Читать книгу The Big Book of Mysteries - Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe - Страница 10

1 PREHISTORIC MYSTERIES

Every so often strange things — Fortean things — turn up and smudge the elaborate picture that most of us are busily painting on the flimsy canvas of common-sense reality (which screens us from the “Ultimate Reality” that we know is waiting out there somewhere).

They may be anachronistic fossils, odd drawings, or carvings that have survived for thousands of years — huge lines carved across a flat plain so that they make much more sense from the air than from ground level, or semi-legendary, semi-mythical accounts of angels and demons, monsters and demigods, who could by a slight tweak of the text be better understood as extraterrestrials, or as the weird, vestigial survivors of strange pre-human civilizations.

In Giza, to the west of Cairo, is the site of the vast and formidable Sphinx with its human head and lion’s body. Nearby are the three great pyramids of Menkaura, Khafra, and Khufu. Usually regarded by Egyptologists as the oldest and biggest of the statues surviving from the Old Kingdom, which began approximately five thousand years ago, the Sphinx’s human face may be meant to represent Pharaoh Chephren, although the Sphinx was also regarded as an image of the benign god, Horus. Did its strange and sinister design perhaps originate in lost Atlantis?

The oldest known sphinx is far more ancient than the one in Giza. It is situated in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and is believed to date back as far as 9500 B.C.

Small, delicate ancient mysteries can sometimes be harder to solve than those on a vast scale like the Sphinx. In 1901, divers working near the island of Antikythera found a very strange little metal device. It was well preserved and thought to have survived for two millennia at least. Careful examination by expert archaeologists, engineers, and historians led to the conclusion that it was a very early computer-type device intended for calculating the positions of the zodiac signs.

The so-called Babylonian electric cells were found by Austrian archaeologist Wilhelm Konig in 1931. He later became director of the Baghdad Antiquities Administration, working from the Iraq Museum. Digging at a Parthian site in Khujut Rubu’a, he came across a small ceramic container with a copper cylinder inside it. This had been soldered with an alloy of tin and lead, topped by a copper disc, and sealed with bitumen. An iron rod showing acidic damage was secured within the copper cylinder. In Konig’s opinion, the only possible explanation of the artifact was that it was an electric cell, and his theory was justified when working reproductions of it produced a potential difference of about one volt.

Konig’s example from Khujut was by no means unique: Numerous other examples were found in the region — all dating from the Parthian period between 300 B.C and A.D. 300. A significant part of the mystery is why the Parthians were using electric cells over two thousand years ago. No devices have yet been found that Konig’s cells may have powered.

Without travelling to Babylon, Egypt, or Greece, strange ancient mysteries abound in Britain — and few are stranger than Stonehenge in Wiltshire. These great trilithons with their thirty upright stones, each nearly four metres tall and weighing a good twenty-five tons, stand in a circle on Salisbury Plain. There are lintel stones balanced horizontally above these massive uprights, and the technical term “trilithon” refers to all three stones together.

The so-called blue stones of the structure seem to have been brought all the way across from Wales. Another interesting feature of Stonehenge is the Heel Stone (Heelstone). This is a block measuring nearly five metres in height, leaning at an angle of almost thirty degrees. There is an interesting legend attached to it: the devil is supposed to have used it to attack a monk, or friar, whose heel was struck by the stone. Other experts think that the word translated as “friar” in the Middle Ages was actually Freyja, the Norse goddess, and that the original purpose of the stone was connected with her worship.

Another mysterious site, Woodhenge, is not far away, and although little remains of the original wood today. Some experts believe that it was used as the model, or trial design, for Stonehenge itself. Others suggest that it was constructed later — during the Bronze Age — and based on the Stonehenge design.

Other ancient mysteries involve curiously ambiguous statuettes, such as the famous Woman of Willendorf, or Venus of Willendorf.

The statuette is just less than twelve centimetres high and is reckoned to be well over twenty thousand years old. Willendorf is in Austria, and when archaeologist Josef Szombathy was working at a paleolithic site there in 1908, he discovered the remarkable little statuette carved out of oolitic limestone and tinted with red ochre. Among the many suggestions about her meaning and origin is that what looks like her hair is actually a space helmet — implying that she is really an extraterrestrial!

The idea of highly technical visitors from space (if that’s what she was) is supported by the fact that there are numerous ancient buildings and subterranean labyrinths that the best modern machinery would be hard-pressed to construct: and there are very old maps, copies of even older maps, which show the detail of coastlines and geographical features that have been totally inaccessible for millennia because of a thick covering of ice.

