From Atlantis to the Sphinx (36 page)

Peking man provides us with another clue. In 1930, Teilhard de Chardin visited the Abbé Breuil in Paris and showed him a piece of blackened bone. ‘What do you think that is?’ The Abbé examined it, then said: ‘It’s a piece of stag antler, which has been exposed to fire then worked with some crude stone tool.’ ‘Impossible!’ said Teilhard. ‘It’s from Chou-Kou-Tien.’ ‘I don’t care where it’s from,’ said Breuil. ‘It was fashioned by man—and by a man who knew the use of fire.’

The piece of antler was about half a million years old. And since it was carved with a tool
after
it was burnt, we must presume it was deliberately burnt first. So
Homo erectus
used fire.

We cannot suppose that he knew how to
make
fire by striking flints together—that seems to be supposing too high a level of sophistication. In which case, we have to assume that he supplied himself with fire when he saw a tree struck by lightning—or some similar phenomenon—and then
kept it burning permanently
, presumably by assigning someone in the group to keep it alive. And this notion of keeping a fire alive, for year after year, would obviously provide the ‘fire-keeper’ with a powerful sense of motivation and purpose. And since purpose makes for evolution, we have yet another possible contributory reason for the ‘brain explosion’. Peking man, apparently, had both fire and some kind of religious ritual.

Schwaller makes the important point that Egyptian science, Egyptian art, Egyptian medicine, Egyptian astronomy, must not be seen as different aspects of Egyptian life; they were all aspects of the same thing, which was religion in its broadest sense. Religion was identical with knowledge.

The same must have been true for the descendants of Peking man. They had moved from the merely animal level to the level where knowledge could be pinned down in some kind of language. To see a tree or a river or a mountain as a god—or rather a
neter—
would be to see it in a new and strange light. Even today, a religious convert sees the world in this strange light in which everything looks different. Shaw makes a character in
Back to Methuselah
say that since her mind was awakened, even small things are turning out to be big things. This is the effect of knowledge. It brings a sense of distance from the material world, and a sense of
control
.

Yet Neanderthal man was religious, and he still vanished from history. This can be for only one reason: that the being who supplanted him had an even greater sense of precision and control. No doubt Neanderthal man had his own form of hunting magic; but compared to the magic of Cro-Magnon man, with its shamans and rituals and cave drawings, it was as crude as a bicycle compared to a motor car.

This sense of precision and control is illustrated in a story told by Jacquetta Hawkes in her book
Man and the Sun
(1962). She points out:

The absence of any solar portrait or symbol in Palaeolithic art may not mean that the sun had absolutely no part in it. A rite practised among the pygmies of the Congo warns against any such assumption. Frobenius was travelling through the jungle with several of these skilful and brave little hunters when, towards evening, a need arose for fresh meat. The white man asked his companions if they could kill an antelope. They were astonished at the folly of the request, explaining that they could not hunt successfully that day because no proper preparation had been made; they promised to go hunting the next morning instead. Frobenius, curious to know what their preparations might be, got up before dawn and hid himself on the chosen hill-top. All the pygmies of the party appeared, three men and a woman, and presently they smoothed a patch of sand and drew an outline upon it. They waited; then, as the sun rose, one of the men fired an arrow into the drawing, while the woman raised her arms towards the sun and cried aloud. The men dashed off into the forest. When Frobenius approached the place, he found that the drawing was that of an antelope, and that the arrow stood in its neck. Later, when the hunting party had returned with a fine antelope shot through the neck, some of them took tufts of its hair and a calabash of blood, plastered them on the drawing and then wiped it out. Joseph Campbell adds, The crucial point of the pygmy ceremony was that it should take place at dawn, the arrow flying into the antelope precisely when it was struck by a ray of the sun...’

It is easy to see that the Cro-Magnon hunter, using this kind of technique, would feel like a modern big game hunter using a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights. By comparison, the older magic of Neanderthal man must have seemed as crude as a bow and arrow.

