Chapter Nine
CITIES LOST AND FOUND
 

"The discovery of the story of Genesis, in its original Mesopotamian version, depicted on the Inca Holy of Holies, raises a host of questions. The first obvious one is, How - how did the Incas come to know these tales, not just in the general manner in which they have become known universally (the creation of the first couple, the Deluge), but in a manner that follows the Epic of Creation including knowledge of the complete Solar System and the orbit of Nibiru?

"....In the absence of written records as one finds in the ancient Near East, the choice of an answer depends to some extent on how one answers another question: Who, indeed, were the Incas?

"The Relacion of Salcamayhua is a good example of the Incas’ attempt to perpetuate an exercise in state propaganda: the attribution of the revered name Manco Capac to the first Inca monarch, Inca Roca, in order to make the people they had subjugated believe that the first Inca was the original "Son of the Sun," fresh out of the Lake Titicaca. In fact, the Inca dynasty began some 3,500 years after that hallowed beginning. Also, the language that the Incas spoke was Quechua, the language of the people of the central-north Andes, whereas in the highlands of Lake Titicaca the people spoke Aymara. That, and other considerations, have led some scholars to speculate that the Incas were latecomers who had arrived from the east, settling in the Cuzco valley that borders on the great Amazon plain.

"....While attention has been focused on the depiction on the wall above the High Altar, no one has wondered why, in the midst of peoples who had made images of their gods and who placed their idols and gods in shrines and temples, there was no idol whatsoever in the great Inca temple, nor in any other Inca shrine.

"The Chroniclers relate that an "idol" was carried during some celebrations, but it was the image of Manco Capac, not of a god. They also relate that on a certain holy day a priest would go to a distant mountain upon which there stood a large idol of a god, and would sacrifice there a llama. But the mountain and its idol were from pre-Inca times....

"....Interestingly, the two customs are in line with biblical commandments from the time of the Exodus. The prohibition against making and worshipping idols was included in the Ten Commandments. And on the Eve of the Day of Atonement, a priest had to sacrifice a "sin-goat" in the desert.... There is the matter of the rules of succession, by which the legal heir was the son by a half sister - a Sumerian custom followed by the Hebrew patriarchs. And there was the customs of circumcision in the Inca royal family.

"Peruvian archaeologists have reported intriguing finds in the Amazonian provinces of Peru, including the apparent remains of stone-built cities, especially in the valleys of the Utcubamba and Marañon rivers. There are undoubtedly "lost cities" in the tropical zones, but in some instances the announced discoveries are really expeditions to known sites.... There have been reports of aerial sightings of "pyramids" on the Brazilian side of the border, of lost cities such as Akakor, and Indian tales of ruins holding untold treasures.... In the national archives in Rio de Janeiro there is purportedly an eighteenth-century report recording a lost city seen by Europeans in 1591.... It was the main reason for an expedition by Colonel Percy Fawcett whose mysterious disappearance in the jungles is still a subject of popular-science articles.

"....Humboldt’s reports of his travels across the continent mention a tradition that people from across the sea landed in Venezuela and proceeded inland; and the principal river of the Cuzco valley, the Urubamba, is but a tributary of the Amazon.... At one site near the mouth of the Amazon, pottery urns decorated with incised patterns that remind one of the designs of the earthenware jars from Ur (the Sumerian birthplace of Abraham) have been found....

"....According to L. Netto, Investigacioes sobre a Archaeologia Braziliera, similarly decorated urns and vases "of superior quality" have been found farther up the Amazon. And, we believe, an equally important route connecting the Andes with the Atlantic Ocean did exist farther to the south.

"Still, it is uncertain that the Incas themselves came this way. One of their ancestry versions attributes their beginnings to a landing on the Peruvian coast. Their language, Quechua, bears Far Eastern resemblances both in word meanings and dialect. And they clearly belong to the Amerindian stock - the fourth branch of mankind that, we have ventured to suggest, stemmed from the line of Cain. (A guide in Cuzco, hearing of our biblical expertise, asked whether In-ca might have stemmed from Ca-in by reversing the syllables. One wonders!)

"The evidence at hand, we believe, indicates that the Near Eastern tales and beliefs, including knowledge of the story of Nibiru and the Anunnaki who had come from there to Earth - the pantheon of twelve - were brought to the predecessors of the Incas from overseas. It took place in the days of the Ancient Empire; and the bearers of these tales and beliefs were also Strangers From Across the Seas, but not necessarily the same ones who brought similar tales, beliefs, and civilization to Mesoamerica.

"....Let us return to Izapa, a site near the Pacific coast where Mexico and Guatemala meet and where the Olmecs and the Maya rubbed shoulders.... It had the customary pyramids and ball courts; but it has mostly amazed archaeologists by its carved stone monuments.... It was art belonging to the Early and Middle Preclassic Olmec, adopted by the Maya as the site changed hands....

