jewels and gold lay in the burial chamber. The sarcophagus was closed with a sliding lid, instead of a removable one. On the 9th June Dr Goneim ceremonially opened the sarcophagus. It contained nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did the mummy decamp, leaving its jewels behind?
The Russian Rodenko discovered a grave, known as Kurgan V, 50 miles from the frontier of Outer Mongolia.
This grave takes the form of a rocky hill that is faced internally with wood. All the burial chambers are packed with eternal ice, and as a result the contents of the grave were preserved in a state of deep-freeze. One of these chambers contained an embalmed man and a similarly treated woman. Both of them were provided with everything that they might have needed for a life to come: foodstuffs in dishes, clothes, jewels and musical instruments. Everything was deep-frozen and in an excellent state of preservation, including the naked mummies. In one burial chamber scholars identified a rectangle containing four rows of six squares, each of which had a drawing inside it. The whole could be a copy of the stone carpet in the Assyrian palace at Nineveh! Strange sphinx-like figures with complicated horns on their heads and wings on their backs are clearly visible and their posture shows them to be aspiring skywards.
But motives for a second spiritual life can scarcely be based on the finds in Mongolia. The deep-freezing used in the graves there—for that is what the chambers faced with wood and filled with ice amount to—is too much of this world and obviously intended for terrestrial ends. Why, and this question keeps on worrying us, did the ancients think that bodies prepared in this way achieved a state which would make reawakening possible? That is a puzzle for the time being.
In the Chinese village of Wu Chuan there exists a rectangular tomb measuring 45 by 39 ft; in it lie the skeletons of 17 men and 24 women. Here too none of the skeletons shows signs of violent death. There are glacier tombs in the Andes, ice tombs in Siberia, group and individual graves in China, Sumeria and Egypt. Mummies have been found in the far north and in South Africa. And all the dead were supplied with the necessities for a new life and all the tombs were so planned and built that they could survive for thousands of years.
Is it all mere coincidence? Are they all merely individual fancies, strange whims on the part of our ancestors? Or is there an ancient promise of corporeal return that is unknown to us? Who can have made it?
Some 10,000-year-old tombs were excavated at Jericho and a number of 8,000-year-old heads, modelled in plaster of Paris were found. That, too, is astonishing, for ostensibly this people did not know the techniques of pottery-making. In another part of Jericho whole rows of round houses were discovered. The walls are curved inwards at the top, like domes.
The omnipotent carbon isotope C 14, with the aid of which the age of organic substances can be determined, gives dates with a maximum of 10,400 years in this case. These scientifically determined dates agree pretty well with the dates which the Egyptian priests transmitted. They said that their priestly ancestors had discharged their duties for more than 11,000 years. Is this only a coincidence, too?
Prehistoric stones at Lussac (Poitou, France) form a particularly remarkable find. They show drawings of men dressed in completely modern style, with hats, jackets and short trousers. The Abbe Breuil says that the drawings are authentic and his statement throws the whole of prehistory into confusion. Who engraved the stones? Who has enough imagination to conceive of a caveman dressed in skins who drew figures from the twentieth century on the walls?
Some really magnificent Stone Age paintings were found in 1940 in the Lascaux Caves in the South of France. The paintings in this gallery are as lively and intact as if they had been done today, and two questions immediately spring to mind. How was this cave illuminated for the laborious work of the Stone Age artists and why were the walls decorated with these astonishing paintings?
Let the people who consider these questions stupid explain the contradictions. If the Stone Age cavemen were primitive and savage, they could not have produced the astounding paintings on the cave walls. But if the savages were capable of paintings these pictures, why should they not also have been able to build huts as shelter? The foremost authorities concede that animals had the ability to build nests and shelters millions of years ago. But it obviously does not fit into the working hypothesis to concede homo sapiens the same ability as long ago as that.
In the Gobi Desert, deep down below the ruins of Khara Khota—not far from those strange sand vitrifications which can only have taken place under the influence of tremendous heat—Professor Koslov found a tomb that is dated to about 12,000 years B.C. A sarcophagus contained the bodies of two rich men and the sign of a circle bisected vertically was found on the sarcophagus.
In the Subis mountains on the west coast of Borneo a network of caves was found that had been hollowed out on a cathedral-like scale. Among these colossal finds there are fabrics of such fineness and delicacy that with the best will in the world one cannot imagine savages making them. Questions, questions, questions... .
The first doubts are beginning to insinuate themselves into stereotyped archaeological theory, but what we need to do is to force breaches in the thicket of the past. Landmarks must be set up again; wherever possible a new series of fixed dates must be established.
Let me make it clear that I am not doubting the history of the last two thousand years here. I am speaking solely and exclusively of the most remote antiquity, of the blackest darkness of time, which I am striving to illuminate by asking new questions.
Nor can I give any figures and dates showing when the visit of unknown intelligences from the universe began to influence our young intelligences. But I venture to doubt the current datings applied to the remote past. I would suggest, on tolerably good grounds, placing the incident I am concerned with in the Early Palaeolithic Age, i.e. between 10,000 and 40,000 B.C. Our hitherto existing methods of dating, including the famous carbon isotope C 14, which makes everyone so happy, leave great gaps as soon as we come to an age of more than 45,600 years. The older the substance to be examined, the more unreliable the radio carbon method is. Even recognised scholars have told me that they considered the C 14 method rather unreliable because if an organic substance is from 30,000 to 50,000 years old, its age can be established anywhere between those limits.
These critical voices should only be accepted with limitations; nevertheless, a second dating method parallel to the C 14 method and based on the latest measuring apparatus would unquestionably be desirable.
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Chapter Eight - Easter Island—land Of The Bird Men
The first European seafarers who landed on Easter Island at the beginning of the eighteenth century could scarcely believe their eyes. On this little plot of earth, 2,250 miles from the coast of Chile, they saw hundreds of
