Page 151 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

pyramid, were the objects I had come all this way to see: several dozen
engraved stelae depicting negroes and Caucasians ... equal in life ...
equal in death.
If a great civilization had indeed been lost to history, and if these
sculptures told part of its story, the message conveyed was one of racial
equality. No one who has seen the pride, or felt the charisma, of the great
negro heads from La Venta could seriously imagine that the original
subjects of these magisterial sculptures could have been slaves. Neither
did the lean-faced, bearded men look as if they would have bent their
knees to anyone. They, too, had an aristocratic demeanour.
At Monte Alban, however, there seemed to be carved in stone a record
of the downfall of these masterful men. It did not look as if this could
have been the work of the same people who made the La Venta
sculptures. The standard of craftsmanship was far too low for that. But
what was certain—whoever they were, and however inferior their work—
was that these artists had attempted to portray the same negroid
subjects and the same goatee-bearded Caucasians as I had seen at La
Venta. There the sculptures had reflected strength, power and vitality.
Here at Monte Alban the remarkable strangers were corpses. All were
naked, most were castrated, some were curled up in foetal positions as
though to avoid showers of blows, others lay sprawled slackly.
Archaeologists said the sculptures showed ‘the corpses of prisoners
captured in battle’.
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What prisoners? From where?
The location, after all, was Central America, the New World, thousands
of years before Columbus, so wasn’t it odd that these images of
battlefield casualties showed not a single native American but only and
exclusively Old World racial types?
For some reason, orthodox academics did not find this puzzling, even
though, by their reckoning, the carvings were extremely old (dating to
somewhere between 1000 and 600 BC ). As at other sites, this time-frame
34
had been derived from tests on associated organic matter, not on the
carvings themselves, which were incised on granite stele and therefore
hard to date objectively.

Legacy

An as yet undeciphered but fully elaborated hieroglyphic script had been
found at Monte Alban, much of it carved on to the same stele as the
35
crude Caucasian and negro figures. Experts accepted that it was ‘the

The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 53.
33
34 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 53; Mexico, p. 671.
35 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 53-4; The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 50.

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