Atlantis Beneath the Ice (12 page)

Gwaai also revealed a story of the Haida carving tradition that dates from these ancient times. It is a tale about one of the smallest, most humble of animals.

Only Mouse-Woman dared to challenge Foam-Woman. Mouse-Woman, who at this time was of normal size, rose from the ocean and scolded Foam-Woman for not sharing the new land with all the people. As she advanced on Foam-Woman the goddess cast a spell over her. With each step she took, Mouse-Woman shrank. Until finally, she was transformed into the tiny creature we know today.

But Foam-Woman was so impressed by Mouse-Woman’s bravery that she yielded to the wishes of the sea people to join her on land.

To honor the courage of Mouse-Woman, Gwaai and other Haida artists often conceal an image of a mouse in their carvings.

Raven, one of the most significant creatures in Haida mythology,
^c
is described as a serious-minded god rather than the trickster that he became. At that time, the myth says, “Hereabouts was all saltwater,” which suggests a time right after the Flood. And the “first land” was a rock protruding from the ocean, where Raven landed.

Sumerian mythology tells of the time when a creature from the sea emerged as the first person. Both the Haida and Sumerians had a long love affair with the sea. The Sumerians’ vocabulary contains hundreds of nautical terms. They also share with the Haida unique stories about amphibious god ancestors with tails. The god Oannes was half man and half fish. During the day Oannes taught the Sumerians how to write and the other arts of civilization before returning to the sea as night fell.

Then Gwaai volunteered that there is a genetic trait uniquely
prevalent among the Haida that results in a high incidence of ankylosing spondylitis (AS), a form of inflammatory arthritis and a painful and potentially debilitating disease. AS attacks the skeleton, particularly the neck, pelvis, and spinal column. Scientists had tested the Haida for this trait by taking hair samples for DNA analysis.
^d
Rand was reminded of Robert Brinchurst’s description in
A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
of Skaay, the blind Haida myth teller who was “an old man with a crippled back and a beautiful mind.”
¹³
The crippled back could be the result of AS.

Ninety-three percent of people with AS carry the antigen HLA-B27, including half of the Haida—among the highest percentage of any group of people in the world. Thirty-six percent of the Navajo (also known as the Dine)—the largest tribe of First Nations people in North America—are also burdened with the antigen. As we’ve seen, the languages of the Haida and Dine are usually grouped together linguistically (although not all researchers agree with the grouping) into the Na-Dene language group

Surprisingly, these two North American peoples share their rare medical condition with a powerful dynasty from halfway around the world. “Among the pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasty of Old Egypt, at least three had ankylosing spondylitis: Amenhotep (Amenophis) II, Ramses II (Ramses the Great), and his son Merenptah.”
¹⁴
Egypt’s geographic proximity to Sumer is suggestive. Both civilizations were largely dependent on the same crops: wheat and barley. These founding crops came to Egypt via Sumer and helped launch Egyptian civilization.

Ramses the Great, one of the most famous of all the pharaohs, is often featured in the story of Moses and the Exodus. He suffered from AS and was so badly crippled that, gruesomely, before his corpse could
be lowered into the sarcophagus, the mummifiers were forced to break his neck so that his body would lie flat.

Merenptah was Ramses the Great’s thirteenth son, and like his father, his remains exhibit all the hallmarks of ankylosing spondylitis. That father and son should bend beneath the same affliction is not unusual since AS is assumed to be primarily genetic. What
is
curious is the fact that the earliest of the three mummies that exhibit signs of AS was that of Amenhotep II, who was not a direct ancestor of either Ramses the Great or Merenptah. Ramses I (Ramses II’s father) had ascended to the throne through a military coup.

So AS appeared in different Egyptian dynasties through different bloodlines. This suggests, as Gwaai pointed out to Rand, that the prevalence of AS must have been high within the royal family of the New Kingdom of Egypt. Gwaai’s idea made sense. What didn’t make sense was the fact that Egypt’s closest neighbors, the Ethiopians to the south and the Berbers to the west, are among the populations that carry the lowest rates of HLA-B27. The Mediterranean Sea lies to the north, but there was no successful sea invasion of Egypt by which the genetic disease could have been introduced until the Roman period. This suggests that the AS that was so prevalent among the pharaohs probably came from the east—from the direction of ancient Sumer.

So how
did
HLA-B27 end up in ancient Egypt? The answer, it seems, might be found in the bloodlines of the foreign pharaohs who ruled immediately before the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties.

For centuries no intruder dared invade Egypt. The Egyptians grew smug in their security and independence. This smugness offered a clear opportunity for imaginative invaders with a revolutionary new weapon. The Hyksos descended from the east in horse-drawn chariots that moved so swiftly that the Egyptians had no time to marshal a defense. The Hyksos, according to the ancient Egyptian historian Manetho, came from the Persian Gulf, the homeland of the Sumerians. They brought with their victory the seeds of a painful disease, ankylosing spondylitis.

Bryan Stykes, author of
The Seven Daughters of Eve,
¹⁵
has developed
a technique by which DNA can be extracted from ancient bones. This new science could prove the radical theory of an ancient link between the Haida and the Sumerians. The discovery of such a link would open the door to the idea that they could have originated as one people. A people who shared a common motherland—a lost island paradise that perished in a Great Flood.

SIX

AZTLAN AND THE POLAR PARADISE

From Egypt and the northwest coast of Canada, our attention again turns to Peru, where we last explored the ruins of the great mountain city, Machu Picchu. We look at the highest major lake in the world and its connection to the flooded and lost Atlantis.

