by Freddy Silva
As pointed out earlier, a collision between the Earth and a large projectile is capable of altering its rotation and, consequently, affecting the way calendars are calculated. Surprisingly enough, most world calendars were originally based on a 360-day year and a 30-day lunar month, until the 8th century BC when five days began to be added to the solar year, and the lunar calendar was reduced to 29 days, thus synchronizing the seasons with current heavenly motions, leading to speculation that at one time the Earth spun faster on its axis and the Moon's orbit differed from what it is today.
This was certainly the view of Hindu chronology outlined in the Aryabhatiya, an Indian treatise on mathematics and astronomy, in which it is argued that with the closing of Great Ages and their associated catastrophes, slight differences in the motions of heavenly bodies come into play.24 The notion was employed by their neighbors, the Assyrians and Babylonians, who applied the same numerical values in their buildings. The walls of ancient Babylon were 360 furlongs in length, "as many as there had been days in the year,"25 while the Egyptians composed their year into 360 days, as did pre-Incan cultures, and the Maya.26 The Chinese went a stage further: they divided the sphere into 360 degrees, each degree corresponding to the passing of the zodiac over the course of a full solar year. When five-and-a-quarter days were added to compensate for the Earth's new rotation, they divided the sphere into the same number, thus harmonizing the new length of solar year with terrestrial geometry.27
It seems chaos still ensued in the heavens and on Earth leading up to the 8th century BC that forced a reformation of calendars. Addressing the emperor of China at the time, the astronomer Y Hang announced that the order of the sky and the movement of planets had changed sufficiently to make it impossible to predict such things as eclipses, further adding that in earlier times Venus orbited 40º south of the ecliptic and even eclipsed the star Sirius, something it does not do today.28
Ancient traditions keep reminding us the cause is periodic. All we need do now if figure out when it is next likely to occur.
Even in 4th century Europe, comets were associated with cataclysms.
15. MISSING COASTS
"If you examine [ancient Egyptian] art on the spot, you will find that ten thousand years ago (and I'm not speaking loosely, I mean literally ten thousand), paintings and reliefs were produced that are no better and no worse than those of today." — Plato1
When caliph Al-Ma'mun attempted to force his way into the Great Pyramid in the ninth century, one of his priorities was to find maps of the world, said to have been deposited there by Twt, whose accuracy once allowed the gods to move unhindered about the planet. It is not known if he succeeded, but a number of anomalous maps subsequently surfaced around the Mediterranean showing islands, continents and other features yet to be discovered at the time, or no longer existed.
One such map appears in Mundus Subterraneus, a geological opus compiled in 1684 by Athanasius Kircher, a scholar and polymath who's been compared to Leonardo da Vinci. It depicts the island continent of Atlantis prominently in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; Kirchner claimed the map was based on Plato's works along with five pages from additional sources including rare Egyptian accounts. The result is a map of the Atlantic oriented with south at the top, with America to the right instead of left, Africa and Iberia to the left instead of right and, on the island of Atlantis itself, a compass pointing south instead of north.
Kirscher's map of Atlantis with north as south.
The thing is, Egyptians once considered south to be north, while the Hopi and other ancient commentators claim a rapid movement of the poles did occur in remote times and led to an ice age. In his studies of the Indian sacred book Mahabharata, the scholar Lokamanya Yilak points out that “the Earth’s magnetic field is tied up in some way with the rotation of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth’s rotation itself... the axis has changed also. In other words, the planet has rolled about, changing the location of the geographical poles.”2 Coincidentally, the last known geomagnetic reversal completed around 10,400 BC.3
In addition to a sudden pole shift, in 1837 Louis Agassiz proposed a hypothesis that the Earth's crust once suffered a major displacement, an idea that only gained traction in the late twentieth century, and with some merit. The planet's rotation and tilt have clearly been a factor, even a trigger of sudden glacial epochs. Einstein himself once considered the uneven distribution of ice at the poles to be capable of destabilizing the Earth through centrifugal momentum causing a slippage of its top-most skin, which is barely 30-miles thick and rests over a lubricating layer. Theoretically this would cause the polar regions to slide to the equator. In such an event the Sun would indeed be seen to rise and set in completely different parts of the sky, in contrast to its present east-west trajectory. This scenario might have taken place between 14,500–12,500 BC, with aftershocks up to about 9500 BC.4
Antarctica is a good example of crustal displacement. A map of this snowbound landmass created by French geographer Orance Fine in 1531 uses sophisticated map projection and spherical trigonometry accurate enough to allow fifty points of reference to be located today. The problem is, the map was drawn three centuries before said continent was discovered.5 Another anomalous map by Philippe Buache accurately shows Antarctica's sub-glacial topography, an extraordinary leap of imagination considering the last time the south pole was ice-free is estimated at 14 million years ago.6 Or is academia wrong? Certainly Antarctica was once 2000 miles further north — where the capital of Chile is today — ice free, with only a small portion of its landmass inside the Antarctic circle; Queen Maud Land in particular would have been a most agreeable place for agriculture and a developing island civilization. There is also evidence that sediment-carrying rivers were still active in the Ross Sea as late as 4000 BC,7 so clearly Antarctica has not been as snowbound as we might believe. The only thing we can be certain about this continent is that much of what we know is uncertain.