This, I am inclined to believe, was the reason that Cro-Magnon man became the founder of civilisation. His command of ‘magic’ gave him a sense of optimism, of purpose, of control, such as had been possessed by no animal before him.

Central to this evolution was the authority of the chief. Among animals, the leader is simply the most dominant. But if Cro-Magnon man resembled his descendants in Egypt and Sumeria and Europe (or even the chief of the Amahuaca Indians in Brazil), then his kings were not simply authority figures, but priests and shamans, those with a knowledge of ‘spirits’ and the gods. This was of immense importance for ancient man; we can form some estimate of what it meant if we think of Hitler’s effect on Germany in the early 1930s—the sense of optimism, of idealism, of national purpose. Hitler’s Third Reich was basically religious in conception—the notion of heaven brought down to earth. The same was true of ancient Egypt, under its pharaoh-god.

So
if
there was a civilisation in ‘Atlantis’ before 11,000 BC, and in Tiahuanaco in the Andes, and in pre-dynastic Egypt, then we can state beyond doubt that it was a ‘pharaonic theocracy’, ruled by a king who was also believed to be a god.

The pyramids were built by men who believed totally and without question that their pharaoh was a god, and that in erecting such magnificent structures, they were serving the gods. Such a belief gives a society a sense of purpose and direction that is impossible for any group of mere animals, no matter how dominant and cunning their leader. When primitive man came to believe that his tribal leader was in touch with the gods, he had taken one of the most important steps in his evolution.

In the summer of 1933, a 39-year-old Scot named Alexander Thom anchored his sailing yacht in East Loch Roag, north-west of the island of Lewis in the Hebrides. Thom was an aeronautical engineer whose lifelong passion was sailing. As the moon rose, he looked up and saw, silhouetted against it, the standing stones of Callanish, ‘Scotland’s Stonehenge’.

After dinner, Thom walked up to it, and looking along the avenue of menhirs, realised that its main north-south axis pointed direct at the Pole Star. But Thom knew that when the stones were erected—probably before the Great Pyramid—the Pole Star was not in its present position.

So how did the men who built it manage to point it with such accuracy to geographical north? To do this, with such incredible precision as is revealed at Callanish, would require something more than guesswork. One way would be to observe the exact position of the rising sun and the setting sun, and then bisect the line between them—but that can only be done accurately in flat country, where both horizons are level. Another would be to observe some star close to the pole in the evening, then again twelve hours later before dawn, and bisect
that
line. Thom could see that it would be an incredibly complicated business involving plumb lines and upright stakes. Obviously, these ancient engineers were highly sophisticated.

Thom began to study other stone circles, most of them virtually unknown. They convinced him that he was dealing with men whose intelligence was equal to, or superior to, his own—a television programme about his ideas referred to them as ‘prehistoric Einsteins’.

The idea staggered—and enraged—most archaeologists. The astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer had observed, around the beginning of the twentieth century, that Stonehenge might be a kind of astronomical calculator, marking the positions of the sun and moon, but no one had taken him very seriously, for most ‘experts’ were convinced that the builders of Stonehenge were superstitious savages, who probably conducted human sacrifices on the altar stone. Thom was asserting that, on the contrary, they were master-geometers.

Moreover, most of these stone circles were
not
circles: some were shaped like eggs, some like letter Ds. Yet the geometry—as Thom discovered through years of study and calculation—was always precise. How did they do it? Thom finally worked out that the ‘circles’ were built around ‘Pythagorean triangles’—triangles whose sides were, respectively, 3, 4 and 5 units long (so the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides).

And
why
did they want these circles? That was more difficult to answer. Presumably to work out such things as the phases of the moon, the movement of the sun between the solstices and equinoxes, and to predict eclipses. But why did they
want
to predict eclipses? Thom admitted that he did not know, but he mentioned a story of two ancient Chinese astronomers losing their heads because they failed to predict an eclipse—which meant that the ancients attached immense importance to eclipses.

