Chapter Seven - Ancient Marvels Or Space Travel Centres?
To the north of Damascus lies the terrace of Baalbek—a platform built of stone blocks, some of which have sides over 65 ft long and weigh nearly 2,000 tons. Until now archaeologists have not been able to give a convincing explanation why, how and by whom the terrace of Baalbek was built. However, the Russian Professor Agrest considers it possible that the terrace is the remains of a gigantic airfield.
If we meekly accept the neat package of knowledge that the Egyptologists serve to us, ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilisation. Great cities and enormous temples, colossal statues with tremendous expressive power, splendid streets flanked by magnificent sculptures, perfect drainage systems, luxurious tombs carved out of the rock, pyramids of overwhelming size—these and many other wonderful things shot out of the ground, so to speak. Genuine miracles in a country that is suddenly capable of such achievements without recognisable prehistory!
Fertile agricultural land only exists in the Nile delta and on small strips to the left and right of the river. Yet experts now estimate the number of inhabitants at the time of the building of the Great Pyramid at 50 million. (A figure, incidentally, that flagrantly contradicts the 20 million considered to be the total population of the world in 3000 B.C.!)
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One of the maps found in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, in the library of Admiral Piri Reis early in the eighteenth century It shows the Americas and West Africa Antartica, mapped at the bottom, conforms very closely to the land mass under the ice, as revealed by echo-sounding gear In recorded history it has never been free of ice.
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Cartographers projected the Pin Reis map on to a grid using the reference points shown on the map It then appeared virtually identical with this United States Air Force map of the world on an equidistant projection based on Cairo.
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The earth taken from Apollo 8 shows close similarity to the Piri Reis map The curious elongated shape of the Americas is particularly striking.
On the Plain of Nazca in Peru appear these strange markings
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A view of the plain showing that the markings (Inca roads, say the archaeologists) lead nowhere.
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The markings in greater detail.
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Another of the strange markings on the Plain of Nazca. This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking bays on a modern airport.
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This huge 820-ft. figure above the Bay of Pisco points to the Plain of Nazca. Could this be an aerial direction indicator rather than a symbol of religious significance?
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This is the ancient Mayan Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque in Mexico.
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Inside on the wall of one of the small chambers is this relief engraving. There is not enough space to take a full front view photograph, but there is enough detail to check the artist's drawing reproduced on the next page.
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This drawing was made in the Temple. Could primitive imagination have produced anything so remarkably similar to a modern astronaut in his rocket? Those strange markings at the foot of the drawing can only be an indication of the flames and gases coming from the propulsion unit.
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American astronauts today take up the same position, their hands on controls, their eyes checking instruments.
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On July 21 st, 1969 a London bookmaker paid out lb10,000 Only five years earlier he gave odds of a thousand to one that man would not land on the moon before 1970 A fortnight later the Americans released photographs taken 2,000 miles away from Mars Space travel had moved out of the realms of science fiction.
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After centuries under the sea this object does not look very important It was found by Greek divers off Antikythera in 1900 Above, right Long and patient cleaning revealed that it was a mass of interlocking cogs and was a planetarium The machine gives the year of construction as 82 BC This drawing reconstructs part of the machine.
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Easter Island is known as the 'navel of the world' by the islanders The huge statues on this tiny fragment of rock are extraordinary Even more extraordinary is the fact that this totally isolated island had its own script, which is still undeciphered.
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This ancient iron pillar does not rust It cannot be accurately dated, but it is hundreds of years old.
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This Babylonian tablet records past and future eclipses.
Here are three curious things from Assyria and one from Iraq.
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The "god Shamasi" It is from the third millennium BC and shows stars and figures with peculiar headgear Why should ancient gods be associated with the stars'?
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The second tablet is from the early first millennium BC. The object in the centre is described as a sacred tree It could just as reasonably be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the construction of an atom, with an astronaut in a fiery chariot above We have a figure within a winged circle and below the circle a representation.
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Next we have an Assyrian crystal lens from the seventh century BC To grind such a lens requires a highly sophisticated mathematical formula Where did the Assyrians get such knowledge'? Finally, these very ancient fragments, now in the Baghdad Museum, have been identified as the remains of an electric battery.
The next five photographs are from South America, a continent teeming with ruins and unexplained puzzles.
