Chariots of the Gods (9 page)

The Tibetan books Tantyua and Kantyua also mention prehistoric flying machines, which they call 'pearls in the sky'. Both books expressly emphasise that this knowledge is secret and not for the masses. In the Samarangana Sutradhara whole chapters are devoted to describing airships whose tails spout fire and quicksilver.

The word 'fire' in ancient texts cannot mean burning fire, for altogether some forty different kinds of 'fire', mainly connected with electric and magnetic phenomena are enumerated. It is hard to believe that the ancient peoples should have known that it is possible to win energy from heavy metals and how to do so. However we should not oversimplify and dismiss the old Sanscrit texts as mere myths. The large number of passages from old texts already quoted turns the suspicion that men encountered flying 'gods' in antiquity almost into a certainty. We are not going to get any further with the old approach which scholars unfortunately still cling to: 'That doesn't exist... those are mistakes in translation ... those are fanciful exaggerations by the author or copyists.' We must use a new working hypothesis, to wit one developed from the technological knowledge of our age, to throw light on to the thicket behind which our past lies concealed. Just as the phenomenon of the space-ship in the remote past is explicable, there is also a plausible explanation of the terrible weapons which the gods made use of at least once in those days and which are so frequently described. A passage from the Mahabharata is bound to make us think:

'It was as if the elements had been unleashed. The sun spun round. Scorched by the incandescent heat of the weapon, the world reeled in fever. Elephants were set on fire by the heat and ran to and fro in a frenzy to seek protection from the terrible violence. The water boiled, the animals died, the enemy was mown down and the raging of the blaze made the trees collapse in rows as in a forest fire. The elephants made a fearful trumpeting and sank dead to the ground over a vast area. Horses and war chariots were burnt up and the scene looked like the aftermath of a conflagration. Thousands of chariots were destroyed, then deep silence descended on the sea. The winds began to blow and the earth grew bright. It was a terrible sight to see. The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings. Never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon and never before have we heard of such a weapon.' (C. Roya, Drona Parva 1889.)

The story goes on to say that those who escaped washed themselves, their equipment and their arms, because everything was polluted by the death-dealing breath of the 'gods'. What does it say in the Epic of Gilgamesh? 'Has the poisonous breath of the heavenly beast smitten you?'

Alberto Tulli, formerly Keeper of the Egyptian Department in the Vatican Museum, found a fragment of a text from the time of Tuthmosis III, who lived about 1500 B.C. It relates the tradition that the scribes saw a ball of fire come down from heaven and that its breath had an evil smell. Tuthmosis and his soldiers watched this spectacle until the ball of fire rose in a southerly direction and disappeared from view.

All the texts quoted date from millennia before our era, The authors lived on different continents and belonged to different cultures and religions. There were no special messengers to spread the news in those days and inter-continental journeys were not an everyday occurrence. In spite of this, traditions telling almost the same story come from the four corners of the world and from innumerable sources. Did all their authors have the same bee in their bonnet? Were they all haunted by the same phenomenon? It is impossible and incredible that the chronicles of the Mahabharata, the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the texts of the Eskimos, the Red Indians, the Scandinavians, the Tibetans and many, many other sources should all tell the same stories of flying 'gods', strange heavenly vehicles and the frightful catastrophies connected with these apparitions, by chance and without any foundation. They cannot all have had the same ideas all over the world. The almost uniform texts can only stem from facts, i.e. from prehistoric events. They related what was actually there to see. Even if the reporter in the remote past may have exaggerated his story with fanciful trimmings, much as newsmen do today, the fact, the actual incident, still remains at the core of all exclusive accounts, as it does today. And that incident obviously cannot have been invented in so many places in different ages. Let us make up an example:

A helicopter lands in the African bush for the first time. None of the natives has ever seen such a machine. The helicopter lands in a clearing with a sinister clatter; pilots in battle-dress, with crash-helmets and machine-guns, jump out of it. The savage in his loin-cloth stands stupefied and uncomprehending in the presence of this thing that has come down from heaven and the unknown 'gods' who came with it. After a time the helicopter takes off again and disappears into the sky.

