From Atlantis to the Sphinx (39 page)

In Harappa, in what is now Pakistan, huge mounds were known to conceal the ruins of an ancient town, and in 1921, an Indian archaeologist, Daya Ram Sahni, suggested that it might belong to a period before the Maurya empire, which was founded at about the time of Alexander the Great (born 356 BC) by Chandragupta. In fact, excavation at Harappa revealed that it was two and a half thousand years earlier than Chandragupta.

In 1922, excavations began at Mohenji-Daro (which means ‘hill of the dead’) in the Indus valley, four hundred miles south-west of Harappa, which revealed a rich civilisation that no one had suspected. Incredibly, Mohenji-Daro proved to be as sophisticated as a later Greek or Roman city, built on mud-brick platforms to protect it from floods, with a grid-plan reminiscent of New York, and an impressive sewer system—not to mention sit-down toilets. The size of the city indicated that it had held about 40,000 people. The large number of female statuettes found there suggested that a female deity—probably the moon goddess—was worshipped. Their seals proved they possessed some form of writing.

In subsequent years, further excavations along the 1800 miles of the Indus river valley revealed more than 150 sites, half a dozen of them cities. The whole area, from the Arabian sea to the foothills of the Himalayas, was once the home of a great civilisation that rivalled Egypt or Greece. This lost civilisation was labelled the Indus Valley Culture.

To the east of the Indus lies a vast desert, the Thar Desert. When remains of towns were found in this desert, there was some puzzlement about how they had survived in such arid conditions. Then satellite photographs revealed the answer: the Thar Desert was once a fertile plain, traversed by a great river; there were even unmistakable signs of canals. Now only a small part of this river, the Ghaggar, exists. Scholars concluded that the river that had now vanished was the Sarasvati, mentioned in the Vedic hymns.

It seemed that in the heyday of Mohenji-Daro and Harappa, this whole plain was one of the richest places in the world. At a time when ancient Britons were Bronze Age farmers, and the Greeks were a few Mycenaean warrior tribes, one of the world’s greatest civilisations flourished in the land of the Indus and Sarasvati.

It seems that some great catastrophe destroyed this civilisation some time after 1900 BC. Evidence shows that the earth buckled, due to the pressure of the tectonic plate that has raised the Himalayas, and the result was a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that literally caused the rivers to sink into the ground. The cost in human life must have been appalling.

The Vedas are written in Sanskrit, a complex language that Sir William Jones—in 1786—demonstrated to be related to Greek, Latin, German and Celtic (giving rise to the expression ‘Indo-European languages’). And if the Vedas speak of the Sarasvati River, then it would seem clear that they were written before about 2000 BC, and not later than 1500 BC, as scholars originally believed. And if—as seemed likely—Sanskrit was the language of the Aryans, then it was also clear that they could not have invaded as late as 1500 BC.

There are four major collections of Vedic hymns—the
Rig-Veda
, the
Sama-Veda
, the
Yajur-Veda
and the
Atharva-Veda
, of which the
Rig-Veda
is recognised as the oldest and most important.

In the 1980s, a Vedic scholar, David Frawley, observed that the hymns of the
Rig-Veda
are full of an oceanic symbolism that seems to argue that they sprang from a maritime culture—which certainly contradicted the assumption that the Aryans came from somewhere in central Europe. He also noted hymns that spoke of the ‘ancestors’ as coming from across the sea, having been saved from a great flood.

Studying the astronomical references in the Vedic hymns, Frawley concluded that one reference to a summer solstice in Virgo indicated a date of about 4000 BC, while a reference to a summer solstice in Libra pointed to about 6000 BC. He also concluded that the authors of the Vedas were familiar with the precession of the equinoxes. These revolutionary ideas were set out in a book called
Gods, Sages and Kings
(1991).

In the section of Vedic astronomy, for example, he discusses a myth about the god of the year, Prajapati, falling in love with his own daughter Rohini, and being punished by a god called Rudra, who pierced him with a three-pointed arrow. Frawley points out that the god Rudra is the name in Vedic astronomy for Sirius, while the three-pointed arrow is Orion, and Rohini is the star Aldebaran. The myth indicates a time when the spring equinox was moving from Gemini into Taurus, around 4000 BC, (A scholar named B. G. Tilak had been one of the first to investigate the astronomy of the Vedas, and he devotes a whole book to Orion.) Anyone who is familiar with
Hamlet’s Mill
will find nothing controversial in all this.