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This is part of a huge monolithic block weighing an estimated 20,000 tons It can be found at Sacsayhuaman in Peru What was its purpose? What titanic forces turned it upside down?
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And what did these great steps lead to? A throne for giants perhaps?
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Rock vitrification requires very high temperatures. What caused it in Peru?
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Part of the huge terrace walls at Sacsayhuaman. Just look at the incredible accuracy of the jointing. How could primitive people handle these huge blocks?
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A mummy from the Second Dynasty.
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Part of a very finely woven piece of cloth. Where did the Egyptians get such complex techniques so early?
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With wood rollers and manpower it would have taken at least 600 years to handle the 2 1/2 million stone blocks in the great pyramid of Cheops.
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As in Peru, we are faced with fantastically accurate jointing of huge blocks of stone.
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This temple at Copan in Honduras is constructed according to the Mayan calendar with a fixed number of steps completed every 52 years.
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There is no recorded history of Tiahuanaco On the Gate of the Sun, above, carved out of a single 10-ton block, is the representation of a flying god flanked by forty-eight mysterious figures Legend tells of a golden space ship which came from the stars.
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On the great idol, is found information about astronomical phenomena covering an immense span of time.
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Once again what primitive people had techniques for handling and accurately jointing such huge blocks of stone, in this case water conduits 6ft long and 1 1/2ft
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"El Castillo at Chichen Itza, Mexico This also has been constructed according to the Mayan calendar The 91 steps on each side add up to 364 and the final platform gives 365.
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In Bolivia near Santa Cruz are long concrete constructions Could these really be roads for people who did not use the wheel"?
Rock drawings from all round the world
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(Left) - From Rhodesia This reclining figure is clad in chainmail and wears curious headgear It might be the burial of a king It might just as likely be an astronaut receiving supplies.
(Right) - This drawing from South Africa shows a white figure dressed in a short sleeved suit with breeches, garters, gloves and slippers A rather surprising example of imagination on the part of primitive natives who went about naked
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This drawing was found by a Russian expedition.
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This drawing from Val Camonica in Northern Italy shows yet again the extraordinary obsession primitive man had with figures in suits and unusual headgear.
More ancient drawings
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From Fergana in Uzbekistan
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From Tassili in the Sahara.
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An American astronaut Perhaps the earliest space travellers also wore suits like this.
With such enormous estimates a couple of million men more or less does not matter. But one thing is clear—they all had to be fed. There were not only a host of construction workers, stone-masons, engineers and sailors, there were not only hundreds of thousands of slaves, but also a well-equipped army, a large and pampered priesthood, countless merchants, farmers and officials, and last but not least the Pharaonic household living on the fat of the land. Could they all, all have lived on the scanty yields of agriculture in the Nile delta?
I shall be told that the stone blocks used for building the temple were moved on rollers. In other words, wooden rollers! But the Egyptians would scarcely have felled and turned into rollers the few trees, mainly palms, that then (as now) grew in Egypt, because the dates from the palms were urgently needed for food and the trunks and fronds were the only tilings giving shade to the dried up ground. But they must have been wooden rollers, otherwise there would not be even the feeblest technical explanation of the building of the pyramids. Did the Egyptians import wood? In order to import wood there must have been a sizeable fleet, and even after it had been landed in Alexandria the wood would have had to be transported up the Nile to Cairo. Since the Egyptians did not have horses and carts at the time of the building of the Great Pyramid, there was no other possibility. The horse and cart was not introduced until the seventeenth dynasty, about 1600 B.C. My kingdom for a convincing explanation of the transport of the stone blocks! Of course the scholars say that wooden rollers were needed ....
There are many problems connected with the technology of the pyramid builders and no genuine solutions.
How did the Egyptians carve tombs out of the rock? What resources did they have in order to lay out a maze of galleries and rooms? The walls are smooth and mostly decorated with paintings in relief. The shafts slope down into the rocky soil; they have steps built in the best tradition of craftsmanship that lead to the burial chambers far below Hordes of tourists stand gaping in amazement at them, but none of them gets an explanation of the mysterious technique used in their excavation. Yet it is firmly established that the Egyptians were masters of the art of tunnelling from the earliest times, for the old rock-cut tombs are worked in exactly the same way as the more recent ones There is no difference between the tomb of Tety from the sixth dynasty and the tomb of Rameses I from the New Kingdom, although there is a minimum of 1,000 years between the building of the two tombs. Obviously the Egyptians had not learnt anything new to add to their old technique. In fact the more recent edifices tend increasingly to be poor copies of their ancient models.