Once he is alone again the savage has to work out and interpret this apparition. He will tell others who were not present what he saw: a bird, a heavenly vehicle, that made a terrible noise and stank, and white-skinned creatures carrying weapons that spat fire. The miraculous visit is fixed and handed down for all time. When the father tells it to his son, the heavenly bird obviously does not get any smaller and the creatures that got out of it become weirder, stronger and more imposing. These and many other embellishments will be added to the story. But the premise for the glorious legend was the actual landing of the helicopter. It did land in the clearing in the jungle and the pilots did climb out of it. From that moment the event is perpetuated in the mythology of the tribe.

Certain things cannot be made up. I should not be ransacking our prehistory for space travellers and heavenly aircraft if accounts of such apparitions only appeared in two or three ancient books. But when in fact nearly all the texts of the primitive peoples all over the globe tell the same story, I feel I must try to explain the objective truths concealed in their pages.

'Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not ...' (Ezekiel 12:2.)

We know that all the Sumerian gods had their counterparts in certain stars. There is supposed to have been a statue to Marduk = Mars, the highest of the gods, that weighed 800 talents of pure gold. If we are to believe Herodotus, that is equivalent to more than 48,000 lb of gold. Ninurta = Sirius was judge of the universe and passed sentence on mortal men. There are cuneiform tablets which were addressed to Mars, to Sirius and to the Pleiades. Time and again Sumerian hymns and prayers mention divine weapons, the form and effect of which must have been completely senseless to the people of those days. A panegyric to Mars says that he made fire rain down and destroyed his enemies with a brilliant lightning flash. Inanna is described as she traverses the heavens, radiating a frightful blinding gleam and annihilating the houses of the enemy. Drawings and even the model of a home have been found resembling a prefabricated atomic bunker; round and massive, with a single strangely framed aperture. From the same period, about 3000 B.C., archaeologists have found a model of a team with chariot, and driver, as well as two sportsmen wrestling, all of immaculate craftsmanship.

The Sumerians, it has been proved, were masters of applied art. Then why did they model a clumsy bunker, when other excavations at Babylon or Uruk have brought much subtler works to light? Quite recently a whole Sumerian library of about 60,000 clay tablets was found in the town of Nippur, 95 miles south of Baghdad. We now possess the oldest account of the Flood, engraved on a tablet in six columns. Five antediluvian cities are named on the tablets: Eridu, Badtibira, Larak, Sitpar and Shuruppak. Two of these cities have not yet been discovered. On these tablets, the oldest deciphered to date, the Noah of the Sumerians is called Ziusudra; he is supposed to have lived in Shuruppak and also to have built his ark there. So we now possess an even older description of the Flood than the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. No one knows whether new finds will not produce still earlier accounts.

The men of the ancient cultures seem to have been almost obsessed with the idea of immortality or rebirth. Servants and slaves obviously laid down voluntarily in the tomb with their masters. In the burial chamber of Shub-At, no less than seventy skeletons lay next to each other in perfect order. Without the least sign of violence, sitting or lying in their brilliantly coloured robes, they awaited the death which must have come swiftly and painlessly—perhaps by poison. With unshakeable conviction, they looked forward to a new life beyond the grave with their masters. But who put the idea of rebirth into the heads of these heathen peoples?

The Egyptian pantheon is just as confusing. The ancient texts of the people on the Nile also tell of mighty beings who traversed the firmament in boats. A cuneiform text to the sun god, Ra, runs:

'Thou couplest under the stars and the moon, thou drawest the ship of Aten in heaven and on earth like the tirelessly revolving stars and the stars at the North Pole that do not set.'

Here is an inscription from a pyramid:

Though art he who directs the sun ship of millions of years.'

Even if the old Egyptian mathematicians were very advanced, it is odd that they should speak of millions of years in connexion with the stars and a heavenly ship. What does the Mahabharata say? 'Time is the seed of the universe.'

