Chapter Seven
THE DAY THE SUN STOOD STILL
 

"The first wave of priests accompanying the conquerors was bent on destroying everything that had to do with the Indians’ "idolatry."

"....The realization that the Andean Indians believed in a Supreme Creator and that their legends recalled the Deluge, increased the curiosity of the Spanish priests (which followed after the first priests).

"....As in Mexico, after various other ancients peoples have been considered, the Israelites of the Ten Lost Tribes seemed the most plausible explanation not only for the similarity of native legends to biblical tales, but also to such customs among the Peruvian Indians as the offering of the first fruits, and Expiation Feast at the end of September that corresponded to the nature and time of the Jewish day of Atonement, and other biblical commandments such as the rite of circumcision, abstaining from the blood of animal meat, and the prohibition against the eating of fish without scales. In the Feast of First Fruits, the Indians chanted the mystic words Yo Meshica, He Meshica, Va Meshica; and some of the Spanish savants discerned in the word Meshica the Hebrew term "Mashi’ach" - the Messiah.

Other terms were compared by scholars:

Ira Andean, compared to Mesopotamian Ira/Illa, from which the Mesopotamian El stems. Malquis Inca, compared to Canaanite Molekh (Lord), likewise Manco from the same Semitic root, meaning "king."

"It was in view of such theories of Israelite-biblical origins that the Catholic hierarchy in Peru, after the initial wave of obliteration, moved to record and preserve the Indian heritage.

"Picking up a common point of departure in biblical and Andean recollections - the tale of the Deluge - Montesinos employed the event (Montesinos was a Spaniard who arrived in Peru in 1628 and devoted the rest of his life to the compilation of a comprehensive and chronological history and prehistory of the Peruvians), as his starting point. In line with the biblical record he followed the repopulation of Earth after the Deluge from Mount Ararat in Armenia through the Table of Nations in Chapter 10 of the book of Genesis. He saw in the name Peru (or Piru/Pirua in the Indian tongue) a phonetic rendering of the name Ophir, the grandson of Eber (the forebear of the Hebrews) who himself was the great-grandson of Shem. Ophir was also the name of the famed Land of Gold from which the Phoenicians had brought gold for the temple in Jerusalem that King Solomon was building.... Havilah (Ophir’s brother) was also another name for the land of gold.

"....It was much before the times of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, much before the Ten Tribes were exiled by the Assyrians, that peoples from the lands of the Bible had come to the Andes, Montesinos theorized....

"The Inca tales Montesinos assembled, attested that long before the latest Inca dynasty there had been an ancient empire. After a period of growth and prosperity upheavals suddenly befell the land.... wars broke out. The king reigning at the time left Cuzco and led his followers to a secluded refuge place in the mountains called Tampu-Tocco; only a few priests remained in Cuzco to maintain its shrine. It was during that calamitous time that the art of writing was lost.

"Centuries passed. The kings went periodically from Tampu-Tocco to Cuzco to consult divine oracles. Then one day a woman of noble birth appeared, whose son had been carried away by the Sun God.... the youth reappeared clothed in golden garments.... his name was Rocca and by succession, even if not the first born, he was made king with the title Inca - sovereign.

"By giving this first Inca the name Manco Capac, Inca historians likened him to the legendary founder of Cuzco, Manco Capac of the four Ayar brothers. Montesinos correctly separated and distanced the Spaniards’ contemporary Inca dynasty.... from its predecessors. His conclusion, that the Inca dynasty consisted of fourteen kings, including Huaina Capac who had died when the Spaniards arrived and his two warring sons, has since been confirmed by all scholars.

"....It is believed that Montesinos had found a copy of Blas Valera manuscript in La Paz, and was allowed by the Jesuit priests there to copy from it.

"....But he (Montesinos) recorded a version whereby the first of the chosen as a leader was a brother that bore the name of the ancestor who had led the people to the Andes, Pirua Manco (and thus the name Peru)....he had decided to build there a city.... one of his half-sisters bore him a son who was called Manco Capac. It was this son who built in Cuzco the Temple of the Great God, Viracocha; and therefore it is from that time that the establishment of the empire is counted and the chronicles of the dynasties begin.... In his time other deities were venerated, one of them was Mother Earth and another a god whose name meant Fire; he was represented by a stone that spoke oracles.

"The principal science at the time, Montesinos wrote, was that of astrology; and the art of writing on processed leaves of the plantain tree and on stones, was known. The fifth Capac introduced the count of the thousand years as a Great Period, and of centuries and periods of fifty years, equivalent to the biblical Jubilee.... Inti Capac Yupanqui, completed the temple and introduced in it the worship of the great god Illa Tici Vira Cocha, meaning "Bright Beginner, Creator of the Waters."

 

Incas praise Sun God

"In the reign of the twelfth Capac, news reached Cuzco of the disembarking on the coast of "some men of great stature.... giants who were settling the whole coast" and, possessing metal implements, were despoiling the land. After a time they began to go into the mountains; fortunately, they provoked the wrath of the Great God and he destroyed them with a heavenly fire.