The tourist who bumps his way to the Pyramid of Cheops to the west of Cairo on a camel called Wellington or Napoleon, depending on his nationality, gets the strange sensation in the pit of his stomach that relics of the mysterious past always produce. The guide tells him that ,1 Pharaoh had a burial place built here. And with that bit of rehashed erudition he rides homewards, after taking some impressive photographs. The Pyramid of Cheops, in particular, has inspired hundreds of crazy and untenable theories. In the 600-page-long book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid by Charles Piazzi Smith, published in 1864, we can read about many hair-raising links between the pyramid and our globe
Yet even after a highly critical examination, it still contains some facts that should stimulate us to reflection.
It is well-known that the ancient Egyptians practised a solar religion. Their sun god, Ra, travelled through the heavens in a bark. Pyramid texts of the Old Kingdom even describe heavenly journeys by the king, obviously made with the help of the gods and their boats. So the gods and kings of the Egyptians were also involved with flying ....
Is it really a coincidence that the height of the Pyramid of Cheops multiplied by 1,000 million corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun? That is to say, 93 million miles. Is it a coincidence that a meridian running through the pyramid divides continents and oceans into two exactly equal halves? Is it coincidence that the area of the base of the pyramid divided by twice its height gives the celebrated figure (Pi) = 3.14159, discovered by Ludolf? Is it coincidence that calculations of the weight of the earth were found and is it also coincidence that the rocky ground on which the structure stands is carefully and accurately levelled?
There is not a single clue to explain why the builder of the Pyramid of Cheops, the Pharaoh Khufu, chose that particular rocky terrain in the desert as the site for his edifice. It is conceivable that there was a natural cleft in the rock which he made use of for the colossal building, while another explanation, though only a feeble one, may be that he wanted to watch the progress of the work from his summer palace. Both reasons are against all common sense. In the first case it would certainly have been more practical to locate the building site nearer the eastern quarries in order to shorten transport distances, and in the second it is hard to imagine that the Pharaoh wanted to be disturbed year after year by the din that filled building sites day and night even in those days.
Since there is so much to be said against the textbook explanations of the choice of site, one might reasonably ask whether the 'gods' did not have their say here, too, even if it was by way of the priesthood. But if that explanation is accepted, there is one more important proof of my theory of the Utopian past of mankind. For the pyramid not only divides continents and oceans into two equal halves, but also lies at the centre of gravity of the continents. If the facts noted here are not coincidences—and it seems extremely difficult to believe that they are—then the building site was chosen by beings who knew all about the spherical shape of the earth and the distribution of continents and seas. In this connexion let us not forget Piri Reis's maps' It cannot all be coincidence or be explained away as fairy-stones.
With what power, with what 'machines', with what technical resources was the rocky terrain levelled at all? How did the master-builders drive the tunnels downwards? And how did they illuminate them? Neither here nor in the rock-cut tombs in the Valley of Kings were torches or anything similar used. There are no blackened ceilings or walls or even the slightest evidence that traces of blackening have been removed. How and with what were the stone blocks cut out of the quarries? With sharp edges and smooth sides? How were they transported and joined together to the thousandth of an inch? Once again there is a wealth of explanations for anyone to choose from: inclined planes, and tracks along which the stones were pushed, scaffolding and ramps. And naturally the labour of many hundreds of thousands of Egyptian slaves: fellahin, builders and craftsmen.
None of these explanations stands up to a critical examination. The Great Pyramid is (and remains?) visible testimony of a technique that has never been understood. Today, in the twentieth century, no architect could build a copy of the Pyramid of Cheops, even if the technical resources of every continent were at his disposal.
2,600,000 gigantic blocks were cut out of the quarries, dressed and transported, and fitted together on the building site to the nearest thousandth of an inch. And deep down inside, in the galleries, the walls were painted in colours.
The site of the pyramid was a whim of the Pharaoh.
The unparalleled, 'classical' dimensions of the pyramid occurred to the master-builder by chance.
