Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients Read online

  Near the town of Carnac is the famous alignment of hundreds of standing stones. They too are apparently part of some huge astronomical observatory. In another article by the Thoms entitled “The Carnac Alignments” for the Journal for the History of Astronomy (No. 3, pages 11-26, 1972),17 they conclude that Carnac is also a lunar observatory of vast proportions. Say the Thoms about the Menec alignments at Carnac, “A remarkable feature is the great accuracy of measurement with which the rows were set out. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the precision was far greater than could have been achieved by using ropes. The only alternative available to the erectors was to use two measuring rods (of oak or whale bone?). These were probably 6.802 ft. long, shaped on the ends to reduce the error produced by malalignment. Each rod would be rigidly supported to be level but we can only surmise how the engineers dealt with the inevitable ‘steps’ when the ground was not level.

  “It may be noted that the value for the Megalithic yard found in Britain is 2.720 plus or minus 0.003 ft. and that found above is 2.721 plus or minus 0.001 ft. Such accuracy is today attained only by trained surveyors using good modern equipment. How then did Megalithic Man not only achieve it in one district but carry the unit to other districts separated by greater distances? How was the unit taken, for example, northwards to the Orkney Islands? Certainly not by making copies of copies of copies. There must have been some apparatus for standardizing the rods which almost certainly were issued from a controlling, or at least advising, centre.”17

  The Thoms see Carnac as part of an ancient and huge system that was used over much of Europe. In their article they conclude, “The organization and administration necessary to build the Breton alignments and erect Er Grah obviously spread over a wide area, but the evidence of the measurements shows that a very much wider area was in close contact with the central control. The geometry of the two egg-shaped cromlechs at Le Menec is identical with that found in British sites. The apices of triangles with integral sides forming the centres for arcs with integral radii are features in common, and on both sides of the Channel the perimeters are multiples of the rod.

  “The extensive nature of the sites in Brittany may suggest that this was the main centre, but we must not lose sight of the fact that so far none of the Breton sites examined has a geometry comparable with that found at Avebury in complication of design, or in difficulty of layout.

  “It has been shown elsewhere that the divergent stone rows in Caithness could have been used as ancillary equipment for lunar observations, and in our former paper we have seen that the Petit Menec and St. Pierre sites were probably used in the same way.” The Thoms confess at the end of their article, “We do not know how the main Carnac alignments were used...”17

  Carnac likens itself to the important Egyptian Temple of Karnak. The Egyptian Karnak is a huge building which also has long rows of megalithic columns which once supported a huge roof.

  Are there other, even larger menhirs under the water near Carnac? One example of a known submerged megalithic structure is the Covered Alley-way of Kernic in the District of Plousescat, Finistére, now submerged at high tide.250

  The Amazing Megaliths of the Andes

  At a leveling-off of a hill overlooking the Cuzco Valley in Peru, is a colossal fortress called Sacsayhuaman, one of the most imposing edifices ever constructed. Sacsayhuaman consists of three or four terraced walls going up the hill and the ruins include doorways, staircases and ramps.

  Gigantic blocks of stone, some weighing more than 200 tons (400 thousand pounds) are fitted together perfectly. The enormous stone blocks are cut, faced, and fitted so well that even today one cannot slip the blade of a knife, or even a piece of paper between them. No mortar is used, and no two blocks are alike. Yet they fit perfectly, and it has been said by some engineers that no modern builder with the aid of metals and tools of the finest steel, could produce results more accurate.

  An old photo of a wall in Cuzco.

  Each individual stone had to have been planned well in advance; a twenty-ton stone, let alone one weighing 80 to 200 tons, cannot just be dropped casually into position with any hope of attaining that kind of accuracy! The stones are locked and dove-tailed into position, making them earthquake-proof. Indeed, after many devasting earthquakes in the Andes over the last few hundred years, the blocks are still perfectly fitted, while the Spanish Cathedral in Cuzco has been leveled twice.

