Page 172 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

summits of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon were level even though
the former was taller. The reason was the same in both cases: the Great
Pyramid was built on lower ground than the Pyramid of Cephren, and the
Pyramid of the Sun on lower ground than the Pyramid of the Moon.
21
Could all this be coincidence? Was it not more logical to conclude that
there was an ancient connection between Mexico and Egypt?
For reasons I have outlined in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen I
doubted whether any direct, causal link was involved—at any rate within
historic times. Once again, however, as with the Mayan calendar, and as
with the early maps of Antarctica, was it not worth keeping an open mind
to the possibility that we might be dealing with a legacy: that the
pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of Teotihuacan might express the
technology, the geographical knowledge, the observational astronomy
(and perhaps also the religion) of a forgotten civilization of the past
which had once, as the Popul Vuh claimed, ‘examined the four corners,
the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth’?
There was widespread agreement among academics concerning the
antiquity of the Giza pyramids, thought to be about 4500 years old. No
22
such unanimity existed with regard to Teotihuacan. Neither the Street of
the Dead, nor the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, nor the Pyramids of the Sun
and the Moon had ever been definitively dated. The majority of scholars
23
believed that the city had flourished between 100 BC and AD 600, but
others argued strongly that it must have risen to prominence much
earlier, between 1500 and 1000 BC. There were others still who sought,
largely on geological grounds, to push the foundation date back to 4000
BC before the eruption of the nearby volcano Xitli.
24
Amid all this uncertainty about the age of Teotihuacan, I had not been
surprised to discover that no one had the faintest idea of the identity of
those who had actually built the largest and most remarkable metropolis
ever to have existed in the pre-Colombian New World. All that could be
25
said for sure was this: when the Aztecs, on their march to imperial power,
first stumbled upon the mysterious city in the twelfth century AD, its
colossal edifices and avenues were already old beyond imagining and so
densely overgrown that they seemed more like natural features than
works of man. Attached to them, however, was a thread of local legend,
26
passed down from generation to generation, which asserted that they had
been built by giants and that their purpose had been to transform men
27
into gods.

21 The Ancient Kingdoms Of Mexico, p. 74; The Traveller’s Key To Ancient Egypt, pp. 110-
35.
22 See, for example, Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids, University of Chicago Press, 1969.
23 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 230-3.
24 Ibid.
The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 282.
25
26 Mysteries of ‘the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 11-12.
27 Ibid.

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