by Colin Wilson
A further calendar, called the Long Count, was used to calculate long periods of time. Its unit, as we have noted, was 20 days; 360 days (or 18 units) was a ‘tun’, 20 tuns was a ‘katun’, 20 katuns was a ‘baktun’, which is 144,000 days, and 13 bak-tuns equalled a ‘Great Cycle’, or an ‘earth age’, at the end of which everything would be destroyed and start all over again. The end of the present earth cycle will occur in the year AD 2012.
The Mayan specialist David Kelley was interested in the Aztec calendar, which is closely related to the Mayan calendar (the Aztecs ruled a few centuries after the Maya).12 He had noted similarities between the 20 days of the Aztec calendar and those of an ancient Hindu lunar zodiac, which divided the sky into 28 mansions, corresponding to constellations. He noticed the storm god Rudra ruling a lunar mansion exactly halfway around the cycle from Apah, the water goddess; the Aztec calendar showed rain halfway around the cycle from the water goddess. And when Kelley set the two zodiacs side by side, he noted that the Aztec Death appeared opposite Yama, the Hindu god of death. The next Aztec day, Deer, corresponded to the Hindu deer god, Prajapati.
The next day in the cycle at first seemed less similar, with the Aztec Rabbit appearing next to the Hindu soma, an intoxicating drink – until Kelley recalled that the Aztec rabbit goddess represents drunkenness. Moreover, she is also the moon goddess. Soma also rules the moon – in both Aztec and Hindu mythology, a rabbit instead of a man lives in the moon. And in Mexico, they do not say that someone is ‘as drunk as a skunk’, but ‘as drunk as 400 rabbits’.
Kelley now had no doubt that the Aztec zodiac and the Hindu zodiac had the same source, and that there must have been trans-Pacific contact. He also comments on the similarities of the lunar zodiacs in the Middle East and the Far East, and this connection between the Hindu and Aztec zodiacs brings to mind Robert Graves’s The White Goddess,13 whose central argument is that the religion of the moon goddess is far older than the religion of the sun god that eventually replaced, or at least suppressed it.
Kelley has an even more conclusive piece of evidence for trans-Pacific voyagers. He was intrigued by a speculation of the American sinologist Hugh Moran that the Hebrew and Greek alphabets were derived from the Chinese lunar zodiac. This time the link is with the Mayan rather than the Aztec calendar. Again, there are obvious correspondences. The Greek kappa and the Hebrew kaph correspond to the letter k; ‘kaph’ also means the palm of the hand, and Kelley notes that the Mayan day Manik is represented as a hand and probably pronounced ‘keh’. The following letter in the Greek alphabet is lambda, which in Hebrew is lamed; in the Mayan calendar it is lamat (another Mayan language calls it lambat, even closer to lambda). Next in Hebrew comes mem, and in Greek mu, which means water not only in Hebrew but also in the Semitic language from which the Greeks borrowed it; in Mayan, the next sign is mulu, which is ruled by the shark god and also corresponds to the Aztec day water. To Kelley this K–L–M sequence seems too close to be coincidence.
Kelley believes that the Mayan calendar originated in a Hindu city called Taxila, which was a great Indian trading post on the Silk Road to China and is now in Pakistan. He points out that, after its conquest by Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Taxila became a centre of learning like Alexandria, with scholars coming from as far away as China and Egypt. These people, Kelley thinks, undertook the long voyage to Mexico.
Kelley notes that Eastern rulers were deeply interested in eclipses because of their ‘occult’ significance: ‘To chart future eclipses, Taxilian scholars had to know the earth’s circumference. Far more advanced scientifically than the Europeans of Columbus’s day, the Taxilians already knew the earth was a sphere.’ So the scholars of Taxila may have mounted an expedition to ‘do better astrology’.
When John Barber asked Kelley what kinds of ships could have been used by primitive man, he indicated that he felt this was the wrong question. ‘The shipping problem is a straw man. People can have made the trip any time in the last 40,000 years. They could have made it intentionally and got back any time in the last 5,000 years.’ In short, Kelley agrees with Zapp and Erikson that man has been a navigator for thousands of years.