Several hundred thousand workers pushed and pulled blocks weighing 12 tons up a ramp with (non-existent) ropes on (non-existent) rollers.
This host of workers lived on (non-existent) grain.
They slept in (non-existent) huts which the Pharaoh had built outside his summer palace.
The workers were urged on by an encouraging 'Heave-ho' over a (non-existent) loudspeaker and so the 12-ton blocks were pushed skywards.
If the industrious workers had achieved the extraordinary daily piece rate of ten blocks piled on top of each other, they would have assembled the two and a half million stone blocks into the magnificent stone pyramid in about 250,000 days = 664 years. Yes, and don't forget that the whole thing came into being at the whim of an eccentric king who never lived to see the completion of the edifice he had inspired.
Of course one must not even suggest that this theory, so seriously advanced, is ridiculous. Yet who is so ingenuous as to believe that the pyramid was nothing but the tomb of a king. From now on who will consider the transmission of mathematical and astronomical signs as pure chance?
Today the Great Pyramid is undisputedly attributed to the Pharaoh Khufu as inspirer and builder. Why? Because all the inscriptions and tablets refer to Khufu. It seems obvious to me that the Pyramid cannot have been erected during a single lifetime. But what if Khufu forged the inscriptions and tablets that are supposed to proclaim his fame.? That was quite a popular procedure in antiquity, as many buildings bear witness. Whenever a dictatorial ruler wanted the fame for himself alone, he gave orders for this process to be carried out. If that was the case, then the pyramid existed long before Khufu left his visiting card.
In the Bodleian Library at Oxford there is a manuscript in which the Coptic author Mas-Udi asserts that the Egyptian King Surid had the Great Pyramid built. Oddly enough, this Surid ruled in Egypt before the Flood. And this wise King Surid ordered his priests to write down the sum total of their wisdom and conceal the writings inside the pyramid. So, according to Coptic tradition, the pyramid was built before the Flood.
Herodotus confirms such a supposition in Book 2 of his History. The priests of Thebes had shown him 341 colossal statues, each of which stood for a high-priestly generation over a period of 11,340 years. Now we know that every high priest had his statue made during his own lifetime; and Herodotus also tells us that during his stay in Thebes one priest after another showed him his statue as a proof that the son had always followed the father. And the priests assured Herodotus that their statements were very accurate, because they had written everything down for many generations and they explained that every one of these 341 statues represented a generation and that before these 341 generations the gods had lived among men and that since then no god had visited them again in human form.
The historical period of Egypt is usually estimated at about 6,500 years. Then why did the priests lie so shamelessly to the traveller Herodotus about the 11,340 years? And why did they so expressly emphasise that no gods had dwelt among them for 341 generations? These precise details would have been completely pointless if 'gods' had not really lived among men in the remote past!
We know next to nothing about the how, why and when of the building of the pyramid. An artificial mountain, some 490 ft high and weighing 31,200,000 tons, stands there as evidence of an incredible achievement and this monument is supposed to be nothing more than the burial place of an extravagant king! Anyone who can believe that explanation is welcome to it ....
Mummies, equally incomprehensible and not yet convincingly explained, stare at us from the remote past as if they held some magic secret. Various people knew the technique of embalming corpses, and archaeological finds favour the supposition that prehistoric beings believed in return to a second life, i.e. a corporeal return. That interpretation would be acceptable if there was even the remotest evidence of a belief in corporeal return in the religious philosophy of antiquity! If our primitive ancestors had believed only in a spiritual return, they would scarcely have gone to such trouble with the dead. But finds in Egyptian tombs provide example after example of the preparation of embalmed corpses for corporeal return.
What the evidence says, what visible proof says, cannot be so absurd! Drawings and sagas actually indicated that the 'gods' promised to return from the stars in order to awaken the well-preserved bodies to new life. That is why the provisioning of the embalmed corpses in the burial chambers took such a practical form and was intended for a life on this side of the grave. Otherwise what were they supposed to have done with money, jewellery and their favourite articles? And as they were even provided in the tomb with some of their servants, who were unquestionably buried alive, the point of all the preparations was obviously the continuation of the old life in a new life. The tombs were tremendously durable and solid, and almost atom-bomb-proof; they could survive the ravages of all the ages. The valuables left in them, namely gold and precious stones, were virtually indestructible. I am not concerned here with discussing the later abuses of mummification.
