

[555] John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, Enslow Publishers, New Jersey, 1979, p. 11.

[556] Ibid., p. 120; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:783; Human Evolution, p. 73.

[557] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 322.

[558] Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.

[559] Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of Countries Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World; entry for 9 January 1834.

[560] Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.

[561] Ibid., pp. 360-1; The Path of the Pole, p. 250.

[562] Quaternary Extinctions, p. 360-1.

[563] Ibid., p. 358.

[564] Donald W. Patten, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch: A Study in Scientific History, Pacific Meridian Publishing Co., Seattle, 1966, p. 194.

[565] The Path of the Pole, p. 258.

[566] David M. Hopkins et al., The Palaeoecology of Beringia, Academic Press, New York, 1982, p. 309.

[567] Professor Frank C. Hibben, The Lost Americans, cited in The Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.

[568] F. Rainey, ‘Archaeological Investigations in Central Alaska’, American Antiquity, volume V, 1940, page 307.

[569] Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.

[570] The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107-8.

[571] A. P. Okladnikov, ‘Excavations in the North’ in Vestiges of Ancient Cultures, Soviet Union, 1951.

[572] The Path of the Pole, p. 255.

[573] A. P. Okladnikov, Yakutia before its Incorporation into the Russian State, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 1970.

[574] The Path of the Pole, p. 250.

[575] The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107. Wragnell, the explorer, observed on Bear Island (Medvizhi Ostrova) that the soil consisted of only sand, ice and such a quantity of mammoth bones that they seemed to be the chief substance of the island. On the Siberian mainland he observed that the tundra was dotted with mammoth tusks rather than Arctic shrubbery.

[576] Georges Cuvier, Revolutions and Catastrophes in the History of the Earth, 1829.

[577] Cited in Path of the Pole, p. 256.

[578] Ivan T. Sanderson, ‘Riddle of the Quick-Frozen Giants’, Saturday Evening Post, 16 January 1960, p. 82.

[579] Path of the Pole, p. 256.

[580] Ibid., p. 256. Winter temperatures fall to 56 degrees below zero.

[581] Ibid., p. 277.

[582] Ibid., p. 132.

[583] R. S. Luss, Fossils, 1931, p. 28.

[584] G. M. Price, The New Geology, 1923, p. 579.

[585] Ibid.

[586] Earth In Upheaval, p. 63

[587] Path of the Pole, p. 133, 176.

[588] The Evolving Earth, Guild Publishing, London, 1989, p. 30.

[589] Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, p. 64.

[590] Path of the Pole, pp. 132-5.

[591] Ibid., p. 137. A major change from glacial to post-glacial conditions occurred about 11,000 years ago. This temperature change was ‘sharp and abrupt’ (Polar Wandering and Continental Drift, Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, Special Publication No. 10, Tulsa, 1953, p. 159). Dramatic climate change around 12,000 years ago is also reported in C.C. Langway and B. Lyle Hansen, The Frozen Future: A Prophetic Report from Antarctica, Quadrangle, New York, 1973, p. 202. See also Ice Ages, pp. 129, 142; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 357: ‘The last 100,000 years of glacial expansion, as recorded by oxygen-isotope ratios in deep-sea cores from the Atlantic and the Equatorial Pacific, terminated ABRUPTLY around 12,000 years ago. A very rapid ice melt caused a rapid rise in sea level... Detailed land fossils show a major movement of plant and animal species at the time, especially into formerly glaciated terrain. American megafaunal extinctions occurred during a time of rapid climatic change as seen in fossil pollen and small animal records.’

[592] Ice Ages, p. 129.

[593] Path of the Pole, p. 137.

[594] ‘The relative change is shown by the change in the relative abundance of cold and warm water planktonic foraminfera, and the absolute change is given by oxygen isotope ratio determinations on the fauna.’ Polar Wandering, p. 96.

[595] The reader may recall that inexplicably warm conditions prevailed in the New Siberian Islands until this time, and it is worth noting that many other islands in the Arctic Ocean were also unaffected for a long while by the widespread glaciations elsewhere (e.g. on Baffin Island the remains of alder and birch trees preserved in peat indicate a relatively warm climate extending at least from 30,000 to 17,000 years ago. It is also certain that large parts of Greenland remained enigmatically ice-free during the Ice Age. Path of the Pole, p. 93, 96.

[596] The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114; Path of the Pole, pp. 47-8.

[597] Ice Ages, p. 11. Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117; Path of the Pole, p. 47.

[598] Ice Ages, p. 11; Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114.

[599] Path of the Pole, p. 150.

[600] Path of the Pole, pp. 148-9, 152, 162-3. In North America, where the ice reached its maximum extent between 17,000 and 16,500 years ago, geologists have made the following discoveries: ‘Leaves, needles and fruits’ that flourished around 15,300 years ago in Massachusetts; ‘A bog which developed over glacial material in New Jersey at least 16,280 years ago, immediately after the interruption of the ice advance.’; ‘In Ohio we have a postglacial sample dated about 14,000 years ago. And that was spruce wood, suggesting a forest that must have taken a few thousand years, by conservative estimate, to get established. What, indeed, does this mean? Does it not clearly suggest that the ice cap, estimated to have been at its maximum at least a mile thick in Ohio, disappeared from Delaware County in that state within only a few centuries?’

Likewise, ‘in the Soviet Union, in the Irkutsk area, deglaciation was complete and postglacial life fully established by 14,500 years ago. In Lithuania another bog developed as early as 15,620 years ago. These two dates taken together are rather suggestive. A bog can develop much faster than a forest. First, however, the ice must disappear. And let us not forget that there was a great deal of ice.’

[601] Ice Ages, p. 11, Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117, Path of the Pole, p. 47.

[602] R. F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch, 1947, pp. 294-5.

[603] Ibid., p. 362.

[604] Earth in Upheaval, p. 43; in general, pp. 42-4.

[605] Ibid., p. 47. Joseph Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena Belonging to the Close of the Last Geological Period and on their Bearing upon the Tradition of the Flood, Macmillan, London, 1895, p. 36.

[606] On Certain Phenomena, p. 48.

[607] Ibid., p. 25-6.

[608] Ibid., p. 50.

[609] Ibid., p. 51-2.

[610] J. S. Lee, The Geology of China, London, 1939, p. 370.

[611] Polar Wandering, p. 165.

[612] J. B. Delair and E.F. Oppe, ‘The Evidence of Violent Extinction in South America’, in Path of the Pole p. 292.

[613] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1:141.

[614] Warren Upham, The Glacial Lake Agassiz, 1895, p. 240.