In fact, this view had been stated more than twenty years earlier. The God-Kings and the Titans (1973)14 by James Bailey, and Gods of the Cataclysm (1976)15 by Hugh Fox, both argued that there had been a worldwide seagoing civilisation long before the Greeks and Romans. In The God-Kings and the Titans, Bailey asserts that the main force that drove the civilisations of the Bronze Age to the seas was the quest for copper and tin, whose alloy bronze was the hardest metal known to man. Much of the book is taken up with detailed comparisons of Meso-American culture and that of Asia and Europe, and a map shows Bronze Age trade routes following the ocean currents and trade winds all over the Atlantic and Pacific. Bailey cites a Phoenician inscription discovered at Parahyba, Brazil, describing how a ship from Sidon had been separated from a fleet of ten ships by a storm before it was cast up on those distant shores. Another Phoenician inscription at Rio, 3,000 feet up on a vertical cliff face, states simply: ‘Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, firstborn of Jethbal.’ Whether or not the Phoenicians of the Rio inscription were in search of minerals, Bailey has no doubt that the American continent was one of the old world’s main sources of tin and copper. In a sequel to The God-Kings and the Titans, called Sailing to Paradise (1994), he quotes the technological historian R. J. Forbes: ‘Much of ancient history could be rewritten as a struggle for the domination of quarries and ore-deposits or metal-supplies’, adding: ‘This is the center of our argument in this book.’16
In his foreword to The God-Kings and the Titans, palaeontologist Raymond Dart points out that historians of science took it for granted that mining began about 4,000 BC until the 1960s, when carbon-dating from the Ngwenya iron mine in Swaziland showed that mining for red iron ore (haematite) had been carried out there as long ago as 7,690 BC. By 1969, it had been established that our ancestors had been mining in 41,250 BC. Dart concludes by mentioning Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition, saying that he ‘has opened the eyes of the whole world to the grandeur of the maritime experience of mankind’.
Gods of the Cataclysm (1976) by Hugh Fox was equally original and challenging. Fox’s wife was Peruvian, and Fox had spent many years studying the ancient cultures of Meso-America and South America. One of these was in Chavin, on the Peruvian coast, whose ruins were discovered in 1919. The archaeologist who had excavated Chavin had remarked that the ruins were covered by a huge amount of dirt and rocks, as if the town had been inundated by waves.
Fox had read a book called The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (1966) by Donald Patten,17 which argued that ‘the Great Flood was the pivotal point in human history’, dividing prehistory from history. Patten believed that ‘an astral visitor of some sort’ had swept close by the earth in 2,800 BC, destroying most of mankind. There is considerable evidence for a flood in the Mediterranean area around 2,200 BC. In Uriel’s Machine, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas have preferred the later date of 3,200 BC for this flood, but this was certainly not Patten’s ‘world flood’, which almost wiped out mankind. And the date of the great flood ‘when the sky fell’ seems to have been about 9,600 BC.
Fox points out that Patten’s notion that civilisation had almost been destroyed by a great flood seemed to have been confirmed in the silt-covered ruins of Chavin. He also noted that a stone cat he had brought from Chavin, every millimetre of which was covered in designs, strongly resembled a Chinese bronze elephant from the late Shang dynasty (2,000 BC) that he had seen in the Freer Gallery in Washington. He became convinced of a connection between China and Peru.
In Chavin excavators had also found stone heads with flat noses, exaggerated nostrils and protruding eyes. Fox had seen a piece of pottery in Taipei, in Taiwan, that had exactly the same features. His first theory was that Chinese fishermen had been swept across the Pacific, landing in Peru. Could they have been swept away by the great flood? This, he decided, was un
likely. What was far more likely was that they had come to Peru before the flood. Then he began to experience doubt: the Chavin heads did not look very Chinese. To begin with, the eyes were the wrong shape. Could it be that the seafarers were not Chinese, but people who had come from elsewhere through China and also been represented on the Taipei pottery? He began to note similarities between the cultures of ancient India and Meso-America, for example, the phallic imagery in India and in Uxmal in Mexico.