Religious, cosmological, and mythological themes intermingled with historical subjects are expressed in the stone carvings.... Of particular interest here is a large carved stone whose face measures some thirty square feet, designated by the archaeologists Izapa Stela 5 (click image right), found in conjunction with a major stone altar. The complicated scene has been recognized by various scholars as a "fantastic visual myth" concerning the "genesis of humanity" at a Tree of Life that grows by a river. The mythical-historical tale is told by an old bearded man seated on the left, and is retold by a Maya-looking man on the right (of the stela’s observer)....

"....The left hand panel, when enlarged, clearly reveals details which we consider extremely important clues. The bearded man tells his story over an altar that bears the symbol of the umbilical cutter; this was the symbol by which Ninti.... was identified on cylinder seals and on monuments. When the Earth was divided among the gods she was given dominion over the Sinai peninsula.... they called her Hathor and depicted her with cow’s horns, as on this Creation of Man scene. These "coincidences" reinforce the conclusion that the Izapa Stela illustrates none other than the Old World tales of the Creation of Man and the Garden of Eden.

"And finally there are portrayals of pyramids, smoothed sided as at Giza on the Nile, depicted here at the bottom of the panel beside a flowing river. Indeed, as one examines and reexamines this millennia-old panel, one must agree that a picture is a worth a thousand words.

"Legends and archaeological evidence indicate that the Olmecs and the Bearded Ones did not stop at the edge of the ocean (Mexico), but pushed on southward into Central America and the northern lands of South America.

"....The legends in the equatorial and northern parts of the Andes recalled not only the arrival by sea of their own ancestors (such as Naymlap), but also two separate ones by "giants." One had occurred in ancient empire times, the other in Mochica times. Cieza de Leon described the latter thus:

"There arrived on the coast, in boats made of reeds as big as large ships, a party of men of such size that, from the knee downward their height was as great as the entire height of an ordinary man...."

They dug wells in the living rock, but for food they raided the natives’ provisions. They also violated the natives’ women, for there were no women among the landing giants. The Mochica depicted these giants who had enslaved them on their pottery, painting their faces in black, while that of the Mochica was painted white. Also found in Mochica remains are clay portrayals of older men with white beards.

"It is our guess that these unwanted visitors were Olmecs and their bearded Near Eastern companions who were fleeing the uprisings in Mesoamerica, circa 400 B.C.... Archaeological expeditions to the equatorial areas of the Pacific coast have found enigmatic monoliths that stem from that fearsome period. The George C. Heye expedition, found in Ecuador giant stone heads with humanlike features but with fangs as though they were ferocious jaguars. Another expedition found at San Agustin, a site closer to the Colombian border, stone statues portraying giants, sometimes shown holding tools or weapons, their facial features are those of the African Olmecs.

San Agustin findings, Colombia, South America

"These invaders may have been the source of the legends current also in these lands of how Man was created, of a Deluge, and of a serpent god who demanded an annual tribute of gold.

"....The equatorial natives worshipped a pantheon of twelve, a number of great significance and an important clue. It was headed by a triad consisting of the Creation god, the Evil god, and the Mother Goddess; and it included the god of the Moon, God ranked higher than the Sun God.... The head of the pantheon was called in the Chibcha dialect Abira - remarkably similar to the Mesopotamian divine epithet Abir, which meant Strong, Mighty; and the Moon God, as we have noted, was called "Si" or "Sian," which parallels the Mesopotamian name Sin for that deity.

"The pantheon of these South American natives therefore brings inevitably to mind the pantheon of the ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean - of the Greeks and the Egyptians, the Hittites and the Canaanites and Phoenicians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians - all the way back to where it all began: to the Sumerians of Southern Mesopotamia from whom all others had obtained the gods and their mythologies.

ASCENDING BACK

"The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and the planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god’s attributes).

At this point Mr. Sitchin briefly lists the head of the pantheon: Anu, his spouse Antu and the two principal sons of Anu: E.A/Enki Firstborn but not from Antu; and EN.LIL/Enlil a son through Antu, Anu’s half sister, therefore the Heir. Enki led the first mission to Earth:

"....His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as a way to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet’s stratosphere.

Eventually Enlil also came down from Nibiru. Much later the division of the land was decided and to Enki and his sons was given:

"....The lands of Ham - the brown/black people - of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and gold mines of southern and western Africa - a vital and cherished prize.

"The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil - Ninurta, Sin, Adad, together with Sin’s twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the land of the Semites and Indo-Europeans:

• Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia

• Ninurta ("Enlil’s Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria

• Adad ("The Thunderer" Mercury) Asia Minor, (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon

• Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization

• Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai Peninsula

The Inhabited Earth was divided among the warring Clans....
 

To the sons of Enlil:

To Ninurta, Elam and Assyria were given.

To Adad,

Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon

To Enlil’s grandchildren was given:
To Shamash, the Sinai Peninsula was given to him, to be in charge of the Spaceport.

And to Ishtar was given,

the Indus Valley Civilization

This division.... gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham - the brown/black people - of Africa.

"A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki’s Egyptian name was Ptah, ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent (African) with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks) - a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids.

Enki shared the African Continent with his sons:

"It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world.... to the lands of Central America and beyond.

