Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

instruments capable of finding longitude did not exist in 1569, but appear to have been used to prepare the ancient source documents Mercator consulted to produce his 1538 map.

It was not until Harrison’s chronometer became generally available in the 1770s that the third of these preconditions was fulfilled. This brilliant invention made it possible for cartographers to fix longitude precisely, something that the Sumerians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, and indeed all other known civilizations before the eighteenth century were supposedly unable to do. It is therefore surprising and unsettling to come across vastly older maps which give latitudes and longitudes with modern precision.

The Piri Reis Map of 1513, for example, places South America and Africa in the correct relative longitudes,11 theoretically an impossible feat for the science of the time. But Piri Reis was candid in admitting that his map was based on far earlier sources.

Also of great interest is the so-called ‘Dulcert Portolano’ of AD 1339 which focuses on Europe and North Africa. Here latitude is perfect across huge distances and the total longitude of the Mediterranean and Black Seas is correct to within half a degree.

Zeno Map14 of AD 1380 is another enigma. Covering a vast area of the north as far as Greenland, it locates a great many widely scattered places at latitudes and longitudes which are ‘amazingly correct’.15 It is ‘unbelievable’, asserts Hapgood, ‘that anyone in the fourteenth century could have found accurate latitudes for these places, to say nothing of accurate longitudes’.

The Oronteus Finaeus World Map also commands attention: it successfully places the coasts of Antarctica in correct latitudes and relative longitudes and finds a remarkably accurate area for the continent as a whole. This reflects a level of geographical knowledge not available until the twentieth century.

Hapgood was to make one more important discovery: a Chinese map copied from an earlier original on to a stone pillar in AD 1137.23 This map incorporates precisely the same kind of high quality information about longitudes as the others. It has a similar grid and was drawn up with the benefit of spherical trigonometry. Indeed, on close examination, it shares so many features with the European and Middle Eastern maps that only one explanation seems adequate: it and they must have stemmed from a common source.24

In the 1980s Ivan Guzman de Rojas, a Bolivian computer scientist, accidentally demonstrated that Aymara might be not only very ancient but, significantly, that it might be a ‘made-up’ language – something deliberately and skilfully designed. Of particular note was the seemingly artificial character of its syntax, which was rigidly structured and unambiguous to an extent thought inconceivable in normal ‘organic’ speech.22 This synthetic and highly organized structure meant that Aymara could easily be transformed into a computer algorithm to be used to translate one language into another: ‘The Aymara Algorithm is used as a bridge language. The language of an original document is translated into Aymara and then into any number of other languages.’23

What might we learn if we could examine this ‘very old’ jewel today? And how old was it really? We shall never find out because Fr Benito, the first missionary of Achiotlan, seized the stone from the Indians: ‘He had it ground up, although a Spaniard offered three thousand ducats for it, stirred the powder in water, poured it upon the earth and trod upon it …’8 Equally typical of the profligate squandering of the intellectual riches concealed in the Mexican past was the shared fate of two gifts given to Cortez by the Aztec emperor Montezuma. These were circular calendars, as big as cartwheels, one of solid silver, and the other of solid gold. Both were elaborately engraved with beautiful hieroglyphs which may have contained material of great interest. Cortez had them melted down for ingots on the spot.9 More systematically, all over Central America, vast repositories of knowledge accumulated since ancient times were painstakingly gathered, heaped up and burned by zealous friars. In July 1562, for example, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in Yucatan Province) Fr Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He also destroyed countless ‘idols’ and ‘altars’, all of which he described as ‘works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity

Diego de Duran, a conscientious and courageous collector of indigenous traditions, was yet another Franciscan who fought to recover the lost knowledge of the past. He visited Cholula in AD 1585, a time of rapid and catastrophic change. There he interviewed a venerated elder of the town, said to have been more than one hundred years old, who told him this story about the making of the great ziggurat: In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this place, Cholula, was in obscurity and darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water, without tree or created thing. Immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature who possessed the land. Enamoured of the light and beauty of the sun they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky. Having collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with which they speedily commenced to build the tower … And having reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky, ‘Have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamoured of the light of the sun and his beauty? Come and confound them, because it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.’ Immediately the inhabitants of the sky sallied fort...

