The Atlantis Blueprint (23 page)

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 unlikely. 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.

At this time no one could read cuneiform writing, although a British officer named Henry Rawlinson had made an important start by copying an inscription on a cliff near Behistun, in Persia; it had been carved there by the Persian king Darius, and was in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (which was, more or less, a form of Assyrian). In 1857 Rawlinson published his first translation from the Assyrian language. By this time he had returned to England and was employed by the British Museum, with a young man named George Smith, a banknote engraver who was interested in archaeology, working for him.

Among the tablets that Smith brought back from Nineveh was one containing huge, preposterously large numbers. No mathematician, Smith did not attempt to find out what they meant, but eventually French scholars translated them into decimals. One Babylonian number contained fifteen digits: 195,955,200,000,000. It fascinated a French communications scientist named Maurice Chatelain,
¹⁸
who in the 1950s had moved to California after Morocco was plunged into chaos following independence. Chatelain worked for the United States government as an aeronautics engineer, and in due course was drafted into the attempt to reach the moon
—
the Apollo project.