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

by Graham Hancock

There was, he asserted, irrefutable evidence that the earth had been comprehensively mapped before 4000 BC by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization which had achieved a high level of technological advancement:10

The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands of years as the ice-cap gradually spread outwards from the interior, increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC

Although they remained undiscovered until 1592, the Falkland Islands appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude.

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.

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.

When it comes to mapping it, therefore, only a globe can represent it in correct proportion. Transferring cartographic data from a globe to flat sheets of paper inevitably involves distortions and can be accomplished only by means of an artificial and complex mechanical and mathematical device known as map projection. There are many different kinds of projection. Mercator’s, still used in atlases today, is perhaps the most familiar. Others are dauntingly referred to as Azimuthal, Stereographic, Gnomonic, Azimuthal Equidistant, Cordiform, and so on, but it is unnecessary to go into this any further here. We need only note that all successful projections require the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques of a kind supposedly unknown in the ancient world20 (particularly in the deepest antiquity before 4000 BC when there was allegedly no human civilization at all, let alone one capable of developing and using advanced mathematics and geometry).

The Chinese map also indicates something else: a global legacy must have been handed down – a legacy of inestimable

value, in all probability incorporating much more than sophisticated geographical knowledge. Could it have been some portion of this legacy that was distributed in prehistoric Peru by the so-called ‘Viracochas’, mysterious bearded strangers said to have come from across the seas, in a ‘time of darkness’, to restore civilization after a great upheaval of the earth? I decided to go to Peru to see what I could find.

Viracochas,

Walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral, I remembered that the Inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more than 700 sheets of pure gold (each weighing around two kilograms) and that its spacious courtyard had been planted with ‘fields’ of replica corn also fashioned out of gold.

I could not help but be reminded of Solomon’s temple in far-off Jerusalem, also reputed to have been adorned with sheets of gold and a marvellous orchard of golden trees.

Viracocha

Rolf Muller, professor of Astronomy at the University of Potsdam, found convincing evidence to suggest that the most important features of Machu Picchu possessed significant astronomical alignments. From these, through the use of detailed mathematical computations concerning star positions in the sky in previous millennia (which gradually alter down the epochs as the result of a phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes), Muller concluded that the original layout of the site could only have been accomplished during ‘the era of 4000 BC to 2000 BC’.10 In terms of orthodox history, this was a heresy of audacious proportions. If Muller was right, Machu Picchu was not a mere 500 but could be as much as 6000 years old. This would make it significantly older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt (assuming, of course, that one accepted the Great Pyramid’s own orthodox dating of around 2500 BC).

On the third column from the right-hand side (and, more faintly, on the third column from the left-hand side too) I could make out a clear carving of an elephant’s head, ears, tusks and trunk. This was unexpected since there are no elephants anywhere in the New World. There had been, however, in prehistoric times, as I was able to confirm much later. Particularly numerous in the southern Andes, until their sudden extinction around 10,000 BC,20 had been the members of a species called Cuvieronius, an elephantlike proboscid complete with tusks and a trunk, uncannily similar in appearance to the ‘elephants’ of the Gateway of the Sun.21

Equally thought-provoking was the appearance of the symbol of the cross on many of these ancient blocks. Recurring again and again, particularly at the northern approach to Puma Punku, this symbol always took the same form: a double crucifix with pure clean lines, perfectly balanced and harmonious, deeply recessed into the hard grey stone. Even according to orthodox historical chronology these crosses were not less than 1500 years old. In other words, they had been carved here, by a people with absolutely no knowledge of Christianity, a full millennium before the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries on the Altiplano.

Where, come to that, had the Christians obtained their crosses? Not only from the shape of the structure to which Jesus Christ was nailed, I thought, but from some much older source as well.

It is recorded, for example, that Ahuitzotl, the eighth and most powerful emperor of the Aztec royal dynasty, ‘celebrated the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshalling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them. On this occasion as many as 80,000 were slain during a single ceremonial rite.’4

The Aztecs liked to dress up in the flayed skins of sacrificial victims.

The celebrants flayed and dismembered the captives; they then lubricated their own naked bodies with grease and slipped into the skin … Trailing blood and grease, the gruesomely clad men ran through the city, thus terrifying those they followed … The second-day’s rite also included a cannibal feast for each warrior’s family.

the Ancient Egyptians had a special liking and reverence for dwarves.

The two intact layers in the Mica Temple, on the other hand, resting as they do in a place where they had no decorative function, look as though they were designed to do a particular job. Let us note in passing that mica possesses characteristics which suit it especially well for a range of technological applications. In modern industry, it is used in the construction of capacitors and is valued as a thermal and electric insulator. It is also opaque to fast neutrons and can act as a moderator in nuclear reactions.

A more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes, 20 March and 22 September. Then the passage of the sun’s rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western façade. The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds. It had done so without fail, year-in year-out, ever since the pyramid had been built and would continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust.7

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.

Since it is almost inconceivable that such a precise mathematical correlation could have come about by chance, we are obliged to conclude that the builders of the Great Pyramid were indeed conversant with pi and that they deliberately incorporated its value into the dimensions of their monument.

This, surely, can no more be a coincidence than the pi relationship extrapolated from the dimensions of the Egyptian monument. Moreover, the very fact that both structures incorporate pi relationships (when none of the other pyramids on either side of the Atlantic does) strongly suggests not only the existence of advanced mathematical knowledge in antiquity but some sort of underlying common purpose

Not a single one of these monuments had ever been found to contain the body of a pharaoh, or any signs whatsoever of a royal burial.

However, the real surprise revealed by Bauval’s astronomical calculations was this: despite the fact that some aspects of the Great Pyramid did relate astronomically to the Pyramid Age, the Giza monuments as a whole were so arranged as to provide a picture of the skies (which alter their appearance down the ages as a result of precession of the equinoxes) not as they had looked in the Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, but as they had looked – and only as they had looked – around the year 10,450 BC.8

West is really an academic’s worst nightmare, because here comes somebody way out of left-field with a thoroughly well thought out, well presented, coherently described theory, full of data they can’t refute, and it pulls the rug out from beneath their feet. So how do they deal with it? They ignore it. They hope it’ll go away … and it won’t go away.

We are told that the evolution of human civilization is a linear process – that it goes from stupid cavemen to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste. But the proof that the Sphinx is many, many thousands of years older than the archaeologists think it is, that it preceded by many thousands of years even dynastic Egypt, means that there must have been, at some distant point in history, a high and sophisticated civilization – just as all the legends affirm.

the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.37 The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality. How, therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?

It is tempting to wonder whether what we are confronted by here might not be a garbled account of a malfunctioning man-made device: a confused, awe-stricken recollection of a monstrous instrument devised by the scientists of a lost civilization. Weight is added to such extreme speculations when we remember that this is by no means the only golden box in the ancient world that functioned like a deadly and unpredictable machine. It has a number of quite unmissable similarities to the Hebrews’ enigmatic Ark of the Covenant (which also struck innocent people dead with bolts of fiery energy, which also was ‘overlaid round about with gold’, and which was said to have contained not only the two tablets of the Ten Commandments but ‘the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod.’)

Plato (fourth century BC) reported that the Egyptians had observed the stars ‘for ten thousand years