The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she had heard his answer, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they may be able to help themselves and to help others. They have to hold on to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their memories. These are the most important things … But my grandfather wants to tell you also, and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an intelligent being, a spirit – a creative and intelligent spirit that has designed everything to be the way it is. My grandfather says that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident – whether good or bad – and that there is a reason for everything that takes place …’ Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval. Indeed it is not just a matter of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Apart from the Valley Temple and other cyclopean edifices on the Giza plateau, no other building remotely resembling the Osireion is known from any other epoch of Egypt’s long history. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom structures, built out of giant megaliths, seems to belong in a unique category. They resemble one another much more than they resemble any other known style of architecture and in all cases there are question-marks over their identity. Archaeologists are trained as anthropologists to recognize and celebrate the diversity of humanity, both today and in the past. Eric Cline succinctly explains this in his review, noting "pseudoarchaeologists cannot accept the fact that the mere humans might have come up with great innovations such as the domestication of plants and animals or built great architectural masterpieces such as the Sphinx all on their own; rather, they frequently seek or invoke divine, or even alien, assistance to explain how these came to be." Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.”

All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Puranu and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the future through a variety of different media – myths, maps, buildings, calendar systems, mathematical harmonies – have been connected to the cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss? I walked on into the deeper darkness, eventually finding my way to the Gallery of the Kings. It led off from the eastern edge of the inner Hypostyle Hall about zoo feet from the entrance to the temple.

Fagan, Garrett G. (2006). Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-30592-1. The Guardian, London, 21 December 1991: A fleet of 5000-year-old royal ships has been found buried eight miles from the Nile. American and Egyptian archaeologists discovered the 12 large wooden boats at Abydos… Experts said the boats-which are 50 to 60 feet long-are about 5000 years old, making them Egypt’s earliest roya1 ships and among the earliest boats found anywhere … The experts say the ships, discovered in September, were probably meant for burial so the souls of the pharaohs could be transported on them. ‘We never expected to find such a fleet, especially so far from the Nile,’ said David O’Connor, the expedition leader and curator of the Egyptian Section of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania… [ 27] See Henry Frankfort, The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, 39th Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Society, London, 1933, p. 25. An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return:Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account: ‘This terrible wind. It dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it, this kind of climate is a consequence of how we’re living today – not just us, but your people as well.’ In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when – and why – the hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think, after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to devote more of the resources to studying the signs and messages that have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia which our species calls prehistory. There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great Egyptian ‘leap forward’ suggest that it could only have resulted from an influx of new ideas from some as yet unidentified source.

Dates from At1as of Ancient Egypt. For further data on Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus see Profuses K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1982, pp. 70-1. I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking. ‘I have a cornfield,’ she continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the sky and try to pray for rain, but there is no rain, no clouds even … When we’re like this we don’t even know who we are.’ Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the sub-glacial landscapes of Antarctica – much the most likely continent to hide the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.Credit List" (PDF). chicagoscifi.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 February 2010 . Retrieved 25 November 2009. It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’. Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a ‘mythical’ account something like this: THE MULTI-MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING SENSATION THAT TURNED HISTORY ON ITS HEAD, FROM THE CREATOR OF NETFLIX'S ANCIENT APOCALYPSE

How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD 2012 of the Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we express chronology?

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What we discovered [Naville wrote] is a gigantic construction of about 100 feet in length and 60 in width, built with the most enormous stones that may be seen in Egypt. In the four sides of the enclosure walls are cells, 17 in number, of the height of a man and without ornamentation of any kind. The building itself is divided into three naves, the middle one being wider than those of the sides; the division is produced by two colonnades made of huge granite monoliths supporting architraves of equal size. [ 13] Members of the scholarly and scientific community have described the proposals put forward in the book as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology. [8] [9] I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want, for example, to tell them – those distant grandchildren of ours – when we had lived in relation to their time. The book was followed by Magicians of the Gods. [4] Thesis [ edit ] The Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl as depicted in the Codex Magliabechiano