[615] Human Evolution, p. 92.

[616] Ibid.; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 375.

[617] Human Evolution, p. 92.

[618] Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 57-8.

[619] Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.

[620] Ibid.

[621] J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N.J. Shackleton, ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’, Science, volume 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976, p. 1125.

[622] The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 288-9. Fifteen trillion miles is equivalent to fifteen thousand billion miles.

[623] Ice Ages, pp. 80-1.

[624] Earth in Upheaval, p. 266.

[625] New York Times, 15 April 1951.

[626] Berossus, Fragments.

[627] Skyglobe 3.6.

[628] Roberta S. Sklower, ‘Predicting Planetary Positions’, appendix to Frank Waters, Mexico Mystique, Sage Books, Chicago, 1975, p. 285ff.

[629] Earth in Upheaval, p. 138.

[630] Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 49.

[631] Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.

[632] Ibid.

[633] Path of the Pole, p. 3.

[634] Jane B. Sellers, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 205.

[635] Skyglobe 3.6.

[636] Precise figure from The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205.

[637] Hamlet ‘s Mill, p. 59.

[638] Ibid., p. 58.

[639] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 5:937-8. See also The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205, where the precise figure of 50.274 is given.

[640] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.

[641] Ibid.; Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.

[642] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 65.

[643] Ibid., p. 345.

[644] Ibid., p. 418.

[645] Ibid., p. 245.

[646] Ibid., p. 132.

[647] Ibid., pp. 4-5,348.

[648] Ibid., p. 5.

[649] Livio Catullo Stecchini, ‘Notes on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid’, in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 381-2.

[650] Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vintage Books, London, 1991, p. 276.

[651] The reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five how Yggdrasil, the world tree itself, was not destroyed and how the progenitors of future humanity managed to shelter within its trunk until a new earth emerged from the ruins of the old. How likely is it to be pure coincidence that exactly the same strategy was adopted by survivors of the universal deluge as described in certain Central American myths? Such links and crossovers in myth between the themes of precession and global catastrophe are extremely common.

[652] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.

[653] Grimnismol 23, the Poetic Edda, p. 93, cited in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 199; Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162; Elsa Brita Titchenell, The Masks of Odin, Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, 1988, p. 168.

[654] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 232-3.

[655] Ibid., p. 231.

[656] Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 82.

[657] See, for example, The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 64. It may also be relevant that other versions of ‘the Bacabs’ myth tell us that ‘their slightest movement produces an earth tremor or even an earthquake’ (Maya History and Religion, p. 346).

[658] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.

[659] Ibid.

[660] Grottasongr, ‘The Song of the Mill’, in The Masks of Odin, p. 198.

[661] Ibid., p. 201.

[662] Grottasongr, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 89-90.

[663] Ibid., p. 2.

[664] Ibid.

[665] Ibid., p. 232.

[666] Ibid., p. 204.

[667] Odyssey (Rouse translation), 20:103-19.

[668] Trimalcho in Petronius, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 137.

[669] John Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1:41.

[670] Judges, 16:25-30.

[671] In Japanese myth the Samson character is named Susanowo. See Post Wheeler, The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese, New York, 1952, p. 44ff.

[672] In slightly distorted form in the Popol Vuh’s account of the Twins and their 400 companions (see Chapter Nineteen). Zipcana, son of Vucub-Caquix sees the 400 youths dragging a huge log they want as a ridgepole for their house. Zipcana carries the tree without effort to the spot where a hole has been dug for the post to support the ridgepole. The youths try to kill Zipcana by crushing him in the hole, but he escapes and brings down the house on their heads, killing them all. Popol Vuh, pp. 99-101.

[673] In Maori traditions the Samson character is known as Whakatu. See Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology, London, 1956 (1st ed. 1858), p. 97ff.

[674] Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 104-8.

[675] Ibid., p. 111.

[676] Ibid., 233.

[677] Ibid., 312.

[678] James Mooney, ‘Myths of the Cherokee’, Washington, 1900, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 249, 389; Jean Guard Monroe and Ray A. Williamson, They Dance in the Sky: Native American Star Myths, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1987, pp. 117-18.

[679] The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 70.

[680] Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 33.

[681] Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17.

[682] Judges, 15:4.

[683] Saxo Grammaticus, in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 13.

[684] Ibid., p. 31.

[685] Ibid., pp. 7, 31.

[686] World Mythology, p. 139. It should also be noted that, like Samson, Orion was blind—the only blind figure in constellation mythology. See Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 177-8.

[687] Mercer, The Religion of Ancient Egypt, London, 1946, pp. 25, 112.

[688] Ibid. Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 39: ‘the ancient Egyptians are known to have identified Orion with Osiris’.

[689] Also rendered Wapwewet and Ap-uaut. See, for example, E. A. Wallis Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, Methuen and Co., London, 1904, vol. II, pp. 366-7.

[690] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. L.

[691] Ibid. Though a mill, as such, is nowhere to be seen, many Ancient Egyptian reliefs depict two of the principal characters in the Osiris myth (Horus and Seth) jointly operating a giant drill, again a classic symbol of precession. Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162: ‘This feature is continuously mislabelled the “uniting of the two countries” whether Horus and Seth serve the churn or, as is more often the case, the so-called Nile Gods.’

[692] The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, author biography.

[693] For example by Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery, pp. 144-5.

[694] The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 174.

[695] This phrase was coined by Jane Sellers, whom also detected the precessional calculations embedded in the Osiris myth.

[696] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, page XLIX.

[697] Cited in The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 204.

[698] Ibid.

[699] Ibid., pp. 125-6ff; see also The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

[700] Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205.

[701] Ibid.

[702] Ibid.

[703] Ibid., p. 196.

[704] Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, p. 143.

[705] Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 162-3; see also Atlas of Mysterious Places, pp. 168-70.

[706] See, for example, Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients, Time-Life Books, 1990, p. 65.

[707] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, George G. Harrap and Company, London, 1913, p. 384.

[708] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162.

[709] Rig Veda, 1:164, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 168.

[710] Frances A. Yates, Girodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 93.

[711] Personal communication from AMORC, San Jose, California, November 1994.

[712] Leon Comber, The Traditional Mysteries of the Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, Eastern Universities Press, Singapore, 1961, p. 52.

[713] Ibid., p. 53.

[714] Gustav Schlegel, The Hung League, Tynron Press, Scotland, 1991 (first published 1866), Introduction, p. XXXVII.

[715] For fuller details see The Hung League and J. S. M. Ward, The Hung Society, Baskerville Press, London, 1925 (in three volumes).

