Although that would suggest a much wider scope of the mechanism’s functions, de Solla Price identified it as “a calendrical Sun and Moon computing mechanism which may have been made about 87 B.C.”—a mechanism that “evolved as a result of Hipparchan modifications to the Archimedian planetarium.” He considered it evidence “of the [higher] level of Greco-Roman mechanical proficiency than has been thought . . . a singular artifact that quite changes our ideas about the Greeks.”
He thus remained true to the title of the book—“Gears from the Greeks.”
I found that these conclusions not only failed to answer the How, Why, and Who really designed and built this incredible device, but also lavished exuberant praise on “the Greeks” for astronomical knowledge the credit for which belonged to Sumer via Babylon. I searched, in vain, for the words Sumer/Sumerian in the book; I did find one brief reference to “Babylonian astronomy”:
The mechanism displays the cyclical sequence of sets of discrete phenomena rather than a continuum of events in a flowing time. In this way it is perhaps more in the spirit of Babylonian astronomy and the modern digital computer than in that of the Greek geometrical models.
Figure 109
Finding this small bow to Mesopotamia, I sent Prof. Price a copy of The 12th Planet with a letter pointing out the Sumerian origins of the Zodiac, etc. I did not receive an answer, but a year or so later—in March 1982—I was invited to attend a lecture by him at the Harvard Club in New York. The subject of the lecture—Is Computer Genius a Throwback to Ancient Babylonian Thought Styles?—seemed to be in line with questions that I had posed to him.
The invitation (fig. 109) came from a society called American Friends of the Haifa Maritime Museum (an interesting and fascinating museum, a visit to which I highly recommend), and I of course attended. I came armed with photocopies of illustrations from my book, showing Mesopotamian artifacts which proved the Sumerian origins of the “ancient Babylonian”—and thus of Greek—astronomical knowledge.
The lecture was not accompanied by any slides or other depictional material. In line with previous lectures and essays by him (that had been available in print), he expounded on his theme that the Babylonians were wedded to a dull arithmetic while the Greeks took off with fanciful geometry. It was all in all rather academic, dwelling on scientific “thought styles” or philosophies that led in time to the computer age. There was no mention of Sumer or the Sumerians.
The Q&A part that followed was very brief, because the meeting also had to deal with the Society’s board elections, etc., and my raised hand was ignored. All I managed was to say “hello” to Dr. Price after the lecture, before he left, and remind him of my letter and book; he said Yes, Hello, and turned to talk to the others who surrounded him. I wondered whether he really recalled who I was.
Prof. Derek de Solla Price passed away the next year, and my avenue of further contacts with him thus came to an abrupt end. Thanks, however, to two devoted fans of mine in England, one (Keith H.) a professional horologist and the other (Martin B.) a part-time one, I was kept abreast of important subsequent researches on the Mechanism—researches which only deepened the mystery, for they showed (among other things) that what Dr. Price considered to be just two “sandwich” groups of moving parts were in fact seventeen layers of gears (fig. 110)!
Figure 110
The first important study was an “analysis through reconstruction” by Alan G. Bromley, a computer scientist at the University of Sydney in Australia, in collaboration with a renowned Australian clockmaker, Frank Percival. Their detailed report in the Horological Journal of July 1990 related their unending difficulties in duplicating the gears and their precise teeth, in attaching this part to that part, in fitting it all within the tiny spaces, and in trying to make it work. They kept failing in cutting teeth at 60°. All along, they “wondered how the ancients did it.” How, for example, do you divide a dial into 79 equal parts? How do you make contrate gears move in reverse?
Exasperated, Prof. Bromley wrote this in conclusion: “I do not pretend to have all the answers to how the Antikythera Mechanism was made, any more than I pretend to complete knowledge of its function or the mathematics of its gear work . . . The only inescapable fact is that, however it was done, the Antikythera Mechanism was made by craftsmen over 2,000 years ago.”
