Page 480 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus,
Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up
a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ...
30
Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our
planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation,
and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be
enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?
We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens.
Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less
than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in
the universe:

Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns
away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational
movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh
power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other
and reduces it to helplessness ...
31
In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may
have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when—and why—the
hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think,
after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to
devote more of our resources to studying the signs and messages that
have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia
which our species calls prehistory.
A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be
highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any
threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators
who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of
this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites. The Chlorine-36 rock-
exposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks
like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the
antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Likewise, if the will is there,
32
then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little
door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of

30 See Part V.
31 Manetho, pp. 191-3.
The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor
32
David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The
Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:
‘One way of resolving the controversy of the ages of the Sphinx and the Pyramids may
be through the application of Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating. This provides an
estimate of the time that has elapsed since a rock was first exposed to the atmosphere.
In the case of the Sphinx and the Pyramids this would be when the rocks were first
exposed by quarrying activity ...’
In 1994 Bowen ran preliminary tests on the famous ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge in
England, hitherto believed to date to 2250 BC. What the tests showed was that these 123
four-ton monoliths could have been quarried during the last Ice Age—perhaps as early
as 12000 BC. See The Times, London, 5 December.

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