[716] W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology: Vedic and Puranic, Heritage Publishers, New Delhi, 1991, p. 353.

[717] Ibid.

[718] Ibid.

[719] Ibid.

[720] Ibid., pp. 353-4.

[721] Ibid., p. 354.

[722] Ibid., p. 247.

[723] For details of these complicated family relationships, see Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLVIIIff.

[724] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 366.

[725] The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 71.

[726] Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 367.

[727] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.

[728] Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX-LI.

[729] Ibid.

[730] Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 32-4.

[731] Ibid., p. 33.

[732] Ibid., p. 119.

[733] See Chapter Twenty-four for details of flood myths. The same kind of convergence among supposedly unconnected myths also occurs with regard to precession of the equinoxes. The mills, the characters who work and own and eventually break them, the brothers and nephews and uncles, the theme of revenge, the theme of incest, the dogs that flit silently from story to story, and the exact numbers needed to calculate precessional motion—all crop up everywhere, from culture to culture and from age to age, propagating themselves effortlessly along the jet-stream of time.

[734] Diodorus Siculus, Book I, 14:1-15, translated by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1989, pp. 47-9.

[735] Galileo, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 10.

[736] Ice Ages; John Imbrie et al., ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’ in Science, volume 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976.

[737] Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 138-9.

[738] ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’.

[739] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 208.

[740] J. H. Cole, Survey of Egypt, paper no. 39: ‘The Determination of the Exact Size and Orientation of the Great Pyramid of Giza’, Cairo, 1925.

[741] The conventional explanations, as given in The Pyramids of Egypt, for example, are entirely unsatisfactory, as Edwards himself admits; see pp. 85-7, 206-41.

[742] Ibid., p. 87.

[743] See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times, University of Texas Press, 1994, p. 17; The Ra Expeditions, p. 15.

[744] The Ra Expeditions, p. 17.

[745] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 132-3.

[746] The Ra Expeditions, p. 16.

[747] See, for example, Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, Penguin Books, London, 1989, pages 89, 108, 113, 283.

[748] A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid Fact Sheet, P.J. Publications, 1989.

[749] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 8.

[750] Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1987, p. 225.

[751] Dr. Joseph Davidovits and Margie Morris, The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, Dorset Press, New York, 1988, pp. 39-40.

[752] Ibid., p. 37.

[753] John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1990, p. 160; The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 229-30.

[754] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 229.

[755] Ibid., p. 85.

[756] Ibid., p. 220.

[757] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 139.

[758] Peter Hodges and Julian Keable, How the Pyramids Were Built, Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1989, p. 123.

[759] Ibid., p. 11.

[760] Ibid., p. 13.

[761] Ibid., p. 125-6. Failure to reach the top would be because spiral ramps and linked scaffolds overlap and exceed the space available long before arrival at the summit.

[762] Ibid., p. 126.

[763] See Chapter Twenty-three; The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 219; Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 139.

[764] Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, Bell Publishing Company, New York, 1990, p. 80.

[765] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 125.

[766] Ibid., p. 87.

[767] ‘One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere,’ Gustave Flaubert commented in his Letters From Egypt. ‘On the top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 rue St Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.’

[768] Skyglobe 3.6.

[769] How the Pyramids Were Built, p. 4-5.

[770] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 232, 244.

[771] Ibid., p. 17.

[772] Cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 90.

[773] Ibid., p. 40. Champollion of course, deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

[774] Herodotus, The History (translated by David Grene), University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 187-9.

[775] The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 54.

[776] Ibid., p. 55.

[777] George Hart, Pharaohs and Pyramids, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 91.

[778] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[779] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.

[780] The Pyramids of Egypt by Professor I. E. S. Edwards is the standard text on the pyramids.

[781] W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (New and Revised Edition), Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1990, p. 21.

[782] John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.

[783] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 11.

[784] The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 120.

[785] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.

[786] The Geography of Strabo, (trans. H. L. Jones), Wm. Heinemann, London, 1982, volume VIII, pp. 91-3.

[787] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.

[788] In general, it is assumed to have been used as an escape route by workers sealed within the pyramid above the plugging blocks in the ascending passage.

[789] Because, over a distance of several hundred feet through solid masonry, it joins two narrow corridors. This could not have been achieved by accident.

[790] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 56-8.

[791] See Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990.

[792] See Valley of the Kings; for Saqqara (Fifth and Sixth Dynasties) see Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 163-7.

[793] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 211-12; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 71.

[794] Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 96.

[795] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 35-6.

[796] Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway To Heaven, Avon Books, New York, 1983, pp. 253-82.

[797] Ibid.

[798] James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, reprinted by Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1988, pp. 83-5.

[799] Ibid., p. 85.

[800] Ibid., p. 84.

[801] Ibid., and Travellers Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 139.

[802] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[803] The Orion Mystery.

[804] Abdul Latif, The Eastern Key, cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 126.

[805] Ibid.

[806] Blue Guide: Egypt, A & C Black, London, 1988, p. 433.

[807] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 127.

[808] It was in this chamber that Vyse found the intrusive burial (of bones and a wooden coffin lid) referred to in Chapter Thirty-Five. The basalt coffin where he also found (later lost at sea) is believed to have been part of the same intrusive burial and to have not been older than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See, for example, Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 433.

[809] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 220.

[810] See, for example, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 180.

[811] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 117.

[812] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123.

[813] The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 49.

[814] Ibid., pp. 36-9.

[815] Ibid., p. 74.

[816] Ibid., p. 42.

[817] Ibid.

[818] The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123; The Pyramids Of Egypt, p. 118.

[819] Diodorus Siculus, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 217.

[820] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 88; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, pp. 30-1.

[821] In the isolated Valley of the Kings in Luxor in upper Egypt, for example.

[822] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 19.

[823] Discussed in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.

[824] Dimension from The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 114.

[825] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.

[826] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 91.

[827] Ibid., p. 88.

[828] Or 51° 50’ 35” to be exact, Ibid., page 87; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 112.

[829] See Chapter Twenty-three.

[830] Ibid.

[831] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

[832] Dimensions from Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 121, and The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

[833] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 24.

[834] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.

[835] The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, p. 428.

[836] Ibid.

[837] Presentation at the British Museum, 22 November 1993, by Rudolf Gantenbrink, of footage shot in the shafts by the robot camera Upuaut.

[838] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 92-3.

[839] Ibid., p. 92; The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 23.

[840] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.

[841] Ibid., p. 93; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.

[842] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

[843] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.

[844] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 281, Utt. 667A.

