Atlantis Beneath the Ice Read online

  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 scho
lar 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.

  Now, two sciences, geology and astronomy, are pushing back humankind’s achievements to a time well before any known civilization. Bauval and Gilbert’s astronomical evidence followed the same measurements that had led Posnansky to conclude that an advanced civilization once existed. Geology and astronomy are working in tandem to provide evidence that our notion of the age of civilization is flawed. But archaeologists, the scientists most directly involved with the human past, have never discovered any physical evidence for the existence of any civilization as old as 9600 BCE. All that changed with the discovery of the world’s oldest monumental buildings.

  GÖBEKLI TEPE, THE WORLD’S OLDEST MONUMENTUAL ARCHITECTURE

  It is one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries ever made. Known as Göbekli Tepe, this “temple” complex covers an area of twenty-two acres of Turkish territory just north of the Syrian border. Initially, archaeologists thought that the large limestone slabs rising out of the ground were Byzantine graves. But when Dr. Klaus Schmidt and his team from the German Archaeological Institute excavated deeper, they realized that this was a much more significant site than the initial examination of the slabs had indicated.

  The Byzantine “grave stones” crowned a series of eighteen-foot-high T-shaped stone pillars, many of which weighed sixteen tons. Schmidt estimates that the strength of as many as five hundred people would have been needed to move the massive pillars, “the oldest known example of monumental architecture” in the world,6 from their quarry half a kilometre away.

  The exploration of Göbekli Tepe is still in its infancy with only about 10 percent of the site having been excavated. But one astonishing fact has already bewildered archaeologists. The most sophisticated and colossal pillars, which date to 11,600 years ago, were found at the oldest levels of the site. Archaeologists believe that humans had not yet domesticated animals or developed the wheel at this time. So how could primitive hunters and gatherers possibly transport such massive pillars? We just don’t know. What we do know is that the building techniques at Göbekli Tepe degenerated from 11,600 years ago onwards. Pillars that were erected after that were smaller and less sophisticated.

  Dr. Schmidt was aware that the earliest evidence of agriculture in the world is to be found at key archaeological sites that lie within a hundred mile radius of Göbekli Tepe. Curious about which came first, agriculture or the Göbekli Tepe site, he concluded that Göbekli Tepe was built before agriculture began. So what force was strong enough to motivate primitive foragers to suddenly build monuments of such astonishing size? Dr. Schmidt’s answer to the mystery is religion. The powerful human impulse to create a holy place for ceremony, he suggests, anchored people to one place. Once it was constructed, Göbekli Tepe drew them like a magnet to its monuments. Agriculture was developed after its emergence as a holy location in order to feed temple workmen and the pilgrims who were increasingly attracted to the complex.

  Dr. Schmidt audaciously argues that the very existence of the monuments implies that both priests and stone masons practiced their craft at the site. While we can imagine the rise of a priest class at this early stage in human cultural development, it is more difficult to imagine hunters and gatherers suddenly developing the technical skills to cut, shape, and transport immense limestone pillars. Where did their building knowledge come from? Where is the evidence of a gradual accumulation of engineering knowledge? Where are the failed attempts at monument building? And why did construction skills so dramatically decline over time?

  These questions aren’t answered by Dr. Schmidt’s bold religionbased idea because his fixation focuses on which event came first: the construction of Göbekli Tepe or the rise of agriculture? But we ask the even bolder question: Is there a connection between Göbekli Tepe and Atlantis?

  The earliest and most sophisticated sixteen-ton T-shaped pillars uncovered at Göbekli Tepe date to the same century that saw the end of Atlantis. The loss of an advanced civilization whose survivors reemerged around the globe would explain why the oldest constructions at the site are the most sophisticated. The Atlanteans were formidable monument builders. Their engineers had the needed expertise, built up by trial and error over centuries, to conceive and design such an elaborate complex.

  Plato relates that the fall of the great civilization brought with it a dark age during which the sum of knowledge declined dramatically. When the last Atlantean died their sophisticated building knowledge began to fade. While the Atlanteans undoub
tedly tried to pass on their technical skills to succeeding generations, the highly developed civilization that allowed them to develop those skills in the first place was gone. Without the Atlantean civilization to back them, the succeeding generations eventually lost their knowledge of the craft of building.

  Ultimately, Dr. Schmidt concludes that the construction of Göbekli Tepe as a religious center caused an unprecedented influx of people, which, in turn, led to the development of agriculture as a means to feed these workers and pilgrims. But there is no more actual evidence for this idea than the possibility that the sudden emergence of agriculture near Göbekli Tepe was the result of advanced skills practiced by the survivors of a lost civilization.

  Monument building and the rebooting of agriculture were happening simultaneously 11,600 years ago as the Atlanteans desperately tried to rebuild their civilization. At Göbekli Tepe we find exactly the kind of construction projects that we would expect to be built by survivors of a devastated, advanced culture. The site tantalizes as it holds out one piece of the large puzzle that is our lost legacy. Like the megalithic structures at Tiahuanaco in the central Andes that so intrigued Arthur Posnansky and the colossal 180-metric-ton stones used to construct the Sphinx Temple that have fascinated John Anthony West, this evocative place offers one of the latest challenges to traditional assumptions about human existence at the close of the ice age.7

  ANCIENT LANGUAGES AND COMPUTERS

  But what became of the incredible architects of these remarkable temples in Bolivia, Egypt, and Turkey? How and why did they perish? We can find some clues in the central Andes, back at the site of the uncompleted city of Tiahuanaco.

  The tale is told by the Aymara, who still live on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The Aymara are a very ancient and proud race. More than 2.5 million people speak the Aymara language, raise llamas, and grow potatoes along the lakeshore, just as their ancestors have for thousands of years. Even the renowned Incan Empire borrowed heavily from their ancient customs of sun worship, agriculture, and the use of llamas.8