Page 43 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

history ...’22
Hapgood was to make one more important discovery: a Chinese map
copied from an earlier original on to a stone pillar in AD 1137. This map
23
incorporates precisely the same kind of high quality information about
longitudes as the others. It has a similar grid and was drawn up with the
benefit of spherical trigonometry. Indeed, on close examination, it shares
so many features with the European and Middle Eastern maps that only
one explanation seems adequate: it and they must have stemmed from a
common source.
24
We seem to be confronted once again by a surviving fragment of the
scientific knowledge of a lost civilization. More than that, it appears that
this civilization must have been at least in some respects as advanced as
our own and that its cartographers had ‘mapped virtually the entire globe
with a uniform general level of technology, with similar methods, equal
knowledge of mathematics, and probably the same sorts of
instruments’.
25
The Chinese map also indicates something else: a global legacy must
have been handed down—a legacy of inestimable value, in all probability
incorporating much more than sophisticated geographical knowledge.
Could it have been some portion of this legacy that was distributed in
prehistoric Peru by the so-called ‘Viracochas’, mysterious bearded
strangers said to have come from across the seas, in a ‘time of darkness’,
to restore civilization after a great upheaval of the earth?
I decided to go to Peru to see what I could find.

22 Ibid., pp. 244-5.
Ibid., p. 135.
23
24 Ibid., p. 139.
25 Ibid., pp. 139, 145.

41