Читать книгу The World's Most Mysterious Objects - Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO:Prehistoric Moon Map

There is an ancient and mysterious prehistoric passage tomb at Knowth, in County Meath, Ireland, and the strangest thing within it is a weird rock carving. At first glance, the researcher might be inclined to think that it was one of the familiar hunting pictures, designed, perhaps, to bring in the game by means of sympathetic magic. Is it a group of aurochs, running to escape the spears and arrows of the huntsmen? These strangely carved curves might represent their great flexed spines as they strain every sinew to escape.

Each curve is smaller than its outer neighbour — might they be incomplete circles? Is this the remains of yet another of the popular circular maze patterns that our Stone Age ancestors left in such abundance to intrigue today’s historians? Some experts might see the three main curves as having religious symbolism, as representations of a mystical bridge, like the rainbow, linking the mortal world with the world to come. The Vikings believed the rainbow was called “Bifrost” and was the way the gods from Asgard reached the Earth. Yet another interpretation is a cornucopia.

Some researchers might interpret it as the all-seeing eye, the pupil in the centre of the lowest curve, the higher curves representing the brow and bone ridges of the upper part of the socket.

The carvings may be intended to be a fertility design, the newborn being discharged from the womb into the world. Yet another perspective suggests three fingers of the hand of a flint knapper, like those who worked in the mines in Grimes Graves in East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The knapper holds a flint instrument from which flakes are being chipped as he works to produce hand-axes, scrapers, and arrowheads. Or, the design might well be a plan of passage tombs similar to that in which it was found.

Every one of these conjectures has a reasonable level of probability — but what about the possibility of this old carving from Knowth representing the features of the lunar surface? It is only recognisable when these strange old marks are placed over a diagram of the moon’s surface as it appears to the naked eye. Placing the carved design over the map produces a remarkably close fit. That piece of evidence on its own is admittedly interesting, but far from conclusive. It is only when some additional data about the Knowth burial site is added into the equation that the strange arcs and dots strengthen their claim to be a map of the moon. It has been known for over twenty years that at certain times it is possible for moonlight to shine along the eastern corridor of the Knowth tomb. It is also possible for moonlight to illuminate the Knowth “map” from time to time. Dr. Philip Stooke of the University of Western Ontario in Canada is an acknowledged world authority on maps of asteroids based on observational data obtained from spacecraft. He is convinced that the enigmatic carvings at Knowth form the earliest known lunar map.

Dark area of the moon from actual photographs.

Dark areas of the moon adjusted for comparison with carving.

Original carving in ancient tomb.

Carving slightly adjusted to coincide with lunar surface.

This raises a great many intriguing questions. The tomb at Knowth is at least five thousand years old — the last earthly resting place of at least a hundred Stone Age kings and rulers. The moon map — if that’s what it really is — is still comparatively modern when compared with an ancient map discovered at Mezhirich in the Ukraine in 1996. This one, showing a river and houses built beside it, was carved some twelve thousand years ago on a mammoth tusk. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Romans all made and used maps. Some of the earliest of these were on clay tablets, but it was the versatile seafaring Greeks who made the first truly scientific maps. In fact, it was Herodotus, the historian, who first referred to maps in his early writings. It was among followers of the great Greek mathematician Pythagoras that the theory of the Earth being spherical was first developed. Did those same pioneers see the moon as spherical too? Or did the idea of a spherical moon give them the related concept of a spherical Earth? There was certainly no lack of mathematical thought in those days: Eratosthenes — best remembered for his famous work on prime numbers — managed to work out the circumference of the Earth to within eighty kilometres.

The exciting work on Atlantis, which owes a great deal to Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, Charles H. Hapgood, and Colin Wilson, suggests that Antarctica was once Atlantis and that, far from sinking, it was swept south by a movement of the Earth’s crust floating loosely on the magma below. Many of the ancient maps show a detailed knowledge of the coast of Antarctica that could not have been available to map makers in relatively recent times, but might have been preserved in very ancient libraries like the ones at Alexandria and Constantinople (Istanbul). The Piri Re’is Map in particular causes a great deal of controversy. Piri, nephew of a notorious pirate named Kemal, was beheaded in 1554, having held a highly responsible post in the sixteenth-century Arab world. Piri claimed that his map was based on twenty or more ancient maps from the library at Alexandria.

Where did all this ancient knowledge originate? Did Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and their disciples have access to information from a highly advanced maritime culture that had flourished in Atlantis before the disastrous shift of the Earth’s crust, about which Hapgood has speculated with such good evidence and such clear reasoning?

Was the mysterious lunar map in the ancient tomb at Knowth in County Meath, Ireland the product of knowledge from Atlantis?