What if these ancient voyagers were Dravidians, the original inhabitants of India? These were a dark-skinned, phallus-worshipping people, who were conquered and driven south by the invading Aryans. Their religion seems to have been matriarchal and they possibly worshipped the moon goddess.
Fox’s comparative study of art from America, Asia and Europe led him to conclude that there was a time — which he calls Phase 1 — when there was a single world culture. Then came the Great Cataclysm — the giant asteroid that swept past the earth and caused the flood. After that, the Andes continued to rise and the green Sahara began to change into a desert, and in this new period of history, the older worldwide culture was replaced by the Mediterranean culture (Phase 2) of the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Matriarchal culture disappeared, and a more brutal patriarchal culture took its place. The Phoenicians (who had also been active in Phase 1) returned to Brazil and Mexico, but this time in search of minerals and precious stones.
As a picture of ancient history, Gods of the Cataclysm is powerfully argued, and its comparison of American, Asian and Mediterranean art is convincing. Two observations made earlier in this chapter seem to support its thesis: Zapp’s comment that ‘atl’ (as in Atlantis’) is not Greek but Mayan, and Kelley’s arguments about the similarity between the Hindu and the Aztec calendars. Its central argument, that history is divided into two phases, before and after the great flood, obviously accords with that of this book, except that Fox places the flood about 7,000 years later, in 2,800 BC instead of 9,600 BC.
At first sight, Jim Bailey’s arguments seem less compelling, since they seem to refer mainly to the Bronze Age, which in Egypt began about 2,500 BC and in Britain about 2,000 BC, but he also argues that, before the beginning of the Bronze Age, copper was equally sought after by ‘ancient voyagers’, and that the Copper Age began as early as 7,000 BC. (He also observes that among the thousands of clay tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, no less than 8 per cent were lists of minerals such as copper.) Certainly, the discovery that man has been mining in South Africa for more than 40,000 years provides powerful support for his thesis that mining has played a central part in the evolution of civilisation.
In fact, he might have cited an even more remarkable discovery: that one iron mine in Africa dated from 100,000 years ago. And since Cro-Magnon man did not appear on earth until later than 100,000 years ago, then this mining must have been carried out by his predecessor, Neanderthal man. He seems to have used the red ochre (haematite) for ritualistic purposes, including burial. And it suggests something that is directly linked to the blueprint: that the science of geology is much more ancient than we commonly assume. Mining is, after all, the technological application of the science of geology. Rand believes that, like astronomy, geology is a very ancient science.
What is beginning to emerge in all these different areas of research is a picture that has more in common with Hapgood’s worldwide maritime civilisation than with the cautious views of scholars who believe that civilisation began at Sumer round about 4,000 BC. This Asian diffusionist’ view has been gathering strength for a long time. In the 1940s, Gordon Eckholm drew up a long list of correspondences between Asia and Meso-America. One of his students, Paul Tolstoy of the University of Montreal, has virtually proved his old professor’s thesis with a study of bark cloth, a cloth made from the inner bark of trees that is turned into products such as felt and paper. Mexicans were making it when Cortés and his Spanish invaders arrived, but so were natives of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. Tolstoy has spent thirty years studying bark cloth manufacture from all around the world, as well as examining the tools used in making it. Among hundreds of examples of bark cloths around the world, similarities of style between those of Indonesia and Meso-America left Tolstoy in no doubt that they were closely related. His conclusion was that Indonesians crossed the Pacific 1,000 years before Columbus. No modern scholars dispute the notion that the production and use of bark cloth moved in the opposite direction: from Java and Borneo to Africa, where it spread across the continent. This bark cloth was made with a quite different technique from that of Sulawesi – and Mexico.
The powerful case for the argument that Mayan culture came from further west, across the ocean, has further support.
Now we must consider another reason that is even more startling.
Early nineteenth-century travellers to Mesopotamia, the Biblical ‘Land of the Two Rivers’, must have been disappointed to find it so bare and unromantic: no pyramids or temples or obelisks, just an arid country of desert and dust storms, with odd-looking mounds that rose out of the brown plain like miniature volcanoes.