[845] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

[846] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

[847] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 94.

[848] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 36.

[849] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.

[850] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.

[851] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 30.

[852] Ibid., p. 95.

[853] Livio Catullo Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 322. Stecchini gives slightly more accurate measures than those of Petrie (quoted) for the internal and external dimensions of the pyramid.

[854] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 103.

[855] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 74.

[856] Ibid., p. 76.

[857] Ibid., p. 78.

[858] Ibid.

[859] Ibid., pp. 74-5.

[860] The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 8.

[861] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 75.

[862] The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 118.

[863] Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs, Time-Life Books, 1992, p. 51.

[864] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[865] For example, see Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 25.

[866] Ibid., p. 57. The relevant artefacts are in the Cairo Museum.

[867] Reported in P. W. Roberts, River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt, Random House, New York and Toronto, 1993, p. 115.

[868] Robert Bauval, Discussions in Egyptology No. 29, 1994.

[869] Ibid.

[870] Ibid. See also The Orion Mystery, p. 172.

[871] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 117; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.

[872] John Ivimy, The Sphinx and the Megaliths, Abacus, London, 1976, p. 118.

[873] Ibid.

[874] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 191.

[875] Ibid. See also Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 117-19.

[876] The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.

[877] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 93.

[878] Measurements from The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 106.

[879] W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’.

[880] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 48.

[881] Ibid., p. 50.

[882] Margaret A. Murray, The Splendour that was Egypt, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1987, pp. 160-1.

[883] See Part VII, for a full discussion of the ‘First Time’.

[884] Discussed in Part VII; see also Part III for a comparison of the Osirian rebirth cult and of the rebirth beliefs of Ancient Mexico.

[885] The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 47.

[886] Measurements from The Pyramids and Temples of Egypt, p. 48, and The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 108.

[887] In addition to the three Giza pyramids, the Mortuary Temples of Khafre and Menkaure can be compared with the Valley Temple in terms of their absence of adornment and use of megaliths weighing 200 tons or more.

[888] Serpent in the Sky, p. 211; also Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

[889] For block weights see The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 215; Serpent in the Sky, p. 242; The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 144; The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 51; Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

[890] Personal communication from John Anthony West. See also Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV.

[891] Ancient Records of Egypt, volume I, p. 85.

[892] See, for example, Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, University of California Press, 1976, volume II, pp. 85-6.

[893] Ancient Records of Egypt, volume I, p. 85.

[894] A History of Egypt, 1902, volume 4, p. 80ff, ‘Stela of the Sphinx’.

[895] Ibid.

[896] Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology, University of Chicago Press, 1976.

[897] The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 106-7.

[898] Mark Lehner, 1992 AAAS Annual Meeting, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

[899] Ibid.

[900] Gaston Maspero, The Passing of Empires, New York, 1900.

[901] See Chapter Thirty-five.

[902] For a general summary of these views see John Ward, Pyramids and Progress, London, 1900, pp. 38-42.

[903] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 471-2 and volume II, p. 361.

[904] Interview in Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

[905] Cited in Serpent In The Sky, p. 230.

[906] Ibid., pp. 230-2; Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV.

[907] At least one orthodox Egyptologist, Selim Hassan, has admitted that the jury is still out on this issue. After twenty years of excavations at Giza he wrote, ‘Except for the mutilated line on the Granite Stela of Thutmosis IV, which proves nothing, there is not one single ancient inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre. So, sound as it may appear, we must treat this evidence as circumstantial until such a time as a lucky turn of the spade will reveal to the world definite reference to the erection of this statue.’ Cited in Conde Nast Traveller, February 1993, pp. 168-9.

[908] See, for example, Rosalie David, A Guide to Religious Ritual at Abydos, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1981, in particular p. 121.

[909] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 262-6.

[910] Lucy Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 93.

[911] Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, The Egypt of the Pharaohs at the Cairo Museum, Scala Publications, London, 1987, p. 118.

[912] Ibid.; see also R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, Inner Traditions International, Rochester, 1988, pp. 182-3.

[913] The Orion Mystery.

[914] Ibid.

[915] Ibid.

[916] Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-242.

[917] Ibid., 186-7.

[918] Ibid.

[919] Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

[920] Conde Nast Traveller, February 1993, p. 176.

[921] E.g, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

[922] Mystery of the Sphinx.

[923] John West and Robert Bauval worked in isolation, unaware of each other’s findings, until I introduced them.

[924] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 264.

[925] Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 509; see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 211-15; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 31ff; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 197.

[926] ‘Saqqara, Egypt: Archaeologists have discovered a green limestone obelisk, the world’s oldest-known complete obelisk, dedicated to Inty, a wife of Pharaoh Pepi I, Egypt’s ruler almost 4300 years ago, who was regarded as a goddess after her death.’ Times, London, 9 May 1992; see also Daily Telegraph, London, 9 May 1992.

[927] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, pp. 173-4; Rosalie and Anthony E. David, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Seaby, London, 1992, pp. 133-4; Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 413.

[928] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110.

[929] George Hart, Egyptian Myths, British Museum Publications, 1990, p. 11.

[930] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 66; From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 140.

[931] Papyrus of Nesiamsu, cited in Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, pp. 188-9; see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 141-3.

[932] From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 142. In other readings Shu and Tefnut were spat out by Ra-Atum.

[933] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 27. The figure 3126 is given in some accounts.

[934] The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 13; C. Jacq, Egyptian Magic, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1985, p. 8; The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[935] Kingship and the Gods, p. 153.

[936] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 246.

[937] For a more detailed discussion see The Orion Mystery, p. 17. Bauval suggests that the Benben may have been an oriented meteorite: ‘From depictions it would seem that this meteorite was from six to fifteen tons in mass ... the frightful spectacle of its fiery fall would have been very impressive ...’, p. 204.

[938] The Penguin Dictionary of Religions, Penguin Books, London, 1988, p. 166.

[939] E.g. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX; Qsiris And The Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, pp. 1-11.

[940] humanity.15 Tradition had it that its architect was the legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer and Doctor.16

[941] Ibid., p. 158.

[942] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[943] From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 147: ‘Judging by the Pyramid Texts, the priests of Heliopolis borrowed very largely from the religious beliefs of the predynastic Egyptians ...’ See also The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 11.

[944] The Orion Mystery, pp. 57-8.

[945] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 166; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. V: ‘The Pyramid Texts ... include very ancient texts ... There are many mythological and other allusions of which the purport is obscure to the translator of today ...’

[946] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

[947] Ibid., p. v.

[948] James Henry Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1944, p. 69.

