Ancient Civilizations: Six Great Enigmas

We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in human history. In recent years two versions of ancient history have formed. One, we shall call ‘alternative’ history, the other we shall refer to as ‘official’ history. The former ponders over a variety of anomalies and tries to make sense out of the corpus of evidence, i.e., the pyramids and timelines, why they were built, by whom and when. The latter conducts digs, catalogues pottery shards, and tries to defend its proposal there are no enigmas, and virtually everything is explained.

At one point perhaps as late as fifteen years ago these two camps seem to be engaged in an informal dialogue. That all changed after, 1) the Great Sphinx re-dating controversy caught Egyptologists off guard, and 2) the impact of Chris Dunn's book The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt at the end of the last decade.

There is no more dialogue and no more polite, gloves on debate. The proponents of ‘official’ history have taken an increasingly political and ideological approach to the issue. They now do little more than offer pronouncements of the historical ‘truth’ on the one hand, and denounce all those who dare challenge officialdom on the other.

In this context we offer evidence that our ‘scholars’, the gatekeepers who control our institutions of ‘higher learning’, refuse to consider.

This colossal structure, the last of the seven ancient wonders and the largest stone building in the world, still provokes awe, controversy and a plethora of theories that inspire bitter debate to this day. Instead of going over the well-established mysteries, we would like to shine new light on this important enigma that appears out of place in ‘Stone Age’ Egypt.

The real challenge the Great Pyramid still poses to us in the opening decade of the Third Millennium is the physical plant itself. Theorists have gone on endlessly speculating about how it was built and the metaphysical, cultural and religious significance and/or symbolism behind its construction. Though several authors have offered tantalising possibilities, none have been conclusively proven.

To begin with, the massive size - the staggering volume and weight of the building blocks - remain problematic. With an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight of about 4 million tons, the pyramid is two-thirds the mass of the Hoover Dam. The sheer size and the numbers of blocks that had to be quarried and moved into place, presents numerous architectural, construction and engineering headaches.

These issues have been raised time and again, yet are still unsettled. It is time to move on and define the even more difficult issues. We consider the core ‘hard’ problems to be those that reflect precision engineering and assembly line manufacturing accomplished on a massive scale. The primitive tools scenario concocted by Egyptologists does not explain the following tasks:

Creating precision-cut casing blocks weighing 16 tons, fitted together and held by a super-glue mortar that maintained a tight seal forming a nearly seamless shell. Leveling the 13-acre limestone bedrock base to a degree of accuracy only recently achieved with laser technology. Squaring the base to True North with minimal deviation. Excavating the ‘Descending Passage’ 350 feet into solid bedrock at a 26-degree angle while keeping the tunnel arrow-straight for its (entire) length. Bringing the massive 48-story pyramid together around complex internal structures, retaining the true shape to enable the builders to form the apex. (These internal structures include four enigmatic ventilation shafts and a coffer in the King’s Chamber that is too large to have been moved through the opening. It shows evidence of having been cut with a jewel-tip saw.) Extensive usage of different types of machined granite inside the Great Pyramid chambers.

The father of modern Egyptology, Sir Flinders Petrie, marvelled at the precision and size of the casing blocks. He carefully measured the blocks and found that “the mean thickness of the joints are .020 and therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square, is but .01 on length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length.” The modern international engineering firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Menendhall conducted a forensic analysis of the Great Pyramid. Their findings are evaluated in an article published in Civil Engineering.

The pyramid was oriented with its major sides either north-south or east-west. This in itself was a remarkable undertaking, given the accuracy to which it was done, because the Egyptians had to perform the work using astronomical or solar observations - the compass had not yet been invented. The dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and the site was levelled within a fraction of an inch over the entire base. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laser levelling.1

The summary speaks volumes between the lines. The problems with the Descending Passage are numerous. For starters the tunnel is less than 4 x 4 feet, enough for no more than one excavator wielding a hammer-stone at any given moment. How would our proposed digging crew negotiate the space in the suffocating darkness once they had dug down 50 feet and more? In addition how would the 26-degree angle be set and maintained without lights or levels? The lack of carbon deposits on walls and ceiling indicate that torches were not used.

Once again, Petrie measured the passage and found an amazing accuracy of .020 of an inch over 150 feet and a mere .250 inch over 350 feet of its constructed and excavated length. We submit that this passage with its smooth surfaces, squared shape, and accurate angle could not have been tunnelled with primitive tools and methods.