In 1840, the French Consul at Mosul, on the west bank of the Tigris, was a doctor named Paul Emile Botta. A linguist and a scholar, he took a lively interest in those academic and philosophical disputes that, then as now, divided French intellectuals into warring camps. Ever since Napoleon had taken archaeologists with him to Egypt to study its pyramids and temples, the French had displayed an interest in archaeology, particularly since a young genius named Champollion had succeeded in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics by means of the Rosetta Stone.
Botta had been following a dispute about the whereabouts of the ancient city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, where Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal had struck terror into the hearts of their neighbours. It seemed to have vanished into antiquity without a trace. One suggestion was that it had been located in the region of Mosul.
Botta found his consular duties less than absorbing, and Mosul full of dust and noise, so he began to make a habit of riding out in the evening, to enjoy the breeze along the river and the desert with its mysterious mounds. He also bought pieces of ancient pottery and inscribed fragments of clay tablets from local Arabs. He decided to start digging at a village called Kuyunjik, where there was a promising-looking mound. As month after month went by without any find more significant than broken pottery and clay tablets, Botta began to feel he was wasting his time and money. The local Turkish pasha — Mesopotamia was then ruled by the Turks — also made life difficult by spying on the excavation and intimidating the workmen, convinced that the French consul was in search of treasure. Botta was about to abandon archaeology when a persuasive Arab told him that he would find plenty of ancient bricks and pottery in his village. Botta needed little persuasion to take his workmen to a village called Khorsabad, 7 miles to the north, where his men sank a shaft and soon came upon a wall lined with slabs of stone, on which there were drawings of animals. Botta had no doubt that he had found Nineveh. He was wrong — he had discovered the palace of a king called Sargon II, who ruled around 700 BC. It proved to be immense, with about 200 rooms, whose walls displayed friezes of bearded men, warriors on horseback and winged animals. Botta might not have discovered Nineveh, but he had rediscovered ancient Assyria.
For three centuries, from 911 BC until 610 BC, the Assyrians had hacked and slaughtered their way to power with such ferocity that their enemies finally banded against them and killed them like vermin, reducing their cities to charred rubble.
Two centuries later, the Greek mercenaries of King Cyrus passed the vast ruins of Nineveh and Nimrud — the story is told by the historian Xenophon — and marvelled at these gigantic empty ruins, but the local inhabitants could tell them nothing about the devastated cities — even the memory of the Assyrians had been destroyed.
In 1842, Botta met a young Englishman named Henry Layard, who had been dreaming about the Middle East ever since he read, The Arabian Nights as a boy. The two often
shared a pipe together — sometimes of opium — and when Botta showed him the mound of Kuyunjik, Layard seems to have been bitten by the bug of archaeological research, which has something in common with the gambler’s love of backing long odds.
Layard had no money, but he had a persuasive tongue, and three years later succeeded in inducing the British ambassador in Constantinople to give him £60, which he used to begin excavating yet another mysterious mound, that of Nimrud (Calah). He unearthed finds even more spectacular than Botta’s — huge winged lions and bulls that were soon on their way back to the British Museum. Now famous, and financed (parsimoniously) by the British treasury, Layard turned his attention to Kuyunjik, which had defeated Botta a few years earlier. Within hours, he realised how close the Frenchman had come to making one of the most momentous finds in archaeology, for this indeed was Nineveh, the great city of the Bible. Layard found himself digging into the burned-out palace of Ashurbanipal (669—626 BC), one of its mightiest and most ruthless kings.
The French also returned to the race, and the mound of Kuyunjik was divided between them. One day in 1852, when the French were absent, Layard’s assistant Hormuzd Rassam decided to do a little poaching, and ordered his workmen to tunnel into the French territory on the other side of the dividing line. The God of Archaeology was with him, and he cut through a wall and found himself in the library of
Ashurbanipal, full of clay tablets inscribed with wedge-like cuneiform.
Ashurbanipal, in spite of being one of the cruellest tyrants in history, was an enthusiastic collector of written records. Whenever he conquered a city, he had its library transported to Nineveh, and as a result had collected some 30,000 clay tablets, mostly concerned with magic, exorcism and divination. After their recovery, they were sent back to the British Museum.