Page 183 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

serene.
The Akapana Pyramid in far-off Tiahuanaco had also been surrounded
by water, which had been the dominant motif there—just as I now found
it to be at Teotihuacan.
I began to climb the Pyramid of the Moon. It was smaller than the
Pyramid of the Sun, indeed less than half the size, and was estimated to
be made up of about one million tons of stone and earth, as against two
and a half million tons in the case of the Pyramid of the Sun. The two
monuments, in other words, had a combined weight of three and a half
million tons. It was thought unlikely that this quantity of material could
have been manipulated by fewer than 15,000 men and it was calculated
that such a workforce would have taken at least thirty years to complete
such an enormous task.
22
Sufficient labourers would certainly have been available in the vicinity:
the Teotihuacan Mapping Project had demonstrated that the population
of the city in its heyday could have been as large as 200,000, making it a
bigger metropolis than Imperial Rome of the Caesars. The Project had
also established that the main monuments visible today covered just a
small part of the overall area of ancient Teotihuacan. At its peak the city
had extended across more than twelve square miles and had
incorporated some 50,000 individual dwellings in 2000 apartment
compounds, 600 subsidiary pyramids and temples, and 500 ‘factory’
areas specializing in ceramic, figurine, lapidary, shell, basalt, slate and
ground-stone work.
23
At the top level of the Pyramid of the Moon I paused and turned slowly
around. Across the valley floor, which sloped gently downhill to the
south, the whole of Teotihuacan now stretched before me—a geometrical
city, designed and built by unknown architects in the time before history
began. In the east, overlooking the arrow-straight Street of the Dead,
loomed the Pyramid of the Sun, eternally ‘printing out’ the mathematical
message it had been programmed with long ages ago, a message which
seemed to direct our attention to the shape of the earth. It almost looked
as though the civilization that had built Teotihuacan had made a
deliberate choice to encode complex information in enduring monuments
and to do it using a mathematical language.
Why a mathematical language?
Perhaps because, no matter what extreme changes and transformations
human civilization might go through, the radius of a circle multiplied by
2pi (or half the radius multiplied by 4pi) would always give the correct
figure for that circle’s circumference. In other words, a mathematical
language could have been chosen for practical reasons: unlike any verbal
tongue, such a code could always be deciphered, even by people from

The Riddle of the Pyramids, pp. 188-93.
22
23 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 281. See also The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 178
and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 226-36.

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