Page 83 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

still spoken hereabouts: ‘Hake means “people” or “men”; Apana means
“to perish” (probably by water). Thus Akapana is a place where people
perish ...’
7
Another commentator, however, after making a careful assessment of
all the characteristics of the hydraulic system, proposed a different
solution, namely that the sluices had most probably been part of ‘a
processing technique—the use of flowing water for washing ores,
perhaps?’
8

Gateway of the Sun

Leaving the western side of the enigmatic pyramid, I made my way
towards the south-west corner of the enclosure known as the Kalassaya. I
could now see why it had been called the Place of the Upright Standing
Stones for this was precisely what it was. At regular intervals in a wall
composed of bulky trapezoidal blocks, huge dagger-like monoliths more
than twelve feet high had been sunk hilt-first into the red earth of the
Altiplano. The effect was of a giant stockade, almost 500 feet square,
rising about twice as far above the ground as the sunken temple had
been interred beneath it.
Had the Kalasasaya been a fortress then? Apparently not. Scholars now
generally accept that it functioned as a sophisticated celestial
observatory. Rather than keeping enemies at bay, its purpose had been to
fix the equinoxes and the solstices and to predict, with mathematical
precision, the various seasons of the year. Certain structures within its
walls, (and, indeed, the walls themselves), appeared to have been lined
up to particular star groups and designed to facilitate measurement of
the amplitude of the sun in summer, winter, autumn and spring. In
9
addition, the famous ‘Gateway of the Sun’, which stood in the north-west
corner of the enclosure, was not only a world-class work of art but was
thought by those who had studied it to be a complex and accurate
calendar carved in stone:

The more one gets acquainted with the sculpture the greater becomes one’s
conviction that the peculiar lay-out and pictorialism of this Calendar cannot
possibly have been the result merely of the ultimately unfathomable whim of an
artist, but that its glyphs, deeply senseful, constitute the eloquent record of the
observations and calculations of a scientist ... The Calendar could not have been
drawn up and laid out in any other way than this.
10
My background research had made me especially curious about the
Gateway of the Sun and, indeed, about the Kalasasaya as a whole. This

7 Ibid., I, p. 78.
The Lost Realms, p. 215.
8
9 Tiahuanacu, II, pp. 44-105.
10 The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, pp. 17-18.

81