culture? Who gave them their incredible knowledge of mathematics and a ready-made writing?
Before we deal with some monumental buildings which raise innumerable questions, let us take another brief glance at the old texts.
Where did the narrators of The Thousand and One Nights get their staggering wealth of ideas? How did anyone come to describe a lamp from which a magician spoke when the owner wished?
What daring imagination invented the 'Open Sesame' incident in the tale of Ali Baba and the forty thieves?
Of course, such ideas no longer astonish us today, for the television set shows us talking pictures at the turn of a switch. And as the doors of most large department stores open by photocells, even the 'Open Sesame' incident no longer conceals any special mystery. Nevertheless the imaginative power of the old story-tellers was so incredible that the books of contemporary writers of science-fiction seem banal in comparison. So it must be that the ancient story-tellers had a store of things already seen, known and experienced ready at hand to spark off their imagination!
In the legendary and saga-like world of intangible cultures which as yet offer to us no fixed points of reference, we are on shakier ground still and things become even more confusing.
Naturally the Icelandic and Old Norwegian traditions also mention 'gods' who travel in the sky. The goddess Frigg has a maid-servant called Gna. The goddess sends her handmaid to different worlds on a steed which rises in the air above land and sea. The steed is called 'Hoof thrower' and once, says the Saga, Gna met some strange creatures high in the air. In the Alwislied different names are given to the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the Universe depending on whether they are seen from the point of view of men, 'gods', giants or dwarfs. How on earth could people in the dim past arrive at different perceptions of one and the same thing, when the horizon was very limited?
Although the scholar Sturluson did not write down the Nordic and Old Germanic legends, sagas and songs until about A.D. 1200, they are known to be some thousands of years old. In these writings the symbol of the world is often described as a disc or a ball—remarkably enough—and Thor, the leader of the gods, is always shown with a hammer, the destroyer. Professor Kuhn supports the view that the word 'hammer' means 'stone', dates from the Stone Age and was only transferred to bronze and iron hammers later. Consequently Thor and his hammer symbol must have been very ancient and probably do go back to the Stone Age. Moreover, the word 'Thor' in the Indian (Sancrit) legends is 'Tanayitnu'; this could be more or less rendered as The Thunderer'. The Nordic Thor, god of gods, is the lord of the Germanic Wanen, who make the skies unsafe.
When arguing about the entirely new aspects that I introduce into investigation of the past, the objection might be made that it is not possible to compile everything in the ancient traditions that points to heavenly apparitions into a sequence of proofs of prehistoric space travel. But that is not what I am doing. I am simply referring to passages in very ancient texts that have no place in the working hypothesis in use up to the present. I am drilling away at those admittedly awkward spots, where neither scribes, translators nor copyists could have had any idea of the sciences and their products. I too should be quite prepared to consider the translations wrong and the copies not accurate enough if these same false, fancifully embellished traditions were not accepted in their entirety as soon as they can be fitted into the framework of some religion or other. It is unworthy of a scientific investigator to deny something when it upsets his working hypothesis and accept it when it supports his theory. Imagine the shape my theory would take and the strength it would gain if new translations made with a 'space outlook' existed!
To help us patiently forge the chain of our thesis a little further, scrolls with fragments of apocalyptic and liturgical texts were recently found near the Dead Sea. Once again, in the Apocryphal Books of Abraham and Moses, we hear about a heavenly chariot with wheels, which spits fire, whereas similar references are lacking in the Ethiopian and Slavic Book of Enoch.
'Behind the being I saw a chariot which had wheels of fire, and every wheel was full of eyes all round, and on the wheels was a throne and this was covered with fire that flowed around it.' (Apocryphal Book of Abraham 18:11 -12.)
According to Professor Sholem's explanation, the throne and chariot symbolism of the Jewish mystics corresponded roughly to that of the Hellenistic and early Christian mystics when they talk about pleroma ( = abundance of light). That is a respectable explanation, but can it be accepted as scientifically proved? May we simply ask what would be the case if some people had really seen the fiery-chariot that is described over and over again? A secret script was used very frequently in the Qumran scrolls; among the documents in the fourth cave different kinds of characters alternate in one and the same astrological work. An astronomical observation bears the title: 'Words of the judicious one which he has addressed to all sons of the dawn.'
But what is the crushing and convincing objection to the possibility that real fiery chariots were described in the ancient texts? Surely not the vague and stupid assertion that fiery chariots cannot have existed in antiquity! Such an answer would be unworthy of the men I am trying to force to face new alternatives with my questions. Lastly it is by no means so long ago that reputable scholars said that no stones (= meteors) could fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky. Even nineteenth-century mathematicians came to the conclusion—convincing in their day— that a railway train would not be able to travel faster than 21 miles an hour because if it did the air would be forced out of it and the passengers would suffocate. Less than a hundred years ago it was 'proved' that an object heavier than air would never be able to fly.
A review in a reputable newspaper classed Walter Sullivan's book Signals from the Universe as science fiction and said that even in the more distant future it would be quite impossible to reach say Epsilon-Eridani or Tau-Ceti; even the effect of a shift in time or deep-freezing the astronauts could never overcome the barriers of the inconceivable distances.
It is a good thing that there were always enough bold visionaries oblivious to contemporary criticism in the past. Without them there would be no world-wide railway network today, with trains travelling at 124 miles an hour and over. (N.B. Passengers die at more than 21 m.p.h.!) Without them there would be no jet aircraft today, because they would certainly fall to the ground. (N.B. Things that are heavier than air cannot fly!) And lastly there would be no moon rockets (because man cannot leave his own planet!). There are so many, many things that would not exist but for the visionaries!
A number of scholars would like to stick to the so-called realities. In so doing they are too ready and willing to forget that what is reality today may have been the Utopian dream of a visionary yesterday. We owe a considerable number of all the epoch-making discoveries that our age thinks of as realities to lucky chances, not to steady systematic research. And some of them stand to the credit of the 'serious visionaries' who overcame restricting prejudice with their bold speculations. For example, Heinrich Schliemann accepted Homer's Odyssey as more than stories and fables and discovered Troy as a result.
We still know too little about our past to be able to make a definitive judgment about it. New finds may solve unprecedented mysteries; the reading of ancient narratives is capable of turning whole worlds of realities upside down. Incidentally, it is obvious to me that more old books were destroyed than are preserved. There is supposed to have been a book in South America that contained all the wisdom of antiquity; it is reputed to have been