  Even more incredibly, the blocks are not local stone, but by some reports come from quarries in Ecuador, almost 1,500 miles away! Others have located quarries a good deal closer, only five miles or so away. Though this fantastic fortress was supposedly built just a few hundred years ago by the Incas, they leave no record of having built it, nor does it figure in any of their legends. How is it that the Incas, who reportedly had no knowlege of higher mathematics, no written language, no iron tools, and did not even use the wheel, are credited with having built this cyclopean complex of walls and buildings? Frankly, one must literally grope for an explanation, and it is not an easy one.57

  When the Spaniards first arrived in Cuzco and saw these structures, they thought that they had been built by the devil himself, because of their enormity. Indeed, nowhere else can you see such large blocks placed together so perfectly. I have traveled all over the world searching for ancient mysteries and lost cities, but I had never in my life seen anything like this!

  The builders of the stoneworks were not merely good stone masons—they were beyond compare! Similar stoneworks can be seen throughout the Cuzco Valley. These are usually made up of finely-cut, rectangular blocks of stone weighing up to perhaps a ton. A group of strong people could lift a block and put it in place; this is undoubtably how some of the smaller structures were put together. But in Sacsayhuaman, Cuzco, and other ancient Inca cities, one can see gigan-tic blocks cut with 30 or more angles on each one.

  The strange ruins of the Nekromonteion in northern Greece, which look identical to ruins around Cuzco.

  At the time of the Spanish conquest, Cuzco was at its peak, with perhaps 100,000 Inca subjects living in the ancient city. The fortress of Sacsayhuaman could hold the entire population within its walls in case of war or natural catastrophe. Some histo-rians have stated that the fortress was built a few years before the Spanish invasion, and that the Incas take credit for the structure. But, the Incas could not recall exactly how or when it was built!

  Massive walls at Ollantaytambo.

  Only one early account survives of the hauling of the stones, found in Garcilaso de la Vega’s The Incas.145In his commentaries, Garcilaso tells of one monstrous stone brought to Sacsayhuaman from beyond Ollantaytambo, a distance of about 45 miles. “The Indians say that owing to the great labor of being brought on its way, the stone became weary and wept tears of blood because it could not attain to a place in the edifice. The historical reality is reported by the Amautas (philosophers and doctors) of the Incas who used to tell about it. They say that more than twenty-thousand Indians brought the stone to the site, dragging it with huge ropes. The route over which they brought the stone was very rough. There were many high hills to ascend and descend. About half the Indians pulled the stone, by means of ropes placed in front. The other half held the stone from the rear due to fears that the stone might break loose and roll down the mountains into a ravine from which it could not be removed.

  “On one of these hills, due to lack of caution and co-ordination of effort, the massive weight of the stone overcame some who sustained it from below. The stone rolled right down the hillside, killing three- or four-thousand Indians who had been guiding it. Despite this misfortune, they succeeded in raising it up again. It was placed on the plain where it now rests.”145

  Even though Garcilaso describes the hauling of one stone, many doubt the truth of this story. This stone was not part of the Sacsayhuaman fortress, and is smaller than most used there, according to some researchers, although the stone has never been positively identified. Even if the story is true, the
Incas may have been trying to duplicate what they supposed was the construction technique used by the ancient builders. While there is no denying that the Incas were master craftsmen, if one credits this tale one would have to wonder how they would have transported and placed the 100-ton blocks so perfectly, given the trouble they had with only one stone.

  That the Incas actually found these megalithic ruins and then built on top of them, claiming them as their own, is not a particularly alarming theory. In fact, it is most probably the truth. It was a common practice in ancient Egypt for rulers to claim previously existing obelisks, pyramids, and other structures as their own, often literally erasing the cartouche of the real builder and subsituting theirs. Indeed, the Great Pyramid itself would seem a victim of such a ruse. The pharoah Kufu, or Cheops as he was known in Greek, had his cartouche chiseled into the Great Pyramid at its base. This is the only writing to be found anywhere on the pyramid, but every indication is that the pyramid was not built by Cheops. It may not have ever been meant to be a tomb, but that is another story.

