Our Cosmic Ancestors (14 page)

The question is
when did this happen?
Two dates are possible - the first great flood of 12,000 years ago and the last inundation of our Earth about 6,000 years ago. As far as I know, there are no records about the existence of Venus in our skies that would be older than 6,000 years. However, I am skeptical about this date, because there are still enormous quantities of manuscripts and books of very old age that have not been read or translated or even discovered; and any day now we could find a proof that 12,000 years ago Venus entered our skies like a gigantic comet and created cataclysms of a fantastic scale all over the world.

What conclusions are possible from the facts presented in this chapter? First, the biblical idea that our culture started only 6,000 years ago in the Middle East is false. Very intelligent and capable humans lived in Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, where the ruins are 30,000 years old. The caves of Cuenca (Ecuador), Lascaux (France), and Altamira (Spain) must have at least 20,000 years to look back on. The Maltese cross with its temples is probably 12,000 years old, older than the agricultural centres of Dorak and Hacilar in Anatolia. The lost continent of Atlantis sank into the deep in the year 9564 BC if we want to believe the Tibetans, or it happened 11,500 years ago according to the Egyptian priests who told it to Solon, one of whose descendants told it to Plato.

For very good reasons, ethnologists have concluded that the earthlings of 30,000 years ago were not highly developed. But we have seen that around that time,
astounding knowledge was demonstrated on several continents, always in the same basic style.
This can make sense only if we are willing to accept the theory of visiting space gods, that it was astronauts who caused the great change by insemination and selective mutation, thus creating a new hybrid human race adapted to the climate and living conditions on Earth while retaining at least some of the high intelligence and knowledge of the original visitors.

THE RHODES CALCULATOR

Most sensational discoveries happen by chance, perhaps because of what we may call the
benevolent intervention of the gods,
as long as there is no better explanation for it. One such haphazard revelation, which simultaneously revolutionized archaeology and the history of science and technology, occurred in October 1900, without anyone noticing it.

It was the finding by Aegean sponge divers of the Rhodes calculator, or the computer of Antikythera, in an ancient sunken Roman ship. It changed all of our ideas about the history of science. It also started a new science - underwater archaeology. since I was one of the very first addicts of the aqualung and deep-sea diving from the times when all equipment was handmade by the dedicated few themselves, let me tell you about this discovery in a little more detail.

On that day in October of 1900 a Greek tartan, a large, single-masted Mediterranean ship with a large lateen sail, returning from a diving expedition along the African coast where it had been gathering sponges, ran into a stiff southwester and had to look for a harbour to let the gale blow over. It was a typical Greek sponge divers' rig. Captain Demetrios Condos, a seasoned veteran of sponge diving, knew that the straits between the islands of Crete and Antikythera was one of the worst places to be in a storm. So he pulled fast into the port of Potamos at the northern tip of Antikythera island. There, guarded by the enormous bulk of the Glyphalda Cape he found calm water.

The Greeks are charming people whom I love very much; but when they have nothing else to do, they can't stop drinking, gambling, and fighting. The trouble is that they seem to have very little to do, far too often. That is exactly what happened to Condos and his crew of twelve. The storm lasted for days; and to keep both his tartan and his diving boat where the air pump and the diving suits were kept from being turned into shambles by his wine-loving crew, Condos sent all of them on a wild goose chase - to look for sponges along the shelf of Cape Glyphalda. He could not care less whether they found sponges or not. He had to keep them occupied.

In the grey of the early morning, while the gale was still blowing in the open sea, the diving boat left the tartan in the port of Potamos and was rowed to Pinakakia, where the water was calm and clear and good for diving. Captain Condos looked through his glass-bottom pail set in the water and could see down about thirty fathoms to a protruding ledge. Thirty fathoms is about 180 feet, which is the outer limit for a diver in an air-pump suit, but Condos' divers were probably among the world's best at that time and he thought he would try his luck and keep his men busy by sending them down one after another at five-minute intervals. Six divers could explore the bottom for half an hour while the other six would man the oars and the air pump.

