The Missing Lands

by Freddy Silva

  L-shape allows great structural integrity but is labor-intensive, requiring extensive removal of stone.

  Coincidentally, mawi is an Egyptian word meaning 'navigator or guide', while the related word haawi in the Hopi language means 'to descend'. Tonga's ancient capital itself, Mu’a, is said to memorialize the name of the land destroyed by a global flood where such gods lived. To the west, in New Guinea — along with New Hanover, New Britain and New Ireland — tribespeople speak of megaliths, pyramids, basalt obelisks, and petroglyphs left by “men belong time before,” unusual people of whom they speak with great respect, who were culturally superior and appeared out of nowhere on large canoes, hiding many artefacts on the sacred mountain called The Mother before disappearing back into the sea. James Sheridan, a government malaria expert traveling to the region in the 1950s, saw the obelisks himself, carved with lines, fish and bird-like heads facing the rising sun. These wandering gods also shaped rocks as large as a double garage and covered them with petroglyphs of unusual figures. One plantation owner recalls how the megaliths reminded him of ones back in his native Germany, in fact he was adamant they were linked to the same type of megalithic constructions found in Egypt and the Andes.

  A man by the name of Jack West, who lived in New Guinea in the 1920s, recalls finding massive carved boulders near the town of Wewak. He located others on nearby islands, along with an obelisk some eight feet high, all facing the rising Sun; surrounding it was a group of smaller stones with petroglyphs, by then half buried. Larger megaliths were discovered in New Guinea by a planter named Peter Murray, who found a stone circle "like Stonehenge" on Unea, the main island in the Vitu group. "The stones are rectangular, each about eleven feet long, and carved with circles and squiggly lines like hieroglyphs. Two old men, Uva and Umbelevi, guided me to where they are positioned on top of a 2500-foot peak known as Kambu. The stones are not volcanic; obviously they have been quarried elsewhere and taken up the mountain by some means. They are so ancient that the natives do not even have legends about them."10

  On the western side of Tahiti there's a fine example of a step pyramid, 267 feet long by 87 feet wide, featuring nine tiers. The megalithic architecture is made with stones as much as 8 feet in length, shaped and close-fitted without mortar. Such step pyramids reach their acme in size and complexity on the Caroline Islands, while the deserted Malden Island features megaliths, and roads built with close-fitting basalt slabs that continue under the sea.

  Step pyramid, Tahiti

  Standing stones, Fiji.

  ahu on Malden Island

  Tonga is packed with one megalithic curiosity after another.

  Obviously built on a human scale. One side of the three megaliths forming Ha’amonga ‘a Maui.

  One of the smaller ahu on Tonga.

  But are these monuments the remnants of a destroyed civilization or were they built from scratch after the flood? Or both, an overlap, a refurbishment, much like the two oldest layers of megalithic architecture in the Andes, comparative yet separate? When myth becomes a reliable memory of past events it completes the picture that archaeology cannot. In Samoan mythology, the outlying Manu’a archipelago is said to be the first island of creation, a navel of the earth, while the island of Savai’i is claimed to be a remnant of Havai’iki, the original homeland of the antediluvian gods and birthplace of Polynesian culture. Certainly it features the largest mounds in all Polynesia, and what else may exist now lies beneath thick lava flows from the islands' dozen or so volcanoes, which sit atop the biggest shield volcano in the Pacific.

  The Indonesian island of Flores is another place with its own share of enigmas, out-of-place artifacts, and stories of unusual people doing unusual things. The Nages who live in the center of the island recall the story of the forefather of the tribe, Dooy, and how he was saved from the great flood by a ship. His grave lies beneath a large stone platform in the public square of the tribal capital Boa Wai. A harvest festival honoring this great ancestor still takes place to this day, when the presiding chief is adorned with a gold model of a ship with seven masts, in memory of the fortunate survival of their ancestor.11