The verse which most interested me suggested very clearly that the ancient builders of the Tower of Babel had set out to create a lasting monument to themselves so that their name would not be forgotten – even if their civilization and language were. Was it possible that the same considerations could have applied at Cholula?

Here, then, was the first mystery of the Olmecs: a monumental piece of sculpture, more than 2000 years old, which portrayed a subject with unmistakable negroid features. There were, of course, no African blacks in the New World 2000 years ago, nor did any arrive until the slave trade began, well after the conquest. There is, however, firm palaeoanthropological evidence that one of the many different migrations into the Americas during the last Ice Age did consist of peoples of negroid stock. This migration occurred around 15,000 BC.

Lying close to the calendar stela at Tres Zapotes, Stirling also unearthed a giant head. I sat in front of that head now. Dated to around 100 BC,7 it was approximately six feet high, 18 feet in circumference and weighed over 10 tons. Like its counterpart in Santiago Tuxtla, it was unmistakably the head of an African man wearing a close-fitting helmet with long chin-straps. The lobes of the ears were pierced by plugs; the pronounced negroid features were furrowed by deep frown lines on either side of the nose, and the entire face was concentrated forwards above thick, down-curving lips. The eyes were open and watchful, almond-shaped and cold. Beneath the curious helmet, the heavy brows appeared beetling and angry.

Soon afterwards the American archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery at Tres Zapotes: children’s toys in the form of little wheeled dogs.9 These cute artefacts conflicted head-on with prevailing archaeological opinion, which held that the wheel had remained undiscovered in Central America until the time of the conquest. The ‘dogmobiles’ proved, at the very least, that the principle of the wheel had been known to the Olmecs, Central America’s earliest civilization. And if a people as resourceful as the Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel, it seemed highly unlikely that they would have used it just for children’s toys.

Strangely, despite the best efforts of archaeologists, not a single, solitary sign of anything that could be described as the ‘developmental phase’ of Olmec society had been unearthed anywhere in Mexico (or, for that matter, anywhere in the New World). These people, whose characteristic form of artistic expression was the carving of huge negroid heads, appeared to have come from nowhere.

Nor were they able to come up with an explanation for another enigma. This was the deliberate burial, along specific alignments, of five of the massive pieces of sculpture, showing negroid features, now widely identified as ‘Olmec heads’. These peculiar and apparently ritualistic graves also yielded more than sixty precious objects and artefacts, including beautiful instruments made of jade and exquisitely carved statuettes. Some of the statuettes had been systematically mutilated before burial.

What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt’s amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period).

such ‘coincidences’ continue to multiply, it is reasonable to wonder whether there may not be some underlying connection. This is certainly the case when we learn that the general term for ‘sacrifice’ throughout Ancient Central America was p’achi, meaning ‘to open the mouth’.

At Monte Alban, however, there seemed to be carved in stone a record of the downfall of these masterful men. It did not look as if this could have been the work of the same people who made the La Venta sculptures. The standard of craftsmanship was far too low for that. But what was certain – whoever they were, and however inferior their work – was that these artists had attempted to portray the same negroid subjects and the same goatee-bearded Caucasians as I had seen at La Venta. There the sculptures had reflected strength, power and vitality. Here at Monte Alban the remarkable strangers were corpses. All were naked, most were castrated, some were curled up in foetal positions as though to avoid showers of blows, others lay sprawled slackly. Archaeologists said the sculptures showed ‘the corpses of prisoners captured in battle’.33 What prisoners? From where? The location, after all, was Central America, the New World, thousands of years before Columbus, so wasn’t it odd that these images of battlefield casualties showed not a single native American but only and exclusively Old World racial types?

I was confronted by crosses yet again. Bearded men … Serpents … Crosses … How likely was it to be an accident that symbols as distinctive as these should repeat themselves in widely separated cultures and at different periods of history? Why were they so often built into the fabric of sophisticated works of art and architecture?

