Page 473 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

We start by preparing for the worst. We assume that there will be
survivors but that they will be blasted back into the Stone Age by the
cataclysm. Realizing that it may take ten or twelve thousand years for a
civilization as advanced as our own to rise again like a phoenix from the
ashes, one of our top priorities is to find a way to communicate with that
postulated future civilization. At the least we would want to say to them:
KILROY WAS HERE! and to be sure they got the message no matter what
language they spoke or what ethical, religious, ideological, metaphysical
or philosophical leanings their society might exhibit.
I’m sure we’d want to say more than just ‘Kilroy was here’. We’d want,
for example, to tell them—those distant grandchildren of ours—when we
had lived in relation to their time.
How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD 2012 of the
Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and
understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would
know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we
express chronology?
One obvious solution would be to make use of the beautiful
predictability of the earth’s axial precession, which has the effect of
slowly and regularly altering the declination of the entire star-field in
relation to a viewer at a fixed point, and which equally slowly and
regularly revolves the equinoctial point in relation to the twelve zodiacal
constellations. From the predictability of this motion it follows that if we
could find a way to declare: WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN THE
CONSTELLATION OF PISCES we would provide a means of specifying our epoch
to within a single 2160-year period in every grand precessional cycle of
25,920 years.
The only drawback to this scheme would become evident if a
civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12,000 or even
20,000 years of the cataclysm, but took much longer—perhaps as much
as 30,000 years. In that case, a monument or calendrical device declaring
‘we lived when the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Pisces’
would no longer be unambiguous. If discovered by a high culture
flourishing at the very beginning of a future Age of Sagittarius for
example it could be read as meaning ‘we lived 4320 years before your
time’—that is, two full precessional ‘months’ prior to the Sagittarian Age
(the 2160-year ‘months’ of Aquarius and Capricorn). But it could also
mean ‘We lived 30,240 years before your time’, that is those two
‘months’ plus the full previous precessional cycle of 25,920 years. The
Sagittarian archaeologists would not only have to use their wits to work
out the meaning of the message (i.e. WE LIVED WHEN THE VERNAL EQUINOX WAS IN
PISCES), but would need to decide from other clues which Age of Pisces we
had lived in: the most recent, or the one in the previous precessional
cycle, or perhaps even the cycle before that.
Geology would naturally be of assistance in making such broad

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