  In the main public space of the village of Bena stands a group of menhirs and dolmens that are used as instruments of communication with people in the Otherworld — much like the megalithic traditions of Europe, except that the root of this Flores tradition arises from the ancestors of the region who arrived after a great flood around 12,000 years ago, on a ship propelled by an engine, no less! Their descendents laid out the entire village in the shape of the ship, with a large megalithic chamber marking the place where the engine house would have been. The megaliths themselves were moved to the village from the slopes of a mountain twelve miles away by the use of special powers possessed by these ancestors, one of whom is described as a giant by the name of Dhake.12

  THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

  It’s funny how the topic of giants keeps rearing its head here and there, and although I originally had no intention to pursue this topic, it is so intrinsic to the understanding of the missing antediluvian civilization that it shouldn’t be overlooked. In most flood myths the outsiders are described as very tall, but whether their height was relative to indigenous people, or they were truly gigantesque, is not always clear. Being a six-foot five-inch tall, white Caucasian I might be looked upon as a giant in the Andes, whereas in Central Europe I would merely be tall; in Norway I am actually normal. Too bad I no longer have the blonde hair I had as a child because, with my green eyes, I too might have been mistaken for Viracocha!

  But seriously, I want to return to my conversations with Teokotai the wisdom keeper, whose stories are never short on illumination.

  He states there are numerous accounts on Tongareva of tall ancestors with red hair, but to confuse matters, they are twenty-two feet tall, fair skinned, with blue or green eyes. One of their massive graves was exhumed in 1969 by a team of anthropologists from the University of Osaka under the auspices of the United Nations. They unearthed bones of a twenty-two-foot long humanoid skeleton, beneath which they found urns. As they attempted to remove the items a booming voice emerged from the lagoon warning them, in no uncertain terms, they’d seen enough and to put back the artefacts. Shaken, the anthropologists left and never returned.13 I contacted the university to solicit an opinion but no one wished to revisit the topic.

  An individual of similar stature washed up on a beach near the north-western tip of New Zealand in the 1950s, found by a young girl whose mother called the authorities, who hauled the remains onto a flat bed truck, drove off, and the case was never brought up again. Residents of the densely forested island of Isatabu in the Solomon Islands come face-to-face with such giants on a regular basis. Even during the Second World War, Japanese and American troops stationed there witnessed the giants, to the point where the thought of being attacked by them gave the soldiers plenty of sleepless nights. As one former Air Force officer said, "The people of the Solomon Islands have shared their islands with a race of hominoids previously undiscovered to the modern world for millennia right to this present day. The larger and more commonly seen are over 10 foot tall, but I have come across numerous islander accounts with evidence that supports that they do grow much taller than that."14

  The giants are said to inhabit the island's vast tunnel system which is composed of a type of self-illuminating stone. This invites a comparison with a description of the Hebrew flood narrative and its hero Noah, whose "Ark was illuminated by a precious stone, the light of which was more brilliant by night than by day, so enabling Noah to distinguish between day and night."15 Noah's Zoroastrian counterpart Yima had the same assistance inside the Vara he was instructed to build, illumination for which was provided by means of a "window, self-shining from within."16 As the god Ahura Mazda explained to Yima, "there are uncreated lights and created lights."17 The first account clearly specifies a stone; the second, however, seems more like technology.

  Incidentally, Isatabu literally means Sacr
ed Abode of Isis. In the Pacific one is never far from an Egyptian word or two.

  North of the Fijian group lies an isolated, nine mile-long island called Rotuma. For such a small place it is filled with mysteries of ages long gone. Its inhabitants are noted for their significantly lighter skin color as though representing a different race altogether.18 During the Second World War, coast watchers were building a viewing station on the summit of Mt. Sororoa when they unearthed shin bones over 3 feet long, making the person to whom it belonged 12 feet tall. The whole mountaintop was an ancient cemetery, as were nearby caves — while searching for places to hide in case of a Japanese invasion, the locals found the caves filled with giant human skeletons.