  If the Incas came along and found walls and basic foundations of cities already in existance, why not just move in? Even today, all one needs to do is a little repair work and add a roof on some of the structures to make them habitable. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that the Incas merely found the structures and added to them. There are numerous legends that exist in the Andes that Sacsayhuaman, Machu Picchu, Tiahuanaco, and other megalithic remains were built by a race of giants. Alain Gheerbrant comments in his footnotes to de la Vega’s book, “Three kinds of stone were used to build the fortress of Sacsayhuaman. Two of them, including those which provided the gigantic blocks for the outer wall, were found practically on the spot. Only the third kind of stone (black andesite), for the inside buildings, was brought from relatively distant quarries; the nearest quarries of black andesite were at Huaccoto and Rumicolca, nine and twenty-two miles from Cuzco respectively.

  “With regard to the giant blocks of the the outer wall, there is nothing to prove that they were not simply hewn from a mass of stone existing on the spot; this would solve the mystery.”57

  Gheerbrant is close in thinking that the Incas never moved those gigantic blocks in place, yet even if they did cut and dress the stones on the spot, fitting them together so perfectly would still require what modern engineers would call superhuman effort. Furthermore, the gigantic city of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia is similarly hewn from 100-ton blocks of stone. The quarries are many miles away, and the site is definitely of pre-Inca origin. Proponents of the theory that the Incas found these cities in the mountains and inhabited them, would then say that the builders of Tiahuanaco, Sacsayhuaman, and other megalithic structures in the Cuzco area were the same people.

  Ruins near Chavin in Peru. They look as if they had some kind of machinery. From Squire’s Peru (1886).

  Again quoting Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote about these structures just after the conquest, “...how can we explain the fact that these Peruvian Indians were able to split, carve, lift, carry, hoist, and lower such enormous blocks of stone, which are more like pieces of a mountain than building stones, and that they accomplished this, as I said before, without the help of a single machine or instrument? An enigma such as this one cannot be easily solved without seeking the help of magic, particularly when one recalls the great familiarity of these people with devils.”145

  The Spanish dismantled as much of Sacsayhuaman as they could. When Cuzco was first conquered, Sacsayhuaman had three round towers at the top of the fortress, behind three concentric megalithic walls. These were taken apart stone by stone, and the stones used to build new structures for the Spanish.

  One interesting theory about the building of the gigantic and perfectly fitted stones is that they were constructed by using a now-lost technique of softening and shaping the rock. Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, wrote in his book Across South America, of a plant he had heard of whose juices softened rock so that it could be worked into tightly fitted masonry.88, 57

  In his book Exploration Fawcett,88 Colonel Fawcett told of how he had heard that the stones were fitted together by means of a liquid that softened stone to the consistency of clay. Brian Fawcett, who edited his father’s book, tells the following story in the footnotes: A friend of his who worked at a mining camp at 14,000 feet at Cerro di Pasco in Central Peru, discovered a jar in an Incan or pre-Incan grave. He opened the jar, thinking it was chicha, an alcoholic drink, breaking the still intact ancient wax seal. Later, the jar was accidentally knocked over onto a rock.

  Quotes Fawcett, “About ten minutes later I bent over the rock and casually examined the pool of spilled liquid. It was no longer liquid; the whole patch where it had been, and the rock under it, were as soft as wet cement! It was as though the stone had melted, like wax under the influence of heat.”88, 57

  Fawcett seemed to think that the plant might be found on the Pyrene River in the Chuncho country of Peru, and described it as having dark reddish leaves and being about a foot high. Another story is mentioned of a biologist observing an unfamiliar bird in the Amazon. He watched it making a nest on a rock face by rubbing the rock with a twig. The sap of the twig dissolved the the rock, making a hollow in which the bird could make its nest.