"Relieved of the dangers, the people forgot the commandments and the rites of worship. "Good laws and customs" were abandoned.... In punishment the Creator hid the sun from the land, "there was no dawn for twenty hours." There was a great outcry among the people and prayers and sacrifices were offered at the temple until the sun reappeared. The king immediately thereafter reintroduced laws of conduct and rites of worship.

"The fortieth Capac established the study of astronomy and astrology and determined the equinoxes. The fifth year of his reign, Montesinos calculated, was the twenty-five hundredth from Point Zero, which he assumed, was the Deluge. It was also the two thousandth year since kingship had began in Cuzco.... He (the Capac) was granted the title of Pachacuti (Reformer)....

"In the reign of the fifty-eighth monarch, "when the Fourth Sun was completed," the count was 2,900 years since the Deluge. It was Montesinos calculated, the year in which Jesus Christ was born.

"....The first Cuzco empire.... came to a bitter end in the reign of the sixty-second monarch.... "marvels and portents" occurred, and great battles....

"....Thus was the government of the Peruvian monarchy lost and destroyed," Montesinos wrote, "and the knowledge of letters was lost."

"....In the reign of the seventy-eighth monarch, when the milestone of 3,500 years since the Beginning was reached, a certain person began to revive the art of writing. It was that the king received a warning from the priests concerning the invention of letters. It was the knowledge of writing, their message explained, that was the cause of the pestilences and accursations that had brought kingship in Cuzco to an end. The god’s wish was "that no one ought to use the letters or resuscitate them, for from their employment great harm would come [again]."

Therefore the king commanded "by law, under the pain of death, that no one should traffic in quilcas, which were the parchments and leaves of trees on which they used to write, nor should use any sort of letters." Instead, he introduced the use of quipus, the strands of colour cords that has served since then for chronological purposes.

"In the reign of the ninetieth monarch, the fourth millennium from Point Zero was completed. By then the monarchy at Tampu-Tocco was weak and ineffective. In such circumstances a princess of the original blood of the Sons of the Sun, one Mama Ciboca, rose to the occasion. She announced that her young son, who was so handsome that his admires nicknamed him Inca, was destined to regain the throne at the old capital, Cuzco. In a miraculous way he disappeared and returned clothed in golden robes, claiming that the Sun God had taken him aloft, instructed him in secret knowledge, and told him to lead the people back to Cuzco. His name was Rocca; he was the first of the Inca dynasty that came to an ignominious end in the hands of the Spaniards.

"Attempting to put these events in an orderly time frame, Montesinos stated at certain intervals that a period called "Sun" had passed or begun. While what length of a period (in years) he was considering is not at all certain, it would appear that he had in mind Andean legends of several "Suns" in the people’s past.

"Although scholars had held - less so nowadays - that there had been no contact whatsoever between the Mesoamerican and South American civilizations, the latter sound hardly different from the Aztec and Maya notions of five Suns. Indeed, all the Old World civilizations had recollections of past ages, of eras when the gods reigned alone, followed by demigods and heroes, and then just mortals. Sumerian texts called King Lists, recorded a line of divine lords followed by demigods who reigned a total of 432,000 years before the Deluge, then listed the list of kings that reigned thereafter through times that are by now considered historical and whose data has been verified and found accurate. The Egyptian king lists, as composed by the priest-historian Manetho, listed a dynasty of twelve gods that began some 10,000 years before the Deluge; it was followed by gods and demigods until, circa 3100 B.C., the pharaohs ascended the throne of Egypt. Again, when his data could be verified against historical records, it was found to be accurate.

"Montesinos found such notions in the Peruvain collective lore, confirming the reports of other chroniclers that the Incas believed that theirs was the Fifth Age of Sun. The First Age was that of Viracochas, gods who were white and bearded. The Second Age was that of the giants; some of them were not benevolent and there had been conflicts between the gods and the giants. Then followed the Age of Primitive Man, of uncultured human beings. The Fourth Age was that of heroes, men who were demigods. And there was the Fifth Age, the age of human kings, of whom the Incas were last in line.

"Montesinos also placed the Andean chronology in the European frame by relating it to a certain Point Zero (he thought it had to be the Deluge) and - most clearly - to the birth of Christ. The two time sequences, he wrote, coincided in the reign of the fifty-eighth monarch: the twenty-nine hundredth from Point Zero was the "first year of Jesus Christ." The Peruvian monarchies, he wrote, began 500 years after Point Zero, i.e., in 2400 B.C.

"The problem scholars have with the history and chronology of Montesinos is thus not lack of clarity, but its conclusion that kingship and urban civilization began - at Cuzco - almost 3,500 years before the Incas, that civilization, according to the information amassed by Montesinos and those on whose work he had relied, possessed writing, included astronomy among its sciences, and had a calendar long enough to require its periodic reform. All this (and more) was possessed by the Sumerian civilization that blossomed out circa 3800 B.C. and by the Egyptian civilization that followed circa 3100 B.C. Another offshoot of the Sumerian civilization, that of the Indus Valley, came about circa 2900 B.C.

"....Was there a Tampu-Tocco, and was it a place identifiable by the landmarks given by Montesinos?.... In 1911, searching for lost Inca cities, Hiram Bingham of Yale University found the place, it is now called Machu Picchu.

