The cave was examined as well, but no traces of human residence, no artifacts, no carvings, or writings—nothing but the tiny stone ledge on which this mummy had been sitting for countless ages. How had it come to be entombed in the solid granite wall anyway? To my knowledge, no carbon dating was ever done on the mummy.
While the mummy was on display in Casper for many years, it has since disappeared, and its current whereabouts are unknown.
After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch.
—Jane Wagner
Robots & Automatons of the Ancients
Ancient man made a large number of machines, many of them virtually identical to machines that we use today. Ancient man had water pumps, cranes, hoists, catapults, water wheels, and even amusing toys and “gadgets.” They had coin operated machines, automatons, and even computers, radio and television incredible as it may seem.
Some of the automatons are actual inventions that we know existed, others are only inferred from texts and “legends.” Says historian Andrew Tomas in We Are Not the First,24“According to Greek legends, Haephestus, the ”blacksmith of Olympus,“ made two golden statues which resembled living young women. They could move of their own accord and hastened to the side of the lame god to aid him as he walked. It cannot be denied that the concept of automation was present in ancient Greece.
“The engineers of Alexandria had over one hundred different automatons over 2,000 years ago. The legendary Daedalus, the father of Icarus, is reported to have constructed humanlike figures which moved of their own accord. Plato says that his robots were so active that they had to be prevented from running away! By what energy were they operated?”
Similarly, in the temples of ancient Egypt, such as Thebes, there were images of gods which could make gestures and speak. It is not at all improbable that some were manipulated by the priests hiding inside them, others may have had mechanical movements. The flashing of lights, such as in the case of the famous flashing eyes on the statue of Isis at Karnak, were probably done with simple electric lights of some kind.
The legends of the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Hindus and Chinese all have references to what we would call robots or automatons: machines that looked and acted like people. The ancient Chinese, for instance, were fond of bronze dragons whose tails wagged in an automated fashion of one sort or another.
In the old Greek story of the quest for the golden fleece, Jason and the Argonauts came to Crete in the course of their voyages and legendary adventures. Medea told them that Talus, the last man left of the ancient bronze race, lived there. Then a metallic creature appeared, threatening to crush the ship Argo with rocks, if they drew nearer. A robot?
Says Tomas in We Are Not the First, “The know-how of robot construction was recorded in ciphered books on magic and thus preserved for long centuries. The monk Gerbert d‘Aurillac (920-1003), professor at the University of Rheims who later became Pope Sylvester II, was reported to have possessed a bronze automaton which answered questions. It was constructed by the pope ’under certain stellar and planetary aspects.‘ This early computer said yes or no to questions on important matters concerning politics or religion. Records of this ’programming and processing’ may still be extant in the Vatican Library. The ‘magic head’ was disposed of after the pope had died.24
Again quoting from Tomas, “Albertus Magnus (1206-1280), the Bishop of Regensburg, was a very learned man. He wrote extensively on chemistry, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. It took him over twenty years to construct his famous android. His biography says that the automaton was composed of ”metals and unknown substances chosen according to the stars.“ The mechanical man walked, spoke, and performed domestic chores. Albertus and his disciple Thomas Aquinas lived together and the android looked after them. The story goes that one day the talkative robot drove Thomas Aquinas mad with his chatter and gossip. Albertus’ pupil grabbed a hammer and smashed the machine.
“This account should not be dismissed as mere fiction. Albertus Magnus was a true scholar—in the thirteenth century he explained the Milky Way as a conglomeration of very distant stars. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were later canonized by the Catholic Church. The word android has even been adopted by science to signify an automaton or robot.”24
Celestial globes, of various sizes, were cast metal machines with automatically moving parts. The earth was in the middle and remained stationary while the heavens revolved about it. The globe was constantly revolving by a mechanical device, and the whole thing agreed with the actual motion of the heavens.
Says Tomas, “According to Cicero (first century BC), Marcus Marcellus possessed just such a globe from Syracuse, Sicily, which demonstrated the motion of the sun, moon, and planets. Cicero assures us that the machine was a very ancient invention, and that a similar astronomical model was displayed in the Temple of Virtue at Rome. Thales of Miletus (sixth century BC) and Archimedes (third century BC) were considered to be the constructors of these mechanical devices.
“The memory of planetariums has persisted for many a century. The historian Cedrenus writes about Emperor Heraclitus of Byzantium, who, upon entry into the city of Bazalum, was shown an immense machine. It represented the night sky with the planets and their orbits. The planetarium had been fabricated for King Chosroes II of Persia (seventh century AD).”24
Ancient Technology and the Antikythera Device
In 1900, an amazing discovery took place on the small island of Antikythera, 25 miles northwest of Crete. A sunken Greek galley had been discovered just offshore from the tiny island and some fishermen and sponge divers managed to salvage its cargo of marble, pottery and other objects.
