Over the past century, man has become increasingly perplexed by the mysteries of the Ancient World, enigmas which continue to defy the greatest scientific and archaeological brains of our day.
Best-selling author Graham Hancock has written a provocative book which challenges the existing widoms about our past. Having travelled the world on a five-year odyssey, he has collected evidence which points to an advanced civilisation which flourished before the last Ice Age.
Did such a race of ‘gods’ exist? Were they responsible for building such monumental edifices as the Great Sphinx of Egypt and the titanic structures that surround it; the strange Andeantemples of Tiahuanaco; Mexico’s awesome Pyramids of the Sun and Moon? And did they construct such wondrous creations as a warning of impending apocalypse in our own time – perhaps a repetition of the same cataclysm that wiped their civilisation from the face of the earth?
In the first of these extracts, Hancock explains the mysteries that lured him to embark upon his quest.
Having travelled the world on a five-year odyssey, best-selling author Graham Hancock has collected evidence which points to an advanced civilisation which flourished before the last Ice Age
The letter was written in dry, official deadpan language. Which is hardly surprising since it was signed by Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Ohlmeyer who, as commander of the Reconnaissance Technical Squadron of the United States Air Force, was not given to exaggeration or fantasy.
The date was July 6, 1960, and Ohlmeyer was writing to Professor Charles Hapgood, an American Professor of History, who had asked him to ‘evaluate certain unusual features’ of a 16th-century map which had been drawn in Constantinople in 1513. The map clearly shows the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa.
But the extraordinary thing is that it also shows land at the South Pole – 300 years before scientists first discovered that Antarctica existed under the polar ice cap!
Though Ohlmeyer’s words were measured, the implications of what he was saying were incredible: ‘Your request for the evaluation of the Piri Reis World Map of 1513 has been reviewed. The claim that the map portrays the coast of Antarctica is reasonable. We find this the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map.
‘The geographical detail in the map agrees very remarkably with the seismic profile of Antarctica made by the Swedish-British Antarctica Expedition of 1949.’
Then came the devastating conclusion: ‘This indicates that the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap. The ice cap in this region is now about one mile thick.’
Lt-Col Ohlmeyer was saying that this 16th-century map accurately and precisely charted the true coast of Antarctica, even though, in the 16th-century, Antarctica’s coasts and interior had been buried under ice for a million years, according to conventional wisdom, long before the human species came into existence.
The official discovery of Antarctica by our own civilisation took place in 1818. So what can explain the mystery of the Piri Reis map?
The immediate reaction is, of course, that the Piri Reis map must be some kind of elaborate hoax, a sort of cartological Turin Shroud.
But the map is a genuine historical document, made in Constantinople in the year 1513 under the direction of Piri Reis, an Admiral in the Turkish navy.
The map that bears his name was rediscovered, painted on a gazelle skin and rolled up on a dusty shelf in the library of the old Imperial Palace at Constantinople, in 1929.
In Piri Reis’s lifetime, Antarctica was certainly covered with ice, to a depth that would have prevented anyone working out where the true coastline lay. And yet Lt-Col Ohlmeyer, applying all the resources of the 20th-century military surveying, concluded that the Turkish admiral had got the under-ice coastline of the Antarctic continent exactly right – back in 1513.
So if the map isn’t a hoax, what other explanation can there be? No one in their right mind would assert the map is based on sources which date back millions of years to the time when Antarctica is assumed to have been ice-free. But what if Antarctica was free of ice more recently than that?
We assume that Antarctica has always been covered in ice because the continent is situated at the South Pole, and the South Pole is covered in ice. However, it is feasible that the continent might have moved.
This theory was first put forward in the Fifties by Professor Hapgood and endorsed by no less than Albert Einstein.
Put at its simplest, it suggests that Antarctica once lay not in polar regions but northwards in the comparatively warm South Atlantic or Pacific. I will return to this subject later in the series, but geological evidence suggests that the northern coast of Antarctica passed through an ice-free period around the year 13000 BC, a period which did not come to an end until about 6,000 years ago. In itself, the theory of Earth-Crust Displacement does no remove the mystery of the Piri Reis map.
Yet Piri Reis did not claim to have surveyed Antarctica himself. He admitted that his skill was as a compiler and copyist and that his own map was derived from a large number of other sources.