The Great Pyramid remains the world’s greatest wonder and ancient enigma. We suggest researchers should pay more attention to these details and ask about the materials used inside the Great Pyramid, especially near the ventilation shafts. We now have two doors blocking a very important shaft, the one that pointed to the star Sirius in 2,450 BCE.

Now we turn to a mystery that nearly equals the pyramid, though it is a little known conundrum hidden in the mists of remote antiquity. Let us start with a simple question that appears to have an obvious answer: what is a dog? It turns out geneticists in the past decade have shown the answer is not so obvious. In fact, generations of anthropologists, archaeologists and wildlife biologists turned out to be dead wrong when it came to the origins of “man's best friend”.

Prior to DNA studies conducted in the 1990s, the generally accepted theory posited that dogs branched off from a variety of wild canids, i.e., coyotes, hyenas, jackals, wolves and so on, about 15,000 years ago. The results of the first comprehensive DNA study shocked the scholarly community. The study found that all dog breeds can be traced back to wolves and not other canids. The second part of the finding was even more unexpected - the branching off occurred from 40-150,000 years ago.

Why do these findings pose a problem? We have to answer that question with another question: how were dogs bred from wolves? This is not just difficult to explain, it is impossible. Do not be fooled by the pseudo-explanations put forth by science writers that state our Stone Age ancestors befriended wolves and somehow (the procedure is never articulated) managed to breed the first mutant wolf, the mother of all dogs. Sorry, we like dogs too, but that is what a dog is.

The problems come at the crucial stage of taking a male and female wolf and getting them to produce a subspecies (assuming you could tame and interact with them at all). Let us take this one step further by returning to our original question, what is a dog? A dog is a mutated wolf that only has those characteristics of the wild parent, which humans find companionable and useful. That is an amazing fact.

Think about those statements for a moment. If you are thinking that dogs evolved naturally from wolves, that is not an option. No scientist believes that because the stringent wolf pecking order and breeding rituals would never allow a mutant to survive, at least that is one strong argument against natural evolution.

Now, if our Paleolithic ancestors could have pulled off this feat, and the actual challenges posed by the process are far more taxing, then wolf/dog breeders today certainly should have no problem duplicating it. But like the Great Pyramid, that does not seem to be the case. No breeders have stepped up to the plate claiming they can take two pure wolves and produce a dog sans biogenetic engineering techniques.

The evolution of the domesticated dog from a wild pack animal appears to be a miracle! It should not have happened. This is another unexplained enigma.

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about 4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary, baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks. The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built with well-engineered drainage channels.

Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40 feet long and 8 feet deep, a huge public facility by any standards. A giant granary, a large residential building, and several assembly halls were also on this upper level.

The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment. We need to address the following question to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro? 2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when 99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labeling pottery shards and other artifacts. We have been and are being overly indulgent with our “soft sciences” regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers?

Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilization that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries.

We note that the Indus Valley civilisation was contemporary with the Great Pyramid. It is often said this was one of the first three civilisations, having a written script that has never been deciphered. Now we turn next to the mother of all civilisations, Sumer.

Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of Abraham - was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out of a hat?

In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question. Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’.

As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’and spoke a strange language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture.

We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley? Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were plentiful in Egypt.

How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy. There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of their native state using high heat.

Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats, inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of their innovations.

Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has 360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all fractions of the root number.

Teotihuacán, in Mexico, is an immense, even overwhelming archaeological site, oriented along a twin axis. In the 1960s a team of archaeologists and surveyors mapped out the entire complex in great detail. The resultant map revealed an urban grid centred around two principal, almost perpendicular, alignments.

From the Pyramid of the Moon at the north end, the complex extends south along the Avenue of the Dead beyond the Ciudadela and Great Compound complexes for about 3.2 kilometres. To this north-south axis we must add an east-west alignment that led from a point near the Pyramid of the Sun to a spot of prime astronomical significance on the western horizon.

Anthony Aveni, an astronomer-anthropologist, discovered that on the day the Sun passes directly overhead in the spring of the Northern Hemisphere (May 18), the Pleiades star cluster makes its first annual pre-dawn appearance. It was at this point on the western horizon that the Pleiades set, and the builders aimed the east-west axis.

Additionally, the Sun also sets at this point on the horizon on August 12 - the anniversary of the beginning of the current Mesoamerican calendar cycle (5th Sun) - determined by a consensus of academic and independent scholars to have begun on August 12, 3114 BCE.

It is very clear Teotihuacán was laid out according to a set of alignments that reflected celestial, geographic, as well as geodetic relationships. Walking along the avenue from one pyramid to another, up the steps to the top, and surveying the site from a multitude of angles, one is struck by the sense of being in the middle of some vast geometric matrix.