Among the items was an encrusted bronze object of undetermined use. It languished in the reserve section of a museum until 1955, when a curious scientist decided to clean it. He found that it was a complex instrument with cog-wheels fitting one into another. Finely graduated circles and inscriptions marked on it in ancient Greek were obviously concerned with its function. The object seems to have been a sort of astronomical clock without a pendulum.
The cargo has enabled the shipwreck to be dated to around the 1st century BC. No Greek or Roman writer has ever described the workings of such an ancient computer, though other marvels of antiquity are mentioned that seem incomprehensible to us.
In 1958, a British scientist named Derek de Solla Price was researching the history of scientific instruments when he came across the Antikythera device in the Athens Museum. He was astonished at the complexity of the device and later wrote, “Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion. On the contrary, from all that we know of science and technology in the Hellenistic Age we should have felt that such a device could not exist.”4
The Antikythera Device reconstructed.
Price was later quoted as saying, “Finding a thing like this is like finding a jet plane in the tomb of King Tut.”
Price had previously believed that the first time that such complicated gear-work had appeared was in a clock made in 1575. For more than a decade Price studied the fragments of the machine and, in 1971, had X-ray photographs taken of it by the Greek Atomic Energy Commission. This finally revealed the astonishing array of intercogged wheels.4,5
Price described the computer in an article that appeared in the March, 1962, issue of Natural History (71:8-17) entitled “Unworldly Mechanics.” (It was entitled “Unworldly Mechanics” because Price and others never imagined that the ancient Greeks, Egyptians or other cultures of 100 BC could have had the astronomical or mechanical knowledge to construct such a device—an idea which is just plain wrong.) As Price explains:Some of the plates were marked with barely recognizable inscriptions, written in Greek characters of the first century BC, and just enough could be made of the sense to tell that the subject matter was undoubtedly astronomical.
Little by little, the pieces fitted together until there
resulted a fair idea of the nature and purpose of the machine and of the main character of the inscriptions with which it was covered. The original Antikythera mechanism must have borne a remarkable resemblance to a good modern mechanical clock. It consisted of a wooden frame that supported metal plates, front and back, each plate having quite complicated dials with pointers moving around them. The whole device was about as large as a thick folio encyclopedia volume. Inside the box formed by frame and plates was a mechanism of gear wheels, some twenty of them at least, arranged in a non-obvious way and including differential gears and a crown wheel, the whole lot being mounted on an internal bronze plate. A shaft ran into the box from the side and, when this was turned, all the pointers moved over their dials at various speeds. The dial plates were protected by bronze doors hinged to them, and dials and doors carried the long inscriptions that described how to operate the machine.
It appears that this was, indeed, a computing machine that could work out and exhibit the motions of the sun and moon and probably also the planets. Exactly how it did this is not clear, but the evidence thus far suggests that it was quite different from all other planetary models. It was not like the more familiar planetarium or orrery, which shows the planets moving at their various speeds, but much more like a mechanization of the purely arithmetical Babylonian methods. One just read the dials in accordance with the instructions, and legends on the dials indicated which phenomena would occur at any given time.5
The British-Greek historian Victor J. Kean maintains in his book The Ancient Greek Computer from Rhodes4that the Antikythera device was made on the island of Rhodes around 71 BC. Kean theorizes that the machine was made at the ancient metallurgical science city known as Kamiros and was destined for Rome when the transport ship sank.
What the Antikythera device has shown historians is that the ancient world did in fact have a higher science than we had previously given it credit for. As in tales of the Rama empire, Osiris and Atlantis, the ancient past was a world in which isolated areas had complex machinery, electricity, and metallurgical sciences. History has been destroyed, just as Solon the Greek told Plato.
Zoomorphic Glyphs of Ancient Heavy Machinery
It has been suggested as well that the ancients must have had heavy machinery for construction purposes. Today, bulldozers, mechanical diggers or pneumatic power tools for such things as quarry work, are commonplace. Many individuals, especially farmers, even have heavy machinery to dig around their ditches. But did the ancients have John Deere tractors and Caterpillar backhoes?
Ivan T. Sanderson says in Investigating the Unexplained8that he investigated small gold models of airplanes from Columbia, as well as a gold model of a “dozer.” The dozer model was found in Panama by archaeologists in the 1920s, says Sanderson, who was apparently at the site at some point.
Sanderson says that the site was on the land “of a family named Conté, in the Province of Colclé, which is on the southern coast of Panama to the west of the Canal Zone. This site was near the town of Penonomé... Here were found hundreds of graves containing masses of pottery, some furnerary urns of children, and masses of gold ornaments, body shields, and jewelry. The Peabody Museum of Harvard University carried out somewhat extensive diggings on this site in 1930, 1931, and 1933.” The object is currently in the University Museum of Philadelphia. 8
Zoomorphic pendant from Panama.