"....After repeatedly going back and exhausting excavations over more than two decades, he concluded that Machu Picchu was indeed the lost interim capital of the Old Empire. His descriptions of the place, still the most comprehensive, are in his books Machu Picchu, a Citadel of the Incas and The Lost City of the Incas.

"The principal reason for believing that Machu Picchu is the legendary Tampu-Toco is the clue of The Three Windows. Montesinos recorded that "at the place of his birth Inca Rocca ordered works to be executed, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows, which were the emblem of the house of his fathers, of who he descended."

"....Machu Picchu, or Great Picchu, is the Quichua name of a sharp peak which rises 10,000 feet above the sea and four thousand feet above the roaring rapids of the Urubamba River, near the bridge of San Miguel...." Bingham wrote, "Northwest of Machu Picchu is another beautiful peak surrounded by magnificent precipices, called Huayna Picchu, or Lesser Picchu....

"As befits a city that, we believe, at first served as a model for Cuzco and then emulated it, Machu Picchu too consisted of twelve wards or groups of structures.

"....the dwelling houses are built mostly of fieldstones held together with mortar. The Royal residences are built of ashlars laid in courses, as finely cut and dressed as any in Cuzco. Then there is one structure where the workmanship is so perfect as to be unmatched; and there are the polygonal megalithical stone blocks.

"....The Temple of the Three Windows (as Bingham named it) stands on the Sacred Plaza.... The Temple has only three walls, its western side being completely open; there it faces a stone pillar, about seven feet high. Bingham surmised that it might have supported a roof, which (he admitted) would have been "a device not found in any other building." It is our opinion that the pillar, in conjunction with the three windows, served astronomical sighting purposes.

"Facing the Sacred Plaza on the north is the structure Bingham named Principal Temple; it too has only three walls, some twelve feet high.

"....Winding steps lead from the northern age of the Sacred Plaza up a hill whose top was flattened to serve as a platform for the Intihuatana, a stone cut with great precision to observe and measure the movements of the Sun. The name meant "That Which Binds the Sun," and it is assumed that it helped determine the solstices, when the sun moves farthest away to the north or south, at which times rites were held to "bind the Sun" and make it return, lest it keeps going away and disappear, returning the Earth to a darkness that had occurred once before according to the legends.

"At the opposite end of the sacred-royal western part of Machu Picchu, just south of the royal ward rises the other magnificent (and unusual) edifice of the city. Called the Torreon for its semicircular shape.... The semicircular wall which is reached by seven steps, creates its own sacred enclosure at the center of which there is a rock that has been cut and shaped and incised with grooves. Bingham found evidence that this rock and the masonry walls near it were subjected to periodic fires, and concluded that the rock and the enclosure were used for sacrifices and other rituals connected with the veneration of the rock.

"....The sanctity of the rock in Machu Picchu stems not from its protruding top, but from what lies below. It is a huge natural rock inside of which there is a cave that has been enlarged and shaped artificially to precise geometric forms that look like (but are not) stairs, seats, ledges, and posts. Additionally, the interior has been improved with masonry of white granite ashlars of the purest color and grain. Niches and stone nobbins add to the interior complexity. Bingham surmised that the original natural cave was enlarged and enhanced to hold royal mummies, brought here because the place was sacred. But why was it sacred, and important for depositing the deceased kings, to begin with?

"The question takes us back to the legend of the Ayar brothers, one of who was imprisoned in a cave at the Haven of the Three Windows. If the Temple of the Three Windows was the legendary one, and the cave so too, then the legends confirm the site and the site is confirmed as the legendary Tampu-Tocco.

"....The ninth Inca (circa A.D. 1340), "being curious about the things of antiquity and wishing to perpetuate his name, went personally to the mountain of Tampu-Tocco.... and there entered the cave whence it is held for certain that Manco Capac and his brethren came when he marched into Cuzco for the very first time.... After he had made a thorough inspection, he venerated the place by rituals and sacrifices, and placed doors of gold on the window of Capac Tocco and ordered that from that time onward the locality should be venerated by all, making it a sacred prayer place for sacrifices and oracles. Having done this, he returned to Cuzco."

"....The ninth Inca was called Titu Manco Capac, he was given the additional title Pachacutec ("Reformer") because after his return from Tampu-Tocco, he reformed the calendar. So, like the Three Windows and the Intihuatana, the Sacred Rock and the Torreon affirm the existence of Tampu-Tocco, the tale of the Ayar brothers, the pre-Inca reigns during the ancient empire, and the knowledge of astronomy and the calendar - key elements in the history and chronology put together by Montesinos.

"....Many South American scholars now join the early chroniclers in believing that the natives of those lands had one or more forms of writing in antiquity.

"...."at the start of the conquest, (Father Garcia adds), the Indians of Peru confessed themselves by painting characters that listed the Ten Commandments and the transgressions committed against them." It is possible to conclude that the Peruvians possessed the use of a picture script, but that their symbols were courser than the Mexican hieroglyphs and that generally the people availed themselves of the quippus.

