Page 174 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

hydraulic flow since the base of the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that
was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the Citadel.
The partitioned sections could easily have been filled with water and
might indeed have served as reflecting pools, creating a spectacle far
more dramatic than those offered by the Taj Mahal or the fabled Shalimar
Gardens. Finally, the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (financed by the
National Science Foundation in Washington DC and led by Professor Rene
Millon of the University of Rochester) had demonstrated conclusively that
the ancient city had possessed ‘many carefully laid-out canals and
systems of branching waterways, artificially dredged into straightened
portions of a river, which formed a network within Teotihuacan and ran
all the way to [Lake Texcoco], now ten miles distant but perhaps closer in
antiquity’.
32
There was much argument about what this vast hydraulic system had
been designed to do. Schlemmer’s contention was that the particular
waterway he had identified had been built to serve a pragmatic purpose
as ‘a long-range seismic monitor’—part of ‘an ancient science, no longer
understood’. He pointed out that remote earthquakes ‘can cause
33
standing waves to form on a liquid surface right across the planet’ and
suggested that the carefully graded and spaced reflecting pools of the
Street of the Dead might have been designed ‘to enable Teotihuacanos to
read from the standing waves formed there the location and strength of
earthquakes around the globe, thus allowing them to predict such an
occurrence in their own area’.
34

Ibid., p. 232.
32
33 Ibid., p. 272.
34 Ibid.

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