The dozer is described as being made by a consummate artist out of gold and containing a huge green gemstone (probably an emerald). It is apparently intended to be a pendant and is four and a half inches long. It was first described as a crocodile, but later as a jaguar by others. The object is clearly covered with mechanical devices, however, including two cogged wheels.
Sanderson mentions that jewelry substituted for coinage in the ancient world of the Americas. Therefore, jewelry often travelled large distances over many hundreds, or even thousands of years. Though the graves in Panama contained material from only about 1000 AD, the pendant was very possibly much older. And, it does look like a dozer, with mud guards and a digging hoe. Indeed the whole thing looks like the model of some sort of digging machine, but it is a zoomorphic depiction.
There is a very strange and interesting rock sketch that was discovered at Merowe, a city of ancient Kush, a country just to the south of Egypt, in present-day Sudan. It appears in the German archaeologist Philipp Vandenberg’s book Curse of the Pharaohs25and is reproduced here. The sketch shows two men operating a device that is said to be identical to a radiation condenser or a laser gun. Others believe it is a rocket of some sort, or a telescope or some sophisticated ray gun. Readers of this book may decide for themselves what it looks like. Academic “experts” have nothing to say on the subject, except that it can’t be a laser, rocket or radiation gun because they didn’t have such devices at the time. Perhaps it was an excavating device or a rock quarrying device—the possibilities are endless if we assume that ancient societies had access to high technology.
Top: A detail of the Aegean from the Ibn Ben Zara map compared with a modern map of the Aegean.
Below: A modern map of the Aegean showing fewer islands than were recorded on earlier maps.
A Hittite stele from central Turkey. The Hittites controlled iron making in Asia Minor for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Top: A map of the Hittite areas of control.
Bottom: A rock relief at Hattusas. The Hittites wore pointy shoes and hats, but were fierce warriors and terrorized Asia Minor with their iron weapons. Ultimately, they were completely destroyed and their cities literally vitrified by intense heat.
The metallic sphere from the Ottosdal Mines in South Africa. The mineral strata was believed to be Precambrian, or 2.8 billion years old. The sphere has three parallel grooves around its equator.
One of many metallic tubes found at Saint-Jean de Livet, France, in a chalk bed that was thought to be 65 million years old.
An auroch skull from Russia with a bullet hole in it.
This metalic vessel was blown out of solid rock in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1851.
Top: The Coso Artifact—a spark plug in a geode?
Bottom: An x-ray of the metal disks and rods inside the geode.
The iron pillar of Delhi.
Aluminum belt buckles found in an ancient Chinese grave.
The Antikythera Device.
The Antikythera Device.
Top: The steam engine-toy invented by the Greek-Egyptian inventor Hero of Alexandria.
Bottom: One of Hero’s inventions, a coin operated holy water dispenser.
One of the few photographs of the Pedro Mountain, Wyoming, mummy. It was blasted out of solid rock in 1932. Today, its whereabouts are unknown.
An x-ray of the Pedro Mountain, Wyoming, mummy.
The zoomorphic gold and “emerald” pendant from Coclé on the south coast of Panama: (a) hung as a pendant; (b) as seen from above, “squared-off,” with “mudguards” hanging down, and possible riding wheels indicated; (c) object as from a photograph taken in the University Museum of Philadelphia; (d) the same, rectified for lateral view, also “squared-off” and with wheels added; (e) a modern back-hoe with dozer-bucket scoop as front attachment.
The zoomorphic pendant from Panama. Side view.
The zoomorphic pendant from Panama. Front view.
The zoomorphic pendant from Panama. Side view.
A modern zoomorphic depicition of heavy machinery from a 1940s science fiction magazine.
Ivan T. Sanderson
Top: Horus, Osiris, Toth, and other gods bring science and civilization to the world.
Bottom: The Sphinx appears in ancient art from North Africa to Central Asia and China.
This strange tablet is attributed to Narmer, the legendary first Pharoah of a united Egypt.
The Tombs of the Genii in Siberia, possibly the largest megaliths ever discovered. Now seemingly lost, these monstrous megaliths (note the horse) are located on the Kora River in what was Soviet
Turkestan and were depicted in the 1876 book The Early Dawn of Civilization (Victoria Institute Journal of Transactions).
An old photo of a megalithic structure in Madagascar.
4.
Ancient Electricity & Sacred Fire
I never pass by a wooden fetish, a gilded Buddha, a Mexican idol without reflecting: perhaps this is the true God.
—Charles Baudelaire
... that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
—Doris Lessing
2,000-Year-Old Electrical Batteries
Electric batteries 2,000 years ago? Shocking but true! True technology of the advanced kind requires some kind of power, usually electricity, or at least a control panel that uses electricity. Think of the amazing array of devices that we use today, from automobiles to airplanes, from toaster ovens and refrigerators to power tools and computers—all of them use electricity in one form or another.
Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients Page 10