"Humboldt, (one of the greatest earlier explorers of South America) reported that when he was in Lima he heard of a Missionary named Narcisse Gilbar, who had found among the Panos Indians of the Ucayale river north of Lima, a book of folded leaves, similar to such as had been used by the Aztecs in Mexico; but no one in Lima could read it. "It was said that the Indians told the Missionary that the book recorded ancient wars and voyages."

"Writing in 1855, Ribero and von Tschudi reported various other discoveries and concluded that there had indeed been another method of writing in Peru besides the quipos.... he was shown a photograph of a skin-parchment with hieroglyphic markings. He found the actual parchment in the Museum of La Paz, Bolivia, and made a copy of the writing on it. He determined that the writing started at left continuing on the second line from the right and so on, in a serpentine manner. He also concluded that it was written at the time when the Sun was worshipped, but that was as far as he got.

"He traced the inscription of its place of origin on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

"Arthur Posansky (Guia general Illustrada de Tiahuanacu) found additional inscriptions in this script on rocks on the two sacred islands of Lake Titicaca. He pointed out that was of a kind of enigmatic inscriptions found on Easter Island, a conclusion with which scholars now generally agree. But the Easter Island script is known to belong to the family of Indo-European scripts of the Indus Valley and of the Hittites. A common feature to all of them (including the Lake Titicaca inscriptions) is their "as the oz ploughs" system: the writing on the first line begins on the left and ends on the right; it continues on the second line beginning on the right, ending on the left; the third line then begins on the left, and so on.

"Without going now into the question of how did a script emulating that of the Hittites reach Lake Titicaca, it seems that the existence of one or more forms of writing in ancient Peru has been confirmed. On this count too, the information provided by Montesinos proves correct.

"If in spite of all this the reader still finds it difficult to accept the inevitable conclusion, that there had indeed been an Old World type civilization in the Andes circa 2400 B.C., there is additional evidence.

"Completely ignored by scholars as a valid clue has been the repeated statement in the Andean legends that there occurred a frightening darkness in long-ago times. No one has wondered whether this was the same darkness - the non appearance of the sun when it was due - of which the Mexican legends speak in the tales of Teotihuacan and its pyramids. For if there had indeed been such a phenomenon, that the sun failed to rise and the night was endless, then it would have been observed throughout the Americas.

"The Mexican collective recollections and the Andean ones seem to corroborate each other on this point, and thus uphold the veracity of each other, as two witnesses to the same event.

"But if even this is not convincing enough, we will call upon the Bible in evidence, and upon none other than Joshua to be the witness.

"According to Montesinos and other chroniclers.... "good customs were forgotten and people were given to all manner of vice," that "there was no dawn for twenty hours." In other words, the night did not end when it usually does and sunrise was delayed for twenty hours. After a great outcry, confessions of sins, sacrifices, and prayers, the sun finally rose.

"This could not have been an eclipse: it was not that the shining sun was obscured by a shadow. Besides, no eclipse lasts so long, and the Peruvians were cognizant of such periodic events. The tale does not say that the sun disappeared; it says that it did not rise - "there was no dawn" - for twenty hours.

"It was as though the sun, wherever it was hiding, suddenly stood still.

"....Scholars have struggled for generations with this tale in Chapter 10 of the Book of Joshua.

"The incident, whose uniqueness is recognized in the Bible ("There was no day like that before or after"), taking place on the other side of the Earth relative to the Andes, thus describes a phenomenon that was the opposite of what had happened in the Andes. In Canaan the sun did not set for some twenty hours; in the Andes, the sun did not rise for the same length of time.

"Do not the two tales, then, describe the same event, and by coming from different sides of the Earth attest to its factuality?.

"What the occurrence was is still a puzzle. The only biblical clue is the mention of the great stones falling from the skies. Since we know that the tales do not describe a standstill by the sun (and moon) but a disruption of Earth’s rotation on its axis, a possible explanation is that a comet had come too close to Earth, disintegrating in the process. Since some comets orbit the sun in a clockwise direction that is opposite to the orbital direction of the Earth and the other planets, such a kinetic force could have conceivably counteracted temporarily the Earth’s rotation and slowed it down.

Mr. Sitchin explains at this point the timing of the legends, biblical and Andean, coinciding with the legend from Teotihuacan.

"The hard-hitting conclusion is clear:

THE DAY THE SUN STOOD STILL IN CANAAN WAS THE NIGHT WITHOUT SUNRISE IN THE AMERICAS.

"The occurrence, thus verified, stands out as irrefutable proof of the veracity of Andean recollections of an Ancient Empire that began when the gods granted Mankind the golden wand at Lake Titicaca.

Return

Chapter Eight
THE WAYS OF HEAVEN
 

"Thus did the biblical Psalmist describe the marvels of the heavens and the miracles of days and nights following each other, as the Earth rotates in its axis (the biblical "line" that goes through the Earth) and orbits the Sun that sits at the center of all (as a potentate in his tent)....

"....For millennia, ever since Man acquired civilization astronomer-priests looked to the heavens for guidance for Man on Earth - from the Ziggurats of Sumer and Babylon, the temples of Egypt, the stone circle of Stonehenge or the Caracol of Chichen Itza. Complex celestial motions of the stars and planets have been observed, calculated, recorded; and to make that possible, the ziggurats and temples and observatories were aligned to precise celestial orientations and provided with apertures and other structural features that let the light of the sun or another star enter as a beam at equinox or solstice times.