Did such a race of ‘gods’ exist? Were they responsible for building such monumental edifices as the Great Sphinx of Egypt and the titanic structures that surround it; the strange Andeantemples of Tiahuanaco; Mexico’s awesome Pyramids of the Sun and Moon?
Some of his information came from explorers of his own time, including Christopher Columbus. But he also used documents dating back to the fourth century BC or earlier, which may themselves have been copies of even earlier documents.
Even so, a problem remains. The earliest known civilisation on Earth, the Sumerian, began around 3000 BC – 1,000 years after the ice-free period in Antarctica had ended.
If Piri Reis’s map were the only one to show the Antarctic, we could perhaps set it aside as a coincidence. But a number of other maps, all of which have the characteristic of having been copied or compiled from more ancient documents, show the same ice-free northern coast that features in the Piri Reis map – and in some cases the interior of the continent, too- and appear to document its gradual but relentless glaciation between 13000 BC and 4000 BC.
The most remarkable map of all is the one drawn by Phillipe Buache, in France in the 18th Century, still a century before the continent was officially ‘discovered’. The map like the others, was copied from an earlier source, now lost. It depicts the continent’s entire land mass as it would have looked before ice covered it, thus raising the astonishing possibility that it was previously and scientifically mapped as early as 13000 BC. Remember, orthodox historians insist that this was the Stone Age, when men were barely capable of drawing on cave walls, let alone calculating accurate maps.
Where could all these incredible maps of Antarctica have come from? And which, as yet unidentified, geographers of remote prehistory could have succeeded in charting the continent so perfectly before the ice overwhelmed it for ever?
Could we be looking at the fingerprints of a vanished civilisation, a civilisation capable of drawing impressively accurate maps of widely separated parts of the Earth? For South America, Australia, China and many other regions also feature in these remarkable documents, represented with the same precision.
What kind of technology and what science and culture, would have been required to do a job like that? It would imply skilled mathematics – you cannot map a round world on a flat parchment without advanced knowledge of trigonometry. It needs accurate clocks – without them, you cannot find the longitudes of the places you are mapping.
Is it possible that a civilisation sufficiently advanced to have drawn such maps could have developed somewhere on Earth before 13000 BC, millennia before Sumer or the pharaohs of Egypt, and then completely disappeared?
FLIGHT OF THE CONDOR
There is another place where sophisticated mathematics and accurate surveying techniques from an unknown civilisation have left their mark – on the Nazca Desert in Peru. I decided to go to Peru to see what I could find out.
You join me several months later on a flight over the mysterious Nazca Lines of southern Peru, those gigantic prehistoric sculptures marked out in the desert that can be seen only from the air.
Below me are the massive figures of a whale and a monkey, then a humming bird comes into view, flutters and unfolds her wings, stretches her delicate beak towards some imaginary flower. Next we fly over that fabulous snake-necked heron, 900ft long, marked out in the desert sand and conceived in the mind of a master geometer.
We pass an astonishing arrangement of fish and triangles laid out beside a pelican, and float over the sublime giant condor with feathers extended.
Below us now is a pair of parallel lines almost two miles long, arrow-straight all the way to vanishing point. And to the right, a series of abstract shapes on a scale so vast, and yet so precise, it seems inconceivable that they could have been the works of men.
The people here say they were not the works of men but demi-Gods called the Viracochas, visitors who also left their fingerprints elsewhere in the Andes thousands of years ago.
At ground level, the desert drawings are almost impossible to see. They are too large in scale, for one thing and physically they are nothing more than grazes on the surface, where black volcanic pebbles have been scraped away to show the pale desert beneath.
This is the one pace on Earth where such markings could, geologically, be guaranteed to last for thousands of years – the desert wind is robbed of its power by the small pebbles that reflect heat and force air currents upwards, away from them.
It is impossible to date these figures accurately. Inexplicably, those showing animals and birds – the really complicated ones- seem to have been made before the comparatively simpler, geometric designs – the triangles, trapezoids and rectangles – and straight lines more than five miles long, which are sometimes drawn on top of them.
They are at least 1,400 years old. It is theoretically possible, however, that they could be much more ancient.