[949] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 882, 883; see also, inter alia, lines 2115 and 2116.

[950] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 117.

[951] He did so on 28 February 1881; see The Orion Mystery, p. 59.

[952] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. v.

[953] Ibid., p. 227, Utt. 572.

[954] Ibid., p. 297, Utt. 688: ‘Atum has done what he said he would do for this King; he ties the rope-ladder for him.’

[955] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 241.

[956] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.

[957] Ibid., p. 97.

[958] Ibid., p. 107.

[959] Ibid., p. 284.

[960] Ibid., p. 249, Utt. 604.

[961] Ibid., pp. 253-4, Utt. 610.

[962] Ibid., p. 280, Utt. 667.

[963] Ibid., p. 170, Utt. 483.

[964] Ibid., p. 287, Utt. 673.

[965] B. Scheel, Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, Shire Egyptology, Aylesbury, 1989; G. A. Wainwright, ‘Iron in Egypt’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 18, 1931.

[966] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 276, 105, 294, 311.

[967] Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, p. 17; ‘Iron in Egypt’, p. 6ff.

[968] Among the many mysterious aspects of the Pyramid Texts it is perhaps inevitable that a fully qualified Opener of the Ways should put in an appearance. ‘The doors of the sky are opened to you, the starry sky is thrown open for you, the jackal of upper Egypt comes down to you as Anubis at your side.’ (The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 288-9, Utt. 675.) Here, as in other contexts, the function of the canine figure seems to be to serve as a guide to secret hoards of esoteric information often linked to mathematics and astronomy.

[969] See Part V for full details.

[970] Ibid.

[971] Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181.

[972] The pouring fire allusion is cited in Jean-Pierre Hallet, Pygmy Kitabu, p. 185.

[973] Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181-5.

[974] Ibid., p. 184.

[975] Ibid., p. 185.

[976] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 94.

[977] Ibid., p. 92-4.

[978] Ibid., p. 93.

[979] Skyglobe 3.6.

[980] See Part IV.

[981] For a detailed discussion see Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy.

[982] The issue of priestly secrecy and the oral tradition is discussed at length in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, e.g. p. 43: ‘It is impossible to think that the highest order of the priests did not possess esoteric knowledge which they guarded with the greatest care. Each priesthood ... possessed a “Gnosis”, a “superiority of knowledge”, which they never put into writing ... It is therefore absurd to expect to find in Egyptian papyri descriptions of the secrets which formed the esoteric knowledge of the priests.’ See also page 27, and Sacred Science, pp. 273-4.

[983] Pyramid Texts cited in The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 158.

[984] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 146.

[985] Sacred Science, pp. 22-5, 29.

[986] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 93.

[987] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 10:845.

[988] The Sirius Mystery.

[989] Ibid., p. 3.

[990] Ibid., p. 1.

[991] See Part III.

[992] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. cxi.

[993] Ibid., p. cxviii. See also The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.

[994] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 8.

[995] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 248.

[996] For a full discussion see Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, particularly pp. 328-30.

[997] Sacred Science, p. 27.

[998] Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 27.

[999] Sacred Science, p. 172.

[1000] Ibid., p. 26-7. For numbers of stars visible to the naked eye see Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion, Collins Guide to Stars and Planets, London, 1984, p. 4.

[1001] Sacred Science, p. 173.

[1002] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 165, line 964. Sacred Science, p. 287.

[1003] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 165, 284; Sacred Science, in particular p. 287ff.

[1004] The established archaeological horizon of the calendar can indeed be pushed back even further because of the recent discovery, in a First Dynasty tomb in upper Egypt, of an inscription reading, ‘Sothis, herald of the New Year’ (reported in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 40.)

[1005] Sacred Science, p. 290.

[1006] Ibid., p. 27.

[1007] E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, (2 volumes), John Murray, London, 1920.

[1008] From Fetish to God In Ancient Egypt, pp. 321-2.

[1009] Ibid., p. 322.

[1010] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[1011] Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 263.

[1012] Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, pp. 263-4; see also Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, Cambridge, 1992, p. 46.

[1013] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16.

[1014] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 84, 161; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 124, 308.

[1015] Osiris And The Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 352.

[1016] Michael Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs, Michael O’Mara Books, 1991, pp. 12-13; Archaic Egypt, pp. 21-3; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 138-9.

[1017] Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 12-13; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 200, 268.

[1018] Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 12.

[1019] Archaic Egypt, p. 23; Manetho, (trans. W. G. Waddell), William Heinemann, London, 1940, Introduction pp. xvi-xvii.

[1020] Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 11.

[1021] Ibid., p. 11-13; Archaic Egypt, pp. 5, 23.

[1022] See, for example, Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 11-13.

[1023] This is a particularly important point to remember in a discipline like Egyptology where so much of the record of the past has been lost through looting, the ravages of time, and the activities of archaeologists and treasure hunters. Besides, vast numbers of Ancient Egyptian sites have not been investigated at all, and many more may lie out of our reach beneath the millennial silt of the Nile Delta (or beneath the suburbs of Cairo for that matter), and even at well-studied locations such as the Giza necropolis there are huge areas—the bedrock beneath the Sphinx for example—which still await the attentions of the excavator.

[1024] Manetho, p. 3.

[1025] Ibid., pp. 3-5.

[1026] Ibid., p. 5.

[1027] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 12:214-15.

[1028] Manetho, p. 5.

[1029] There is absolutely no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians ever confused years and months, or styled one as the other; ibid, p. 4, note 2.

[1030] Ibid., p. 7.

[1031] Ibid., p. 15.

[1032] Ibid., p. 231; see also The Splendour that was Egypt, p. 12.

[1033] Like the Maya, (see Part III), the Ancient Egyptians made use for administrative purposes of a civil calendar year (or vague year) of 365 days exactly. See Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, p. 151, for further details on the Maya vague year. The Ancient Egyptian civil calendar year was geared to the Sothic year so that both would coincide on the same day/month position once every 1461 calendar years.

[1034] Diodorus Siculus, translated by C.H. Oldfather, Harvard University Press, 1989, jacket text.

[1035] Ibid., volume I, p. 157.

[1036] The History, pp. 193-4. In the first century ad a similar tradition was recorded by the Roman scholar Pomponious Mela: ‘The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in the part of the sky where it rises today.’ (Pomponious Mela, De Situ Orbis.)