"....A farmer tilling the land year after year can judge the change of seasons and the coming of rains better than an astronomer, and has the groundhog to tell him a thing or two. The fact is wherever pockets of primitive societies (subsisting on agriculture) have been found in remote parts of the world, they have lived and fed themselves for generations without astronomers and a precise calendar. It is also an established fact that the calendar was devised in antiquity by an urban, not an agricultural, society.

"....Yet ancient man studied the heavens and aligned his temples toward stars and planets, and linked his calendar and festivals not to the ground upon which he stood but to the ways of heaven. Why? Because the calendar was devised not for agricultural but for religious purposes. Not to benefit mankind but to venerate the gods. And the gods, according to the first-ever religion and the people who gave us the calendar, came from the heavens.

"....It was knowledge, the Sumerians asserted, that was given them by the Anunnaki ("Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came") who had come to Earth from their planet, Nibiru. Nibiru, they said, was the Twelfth member of the Solar System, and that is why the celestial band was divided into twelve houses, the year into twelve months. Earth was the seventh planet (counting from the outside in) and therefore as twelve was a hallowed celestial number, seven was a sacred terrestrial one.

"The Anunnaki, the Sumerians wrote upon numerous clay tablets, had come to Earth long before the Deluge. In The 12th Planet we determined that it happened 432,000 years before the Deluge - a period equivalent to 120 orbits of Nibiru.... equivalent to 3,600 Earth-years per orbit.... and there is no doubt whatsoever that the Sumerians began to observe the heavens not to know when to sow, but in order to see and celebrate the return of the celestial Lord.

"This, we believe, is why Man became an astronomer. This is why, as time passed and Nibiru could no longer be observed, Man sought signs and omens in the phenomena that could be seen, and astronomy bred astrology. And if the astronomical orientations and alignments and celestial division that began in Sumer could also be found in the Andes, an irrefutable link would be proven.

"....The care and great astronomical knowledge that were required for building temples in Sumer are evident from the Inscriptions of the Sumerian King Gudea (circa 2200 B.C.). First there appeared to him "a man who shone like the heaven" who "was standing beside a "divine bird." This being, Gudea wrote, "who by the crown on his head was obviously a god," turned out to have been the god Ningirsu. He was accompanied by a goddess who "held the tablet of her favorable star of the heavens." In her other hand she held "a holy stylus" with which she pointed out to the king "the favorable planet." A third human looking god held in his hands a tablet made of precious stone, on which the plan of the temple was drawn.... And it was, the text indicates not a Solar but a Star + Planet Temple.

"....It was in Sumer that all the concepts and principles of modern spherical astronomy were laid out. The list can begin with the division of a circle into 360 degrees, the devising of zenith, horizon and other astronomical concepts and terminologies, and end with the grouping of stars into constellations, the devising, naming, and pictorial depiction of the zodiac and its twelve houses, and the recognition of the phenomenon of Precession - the retardation, by about one degree every seventy-two years, of Earth’s motion around the sun.

"....After the phenomenon of day and night the easiest to recognize are the seasons. As the simplest and abundant stone circles attest, it was easy to establish markers delineating the four points in the Earth/Sun relationship:

"....the Sun’s apparent rising higher in the skies and lingering longer as winter gives way to spring; a point when day and night appear equal; the gradual distancing of the sun as days grow shorter and the temperature begin to drop. As cold and darkness increase and it seems that the Sun may vanish all together, it hesitates, stops and begins to comeback; and the whole cycle is repeated - a new year has begun. Thus were the four occurrences in the Earth/Sun cycle established: ’the summer and winter solstices ("solar standstills") when the sun reaches its outermost positions north and south, and the spring and autumn equinoxes (when day and night are equal).

"....It was necessary to provide the observer on Earth with a celestial point of reference. This was achieved by dividing the heavens, the great circle formed by the Earth going around the Sun, into twelve parts - the twelve houses of the Zodiac, each with its own group of discernible stars ( the constellations).

"....Because Earth’s axis is inclined in relation to its orbital plane around the Sun (23.5 degrees nowadays) and it spins as a top, forming a great imaginary circle in the heavens that takes 25,920 years to complete, that means that the selected "fixed point," shifting one degree every 72 years, shifts completely from one zodiac house to another every 2,160 years. Some two millennia after the calendar was begun in Sumer, it was necessary to order a reform of the calendar and select as the fixed point the House of Aries. Our astrologers still chart their horoscopes based on the First Point of Aries, although our astronomers know that we have been almost two thousand years in the Age of Pisces (and are about to enter the Age of Aquarius).

"....By Baylonian times, in the second millennium B.C., temples required a triple alignment:

• to the new zodiac (Aries)

• to the matching four solar points (the most important of which, in Babylon, was the spring equinox)

• to the lunar period

The principal temple of Babylon honoring its national god Marduk, the remains of which have been found in good preservation, exemplifies all these astronomical principles.

 

God Indra on a three headed Elephant.

"....That astronomy, combined with archaeology, can help date monuments, explain historical events, and define the celestial origins of religious beliefs, has been recognized fully only in recent years.

