Page 402 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Unseen connections?

This epoch was crucial not only for the Ancient Egyptians but for many
peoples in other areas. Indeed, as we saw in Part IV, it was the epoch of
dramatic climate shifts, rapidly rising sea levels, earth movements,
floods, volcanic eruptions, bituminous rains and darkened skies that was
the most probable source of many of the great worldwide myths of
universal cataclysm.
Could it also have been an epoch in which ‘gods’ really did walk among
men, as the legends said?
On the Bolivian Altiplano those gods were known as the Viracochas and
were linked to the astonishing megalithic city of Tiahuanaco, which may
have pre-existed the immense floods in the Andes in the eleventh
millennium BC. Thereafter, according to Professor Arthur Posnansky,
though the flood-waters subsided, ‘the culture of the Altiplano did not
again attain a high point of development but rather fell into a total and
definitive decadence.’
12
Of course, Posnansky’s conclusions are controversial and must be
evaluated on their own merits. Nevertheless, it is interesting that both the
Bolivian Altiplano and Egypt should have been scoured by immense
floods in the eleventh millennium BC. In both areas too, there are signs
that extraordinarily early agricultural experiments—apparently based on
introduced techniques—were attempted and then abandoned. And in
13
both areas important question-marks have been raised over the dating of
monuments: the Puma Punku and the Kalasasaya in Tiahuanaco, for
example, which Posnansky argued might have been built as early as
15,000 BC, and, in Egypt, megalithic structures like the Osireion, the
14
Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza, which John West
and the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch have dated on
geological grounds to earlier than 10,000 BC.
Could there be an unseen connection linking all these beautiful,
enigmatic monuments, the anomalous agricultural experiments of
13,000-10,000 BC, and the legends of civilizer gods like Osiris and
Viracocha?

‘Where is the rest of this civilization?’

As we set out on the road from Abydos to Luxor, where we were to meet
John West, I realized that there was a sense in which all the connections
would look after themselves if the central issue of the antiquity of the
monuments could be settled. In other words, if West’s geological

See Chapter Twelve.
12
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.

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