Chapter 2: Ancient Technology

Egyptian Influence on America

Laura Lee is an award-wining producer and host of a nationally syndicated radio talk-program, “The Laura Lee Show,” since 1990. During the course of hundreds of broadcasts, she has introduced leading authorities on alternative history and technology to millions of listeners from coast to coast, including some of the authors featured in this collection. A world traveler to many of our planet’s most remote corners, Ms. Lee returned to her home in Washington state in 1997 from a trip to Egypt, where she found intriguing comparisons with the monumental stonework of pre-Columbian Peru. Her report appeared in Ancient Americans March/April, 1997 issue and has since been regarded as something of a “classic” by collectors of back issues of the magazine.

Modern construction engineers would find duplicating the massive walls of Peru's Sacsayhuman a daunting challenge. Yet, similarly massive public building projects were undertaken on the other side of the world in Ancient Egypt.

Super Science From Pharaonic Egypt to Pre-Spanish Peru by Laura Lee

I found much to marvel at during a recent trip to Egypt. Mostly, I was in awe of the ancient stonework, such as the huge blocks in the Great Pyramid, and how they could have been put into place with such a high degree of engineering precision millennia before the Industrial Age. But I was also enchanted by an aspect of ancient stonemasonry that gets little press, yet offers tangible clues to another mystery.

Cairo Museum’s “Old Kingdom” rooms are full of vases, bowls, large lidded boxes, and statues carved from schist, diorite, granite, and obsidian. These artifacts defy simple answers to the question:

“How did ancient sculptors carve in hard, igneous rock with such exactitude?” Surely, not with clumsy pounding balls and primitive cooper and stone tools, as explained by most Egyptologists. After our tour, my husband, Paul, and I spent a full day in the museum, where we could leisurely examine the wonders inside. To our eyes, the oldest artifacts had an austere, “modern” look, with their clean lines and perfect proportions that make New Kingdom items seem baroque by comparison. The big stone boxes wore marks in corners where two curved lines came together, for example, that I could only guess were made by machine tools.

I was especially puzzled by life-size diorite and granite statues with satin-smooth surfaces and precisely, delicately carved features. A few crooked rows of crudely carved, rough-edged hieroglyphs had been chipped on the base of several statues. Now, this is more the look you get with chisels on hard stone. I imagined those hieroglyphs to be the equivalent of graffiti on a fine work of art, a later addition to an heirloom antique. Two very different techniques on the same artifact implies two different dates. And why use a lesser technique, unless the first, superior technique had been lost? When the standards are inadequate, new theories arise. So, I went looking for them.

I find great benefit in crossing disciplines. Following the trail of evidence to see where it leads often requires stepping outside the constraints of the preconceived notions of a particular field. I went looking, not among Egyptologists or archaeologists, but to those who would know about rocks and tools. I found two independent researchers, a geologist and a machine tool manufacturer, to learn what the stone artifacts could tell us, and what the marks left behind by precision machine tools looked like. Both were recent guests on “The Laura Lee Show,” the weekly, nationally syndicated radio interview/talk show that I host. Here is their story. Ivan Watkins is a Professor of Geology, Department of Earth Sciences, at St. Cloud University, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He is investigating the finished surface of Inca stone masonry.

Watkins says the surface of stone at the microscopic level indicates how it was, or wasn’t worked. “And you can rule out the standard issue explanations when it comes to ancient Inca stonemasonry, which is very similar to that of Egypt,” he says. Watkins explains that soft rock is easy to cut; granite and the other hard, igneous rocks are difficult. Granite contains 15 percent to 30 percent quartz crystals, and a few other minerals of varying degrees of hardness, which is important to know when viewing the signature marks left in stone under the microscope. The methods that are supposed to have been used by the ancients, such as pounding, hammering, grinding, polishing with abrasives, and wedging, just don’t match up with what Watkins sees under the microscope. What he sees, in the case of hammering, is rock wanting to break along pre-existing planes of weakness.

When river sand, which is mostly quartz, is used to grind and polish rock with quartz, the softer minerals in the rock are sanded out, while the quartz crystals, little affected, are left standing above the rest of the minerals on the surface. In the case of wedging rock, Watkins finds the absence of low-angle fractures, and no ability to control the cracking of the rock. On a surface worked with pounding stones, all the minerals are unevenly fractured. All of which is incompatible with what Watkins sees with Inca stonemasonry. What he does see on some Inca stones are slick surfaces at Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo, and the Rodadero at Sacsayhuman, still used as a slide by children. Similar to a ceramic glaze, heat can melt quartz fragments into a glaze that fills in irregularities, creating a smooth surface. In an effort to discover just how such surfaces could have been obtained by ancient cultures, Watkins went looking for modern technology that produces a similar signature.