Anyone who attempts the 4,350-meter climb up the rough and winding road to Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian Andes gasps as the thin mountain air evades his or her lungs. But the struggle is worth it, for at the summit lies a mysterious lake. Only the graceful reed boats of the native people who still fish its depths and the restless winds of the past disturb the surface of the lake.

The Inca claim that their ancestors came here in the remote past to construct the great city of Tiahuanaco and its amazing Temple of the Sun. The city was built from massive boulders, comparable to those of the Egyptian pyramids. But the construction is incomplete, as if it had been abruptly abandoned.

No one has spent more time or effort studying Tiahuanaco’s ruins than Arthur Posnansky (1874–1946). He spent the better part of his life trying to unravel its mysteries. Posnansky concluded that the Temple of the Sun had been constructed more than ten thousand years ago, around the same time that Atlantis was destroyed. He was convinced that a Great Flood had drowned much of the earth. In one amazing
passage he offers a prophetic conclusion. “The face of the earth has with the passage of time undergone great transformations. Where today we find the arctic region covered with a vast tunic of ice, there lies hidden, perhaps, in an impenetrable silence, the ground which in very remote epochs was the dwelling place of great concentrated masses of human beings.
¹

The same words could apply to Antarctica.

In the center of Tiahuanaco, the massive Temple of the Sun is aligned with the rising sun, as are the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico. However, there is a slight discrepancy in its angles. Posnansky reasoned that if the ancient builders were capable of constructing such elaborate monuments in the thin air of the high Andes, then surely they could accurately align their holy temple with the rising sun on the summer solstice.

It occurred to him that perhaps the boulders were correctly aligned when first erected, but gradual alterations of the earth’s axis over a long period of time had resulted in what now, at first glance, appeared to be a misalignment. If the temple had been properly aligned when it was first built, then a construction date could be estimated based on the precession of the equinoxes. Posnansky concluded that the temple was correctly aligned to a date “somewhere beyond ten thousand years.”
²

Archaeologists have dismissed this notion as fantasy. It is simply not possible, in their view, for a civilization to have existed at such an early date. (This would be four thousand years before Sumer, the “first” civilization recognized by archaeologists.) Posnansky’s research has consequently been ignored.

However, the Polish researcher’s estimated date for the construction of the Temple of the Sun on Lake Titicaca has recently been given a boost with the unexpected discovery of the age of the Great Sphinx of ancient Egypt. Two methods have been used to date the construction of the Sphinx: one using evidence of erosion and the other using the gradual changes in the heavens as seen from Earth.

The idea that the Sphinx might be much older than Egyptian
civilization was first proposed in the late 1940s by the French scholar R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. In
Le roi de la theocritie pharaonique (Sacred Science
in the English version), Schwaller claimed that the Great Sphinx had experienced extensive
water
erosion. We all know that the Sphinx lies in a vast desert where rain is rare. In 1972, John Anthony West focused on this insight of Schwaller’s and included it in his book,
Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt.
³

The revolutionary idea that the Sphinx might predate Egyptian civilization was too radical for Egyptologists to consider. They ignored it, preferring silence to debate.

West continued to explore the idea. Eventually, he interested a geologist from the University of Boston, Dr. Robert M. Schoch, in his work. Schoch was skeptical but curious. He went to Egypt with West to see for himself the weathering patterns on the Sphinx. It soon become clear to Schoch that the Sphinx had indeed been weathered by rain for thousands of years before the desert claimed the region. Wind erosion cuts sharp, straight patterns into sediment layers. But the Sphinx exhibits the round, furrowed contours typical of water erosion. This meant that the monument must have been constructed during a long rainy period sometime before 5000 BCE and very possibly much earlier. Since this predates the appearance of Egyptian civilization by thousands of years, the question was at once raised: who carved the Great Sphinx?

On October 23, 1991, Schoch presented his conclusions to the Geological Society of America. His data were accepted at once. Schoch and West had begun to turn back the clock of human history by thousands of years. In 1992, they took their argument to Chicago before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Once again support was forthcoming from geologists, but Egyptologists simply could not accept such an ancient age for the Sphinx. It
must
be incorrect, so their reasoning went, for the alternative was to suggest a notion that, as one Egyptologist claimed, undermined “everything we know about ancient Egypt.”
⁴

In the fall of 1993 and again in the summer of 1994, West presented
his documentary,
The Mystery of the Sphinx
, on U.S. television. The arguments were now too strong to be ignored. It was clear that the very existence of the Sphinx and the impressive temples standing in front of it, built with stones weighing more than 180 metric tons, was evidence for the existence of a long-lost ancient, yet advanced, civilization.

In 1994, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert published
The Orion Mystery
.
⁵
They discovered that the layout of Egypt’s great pyramids followed the pattern of the constellation Orion as it would have appeared in the year 10,450 BCE. Orion, representing a giant star-belted god striding across the heavens, appears near the Milky Way, which to the Egyptians seemed to flow in an immense stream across the heavens. Its counterpart on Earth was the Nile River. The three pyramids of Giza mirror the positions of the three stars of Orion’s belt.

Bauval and Gilbert, using precessional astronomy, dated the actual construction of the Great Pyramid to 2450 BC. They concluded that this date corresponded to what the ancient Egyptians called the “First Time”—an age when the gods entrusted mortals, the first pharaohs, with the laws and wisdom that would enable them to rule Egypt.

The Great Sphinx, as part of the Giza pyramid complex, is also orientated to the “First Time” (10,450 BC) and may actually have been built then. It’s possible that the Great Sphinx is a remnant of a much larger project constructed sometime after 10,450 BC. The discoveries of Bauval and Gilbert, when coupled with the research of West and Schoch, hints at the possibility that there are much older structures, physically connected to the Great Sphinx, hidden beneath the pyramids.