It will also be noted that the Vedic Hindus showed a preoccupation with the same stars and constellations that were central to the Egyptians. Frawley points out that the Hindu Varuna, like the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Ouranos, are all symbolised by Orion, and that their myths seem to refer to the vernal equinox in Orion around 6000 BC.

Frawley recognised that the notion of a
maritime
culture dating back to before 6000 BC is highly controversial and likely to be rejected out of hand. Yet, as we have seen, Charles Hapgood would have found it perfectly credible. So, of course, would that remarkable student of Mayan culture Augustus le Plongeon, who—it may be recollected—suggested that colonists from the Maya lands had sailed to Europe and India thousands of years before Christ, and quoted the
Ramayana
to the effect that India and China were invaded and conquered by warriors known as great navigators and architects. John West and Graham Hancock would probably amend Le Plongeon’s argument, and suggest that South America, Egypt
and
India became the home of survivors of some great catastrophe long before 6000 BC.

The questions raised by Frawley in
Gods
,
Sages and Kings
are further explored in a book called
In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation
(1995) by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley. As the title suggests, they argue that India is the ‘cradle of civilisation’, and that there is evidence of Vedic culture as long ago as 7000 BC. They point out that the myth of creation from a churning ocean of milk seems to refer to the Milky Way, while the churning motion—as in Santillana—refers to Hamlet’s Mill or precession, and that the ancient Hindus regarded the switch of the equinoctial point from one constellation to another (the end of an age) as an alarming event.

The arguments of
In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation
inevitably bring to mind those of John Anthony West, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock—in fact, the authors mention Robert Schoch’s opinion that the Sphinx may date back to 7000 BC. But they were unaware of the astronomical arguments that have since led West, Hancock and Bauval to date the Sphinx to 10,500 BC. If these are sound, then the suggestion that India is the cradle of civilisation because the Vedas seem to refer to dates as remote as 6000 BC loses much of its force.

On the other hand, it could also be argued that the astronomical evidence Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley present demonstrates that the ancient Hindus shared the Egyptian obsession with star-gazing and the precession of the equinoxes. In which case, the same arguments apply to ancient India as to ancient Egypt. In Egypt, we have the suggestion that the dynastic civilisation of the third millennium may have been preceded by a far older civilisation founded by survivors from a great flood, who planned the pyramids and built the Sphinx in 10,500 BC. In India, it seems that the great civilisation of the Indus and Sarasvati plain was preceded by forerunners whose great achievement was the
Rig-Veda
. Frawley suggests that the civilisation of the ‘forerunners’ may date from 7000 BC—which happens to be the date that Schoch suggested for the Sphinx. There seems to be no good reason why the civilisation of the Vedic Hindus should not also be pushed back a further 3,000 years or so.

Let me try to express some of these insights in terms of the concepts developed in the last two chapters.

Ancient man’s ‘knowledge’ was not knowledge in our modern sense: knowledge that could be classified in an encyclopaedia. It was a slowly increasing sense of intuitive involvement in the universe. Santillana says: ‘Archaic thought is cosmological first and last; it faces the gravest implications of a cosmos in ways which reverberate in later classic philosophy... It cannot be reduced to concreteness.’

An animal feels itself to be a
creature
, whose business is to adjust—in an essentially passive manner—to the universe around it. As man ceased to be mere animal, he ceased to be passive. He began to feel there was something he could do to
control
the world in which he found himself. At first, this attempt at control came through various forms of ritual—including ritual cannibalism. ‘True man’ began as a religious animal.

A few hundred thousand years later, Neanderthal man had so far evolved that his brain was a third larger than that of modern man. The zoologist Nicholas Humphrey was puzzled by the fact that the gorilla’s brain is far larger than it needs to be, until he realised that this is a response to the extraordinarily rich social life of the gorilla. In effect, a baby gorilla attends a kind of university in which it learns highly complex social behaviour. The same was almost certainly true of Neanderthal man.

