Page 99 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

the attention of governmental and international development agencies
and was now under test in several other parts of the world as well.
20

An artificial language

Another possible legacy of Tiahuanaco, and of the Viracochas, lay
embedded in the language spoken by the local Aymara Indians—a
language regarded by some specialists as the oldest in the world.
21
In the 1980s Ivan Guzman de Rojas, a Bolivian computer scientist,
accidentally demonstrated that Aymara might be not only very ancient
but, significantly, that it might be a ‘made-up’ language—something
deliberately and skillfully designed. Of particular note was the seemingly
artificial character of its syntax, which was rigidly structured and
unambiguous to an extent thought inconceivable in normal ‘organic’
speech. This synthetic and highly organized structure meant that
22
Aymara could easily be transformed into a computer algorithm to be used
to translate one language into another: ‘The Aymara Algorithm is used as
a bridge language. The language of an original document is translated
into Aymara and then into any number of other languages.’
23
Was it just coincidence that an apparently artificial language governed
by a computer-friendly syntax should be spoken today in the environs of
Tiahuanaco? Or could Aymara be a legacy of the high learning that legend
attributed to the Viracochas? If so, what other legacies might there be?
What other incomplete fragments of an old and forgotten wisdom might
be lying scattered around—fragments which had perhaps contributed to
the richness and diversity of many of the cultures that had evolved in this
region during the 10,000 years before the conquest? Perhaps it was the
possession of fragments like these that had made possible the drawing of
the Nazca lines and enabled the predecessors of the Incas to build the
‘impossible’ stone walls at Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman?

Mexico

The image I could not get out of my mind was of the Viracocha people
leaving, ‘walking on the waters’ of the Pacific Ocean, or ‘going

20 Ibid.
21 Evan Hadingham, Lines to the Mountain Gods, Harrap, London, 1987, p. 34.
22 ‘Aymara is rigorous and simple—which means that its syntactical rules always apply,
and can be written out concisely in the sort of algebraic shorthand that computers
understand. Indeed, such is its purity that some historians think it did not just evolve,
like other languages, but was actually constructed from scratch.’ Sunday Times, London,
4 November 1984.
23 M. Belts, ‘Ancient Language may Prove Key to Translation System’, Computerworld,
vol. IX, No. 8, 25 February 1985, p. 30.

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