(Published in GralsWelt 24/2002)
QUESTIONS OF THE PREVIOUS TIME
Scientists cannot agree on the existence of an as yet undiscovered, early high culture; but many serious researchers consider Plato's Atlantis report to be reliable and look for traces of the vanished civilization. This lost culture is suspected in all possible places, and both archaeological finds and oral traditions seem to speak for its existence:
The secret of the portolane
In "The secret of the portolane”(Under“ Strange Stories ”), we have reported on puzzling, old nautical charts that contain information that was still unknown at the time when the traditional maps were drawn. Some of these landscapes, which were undiscovered at the time, are given with an accuracy that was unattainable with the methods of the time.
So there must have been templates that unknown seafarers created with astonishing accuracy in an unknown time. The Atlanteans, Atlantids or Antilids?
Galvanic element
In 1978/79, a special show of early Mesopotamian art and culture was shown in several German cities under the title “The Garden in Eden”. Among the exhibits was a small clay vessel that included a copper pipe and an iron pin.
In the exhibition catalog it said:
„The interpretation of device no. 183, which is found quite numerous in Parthian strata, is controversial. Some see it as a preliminary stage of our electric battery, which could have been used to gild silver vessels, while others consider it a cult or magic device, whereby one use does not exclude the other. " (12, p. 211).
These devices were copied and filled with an electrolyte (copper sulfate solution or grape juice). They supplied electrical currents such as are required for copper or gold plating. Galvanized gold-plated vessels were found from the same Parthian period. Actually a sensation: The “old ones” knew electricity before the turn of the century and knew how to use it in practice! (14, p. 123)
One may see an accidental discovery in the galvanic element. It is equally justified to assume that the use of galvanization is an expression of a more precise knowledge of electricity and its possibilities; perhaps part of a lost knowledge of which only remnants were preserved in antiquity. Again and again there are reports of unbelievable achievements of ancient peoples, which specialist archaeologists mostly refer to the realm of the imagination. This includes, for example, the assertion that puzzling figures are depicted on reliefs in the Hathor Temple at Dendera, which, when viewed impartially, turn out to be incandescent lamps. After all, it was possible to build an incandescent lamp based on the pattern of the ancient Egyptian temple relief and to present it at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1982. (8th)
Did the ancient Egyptians know electric light?
Puzzling artifacts
In “The iron hammer from the Cretaceous” (cf. “Short, brief, curious” page 71) we reported about an iron hammer that supposedly dates from the Cretaceous. There are many artifacts of a comparable kind that are difficult to classify and that can be viewed as remnants of blown, unknown civilizations. These include B. complicated instruments (1, S 85), aluminum parts from ancient China of the Tsing dynasty (around 220 BC, 1, p. 90) and many other puzzling finds that various authors describe (see e.g. 2 and 7).
Dante's Southern Cross
In Dante's Divine Comedy, the First Canto of Purgatory contains the following verse:
“I turn to the right, my mind fixed
To the other pole, and saw four stars there,
Which no one noticed as the first couple;
Heaven, it seemed, was glad to see its flames,
O arctic, deserted region of the earth,
Since you are denied to contemplate them!
As I move away from her gaze
I turn a little at the other pole,
On which the car could no longer be seen ... "(3, p. 141)
The “four stars” are considered to be the Southern Cross, which cannot be observed from the northern hemisphere - the “arctic, orphaned region”. And the car that "was already no longer to be seen " when Dante turned to the other pole (the South Pole) it is obviously the Big Bear or Big Dipper. How did Dante come to his astronomically accurate description at a time when no one went south enough to enjoy this sight?
Since Pharaoh Necho II sent an Egyptian-Phoenician expedition from Egypt (609-594 BC) to circling Africa (6, p. 91), hardly a person from the Mediterranean area was likely to advance across the equator until the end of the Middle Ages be. Were there lost traditions of seafarers from Egyptian, Phoenician, perhaps even Atlantic times that Dante knew?
Saturn devours its children
Occasionally, mythical traditions only become clear if the ancients are allowed more in-depth astronomical knowledge. Mythology reports that Chronos - revered by the Romans as Saturn - devoured his children immediately after birth so as not to suffer a fate similar to that which he himself had prepared for his father Uranus.
When Galileo pointed his newly invented telescope at the sky in 1609, he not only discovered mountains on the moon and the four great satellites of Jupiter, but also the ring of Saturn. However, this ring could only be made out vaguely in Galileo's still imperfect telescope, so that Saturn offered a sight that resembled a cup with two handles. Galileo then also believed that Saturn - like Jupiter - was orbited by moons. When Galileo later observed Saturn again, it was at a different angle. The ring of Saturn turned its narrow side towards the earth, which can only be seen with powerful instruments and had to remain invisible to Galileo. Amazed that the "moons" seemed to have disappeared, Galileo is said to have asked: "Did Saturn devour its children?“
Is this correspondence accidental or is it more deeply related? Which could lie in the fact that the rings of Saturn were already seen in early times - before the creation of myths?
Another, decidedly more complicated astronomical riddle is provided by the Dogon cosmology (cf. in “Brief, concise, curious” page 466 “The enigmatic cosmology of the Dogon”).