The Maya knew where their advanced learning originated. It was handed down to them, they said, from the First Men, the creatures of Quetzalcoatl, whose names had been Balam-Quitze (Jaguar with the Sweet Smile), Balam-Acab (Jaguar of the Night), Mahucutah (The Distinguished Name) and Iqui-Balam (Jaguar of the Moon).1 According to the Popol Vuh, these forefathers: were endowed with intelligence; they saw and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing; they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move … Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the rocks, the lakes, the seas, the mountains, and the valleys. In truth, they were admirable men … They were able to know all, and they examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth.2 The achievements of this race aroused the envy of several of the most powerful deities. ‘It is not well that our creatures should know all,’ opined these gods, ‘Must they perchance be the equals of ourselves, their Makers, who can see afar, who know all and see all? … Must they also be gods?’3 Obviously such a state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. After some deliberation an order was given and appropriate action taken: Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth … Then the Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes which clou...

The biblical Garden of Eden looks like a metaphor for the state of blissful, almost ‘godlike’, knowledge that the ‘First Men’ of the Popol Vuh enjoyed. • The essence of this knowledge was the ability to ‘see all’ and to ‘know all’. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’? • Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to ‘see far’. Thereafter ‘their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close …’

Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying ‘the round face of the earth’ but for their contemplation of ‘the arch of heaven’?8 And is it a coincidence that the outstanding achievement of Mayan society was its observational astronomy, upon which, through the medium of advanced mathematical calculations, was based a clever, complex, sophisticated and very accurate calendar?

Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days. The Gregorian calendar therefore incorporates a very small plus error, just 0.0003 of a day – pretty impressive accuracy for the sixteenth century. Strangely enough, though its origins are wrapped in the mists of antiquity far deeper than the sixteenth century, the Mayan calendar achieved even greater accuracy. It calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days, a minus error of only 0.0002 of a day.10 Similarly, the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days – extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.11

Unlike the Ancient Greeks, but like the Ancient Egyptians, the Maya understood that Venus was both ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’.18 They understood other things about it as well. The ‘synodical revolution’ of a planet is the period of time it takes to return to any given point in the sky – as viewed from earth. Venus revolves around the sun every 224.7 days, while the earth follows its own slightly wider orbit. The composite result of these two motions is that Venus rises in exactly the same place in the earth’s sky approximately every 584 days. Whoever invented the sophisticated calendrical system inherited by the Maya had been aware of this and had found ingenious ways to integrate it with other interlocking cycles. Moreover, it is clear from the mathematics which brought these cycles together that the ancient calendar masters had understood that 584 days was only an approximation and that the movements of Venus are by no means regular. They had therefore worked out the exact figure established by today’s science for the average synodical revolution of Venus over very long periods of time.19 That figure is 583.92 days and it was knitted into the fabric of the Mayan calendar in numerous intricate and complex ways.20 For example, to reconcile it with the so-called ‘sacred year’ (the tzolkin of 260 days, which was divided into 13 months of 20 days each) the calendar called for a correction of four days to be made every 61 Venus years. In addition, during every f...

On a stela at Quiriga in Guatemala a date over 90 million years ago is computed; on another a date over 300 million years before that is given. These are actual computations, stating correctly day and month positions, and are comparable to calculations in our calendar giving the month positions on which Easter would have fallen at equivalent distances in the past. The brain reels at such astronomical figures …

Isn’t all this a bit avant-garde for a civilization that didn’t otherwise distinguish itself in many ways? It’s true that Mayan architecture was good within its limits. But there was precious little else that these jungle-dwelling Indians did which suggested they might have had the capacity (or the need) to conceive of really long periods of time.

At any rate, if the centre line of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun, markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the Street of the Dead seemed to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the so-called ‘Sun’ Pyramid), Uranus (by the ‘Moon’ Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometres farther north.

But was this just an astronomical ‘cult’? Or was it something approximating more closely to what we might call a science? And whether cult or science, was it realistic to suppose that it had enjoyed ‘widespread distribution’ only in the Americas when there was so much evidence linking it to other parts of the ancient world? For example, archaeo-astronomers making use of the latest star-mapping computer programmes had recently demonstrated that the three world-famous pyramids on Egypt’s Giza plateau formed an exact terrestrial diagram of the three belt stars in the constellation of Orion.14 Nor was this the limit of the celestial map the Ancient Egyptian priests had created in the sands on the west bank of the Nile. Included in their overall vision, as we shall see in Parts VI and VII, there was a natural feature – the river Nile – which was exactly where it should be had it been designed to represent the Milky Way.