He found an important clue in the work of geologist David Lindroth, at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Twin Cities’ Research Center, in Minnesota. Lindroth was using 100 watts of light energy focused to a circle of 2 millimeters to cut through any rock in a process called “thermal disaggregation.” The cuts were only two millimeters deep,but repeated passes can cut through rock of any size, he reports. Quartzite fragments cut quite easily with this process, whereas basalt melts. And he concludes, Inca stone surfaces are similar to those that have been thermally disaggregated. What about a process that could cut stone, produce this signature, and used an energy source available to the Inca? Watkins found another clue in the bracelet worn by a modern-day priest in Cuzco, the old Inca capital. In the yearly Festival of the Sun, fire must be given by the hand of the Sun. The ceremony requires lighting wisps of cotton on fire by using the Sun's rays, which are concentrated with a highly polished, concave indentation on a large, gold bracelet. The bracelet is similar to those worn by ancient Inca.

Then Watkins noticed large, parabolic golden bowls in a Peruvian museum. “These bowls were not meant to sit on a table holding fruit,” he observed. “They’d roll around the table. They must have been used for something else. They are just the right shape and material for catching the Sun’s rays and focusing them into a beam of light.” Sunlight strong enough to cut stone? Watkins suggests ancient Inca stonemasons heated and cut stone by using a series of very large, golden parabolic reflectors to concentrate and focus solar energy. He points to the Conquistadors’ own records mentioning an Inca dish of gold so large it spanned the length of two men.

It was later cut up for poker chips before it was melted into ingots and carried back to Spain. Interestingly, large, granite bedrock posts at Machu Picchu may have originally served as supports for such a mirror. Peru, as does Egypt, gets strong sunlight all year round, and gold is most reflective when alloyed with silver, a metallurgical process used by both Incas and Pharaonic Egyptians. Some pyramidians, or capstones, found in Dynastic Egypt were made of electrum, an 80/20 ratio of gold to silver. Watkins’s research led him to develop a solar-powdered device for cutting and polishing stone, for which he received a patent, application Number 4611857.

Someone able to connect Watkins’ invention with its ancient precursor is a man who reads the signature of precision machine tools,even when he sees them in places that just “can’t be,” according to mainstream Egyptologists. And read them he did, from core drills more efficient than our diamond bits today, to space-age precision planning, to intersecting lathe marks. Chris Dunn, presently in senior management at Danville Metal Stamping, in Danville, Illinois, has spent much of his career working with machinery for jet-engine components and nonconventional manufacturing methods, such as laser processing and electrical discharge machining. He also brings a fresh perspective to viewing an ancient artifact, describing himself as “unencumbered with dates and histories and chronologies.” Two visits to Egypt for personal inspections of selected artifacts had him asking, “How was this created? How, precisely, is this engineered? What tools were used to make this?”

The tools on display were used for creating many ancient artifacts. His theory on this is: “They are simply physically incapable of reproducing those artifacts today. So, why should I believe that they could do so thousands of years ago?” Logical enough. And it does not deter him that ancient tools capable of reproducing these artifacts have not been unearthed. “The tools haven’t yet been found,” he said, “but that shouldn’t stop us from deducing what they were by the marks they left on the artifacts.” What marks? According to Dunn’s investigation, the marks of sophisticated sawing, drilling, lathe, and milling practices and a standard of even, level, flat surface planes impossible to achieve by hand. For example, there’s the diorite bowl in the Cairo Museum that appears to have been cut on a lathe. Dunn points out the simple stone bowl has a “sharp cusp, where two spherical, concave radii intersected. This indicates the radii were cut on two separate axes of rotation. Cutting stone on a turning lathe is a pretty sophisticated use of a wheel.”

And how to explain the spherical stone drill cores, the piece removed when a round hole is cut? Dunn points out that ancient drill cores fascinated famed British archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, who first established, by examining the cores and the holes left behind

in the stone, that a tubular drill was used, the same as used today. Dunn found in “Pyramids and Temples of Giza,” published in 1883, that Petrie had calculated the rate of descent of this ancient tubular drill by measuring the distance between the spiral grooves it left behind on the core, as one-tenth of an inch per revolution. Which means, according to Dunn, that these ancient drills cut through solid granite with a feed-rate 500 times greater than today’s diamond drills.

