Page 94 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 12

The End of the Viracochas

We saw in Chapter Ten that Tiahuanaco was originally built as a port on
the shores of Lake Titicaca, when that lake was far wider and more than
100 feet deeper than it is today. Vast harbour constructions, piers and
dykes (and even dumped cargoes of quarried stone at points beneath the
old waterline), leave no doubt that this must have been the case. Indeed,
1
according to the unorthodox estimates of Professor Posnansky,
Tiahuanaco had been in active use as a port as early as 15,000 BC, the
date he proposed for the construction of the Kalasasaya, and had
continued to serve as such for approximately another five thousand
years, during which great expanse of time its position in relation to the
shore of Lake Titicaca hardly changed.
2
Throughout this epoch the principal harbour of the port city was
located several hundred metres south-west of the Kalasasaya at a site
now known as Puma Punku (literally, the Puma Gate). Here Posnansky’s
excavations revealed two artificially dredged docks on either side of: ‘a
true and magnificent pier or wharf ... where hundreds of ships could at
the same time take on and unload their heavy burdens’.
3
One of the construction blocks from which the pier had been fashioned
still lay on site and weighed an estimated 440 tons. Numerous others
4
weighed between 100 and 150 tons. Furthermore, many of the biggest
5
monoliths had clearly been joined to each other by I-shaped metal
clamps. In the whole of South America, I knew, this masonry technique
had been found only on Tiahuanacan structures. The last time I had seen
6
the characteristic notched depressions which proved its use had been on
ruins on the island of Elephantine in the Nile in Upper Egypt.
7

1 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 156ff; III, p. 196.
2 Ibid., I, p. 39: ‘An extensive series of canals and hydraulic works, dry at present, but
which are all in communication with the former lake bed, are just so many more proofs
of the extension of the lake as far as Tiahuanacu in this period.’
3 Ibid., II, p. 156.
4 Bolivia, p. 158.
5 The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 93.
Ibid.
6
7 For example on the paving blocks above the Nilometer at Elepantine Island, Aswan. I
am indebted to US film maker Robert Gardner for pointing this similarity out to me.

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