Page 445 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

an Atlantis of Plato’s dimensions to have existed in the Atlantic ...
1
The adamant and assertive tone, I had long ago learnt, was entirely
justified. Modern oceanographers had thoroughly mapped the floor of
the Atlantic Ocean and there was definitely no lost continent lurking
there.
But if the evidence that I was gathering did represent the fingerprints of
a vanished civilization, a continent had to have got lost somewhere,
So where? For a while I used the obvious working hypothesis that it
might be under some other ocean. The Pacific was very big but the Indian
Ocean looked more promising because it was located relatively close to
the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent, where several of the earliest known
historical civilizations had emerged with extreme suddenness at around
3000 BC. I had plans to go chasing rumours of ancient pyramids in the
Maldive Islands and along the Somali coast of East Africa to see if I could
pick up any clues of a lost paradise of antiquity. I thought I might even
work in a trip to the Seychelles.
The problem was the oceanographers again. The floor of the Indian
Ocean, too, had been mapped and it didn’t conceal any lost continents.
Ditto every other ocean and every other sea. There seemed to be nowhere
now under water into which a landmass big enough to have nurtured a
high civilization could have vanished.
Yet, as my research continued, the evidence kept mounting that
precisely such a civilization had once existed. I began to suspect that it
must have been a maritime civilization: a nation of navigators. In support
of this hypothesis, among other anomalies, were the remarkable ancient
maps of the world, the ‘Pyramid Boats’ of Egypt, the traces of advanced
astronomical knowledge in the astonishing calendar system of the Maya,
and the legends of seafaring gods like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha.
A nation of navigators, then. And a nation of builders, too: Tiahuanaco
builders, Teotihuacan builders, pyramid builders, Sphinx builders,
builders who could lift and position 200-ton blocks of limestone with
apparent ease, builders who could align vast monuments to the cardinal
points with uncanny accuracy. Whoever they were, these builders
appeared to have left their characteristic fingerprints all over the world in
the form of cyclopean polygonal masonry, site layouts involving
astronomical alignments, mathematical and geodetic puzzles, and myths
about gods in human form. But a civilization advanced enough to build
like that—rich enough, sufficiently well organized and mature to have
explored and mapped the world from pole to pole, a civilization smart
enough to have calculated the dimensions of the earth—simply could not
have evolved on an insignificant landmass. Its homeland, as my
researcher had rightly pointed out, must have been blessed with major
mountain ranges, huge river systems and a congenial climate, and with

1 Galanopoulos and Bacon, Lost Atlantis, p. 75.

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