Fingerprints of the Gods - Book Review

[stan]

For me "It's only a flesh wound." goes back to 50's radio programs
like The Lone Ranger.

[Forum Monk]

Here's one for you kemosabi (make sure you turn your speakers up nice and loud before clicking)

http://www.endeavorcomics.com/largent/ranger/lone.wav

[marduk]

Who was that masked man?

[Beagle]

Odd, I read it last night and had no trouble sleeping!

Not sure I get that.
I've been looking at various assertions that Tiahuanco was a port city. Not a lot of luck yet. I haven't seen any proof that it wasn't either. I'll look a little more over the weekend, and then rely to common sense.

[Minimalist]

You need to ask yourself why anyone would build a city near a lake without making some provision for water transport.

[Beagle]

That's the common sense I was talking about. It would be nice to find something beside Posnanski as evidence though. I'll look a little more.

[Minimalist]

I found this while googling around. It's a translation of a Spanish language site.

In English:
According to we have seen, professor Posnansky says to us that Tiahuanaco was a very active harbor city in the 15,000 a.C., and that continued being it during other 5,000 years. During that time, the main wharf of the city was at the moment located in a called place Puma Punku, "the door of puma". When Posnansky carried out their excavations observed that one of the stone blocks that were used in the construction of the wharf it still found in the deposit and weighed approximately 440 tons and were many other blocks, which weighed between 100 and 150 tons. Another peculiar data is that in these blocks they appear representations deeply taxed de la Cruz in the hard gray stone. According to the orthodox historical chronology those crossings even had an antiquity of not less than 1500 years. In other words, they had been carved in this place by people who did not know the Christianity, a millenium before the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the Plateau. But, from where their crossings had obtained the Christians, then surely, nonde la Cruz of Christ, but of some but much old source, in fact, old the Egyptians had used a similar hieroglyphic to a cross to symbolize the life. We were whereupon in Tiahuanaco the esvástica, recorded on the construction stone was used like decorative element, like in the valley of the Hindu. Also one was used in the ceramics of Tiahuanaco.

With this drawing.




http://elumbralinexplorado.iespana.es/


FWIW.

[Beagle]

Thanks. I've actually looked at that one. Many of the websites are in Spanish.

I haven't found any proof/disproof about the port but I've learned a great deal about Tiahuanaco. I'll post some thoughts on it before we move on. I think it's a good deal that we hang here for a brief time since I've got more info than I did when we first discussed what GH said about it.

http://www.geocities.com/seqenenretaoii/tiahuanaco.html

This site has the usual pics but click on the Puma Punku link to see the alledged port area.

In it's heyday this place was a marvel, with water spouting out of fountains like a modern supercity of today.

[Minimalist]

and at present there is nothing oceanic near these docks except an ancient coastline made of chalky fossils.

I've never understood why they persist with this nonsense that Tiahuanaco was at sea level and then thrust up. There are no port cities on lakes anywhere in the world?

Chicago? Bern? Baku? Cleveland?

[Beagle]

There obviously are. Plus there were other cities around Titicaca, all of them port cities (it's a huge lake), but clearly Tiahuanaco was the dominent and megalithic city in the entire culture.

Speaking of culture, this city was occupied more than 5 times over it's history. That only makes sense to me, and why a city like Teotehuacan was abandoned and never reoccupied is a real mystery. A number of cultures have been identified. So did it have a port? When was it constructed? All the more confusing now.

Late here. I'll continue the next time we post in FOTG.

[Forum Monk]

During some early morning browsing, I found this:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/egipt ... m#contents

Don't know if its legal. But maybe it will open up your discussions. Still probably too late I imagine.

[Beagle]

Thanks Monk, that might have been helpful in the beginning but probaly would not have changed the way the thread has gone.

I don't know if you've ever read the first few pages of this thread but it started pretty well. We pretty much jump around now but are staying on a linear course for the most part. Thanks again though.

[Minimalist]

Hey, Beags, if it is okay with you I would like to move on to an issue on which I disagree totally with Hancock...just for a change! Thanks to Monk for finding the online version, I don't have to re-type the whole thing. In Chapter 50 Hancock begins by talking about his researcher resigning.

It transpired that, in his opinion, certain significant economic, climatic, topographical and geographical preconditions had to be met before a civilization could evolve:

So if you are looking for a hitherto undiscovered civilization of great originators who made it on their own, separate from any of the ones we already know, you are not looking for a needle in a haystack. You are looking for something more like a city in its hinterland. What you are looking for is a vast region which occupied a land area at least a couple of thousand miles across.

This is a landmass as big as the Gulf of Mexico, or twice the size of Madagascar. It would have had major mountain ranges, huge river systems and a Mediterranean to sub-tropical climate which was buffered by its latitude from the adverse effects of short-term climatic cooling.

It would have needed this relatively undisturbed climate to last for around ten thousand years ... Then the population of several hundred thousand sophisticated people, we are to believe, suddenly vanished, together with their homeland, leaving very little physical trace, with only a few surviving individuals who were shrewd enough to see the end coming, wealthy enough and in the right place, with the resources they needed to be able to do something about escaping the cataclysm.

So there I was without a researcher. My proposition was a priori impossible. There could be no lost advanced civilization because a landmass big enough to support such a civilization was too big to lose.

Now, Hancock used this dubious proposition by his researcher to latch on to Hapgood's discredited Crust-Shift model. But a more reasoned approach would have been to question the parameters which were set. Why would a lost civilization have had to be on a continent-sized landmass?

History, especially his own, teaches us that small civilizations have developed major empires. Britain, not so long ago, an island nation of no great size, expanded so that the boast "the sun never sets on the British Empire" was not an idle claim. They did not do this with machine guns and jet fighters. Much of their empire was built with single-shot muskets and bayonets and a navy to transport them where needed. The Minoan civilization apparently got much the same service from its navy, yet Crete is also just a small island and not a continent. Roman civilization developed from one small city state. Greek culture developed in isolation and then spread when the Macedonian developed a 21 foot pike to push their enemies away. Sometimes, something as minor as a compound bow versus a plain bow was a sufficient technological edge.

At some point I think that Hancock lost the courage of his convictions, here. Anyone who wants to can go play with that sea level toy I posted. If you go back to the LGM and set the sea level to -130 meters you will find plenty of areas the size of Rome, Crete, Britain or Greece which were submerged. Why does Hancock not stick to his original thesis that a civilization could easily have developed in a now submerged coastal region and given rise to many of the legends which we maintain.

With any mythology you have to look for the kernel of truth which underlies. In any fish story, the fish never gets smaller. So it is necessary to start peeling back the layers of exaggeration to find out what the reality may have been. If underwater archaeology can help in this, I am all for it.

[Forum Monk]

Min,
Perhaps the answer is simple. Drop the sea level 130 meters and all kinds of new land masses emerge. True enough. The problem, however, is the slow rise would not have resulted in a disasterous annihilation and even if a volano or earthquake was the culprit, evidence of the civilation would have likely been found by now. 130m. is not that deep anymore. Since the key to Hancock's theory evolved into this super-race and no home for them has ever been evidenced, you have to now speculate a hypothesis. It was either another planet or some other underexplored, difficult to reach location on earth. What choices then, are there?

Making it a continent-sized location, was a construct to support his hypothesis. There can be no other logic to it as you have well pointed out.

[Minimalist]

Most of the models I have seen do not call for a slow meltdown, though.

We've had previous discussions of the concept of super floods, when melting glaciers formed huge lakes which suddenly burst their banks.
Try the sea level thingy for the US and look what a 5 meter rise would do to Florida.