  Graveyards are also aplenty in the village of Itu’mut. The small size of the island leaves inhabitants little choice but to stack the graves above ground and recycle them every twenty years or so. The thing is, the modern graves are placed on top of megalithic platforms built by people from a forgotten era. Looking at them one could be mistaken for being in Saqsayhuaman, so precise and similar is the masonry. Adjacent to this plot are graves of a different kind, marked with stones of enormous size, beneath which lay the remains of 12-foot tall people. A road built in 1927 accidentally uncovered graves of identical skeletons but, due to superstition, the bones were quickly reburied and the road re-routed.19

  Despite having little land above water nowadays, Fiji enjoys a disproportionate number of megalithic sites — at least twenty-nine —as though the island is a fragment of a once larger landmass. Many archaeological sites feature rock art with concentric rings and dots in a style identical to that used in Europe to mark stars and other astronomical data; near Vuna, a pair of menhirs are carved with circular cup-and-ring marks, the kind thought to have been unique to western Scotland.

  One massive dolmen is of the type commonly seen in Korea and western Siberia; the council meeting place of Na Ututu resembles a scaled-down version of a Guatemalan pyramid: and the sacred hill Takiveleyawa, which is said to be a portal to the Otherworld, resembles the kind of hills in Yucatan once mistaken as natural but later proven to be man-made structures. When did this civilization exist in Fiji?

  Many sites are now partly submerged, indicating their extreme antiquity, places like Sawailau, a sacred cave and abode of an ancient god by the name of Ulutini. It lies to the northwest of Fiji on the island of Yasawa. A diver with excellent lungs can reach this air pocket and gaze at a series of beautifully etched pictograms on the cave wall. The mouth of the cave was last above sea level 5000 years ago, so the carvings must be significantly older. The most recognizable is a horizontal lozenge shape of the type used by early Neolithic people to mark the extreme positions of the Sun at the solstices. Because the angle of the rising Sun changes relative to one's latitude, the lozenge changes shape accordingly — the closer to the equator the more horizontal, the closer to the pole the more vertical.

  The Yasawa lozenge has a horizontal aspect and precisely matches the Sun’s position at the latitude of the cave. But there’s an appendage like a bow attached to the right of the design as though marking some other object rising in the east. Just below, a line of three fist-size circular protrusions are carved in relief, with one of the circles offset from the other two. The combination bears a remarkable resemblance to the three stars of Orion’s belt. Perhaps the 'bow' above this relief refers to Orion's club. Let's see.

  Orion’s Belt inside Yasawa cave. Note lozenge with appendage.

  Orion’s shield.

  Shape formed by the solstices at this latitude.

  As we have already seen, the Orion constellation was of prime importance to ancient cultures — something we’ll examine in detail later — particularly its heliacal rising at the winter solstice and spring equinox. If we roll back the night sky as though we are sitting at the mouth of Sawailau cave when it was still above sea level, two prominent occasions appear on the horizon. The first is 13,000 BC when Orion’s Belt aligns with the horizon on the spring equinox. The second is when the entire constellation appears for the first time above the horizon, the epoch of 9500 BC. Is it possible people marked this alignment to commemorate the onset of the Oldest Dryas, then returned to this marker two hundred years after the Younger Dryas? Were they referencing the new sky, like navigators charting missing lands in this drastically rearranged landscape? I could not help but be reminded of the Waitaha narrative after the world was “turned by water,” when Kiwa arrives on Easter Island, from which he makes numerous voyages across the Pacific, charting its remaining lands, many of which had become islands following the dramatic rise in sea level.20 Could this cave have been a point of reference?

  Fiji is not the only archipelago with connections to a post-diluvial race. On the small atoll of Lae in the Marshall Islands there is the legend of a huge cylinder made of timber that came ashore filled with giants, weak from drifting across the ocean. The fearful villagers overpowered and killed them, but upon discovering that one was a princess they were filled with remorse, and to this day the islanders toss a food offering into the sea to ask forgiveness whenever they pass by the islet where she is buried.

  But from which missing land did these people drift? Legends in Samoa claim that a tribe of giants, the Hiti, lived there before a great flood, while Aborigines of the Northern Territories claim the area near the Brimmy Valley was once Burrangie, the secret place of the giant people from the Dreamtime.

