Chariots of the Gods (13 page)

In the course of the centuries, mummification, originally a solemn matter, became the fashion. Suddenly everyone wanted to be reawakened; suddenly everyone thought that they would come to new life so long as they did the same as their forefathers. The high priests, who actually did possess some knowledge of such re-awakenings, did a great deal to encourage this cult, for their class did good business out of it.

I have already mentioned the physically impossible ages of the Sumerian kings and the biblical figures. I asked whether these people could not have been space travellers who prolonged their life-span through the effect of the time shift on interstellar flights just below the speed of light.

Are we perhaps getting a clue to the incredible age of the men named in the texts if we assume that they were mummified or frozen? If we follow this theory then the unknown space travellers would have frozen leading personalities in antiquity—put them into an artificial deep sleep, as legends tell us—and taken them out of the drawer, and thawed them out and conversed with them during subsequent visits. At the end of each visit it would have been the task of the priestly class appointed and instructed by the space travellers to prepare the living dead again and preserve them once more in giant temples until the 'gods' returned.

Impossible? Ridiculous? It is mostly those people who feel that they are absolutely bound by the laws of nature who make the most stupid objections. Does not nature herself display brilliant examples of 'hibernation' and reawakening?

There are species of fish which, after being frozen stiff, thaw out at milder temperatures and swim around again in the water. Flowers, larvae and grubs not only go into hibernation, but also reappear in the spring in lovely new garb.

Let me be my own devil's advocate. Did the Egyptians learn the possibility of mummification from nature? If that were the case, there ought to have been a cult of butterflies or cockchafers or at least a trace of such a cult. There is nothing of the kind. Underground tombs do contain gigantic sarcophagi with mummified animals, but given their climate the Egyptians could not have copied hibernation from animals.

Five miles from Helwan lie more than 5,000 tombs of different sizes and all date to the time of the 1st and 2nd dynasties. These tombs show that the art of mummification is more than 6,000 years old.

In 1953 Professor Emery discovered a large tomb in the archaic cemetery of North Sakkara that is attributed to a Pharaoh of the 1st dynasty (probably Uadyis). Apart from the main tomb there were 72 other tombs, arranged in 3 rows, in which lay the bodies of the servants who wanted to accompany their king in the new world. No trace of violence is visible on the bodies of the 64 young men and 8 young women. Why did these 72 allow themselves to be walled up and killed?

Belief in a second life beyond the grave is the best known and also the simplest explanation of this phenomenon. In addition to gold and jewellery the Pharaoh was provided with grain, oil and spices in the tomb, which were obviously intended as provisions for the life to come. Apart from grave robbers, the tombs were also opened by later Pharaohs. In such cases the Pharaoh found the provisions in the tomb of his ancestor well preserved. In other words the dead man had neither eaten them nor taken them into another world. And when the tomb was closed again, fresh supplies were placed in the vault, which was shut up, protected against thieves and sealed with many traps. It seems obvious that the Egyptians believed in a reawakening in the distant future and not in an immediate reawakening in the hereafter.

In June 1954, also at Sakkara, a tomb was discovered that had not been robbed, for a chest containing jewels and gold lay in the burial chamber. The sarcophagus was closed with a sliding lid, instead of a removable one. On the 9th June Dr Goneim ceremonially opened the sarcophagus. It contained nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did the mummy decamp, leaving its jewels behind?

The Russian Rodenko discovered a grave, known as Kurgan V, 50 miles from the frontier of Outer Mongolia.

This grave takes the form of a rocky hill that is faced internally with wood. All the burial chambers are packed with eternal ice, and as a result the contents of the grave were preserved in a state of deep-freeze. One of these chambers contained an embalmed man and a similarly treated woman. Both of them were provided with everything that they might have needed for a life to come: foodstuffs in dishes, clothes, jewels and musical instruments. Everything was deep-frozen and in an excellent state of preservation, including the naked mummies. In one burial chamber scholars identified a rectangle containing four rows of six squares, each of which had a drawing inside it. The whole could be a copy of the stone carpet in the Assyrian palace at Nineveh! Strange sphinx-like figures with complicated horns on their heads and wings on their backs are clearly visible and their posture shows them to be aspiring skywards.