In July 1960, United States Air Force lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron, Westover, Massachusetts, wrote a devastatingly important letter to Professor Charles H. Hapgood. Hapgood had asked Ohlmeyer to study the Piri Reis map drawn by that famous old Turkish admiral in 1513, and Ohlmeyer’s answer was that the seismic work of the 1949 Anglo-Swedish Expedition showed that Reis’s coastline, far below the present Antarctic ice sheet, was accurate. Ohlmeyer concluded that the coastline in question had been mapped before the ice covered it.

Stonehenge.

Who was Piri Reis, and how did he get that accurate geographical information in the early sixteenth century? He was a high-ranking officer in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and, as far as can be judged, a particularly honest and open character. He did not claim to have compiled his map by his own unaided efforts or his own practical cartographic expeditions, although he was an excellent sailor who travelled far and wide, and had written a textbook about sailing. Notes in his own handwriting explain how he compiled his map from many sources — some of them as recent as Christopher Columbus, others going back to at least 400 B.C. Somehow or another he clashed with the Ottoman High Command and was beheaded around 1555. His precious map drawn on gazelle skin was rediscovered in the old Imperial Palace in Constantinople in 1929.

The Venus of Willendorf in Austria. Is she wearing a space helmet?

Hapgood’s work in 1963 envisaged Reis working away among the ancient documents preserved at Constantinople, which were themselves based on far older sources, compiled in turn from older sources still … and going back beyond 4000 B.C. This argument implied that a very advanced technological civilization had existed at a far more distant date than was generally accepted by most prehistorians. Hapgood traced this channel of geographical and navigational information through the Minoan and Phoenician cultures, through ancient Egypt, and back beyond that. How far was ancient Atlantis connected with these mysterious, old maps?

One map alone, however interesting its history, and however accurate its details of the Antarctic coastline, could be regarded as nothing more than a strange coincidence. If another old map turned up independently, that would be much more significant. Well, such a map did in fact appear: it is known as the Oronteus Finaeus map and was drawn in 1531–32. It depicts mountain ranges as well as a surprisingly accurate Antarctic coastline, and realistic rivers draining down from the mountains. It is also significant that the central area nearest to the South Pole itself has been left blank — as though the accurate and honest cartographer who drew it has acknowledged that this central region is heavily shrouded in ice so that no details of mountains or rivers can be surveyed or measured.

THREADS OF TIME

There is one anachronistic mystery that concerned a length of gold thread that was found inside a lump of coal estimated at three hundred million years old. Had a time traveller lost it when that piece of coal was growing as a green and fertile tree?

A major discrepancy on the Oronteus Finaeus map is that the Antarctic Peninsula goes too far north, almost touching Cape Horn. But a closer scrutiny of the whole of Oronteus’s representation of the Antarctic continent shows that all of it extends too far from the centre, too far north, in fact, in every direction. It is not inaccurate — it’s simply drawn to the wrong scale for the rest of the Finaeus map. Whoever first made the scaling error, it was made in the distant past and copied by a succession of cartographers, including Piri Reis.

The very old portolanos on which the medieval navigators depended did not carry regular grid lines like our modern lines of latitude and longitude. Instead they tended to use central points — located at various positions on the map — from which lines radiated like the closely fitting spokes of a bicycle wheel. The centres may have been meant to reproduce the directions of a primitive mariner’s compass, and navigation would probably have proceeded by attempting to recognize the ship’s location by the position of various landmarks, islands, cliffs, bays, and headlands. Having established his present position, the navigator would possibly have tried to line up the ship’s course along the grid line which would have taken it nearest to his intended destination.

A.E. Nordenskiöld, who was an acknowledged world authority in this area, compiled an atlas from the many portolanos he studied, and concluded that they were based on much older and far more accurate maps. He argued that the Dulcert Portolano of 1339 was particularly accurate beyond the capabilities of typical fourteenth century navigators and cartographers. He thought that there was no observable development in the maps and charts that appeared from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Two hundred years of sailing, exploration, and discovery was not reflected in the maps. He concluded that this was because someone in the early 1300s had discovered an exceptionally accurate map, one that was destined not to be surpassed for the next two centuries at least. It also seemed to Nordenskiöld that there was only one such excellent original and that all the good and reliable portolanos had been copied from it.

