As mentioned previously, the civilisations of time gone by left monuments to remind us that they existed, such as the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt and the city of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia. As Philip Coppens points out in The Lost Civilisation Enigma, civilisation is far older than we assume from what archaeologists lead us to believe. Civilisation existed in Europe, Africa and the Middle East long before the so-called start of civilisation in Mesopotamia around 4,000 BC.
Andrew Collins cites in Gods of Eden the example of Nevali Cori, constructed over 10,000 years ago on the upper Euphrates of Eastern Anatolia. Nevali Cori can hold itself out to be a more realistic description as a “cradle of civilisation” than ancient Mesopotamia, which emerged a full 5,000 years later, and which may have been an area which the Aryans lived at one time. This was a culture sufficiently sophisticated that it was able to produce carved stone pillars so beautiful that they were more in keeping with the megalithic art of Malta or Western Europe, which were created many thousands of years later. The art had immense similari-ties to the Kalasasaya palace court at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, a mysterious city which is referenced shortly.
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Coppens cites many examples across the globe, but his description of Gobekli Tepe, the region where Andrew Collins’ Aryans may have lived (which he describes in his book From the Ashes of Angels:
The Legacy of a Fallen Race), in the highlands of Turkey near the Iraqi and Syrian borders, is particularly fascinating. The place consists of a series of mainly circular and oval structures set in the slopes of a hill.
Here we can see that people had built extraordinary towns and structures as long ago as 10,000 BC. Unlike the discovery of Jerico, the town which dates back to 8,000 BC and created immense interest because of its biblical links, an older discovery in southeastern Turkey cannot raise huge media interest. Gobekli Tepe was not alone; another site, Karahan Tepe in the Tektek mountains, has been dated to 9,500 BC and contains carvings similar to those at Gobekli Tepe.
It is from Graham Hancock’s immense research in Fingerprints of the Gods, however, that we can really get an idea of what was left behind for future civilisations to see. The problem is that because of the devastation of earth in the period from 17,000 BC to 7,000 BC, apart from the huge megalithic structures that still remain, most of what could have helped archaeologists has been washed away, buried or destroyed. But what is left still stretches the imagination. Hancock goes into great detail about why, in defiance of the viewpoint of conven-tional archaeologists, sites like Tiahuanaco may well go back 12,000 years or more. Orthodox archaeology concentrates on the latest layers of occupation and construction without considering the possibility that the origins of the site might be much older. It is well accepted that sacred places remain sacred forever, and new
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religious constructions, such as temples, are often built over the site of older temples or buildings. Teotihuacan in Mexico for example is highly likely to have been a holy place for thousands of years before 4,000 BC, and Mayan script tablets dating to over 12,000 years old have been found in the region. As Zecharia Sitchin points out in When Time Began, Sumerian, and then Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian kings, recorded in their inscriptions, with great pride, how they repaired, embellished, or rebuilt the sacred temples and their precincts. In the early twentieth century, a joint expedi-tion of the University of Pennsylvania and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago spent many years working to unearth the Temple of Enlil in Nippur’s sacred precinct. The excavators found five successive constructions between 2200 BC and 600 BC. The report noted that the five temples were “built one above the other on exactly the same plan”. This principle applied just as precisely in the discovery of later temples. The same applies to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem rebuilt by King Herod.
Carbon-14 dating, for instance, merely dates the organic artefact that has been found. It does not conclu-sively date the site that surrounds the artefact. Videos and websites such as Ancient Aliens Debunked try hard to remove the mystique of these colossal structures that remain, concentrating on their own interpretation of the facts, but the mystery remains. One can believe them, or one can take the views of academics like Arthur Posnansky of the University of La Paz or Oswaldo Rivera, the former Director of Bolivian Archaeology, who believe the site of Tiahuanaco goes back beyond commonly accepted views of when civilisation may
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have existed there. For one thing, the city of Tiahuanaco underwent massive physical movement, having formerly been a port of gigantic proportions and ended up being marooned twelve miles south of Lake Titicaca, with remnants of its port gates such as stone blocks weighing over 400 tons scattered across the site.
“We were here”: Giza, Baalbek and Nasca
The literature on the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, the most famous ancient structures in the world, is too voluminous to discuss in any depth here. However, for readers who wish to obtain an overview on the background to the construction of the pyramids in the area called the Memphite Necropolis (which includes the three Giza pyramids, two large pyramids at Dashour and further pyramids at Zawyat-al-Aryan and Abu Ruwash, and covers about thirty kilometres long by four kilometres wide) an extremely readable book on the subject is The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, published in 1994. The three Giza pyramids are believed to have been constructed during the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt (2613 BC to 2494 BC). However, were they conceived, designed or constructed at an earlier date, perhaps from around 10,450 BC when the pattern of Orion’s Belt was mirrored on the ground by the Giza Pyramids? Perhaps the designers and constructors of the pyramids came from the areas in the sky where the shafts in the Great Pyramid point to: The Orion Belt and Sirius to the south, and Alpha Draconis and Ursa Minor to the north.
Aside from the ground-breaking research of Messrs Bauval and Gilbert, John Anthony West gives a plausible
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explanation, based on water weathering evidence, that the pyramids are far older than archaeologists will countenance. As Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval have postulated, perhaps the pyramids were the ultimate expression of our predecessors saying “we were here”, by laying out the Pyramids to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 BC and, thereby, giving future civilisations a precise marker as to when they were there. The same could be deduced from the astronomical layout of the stones at Nabta Playa, one hundred miles west of Aswan in Egypt, which also references the historical position of Orion.
Alternatively, perhaps the Pyramids were a marker for the reasons given by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson in The Atlantis Blueprint. It cannot be chance that the Pyramids were built right at the centre point on the planet, too. The precision of the construction at that time is still a marvel to behold in today’s technologically advanced world, with no gaps in stone placement. In an age (conservatively placed at over four thousand years ago) when it has been assumed that no modern engineering or construction techniques were known, an incredible thirty million tons of rock was moved around the western desert near modern Cairo.
Sir Flinders Petrie, in 1880, found that the sides of the Great Pyramid of Khufu were lined up almost exactly with the cardinal points of the compass: north, south, east, and west. The accuracy of the alignment is remarkable when one considers the size of the structure.
The orientation towards the cardinal points, the keeping of the base square, and the sloping sides perfect are