Page 120 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Diego de Duran, a conscientious and courageous collector of
indigenous traditions, was yet another Franciscan who fought to recover
the lost knowledge of the past. He visited Cholula in AD 1585, a time of
rapid and catastrophic change. There he interviewed a venerated elder of
the town, said to have been more than one hundred years old, who told
him this story about the making of the great ziggurat:
In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this place, Cholula,
was in obscurity and darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled
in every part by water, without tree or created thing. Immediately after the light
and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature
who possessed the land. Enamoured of the light and beauty of the sun they
determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky. Having
collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen
with which they speedily commenced to build the tower ... And having reared it to
the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached the sky, the Lord of the Heavens,
enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky, ‘Have you observed how they of the
earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamoured of
the light of the sun and his beauty? Come and confound them, because it is not
right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.’ Immediately
the inhabitants of the sky sallied forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the
edifice and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth.
18
It was this story, almost but not quite the biblical account of the Tower of
Babel (which was itself a reworking of a far older Mesopotamian
tradition), that had brought me to Cholula.
The Central American and Middle Eastern tales were obviously closely
related. Indeed, the similarities were unmissable, but there were also
differences far too significant to be ignored. Of course, the similarities
could be due to unrecorded pre-Colombian contacts between the cultures
of the Middle East and the New World, but there was one way to explain
the similarities and the differences in a single theory. Suppose that the
two versions of the legend had evolved separately for several thousands
of years, but prior to that both had descended from the same remotely
ancient ancestor?

Remnants

Here’s what the Book of Genesis says about the ‘tower that reached to
heaven’:
Throughout the earth men spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary.
Now as they moved eastwards they found a plain in the land of Shinar, where they
settled. There they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them
in the fire.’ For stone they Used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come,’
they said, ‘let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven.
Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the

18 Diego de Duran, ‘Historia antiqua de la Nueve Espana’, (1585), in Ignatius Donelly,
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 200.

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