Diving is very dangerous business and Condos' men knew it. The six divers stood assembled in the bow of the diving boat, smoking one cigarette after another to calm down hunger pains. Nobody had eaten breakfast because food in the stomach increases the chance of contracting cramps, the terror of all divers. One after another they flipped their cigarettes into the water, soaped their wrists with black soap so that the diving-suit cuffs would close airtight. With the help of the youngest boy on the boat, an apprentice seaman, they put on their cumbersome diving equipment. When the deck boy had rinsed out each helmet with sea water and cleansed the visor glass with a special sponge to prevent fogging, the casque was screwed on to the diver's suit, and after some weights were added to his breastplate and the soles of his boots, the diver at the end of the air tube was on his way to the deep.

The lead weights which pulled them down were good old historic metal, mostly from Roman foundries. All Roman ships used wooden anchors, some as many as six, with lead crossbars, and the standard Roman galley had as much as two or three tons of lead. Mediterranean fisherman and divers had divested the sunken wrecks long ago of every scrap of metal to build their own boats and anchors, and the Condos vessel was no exception.

The historic moment started when the second in command on the boat, Mercurio, gave order to one of the oldest divers, Elias Stadiatis, to descend into the water. The deck boy called out loud the air-pump manometer readings; and when the needle indicated 15 fathoms, a sand hourglass was turned over to time the descent for another full minute. When sand ran out, the depth of the shelf was reached and the pump pressure indicated a depth of 30 fathoms - the limit at which a diver can work for five minutes. But Stadiatis did not stay down his allocated time. A few moments after reaching the bottom, he yanked the descent cord in panic and started his ascent.

Condos and Mercurio both ran to help get him out because no old, experienced diver would do such a thing unless there was real danger or emergency. When Stadiatis' face appeared through the visor of the helmet he looked like a corpse, pale and with bulging eyes. The metal casque came off and Stadiatis could barely speak. He stammered something about naked women and horses but was otherwise incoherent. He mentioned the Holy Virgin in the same breath and made no sense.

Finally Condos got angry and ordered him to calm down and tell exactly what had happened. Stadiatis did his best, but that wasn't much. He insisted that many horses, naked women, and women in flowing robes were on the bottom and that most of the pretty faces were pockmarked. Captain Condos was a calm and practical man and would not buy this fool's story. So he put on his own diving suit and went down himself. Mercurio was holding the descent line, and after a minute of descent he felt one strong pull - the signal to slacken the cable and that everything was all right.

The captain stayed down for only a few minutes, not using up all of his time. When his helmet was unscrewed he looked very satisfied, even smug, but did not say a word to anybody. He simply ordered his cable basket pulled up. In it the astonished crew saw a green metallic human hand, hollow and full of sand. Then Condos let loose his best salty sea language and called all of his crew, and Stadiatis especially, the dumbest idiots who ever sailed the Mediterranean. He told them that down under there was a whole ship full of stone and bronze statues! A sunken treasure.

Up to this point the history of this event is clear and simple, but not so, further on. The official version of the authorities and the stories of the crew are quite different. To understand this discrepancy, we have to talk a little about the Greek sponge divers, particularly from the Aegean. First of all, they are great divers, who can stand and survive water pressure down to 180 feet for several minutes. Anything of value that could be retrieved from such depth is their prey. Flooded houses and sunken galleys have been mines of gold, silver, copper, bronze, and lead. As I mentioned before, a Roman galley usually had as many as six big wooden anchors with crossbars of lead; and one single shipwreck could yield two or three tons of this valuable metal. Condos and his crew would not let their prize of naked women and horses drift away - not if these statues were made of precious metal that could be sold with no questions asked.

Condos became a rich man, for a while at least. He ordered a new, bigger ship built for himself and started smuggling arms across the Mediterranean - mostly French army rifles. He wanted to be a big businessman and went broke. His ship was sold for debts, and he had to return to the sea and dive for sponges until the cramps got him, and he became half paralyzed. He died in 1926 in the home of his daughter, who had given him his last shelter in Suez, Egypt. The gods had abandoned the man who once was so lucky.