"For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

"Before the Incas and the Chimu and the Mochica, a culture named by scholars Chavin flourished in the mountains that lie in northern Peru between the coast and the Amazon basin.... It takes us back to at least 1500 B.C.; and like the Olmec in Mexico at the same time, it arose suddenly, with no apparent prior development.

"....The Chavin culture appeared to have been centered at a site called Chavin de Huantar near the village of Chavin. It is situated at an elevation of 10,000 feet in the Cordillera Blanca.... An area of some 30,000 feet was flattened and terraced and made suitable for the construction of complex structures.... Not only do the buildings and plazas form precise rectangular and squares, they have also been precisely aligned with the cardinal points, with east-west as the major axis.

"....The largest building was at the southwest corner, measured about 240 by 250 feet.... The exterior’s precision was exceeded by the interior complexity. Within the three structures there ran corridors and mazelike passages, intermingled with connecting galleries, rooms and staircases, or leading to dead ends and therefore nicknamed labyrinths.... there are niches and protrusions for no apparent purpose; and vertical or sloppy shafts that the archaeologist thought might have served for ventilation.

"What was Chavin the Huantar built for?  The only plausible purpose that its discoverers could see was that of a religious center, a kind of ancient "Mecca."

"....Three fascinating and most enigmatic relics found at the site:

*  in the main building the Tello Obelisk, named so for his discoverer, rich in design, conveys all the tales and myths, plus geometrical figures.

*  at a nearby estate a carved stone called the Raimondi Monolith was found.... it depicts an anthropomorphic figure.... holding a weapon in each hand, like a thunderbolt.... his face gives the impression (to Mr. Sitchin and his party) of a face of a bull, "completely absent in South America, but one that featured considerably in the lore and iconography of the ancient Near East. Significantly (in the opinion of Mr. Sitchin’s party) it was the "cult animal" of Adad, and the mountain range in his domain, in Asia Minor, is still called to this very day the "Taurus Mountains."

"A third unusual and enigmatic carved stone column at Chavin the Huantar is called El Lanzon because of its lancelike shape. It is twelve feet high ( also apparently depicting the anthropomorphized face of a bull, and it has remained in the middle building where it was discovered).

"....It was by and large the high artistic level of the artifacts rather than the complex and unusual structures that so impressed scholars and led them to consider Chavin as the "matrix culture" of north-central Peru, and to believe that the site was a religious center. But that the purpose was not religious and rather utilitarian seems to be indicated by recent finds at Chavin de Huantar. This latest excavations revealed a network of subterranean tunnels hewed out of the native rock; they honey-combed the whole site, both under built as well unbuilt parts, and served to connect several series of underground compartments arranged in a chainlike manner.

"The openings of the tunnels.... seemed to connect the two river tributaries that flank the site, one (due to the mountainous terrain) above it and the other in the valley below it.... Why did the ingenious builders place their structures at such a vulnerable spot?

"They did so, we hold, on purpose. They ingeniously used the two levels of the tributaries to create a powerful, controlled flow of water needed for the processes that were carried out at Chavin de Huantar. For there, as at many other sites, such devices of flowing water were used in the panning of gold.

"....Who was there at Chavin de Huantar...? Reminiscent of the Olmec art of Mexico. The enchanting objects include a jaguar-cat receptacle, a feline bull, an eagle-condor, a turtle basin, a large number of vases and other objects decorated with glyphs created of entwined fangs - a motive decorating wall slabs as well as artifacts. There were, however, also stone slabs covered with Egyptian motifes - serpents, pyramids, the sacred eye of Ra. And as though this variety was insufficient, there were fragments of carved stone blocks that depicted Mesopotamian motifs, such as deities within Winged Disks or (engraved on bones) images of gods wearing conical headdresses, the headgear by which Mesopotamian gods were identified.

"The deities wearing the conical headdresses have facial features that have an "African" look.... Could it be that Africans-negroid, Egyptian-Nubian - were ever at this South American site at its earliest time? The surprising answer is yes. There are indeed black Africans here and at nearby sites (especially at one called Sechin), and they left their portraits behind.

"....The age of Chavin suggests that the first wave of these Old World, both Olmec and Semitic migrants had arrived there circa 1500 B.C. Indeed, it was the reign of the 12^th monarch of the Ancient Empire that, as Montesinos chronicled, "news reached Cuzco of the disembarking on the coast of some men of great stature.... giants who were settling on the whole coast" and who possessed metal implements.... but the giants provoked the Great God and he destroyed them. These events had taken place before the standstill of the Sun that had occurred circa 1400 B.C. - i.e, circa 1500 B.C., the very time at which Chavin de Huantar’s waterworks were built.
 

Artefacts in Moche Warrior Tomb.

"This, it must be pointed out, is not the same incident reported by Garcilaso, about giants who despoiled the land and raped women - an occurrence in Moche times, circa 400 B.C.

"....Thus it was, after some 1,000 years in the northern Andes and almost 2,000 years in Mesoamerica, that the African-Semitic presence had come to a tragic end.
 