The Aztec and Maya calendars
The time calculations of ancient American peoples also pose some puzzles. It is known, for example, that the Aztec calendar consisted of two different calendars: a "civil calendar" of 365 days for daily life, and an "oracle calendar" with 260 days, used only by the priesthood. After 52 years of the civil and 73 years of the fortune-telling calendar, the New Year's days of both calendars coincided, and a new, great period began. One can only speculate about the reasons for this double calculation of time, one of which is extremely flawed. The suspicion arises that an old, very imperfect time division has been replaced by a more modern calendar, which may have come from a more developed culture. Only the traditional priesthood stayed with the old oracle calendar for their cults.
The period of 52 years also takes place in the Mayan calendar played a role, because every 52 years new bowls (stone cladding) were placed around the temple mountains to record this period. 29 such periods, i.e. the period of 1508 calendar years, were the Maya correction cycle, which was equated with 1507 tropical *) solar years. This method of calculation made the Maya calendar the most accurate of all known calendars; it only had an error of about 1 day in 14,000 years and was therefore more exact than our modern Gregorian calendar!
So we find a culture among the Maya that had no modern measuring devices and recorded astronomical data in the most archaic way that shells were built around temple mountains or data were carved into the temples. At the same time, this civilization had the most precise of all time calculations used in practice and knew the orbital times of the planets as well as many other astronomical data with an accuracy that no other ancient people could match.
How exactly the Maya astronomers knew how to measure despite their extremely simple tools, a statement by the long-time director of the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam, Hans Ludendorff, may underline:
“As a further result it emerges ... that the Maya knew both the length of the sidereal *) and the tropical *) solar year with great accuracy. The two dates mentioned led to the following relationship between the two types of year:
3,753 tropical years = 3,743 sidereal years + 3,600 days
In order to get complete correspondence with modern values, one would only have to write 3,588.8 days instead of 3,600 days on the right-hand side. " (9, p. 60).
How did the Mayan culture, which suddenly collapsed in the 7th century AD, come up with such precise astronomical data? Was it just your own observations, which must have stretched over many centuries, if not millennia, in order to arrive at such reliable results without powerful instruments, or was the Maya imparted their knowledge by a more developed civilization?
Otto Muck (10, p. 282) sees the day of the sinking of Atlantis on June 5, 8498 BC. As the zero day of the Mayan calendar!
Perhaps it is not without significance for this connection that the Aztecs call their country of origin "Aztlan", an island in the middle of the water, and let the first section of their history end with a flood. (14, p. 503; 15, p. 25).
Riddle of the megalithic culture
Prehistoric buildings - from Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid of Cheops - are often aligned with the stars, so that it is difficult to say whether they served a star cult (ancient deities were associated with the stars) or whether they were scientific and astronomical observatories. One does not exclude the other.
The most impressive testimonies of prehistoric Europe include large stone settings. In the so-called megalithic culture, which is mostly settled in the Neolithic Age beginning in the 6th millennium BC, graves, places of worship, menhirs, and sometimes huge, uncut rocks or stones, arose in Europe and many other parts of the world, from Africa to East Asia hewn stone blocks were used. Some of these structures show the builders' considerable astronomical knowledge:
An investigation of Stonehenge, the most famous megalithic structure, showed that it was an astronomical observatory. So you can see the position of the sun at the time of the summer or winter solstice around 1880 BC from the building. can be read with great accuracy, and characteristic points of the far more complicated lunar orbit are also for the time around 1800 BC. specified exactly. With this one can assume with a probability of 1: 1,000,000 that Stonehenge was a sun and moon sanctuary (or observatory). (4).
Analyzes of various megalithic structures led to the view that the Stone Age man divided the year of 365 days into 16 sections of 22, 23, 24 days and inserted a leap year every 4th year. This made the megalithic calendar more accurate than that of Caesar in 46 BC. introduced Julian calendar (11, p. 23). How did the simple people of the Neolithic Age come up with such an accurate calender? Did they now have lost knowledge from earlier times?
Continuation: Part III.
Final grade:
* A "tropical year" is the time between two passes of the sun through the vernal equinox; a "sidereal year" is the length of time between two sun transitions on the same star. Due to the precession, the tropical year is slightly shorter than the sidereal year.
Literature:
(1) Aschenbrenner, Klaus "Die Antiliden", Universitas, Munich 1993.
(2) Charroux, Robert “Fantastic Past”, Herbig, Berlin 1966.
(3) Dante “The Divine Comedy”, Th. Knaur Nachf., Berlin undated
(4) Hawkins, Gerald S. "Stonehenge Decoded," Doubleday, New York 1965.
(5) Hermann, Joachim "DTV Atlas zur Astronomie", 5th edition. DTV Munich 1973.
(6) Herrmann, Paul "7 over and 8 gone", Rowolt, Hamburg 1969.
(7) Hoch, Werner “It didn't just start with Noah”, Universitas, Munich 1991.
(8) Krassa, Peter / Habeck, Reinhard “Licht von den Göttern”, Esotera, 33rd year 1982, issue 10, Hermann Bauer, Freiburg.
(9) Ludendorff, Hans "Astronomical inscriptions in Piedras Negras and Naranjo", treatises of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, year 1940, issue 6.
(10) Muck, Otto “Everything about Atlantis”, Droemer-Knaur, Munich 1976
(11) Paturi, Felix R. "The great riddles of our world", ADAC Verlag, Munich 1999.
(12) Prehistoric State Collection Munich “The Garden in Eden”, Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1978
(13) Tollmann, Alexander and Edith “And the Flood did exist” Droemer Kanur, Munich 1993.
(14) Tomas, Andrew "We are not the first", Europäische Bücherei, W. Hieronimi, Bonn 1972.
(15) Zanot, Mario "The world went under three times", Rowolt, Hamburg 1979.