I am only concerned with the question: who put the idea of corporeal rebirth into the heads of the heathen? And whence came the first audacious idea that the cells of the body had to be preserved so that the corpse, preserved in a very secure place, could be awakened to new life after thousands of years?
So far this mysterious reawakening complex has only been considered from the religious point of view. But supposing the Pharaoh, who certainly knew more about the nature and customs of the 'gods' than his subjects, had these possibly quite crazy ideas? 'I must make a burial place for myself that cannot be destroyed for millennia and is visible far across the country. The gods promised to return and wake me up (or doctors in the distant future will discover a way to restore me to life again).'
What have we to say about that in the space age?
In his book The Prospect of Immortality, published in 1965, the physician and astronomer Robert C. W. Ettinger suggests a way in which we twentieth-century men can have ourselves frozen so that our cells can go on living from the medical and biological point of view, but slowed down a billionfold. For the present this idea may still sound Utopian, but in fact every big clinic today has a 'bone bank' which preserves human bones in a deep-frozen condition for years and makes them serviceable again when required. Fresh blood—this too is a universal practice—can be kept for an unlimited time at minus 196° C and living cells can be stored almost indefinitely at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Did the Pharaoh have a fantastic idea which will soon be realised in practice?
You must read what follows twice to grasp the fantastic implications of the result of the next piece of scientific research. In March 1963 biologists of the University of Oklahoma confirmed that the skin cells of the Egyptian Princess Mene were capable of living. And Princess Mene has been dead for several thousand years!
There have been finds in many places of mummies which are preserved so completely and intact that they seem to be alive. Glacier mummies left by the Incas survived the ages and theoretically they are capable of living. Utopia? In the summer of 1965 Russian television showed two dogs which had been deep-frozen for a week. On the seventh day they were thawed out again and—hey presto I—they went on living as cheerfully as ever!
The Americans—and this is no secret—are seriously concerned, as part of their space programme, with the problem of how to freeze astronauts of the future for their long journeys to distant stars.
Professor Ettinger, often scoffed at today, prophesies a remote future in which men will not be consumed by fire or eaten by worms—a future in which bodies, frozen in deep-freeze cemeteries or deep-freeze bunkers, await the day when advances in medical science can remove the cause of their death and bring their bodies to new life. Following up the implications of this Utopian idea one can see the terrifying vision of an army of deep-frozen soldiers who will be thawed out as necessary in case of war. A really horrifying idea.
But what connexion have mummies with our theory of space travellers in the remote past? Am I dragging proofs in willy-nilly?
I ask: how did the ancients know that the body cells continue to live slowed down a billionfold after special treatment?
I ask: where did the idea of immortality come from and how did people get the concept of corporeal reawakening in the first place?
The majority of ancient peoples knew the technique of mummification and the rich peoples actually practised it. I am not concerned here with this demonstrable fact, but with solving the problem of where the idea of a reawakening, a return to life, originated. Did the idea occur to some king or tribal prince purely by chance or did some prosperous citizen watch 'gods' treating their corpses with a complicated process and preserving them in bomb-proof sarcophagi? Or did some gods (= space travellers) transmit their knowledge of how corpses can be reawakened after a special treatment to a quick-witted prince of royal blood?
These speculations require confirmation from contemporary sources. In a few hundred years mankind will have a mastery of space travel that is inconceivable today. Travel agencies will offer trips to the planets, with precise departure and return dates, in their brochures. Obviously a prerequisite for this mastery is that all branches of science keep pace with the development of space travel. Electronics and cybernetics alone will not do the trick. Medicine and biology will make their contribution by finding out ways of lengthening the vital functions of human beings. Today this department of space research is also working in top gear. Here we must ask ourselves: did space travellers in prehistory already possess knowledge that we must win anew? Did unknown intelligences already know the methods with which to treat bodies so that they could be revived in X thousand years? Perhaps the 'gods' being shrewd, had an interest in 'preserving' at least one dead man with all the knowledge of his time so that some day he could be questioned about the history of his generation? Who can tell? Is it not possible that such an interrogation by 'gods' who came back has already taken place?