"Although some of the Africans may have gone further south, as finds at Tiahuanaco attest, the African-Semitic extension into the Andes from Mesoamerica appears to have not gone beyond the Chavin-culture area. The tales of the giants stricken by divine hand may hold more than a kernel of fact; for it is quite possible that there, in the Northern Andes, two realms of two gods had met, with an unseen boundary between jurisdictions and human subordinates.

"We say this because, in that very zone, other white men had been present. They were portrayed in stone busts, nobly clad, wearing turbans or headbands with symbols of authority, and decorated with what scholars call "mythological animals." These bust-statues have been mostly found at a site near Chavin named Aija.

"....Is it possible that people from those distant lands (Asia Minor, Elam and later from the Indus Valley) had crossed the Pacific and come to the Andes in prehistoric times?.... An ancient Near Eastern hero whose tales were told and retold, Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk (the biblical Erech) who had reigned circa 2900 B.C.; he went in search of the hero of the Deluge story whom the gods had granted (according to the Mesopotamian version) immortality.... One of his heroic deeds, the wrestling with and defeat of two lions with his bare hands, was a favorite pictorial depiction by ancient artists, as this one on a Hittite monument. (image left)

"Amazingly, the same depiction appears on stone tablets from Aija and a nearby site, callejon the Huaylas in the Northern Andes. If legends be the guide, they preceded the two waves of African "giants" and Mediterranean Bearded Ones, and could have been the earliest settlers of which the tale of Naymlap recounts. The traditional landing site for that arrival has been the Peninsula of Santa Elena (now Ecuador), with its nearby La Plata island, just out in the Pacific. Archaeological excavations have confirmed early settlements there, beginning with what is called Valdivian Phase circa 2500 B.C. Among the finds reported.... were stone statuettes, with the same straight-nose features as well as a symbol on pottery that was the Hittite hieroglyph for "gods."

"....The handiwork of the megalithic builders - Indo-European guided by their gods? - which began south of Chavin has left its mark all the way south into the valley of the Urubamba river and beyond.

"....West-southwest of Cuzco, on the way to the town of Abancay, lie the ruins of Sayhuiti-Rumihuasi. As the other sites it is also situated near the junction of a river and a smaller stream.... The Great Monolith was found there.... at a distance it appears as an immense bright egg.... its bottom part has been carefully shaped as an ovoid.... the upper part represents in all probability a scale model of some unknown area.... (plus other features, shaped with geometric precision which Mr. Sitchin likens to dies or matrixes for the casting of some ultramodern instruments.)

"One of the better known sites, just east of Sacsahuaman, is called Kenko - a name which in the native tongue means "Twisting Channels."

KENKO Shrine near Cuzco

"The main tourist attraction there is a huge monolith standing on a podium that it may have represented a lion or other large animal standing on its hind legs. In front of the monolith is a six-foot high wall built of beautiful ashlars, surrounding the monolith in a circle. The monolith stands in front of an immense natural rock and the circular wall reaches and ends at the rock as a pincer. In the back the rock has been cut, carved, an shaped into several levels connected by staggered platforms. Zigzagging channels have been cut in the rock’s artificially sloping sides and the rock’s interior has been hewed out to create labyrinthine tunnels and chambers. Nearby a cleft in the rock leads to a cavelike opening that has been hollowed out with geometric precision to form stone features that some describe as thrones and altars.

Mr. Sitchin mentions a few more sites where more carvings of precise features have been found on stone, water appearing to be of most importance to have a relation with these stone features.

"....But what was Sacsahuaman itself, now that the notion of its having been built by the Incas as a fortress is completely discredited? One is the fact that walls, conduits, receptacles, channels, and the like have been created both out of the living rock and with the aid of perfectly shaped large ashlars, many of the polygonal kind of the Megalithic Age, to form a series of water-channeling structures one above the other; rain or spring water could thus be made to flow in a regulated manner from level to level.

"The other aspect is the uncovering of a huge circular area enclosed by megalithic ashlars, that by all opinions served as a reservoir. Also uncovered was a sluice-chamber built of megalithic ashlars, that lies underground at a level permitting the running off of the water from the circular reservoir.... the channel leading away from this sluice-chamber leads to the Chingana or "Labyrinth" carved out of the native rock behind and below this circular area.... It all looks like a large-scale gold-panning facility. The water was finally flowed off through the sluice-chamber, and out and away through the labyrinth. In the stone vats, what remained was gold.

"What then did the megalithic, colossal zigzagging walls, at the edge of the promontory, protect or support? To this question there is still no clear answer, except to surmise that some kind of massive platform was required for the vehicles - airborne, we must presume - that were used to haul the ores and take away the nuggets.

"One site that may have served, or was intended to serve, a similar transportation function, located some sixty miles northwest of Sacsahuaman, is Ollantaytambu. The archaeological remains atop a steep mountain spur, they overlook an opening between the mountains that rise where the Urubamba-Vilcanota and Patcanchar rivers meet. A village that gave its name to the ruins is situated at the bottom of the mountain; the name, meaning: "Restplace of Ollantay," stems from the time an Inca hero prepared there a stand against the Spaniards.