His measurements revealed that as far as the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were concerned, all the portolanos were practically identical, and the same scale was used on all.

Nordenskiöld was intrigued to find that the scale used was not obviously linked with the customary Mediterranean units of measurement, except for those found in Catalonia. He suggested that the historical link between Catalan and the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians could well account for this. If the units of measurement and the scale were Carthaginian, then there was a strong possibility that the original, accurate map from which the good portolanos had been copied, had also been known to the Carthaginians — even if it had not originated with them.

Nordenskiöld then examined the role of Marinus of Tyre, a navigator who lived during the second century A.D. and was the predecessor of the famous Ptolemy.

Theodorus Meliteniota of Byzantium, from whom most of the information about the great scholar’s life is derived, suggests that Claudius Ptolemaus, popularly known as Ptolemy, was born in the Greek city of Ptolemais Hermii, and did most of his scientific, astronomical, and mathematical work in Alexandria. He was certainly making astronomical observations between the years A.D. 127 and 151, and may still have been working as late as 155. There is also an Arabian tradition that Ptolemy died at the age of seventy-eight.

From his studies of the portolanos, Nordenskiöld felt that the units of measurement used could not have been from a time later than that of Marinus of Tyre, and were probably far earlier. Comparing them with Ptolemy’s work, he saw clearly that the original source from which the portolanos had been copied was greatly superior.

To give Ptolemy the credit he richly deserves, he was the most famous geographer of his time. He had access to the greatest library of the ancient world, and all its geographical documents and records. He was a fine mathematician and posessed a modern, scientific attitude to the phenomena he observed and studied. As Hapgood so rightly argues in Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings, it is very unlikely that medieval sailors during the fourteenth century without the advantages of Ptolemy’s reference library and high mathematical skills could have produced charts superior to his.

Assuming that it was the Carthaginians and Phoenicians who had access to much older and more accurate charts than Ptolemy was able to produce, and assuming again that these reappeared after an interval of well over a thousand years to form the basis of the portolanos, why did they vanish, and where might they have been hidden? The answer could lie in the grim and chronic struggle between Rome and Carthage known as the Punic Wars.

To understand the hatred and rivalry between these two great ancient powers, it is necessary to look briefly at their respective histories.

The first legend of the foundation of Rome relates how Aeneas, the Trojan prince, escaped from the ruin of Troy, married a Latin princess, and founded the city of Rome and the Julian Dynasty. The second legend concerns Romulus and Remus, descendants of Aeneas on their mother’s side, and, in the myth, the sons of Mars, god of war. Thrown into the Tiber by an unfriendly king of Latium, they drifted to Capitol Hill, were raised by a she-wolf, and founded Rome in 753 B.C. — a date from which all Roman history traditionally begins.

The most likely historical origin is that clusters of settlements on Rome’s seven hills got together to form a city state round about 1000 B.C. Having been involved in various battles with fierce Celtic neighbours and Gauls, “Rome conquered the world in self-defence!”

The Roman Empire was a great trading organization, and freedom of the seas was vitally important to her both commercially and militarily. The Carthaginians were the major maritime problem for Roman ships in the Mediterranean. It was inevitable that one power or the other would have to go down.

The history of Carthage begins with Phoenician colonists from Lebanon and Syria 1,600 kilometres to the east. Lacking the manpower to establish large settlements, they set up a few coastal cities as trading posts. The silver and tin of southern Spain were a great attraction for them. Phoenicians looked for places easily accessible from the sea but not open to hostile tribes from the hinterland: they liked offshore islands, rocky peninsulas, and sandy bays to facilitate beaching their ships. Carthage conformed to this pattern. It was also in a good position to expand into the fertile areas around it. The name itself derives from two Phoenician words kart hadasht, which means “new city.”

The implacable attitude separating the two great Mediterranean powers is clearly illustrated by the bitter words of the grim old Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 B.C.) “Delenda est Carthago” — “Carthage must be destroyed.”

The first Punic War (264–261 B.C.) started because of problems in Sicily. The second (218–201 B.C.) ended with Scipio Africanus’s triumph over Hannibal, the Carthaginian general at the epoch-making Battle of Zama in what is now Tunisia. The third and final round (149–146 B.C.) ended with the total destruction of Carthage and her people.

Did the precious old maps survive the destruction of Carthage, or were they safely onboard a Carthaginian ship that somehow evaded the Roman blockade and made its way east, back toward the old Phoenician homelands from which the ill-fated colony at Carthage had originally sprung?