[1037] Sacred Science, p. 87

[1038] As the following table makes clear:

VERNAL EQUINOX	SUNRISE	IN OPPOSITION (DUE WEST) AT SUNRISE
Fifth century bc (time of Herodotus)	Aries	Libra
Approx 13,000 years before Herodotus	Libra	Aries
Approx 26,000 years before Herodotus	Aries	Libra
Approx 39,000 years before Herodotus	Libra	Aries

[1039] See, for example, Sir A.H. Gardner, The Royal Cannon of Turin, Griffith Institute, Oxford.

[1040] Archaic Egypt, p. 4.

[1041] For further details, Sacred Science, p. 86.

[1042] Ibid., p. 86. See also Egyptian Mysteries, p. 68.

[1043] Archaic Egypt, p. 5; Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 200.

[1044] Archaic Egypt, p. 5; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 9:81.

[1045] Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 200.

[1046] Archaic Egypt, p. 5.

[1047] Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, p. 12.

[1048] Kingship and the Gods, pp. 181-2; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 209, 264; Egyptian Myths, pp. 18-22. See also T. G. H. James, An Introduction to Ancient Egypt, British Museum Publications, London, 1979, p. 125ff.

[1049] Cyril Aldred, Akhenaton, Abacus, London, 1968, p. 25: ‘It was believed that the gods had ruled in Egypt after first making it perfect.’

[1050] Kingship and the Gods, pp. 153-5; Egyptian Myths, pp. 18-22; Egyptian Mysteries, pp. 8-11; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 10-28.

[1051] See Part IV.

[1052] Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 37.

[1053] Ibid.

[1054] Mystic Places, Time-Life Books, 1987, p. 62.

[1055] Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt, p. 13; Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 27, 261.

[1056] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 11.

[1057] Ibid., p. 13.

[1058] Ibid., pp. 14-15.

[1059] Ibid.

[1060] Hebrews 9:4. For details of the Ark’s baleful powers see Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, Mandarin, London, 1993, Chapter 12, p. 273ff.

[1061] Cited in Egyptian Myths, p. 44.

[1062] Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, London, 1901, p. 5; The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 214.

[1063] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 27. If Set’s usurpation is included as a reign, we have seven divine pharaohs up to and including Thoth (i.e., Ra, Shu, Geb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth).

[1064] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400; Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 22-3. see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 121-2; Egyptian Magic, pp. 128-9; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 27-8.

[1065] Manetho, quoted by the neo-Platonist Iamblichus. See Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded, Element Books, 1989, p. 15; The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.

[1066] See, for example, Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 53, where Thoth (under his Greek name of Hermes) is described as being ‘endowed with unusual ingenuity for devising things capable of improving the social life of man’.

[1067] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 307.

[1068] Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 179; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16.

[1069] New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 9-10, 16; Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 44; The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 130-1; From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 190; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 230.

[1070] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 2.

[1071] Chapter CXXV, cited in ibid., volume II, p. 81.

[1072] See Parts II and III for Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha. A good summary of Osiris’s civilizing attributes is the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16. See also Diodorus Siculus, pp. 47-9; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, pp. 1-12.

[1073] Diodorus Siculus, p. 53.

[1074] Ibid.; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 2.

[1075] Diodorus Siculus, p. 55.

[1076] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 11.

[1077] Ibid., p. 2.

[1078] Ibid., 2-11. For Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha see Parts II and III. Interestingly enough, Osiris was said to have been accompanied on his civilizing mission by two ‘openers of the way’: (Diodorus Siculus page 57), ‘Anubis and Macedo, Anubis wearing a dog’s skin and Macedo the fore-parts of a wolf ...’

[1079] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 273. See also in general, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

[1080] Archaic Egypt, p. 122; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 98.

[1081] See, in general, Kingship and the Gods; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection; The Gods of the Egyptians.

[1082] Archaic Egypt, p. 38.

[1083] Manetho, p. 5.

[1084] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[1085] Dates from Atlas of Ancient Egypt. For further data on Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus see Profuses K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1982, pp. 70-1.

[1086] See, for example, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, pp. 135-7.

[1087] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 384.

[1088] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 285, 253.

[1089] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 386.

[1090] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 59.

[1091] Chapter 175 of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, cited in Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 137.

[1092] See Henry Frankfort, The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, 39th Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Society, London, 1933, p. 25.

[1093] The Geography of Strabo, volume VIII, pp. 111-13.

[1094] Margaret A. Murray, The Osireion at Abydos, Egyptian Research Account, ninth year (1903), Bernard Quaritch, London, 1904, p. 2.

[1095] Ibid.

[1096] The Times, London, 17 March 1914.

[1097] Ibid.

[1098] Ibid.

[1099] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 391.

[1100] The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 18.

[1101] Ibid., p. 28-9.

[1102] E. Naville, ‘Excavations at Abydos: The Great Pool and the Tomb of Osiris’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, volume I, 1914, p. 160.

[1103] The Times, London, 17 March 1914.

[1104] Ibid.

[1105] The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, pp. 4, 25, 68-80.

[1106] Ibid., in general.

[1107] ‘Excavations at Abydos’, pp. 164-5.

[1108] The Splendour that was Egypt, pp. 160-1.

[1109] The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 23.

[1110] Guardian, London, 21 December 1991.

[1111] David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, in Expedition, volume 33, No. 3, 1991, p. 7ff.

[1112] Ibid., pp. 9-10.

[1113] Sent to me by fax 27 January 1993.

[1114] David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, p. 12.

[1115] Ibid., p. 11-12.

[1116] Guardian, 21 December 1991.

[1117] See Cairo Museum, Gallery 54, wall-painting of ships from Badarian period c. 4500 bc.

[1118] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 192, Utt. 519: ‘O Morning Star, Horus of the Netherworld ... you having a soul and appearing in front of your boat of 770 cubits ... Take me with you in the cabin of your boat.’

[1119] Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.

[1120] To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century bc) passing on what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt [fourth century bc], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.

[1121] Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.

[1122] Ibid., p. 90.

[1123] A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.

[1124] Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 88.

[1125] Fred Wendorff and Romuald Schild, Prehistory of the Nile Valley, Academic Press, New York, 1976, p. 291.

[1126] Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 89-90.

[1127] Ibid., p. 86.

[1128] Ibid., pp. 97-8.

[1129] Ibid., p. 161.

[1130] See Chapter Twelve.

[1131] Ibid.

[1132] Ibid.

[1133] AAAS Annual Meeting, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

[1134] Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt; Serpent in the Sky, p. 20.

[1135] Sacred Science, p. 96.