"....The greatest mystery of Ollantaytambu is there: a row of six colossal monoliths that stand on the topmost terrace.... their thickness varies from three to over six feet.... At least two of the monoliths bear the weathered remains of relief decorations; on the fourth one (counting from the left) the design is clearly that of the Stairway symbol; all archaeologists agree that the symbol, which had its origin at Tiahuanacu at Lake Titicaca, signified the ascent from Earth to Heaven or, in reverse, a descent from Heaven to Earth.... One provides a most significant clue: a deep T shape has been cut into it. All the scholars having found such cuts in gigantic stone blocks at Tiahuanacu, had to agree that this groove was intended to hold together two stone blocks with a metal clamp; as a precaution against earthquakes.

"One must therefore wonder how scholars can continue to attribute these remains to the Incas, who did not possess any metal except gold, which is too soft and thus totally unsuitable to hold together colossal stone blocks shaken by an earthquake. Naive too is the explanation that Inca rulers built this colossal place as a gigantic bathhouse, for bathing was one of their cherished pleasures. With two rivers running just at the foothills, why haul immense blocks - some weighing as much as 250 tons - to build a bath up the hill? And all that without iron tools?

"More serious.... the size and the massivity of the stone blocks bring to mind the colossal stone blocks used to construct the unique platform at Baalbek, in the Lebanon mountains. In The Stairway to Heaven we described and examined at length that megalithic platform, and concluded that it was the "landing place" that had been the first destination of Gilgamesh - a landing place for the "aerial ships" of the Anunnaki.

"Whose handiwork was Ollantaytambu? Garcilaso de la Vega wrote that it was "from the very first epoch, before the Incas." Blas Valera stated, "from an era that anteceded the epoch of the Incas... the era of the pantheon of the gods of pre-Inca times." It is time that modern scholars agree.

"It is also time to realize that these gods were the same deities to whom the construction of Baalbeck has been attributed by Near Eastern legends.

"Was Ollantaytambu intended to be a stronghold, as Sacsahuaman might have been, or a landing place, as Baalbeck had been?

"In our previous books we have shown that, in determining the site of their spaceport and "landing places," the Anunnaki first anchored a landing corridor in some outstanding geographical feature (such as Mount Ararat). The flight path within this corridor was then inclined at a precise 45 degrees to the equator. In postdiluvial times, when the spaceport was in the Sinai peninsula and the landing place for airborne craft in Baalbek, the grid followed the same pattern.

"The Torreon at Machu Picchu has, besides the two observation windows in the semicircular section, another enigmatic window that has an inverted stairway opening at its bottom and a wedgelike slit at its top. Our own studies show that a line from the Sacred Rock to the slit to the Intihuatana will run at precise angle of 45 degrees to the cardinal points, thus establishing for Machu Picchu its principal orientation.

"This 45 degree orientation determined not only the layout of Machu Picchu, but also the location of major ancient sites. If one draws on a map of the region a line connecting the legendary stops made by Viracocha from the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, the line will pass Cuzco and continue to Ollantaytambu - precisely at a 45 degree angle to the equator!

"A series of studies and lectures by Maria Schulten de D’Ebneth, summed in her book La Ruta de Wiracocha, showed that the 45 degree line on which Machu Picchu is located fits a grid pattern along the sides of a square tilted at 45 degrees (so that the corners, not the sides, point toward the cardinal points). She confessed that she was inspired to search for this ancient grid by the Relacion of Salcamayhua. Relating the tale of the three windows, he drew a sketch to illustrate the narrative, and gave each window a name: Tampu-Tocco, Maras-Tocco, and Sutic-Tocco. Maria Schulten realized that these are places names. When she applied the tilted square to a map of the Cuzco-Urubamba area, with its northwestern corner at Machu Picchu (alias Tampu-Tocco), she discovered that all the other places fell into the correct positions. She drew lines showing that a 45 degree line originating at Tiahuanacu, combines with squares and circles of define measurements, embraced all the key ancient sites between Tiahuanacu, Cuzco and Quito in Ecuador, including the all important Ollantaytambu.

"No less important is another finding by her. The subangles that she had calculated between the central 45 degree line and sites located away from it, such as Pachacamac’s temple, indicated to her that the Earth’s tilt ("obliquity") at the time this grid was laid out was close to 24º 08’, this means the grid was planned (according to her) 5,125 years before her measurements were done in 1953, in other words, in 3172 B.C.

"It is a determination that confirms our own conclusion that the megalithic structures belong to the Age of Taurus the era between 4000 B.C. and 2000 B.C. And, by combining modern studies with the data provided by the chroniclers, it affirms what the legends kept reiterating:

"It all began in Lake Titicaca.

Return

Chapter Ten
"BAALBEK OF THE NEW WORLD"
 

"Every version of every legend in the Andes points to Lake Titicaca for the Beginning - the place,

• where the great god Viracocha performed his creative feats

• where mankind reappeared after the Deluge

• where the ancestors of the Incas were granted a golden wand with which to establish Andean civilization

If this be fiction, then it is supported by fact; for it is in the shore of Lake Titicaca that the first and greatest city in all of the Americas has stood.