The most thorough subsequent effort was by M. T. Wright, Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum in London, who has labored over the Mechanism for many years. Not relying on Price’s study of the Mechanism’s fragments, he re-studied it with the latest technologies, even bringing over to Greece a huge apparatus for Linear Tomography. He then attempted to fathom the Mechanism’s secrets by building an accurate duplicate thereof.
The resulting research paper, published in the Horological Journal in May 2002, disagreed with Price in various technical points, suggested that some parts were still missing, and concluded that the Mechanism was an Orrery—a mechanical model of the solar system that shows the orbits of the planets around the Sun in the correct relative velocities. Yet, though the study dwelled a lot on the zodiacal aspects of the device, it offered no explanation for the obvious paradox: Why do you need a complex zodiacal mechanism to show how Venus or Jupiter—which are planets—orbit around the Sun? And what was the purpose of the Mechanism’s elaborate Moon/Sun relationships (which underlie eclipse phenomena)?
The fact that even the substantial researches conducted by Bromley, Percival, and Wright left key questions unanswered, led a group of British and Greek scientists, with the help of American computer and imaging experts, to launch, under the aegis of the National Bank of Greece, The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. Using even more advanced techniques, and testing the results by constructing an updated model of the Mechanism, they presented their findings at an international conference held in Athens, Greece, November 30–December 1, 2006. Their full report was published in the November 30, 2006, issue of the journal Nature.
By combing the Athens Museum’s stores of artifacts from the sunken ship and with the aid of CT-tomography, this latest team found a few more tiny fragments of the mechanism, established that there were at least 30 gears, probably 32, and perhaps as many as 37—some of them truly miniature. They were also able to read additional letters on the wooden or metal parts, and disclosed that some of the letters were a microscopical 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) in size.
As baffling as these findings were, the most astounding discovery of technological sophistication was that two connected gear-wheels were purposely slightly misaligned, with an ingenious pin from one gear moving the other gear back and forth to simulate the irregular elliptical orbit of the Moon around the Earth. That, the scientists pointed out, was essential if the purpose was to be able to predict lunar and solar eclipses. “When you see that, your jaw just drops and you think ‘bloody hell, that’s clever—that’s brilliant technical design,’” said astronomy professor Michael Edmunds, a team leader from the University of Cardiff in Wales.
When it came to the question of Who had such technology centuries B.C., the team’s best guess stayed with the Hipparchus/Rhodes island suggestions, although they repeatedly stressed that there has not been found anything like it from either before or after times; the only much simpler geared mechanisms appeared in Europe more than a thousand years later. As to Who had the astronomical knowledge required for devising the Mechanism, they recognized—though without elaborating—the “Babylonian legacy.” As to Who needed such a mechanism and what for, Prof. Edmunds simply said: We don’t know. But another team member’s answer was: “This would have been important for timing agricultural and religious festivals.”
One is as amazed by such a ridiculous answer as much as one is amazed by the incredible technological, scientific, and astronomical aspects of the Mechanism; its existence in its time frame is as astounding as if one were told that Jesus communicated with his disciples by cell phone . . .
As the reader will find out by th
e end of this book, it was not until I completed my research for the The End of Days (the concluding volume of The Earth Chronicles) that the portentous secret of the Antikythera Predictor dawned on me.
12
NAZCA: WHERE THE GODS LEFT EARTH
In 1997 I was leading one of the Earth Chronicles Expeditions to Turkey, and I insisted—over the objections of the tour operator—that we go to the country’s eastern part. The local people were concerned about the security situation, because violent clashes were taking place there between the Turkish army and Kurdish rebels. But I insisted on going there—to see and be in Harran. It was a journey intended to complete a circuit that began almost a decade earlier on the other side of the world.
Harran, in case the reader has missed Bible classes, is where Abraham’s God-ordained journey to Canaan began, more than four thousand years ago. He came to Harran with his father and other family members from Ur, the Sumerian capital in southern Mesopotamia. It was in Harran that Rebecca was chosen to become the bride of Abraham’s son Isaac, and where Isaac’s son Jacob met and fell in love with Rachel. All three Hebrew patriarchs and their wives, and thus all their descendants—myself included—have an ancestral “umbilical cord” to Harran.