It is interesting to speculate that if the precious and highly accurate old map did find its way back to the Middle East before the final destruction of Carthage, it could well have surfaced again during the Crusades, the period prior to 1307 during which the indomitable Templars were in the ascendancy. They were great sailors as well as great soldiers: were their successes at sea due in part to their possession of superior maps and charts, copied from highly accurate originals that predated the maritime Phoenicians and Carthaginians?

So one possible scenario suggests that some very ancient but unknown source produced maps of high quality, which in turn came into the hands of the Phoenicians, and passed from them — indirectly — to the Templars, and so to European navigators in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Where could the advanced technical knowledge behind those maps have come from in the first place? Assuming that Graham Hancock’s thoroughly researched and well-reasoned theories have the sound basis in fact that they certainly appear to have, then Antarctica would be as good a starting place as any.

If Hapgood’s deductions about the ability of continental land masses to slide over the Earth’s surface — that is, if the crust is able to move independently of the core beneath it — are correct, then areas that once occupied warm or temperate zones may find themselves relatively quickly inside polar circles, and vice versa.

Hapgood and his colleague, James Campbell, put forward the theory that the Earth’s crust rests on a very weak layer below — a layer that is virtually liquid. Following an idea suggested to them by Hugh Auchincloss Brown, an engineer, they investigated the possibility that a force powerful enough to move the entire crust of the Earth over this weak, quasi-liquid layer, could be generated by the mass of the polar ice-caps themselves, and their centrifugal effects arising from the Earth’s own rotation.

The centre of gravity of the Antarctic ice-cap, for example, is approximately 483 kilometres from the South Pole: “As the Earth rotates,” suggests Hapgood, “the eccentricity creates a centrifugal effect that works horizontally on the crust, tending to displace it toward the equator.”

Einstein himself supported this theory: in the introduction to Hapgood’s Earth’s Shifting Crust, Einstein wrote, “His (Hapgood’s) idea is original, of great simplicity, and — if it continues to prove itself — of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the Earth’s surface.”

Following Hapgood’s hypothesis, if there was an advanced civilization living on Antarctica before it moved into a polar position where it would rapidly become ice-locked, what would such people do to save themselves, their children, and their culture?

Such cataclysmic shifting of the Earth’s crust would inevitably be accompanied by dynamic geological and meteorological phenomena. There would be earthquakes, volcanic disturbances, fierce storms, destructive winds, and tidal waves. Those who could — those who had ships strong and buoyant enough to survive the devastation and the accelerating onset of the paralyzing cold — would head north toward warmer zones. Where might those fortunate few refugees and survivors have landed?

Heading north from all sides of the ice-doomed Antarctic continent would bring the desperate travellers to either Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand’s South Island, the southern coast of Australia, or — if they travelled far enough due north along the 109 degrees west longitude — to the remote mysteries of Easter Island.

Is there the faintest possibility that the indecipherable rongo-rongo script and the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island are thousands of years older than is generally thought to be the case?

Just suppose that a highly advanced civilization once flourished on the land that is now buried under hundreds of metres of Antarctic ice. Those of their refugees who travelled up the East African coast could eventually have reached Egypt. Was it their skill, perhaps, that designed and constructed the Sphinx and many of the other massive structures that are still defying time?

Did another group of them reach South America and leave indelible traces of their architectural knowledge and structural expertise there as well?

When the oldest indigenous Australians talk of the Dream Time does their mysticism go right back to another half-remembered place from which they came millennia ago, and will paintings one day be discovered under the ice of Antarctica that bear an uncanny resemblance to the oldest Australian rock and cave art?

Puzzling legends of lost civilizations persist all over the world. The vanishing of a once great Antarctic civilization below the ice of the present South Pole might reveal the history behind those legends.

We now move from the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the oppressive heat of the African sun for the next of the ancient mysteries — the Blombos Cave in South Africa. The caves contain a variety of wall carvings, many thousands of years old, that some experts believe could be the famous square and compasses symbol of the Masonic Order. There are daringly speculative historians and antiquarians who have suggested that the Order is far, far older than is generally recognized, and that modern Freemasonry is descended from a group of Guardians who have protected human beings for many millennia.

ANCIENT AIR TRAVEL?

Some very strange, ancient gold ornaments from Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Columbia made by Mochica or Chimú people were thought by Fortean investigator Ivan Sanderson to resemble model airplanes, and, as the illustration shows, there was good reason for his hypothesis.