The orthodox view is that Archimedes in the third century BC was the first man to calculate pi correctly at 3.14.8 Scholars do not accept that any of the mathematicians of the New World ever got anywhere near pi before the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. It is therefore disorienting to discover that the Great Pyramid at Giza (built more than 2000 years before the birth of Archimedes) and the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, which vastly predates the conquest, both incorporate the value of pi. They do so, moreover, in much the same way, and in a manner which leaves no doubt that the ancient builders on both sides of the Atlantic were thoroughly conversant with this transcendental number.

The story that Gilgamesh brought back had been told to him by a certain Utnapishtim, a king who had ruled thousands of years earlier, who had survived the great flood, and who had been rewarded with the gift of immortality because he had preserved the seeds of humanity and of all living things. It was long, long ago, said Utnapishtim, when the gods dwelt on earth: Anu, lord of the firmament, Enlil, the enforcer of divine decisions, Ishtar, goddess of war and sexual love and Ea, lord of the waters, man’s natural friend and protector. In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamour. Enlil heard the clamour and he said to the gods in council, ‘The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel.’ So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind.’2 Ea, however, took pity on Utnapishtim. Speaking through the reed wall of the king’s house he told him of the imminent catastrophe and instructed him to build a boat in which he and his family could survive: Tear down your house and build a boat, abandon possessions and look for life, despise wordly goods and save your soul … Tear down your house, I say, and build a boat with her dimensions in proportion – her width and length in harmony. Put aboard the seed of all living things, into the boat.3 In the nick of time Utnapishtim built the boat as ordered. ‘I loaded into her all that I had,’ he said, ‘loaded her with...

The identical message was preserved in the Valley of Mexico, far away across the world from Mounts Ararat and Nisir. There, culturally and geographically isolated from Judaeo-Christian influences, long ages before the arrival of the Spaniards, stories were told of a great deluge. As the reader will recall from Part III, it was believed that this deluge had swept over the entire earth at the end of the Fourth Sun: ‘Destruction came in the form of torrential rain and floods. The mountains disappeared and men were transformed into fish …’8 According to Aztec mythology only two human beings survived: a man, Coxcoxtli, and his wife, Xochiquetzal, who had been forewarned of the cataclysm by a god. They escaped in a huge boat they had been instructed to build and came to ground on the peak of a tall mountain.

How far and how widely across the myth memories of mankind do the ripples of the great flood spread? Very widely indeed. More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.

Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference between Yima’s divinely inspired var and Noah’s divinely inspired ark: the ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating ‘winter’ which will destroy every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice and snow.

This is not the place to speculate on what may have caused the alarming disturbances in the patterns of the heavens that are linked with cataclysm legends from all over the world. For our purposes at present, it is sufficient to note that such traditions seem to refer to the same ‘derangement of the sky’ that accompanied the fatal winter and spreading ice sheets described in the Iranian Avesta.22 Other linkages occur. Fire, for example, often follows or precedes the flood. In the case of Phaeton’s adventure with the Sun, ‘the grass withered; the crops were scorched; the woods went up in fire and smoke; then beneath them the bare earth cracked and crumbled and the blackened rocks burst asunder under the heat.’

Can it be a coincidence that one of the many Central American flood myths about the fourth epoch, 4 Atl (‘water’), does not install the Noah couple in an ark but places them instead in a great tree just like Yggdrasil? ‘4 Atl was ended by floods. The mountains disappeared … Two persons survived because they were ordered by one of the gods to bore a hole in the trunk of a very large tree and to crawl inside when the skies fell. The pair entered and survived. Their offspring repopulated the world.’