But that was not the only reason for wanting to go there. The principal reason was to visit the remains of an ancient temple whose god took off and left the Earth—only to return fifty-five years later; a god who followed the skymap’s route!
Nowadays Harran is a sleepy town, surrounded by the remains of an impressive but crumbling defensive wall from Islamic and medieval times (plate 34), built when some crucial battles were fought there; its few inhabitants live in adobe houses shaped like beehives, to provide some coolness in the summer heat. But in ancient times Harran was a thriving commercial center, famed for its temple to the god Sin (the “Moon god,” whose principal temple was in Ur), and for its scribal academies. Outside the town the well where Jacob met Rachel—so local traditions hold—is still there, now protected by a raised concrete platform (plate 35), with sheep flocks still grazing in the nearby meadows.
Within the walls a mound, where the ancient temple was, dominates the landscape (plate 36). It was there that archaeologists found four inscribed stelas that record eyewitness reports of the divine departure and return.
Two of the stelas were emplaced by the high priestess of the temple whose name was Adda-Gupi, and record the events as told by her. The other two belonged to her son Nabuna’id (plate 37 and fig. 111), and record how he was fated to become the last king of Babylon. It was in a year equivalent to 610 B.C., Adda-Gupi wrote, that the god Sin “got angry with the people and went up to heaven”; it was in 555 B.C. that, relenting (and given a promise to be restored to primacy in Ur itself ), he returned. The return was an event the likes of which were legendary already in his days, Nabuna’id wrote on his stelas—
This is the great miracle of Sin
that has by gods and goddesses
not happened to the Earth—
since days of old unknown;
That the people of the Earth
had neither seen nor found written
on tablets since days of old:
That Sin, lord of gods and goddesses,
residing in the heavens,
has come down from the heavens—
in full view of Nabuna’id, king of Babylon.
Figure 111
The full story is told in greater detail in The End of Days, the seventh book of The Earth Chronicles series, in which a mass of other evidence is provided to conclude that not only Sin (with his spouse and chamberlain) had left; with some exceptions, it was a wholesale departure of the Anunnaki from Earth.
Indeed, the departure was so comprehensive that even in Jerusalem, according to the Bible (Ezekiel 8:12), it was lamented that “Yahweh sees us no more—Yahweh has left the Earth!”
In the previous volumes of The Earth Chronicles and earlier in this book, the story has been told of the Anunnaki’s coming to Earth from Nibiru, in need of gold to save their planet’s dwindling (or damaged) atmosphere, and of the first “cities of the gods” established in the E.DIN—“Eden” in pre-Diluvial Mesopotamia—with a Mission Control Center, a Spaceport, Beacon Cities, and a Landing Corridor for their spacecraft and shuttlecraft. All that was wiped out by the Deluge, and was replaced by a similar layout in the Lands of the Bible—a Spaceport in the Sinai peninsula, in whose central plain the ground was firm, flat, and suitable for landings and takeoffs; a Mission Control Center in the future Jerusalem; the great pyramid and its companions in Giza as Guidance Beacons; and the pre-Diluvial Landing Place in the Lebanon Mountains (“Baalbek”) as a shuttle base.
These four space-related sites (see fig. 16) were to play a key role in the affairs of gods and men not only in antiquity, but also in the present and even in the future. In The Wars of Gods and Men I described the Pyramid Wars (when the Great Pyramid was stripped of its functioning equipment), and the Nuclear Attack of 2024 B.C., when the Spaceport in the Sinai, and Sodom and Gomorrah, were obliterated. The obvious question, then, was this: Where was an alternative post-nuclear space facility from which the Anunnaki could leave?
For the answer we have to look to South America; and when one goes there, the most amazing ancient remains are encountered.