Teotihuacán was the first true urban centre in the Americas. At its peak around 500 CE, it boasted a population of an estimated 200,000. George E. Stuart, archaeologist and the editor of National Geographic magazine sums up our ignorance:

We speak of it with awe, as we do the pyramids of Egypt, but we still know next to nothing about the origins of the Teotihuacános, what language they spoke, how their society was organised, and what caused their decline.2

As for one the most anomalous of artifacts on the planet, in the 1900s archaeologists discovered a sheet of mica in the upper tiers of the Pyramid of the Sun. This was no ho-hum pottery shard to catalogue and file away in a dusty box, yet that is about how archaeologists treated the find. To anyone with even a smattering of technical knowledge, discovering a large sheet of mica in an ancient pyramid site comes as a shock. In fact, it is one of the great ‘smoking guns’ that turn archaeologists mum.

Mica is an inflammable and non-conductive mineral that grows in fairly weak plate-like structures. It is not at all useful as a structural building material. NASA uses it as a radiation shield in space vehicles. Mica is also utilised in electronic components and microwave ovens, and it is a good shield for electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves. Like the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun has a subterranean cavity under the middle of the pyramid. A large pyramid with layers of thick mica would be an excellent EMI shield.

Its placement in the complex raises questions that we could only answer today after the development of electronic, atomic and space age technologies.

Thick sheets of mica were also found by archaeologists about 400 meters down the avenue from the Sun Pyramid, these precision-cut sheets were of considerable size: 27.5 meters square. They were located under a rock-slab floor of a complex now called “the Mica Temple”.

What possible reason could the builders have had for including a layer of mica in any structure? It was obviously not decorative. To add greatly to the growing mystery, the particular mica used was traced to Brazil. Now we are getting in deep. How would a supposedly indigenous “Stone Age” culture know that mica existed 3,200 kilometres away in the jungles of Brazil? Not only that, how did they transport these large sheets over that long distance intact without wheeled vehicles? Surely not via relay teams on foot travelling overland! No large sea-going boats or ports have ever been found in ancient Mexico.

Lake Titicaca borders Bolivia and Peru in the Andes. The highest large lake in the world, there are many signs it was once exposed to the ocean. Megalithic structures like the Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanacu, Bolivia, also indicate a long lost past. The gateway was carved out of one solid block, the hard way to make a gate.

Moving northward near Cuzco, Peru, we find even more large, impressive and mysterious structures. Here we find walls built with complex jigsaw type megalithic blocks similar to the more familiar walls found at nearby Machu Picchu. Some of the megalithic structures contain complex cut-rocks weighing over 100 tons; a few were joined together by bronze clamps. Some of the bronze had obviously been poured in place, a skill not available in pre-Columbian Peru.

Like Sumer, the high Andes is an unlikely location for Stone Age cities, evidence of advanced technologies, and seminal agricultural discoveries. It is well established that the region around Tiahuanco, at 12,500 feet elevation, had been turned into a highly productive agricultural zone. That was achieved by the building of dikes, dams, canals and raised beds that created micro-climates which protected the plants from frost.

We have attempted to show our planet is full of ancient wonders and mysteries that have yet to be solved. You can find more information as well as our theories on who and what created these enigmas in our books, The Genesis Race (by Will Hart) and Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries: Will They Return in 2012 AD? (by Robert Berringer).

1. `Program Management BC', Civil Engineering, June 1999, Craig Smith, P.E., 2. `The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacán', National Geographic Magazine, December 1995

If I wanted this kind of crap to believe in, I can still pull out my dog-eared copy of "Chariots of the Gods"... Von Daniken, you wild-eyed hypothesizer, you started all of this stuff.. Nobody holds a candle to you..

Oh, come on; you give too much credit. Never forget Charles Forte and the Forteans.

Or, the early Fate! magazines.

Or, Long John Nebble's radio program.

You could see FIRE through it.. ( That's what always impressed ME, looking through the mica window on our oil heater as a kid.. )

"I Remember Isinglass"...maybe a title I'll use some day. Maybe not, too; using a title implies all the hard work involved in writing the stuff between said title and, "The end."

Anyway, we never had a mica window on our oil heater as a kid...because we never had an oil heater; instead, we had a cast iron wood stove, with big mica windows in the doors.