  All of this speculation may be put to rest by more recent findings, reported in Scientific American (February, 1986). In a fascinating article, a French researcher, Jean-Pierre Protzen, relates his experiments in duplicating the construction of Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo. Protzen spent many months around Cuzco experimenting with different methods of shaping and fitting the same kinds of stones used by the Incas (or their megalithic predicessors). He found that quarrying and dressing the stones could be accomplished using the stone hammers found in abundance in the area. The precision fitting of stones was a relatively simple matter, he says. He pounded out the concave depressions into which new stones were fitted by trial and error, until he achieved a snug fit. This meant continually lifting and placing the stones together, and chipping at them a little at a time. This process is very time consuming, but it’s simple, and it works.

  Yet even for Protzen, some mysteries remain. He was not able to figure out how the builders handled the larger stones. The fitting process necessitated the repeated lowering and raising of the stone being fitted, with trial-and-error pounding in between. He does not know just how 100-ton stones were manipulated at this stage, and some stones are actually far heavier.

  According to Protzen, to transport the stones from the quarries, special access roads and ramps were built. Many of the stones were dragged over gravel-covered roads, which in his theory gave the stones their polished surfaces. The largest stone at Ollantaytambo weighs about 150 tons. It could have been pulled up a ramp with a force of about 260,000 pounds, he says. Such a feat would have required a mimimum of some 2,400 men. Getting the men seemed possible, but where did they all stand? Protzen says that the ramps were only eight meters wide at most. Further perplexing Protzen is that the stones of Sacsayhuaman were finely dressed, yet are not polished, showing no signs of dragging. He could not figure out how they were transported the 22 miles from the Rumiqolqa quarry.

  Protzen’s article reflects good research, and points out that modern science still cannot explain or duplicate the building feats found at both Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo. Continually lifting and chipping away at a 100-ton stone block to make it fit perfectly is just too great of an engineering task to have been practical. Protzen’s theory would work well on the smaller, precisely square, later construction, but fails with the older megalithic construction beneath. Perhaps the theories of levitation and softening stones cannot be discarded yet! One last intriguing observation which Protzen makes is that the cutting marks found on some of the stones are very similar to those found on the pyramidion of an unfinished obelisk at Aswan in Egypt. Is this a coincidence, or was there an ancient civilization with links to both sites?

  Most “scientists”
are bottlewashers and button sorters.

  —Robert Heinlein

  The World’s Largest Computer

  The magnificent monument in England called Stonehenge sits alone on the Salisbury Plain, flanked by a parking lot and gift shop for tourists. It is famous for its large stones and curious architecture: a circle of masssive, well-cut stones.

  In 1964 the British astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins first published his now-famous treatise on Stonehenge as an astronomical computer. His article, entitled “Stonehenge: A Neolithic Computer,” appeared in issue 202 of the prestigious British journal Nature. In 1965, Hawkins’ famous book Stonehenge Decoded was published.95

  Hawkins upset the archaeological world by claiming that the megalithic site was not just a circular temple erected by some egocentric kings, but rather a sophisticated computer for observing the heavens.

  He begins his Nature article with a quote from Diodorus on prehistoric Britain from his History of the Ancient World, written about 50 BC: “The Moon as viewed from this island appears to be but a little distance from the Earth and to have on it prominences like those of the Earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god [Moon?] visits the island every 19 years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished... There is also on the island, both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo [Sun] and a notable temple... and the supervisors are called Boreadae, and succession to these positions is always kept in their family.”

  Hawkins’ basic theory was that “Stonehenge was an observatory; the impartial mathematics of probability and the celestial sphere are on my side.” Hawkins’ first contention was that alignments between pairs of stones and other features, calculated with a computer from small-scale plans, compared their directions with the azimuths of the rising and setting sun and moon, at the solstices and equinoxes, calculated for 1500 BC. Hawkins claimed to have found thirty-two “significant” alignments.