The Deluge, the great Flood, that “swept over the Earth” some 13,000 years ago, destroyed not only all in the Edin, but also the vital gold-mining operations of the Anunnaki in southeastern Africa. But the same calamity that in one swoop deprived the Anunnaki of the gold in one location opened up for them an even better source in another location—in the Andes mountains of South America.
Sweeping over vast mother lodes of gold in what is now Peru and Bolivia, the avalanche of water exposed immense quantities of gold that needed neither mining nor smelting and refining: Nuggets of pure gold just lay there, to be found and retrieved in a method called Placer Mining—the way gold was first recovered millennia later in North America, when some 30,000 gold seekers swarmed into the mountains of Canada’s Yukon Territory to pan for gold at the Klondike River.
The Anunnaki established their new gold center at a site near the shores of a great lake—the largest navigable body of freshwater at the highest elevation (some 13,000 feet) in the world—Lake Titicaca (fig. 112). Called Tiahuanacu (lately spelled Tiwanaku) by the area’s Aymara natives, it was deemed by the Incas of Peru to be the place where the great god of ancient South America, Viracocha, placed the first humans, gave them a golden wand with which to locate the future Cuzco, and granted civilization to the forerunners of the Incas. Then he left and was gone from the Earth.
The first European explorer of Tiahuanacu in modern times, Ephraim George Squier (The Primeval Monuments of Peru, 1853) was amazed to find in the windswept and barren place, at an elevation of almost four kilometers, the remains of monumental stone structures, large carved monoliths, statues representing giantlike unusual male beings, long conduits, subterranean tunnels. Why, he wondered, would anyone haul heavy stone boulders, erect immense buildings, or carve all that, in such a forbidding and almost lifeless place?
Figure 112
His amazement increased as he went the short distance to the lake’s shore, where the ground was strewn with puzzling stone ruins. Finding a promontory, he gazed around and realized that the Lake and Tiahuanacu lay in a topographic depression, a once flat valley astride peaks that rose more than another 10,000 feet around it. Dominating the panorama were two grand peaks—Illampu and Illimani, rising to 27,000 and 25,000 feet, respectively (the highest in the Andes).
He could only think of the comparable twin peaks of Ararat, the highest in the Near East (though rising only to 17,000 and 13,000 feet), and he titled the chapter describing Tiahuanacu and its environs “Tiahuanacu, the Baalbec of the New World.” Little did he realize how close he had come to a secret truth.
When I went to Tiahuanacu and Lake Titicaca in 1989, my primary “guidebook” was not
one of the variety of tourists’ handbooks then available, but heavier yellowing volumes of the writings of Arthur Posnansky, a European engineer who moved to Bolivia and devoted a lifetime to unraveling the enigmas of these ruins. The Spanish chronicler Pedro de Cieza de Leon, who traveled in Peru and Bolivia in 1532– 1550, reported that “without doubt the ruins of Tiahuanacu were the most ancient place of any” that he had seen in those lands. Arthur Posnansky astounded the scientific community by announcing, in his extensive writings beginning in 1914, that Tiahuanacu was built 12,000 years ago.
The principal aboveground structures in Tiahuanacu (there are numerous subterranean ones) are the Akapana, an artificial hill riddled with channels, conduits, and sluices (in The Lost Realms I have suggested that it served as a metallurgical facility) and (apart from an enigmatic carved stone giant) a stone gateway known as the Gate of the Sun (fig. 113)—a prominent structure that was cut and fashioned from a single boulder.
The main interest in the “Gate of the Sun” are the images carved on it, suggesting that it served a calendrical purpose, as the arrangement of the carved images on the archway indicates, and probably also a more sophisticated astronomical/zodiacal function. Those carvings are dominated by the larger central image of the god Viracocha (fig. 114) holding a forked lightning rod as his symbol, dominating a row of eleven smaller similar images (making twelve in all), and flanked by 30 “emissaries,” fifteen on each side (fig. 115a, b) (adding up to days in a month).
Journeys to the Mythical Past Page 14