But motives for a second spiritual life can scarcely be based on the finds in Mongolia. The deep-freezing used in the graves there—for that is what the chambers faced with wood and filled with ice amount to—is too much of this world and obviously intended for terrestrial ends. Why, and this question keeps on worrying us, did the ancients think that bodies prepared in this way achieved a state which would make reawakening possible? That is a puzzle for the time being.

In the Chinese village of Wu Chuan there exists a rectangular tomb measuring 45 by 39 ft; in it lie the skeletons of 17 men and 24 women. Here too none of the skeletons shows signs of violent death. There are glacier tombs in the Andes, ice tombs in Siberia, group and individual graves in China, Sumeria and Egypt. Mummies have been found in the far north and in South Africa. And all the dead were supplied with the necessities for a new life and all the tombs were so planned and built that they could survive for thousands of years.

Is it all mere coincidence? Are they all merely individual fancies, strange whims on the part of our ancestors? Or is there an ancient promise of corporeal return that is unknown to us? Who can have made it?

Some 10,000-year-old tombs were excavated at Jericho and a number of 8,000-year-old heads, modelled in plaster of Paris were found. That, too, is astonishing, for ostensibly this people did not know the techniques of pottery-making. In another part of Jericho whole rows of round houses were discovered. The walls are curved inwards at the top, like domes.

The omnipotent carbon isotope C 14, with the aid of which the age of organic substances can be determined, gives dates with a maximum of 10,400 years in this case. These scientifically determined dates agree pretty well with the dates which the Egyptian priests transmitted. They said that their priestly ancestors had discharged their duties for more than 11,000 years. Is this only a coincidence, too?

Prehistoric stones at Lussac (Poitou, France) form a particularly remarkable find. They show drawings of men dressed in completely modern style, with hats, jackets and short trousers. The Abbe Breuil says that the drawings are authentic and his statement throws the whole of prehistory into confusion. Who engraved the stones? Who has enough imagination to conceive of a caveman dressed in skins who drew figures from the twentieth century on the walls?

Some really magnificent Stone Age paintings were found in 1940 in the Lascaux Caves in the South of France. The paintings in this gallery are as lively and intact as if they had been done today, and two questions immediately spring to mind. How was this cave illuminated for the laborious work of the Stone Age artists and why were the walls decorated with these astonishing paintings?

Let the people who consider these questions stupid explain the contradictions. If the Stone Age cavemen were primitive and savage, they could not have produced the astounding paintings on the cave walls. But if the savages were capable of paintings these pictures, why should they not also have been able to build huts as shelter? The foremost authorities concede that animals had the ability to build nests and shelters millions of years ago. But it obviously does not fit into the working hypothesis to concede homo sapiens the same ability as long ago as that.

In the Gobi Desert, deep down below the ruins of Khara Khota—not far from those strange sand vitrifications which can only have taken place under the influence of tremendous heat—Professor Koslov found a tomb that is dated to about 12,000 years B.C. A sarcophagus contained the bodies of two rich men and the sign of a circle bisected vertically was found on the sarcophagus.

In the Subis mountains on the west coast of Borneo a network of caves was found that had been hollowed out on a cathedral-like scale. Among these colossal finds there are fabrics of such fineness and delicacy that with the best will in the world one cannot imagine savages making them. Questions, questions, questions... .

The first doubts are beginning to insinuate themselves into stereotyped archaeological theory, but what we need to do is to force breaches in the thicket of the past. Landmarks must be set up again; wherever possible a new series of fixed dates must be established.

Let me make it clear that I am not doubting the history of the last two thousand years here. I am speaking solely and exclusively of the most remote antiquity, of the blackest darkness of time, which I am striving to illuminate by asking new questions.