In the course of the centuries, mummification, originally a solemn matter, became the fashion. Suddenly everyone wanted to be reawakened; suddenly everyone thought that they would come to new life so long as they did the same as their forefathers. The high priests, who actually did possess some knowledge of such re-awakenings, did a great deal to encourage this cult, for their class did good business out of it.
I have already mentioned the physically impossible ages of the Sumerian kings and the biblical figures. I asked whether these people could not have been space travellers who prolonged their life-span through the effect of the time shift on interstellar flights just below the speed of light.
Are we perhaps getting a clue to the incredible age of the men named in the texts if we assume that they were mummified or frozen? If we follow this theory then the unknown space travellers would have frozen leading personalities in antiquity—put them into an artificial deep sleep, as legends tell us—and taken them out of the drawer, and thawed them out and conversed with them during subsequent visits. At the end of each visit it would have been the task of the priestly class appointed and instructed by the space travellers to prepare the living dead again and preserve them once more in giant temples until the 'gods' returned.
Impossible? Ridiculous? It is mostly those people who feel that they are absolutely bound by the laws of nature who make the most stupid objections. Does not nature herself display brilliant examples of 'hibernation' and reawakening?
There are species of fish which, after being frozen stiff, thaw out at milder temperatures and swim around again in the water. Flowers, larvae and grubs not only go into hibernation, but also reappear in the spring in lovely new garb.
Let me be my own devil's advocate. Did the Egyptians learn the possibility of mummification from nature? If that were the case, there ought to have been a cult of butterflies or cockchafers or at least a trace of such a cult. There is nothing of the kind. Underground tombs do contain gigantic sarcophagi with mummified animals, but given their climate the Egyptians could not have copied hibernation from animals.
Five miles from Helwan lie more than 5,000 tombs of different sizes and all date to the time of the 1st and 2nd dynasties. These tombs show that the art of mummification is more than 6,000 years old.
In 1953 Professor Emery discovered a large tomb in the archaic cemetery of North Sakkara that is attributed to a Pharaoh of the 1st dynasty (probably Uadyis). Apart from the main tomb there were 72 other tombs, arranged in 3 rows, in which lay the bodies of the servants who wanted to accompany their king in the new world. No trace of violence is visible on the bodies of the 64 young men and 8 young women. Why did these 72 allow themselves to be walled up and killed?
Belief in a second life beyond the grave is the best known and also the simplest explanation of this phenomenon. In addition to gold and jewellery the Pharaoh was provided with grain, oil and spices in the tomb, which were obviously intended as provisions for the life to come. Apart from grave robbers, the tombs were also opened by later Pharaohs. In such cases the Pharaoh found the provisions in the tomb of his ancestor well preserved. In other words the dead man had neither eaten them nor taken them into another world. And when the tomb was closed again, fresh supplies were placed in the vault, which was shut up, protected against thieves and sealed with many traps. It seems obvious that the Egyptians believed in a reawakening in the distant future and not in an immediate reawakening in the hereafter.
In June 1954, also at Sakkara, a tomb was discovered that had not been robbed, for a chest containing jewels and gold lay in the burial chamber. The sarcophagus was closed with a sliding lid, instead of a removable one. On the 9th June Dr Goneim ceremonially opened the sarcophagus. It contained nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did the mummy decamp, leaving its jewels behind?
The Russian Rodenko discovered a grave, known as Kurgan V, 50 miles from the frontier of Outer Mongolia.
This grave takes the form of a rocky hill that is faced internally with wood. All the burial chambers are packed with eternal ice, and as a result the contents of the grave were preserved in a state of deep-freeze. One of these chambers contained an embalmed man and a similarly treated woman. Both of them were provided with everything that they might have needed for a life to come: foodstuffs in dishes, clothes, jewels and musical instruments. Everything was deep-frozen and in an excellent state of preservation, including the naked mummies. In one burial chamber scholars identified a rectangle containing four rows of six squares, each of which had a drawing inside it. The whole could be a copy of the stone carpet in the Assyrian palace at Nineveh! Strange sphinx-like figures with complicated horns on their heads and wings on their backs are clearly visible and their posture shows them to be aspiring skywards.
But motives for a second spiritual life can scarcely be based on the finds in Mongolia. The deep-freezing used in the graves there—for that is what the chambers faced with wood and filled with ice amount to—is too much of this world and obviously intended for terrestrial ends. Why, and this question keeps on worrying us, did the ancients think that bodies prepared in this way achieved a state which would make reawakening possible? That is a puzzle for the time being.
