Our Cosmic Ancestors (15 page)

These layers were minuscule, about two millimetres thick each, and all together there were as many as thirty different gears. This method of selective photography also proved that the clock contained a differential gear - a sensational discovery indicating a very high technological achievement; since differential gears have been invented only in very recent times, to make it possible to obtain the sum or difference of two angular velocities with gears.

The differential mechanism of the Antikythera clock is of the flat type. It consists of one big crown gear, a pinion in the centre, and satellite gears between the pinion and the crown. These satellites are mounted on a rotating support that moves with an angular speed representing the difference between those of the big crown and pinion. For somebody who lived 2,000 years ago to have built this mechanism, would really have been a superb achievement. The size of the whole calculator must have been equal to that of a portable typewriter of today, with two dials in the back and one in the front. This front dial had two concentric bands - one with the signs of the zodiac, and the other, a moveable one, with names of each month in Greek. A pointer that was moved by the mechanism indicated the position of the Sun in the zodiac for each day of the year.

The two dials in the back seemed to indicate the phases of the Moon and the movements of the five planets known at that time - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The mechanism was set in motion by a worm gear that had to be rotated by one turn every day, probably at noon. The last information available about this calculator is that it may have had five dials - two in the front and three in the back and that all of them were adjustable.

This discovery was revolutionary in every sense of the word. Many called the Antikythera clock a computer because the purpose of the gadget was probably to avoid tedious astronomical computations. Price himself said in a scientific meeting in Washington, that finding a thing like this computer in a Roman galley was like finding a jet plane in King Tutankhamen's tomb.

The probable builder of this astronomical calculator must have been the Greek astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Geminus, who was the apprentice of Posidonius. The birth and death dates of Geminus are not exactly known; but his teacher, Posidonius, a philosopher of the Stoic school founded by Zeno, lived from 135 to 51 BC, and taught on the island of Rhodes.

Geminus was a near contemporary of his master in philosophy and became famous through his manuals of astronomy and mathematics. He also invented most of all known combinations of gears, the worm gear, the differential gear, the bevel gear and probably also the crank and connecting rod that transforms uniform circular motion into alternating linear movement. If there was anyone in Greece at that time who would have been able to build the calculator of Rhodes, it was Geminus. Only he could have had the idea to put together differential gears with bevel gears and astronomical dials in a single box to make a navigational computer. The complicated mechanism of more than thirty separate gears was probably put together by his pupils, since all Greek masters of that time had apprentices.

The date for which this calculator was set for the last time is the year 86 BC, as can be seen by the relative positions of the dials and pointers. The Roman galley which was transporting the statues from Rhodes to Rome probably sank near Antikythera three years later, in 83 BC.

The year 86 BC was a remarkable date. There were five conjunctions of planets in four zodiacal signs that year, an ideal time to set an astronomical calculator precisely if it was already built, or to start constructing one. So here we have another trail-blazing achievement of the famous Greeks, permitting the Graecophils once more to claim that all science came from Greece.

Unfortunately not all people agree on that, and I am one who disagrees. In recent years one discovery after another has shown that all the scientific knowledge of Greeks was inherited and borrowed from the high priests of Egypt, who had obtained it thousands of years earlier from an unknown source. The calculator of Rhodes can give us some indication where this mysterious unknown source of all science was located, or at least it can indicate the direction in which we will have to look for the beginning of our civilization.

If somebody wants to construct an astronomical calculator by using intermeshing gears, the first condition is to find the number of cycles necessary to obtain an exact number of whole days. Some of these cycles are easily found but many are nearly impossible. A good example is the tropical year - also called the 'solar year' or the 'calendar year' of 365.2422 mean solar days. To fit a number of full days, we need 5,000 solar years, or 1,826,211 days! Anything less won't do.

And the sidereal year of 365.2564 days is not much better. it takes 2,500 of these years representing 913,141 days. The gears of the computer would have to be too big to be practical. But the Sothic year of the ancient Egyptians fits like a glove for a small mechanical computer. It has 365.25 days, so we need only a gear ratio of 4:1 to obtain whole numbers of days and years. Every four years of this Sirius, or Sothic, calendar will give an exact number of days. The gears are small and manageable.

This simple and practical year of the Egyptian priests makes many complicated astronomical cycles equally simple, an advantage which modern astronomers, with their ingrained traditions have so far ignored. Use of the Sothic-year cycle makes it easy to calculate all periods of revolution or conjunction, of all planets, as well as all phases of the Moon.

The second important condition for a successful construction of an astronomical calculator with gears is to find a simple relationship between the cycles in Lull, whole days. The Mayan calendar almost made it. So did the Sumerian calendar, which was based on the Saros cycle of eighteen tropical years. The Greeks used a calendar
based on the Metonic cycle of nineteen tropical years. This system has no practical value for a gear computer either, which proves that the Greeks were not such great mathematicians after all. Whoever constructed the marvel of Antikythera was a real genius.

We are left with the ancient Egyptian calendar. It is the only one that fulfills all of the requirements, and it is the basis for the Rhodes calculator. The seemingly complicated Egyptian calendar, based on Sirius, the Sun, and also the Moon, actually works like a charm. Every four years represents exactly 1,461 days which in turn represent 49.474 synodical moon months. This last number has to be multiplied only 19 times to give a number of whole days - 27,759 -equal to 940 months, or 76 Sothic years, which is the cycle of the Rhodes calculator!