But to return to that time in October 1900, off Antikythera: after Condos had cleared the wreck of anything valuable that he could lift out and sold it, he informed the owners of his tartan, the Lyndiakos brothers, about the wreck off Atrikythera. He also suggested that the Greek government should be informed and put in charge of the salvage operation of this historic sunken art, which was to be presented as his patriotic gift to Greece. It was done, and Condos felt great. His own home was on the Dodecanese island of Syme, at that time ruled by Turks, whom Condos hated. As you see, history does not change. The problem of the Greeks and the Turks is the same today as it was eighty years ago.

The Greek government ordered its navy to carry out the salvage of the statues in the sunken ship. It was done the military way: get things done fast no matter how. Big crane ships arrived, and the crews pushed over the coastal shelf on which the treasure ship rested, all of the big stone blocks from the deck of the galley that hindered the divers from getting at the bronze statues. Nobody noticed that the big stone blocks were huge statues turned upside down; so that the square sockets alone were visible to the officer in charge of the operation. When this mistake was finally noticed, orders were given to retrieve, without fail, everything that was on or inside the sunken ship.
The museum of Athens received the whole lot - the stone sculptures, the bronze figures, a heap of broken bronze heads and arms, and some lumps of indefinite shape that would be sorted out later. By the end of summer in 1901, the sunken galley was nothing but an empty hulk, 100 feet long and 40 feet wide, the standard measurements for a Roman galley of 83 BC. This wreck remained there totally abandoned for another fifty-two years, until 1953 when Captain Jacques Cousteau and his divers visited it.

Meanwhile, back in 1902, a young Greek student by the name of Valerio Stais had been sorting the broken pieces of bronze at the National Museum in Athens. His task was to find and match missing heads and arms so that the sculptures could be restored; but he noticed a calcified lump of bronze that did not fit anywhere and was not a part of a statue. While drying, the calcified mass had split in half, and what was visible looked like the insides of a big watch gears and pinions and dials with inscriptions in ancient Greek characters and signs of the zodiac.

Valerio Stais guessed that it must be an astronomical clock of some sort or an instrument of navigation; he wrote a paper to announce this finding to the scientific world, with the result that he was declared to be a fool. The dale of the sunken galley was indicated by artifacts in several places on the ship. It was without any doubt, determined to be the year 83 BC, and everybody knew that at that time there were no clocks - or any other device - made with gears. Neither were mechanical calculators constructed in ancient Greece.

To tell time, both Greeks and Romans of the last century before Christ used sun dials, water-dripping
clepsydras,
or handy sand hourglasses. Never before had anybody found or read of gear and dial mechanisms for that purpose. Besides, nobody seemed much concerned about keeping the exact time. Night and day were divided into twelve parts each and only at the spring and the autumnal equinoxes were the divisions of equal length.

Thus the conclusion of the scholars was that the mechanism found in the galley of Antrikythera simply could not have been made 2,000 years ago. It had to be a clock perhaps 200 or 300 years old, tossed overboard by the captain of a ship passing over the wreck of the ancient galley. That was an explanation acceptable to the
twentieth century scientific establishment, and for the next fifty-six years nobody had the nerve to speak about it again. To avoid controversy, the find was registered in the museum catalogue as an astrolabe. That's
where
things rested more or less until 1958, when a young English mathematician, Dr Derek J. de SoIla Price, working at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, obtained a grant to study the Antikythera mechanism and later published his findings in the scientific magazines
Natural History
and
Scientific American.

Luckily, the museum technicians had taken good care of the clock remnants. There were four main pieces, each composed of many layers of bronze gears and some smaller lumps. Some parts were missing and are probably still on the bottom of the Aegean. As he studied what was there, Price had the good idea to use radiation with different intensities and frequencies to photograph separate layers of the mechanism that could not be taken apart.