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (Century, £22.99). © Graham Hancock 1995
Who made them? No one knows. Scholars simply call the creators ‘the Nazcans’ and depict them as primitive tribesmen who unaccountably managed to develop sophisticated techniques of self-expression – and then vanished from the Peruvian scene hundreds of years before the appearance of their better-known successors, the Incas.
Yet they can hardly have been primitive. They must have been good observational astronomers. A computer study has shown that the famous Nazca spider figure was devised as a diagram of the giant constellation of Orion. The arrow-straight lines linked to the figure appear to have been set to track the through the ages the changing declinations of the three stars of Orion’s belt.
Even stranger, the spider itself has its reproductive organs positioned on the end of its right leg, which identifies it as one of the rarest spiders in the world, one found only in the Amazon rainforest.
How did the supposedly primitive Nazcan artists manage to travel so far from their homeland, crossing the formidable barrier of the Andres, to duplicate minute details of this spider’s anatomy, normally seen only under a microscope?
It prompts the question: Were these line-makers map-makers too? And why were they called the ‘Viracochas’?
VIRACOCHAS AND THEIR WORKS
Throughout South America, local legends are remarkably unanimous in their physical description of the man they call Viracocha: ‘A bearded man of tall stature, clothed in a white robe.’ Other descriptions, from the Andean people, all seem to identify the same enigmatic individual: ‘A bearded man dressed in a long cloak. He walked with a staff and addressed the natives with love, calling them his sons and daughters.’
More noteworthy was what he did: ‘As he traversed all the land, he worked miracles.’ He healed the sick by touch. He brought to Peru such varied skills as metallurgy, farming, animal husbandry, the art of writing (said by Incas to have been by Viracocha but later forgotten), and a sophisticated understanding of the principles of engineering and architecture.
Stranger were the artefacts he seems to have left. The Spanish conquistadors found the remnants of a road network, 15,000 miles long, surfaced and including twin highways parallel to the Pacific coast, with suspension bridges and tunnels cut through solid rock. These seem to have predated he Inca culture.
Local tradition says the road system and the sophisticated stone architecture had been ‘ancient in the time of the Incas’. It also asserted that they were ‘the work of white, auburn-haired men who lived thousands of years earlier’ – Viracocha and his followers.
Consider the ancient citadel of Sacsayhuaman, now situated on the outskirts of the modern Peruvian town of Cuzco. I visited Sacsayhuaman late ne afternoon under a cloudy sky of tarnished silver. As I clambered up stairways, I passed through the lintelled stone gates built for giants and walked along a mammoth row of zigzag walls.
I craned my neck and looked up at a granite boulder – 12ft high, 7ft across, and weighing more than 100 tons. It was the work of man, not nature. It had been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles, manipulated with apparent ease, almost as though it were made of wax or putty. Then it had been stood on its end amid a wall of other similarly huge polygonal blocks, some above it, some below, all perfectly balanced and well-ordered.
Since one of these astonishing stones was 28ft high and was calculated to weigh 361 tons, it seemed that a number of fundamental questions were crying out to be answered.
How had the Incas, or their predecessors, done all this? How had they been able to cut these boulders so precisely, transport them tens of miles, shuffle and raise them with such apparent ease? Remember that these people were not even supposed to have had the wheel at this time, let alone machinery to move 100-ton blocks of stone.
Early chroniclers had been as perplexed as I. The greatly-respected Garcilaso de la Vega came here in the 16th century. He was a man familiar with the technology of the time. ‘The Indians disposed of neither iron nor steel with which to cut and polish the rock,’ he marvelled. ‘They had neither wagons nor oxen to transport them and, in fact, there exists neither wagons nor oxen throughout the world that would have sufficed for this task.’
Garcilaso reports something more telling still. An Inca king, to show his power, tried to emulate the achievements of the builders of Sacsayhuaman. He tried to move one boulder from several miles away, to add to the existing fortifications. ‘This boulder was hauled across the mountain by more than 20,000 Indians, going up and down steep hills. At a certain spot, it fell from their hands over a precipice, crushing more than 3,000 men.’
If the Incas could not move even one stone, it was surely impossible that they had built the whole city.
Who, then, had the original builders been? Could it be, as ancient myth reported, the ‘Viracochas, the bearded, white-skinned strangers, the shining ones?’ Perhaps significantly, the myths also said that these ‘demigods’ had arrived in the Andes in ‘a time of darkness’ after ‘a great flood’.