This discipline is today known as archaeoastronomy.

"....In 1894, Sir Norman Lockyer noted.... "a remarkable thing: in Babylon, from the beginning of things, the sign for God was a star"; likewise, in Egypt, "in the hieroglyphic texts, three stars represented the plural ’gods.’" He also noted that in the Hindu pantheon, the most venerated temple gods were Indra ("The Day Brought by the Sun") and Ushas ("Dawn"), gods related to the rising of the Sun.

"....Lockyer recognized that temples in antiquity were Sun Temples or Star Temples. The former were temples whose axis and ritual or calendric functions aligned them with either the solstices of the equinoxes; the latter were temples not connected with any of the four Sun points, but designed to observe and venerate the appearance of a certain star on a certain day at a certain point on the horizon. Lockyer found it amazing that the older the temples were, the more sophisticated their astronomy had been.

"His mayor example (Lockyer’s), was the complex of Temples at Thebes in Upper Egypt (Karnak). There the older, more sophisticated orientation of the earliest sacred cities (to the equinoxes) had given way to the easy orientation toward the solstices. At Karnak the Great Temple to Amon-Ra consisted of rectangular structures build back-to-back on an east-west axis with a southern tilt. The orientation was such that at solstice time a beam of sunlight would travel the whole length of a corridor (some five hundred feet long), passing from one part of the temple to the other between two obelisks, and for two minutes the sunbeam would strike the Holy of Holies with a flash of light at the far end of the corridor, thereby signaling the moment when the first day of the first month began the new year.

"But that precise moment was not constant; it kept shifting, resulting in the construction of subsequent temples with modified orientations.... Over time, the Sun’s movements seemed subject to yet another phenomenon in the Earth/Sun relationship, this was the discovery by astronomers that the Earth’s obliquity, the tilt of its axis against its orbital path around the Sun, has not always been its present one....

The point Mr. Sitchin makes by giving all these astronomical details (more in his book) is, that it gives indication of the times the ancients built their Sun and Stars Temples, and observatories. Rolf Muller applies the Earth/Sun relationship to Andean archaeology, coming to the conclusion that such buildings were built at least 4,000 years ago.

"....Such application of archaeoastronomy to Andean remains, as we shall see, has upset even more notions regarding the antiquity of civilization in the Americas.

"Modern astronomers were slow to come to Machu Picchu, but eventually they did....

"At Machu Picchu Muller focused his attention on the Intihuatana.... he realized was placed atop the highest point of the city. It could command a view of the horizon in all directions, but walls of megalithic ashlars confined the view to only certain directions, ones that were in the mind of the builders.... Muller determined that the various inclined surfaces and angled sides were so devised as to enable the determination of sunset at the summer solstice, sunrise at the winter solstice, and of the spring and autumn equinoxes.

"....An old Spanish woodcut suggested to Muller that the great Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was so constructed as to allow the sun’s rays to shine directly into the Holy of Holies at the moment of sunrise on the day of winter solstice. Applying the theories of Lockyer to the Coricancha, Muller was able to calculate and to show how the pre-Columbian walls together with the circular Holy of Holies were able to serve the same purpose as the temples of Egypt.

"....In the 1980’s two astronomers from the Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, D.S. Dearborn and R. E. White (Archaeoastronomy at Machu Picchu) went over the same ground with more precise instruments.... they did not join, however, in Muller’s discussion of the structure’s age.... Neither they nor Muller attempted to trace back, to millennia ago, the lines of observation through the most ancient megalithic structure, the legendary Three Windows. There, we believe, the results would have even been more astounding.

"Muller did, however, study the orientation of the megalithic walls in Cuzco. His conclusion, whose far-reaching implications have been ignored, was that "they are positioned for the era of 4000 B.C. to 2000 B.C...."

This puts the age for the megalithic structures (at Cuzco, Sacsahuaman, and Machu Picchu, at least) in the 2000- year period preceding the 2000 B.C. of the Torreon and Intihuatana at Machu Picchu.... Muller concluded that the structures form the pre-Inca period stretch over two zodiac ages: the megalithic ones belonging to the Age of Taurus; the ones from the times of the Ancient Empire and the hiatus at Tampu-Tocco being from the Age of Aries.

"In the ancient Near East the shift caused by precession required periodic reform of the original Sumerian calendar. A major change, accompanied by major religious upheavals, took place circa 2000 B.C. with the transition from the zodiac of the Bull to that of the Ram. To others’ (but not our own) amazement, such changeovers and reforms are also evidenced in the Andes.

"....It took however several studies, beginning in the 1930s, to confirm that these people not only had a calendar but also recorded it (though they were supposed to have no writing). A pioneer in the field, Fritz Buck, produced archaeological evidence to support such conclusions, such as a mace that was a time-reckoning instrument and a vase, found in the ruins of the temple of Pachacamac, that denoted four periods of twelve with the aid of line and not markings akin to those of the Maya and Olmecs.

"....Because the Gregorian calendar was introduced in Cuzco only after Molina’s time, the day of the New Year related by him corresponds to May 25 or thereabouts. Observation towers that had been described by Garcilaso have been discovered in recent years by astronomers from Texas and Illinois.... According to the chroniclers the Incas considered their year to begin in the winter solstice (equivalent to the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere). But this event occurs not in May, but on June 21.... a difference of a full month.