The Alaskan muck in which the remains are embedded is like a fine, dark-grey sand. Frozen solid within this mass, in the words of Professor Hibben of the University of New Mexico: lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled with lenses of ice and layers of peat and mosses … Bison, horses, wolves, bears, lions … Whole herds of animals were apparently killed together, overcome by some common power … Such piles of bodies of animals or men simply do not occur by any ordinary natural means …’11 At various levels stone artefacts have been found ‘frozen in situ at great depths, and in association with Ice Age fauna, which confirms that men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska’.12 Throughout the Alaskan mucks, also there is: evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence. Mammoth and bison alike were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in Godly rage. In one place we can find the foreleg and shoulder of a mammoth with portions of the flesh and toenails and hair still clinging to the blackened bones. Close by is the neck and skull of a bison with the vertebrae clinging together with tendons and ligaments and the chitinous covering of the horns intact. There is no mark of knife or cutting instrument [as there would be if human hunters, for example, had been involved]. The animals were simply torn apart and scattered over the landscape like things of straw and string, even though some of them weighed several tons. Mixed with piles of bone...

Once again, some mysterious factor appears to have been at work in bringing about these mass extinctions. With their woolly coats and thick skins, mammoths are generally considered adapted to cold weather, and we are not surprised to come across their remains in Siberia. Harder to explain is the fact that human beings perished alongside them,15 as well as many other animals that in no sense can be described as cold-adapted species: The northern Siberian plains supported vast numbers of rhinoceroses, antelope, horses, bison, and other herbivorous creatures, while a variety of carnivores, including the sabertooth cat, preyed upon them.… Like the mammoths, these other animals ranged to the extreme north of Siberia, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and yet further north to the Lyakhov and New Siberian Islands, only a very short distance from the North Pole.16 Researchers have confirmed that of the thirty-four animal species living in Siberia prior to the catastrophes of the eleventh millennium BC – including Ossip’s mammoth, giant deer, cave hyena and cave lions – no less than twenty-eight were adapted only to temperate conditions.17 In this context, one of the most puzzling aspects of the extinctions, which runs quite contrary to what today’s geographical and climatic conditions lead us to expect, is that the farther north one goes, the more the mammoth and other remains increase in number.18 Indeed some of the New Siberian Islands, well within the Arctic Circle, were descr...

There is a great deal of other evidence which suggests that a sudden freeze took place in Siberia during the eleventh millennium BC. In his survey of the New Siberian Islands, the Arctic explorer Baron Eduard von Toll found the remains ‘of a sabretooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been 90 feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches … At the present time the only representative of tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high’.21 Equally indicative of the cataclysmic change that took place at the onset of the great cold in Siberia is the food the extinct animals were eating when they perished: ‘The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested … Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs.’

Santillana and von Dechend argue that it is no accident that the allegory of the ‘orb of heaven that turns around like a millstone and ever does something bad’20 also makes an appearance in the biblical tradition of Samson, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’.21 His merciless captors unbind him so that he can ‘make sport’ for them in their temple; instead, with his last strength, he takes hold of the middle pillars of that great structure and brings the whole edifice crashing down, killing everybody.22 Like Fenja and Menja, he gets his revenge. The theme resurfaces in Japan,23 in Central America,24 among the Maoris of New Zealand,25 and in the myths of Finland. There the Hamlet/Samson figure is known as Kullervo and the mill has a peculiar name: the Sampo. Like Fenja and Menja’s mill it is ultimately stolen and loaded on board a ship. And like their mill, it ends up being broken in pieces.26

What is remarkable about all this is the way that the mill (which continues to serve as an allegory for cosmic processes) stubbornly keeps on resurfacing, all over the world, even where the context has been jumbled or lost. Indeed, in Santillana and von Dechend’s argument, it doesn’t really matter if the context is lost. ‘The particular merit of mythical terminology,’ they say, ‘is that it can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc.’29 What matters, in other words, is that certain central imagery should survive and continue to be passed on in retellings, however far these may drift from the original storyline. An example of such drift (coupled with the retention of essential imagery and information) is found among the Cherokees, whose name for the Milky Way (our own galaxy) is ‘Where the Dog Ran’. In ancient times, according to Cherokee tradition, the ‘people in the South had a corn mill’, from which meal was stolen again and again. In due course the owners discovered the thief, a dog, who ‘ran off howling to his home in the North, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day … “Where the Dog Ran”.’

If the ‘precessional message’ identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn’t just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn’t that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It must be obvious that in such circumstances a written legacy to the future would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense of it. What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them – and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.

