Page 363 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in
one?
In The Sirius Mystery, an important book published in 1976, I knew that
the American author Robert Temple had offered some extraordinary
answers to this question. His study focused on the traditional beliefs of
40
the Dogon tribe of West Africa—beliefs in which the binary character of
Sirius was explicitly described and in which the correct figure of fifty
years was given for the period of the orbit of Sirius-B around Sirius-A.
41
Temple argued cogently that this high quality technical information had
been passed down to the Dogon from the Ancient Egyptians through a
process of cultural diffusion, and that it was to the Ancient Egyptians that
we should look for an answer to the Sirius mystery. He also concluded
that the Ancient Egyptians must have received the information from
intelligent beings from the region of Sirius’.
42
Like Temple, I had begun to suspect that the more advanced and
sophisticated elements of Egyptian science made sense only if they were
understood as parts of an inheritance. Unlike Temple, I saw no urgent
reason to attribute that inheritance to extra-terrestrials. To my mind the
anomalous star knowledge the Heliopolitan priests had apparently
possessed was more plausibly explained as the legacy of a lost human
civilization which, against the current of history, had achieved a high level
of technological advancement in remote antiquity. It seemed to me that
the building of an instrument capable of detecting Sirius-B might not have
been beyond the ingenuity of the unknown explorers and scientists who
originated the remarkable maps of the prehistoric world discussed in Part
I. Nor would it have daunted the unknown astronomers and measurers of
time who bequeathed to the Ancient Maya a calendar of amazing
complexity, a data-base about the movements of the heavenly bodies
which could only have been the product of thousands of years of
accurately recorded observations, and a facility with very large numbers
that seemed more appropriate to the needs of a complex technological
society than to those of a ‘primitive’ Central American kingdom.
43

Millions of years and the movements of the stars

Very large numbers also appeared in the Pyramid Texts, in the symbolic
‘boat of millions of years’, for example, in which the Sun God was said to
navigate the dark and airless wastes of interstellar space. Thoth, the
44
god of wisdom (‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the

40 The Sirius Mystery.
41 Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 1.
42
43 See Part III.
44 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. cxi.

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