[1136] West’s detailed evidence is set out in Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-20. Concerning the covering of the Sphinx by sand he arrives at the following table:

	Sphinx buried
Chephren-Tuthmosis IV c. 1300 years	1000 years
Thuthmosis IV-Ptolemies c. 1100 years	800 years
Ptolemies-Christianity c. 600 years	0 years
Christianity-Present day c. 1700 years	1500 years
Chephren-present day, c. 4700 years	3300 years

[1137] ‘An abstract of our team’s work was submitted to the Geological Society of America, and we were invited to present our findings at a poster session of at the GSA convention in San Diego—the geological Superbowl. Geologists from all over the world thronged to our booth, much intrigued. Dozens of experts in fields relevant to our research offered help and advice. Shown the evidence, some geologists just laughed, astounded [as Schoch had been initially] that in two centuries of research, no one, geologist or Egyptologist, had noticed that the Sphinx had been weathered by water.’ Serpent in the Sky, p. 229; Mystery of the Sphinx. NBC-TV, 1993. 275 geologists endorsed Schoch’s findings.

[1138] AAAS, Annual Meeting 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

[1139] Mystery of the Sphinx.

[1140] Ibid.

[1141] Ibid.

[1142] Ibid.

[1143] Ibid.

[1144] AAAS Annual Meeting 1992.

[1145] Ibid. The relevant geologists include Farouk El Baz, and Roth and Raffai.

[1146] Extracts from Mystery of the Sphinx and AAAS meeting.

[1147] Under the category of anomalies, West made specific reference to the bowls carved out of diorite and other hard stones described in Part VI.

[1148] 'After reviewing my various drawings, schematics and measurements, my final conclusion concurs with my initial reaction: the two works represent two separate individuals. The proportions in the frontal view and especially the angles and facial protrusion in the lateral views, convinced me that the Sphinx is not Khafre. If the ancient Egyptians were skilled technicians and capable of duplicating images, then these two works cannot represent the same individual.' Frank Domingo, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 232. See also AAAS 1992, for Schoch's views on the recarving of the Sphinx's head.

[1149] Collins English Dictionary, p. 608.

[1150] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 38. Much of the material in this chapter is based directly on the work of Peter Tompkins and of Professor Livio Catullo Stecchini.

[1151] Ibid., p. 46.

[1152] Ibid., p. 181.

[1153] Ibid., p. 299.

[1154] Ibid., pp. 179-81.

[1155] Cited in Ibid., p. 333.

[1156] See Chapter Twenty-three, and Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378.

[1157] See Chapter Twenty-three.

[1158] Accepted, for example, by Edwards, Petrie, Baines and Malek, and so on.

[1159] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.

[1160] The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 87.

[1161] See Part V.

[1162] Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 189.

[1163] Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, p. 17ff.

[1164] See, for example, The Shape of the World, p. 23.

[1165] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.

[1166] Ibid., volume I, p. 443; volume II, pp. 7, 287.

[1167] Ibid., volume II, p. 7, where the deity Amen-Ra is addressed in a hymn: ‘The gods love the smell of thee when thou comest from Punt, thou eldest-born of the dew, who comest from the Divine Land (Ta-Neteru).’ See also volume II, p. 287. Punt is thought by many scholars to have been located on the Somali coast of East Africa where the trees that produce frankincense and myrrh (‘the food of the gods’) are still grown today.

[1168] Ibid.

[1169] Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 98; Pyramid Texts of Pepi I, Mer-en-Rah and Pepi II, translated in Ibid., volume II, p. 316, where the maritime connections of the land of the blessed are made clear.

[1170] Ibid., volume I, p. 97.

[1171] Ibid., pp. 97-8.

[1172] Ibid., volume II, p. 307.

[1173] Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, Newnes Books, London, 1986, p. 84.

[1174] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 407-8.

[1175] Ibid., volume I, p. 414.

[1176] Egyptian Mythology, p. 85.

[1177] The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 414.

[1178] Ibid., pp 414-15.

[1179] The History, 2:4.

[1180] Reported in E. M. Antoniadi, L’Astronomie egyptienne, Paris, 1934, pp. 3-4; see also Schwaller, p. 279.

[1181] Diodorus Siculus, volume I, pp. 279-80.

[1182] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, for example pp. 78, 170, 171, 290.

[1183] Robert Bauval’s The Orion Mystery (Heinemann, London; Crown, New York; Doubleday, Canada; List, Germany; Planeta, Spain; Pygmalion, France, etc.) was an international bestseller when it was published in 1994. Egyptologists closed ranks against its implications, which they refused to discuss, but many distinguished astronomers hailed Bauval’s findings as a breakthrough.

[1184] Virginia Trimble, cited in The Orion Mystery, p. 241.

[1185] Ibid., p. 172.

[1186] Personal communications/interviews, 1993-4.

[1187] Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

[1188] Personal communications/interviews.

[1189] Skyglobe 3.6.

[1190] Personal communications/interviews.

[1191] Skyglobe 3.6

[1192] Personal communications/interviews.

[1193] See Chapters Forty-two to Forty-four.

[1194] ‘The Egyptians ... believed that they were a divine nation, and that they were ruled by kings who were themselves gods incarnate; their earliest kings, they asserted, were actually gods, who did not disdain to live on earth, and to go about up and down through it, and to mingle with men.’ The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 3.

[1195] The Mortuary Temple was excavated by von Sieglin in 1910 and was found to consist of blocks of varying sizes weighing ‘between 100 and 300 tons’. Blue Guide: Egypt, p. 431.

[1196] Just as any great Christian cathedral, however modern (for example the twentieth-century gothic cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco), expresses the thinking, symbolism and iconography of the Judaeo-Christian ‘cult’ which has roots at least 4000 years old, it should not be impossible to imagine a cult enduring for 8000 years in Ancient Egypt and thus linking the epoch of 10450 bc to 2,450 bc. The completion of the pyramids at that time, like the completion of a cathedral today, would therefore have resulted in structures that expressed extremely old ideas. Plentiful evidence exists within Ancient Egyptian tradition which seems to attest to the existence and preservation of such ancient ideas. For example, ‘King Nefer-hetep [XIIIth Dynasty] was a loyal worshipper of Osiris and hearing that his Temple [at Abydos] was in ruins, and that a new statue of the god was required, he went to the temple of Ra-Atum at Heliopolis, and consulted the books in the library there, so that he might learn how to make a statue of Osiris which should be like that which had existed in the beginning of the world ...’ (Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 14). Also Sacred Science; pp. 103-4, explains that the construction of temples in the Ptolemaic and late periods of Egyptian history continued to obey very ancient specifications: ‘All the plans always refer to a divine book; thus the temple of Edfu was rebuilt under the Ptolemies according to the book of foundation composed by Imhotep, a book descended from heaven to the north of Memphis. The temple of Dendera followed a plan recorded in ancient writings dating from the Companions of Horus.’