Buache shows Antarctica as two islands, just as it appears beneath the ice.
Adding weight to the crustal displacement theory is the 1513 map of Turkish admiral Piri Reis, collated from twenty different ancient source documents, and showing the coastlines of South America and Africa with a high degree of accuracy, even the remote Falkland Islands are located with pinpoint precision. It correctly depicts the Amazon River and its source, yet in the sixteenth century all this had yet to be located or explored by westerners. The large island of Marajo, which ought to appear at the mouth of the Amazon, is missing, leading to the conclusion that the source map was made around 13,000 BC when said island was still part of the mainland. But more importantly, Queen Maud Land is depicted free of ice, a situation that only occurred before 4000 BC. The map also shows a large landmass over the sub-oceanic Mid Atlantic ridge, 500 miles to the east of Brazil and just north of the equator. Due to rising sea levels, only fifteen pinnacles of rock remain above the water today, collectively named the Rocks of Peter and Paul.
Not only does the Piri Reis map depict the Earth’s landmass prior to major geological changes and upheavals, its unusual projection is based on an ancient astronomical observatory centered on the Nile island of Elephantine, once Egypt’s legendary southern border. This was validated by the US Air Force. However, on the Piri Reis map the island is not located north of the equator but two thousand miles to the south, in present-day Tanzania. The US Air Force office was similarly impressed by the ability of this 16th century cartographer to have projected his map as though from space. Since the map is based on extremely ancient sources, it follows that the original cartographer must have known the Earth to be spherical.
We are regularly told the Greeks were the first to figure out the Earth was round and yet the Avestans before them were certainly aware of the existence of the poles by the time they wrote the Mahabharata, for they describe the Arctic Circle as a place where “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.”8 An Icelander reading this passage would see an accurate description of the behavior of the sky at extreme northern latitudes. The text is conservatively dated to 800 BC but eastern scholars claim it too is a copy based on extremely ancient sources, like so many other texts of the Indian region. Even Pliny knew the spherical attributes of the Earth when he noted in 79 AD, "Human beings are distributed all around the earth and stand with their feet pointing toward each other.... Another marvel, that the earth herself hangs suspended and does not fall and carry us with it."9
Maps, it seems, are a remarkably reliable method of recording what exists as well as what no longer does.
Ben Zara’s map still shows glaciers in Europe and a river along the Sahara.
In historical times it was commonplace for seafarers around the Mediterranean to copy maps without realizing the source documents recorded landmasses no longer extant. For example, a map drawn in 1487 by Yehudi Ibn Ben Zara depicts glaciers further south than Sweden, and what the coastlines of the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean seas might have looked like before the melting of Europe’s ice caps following the end of the Younger Dryas.10 It also shows a substantial river running east to west in the middle of the Sahara emptying into the Atlantic Ocean, yet no such river existed in Ben Zara's time, only though satellite imagery has this hitherto unknown body of water been located beneath the sand. The desertification of northern Africa began around 9700 BC due to a change in the Earth’s orbit and interplay with changes in atmosphere, sea levels and sea ice,11 with the region between Egypt and the west coast of Africa finally succumbing to desert by 3000 BC. Thus Ben Zara's source map must have been created when the river was still in full flow, which again takes us to around the time of the Younger Dryas.12
REBUILDING THE FORMER HOME OF THE GODS
The Apkallu were said to have arrived in Mesopotamia from their residence in Apsû (Ocean of Wisdom or deepwater abode) until the god Marduk — who is perceived as an errant celestial object — forced them to retreat to the safety of this location during the flood, so clearly this is not a metaphorical or otherworldly environment but a physical location — quite possibly Te Pitaka, the missing land of the Anunaki described in the Tongarevan tradition.
There is a parallel to this account in the Building Texts, where “the homeland of the Primeval Ones” is identified as an island in the ocean, home to a prosperous civilization whose survivors set out in ships, re-settling in a number of locations to "rebuild the former world of the gods.”13 The Building Texts make it clear that 12,000 years ago there were two races on Earth: hunter-gatherers with little knowledge of civilization, and an altogether different race of people who lived remotely, far more advanced in engineering, metallurgy, large-scale architecture, natural magic, civic cohesion and navigation. And perhaps in technology too, because there is an odd passage describing how the source of light on Ta Neterw came from a Sound Eye, alluding to a device by which the entire island was artificially illuminated. It too was destroyed by the great flood, causing darkness to fall on the domain of the gods.14
A small section of the Building Texts. Edfu.
