Page 173 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Hints of forgotten wisdom

Leaving the Temple of Quetzalcoatl behind me, I recrossed the Citadel in
a westerly direction.
There was no archaeological evidence that this enormous enclosure had
ever served as a citadel—or, for that matter, that it had any kind of
military or defensive function at all. Like so much else about Teotihuacan
it had clearly been planned with painstaking care, and executed with
enormous effort, but its true purpose remained unidentified by modern
scholarship. Even the Aztecs, who had been responsible for naming the
28
Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon (an attribution which had stuck though
no one had any idea what the original builders had called them) had
failed to invent a name for the Citadel. It had been left to the Spaniards to
label it as they did—an understandable conceit since the 30-acre central
patio of La Ciudadela was surrounded by massively thick embankments
more than 23 feet high and some 1500 feet long on each side.
29
My walk had now brought me to the western extreme of the patio. I
climbed a steep set of stairs that led to the top of the embankment and
turned north on to the Street of the Dead. Once again I had to remind
myself that this was almost certainly not what the Teotihuacanos
(whoever they were) had called the immense and impressive avenue. The
Spanish name Calle de los Muertos was of Aztec origin, apparently based
on speculation that the numerous mounds on either side of the Street
were graves (which, as it happened, they were not).
30
We have already considered the possibility that the Way of the Dead
may have served as a terrestrial counterpart of the Milky Way. Of interest
in this regard is the work of another American, Alfred E. Schlemmer,
who—like Hugh Harleston Jr.—was an engineer. Schlemmer’s field was
technological forecasting, with specific reference to the prediction of
earthquakes, on which he presented a paper at the Eleventh National
31
Convention of Chemical Engineers (in Mexico City in October 1971).
Schlemmer’s argument was that the Street of the Dead might never
have been a street at all. Instead, it might originally have been laid out as
a row of linked reflecting pools, filled with water which had descended
through a series of locks from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern
extreme, to the Citadel in the south.
As I walked steadily northward towards the still-distant Moon Pyramid,
it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favour. For a
start the ‘Street’ was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls,
at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be
seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south

28 Ibid., p. 213.
Ibid.
29
30 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 72.
31 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 271-2.

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