Of course, I also learned that if you put enough dry driftwood & green manzanita in a sheet-steel stove, and open the drafts, once the metal turns from cherry-red to yellowish-white, it at least looks like you can also see the flames licking inside. That is Pretty Cool, too...once.LOL

I might recommend a book, if you can find it, that is MUCH better than Von Dingalin's books: Supernature. Sorry; I forget the author's name. Excellent read, and not nearly so far out.

If men took wolf pups and raised them as pets<

Even simpler "Dogs and More Dogs," NOVA Good program

Dog evolution is simpler than most people think, contends Raymond Coppinger, professor of biology at Hampshire College and coauthor of Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution. Coppinger is convinced that, contrary to the traditional theory that humans actively domesticated wolves, wolves themselves chose domestication because of the easy pickings in Stone Age refuse dumps, where those animals that weren't scared off by people had a better chance of finding food and surviving.

"Any one wolf that's a little tamer than the other, who can stay there longer, gets more food," Coppinger says. "He's the one that's going to win that evolutionary battle."

And there's no reason that process couldn't have begun 100,000 years ago.

Yes, I mean I can see maybe one remarkable resemblence...but all of them???

Right. One may be a coincidence - five is by design. When I first saw those pictures my immediate reaction was that they were Photoshop alterations. I was never able to confirm their authenticity, but the lady Egyptologist clearly acknowledged that the inscriptions did actually exist. She just "labored mightily" to explain and debunk them within the bounds of conventional archaeology.

the site was levelled within a fraction of an inch over the entire base

1. Level the area roughly to slightly below the natural rock surface.
2. Have your workers each carry a goatskin of water from the Nile.
3. Empty into the shallow hole
4. Note which areas stick out.
5. Have your workers push a large flatish piece of rock over the sticking out area and wear it down
6. As the water evaporates/soaks away, other areas will stck out.
7. goto 4.

Actually the way wolves turned to dogs was proven in Russia by the domestication of foxes over about a 50 year period. They now sell domesticated foxes who have both dog/cat behavior traits.

Exactly, I stopped reading this stupid article after the statement that dogs couldn't be developed without bio-engineering.

Excellent points.

Have to wonder if these wanks ever even touched a small block of limestones. One of the softest building stones, a hard brush with the naked hand will dust off some stone. Moving one block back and forth over another and using water will level both blocks rather quickly and leave a nice slurry for sun baked mortar. On one show long ago, they showed how today's egyptians quarried limestone without steel tools...levers and water. Three or four skinny workers were knocking these off fast enough to put union workers to shame.

A visit to Indiana's limestone quarries and fab plants would quickly educate these wanks as to the mysteries of stone. It is awe inspiring to walk through a limestone plant with huge blocks stacked on timbers to season. The 20 to 30 foot high stacks obliterate any view of the nearby surroundings, making it easy to fantasize being in the pyramid setting. Even more awesome is hearing the loud crack and tumble of broken stone after the first freeze.

The book: It was Lyall Watson's first book on the subject.

SUPERNATURE: A New Look at Unexplained Phenomena
Paperback
New York: Bantam, 1974
ISBN: 553 08368 195

(In Britain, the sub title is The Natural History of the Supernatural)

Fascinating reading, and no deep-end theories to get in the way.

I think Von Daniken ripped off The Morning of The Magicians, a more interesting book.

I wouldn't doubt he used many sources..
But "Chariots" was the big book, the one that got the press, the one that sold, the one on the best seller list, the one talked about at the cocktail parties, etc..

I give him credit where it's due..
He asked all the questions, made the wild claims, got everybody all worked up...

Plywood forms... wow.. egyptians had plywood.. LOL!!!

Seriously, it's just something that someone, somewhere, pointed out.. that limestone is used to make cement, mortar, and that if it was poured into a form, allowed to harden, then "finished", after a couple thousand years, you wouldn't be able to readily distinguish it from "regular" limestone..
I don't know if it's true, but it sure sounds like it would be plausible..
It would sure make transport easier..
Mix it on site, pour it into a large form, let it set..
No carrying large 11 ton block up to the next tier, and all the manpower, danger involved..

Who knows?

Only those of "us" that read FATE even knew who the forteans were.. or Madame Blavatsky, or the Cardiff Giant, or any of the other, myriad msyteries of the universe that only FATE could "educate" a young reader about..
I was "lucky" (?)... A friend of my father was a regular subscriber to FATE and gave me all his old copies..
I was able to read it right through the 50's and 60's..
I owe FATE and READER'S DIGEST a great debt of gratitude for providing me with "stimulating" reading material and building an interest in reading... As well as expanding my vocabulary..

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