"The only plausible explanation for this can come from a recognition that the calendar and the system for observation on which it was based was bequeathed to the Incas from an earlier Age; a retardation by one month results from the precessional shift that lasts 2,160 years per zodiac house.

"....Reports (from chroniclers and researchers such as L.E. Valcarel) tell that the Incas went to great lengths to determine the precise days of the equinoxes and venerated them. This custom must have also stemmed from earlier times, for we read in the early reports that the monarchs of the Ancient Empire were preoccupied with the need to determine the equinoxes.

"....What was happening circa 400 B.C. that required a reform of the calendar? The length of the time span 2000 years, parallels the time spans of zodiacal shifts due to precession. In the ancient Near East, when the calendar was begun at Nippur, circa 4,000 B.C., the spring equinox occurred in the House or Age of Taurus. It retarded to that of Aries circa 2,000 B.C. and to Pisces by Christ’s time.

"The Andean reform circa 400 B.C. confirms that the ancient empire and its calendar indeed began circa 2500 B.C. It also suggests that those monarchs were familiar with the zodiac; but the zodiac was a purely artificial and arbitrary division of the celestial band around the Sun into twelve parts; a Sumerian invention that had been adopted in the Old World by all the people who had succeeded them (to this very day). Was this possible? The answer is yes.

"....The names ( of the zodiac), to scholars’ surprise, but not to ours, bear an uncanny resemblance to the ones with which we are all familiar and which originated in Sumer. Thus:

• January, the month of Aquarius, was dedicated to Mama Cocha and Capac Cocha, Mother Water and Lord Water.

• March, the month of Aries when the first moon signified in antiquity New Year’s eve was called Katu Quilla, Market Moon.

• April, Taurus, was named Tupac Taruka, Pasturing Stag (there were no bulls in South America).

• Virgo was Sara Mama (Maize Mother) and its symbol was the female member, and so on.

"Indeed, Cuzco itself was a testimonial in stone both to the familiarity with the twelve-house zodiac and the antiquity of that knowledge.

"....One must wonder whether the knowledge required for such astronomical information and calendar reforms could have been retained and passed along over so many millennia without some kind of record-keeping, without being written down in some form. The Maya codices contained, as we have seen, astronomical data copied and obtained from earlier sources.

"...."Primitive" calendar-zodiac circular stones must have preceded the perfected Aztec "calendar stones," several of which have been found and a golden one of which, the most hallowed of all, was presented to Cortes by Moctezuma when the latter believed that he was only returning to the God of the Plumed Serpent what was his.

"Were there such records - in gold - in existence in ancient Peru?.... At least one such relic remains.
It is a golden disk, about 5 1/2 inches in diameter. Discovered in Cuzco and now lodged in the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

There were several interpretations of what the disk signified.... "None (scholars) have shown, however, how similar it is to the calendar discovered at Tikal - perhaps because it would add another nail to the coffin in which the notion that there had been no contact, no "diffusion" between Mesoameria and South America, must be laid to rest.

"....The physical destruction (of the Spanish force) could not eradicate what the Incas retained in their memories. The Coricancha was built, the Incas recalled, by the very first monarch; it began as a hut with a thatched roof. Later monarchs enlarged and enhanced it, until it assumed the final dimensions and shape as seen by the Spaniards. In the Holy of Holies, they related, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with plates of gold....

"....The most detailed description of the centerpiece (in the Holy of Holies).... was provided by Salcamayhua: it was the first king of the Inca dynasty who "ordered the smiths to make a flat plate of gold which signified that there was a creator of heaven and earth." Salcamayhua illustrated his text with a drawing: it was the unusual and rare shape of an oval.

"That first image was replaced by a round plate when a certain monarch later declared the Sun supreme. It was changed back to an oval image by a subsequent Inca "a great enemy of idols; he ordered his people not to pay honors to the Sun and Moon"; rather, to the celestial body represented by the oval shape; it was he who had "caused images to be put around the plate." Referring to the oval shape as "The Creator," Salcamayhua made it clear that it did not mean the Sun, for the images of the Sun and the Moon had flanked the oval. To illustrate what he meant, Salcamayhua drew a large oval flanked by two smaller circles.

"....Inca Huascar, one of the two half brothers involved in the struggle for the throne when the Spaniards arrived, he removed the oval image and replaced it "with a round plate, like the Sun with rays." "Huascar Inca had placed the image of the Sun in the place where the Creator had been."

"....Explaining that the gabled wall with the oval as its principle image represented "what the heathen thought" regarding the heavens and the earth, Salcamayhua drew a large sketch showing how the wall had looked before Huascar replaced the oval shape with the Sun’s image. (By this, Huascar also adding to his name the epithet Inti ("Sun") meaning that it was he, and not his half brother, who was the true offspring of the original Sons of the Sun). The sketch has survived because Francisco de Avila.... kept it among his papers. He also scribbled on and around the sketch notations explaining the images, using the Quechus and Aymara terms given by the natives and his own Castillian Spanish. When these notations are removed one gets a clear picture of what had been depicted above the altar.