THE LAKE AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
The next stage of my odyssey took me into modern-day Bolivia. Setting off from the capital La Paz, we drove in a rented Jeep through the incomprehensible permanent traffic jams, past the skyscrapers and slums into the clear, wide horizons of the Altiplano.
The empty, treeless savannah creates an unforgettable spectacle of natural beauty and power. But there is also a feeling of other-worldliness about this place, which seems to float above the clouds like an enchanted kingdom. Our destination is Lake Titicaca – from the beginning a very special place.
There are many mysteries about Lake Titicaca. Today it lies almost two miles above sea level, yet it is littered with millions of fossilised seashells.
It is a fresh-water lake, the highest navigable lake in the world. Yet the fish and crustacea in it are oceanic types. There are even sea horses in Titicaca. The conclusion must be that the water which formed Titicaca came from the sea and that it was dammed and locked in when the Andes rose with the South American continent.
Today the lake is 138 miles long, but the ancient strandline, visible on much of the surrounding terrain, shows that in the past its extent fluctuated enormously. Puzzlingly, this strandline is not level but slopes markedly north to south. At the northern-most point it is 295ft higher than Lake Titicaca ; 400 miles further south, it is 274 ft lower then the present lake.
Clearly, the Altiplano and the Andes are rising and tilting at the same time, but the timescale of that is geological time, millions of years. Much harder to explain is the irrefutable evidence that the ancient city of Tiahuanaco was once a port, complete with extensive docks, positioned on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Vest harbour constructions, piers, dykes and even dumped cargoes of quarried stone leave no doubt that this must have been the case. But there is a problem: Tiahuanaco’s ruins are now marooned 20 miles to the south of the lake, and more than 100ft higher than the present shoreline.
So when, exactly, was Tiahuanaco built? Orthodox historians suggest AD 500 as a possible date. But then, why would it be so far from the lake? Could it, instead, have been built much earlier, as the mathematical and astronomical calculations of two professors of La Paz University have suggested?
They would push the main phase of construction at Tiahuanaco back to 15000 BC, in tune with the geological timespan of the lake. It would account for the dockside constructions – the lake would have been at that level then. But such a date is well before any civilisation we know of. Those findings suggest that this great Andean city of Tiahuanaco somehow flourished during the last Ice Age, in the midnight of prehistory.
The legends of Viracocha are told in this area, too. Around Titicaca they speak of a white man of august presence, blue-eyed and bearded, travelling great distances through the Andes where he created a peaceful kingdom and taught men all the arts of civilisation. Then, struck down and grievously wounded by a group of jealous conspirators, ‘they put his blessed body in a boat of totora rush and set it adrift in Lake Titicaca. He sailed away with such speed that they were astonished – for this lake has no current.’ Eventually the body reached the sea.
This was a story that, in altered form, I had heard before. For there are curious parallels here to the story of Osiris, the High God of Death and Resurrection of Ancient Egypt. Osiris, too, brought the gifts of civilisation to his people. He abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice before travelling the world to spread civilisation to other nations. On his return he, too, was murdered by conspirators.
They lured him into a splendid coffer, constructed precisely to his measurements, nailed the life closed, sealed even the cracks with molten lead, and threw the coffin in the Nile where it floated away rapidly to the sea.
A civiliser, a betrayal, a floating away at great speed to the sea: Are the parallels in the two stories to be dismissed as coincidences? Or could there be some underlying connection?
REED BOATS OF SURIQUI
The air was alpine-cold and I was sitting on a motor boat doing about 20 knots across the icy waters of Lake Titicaca. The sky was clear blue, the vast body of the lake, glinting in copper and silver tones, seemed to stretch away for ever.
We were headed towards Suriqui Island, the one place where the reed boats spoken of in the legends were still made as they should be. In a small village close to the shore I found two elderly Indians making a boat from bundled totora rushes. The elegant craft, which appeared to be almost complete, was about 15ft long. It was wide amidships but narrow at either end, with a high curving prow and stern.
