Page 265 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?
And could the myths be attempts to communicate?

A message in the bottle of time

‘Of all the other stupendous inventions,’ Galileo once remarked,

what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate
his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or
place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not
yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater
difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let
this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.
3
If the ‘precessional message’ identified by scholars like Santillana, von
Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at
communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn’t
just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn’t that have been easier
than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got
destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that
the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the
enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more
than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It
must be obvious that in such circumstances a written legacy to the future
would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense
of it.
What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the
kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically
advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years
into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics
is one of them—and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a
lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.
Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical
points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid
and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most
conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction
of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall
see).
Another ‘constant’ in our solar system is the language of time: the
great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of
precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message
that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be
instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent
for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost

3 Galileo, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 10.

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