Following are guidelines, Mr. Sitchin goes to more detail in his book:

long crisscrossed object at the bottom;
terrestrial symbols: people, an animal, a river, mountains, a lake, etc. at the bottom part;
celestial images: Sun, Moon, stars, the enigmatic oval, etc. in the upper part.

"....Markham saw in the upper part "a stellar chart which is a veritable key to the cosmogony and astronomy of ancient Peru," and was certain that the gabled triangular tip was a hieroglyph for "sky." S.K. Lothrop (Inca Treasure) stated that the images above the great Altar "formed a cosmogony tale of the creation of heaven and earth, the Sun and Moon, the first Man and Woman." All are agreed that Salcamayhua had stated, it represented "what the heathens thought" - the sum total of their religious beliefs and legendary tales; a saga of Heaven and Earth and the bond between them.

"....Since the Sun was thus depicted (to the left of the oval), what did the central image, the great oval, represent? The tales describe how this symbol alternated with the Sun in being worshipped and venerated in Inca times. Its identity is clearly explained by a notation that reads, "Illa Ticci Uuiracocha, Pachac Acachi. Quiere decir imagen del Hacedor del cielo y de la tierra." Translated, it means "Illa Ticci Viracocha, Maker of All; that is to say, image of the Creator of Heaven and Earth."

"But why was Viracocha depicted as an oval?

"One of the principal researchers of the subject, R. Lehmann-Nitsche.... developed the thesis that the oval shape represented the "Cosmic Egg," a theogonic idea that is echoed in Greek legends, in Hindu religions, "even in Genesis." It is the oldest theogony whose details have not been grasped by white authors." It had been represented in the sanctuaries of the Indo-European deity Mithra as an egg surrounded by the constellations of the zodiac. "Perhaps one day Indianologists will see the similarities in the details and cult of Viracocha, Brahma with the seven eyes, and the Israelite Yahweh.... In the classic antiquity and in the Orphic cult were sacred images of the Mystic Egg; why shouldn’t the same happen in the great sanctuary of Cuzco?

"....But he (Lehmann-Nitsche) and others seem to ignore the fact the elliptical shape has superimposed on it (at the bottom) a star symbol. If, as it seems, the elliptical or oval shape applies to one more celestial body (besides the five above and four below), it spells to us the "oval" that is found in nature - not on Earth, but in the heavens: it is the natural curve of a planet’s orbit around its sun. It is we suggest, the orbital path of a planet in our Solar System.

"What the sacred wall depicted, we must conclude, was not distant or mysterious constellations, but our own Solar System, with the Sun, the Moon, and ten planets, adding up to a total of twelve.... The two groups (of celestial bodies) are divided by the vast elliptical orbit of the twelfth member of the Solar System. To the Incas, it represented the celestial Viracocha.

"Should we be surprised to find that this was exactly the Sumerian view of our Solar System?

Mr. Sitchin explains more at length (in his book) other symbols found on the depiction, like:

In the skies:
a starry sky, depicts bright nights in "summer";
clouds, depict "winter";
fierce animal under clouds, represents a zodiac sign for winter "Leo,"

which is unusual because there are no lions in South America;
a star under the starry sky, represents the solstice (then) when the Sun was seen in the zodiac constellation of the Lion (UR.GULA in Sumerian).

And on Earth:

the first Man and Woman, Eden, a large river, a serpent, mountains, a sacred lake. An Incan "panorama of the world," in the words of Lehmann-Nitsche. It would be more accurate to say, the Pictorial Bible of the Andes.

"....The elements in this part of the pictorial composition could well serve to illustrate the Mesopotamian-biblical tales of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.... The Sumerian E.DIN (from which Eden stems) was the valley of the great river Euphrates, emanating from the high mountains in the north. This geography is clearly depicted on the wall’s right, where a globe representing Earth bears the notation "Pacha Mama" - Mother Earth. Even the Rainbow which featured in the Near Eastern tales of the Deluge, appears here.

" (While all accept that the globe or circle marked Pacha Mama represents the Earth, none have stopped to wonder how the Incas knew that the Earth was round. The Sumerians, however, were aware of the fact and depicted the Earth and all the other planets accordingly).

"The group of seven dots below the Earth (in the Inca depiction) has given scholars endless problems.... adhering to the erroneous notions of the Pleiades.... that portion of the constellation Taurus.... "the seven eyes of the supreme god...." But we have already shown that the seven dots, the number seven, was the designation of Earth itself in the Sumerian enumeration of the planets. The symbol "seven" is thus exactly where it belongs, as a caption for the globe of the Earth (rather than at the top or bottom of the depiction).

The last image on the sacred wall is that of a great lake connected by a waterway to a smaller body of water. The notation on this is "Mama Cocha," Mother Water. All are agreed that this represents the Andean sacred lake, Lake Titicaca, by depicting it, the Incas had taken the story of Creation from the Heavens to Earth and from the Garden of Eden to the Andes.

"Lehmann-Nitsche summed the meaning and message of the composite depiction on the wall above the Great altar by saying, "it takes man from the ground to the stars." It is doubly amazing that it takes the Incas to the other side of the Earth.

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