There was another interesting problem. If these ancient men were so skilled in geometry, how did they
remember
it all? No stone or clay tablets inscribed with geometrical propositions has come down to us from the megalith builders. But then, we
do
know that the ancient Greeks knew their Homer—and other poets—
by heart
. They had trained their memories until they could recite hundreds of thousands of lines. The
Iliad
and
Odyssey
we read in books had been passed down for centuries in the memory of bards—this is why bards were so highly respected.

When Alexander Thom died, at the age of 91, in 1985, he was no longer regarded as a member of the lunatic fringe; many respectable archaeologists and experts on ancient Britain had become his firmest supporters. Moreover, the British astronomer Gerald Hawkins had confirmed Thom’s most important assertions by feeding the data from monuments like Stonehenge through his computer at Harvard, and proving that there
were
astronomical alignments.

One of Thom’s most interesting followers, the Scottish academic Anne Macaulay, has followed in Thom’s footsteps with a theory that is just as controversial. In
Science and Gods in Megalithic Britain
, she starts from Thom’s assumption that the earliest geometry was a tradition which was not written down, and that it was connected with astronomy.
¹
She then asked herself how ancient astronomers could have stored their knowledge in the absence of phonetic writing (which was developed by the Greeks and Phoenicians after 2000 BC). Obviously, memory has to be the answer. But not memory in the sense we speak of it today. It is a little-known fact that the ancients had developed a complex
art of memory
, which they regarded as comparable to any of the other arts or sciences. The scholar Frances Yates has written about it in her book
The Art of Memory
(1
966)
and shows how we can trace it back to the ancient Greeks, and how it survived down to the time of Shakespeare.

The art of memory did not simply depend on brain power, but upon a complicated series of mnemonics (devices for helping us remember, like ‘roygbiv’ for the colours of the rainbow). Anne Macaulay’s suggestion is that the phonetic alphabet was created as a series of mnemonics to record positions of the polar stars, and that the word ‘Apollo’—the god of music—was one of these basic mnemonics. The letters, from A to U, were created as mnemonics for certain geometric theorems or figures, with which numbers were associated. (In fact, Anne Macaulay’s starting point was her study of the ancient Greek musical scale.)

Her theory of ancient history, and the geometry of megalithic circles, is too complicated to detail here. But she reaches one thought-provoking conclusion: that when this ‘code’ is used to encapsulate the extreme southerly rising of the moon, the ideal spot to build an observatory is precisely where Stonehenge is placed. Another is that all this indicates that ancient Greek science—including Pythagoras (who was born about 540 BC)—probably originated in Europe—the exact reverse of a suggestion made in the nineteenth century that Stonehenge was built by Mycenaean Greeks. She suggests that the early Greeks may have been British tin traders from Cornwall.

Since we know that the construction of Stonehenge began about 3100 BC, her theory also implies that phonetic writing is about fifteen hundred years older than we at present assume.

From our point of view, the importance of this whole argument is its suggestion that geometry and astronomy existed in a sophisticated form long before there was an accurate method of writing it down. Anne Macaulay believes—as Thom does—that it can be
read
in the geometry of megalithic circles and monuments, and that their builders are trying to pass a message on to us—just as Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock believe (as we shall see) that the ancient Egyptians were passing on a message in the geometry of Giza.

When
did
our ancestors begin to use mnemonics to record the movements of the sun and moon?

Incredibly, the answer to that question seems to be at least 35,000 years ago.

In the 1960s, a research fellow of the Peabody Museum named Alexander Marshack was studying the history of civilisation, and was troubled by what he called ‘a series of “suddenlies”’. Science had begun ‘suddenly’ with the Greeks, mathematics and astronomy had appeared ‘suddenly’ among the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians and the Chinese, civilisation itself had begun ‘suddenly’ in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East.

In short, Marshack was bothered by the same question that had troubled Schwaller de Lubicz and John Anthony West. And, like Schwaller and West, Marshack decided that these things had not appeared ‘suddenly’, but after thousands of years of preparation.