"Its scope, the size of its monoliths, the intricate carvings upon its monuments and its statues have amazed all who have seen Tiahuanacu (as the place has been called) ever since the first chronicler described it for Europeans.... The greatest puzzle of all is the location itself: a barren, almost lifeless place some 13,000 feet - four kilometers - up among the highest Andean peaks that are permanently snow-covered. Why would anyone expend incredible effort to erect colossal edifices out of stone that had to be quarried and brought over for many miles away in this treeless, windswept desolate place?

"The thought struck Ephraim George Squier when he reached the lake a century ago.... "The waters hide a variety of strange fishes, which contribute to support a population necessarily scanty.... The only grain is quinoa.... where the only indigenous animals fit for food are the biscacha, the llama, and the vicuna." Yet in this treeless world, he added, "if tradition be our guide, were developed the germs of Inca civilization" from an earlier, "original civilization which carved its memorials in massive stones, and left them in the plains of Tiahuanaco, and of which no tradition remains except that they are the work of the giants of old, who reared them in a single night."

"A different thought, however, struck him as he climbed up a promontory overlooking the lake and the ancient site.... From a ridge at the southwestern edge of the plain in which the lake is situated, near where the waters flow out southward through the Desaguadero river, he could see not only the lake with its southern peninsulas and islands, but also the snowy peaks to the east.... Dominating the lake is the massive bulk of Illampu, or Sorata, the crown of the continent, the highest mountain of America, rivaling, if not equally in height, the monarchs of the Himalayas; observers vary in their estimates and calculations of its altitude from 25,000 to 27,000 feet." Southward from this outstanding landmark the uninterrupted chain of mountains and peaks "terminates in the great mountain of Illimani, 24,500 feet in altitude.... Nowhere else in the world, perhaps," Squier went on, "can a panorama so diversified and grand be obtained from a single point of view. The whole great tableland of Peru and Bolivia, at its widest part, with its own system of waters, its own rivers and lakes, its own plains and mountains, all framed in by the ranges of the Cordilleras and the Andes, is presented like a map."

"Were these geographical and topographical features the very reason for the selection of the site - at the edge of a great plain basin, with two picks that stand out not only from the ground but also from the skies - just as the twin peaks of Ararat (17,000 and 13,000 feet) and the two pyramids of Giza had served to mark the landing paths of the Anunnaki?

"Unbeknown to Squier, he had raised the analogy, for he had titled the chapter describing the ancient ruins "Tiahuanaco, the Baalbec of the New World"; for that was the only comparison he could think of - a comparison with a place that we have identified as the landing place of the Anunnaki to which Gilgamesh had set his steps five thousand years ago.

"The greatest explorer of Tiahuanaco and its ruins this century has been, without doubt, Arthur Posnansky, a European engineer who moved to Bolivia and devoted his lifetime to unraveling the mysteries of these ruins. As early as 1910 he complained that, from visit to visit, he saw less and less of the artifacts, for the local natives, builders in the capital La Paz, and even the government itself for construction of the railroad, systematically carry off the stone blocks not for their artistic or archaeological value, but as freely available building materials.... Yet the little that remained - mainly because it was too massive to move - impressed him that this were remains of a civilization that disappeared before that of the Incas began, a civilization contemporary with that of Egypt and the Near East.

"Pedro Cieza de Leon, who travelled throughout what is now Peru and Bolivia in the years 1532-1550 reported in his Chronicles that, without doubt, the ruins of Tiahuanaco were "the most ancient place of any that I have yet described."

Another site near Tiahuanako with notable remains is Puma-Punku, so named by the Indians....

"....Here the clamps (to hold the stone blocks together against earthquakes) were made of bronze. That this was so is known because some of these bronze clamps have actually been found. This is certainly a discovery of immense significance, for bronze is a most difficult alloy to produce, requiring the combination of a certain proportion of copper (about 85-90%) with tin; and whereas copper can be found in its natural state, tin must be extracted by difficult metallurgical processes from the ores in which it is contained.

"How was this bronze obtained, and was its availability not only part of the puzzle but also a clue to the answers?
 

"Putting aside the customary explanation that the colossal and intricate structures of Puma-Punku were "a temple," what practical purpose did it serve?.... The German master architect Edmund Kiss.... believed that the mounds and remains flanking and fronting on the four-part collapsed section were elements of a harbour, for the lake had extended that far in antiquity. But this leaves open and even reinforces the question, what was going on at Puma-Punku? What did it import and what products did it ship out at this barren altitude?

"Ongoing excavations at Puma-Punku have uncovered a series of semisubterranean enclosures constructed of perfectly shaped stone blocks. They remind one of the sunken plazas of Chavin de Huantar, and raise the possibility that these were elements - reservoirs, pools, sluice-chambers - of a similar waterwork system.

"....There is absolutely no plausible explanation for these artifacts except to suggest - based on our own present technology - that these were matrixes, dies for the casting of intricate metal parts for some complex and sophisticated equipment that Man in the Andes, or for that matter anywhere else, was absolutely incapable of possessing in pre-Inca times.