The late English scholar Eve Reymond published an incisive study of the Building Texts that reveals much about the origin and home of the antediluvian gods of Egypt. To read them is to travel to a bygone era of high civilization, of survival and new hope, to place yourself front and center of a rebuilding project that attempted to revive a destroyed wonderworld. One can almost taste the bittersweet endeavor as the texts describe a period in prehistoric times called the Early Primeval Age of the Gods, in which we find the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians arriving from the Home of the Primeval Ones, a sacred island amidst a great ocean where “the earliest mansions of the gods” were founded.15
These gods were accomplished sailors who traversed the seas, but when a meteorite and a flood destroyed their island, “companies of gods” lucky enough to be caught at sea survived. The texts describe the calamity as "the great leaping snake pierced the domain of the gods," eerily reminiscent of the Waitaha description of a comet and its tail, "Auahi Tu Roa [Firebird] who carries messages across the darkened skies for the Sky Father.” Upon sailing back to see what remained of their homeland, all the gods saw were reeds and mud that made the sea impassible to navigation and hindered further exploration.16 Reluctantly the group wandered the world as the “crew of the Falcon” in search of suitable locations where they might recreate their former home;17 chief among this group of wandering gods was Hor and Twt.
When Diodorus was compiling his history of Egypt, informants told him that the decision by the gods to rebuild there was due to southern Egypt’s geographical advantage in a period marked by extreme cold and the absence of sunlight. Close to the equator, conditions were warmer and humid, and the extra rainfall following the flood benefitted this region well as an ideal place for the regeneration of new forms of life.18
Each of the gods were assigned specific tasks: the Shebtiw possessed the ability to “enbue with power the substances of the earth”, they could “magnify things” and provide magical protection through the careful use of symbols and words; a second group, the Builder Gods, were in charge of constructing sacred architecture “according to what the Sages of the primeval age revealed to Twt”; then there were the Seven Sages, Followers of Horus, each an expert in their field, whose knowledge was superior even to that of Twt.19 We may as well be describing the Lords of Anu, the Anunaki or the Watchers.
But where exactly was their original land? The Egyptians believed Ta-Neterw lay to the south — assuming that in the period being described south meant south, not north — a maritime land across a large expanse of water that could only be reached by boat; on occasion the gods would invite a human there to see it. Part of it was still in existence during Zep Tepi, when the territorial reign of the god Ra gave rise to a golden age which later Egyptian cultures looked upon with great fondness and regret, since it was "a time of truth that came down from the sky and united with those who were here on Earth. The land was in abundance, bodies were full, there was no year of hunger in the Two Lands. Walls did not fall, thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods."20 It is described as an Island of Fire, “a mystic land of origin beyond the horizon,” presided by Hor; it was also the abode of Twt, where he “made shrines for the gods and goddesses,” validating it as a real location, least of all because the Egyptians recorded its name as Ta-Ur, land of the old city’.21
The island is described as "intersected by canals filled with running water, which caused them to be always green and fertile. On these grew luxuriant crops of wheat and barley, the like of which were unknown to earth. The Papyrus of Nu says that ”the wheat grew to a height of five cubits, the ears being two cubits long and the stalks three; the barley grew to a height of seven cubits, the ears being three cubits long and the stalks four. Here lived the spirits of the blessed dead, who were nine cubits high, and the reaping of these crops was, it seems, reserved for them, and for the Souls of the East.”22
Such a description of abnormally large crops is strangely similar to the way Viracocha and his Shining Ones potentized the water in and around the Qorikancha in Cuzco that made vegetation grow to extravagant height.
The deciphering of the Building Texts soon revealed they did not originate at the temple of Edfu, they are a synopsis of an ancient and vast archive of material that fell prey to millennia of political and environmental caprice. It has to be remembered that when explorers reached the site in the early nineteenth century, its once grand interior was being used as a storehouse for animals and corn. Vast amounts of rubbish were piled in and around the site, and state rooms had been turned into sleeping quarters and kitchens, while campfires lit inside the buildings led to the fine, painted hieroglyphs being covered in thick layers of soot. An architectural wonder had been transformed into a hovel. It was wise of the Greek restorers in the 3rd century BC to physically carve the information onto the walls of Edfu lest the kn
owledge of the origins of the gods be lost — especially as the Building Texts state how they constitute nothing less than “the words of the Sages... the only divine beings who knew how the temples and sacred places were created,” for they were the very creators of that knowledge.23 They dictated it to Twt who compiled it into a number of books, all lost for the time being: Sacred Book of the Temples, Book for Planning the Temple, Sacred Book of the Early Primeval Ones, and Sacred Book of Atum. Another work, Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, contained the master plan upon which Egypt was to be laid out, including an inventory of all the original mounds upon which the historical temples would be built, all part of the plan to resurrect the former age of the gods during and following the Younger Dryas.
A CONTINENT HIDDEN BEHIND A MURAL
Twt’s tomes were not the only ones to be concealed. At some point in the early eleventh century, an archive of up to 50,000 documents was sealed up in a chamber inside one of the caves of Mogao (Peerless), part of a system of 492 temples located in a remote corner of northwestern China.
The entrance to Mogau caves today. Below: The mural in Cave 16 in 1921.