It seems to me that the mechanism found in the Roman galley was a small, reduced model of a much more complicated and refined machine that the Egyptian priests used to calculate all of the planetary movements in the solar system and more. But the calculator has not yet been found.

When men decide to make a really serious effort to explore the ground under and around the pyramids near Cairo, we will probably find it. We know that, as a rule, all the other pyramids stand on top of underground systems of passages and temples, sometimes whole subterranean villages; and it would be very surprising if the Great Pyramid of Cheops didn't follow the rule. We are bound to find those hidden chambers some day; and once we find them, we will have evidence that it was astronauts from space who elevated us to our present pedestal.

Most of the ancient civilizations used the Sothic year to calculate the ages of mankind and of the world in fantastically high numbers. The Hindus estimated man was 4.32 million years old and the Earth 4.32 billion. The Mayas arrived at far greater numbers. But the Sothic year is the basis of all great cycles known by either Mayas, Hindus, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, or others that we know of. Aside from the cyclic relationships that were built in the Rhodes calculator, the Egyptians also used others, all based on Sothis-Sirius, who for them was the 'good god who makes all things green grow'.

SIDEREAL MONTH NINETE
N
YEARS SYNODIC MONTH
ECLIPTIC MONTH SOTHIC YEAR EARTH MERCURY
I P SES SUN - MOON
MARS - JUPITER
^{MARS , VENUS}
76 SOTHIC YEARS

One of these regular repetitions came every 1,460 Sothic years, or 1,461 civil years of 365 days each. Then both of these years coincide with each other on 19 July, the day when the Nile starts to rise, as the Egyptians believed, by the command of the Sothis, the Dog Star. These long Sothic cycles were documented by Egyptian astronomers as having occurred on 19 July in the years 1320 BC, 2780 BC, 4240 BC, and 5700 BC. The Sothic cycles are bringing us far into the past indeed.

The Rhodes calculator and the recently popular Piri Reis [see Graham Hancock’s’ Fingerprints of the Gods] maps that show the ancients knew the Antarctic continent are both copies of much older originals. Since neither bronze nor parchment are very durable materials, the survival as well as the rediscovery of these items do make one wonder if there wasn't some of what I describe as
benevolent intervention of the gods
involved in the findings. The fact is that only stone does not change over aeons. Under favourable conditions, in places like the Dead Sea region, some documents can survive a few thousand years, but not ten or twelve thousand. This is why we will never find the originals of the maps that the Turkish admiral and cartographer Reis copied in the fifteenth century and we may never see the original model of the Rhodes calculator.

Opposite: THE RHODES CALCULATOR
With Fifteen Astronomical Cycles
Egyptian lunisolar cycle of 27,759 days or 76 Sothic years.

This astronomical calculator, discovered in 1900 at the bottom of the Aegean Sea west of Crete and probably built more than 2,000 years ago, was based on a long-forgotten Egyptian cycle of 27,759 days, or 76 Sothic years of 365 1/4 days each. By means of gear trains, this cycle was divided into fifteen different astronomical cycles. The cycles indicated here are the most accurate that could be obtained with a minimum of gear trains.

However, the existence of the copies is enough to make us understand that some of man's highest achievements date back to the dawn of time and that the Rhodes calculator is a link in a chain that leads back to great civilizations of an unknown past. There is a message for humanity in this ancient machine that I cannot decipher and even makes me suspect that we are still not sufficiently developed to grasp its true meaning. This is a fact that annoys and disquiets me, and yet there are in this world some even more disturbing findings.

I am talking about recent findings in all parts of the world of perfectly machined metal parts that were buried in strata of coal or rock hundreds of feet underground and millions of years old. Cubes, spheres, and cylinders of perfect geometrical form have been dug up from such strata and nobody yet has been able to explain these findings without admitting the possibility that indeed our most ancient forefathers were capable of making precision gears out of thin sheets of bronze and to assemble them into clocks useful for astronomers, mankind's oldest scientists.

It is very difficult for me to respect those scientists whose minds seem permanently closed. After all, most of today's scientific equipment and techniques just did not exist a short one hundred years ago, when Paris and London academies of science thought they knew everything already and wanted to ignore every discovery that disturbed their theories. If in the last century we have achieved as much progress as we actually have, it had happened only thanks to independent, unprejudiced minds outside the academic establishment.
We were told that machines heavier than air would never fly, that the sound barrier and air friction would kill pilots and melt the planes, and that rockets would never be able to overcome Earth's gravity. Man will never walk on the Moon, said most scientists not so long ago.

Well, man did, and I was part of the team that made it possible. To tell you the truth, before the landing module from Apollo 11 landed on the Moon we were not so sure either. The monumental project needed constant changes and inventions that were not even conceived of at the start. We went along improvising and improving and making impossible things possible. Apollo was designed and built in a few short years by several thousand capable engineers. There were real geniuses among them, and they came from all nations.
We all recognized one fact - that in our native countries, be it England, France, Germany, Japan, or China, we would never have had a chance to prove our true potential. it was the free and untrammelled state of mind that made the Moon shot possible; and, naturally, the unlimited access to means and material to make every new concept or idea work. All that was attainable only in the United States and nowhere else. The gods themselves know that I am not always a proud American, as I am not every day proud of my French origin. But I am proud to have been born and educated in France and proud to be an American by adoption and profession.