The Atlantis Blueprint (22 page)

They point out that there have been many theories about the location of Atlantis: in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, in the Atlantic near the Canaries, and in Antarctica. The latter, they argue, is the likeliest among these candidates, for the others are too small to fit Plato’s description. But it cannot be Antarctica, they insist, because Plato described Atlantis as ‘favoured by the sun’ – semi-tropical – and this hardly fits Antarctica. (They had not taken into account Hapgood’s hypothesis that Antarctica was once much further north.)

Zapp and Erikson also believe that the Atlantis catastrophe was caused by a comet or asteroid, about 5 miles across, which landed in the Caribbean in 10,513
BC
and sent a great tidal wave thundering across Central America – the heart of their Atlantis’ – from ocean to ocean, leaving behind folk memories of catastrophe. (In
Uriel’s Machine,
Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight point out that the vast salt plains of Utah are made of sea salt, as is the lake after which Salt Lake City is named, which suggests that an immense tidal wave from the Pacific, perhaps 3 miles high, was responsible.)
⁶

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American archaeologists would have dismissed the idea of folk memories on the grounds that there were no human beings in America at
that time. The most influential anthropologist, Ales Hrdlicka of the National Museum, was totally convinced that man had arrived in America about 3,000
BC.
The general idea that hunters came across the land bridge that once existed between Russia and Alaska across the Bering Strait is still the main theory of modern anthropology, but modern geological studies, Zapp points out, have revealed that ‘Beringia’ was a desert, devoid of vegetation. Since it was also 600 miles wide, there is no possible reason to assume that Asian hunters decided to cross it to reach an equally barren Alaska.

In 1927, the skeleton of a long-haired bison with a spear point lodged between its ribs was found in New Mexico. Since these bison became extinct more than 10,000 years ago, Hrdlicka’s theory was placed under question. In 1932, archaeologists found more spear tips lodged in mammoth bones near Clovis, New Mexico, after which ‘Clovis man’ was regarded as the first human being in America, dated to around 10,000
BC.7

There is an immense amount of evidence for contact between America and civilisations of the Far East. Joseph Needham, the author of the monumental
Science and Civilisation in China
,
⁸
describing a visit to Mexico City in 1947, noted the ‘palpable similarities between many features of the high Central American civilisations and those of East and South-east Asia’. He then offered two dozen or so particular points of resemblance, including pyramids, double-headed serpents, dresses made of feathers and jade beads placed in the mouths of the dead. Needham claims that a mountain of evidence has accumulated of visits by Asian people to America from the seventh century
BC,
although Grant Keddie, a curator of the Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada, believes that Asians established trading posts around the North Pacific rim 5,000 years ago.
⁹

In the early 1960s, Emilio Estrada, an Ecuadorian businessman who was also an amateur archaeologist, read a book on Japanese archaeology and was impressed by similarities
between Japanese pottery from the Jomon period (about 3,000
BC)
and ancient potsherds he had dug up near Valdivia, on the coast of Ecuador. He passed on his observation to Betty Meggars, of the Smithsonian Institution, but she was unimpressed
—
until she went to Japan in 1963 and saw 5,000-year-old Japanese pottery found on the island of Kyushu. She became convinced that the similarities of design could not be coincidence.

Her own explanation was that a fishing boat from Kyushu had been blown across to Ecuador by a typhoon, and that the Japanese had taught the native Indians to make ceramics. She was upset that most archaeologists rejected her theory on the grounds that the fishermen would have starved to death on a voyage of more than 8,000 miles. The archaeologists were right, of course
—
the voyagers would have needed supplies on board, probably more than Columbus needed to cross the Atlantic. It is unlikely that such a journey was made by chance. Ivar Zapp’s Costa Rican mariners could have managed it, though.

One of the most remarkable of the advocates of the spread of Asian culture to America is David Kelley, an archaeologist who, before his retirement, was on the faculty of the University of Calgary. Kelley is an expert on the Maya, who
—
as we have seen
—
are still revered for the incredible precision of their calendar.

The first calendar in general use was the moon itself. In 1962, a scholar from the Peabody Museum named Alexander Marshack studied under a magnifying glass a bone about 35,000 years old. It had a curious series of markings made by our ancestor
—
small holes engraved in the bone with a point. It looked like a decorative pattern, except the holes had been made at different times. Marshack realised that he was looking at the earliest known calendar, and that it showed the phases of the moon.
¹⁰

The Greeks had based their calendar on the moon, which takes approximately 29.5 days to revolve around the earth.

They had soon encountered a major problem: 12 times 19.5 only equals 354 days, which is 11.25 days short of the year. With a calendar running as fast as this, it only took sixteen years for Midsummer Day to arrive in the middle of winter. Any Greek farmer who tried to regulate his planting by the famous
Works and Days
of the farmer-poet Hesiod, who lived around 800
BC,
would soon have found himself hopelessly confused.

Even the Sumerians had been unable to solve the problem. Although they divided the day into 24 hours, and the hours into 60 minutes, they were still unable to get the year right. They added half a day to each lunar month, making it 30 days, bringing the year to 360 days.

For the average person, living in a small town or village, the number of days in a year didn’t really matter. The seasons came and went, whether you counted them or not, so a calendar that was a few days out made no real difference.

It was the ancient Egyptians who finally came close to measuring the actual length of the year by adding five days that were supposed to be the birthdays of Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nephtys and Set. Some scholars believe that the Nile acted as a calendar, flooding at the same time every year, but Egypt was – as we have seen – green until a few thousand years ago. According to Egyptologist Henry Lhote, the Sahara region was green between 7,000 and 2,000
BC11
– when the Great Pyramid was built, the surrounding landscape was probably a savannah. The Neolithic Egyptians had no reason to pay close attention to the flooding of the Nile. They were not dependent on it, as they are now. Why should these farmers have wanted a calendar of such accuracy? Schwaller de Lubicz would have said that it was a legacy from a far older civilisation – Atlantis.

The people who developed a more precise calendar than anyone else – even more exact than the Romans, whose Julian calendar was 365.25 days long – were the Maya, whose year was 365.242 days long. Why did the early Maya – the so-called

‘classic Maya’ who built cities in the jungle before they mysteriously abandoned them around
AD
890 – want a calendar as accurate as that? Our own modern measurement, based on the caesium clock, is 365.2422, only 0.0002 seconds longer.

Moreover, the Maya had invented a symbol for zero, which is now regarded as a basic essential in mathematics (neither the Greeks nor Romans had a zero).

Mayan astronomy is also awe-inspiring in its complexity and precision. We calculate the year by the sun; so did the Maya, but they also calculated it by the planet Venus, and by Jupiter–Saturn cycles. As to the length of our earthly year, they solved the problem that the Egyptians, the Greeks and even the Romans had failed to solve by having no fewer than three distinct calendars based on different years: a solar year of 360 days, to which they added 5 supernumary days (although, as already noted, they knew its exact length); a lunar year of 354 days; and a tzolkin, a special ‘sacred’ calendar of 260 days divided into 13 months of 20 days each, which was used for magical and ritual purposes.

These three cycles ran concurrently. Since the tzolkin was well into its second year when the ordinary year had only just come to an end, their ‘century’ was a total cycle in which the three lesser cycles had finally caught up with one another, which was every 52 years. The ‘Venus year’ (584 days long) caught up with the other cycle every two Mayan centuries (104 years).

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
,
¹
3 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