I sat down to watch. The more senior of the two builders repeatedly braced his bare left foot against the side of the vessel to give additional leverage as he pulled and tightened the cords that held bundles of reeds in place. From time to time, I noticed that he rubbed a length of cord against his perspiring brow, thus moistening it in order to increase adhesion.
The boat was one of several I was able to study and, though the setting was unmistakably Andean, I found myself repeatedly overtaken by a sense of déjà vu.
The reason was that the totora vessels of Suriqui were virtually identical, both in method of construction and in appearance, to the beautiful craft fashioned from papyrus reeds in which the pharaohs had sailed upon the Nile thousands of years before.
In my own travels in Egypt I had examined the images of many such vessels painted on the walls of ancient tombs. It sent a tingle down my spine to see them now so colourfully brought to life on an obscure island in Lake Titicaca. I knew that no satisfactory explanation had ever been given for how such close and richly-detailed similarities of design could have occurred in these widely separated places.
The reed boats of the ancient Nile, and the reed boats of Lake Titicaca (the original design of which, local Indians insisted, had been given to them by ‘the Viracocha people’), had other points in common. Both were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged straddle masts. Both had been used for the long-distance transport of exceptionally heavy building materials: obelisks and Cyclopean blocks of stone bound for the temples of Giza and Luxor on the one hand, and for the mysterious edifices of Tiahuanaco on the other.
The earliest Spanish travellers who visited the ruined city of Tiahuanaco were greatly impressed by the size of the buildings. ‘I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time of the Inca,’ wrote one. ‘They laughed at the question, affirming that they were made long before the Inca reign and they had heard from their forebears that everything to be seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night.’ The stones, according to a 16th-century writer, ‘had been carried through the air to the sound of trumpets.’
‘Here are gigantic figures carved in stone; remains of strange buildings, with stone portals, hewn out of solid rock, on bases 30ft long by 15ft wide and 6ft thick, base and portal all being of one piece. How, and with the use of what tools or implements, could such size be achieved? These are question we are unable to answer. Nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought here.’
More than 400 years later, at the end of the 20th century, I stood in Tiahuanaco and shared the 16th-century writer’s puzzlement. Scattered around were monoliths so big and cumbersome, yet so well-cut, that they seemed almost the work of superbeings.
Were the legends right? Had the Ancient city of Tiahuanaco really been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here long ago?
I sat on the floor of the Sunken Temple and looked up at the face which all the scholars believe represents Viracocha. I came to the Gateway of The Sun, a freestanding monolith of grey-green stone about 12 1/2 ft wide and 10st high, like a miniature Arc de Triomphe, a door between nowhere and nothing.
The stonework is of exceptional quality and all the authorities agree that it is to be regarded as one of the archaeological wonders of the Americas. Its most enigmatic feature is the so-called ‘calendar frieze’ carved into its eastern façade along the top of the portal.
Here, at its top, is yet another representation of the god-man Viracocha. Yet on the base of the frieze are carved stranger things. I could quite clearly make out a carving of an elephant’s head, ears, tusk and trunk.
This was unexpected because there are, of course, no elephants in the New World. They died out around 10,000 years before Christ. Particularly numerous in the Southern Andes until then had been a species of elephant called Cuvieronius, with an uncannily similar appearance to the ‘elephant’ of the Gateway of the Sun.
Among the riot of stylised animals carved into the gateway were other extinct species. One of these has been convincingly identified as a Toxodon, a three-toed amphibious mammal about 9ft long, like a short, stubby cross between a rhino and a hippo. Like Cuvieronius, Toxodon had flourished in South America in the late Pliocene period, nearly two million years ago, and died out about 12,000 years ago.
That animal could only have been modelled from life – and no fewer than 46 Toxodon heads had been carved into the frieze of the Gateway of the Sun. Nor was this creature’s caricature confined to the gateway. Toxodon has been identified on numerous fragments of Tiahuanaco pottery, and even on three-dimensional sculpture.
Such images of Tiahuanaco was a kind of picture book from the past, a record of bizarre animals, deader than the dodo.
To my eye this looked like a striking corroboration for the astronomical and geological evidence: it meant that Tiahuanaco must be dated not to a mere 1,500 years ago but much, much earlier.
Are we looking at a city that must have been built at the end of the Pleistocene era, 10,000 years before Christ?
Adapted from Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (Century, £22.99). © Graham Hancock 1995.