"....Arthur Posnansky, who first presented his extraordinary work and insights in the 1914 extensive volumes of Una Metropoli Prehistorica en la America del Sur and, after another three decades of devoted research, in the four-volumed Tihuanacu - Cuna del Hombre de las Americas, combines with an English translation (in 1945). This edition was honored with an official foreword by the Bolivian government (the site ended up in the Bolivian part of the lake after its partition from Peru), and celebrated "the 12,000^th year of Tiahuanacu."

"....The most outstanding (and controversial) conclusion of Posnansky: that Tiahuanacu was millennia old, that its first phase was built when the level of the lake was about one hundred feet higher and before the whole area had been engulfed by an avalanche of water - perhaps the famous Great Flood, thousands of years before the Christian era.... Posnansky, (after much study of the area) concluded that there had been three phases in the history of Tiahuanacu; that it was settled by two races - first the Mongoloid people, then Middle Eastern Caucasians - and at no time by the negroid people.... The main interest was and remains on three major components of the site.

"The one at the southeastern part of the ruins is a hill known as the Akapana. It was probably given originally the shape of a stage-pyramid, and is presumed to have acted as the fortress guarding the site.... Rumors however persisted that it was a place where gold was hidden, and in the eighteenth century a Spaniard named Oyaldeburo was given a mining concession for the Akapana. He cut through the eastern side of the hill to drain off the water, searched the bottom of the reservoir, tore down structures of beautiful ashlars, and dug deep into the hill wherever he found channels and conduits.

"....That some processing might have taken place in the Akapana is further suggested by the discovery on the surface and in the soil removed from the "reservoir" of large quantities of dark-green rounded "pebbles" that ranged in size from three fourths of an inch to two inches. Posnansky determined that they are crystalline, but neither he nor others (to our knowledge) conducted further tests to determine the nature and origin of these globular objects.

A few more paragraphs, in the book, explain the vast systems of conduits in Tiahuanacu, apparently leading to the Akapana. Mr. Sitchin continues:

"The indications were of extensive ground and underground waterworks at Tiahuanacu; and Posnansky devoted to them a whole chapter in his ultimate work, titled Hydraulic Works in Tihuanacu. Recent excavation have uncovered more stone conduits and water channels, confirming the conclusions of Posnansky.

"The second outstanding edifice at Tiahuanacu needed the least excavating.... Known as the Gate of the Sun, it has been described by Posnansky as "the most perfect and important work.... a legacy and elegant testimony of the cultured people and their leader’s knowledge and civilization." All who have seen it agree, for it is amazing not only by dint of having been cut and shaped out of a single block of stone (measuring about ten by twenty feet and weighing over one hundred tons), but also because of the intricate breathtaking carvings upon it.

"There are niches and geometric carved openings and surfaces on the lower part of the gate’s front and on its back side, but the marveling has been at the carved section on the gate’s upper front part. There a central figure, almost three dimensional though carved only in relief, is flanked by three rows of winged attendants; a lower row of images depicting only the central figure’s face framed by a mendering line, completes the composition.

"There is general agreement that the central and dominant figure is that of Viracocha, holding a scepter or weapon in the right hand and a forked lightning in the other.

By studying all the carvings, Posnansky discovered that the Gate was a solar calendar, discovered the planets that bond Heaven and Earth; the Stairway, the "trademark" of Tiahuanacu. Mr. Sitchin continues:

"He acknowledged that it was a glyph based on the Mesopotamian ziggurats, but noted that he did not think therefore that there had been Sumerians at Tiahuanacu.

All that reinforced his growing sense that the Gate of the Sun was part of a larger structural complex at Tiahuanacu whose purpose and function was to serve as an observatory; and this guided him in his most important and, as it turned out, most controversial work and conclusions.

"Official records of the Commission for the Destruction and Expiation of Idolatry, established by the Spaniards for that clear purpose (although some suspect it was also a cover for treasure hunting), attest that the Commission’s men arrived in Tiahuanacu in 1625. A 1621 report by Father Joseph de Arriaga listed over 5,000 "objects of idolatry" that were obliterated by breaking, melting, or burning. What they did at Tiahuanacu is not known. The Gate of the Sun, as early photographs show, was found in the nineteenth century standing broken in two at the top, with the right-hand part leaning dangerously against the other half.

Posnansky believed that the Gate was not damaged by the Commission, rather they might have not seen it at the time, as it was already fallen and covered by soil. Then there were doubts that whoever re-erected it did not place it on its original site. But this argument had the size and weight of the Gate against it, so the opinion was that the Gate remained on its original site. Mr. Sitchin continues:

"....A huge structure just east of it, called Kalasasaya, was delineated by a series of vertical pillars, which is what the name meant ("The Standing Pillars"), revealing a somewhat rectangular enclosure measuring 450 by 400 feet. Since the axis of this structure appeared to be east-west, some wonder whether the gate should not have stood in the center rather than in the northern edge of the enclosure’s western wall (as it now does).