In the Chinese village of Wu Chuan there exists a rectangular tomb measuring 45 by 39 ft; in it lie the skeletons of 17 men and 24 women. Here too none of the skeletons shows signs of violent death. There are glacier tombs in the Andes, ice tombs in Siberia, group and individual graves in China, Sumeria and Egypt. Mummies have been found in the far north and in South Africa. And all the dead were supplied with the necessities for a new life and all the tombs were so planned and built that they could survive for thousands of years.
Is it all mere coincidence? Are they all merely individual fancies, strange whims on the part of our ancestors? Or is there an ancient promise of corporeal return that is unknown to us? Who can have made it?
Some 10,000-year-old tombs were excavated at Jericho and a number of 8,000-year-old heads, modelled in plaster of Paris were found. That, too, is astonishing, for ostensibly this people did not know the techniques of pottery-making. In another part of Jericho whole rows of round houses were discovered. The walls are curved inwards at the top, like domes.
The omnipotent carbon isotope C 14, with the aid of which the age of organic substances can be determined, gives dates with a maximum of 10,400 years in this case. These scientifically determined dates agree pretty well with the dates which the Egyptian priests transmitted. They said that their priestly ancestors had discharged their duties for more than 11,000 years. Is this only a coincidence, too?
Prehistoric stones at Lussac (Poitou, France) form a particularly remarkable find. They show drawings of men dressed in completely modern style, with hats, jackets and short trousers. The Abbe Breuil says that the drawings are authentic and his statement throws the whole of prehistory into confusion. Who engraved the stones? Who has enough imagination to conceive of a caveman dressed in skins who drew figures from the twentieth century on the walls?
Some really magnificent Stone Age paintings were found in 1940 in the Lascaux Caves in the South of France. The paintings in this gallery are as lively and intact as if they had been done today, and two questions immediately spring to mind. How was this cave illuminated for the laborious work of the Stone Age artists and why were the walls decorated with these astonishing paintings?
Let the people who consider these questions stupid explain the contradictions. If the Stone Age cavemen were primitive and savage, they could not have produced the astounding paintings on the cave walls. But if the savages were capable of paintings these pictures, why should they not also have been able to build huts as shelter? The foremost authorities concede that animals had the ability to build nests and shelters millions of years ago. But it obviously does not fit into the working hypothesis to concede homo sapiens the same ability as long ago as that.
In the Gobi Desert, deep down below the ruins of Khara Khota—not far from those strange sand vitrifications which can only have taken place under the influence of tremendous heat—Professor Koslov found a tomb that is dated to about 12,000 years B.C. A sarcophagus contained the bodies of two rich men and the sign of a circle bisected vertically was found on the sarcophagus.
In the Subis mountains on the west coast of Borneo a network of caves was found that had been hollowed out on a cathedral-like scale. Among these colossal finds there are fabrics of such fineness and delicacy that with the best will in the world one cannot imagine savages making them. Questions, questions, questions... .
The first doubts are beginning to insinuate themselves into stereotyped archaeological theory, but what we need to do is to force breaches in the thicket of the past. Landmarks must be set up again; wherever possible a new series of fixed dates must be established.
Let me make it clear that I am not doubting the history of the last two thousand years here. I am speaking solely and exclusively of the most remote antiquity, of the blackest darkness of time, which I am striving to illuminate by asking new questions.
Nor can I give any figures and dates showing when the visit of unknown intelligences from the universe began to influence our young intelligences. But I venture to doubt the current datings applied to the remote past. I would suggest, on tolerably good grounds, placing the incident I am concerned with in the Early Palaeolithic Age, i.e. between 10,000 and 40,000 B.C. Our hitherto existing methods of dating, including the famous carbon isotope C 14, which makes everyone so happy, leave great gaps as soon as we come to an age of more than 45,600 years. The older the substance to be examined, the more unreliable the radio carbon method is. Even recognised scholars have told me that they considered the C 14 method rather unreliable because if an organic substance is from 30,000 to 50,000 years old, its age can be established anywhere between those limits.
These critical voices should only be accepted with limitations; nevertheless, a second dating method parallel to the C 14 method and based on the latest measuring apparatus would unquestionably be desirable.