Nor can I give any figures and dates showing when the visit of unknown intelligences from the universe began to influence our young intelligences. But I venture to doubt the current datings applied to the remote past. I would suggest, on tolerably good grounds, placing the incident I am concerned with in the Early Palaeolithic Age, i.e. between 10,000 and 40,000 B.C. Our hitherto existing methods of dating, including the famous carbon isotope C 14, which makes everyone so happy, leave great gaps as soon as we come to an age of more than 45,600 years. The older the substance to be examined, the more unreliable the radio carbon method is. Even recognised scholars have told me that they considered the C 14 method rather unreliable because if an organic substance is from 30,000 to 50,000 years old, its age can be established anywhere between those limits.

These critical voices should only be accepted with limitations; nevertheless, a second dating method parallel to the C 14 method and based on the latest measuring apparatus would unquestionably be desirable.

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The first European seafarers who landed on Easter Island at the beginning of the eighteenth century could scarcely believe their eyes. On this little plot of earth, 2,250 miles from the coast of Chile, they saw hundreds of colossal statues, which lay scattered about all over the island. Whole mountain massifs had been transformed, steel-hard volcanic rock had been cut through like butter and 10,000 tons of massive rocks lay in places where they could not have been dressed. Hundreds of gigantic statues, some of which are between 33 and 66 ft high weigh as much as 50 tons, still stare challengingly at the visitor today—like robots which seem to be waiting solely to be set in motion again Originally these colossi also wore hats; but even the hats do not exactly help to explain the puzzling origin of the statues. The stone for the hats, which weighed over ten tons apiece, was found at a different site from that used for the bodies, and in addition the hats had to be hoisted high in the air.

Wooden tablets, covered with strange hieroglyphs, were also found on some of the statues in those days But today it is impossible to find more than ten fragments of those tablets in all the museums in the world, and none of the inscriptions on those still extant has been deciphered as yet.

Thor Heyerdahl's investigations of these mysterious giants produced three clearly distinguishable cultural periods and the oldest of the three seems to have been the most perfect. Heyerdahl dates some charcoal remains that he found to about A.D. 400. It has not been proved whether the fire-places and remains of bones had any connexion with the stone colossi. Heyerdahl discovered hundreds of unfinished statues near rock faces and on the edges of craters; thousands of stone implements, simple stone axes, lay around as if the work had been abandoned quite suddenly.

Easter Island lies far away from any continent or civilisation. The islanders are more familiar with moon and stars than any other country. No trees grow on the island, which is a tiny speck of volcanic stone. The usual explanation, that the stone giants were moved to their present sites on wooden rollers, is not feasible in this case, either. In addition the island can scarcely have provided food for more than 2,000 inhabitants. (A few hundred natives live on Easter Island today.) A shipping trade, which brought food and clothing to the island for the stonemasons, is hardly credible in antiquity. Then who cut the statues out of the rock, who carved them and transported them to their sites? How were they moved across country for miles without rollers? How were they dressed, polished and erected? How were the hats, the stone for which came from a different quarry from that of the statues, put in place?

Even if people with lively imaginations have tried to picture the Egyptian pyramids being build by a vast army of workers using the 'heave-ho' method, a similar method would have been impossible on Easter Island for lack of manpower. A maximum of 2,000 men was not nearly enough to carve these colossal figures out of the steel-hard volcanic stone with rudimentary tools, even if they worked day and night. For at least a part of the population must have tilled the barren fields and gone fishing, and a few of them must have woven cloth and made ropes. No, 2,000 men alone could not have made the gigantic statues. And a larger population is inconceivable on Easter Island. Then who did do the work? And how did they manage it? And why do the statues stand round the edge of the island and not in the interior? What cult did they serve?

Unfortunately the first European missionaries on this tiny patch of earth helped to ensure that the Island's dark ages stayed dark. They burnt the tablets with hieroglyphic characters, they prohibited the ancient cults of the gods and did away with every kind of tradition. Yet thoroughly as the pious gentlemen went to work, they could not prevent the natives from calling their island the 'Land of the bird men', as they still do today. An orally transmitted legend tells us that flying men landed and lit fires in ancient times. The legend is confirmed by sculptures of flying creatures with big staring eyes.