Yet it was Cro-Magnon man who took the next immense step forward in developing hunting magic. He felt that this brought him a new control over the universe. And he also studied the movements of the moon. Our assumption is that he merely needed some kind of calendar to tell him about animal migration, but both Graves and Schwaller would obviously regard it in a completely different light. They would say that it was a part of a rich and complex knowledge system, a ‘lunar’ system that was totally unlike our ‘solar’ knowledge. This is clearly what Santillana is also trying to express.

At some point—perhaps, as Jaynes suggests, as recently as 1250 BC—man began to develop ‘solar’ knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can be set down in encyclopaedias and dictionaries and tables of logarithms. The difference between the two types of knowledge is quite easy to express: it is the difference between
insight
and mere information. When Archimedes leapt out of the bath shouting ‘Eureka!’, he had had a sudden insight into floating bodies. He expressed this insight in the form of a ‘law’, which any schoolboy can learn by rote: the weight of a floating body is equal to the weight of the amount of water displaced. This sounds simple enough. But how would we use it if, like Archimedes, we had to devise a method to find out whether a goldsmith has adulterated the gold of a crown with some base metal? To work out this problem, we need
insight
into the law of floating bodies.
³

This is why, in Plato’s
Phaedrus
, King Thamus expresses doubt when the god Thoth tells him that his invention of writing is a great step forward for the human race; the king replies that it will only make man mentally lazy, and
diminish his mental powers
.

Solar knowledge, which can be stored in encyclopaedias, is extremely useful; but it is no real substitute for that
intimate
sense of the universe—and of our involvement with it—that was first developed by our remote star-gazing ancestors.

This brings us to one of the most recent and exciting speculations about our star-gazing ancestors.

In Chapter 3, I spoke of the important advance Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock have made in suggesting exactly why the ancient Egyptians built the Sphinx around 10,500 BC, and the Great Pyramid 8000 years later.
Keeper of Genesis
(the title refers to the Sphinx) is a remarkable piece of research, based on computer simulations of the skies of ancient Egypt. The essence of the book lies in this comment:

‘...it is our hypothesis that the Giza monuments, the past, present and future skies that lie above them, and the ancient funerary texts that interlink them, convey the lineaments of a message. In attempting to read this message we have done no more than follow the initiation “journey” of the Horus-Kings of Egypt...’

We have already seen how Bauval reconstructed the skies in 2500 BC, and discovered that the southern ‘ventilation shaft’ out of the King’s Chamber pointed directly at Orion’s Belt, while the similar shaft out of the Queen’s Chamber below it pointed at the star Sirius, whom the Egyptians identified with Isis, just as they identified the constellation of Orion with Osiris. These alignments convinced Bauval that the Pyramid was, indeed, built when Egyptologists think it was built.

We also recall that the only time the positions of the three pyramids on the ground
reflect
the positions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt is 10,500 BC, when Orion is at its closest to the southern horizon in the ‘precessional cycle’, which takes 25,920 years. After that, Orion seems to rise very slowly through the heavens, and, in AD 2500, it will have reached its highest point, and begin descending again.

The Egyptians called this earlier time, 10,500 BC,
Zep Tepi
, the ‘first time’, and identified it with a kind of golden age, the beginning of a new epoch. In Santillana’s terms, it was a time when the ‘mill’ ground out peace and plenty.

It would, of course, have been highly convenient if the alignments suggested that the pyramid had been built in 10,500 BC, for it would go a long way to proving Schwaller’s conviction that the Sphinx and the pyramids were built by the highly civilised survivors of some great catastrophe—Atlanteans.

Bauval and Hancock point out that there is a highly convincing reason to believe that the Sphinx was built in 10,500 BC. Imagine that you are standing between the paws of the Sphinx at dawn on the spring equinox of 10,500 BC. The Sphinx faces due east, and a few moments before dawn, we see the constellation of Leo rising above the horizon—Leo the lion. If we now turn at a right angle to face due south, we see in the sky the constellation of Orion, with the stars in its belt reflecting exactly the later lay-out of the pyramids. It is as if the pyramid builders are leaving us a message to tell us not only when they built the Great Pyramid but, by implication, when their ancestors built the Sphinx. The southern ‘air shaft’ tells us when they built the Pyramid, and the alignment of the pyramids, reflecting Orion’s Belt, tells us that they are directing our attention to 10,500 BC, in the age of Leo.