Page 68 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

able to count a total of thirty-three angles, every one intermeshed
faultlessly with a matching angle on an adjoining block. There were
massive polygons and perfect ashlars with razor-sharp edges. There were
also natural, unhewn boulders integrated into the overall design at a
number of points. And there were strange and unusual devices such as
the Intihuatana, the ‘hitching post of the sun’. This remarkable artefact
consisted of an elemental chunk of bedrock, grey and crystalline, carved
into a complex geometrical form of curves and angles, incised niches and
external buttresses, surmounted at the centre by a stubby vertical prong.

Jigsaw puzzle

How old is Machu Picchu? The academic consensus is that the city could
not have been built much earlier than the fifteenth century AD.
9
Dissenting opinions, however, have from time to time been expressed by
a number of more daring but respectable scholars. In the 1930s, for
example, Rolf Muller, professor of Astronomy at the University of
Potsdam, found convincing evidence to suggest that the most important
features of Machu Picchu possessed significant astronomical alignments.
From these, through the use of detailed mathematical computations
concerning star positions in the sky in previous millennia (which
gradually alter down the epochs as the result of a phenomenon known as
precession of the equinoxes), Muller concluded that the original layout of
the site could only have been accomplished during ‘the era of 4000 BC to
2000 BC’.
10
In terms of orthodox history, this was a heresy of audacious
proportions. If Muller was right, Machu Picchu was not a mere 500 but
could be as much as 6000 years old. This would make it significantly
older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt (assuming, of course, that one
accepted the Great Pyramid’s own orthodox dating of around 2500 BC).
There were other dissenting voices concerning the antiquity of Machu
Picchu, and most, like Muller, were convinced that parts of the site were
thousands of years older than the date favoured by orthodox historians.
11
Like the big polygonal blocks that made up the walls, this was a notion

The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 163.
9
10 Cited in Zecharia Sitchin, The Lost Realms, Avon Books, New York, 1990, p. 164.
11 Another scholar, Maria Schulten de D'Ebneth, also worked with mathematical methods
(as opposed to historical methods which are heavily speculative and interpretive). Her
objective was to rediscover the ancient grid used to determine Machu Picchu's layout in
relation to the cardinal points. She did this after first establishing the existence of a
central 45° line. In the process she stumbled across something else: ‘The sub-angles
that she calculated between the central 45° line and sites located away from it ...
indicated to her that the earth's tilt ("obliquity") at the time this grid was laid out was
close to 24° o’. This means that the grid was planned (according to her) 5125 years
before her measurements were done in 1953; in other words in 3172 BC.’ The Last
Realms, pp. 204-5.

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