[1197] Hamlet’s Mill, p. 59.

[1198] Ibid.; Sacred Science, p. 179.

[1199] Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 514.

[1200] Sacred Science, p. 177.

[1201] Genesis: 22:13

[1202] Jerusalem Bible, chronological table, p. 343.

[1203] King James Bible, Franklin, Computerized First Edition.

[1204] The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 20.

[1205] Ibid., p. 133.

[1206] Sacred Science, p. 177.

[1207] As early as 3000 bc. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:731.

[1208] Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 27, 171.

[1209] Skyglobe 3.6.

[1210] Galanopoulos and Bacon, Lost Atlantis, p. 75.

[1211] See, for example, Brian Inglis, Coincidence, Hutchinson, London, 1990, p. 48ff.

[1212] When the Sky Fell, with an Introduction by Colin Wilson and Afterword by John Anthony West, is published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995.

[1213] See Part I.

[1214] Ibid.

[1215] Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.

[1216] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.

[1217] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.

[1218] Discover The World Of Science, February 1993, p. 17. The fifteen mineralized tree stumps, presumably the remnant of a much larger forest, range from three and a half to seven inches in diameter. They were saplings of a well-known genus of seed fern, Glossopteris [found in much of the southern hemisphere’s coal]. Unlike true ferns, seed ferns had seeds instead of spores, were often treelike, and are now extinct ... All around the Mount Achernar tree stumps, Taylor’s colleagues found the tongue-shaped imprints of fallen Glossopteris leaves.

Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.

‘In our memory Antarctica has always been cold,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s only by looking at fossil floras that we can see what potential there is for plant communities. This fossil forest, growing at 85 degrees latitude, gives us some idea of what is possible with catastrophic climate change.’ n.b. The trees were killed by a flood or mudflow—another impossibility in Antarctica today.

[1219] The Path of the Pole, p. 61.

[1220] Ibid., pp. 62-3.

[1221] In Dolph Earl Hooker, Those Astounding Ice Ages, Exposition Press, New York, 1958, page 44, citing National Geographic Magazine, October 1935.

[1222] Path of the Pole, p. 62.

[1223] Rand Flem-Ath, Does the Earth’s Crust Shift? (MS.).

[1224] Daniel Grotta, ‘Antarctica: Whose Continent Is It Anyway?’, Popular Science, January 1992, p. 64.

[1225] Path of the Pole, p. 107.

[1226] See Part I.

[1227] Path of the Pole, p. 111ff.

[1228] See Part I for details.

[1229] The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 109-10.

[1230] Path of the Pole, p. 66.

[1231] Ibid., pp. 93, 96.

[1232] Ibid., p. 99.

[1233] See Part IV.

[1234] Ibid.

[1235] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440; John White, Pole Shift, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 65.

[1236] Pole Shift, p. 77: Twenty billion tons of ice are added each year at Antarctica.

[1237] H. A. Brown, Cataclysms of the Earth, pp. 10-11.

[1238] See Part IV.

[1239] Ibid.

[1240] Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 228.

[1241] Thomas Huxley cited in Path of the Pole, p. 294.

[1242] Scientific American, December 1985.

[1243] Path of the Pole, pp. 47-9.

[1244] Ibid., p. 49.

[1245] Ibid., p. 58.

[1246] See Part IV.

[1247] The Mahabaratha, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 64-5.

[1248] Ibid., pp. 66-7.

[1249] Cited in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, p. 199.

[1250] Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 81.

[1251] Ibid., p. 85.

[1252] Ibid., pp. 414, 417.

[1253] Ibid., p. 420.

[1254] Pole Shift, p. 9.

[1255] Ibid.

[1256] Ibid., p. 61.

[1257] Nature, volume 234, 27 December 1971, pp. 173-4; New Scientist, 6 January 1972, p. 7.

[1258] J. M. Harwood and S. C. R. Malin writing in Nature, 12 February 1976.

[1259] The Path of the Pole, op. cit., Appendix, pp. 325-6.

[1260] Ibid., p. 44.

[1261] USA Today, 23 November 1994, p. 9D.

[1262] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36.

[1263] The Bhagavata Purana, Motilal Banardass, Delhi, 1986, Part I, pp. 59, 95.

[1264] Ibid., p. 60.

[1265] Dileep Kumar Kanjilal, Vimana in Ancient India, Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta, 1985, p. 16.

[1266] Ibid., p. 17.

[1267] Ibid., p. 18.

[1268] Ibid.

[1269] Ibid.

[1270] Ibid., p. 19.

[1271] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.

[1272] The Complete Works Of Josephus, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991, p. 27.

[1273] Ibid.

[1274] John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.

[1275] Popol Vuh, p. 168.

[1276] Ibid., p. 169.

[1277] Ibid., p. 79.

[1278] Ibid., p. 79-80.

[1279] The Bhagavata Purana, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 88.

[1280] Berossus Fragments cited in The Sirius Mystery, p. 249.

[1281] Ibid.

[1282] 2 Peter 3:10.

[1283] The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.

[1284] By Robert Bauval, personal communication.

[1285] See Part VII.

[1286] 1 Enoch, LXV, in The Apockryphal Old Testament (ed. H.F.D. Sparks), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 247.

[1287] Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

[1288] Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.

[1289] Will The World Survive? Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1992.

[1290] Circulating File, Earth Changes, Extracts from the Edgar Cayce Readings, Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 36.

[1291] See Part V.

[1292] Manetho, pp. 191-3.

[1293] The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:

‘One way of resolving the controversy of the ages of the Sphinx and the Pyramids may be through the application of Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating. This provides an estimate of the time that has elapsed since a rock was first exposed to the atmosphere. In the case of the Sphinx and the Pyramids this would be when the rocks were first exposed by quarrying activity ...’

In 1994 Bowen ran preliminary tests on the famous ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge in England, hitherto believed to date to 2250 bc. What the tests showed was that these 123 four-ton monoliths could have been quarried during the last Ice Age—perhaps as early as 12000 bc. See The Times, London, 5 December.

[1294] Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

[1295] 2 Peter 3:4.

[1296] 2 Peter 3:3.

[1297] Community Profile: Hopi Indian Reservation, Arizona Department of Commerce.

[1298] Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.

[1299] Book of the Hopi.

[1300] World Mythology, p. 26.

[1301] Matthew, 24: 38-39.

[1302] Matthew, 24: 27-41.