Although several different mechanisms of an astronomical and geological nature seem to be involved, and although not all of these are fully understood, the fact is that the cycle of precession does correlate very strongly with the onset and demise of ice ages.

As the guards continued their patrol in a westerly direction along the northern face of the Great Pyramid, we made our way around the north-eastern corner and along the base of the eastern face. I had long ago fallen into the habit of orienting myself according to the monument’s sides. The northern face was aligned, almost perfectly, to true north, the eastern face almost perfectly to true east, the southern to true south, and the western face to true west. The average error was only around three minutes of arc (down to less than two minutes on the southern face)1 – incredible accuracy for any building in any epoch, and an inexplicable, almost supernatural feat here in Egypt 4500 years ago when the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built. An error of three arc minutes represents an infinitesimal deviation from true of less than 0.015 Per cent. In the opinion of structural engineers, with whom I had discussed the Great Pyramid, the need for such precision was impossible to understand. From their point of view as practical builders, the expense, difficulty and time spent achieving it would not have been justified by the apparent results: even if the base of the monument had been as much as two or three degrees out of true (an error of say 1 per cent) the difference to the naked eye would still have been too small to be noticeable. On the other hand the difference in the magnitude of the tasks required (to achieve accuracy within three minutes as opposed to three degree...

Its north side was 755 feet 4.9818 inches in length; its west side was 755 feet 9.1551 inches in length; its east side was 755 feet 10.4937 inches; its south side 756 feet 0.9739 inches.2 This meant that there was a difference of less than 8 inches between its shortest and longest sides: an error amounting to a tiny fraction of 1 per cent on an average side length of over 9063 inches.

Very few modern buildings, even the houses we live in, have corners that consist of perfect ninety degree right angles; it is common for them to be a degree or more out of true. It doesn’t make any difference structurally and nobody notices such minute errors. In the case of the Great Pyramid, however, I knew that the ancient master-builders had found a way to narrow the margin of error to almost nothing. Thus, while falling short of the perfect ninety degrees, the south-eastern corner achieved an impressive 89° 56ʹ 27˝. The north-eastern corner measured 90° 3ʹ 2˝; the south-western 90° 0ʹ 33˝, and the north-western was just two seconds of a degree out of true at 89° 59ʹ 58˝.

Made of cedarwood, the beautiful ship in the museum was still in perfect condition 4500 years after it had been built. With a displacement of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking, incorporating, in the words of one expert, ‘all the sea-going ship’s characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile.’6 Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange pyramid boat could potentially have made it ‘a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus’.7 Moreover, the experts agreed that it had been built to a pattern that could only have been ‘created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.’8 Present at the very beginning of Egypt’s 3000-year history, who had those as yet unidentified shipbuilders been? They had not accumulated their ‘long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ while ploughing the fields of the landlocked Nile Valley. So where and when had they developed their maritime skills?

Assuming that the masons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, the mathematics indicate that they would have needed to place 31 blocks in position every hour (about one block every two minutes) to complete the Pyramid in twenty years. Assuming that construction work had been confined to the annual three-month lay-off, the problems multiplied: four blocks a minute would have had to be delivered, about 240 every hour.

For some reason, too, it had taken their fancy to place the Great Pyramid almost exactly on the 30th parallel at latitude 29° 58ʹ 51˝. This, as a former astronomer royal of Scotland once observed, was ‘a sensible defalcation from 30°’, but not necessarily in error: For if the original designer had wished that men should see with their body, rather than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at an altitude before them of 30°, he would have had to take account of the refraction of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at 30° but at 29° 58ʹ 22˝.16 Compared to the true position of 29° 58ʹ 51˝, this was an error of less than half an arc minute, suggesting once again that the surveying and geodetic skills brought to bear here must have been of the highest order.

Here and there around the base, however, I knew that enough had remained in position to permit the great nineteenth century archaeologist, W.M. Flinders Petrie, to carry out a detailed study of them. He had been stunned to encounter tolerances of less than one-hundredth of an inch and cemented joints so precise and so carefully aligned that it was impossible to slip even the fine blade of a pocket knife between them. ‘Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work’, he admitted, ‘but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians’ work on a scale of acres.’