In Memphis the god Ptah handed the king two models with which to celebrate the anniversaries of his reign and commanded him to celebrate the said anniversaries for six times a hundred thousand years. Need I add that when the god Ptah came to give the king the models he appeared in a gleaming heavenly chariot and afterwards disappeared over the horizon in it. Today representations of the winged sun and a soaring falcon carrying the sign of eternity and eternal life can still be found on doors and temples at Edfu. There is no known place in the world where such innumerable illustrations of winged symbols of the gods are preserved as in Egypt.

Every tourist knows the Island of Elephantine with the famous Nilometer at Asswan. The island is called Elephantine even in the oldest texts, because it was supposed to resemble an elephant. The texts were quite right—the island does look like an elephant. But how did the ancient Egyptians know that, because this shape can only be recognised from an aeroplane at a great height? For there is no hill offering a view of the island that would prompt anyone to make the comparison.

A recently discovered inscription on a building at Edfu says that the edifice is of supernatural origin. The ground plan was drawn by the deified being Im-Hotep. Now this Im-Hotep was a very mysterious and clever personality— the Einstein of his time. He was priest, scribe, doctor, architect and philosopher rolled into one. In this ancient world, the age of Im-Hotep, the only tools the archaeologists allow its people for working stone are wooden wedges and copper, neither of which is suitable for cutting up granite blocks. Yet the brilliant Im-Hotep built the step pyramid of Sakkara for his king, who was called Zoser. This 197-ft-high edifice is built with a mastery that Egyptian architects were never quite able to equal afterwards. The structure, surrounded by a wall 33 ft high and 1,750 ft long, was called the 'House of Eternity' by Im-Hotep. He had himself buried in it, so that the gods could wake him on their return.

We know that all the pyramids were laid out according to the position of certain stars. Is not this knowledge a bit embarrassing in view of the fact that we have very little evidence of an early Egyptian astronomy? Sirius was one of the few stars they took an interest in. But this very interest in Sirius seems rather peculiar, because seen from Memphis Sirius can only be observed just above the horizon in the early dawn when the Nile floods begin. To fill the measure of confusion to overflowing, there was an accurate calendar in Egypt 4,221 years before our era! This calendar was based on the rise of Sirius (1st Tout= 19th July) and gave annual cycles of more than 32,000 years.

Admittedly the old astronomers had plenty of time to observe the sun, moon and constellations, year in, year out, until they finally decided that all the constellations stand in the same place again after approximately 365 days. But surely it was quite absurd to base the first calendar on Sirius when it would have been easier to use the sun and the moon, besides leading to more accurate results? Presumably the Sirius calendar is a built up system, a theory of probabilities, because it could never predict the appearance of the star. If Sirius appeared on the horizon at dawn at the same time as the Nile flood, it was pure coincidence. A Nile flood did not happen every year, nor did every Nile flood take place on the same day. In which case, why a Sirius calendar? Is there an old tradition here, too? Was there a text or a promise which was carefully guarded by the priesthood?

The tomb in which a gold necklace and the skeleton of an entirely unknown animal were found probably belonged to King Udimu. Where did the animal come from? How can we explain the fact that the Egyptians had a decimal system already at the beginning of the First Dynasty? How did such a highly developed civilisation arise at such an early date? Where do the objects of copper and bronze originate as early as the beginning of the Egyptian culture? Who gave them their incredible knowledge of mathematics and a ready-made writing?

Before we deal with some monumental buildings which raise innumerable questions, let us take another brief glance at the old texts.

Where did the narrators of The Thousand and One Nights get their staggering wealth of ideas? How did anyone come to describe a lamp from which a magician spoke when the owner wished?

What daring imagination invented the 'Open Sesame" incident in the tale of Ali Baba and the forty thieves?

Of course, such ideas no longer astonish us today, for the television set shows us talking pictures at the turn of a switch. And as the doors of most large department stores open by photocells, even the 'Open Sesame' incident no longer conceals any special mystery. Nevertheless the imaginative power of the old story-tellers was so incredible that the books of contemporary writers of science-fiction seem banal in comparison. So it must be that the ancient story-tellers had a store of things already seen, known and experienced ready at hand to spark off their imagination!