"....Posnansky found along this axis various stones especially carved to permit astronomical observations; and his conclusions that the Kalasasaya was an ingenious celestial observatory is now accepted as a matter of fact.

"The most obvious archaeological remains of the Kakasasaya have been the standing pillars.... Of particular interest to Posnansky were eleven pillars erected alongside the terrace protruding from the center of the western wall.... His measurements (in relation with the structure).... convinced him that the Kalasasaya was built by people with ultramodern knowledge of astronomy for the precise fixing of the equinoxes as well of the solstices.

"The architectural drawings of Edmund Kiss (Das Sonnentor von Tihuanaku), based on Posnansky’s work as well as on his own measurements and evaluations, envision (probably correctly) the structure inside the enclosure as a hollow stage-pyramid: a structure whose outer walls rise in stages but only to surround a central open-air square courtyard. The principal monumental stairway was in the center of the eastern wall; the principal observation points were in the centers of the two wider terraces that completed the "pyramid" on the west.

"It was on this point that Posnansky made his most startling discovery with the explosive ramifications. By measuring the distances and angles between the two solstice points, he realized that the obliquity of the Earth against the Sun on which the astronomical aspects of the Kalasasaya were based did not conform to the 23.5 degrees of our present era.

"The obliquity of the ecliptic, as the scientific term is, for the orientation of the Kalasasaya’s astronomical lines of sight, he found, was 23o 8’ 48". Based on the formulas determined by astronomers at the International Conference of Ephemerides in Paris in 1911, which takes into account the geographical position and elevation of the site, this meant that the Kalasasaya was built circa 15,000 B.C.!

"Announcing that Tiahuanacu was the oldest city in the world, one that was "built before the Flood," Posnansky inevitably aroused the wrath of the scientific community of his time; for it was held then, based on the theories of Max Uhle, that Tiahuanacu was established some time at the beginning of the Christian era.

After investigations were carried out on site by various entities from Germany and the Vatican it was agreed that:

"....The Kalasasaya was indeed an astronomical-calendrical observatory.... Posnansky was essentially correct about the obliquity.... The astronomical team concluded that the results could indeed indicate a date circa 15,000 B.C., but also one of 9,300 B.C. depending on the curved used.

"Needless to say, even the latter date was simply unacceptable to the scientific community.... Further studies were conducted in Peru and Bolivia, teaming up with Posnansky in Tiahuanacu.... different possible points were taken into consideration.... Rolf Muller published a definite report in the leading scientific journal Baesseler Archiv (vol. 14) in which he stated all the alternatives and concluded that if the angle of 24o 6’ is to be accepted as the most accurate, the obliquity curve would cross this reading at either 10,000 B.C. or 4000 B.C.

"Posnansky was invited to address the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists.... conceding that this was "thorny material," he left the matter hanging by agreeing that it needs further study.

"Such studies have indeed been conducted, even if not directly at Tiahuanacu. We have already mentioned that the calendar of the Incas indicated a Beginning in the Age of the Bull, not of Aries (the Ram).... And we have also referred to the research, along totally different lines of investigation, by Maria Schulten de D’Ebneth which led her to conclude that the Grid of Viracocha conformed to an obliquity of 24o 8’ and thus to the date 3172 B.C. (by her calculations).

"....The official 1981 report by Carlos Ponce Sangines.... states that samples of organic matter found at this location (excavations on the east side of Kalasasaya) gave radiocarbon readings of 1580 B.C....This does not preclude an older age for the stone structures making up the site. Indeed Ponce Sangines himself revealed in a subsequent study.... that new dating techniques called Obsidian Hydration gave the earlier date 2134 B.C. for obsidian objects found at the Kalasasaya.

"But why was Tiahuanaco established, at this site, at that early time?

"In view of our own conclusions that the original (and practical) purpose of Teotihuacan (Mexico) and its edifices was expressed by the site’s waterworks, within and alongside the two pyramids; the water channels inside the Akapana (Bolivia) and throughout Tiahuanacu assume a central role. Was Tiahuanacu established where it was as a processing facility? And if so, of what?

"....The discovery of the "small green pebbles...." Significantly, the boulders in the retaining walls in the piers of Puma-Punku (Kiss had envisioned a quay at the edge of the Lake) have also turned green. That can mean only one thing: exposure to copper, for it is oxidized copper that gives stone and soil their greenish color (just as the presence of oxidized iron rends a red-brown hue).

"What Tiahuanacu was the source of should have been clear from the very meaning of the name of its location: Titicaca.... It was there, the legends tell, that the rays of the Sun had struck Titikalla, the sacred rock.... It was there at the sacred rock, that Viracocha granted the divine wand to Manco Capac.

"....Titi in the Aymara language was the name of a metal - either lead or tin, according to linguists.

"Titikalla, we suggest, meant the "Rock of Tin." Titicaca meant "Stone of Tin." And Lake Titicaca was the lake that was the source of tin.

"Tin, and bronze, were the products for which Tiahuanacu was established - right where its ruins still enchant.

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