  Or maybe they came from the island of Tinian in the Marianas archipelago, home to a most unusual set of megaliths collectively known as the House of Taga. Sometime in prehistory a ten-foot tall chief named Taga erected two parallel rows of monoliths, fifteen feet in height, topped with enormous hemispherical caps hollowed into cups. Of the twelve upright stones sketched by explorer George Anson in 1742, only one remains upright due to earthquakes. The House of Taga was just one of eighteen such structures on Tinian, all out of place and time.21

  House of Taga as it appeared in 1742.

  RETURNING TO BLONDES AND REDHEADS

  Teokotai Andrew's narrative of fair-skinned, red or blonde-haired voyagers arriving from the Middle East via the Andes is corroborated by another indigenous group of New Zealand, the Ngati Hotu. Historians such as J.M. McEwen researched the tribe for nearly two decades based on the writings of Maori elders Raniera Te Ahiko and Paramena Te Naonao. A quote from one elder about the Ngati Hotu makes some startling claims: "Generally speaking, Ngati Hotu were of medium height and of light colouring. In the majority of cases they had reddish hair... and were spoken of as Te Whanau a Rangi [Children of Heaven] because of their fair skin. There were two distinct types. One had kiri wherowhero or reddish skin, a round face, small eyes and thick protruding eyebrows. The other was fair-skinned, much smaller in stature, with larger and very handsome features. The latter were the true urukehu and Te Whanau a Rangi. In some cases not only did they have reddish hair, but also light coloured eyes."22

  Fair skin, light color eyes, children of heaven? What's going on here?

  When Captain Wallis arrived in Tahiti from England on an exploratory voyage in 1767 he was astonished to find over ten per cent of Tahitians were white-skinned and blonde, with the greatest concentration living on the island of Ra-Iatea — literally 'White-skinned People of Ra'. Local traditions claim that most ancient Maori tribes intermarried both blonde, blue-eyed people and red-haired green-eyed people who'd migrated from afar.23 The historian J.M. Brown noted similar Caucasian features still prevalent in many Easter Islanders during his visit to the island in 1920: “There is a general consensus of the European-like features and colour of many of the natives of Easter Island. And the faces of the images confirm this Caucasoid impression; they are oval, straight-nosed, large-eyed, thin-lipped and short in the upper lip, the features that distinguish or are supposed to distinguish the highest ideal of beauty of the north-west of Europe.” 24

  Thor Heyerdahl himself was persuaded that the red volcanic tufa cylinders found atop many moai, like
crowns, are representative of the Urukehu's red hair, after all it would have been far easier to carve these additions as one piece with the statues, an observation made earlier by the archaeologist Henry Balfour. For one thing, Polynesians used to dye their black hair red to simulate the gods.25

  Where does this leave the Ngati Hotu? Despite their near-extinction at the hands of invading Maori tribes in the 14th century, a fair number still exist today in New Zealand. They are described not simply as manifesting the Urukehu strain, but as direct ancestors of the Urukehu themselves.26 Their oral traditions unequivocally state they are of Middle Eastern origin, specifically from Persia and Egypt, forced out of the region long ago by war with dark skin people, compelling their ancient predecessors to sail to Madagascar, around Africa, across the Atlantic, settling for a time in Yucatan and Central America. Later they migrated south to the Andes, contributing to the culture around Lake Titicaca before finally sailing westwards to Easter Island and New Zealand. Based on the evidence presented so far, it appears they were following in the footsteps of the Anunaki, merely taking the long route.

  Fed up of having her tribe's traditions brushed under the carpet by historians and government officials alike, an elder of the Ngati Hotu by the name of Monica Matamua — who is blonde and blue eyed — submitted a sample of her DNA to the National Geographic Society DNA Register. The results validated her claim: the Ngati Hotu's origins were to be found in the Middle East, the Steppes, Egypt, Madagascar and Central America, with the most recent concentrations around Lake Titicaca and Easter Island.27