“I presented Petrie’s astonishing calculations to other craftsmen,” said Dunn, “asking them to determine what possible method could create that same feed-rate, and the other characteristics we see in ancient drill cores, such as the hole and core tapering into the stone, and grooves cut deeper in quartz than in feldspar. Most gave up. Only one figured it out, and he independently came up with the same method I did.” What method was that? “Ultrasonics.” How do we use sound today to cut through rock? Dunn explains, “Modern ultrasonic drills use very high frequency vibration sound traveling through a medium. It induces a tool to oscillate, or reciprocate back and forth about 19,000 to 25,000 hertz in a rapid grinding process. A paste or slurry stimulates the cutting action.” Today’s ultrasonic machine bits are used for the precision machining of odd-shaped holes in hard, brittle materials. It is significant that ultrasonic drills cut through quartz more easily than through feldspar or granite.

“Ultra sound gets the quartz in the granite vibrating in sympathy,” says Dunn, “and therefore cuts more easily.” Then there’s the so-called “sarcophagus” in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Why assume it was meant to hold corpses, when no human remains, mummified or otherwise, were ever found there? Was it instead a chamber of initiation? Or did it have something to do with the biblical Ark of the Covenant, because the Ark’s outside dimensions are said to be a perfect it to the sarcophagus’s inside dimensions? In any case, Dunn points out the end piece of this granite box. “The side facing north bears saw marks that are very similar to saw marks on modern granite surface plates. According to Dunn, surface plates are precision-ground, flat blocks that serve as a reference plane when measuring other flat planes in the manufacturing process. Granite is used because it’s stable and extremely hard. Metal surface plates can swell. Granite surface plates don’t.”

And this is why he finds it intriguing that the big, black granite boxes on the Serapeum, at Sakkara, were only roughed out when first brought into underground chambers with quite different atmospheric conditions than the dry, outside air. Once inside the chambers, after the stone had a chance to adapt to the atmosphere, it was finished. This helped the granite retain its precise dimensions. And “Space Age precision” is how Dunn describes the level surface of the inside of the Great Pyramid’s sarcophagus, or granite box, and those of the Serapeum. He brought along a portable instrument which measures the accuracy of a level surface, and shone a flashlight behind a straight edge held against the smooth sides. No light escaped between the straight edge and the granite to indicate slight imperfections.

“Of course, to really measure it,” Dunn said, “I’d like to bring in laser surface scanning equipment. But from my brief measurements, I’d say it was so even, so level, it would be impossible to achieve that by hand.” Still, why was such precision needed? It’s an open question as to exactly what the ancient builders were doing with these artifacts. Unfortunately, the dynastic stonemasons were not giving away any secrets, or writing them down. Judging from the Freemasons, architects, and builders, they were a secretive lot. This does not deter Dunn, however.

“The interpretation and understanding of a civilization’s level of technology cannot hinge on the preservation of a written record for every technique that they developed,” he says. But what about the preservation of an artifact? In this case, these were precision tools. What was their function, and what were they made of? Copper is just not tough enough for this kind of work. “Ferrous metal tools would have rusted away by now,” Dunn observes. Petrie, who was the leading Egyptologist of his day, also determined that saws 9 feet in length were used by the ancient Egyptians and noticed that, during construction of the Great Pyramid’s sarcophagus, the drill had wandered away from its course, leaving a scallop cut a little deeper in the corner. Yet, todays Egyptologists never seem to mention such curiosities. When a theory cannot adequately explain the evidence, let's throw out the theories, not the evidence!

100-Year-Old Artifact Still Unidentified

Two man-made objects were encrusted in rock long before human evolution supposedly began. Although both were found more than 150 years ago, archaeologists are still unable to explain their geological context. Were the artifacts somehow enveloped in a natural process that still eludes scientists? Or could at least one of them—as incredible as it seems—have actually been used when dinosaurs roamed the Earth? These intriguing questions were raised in Ancient Americans February, 2001 issue.

The Bell and Hammer: Two “Impossible” Finds by Dennis Ballard

In its June, 1851 issue Scientific American carried an item about a metallic vessel that had been blasted out of an “immense mass of rock” when workmen were excavating on Meeting House Hill, in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

“On putting the two parts together, it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top, and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The color resembles zinc, or a composition metal, in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the sides there are six figures of a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of the solid pudding stone, 15 feet below the surface.

Dr. J. V. C. Smith, who has recently traveled in the East...and examined hundreds of curious domestic utensils, has never seen anything resembling this. There is no doubt that this curiosity was blown out of the rock.”

The discovery of man-made objects in settings that pre-date current understanding of human origins defies scientific explanation.

Recently, the present owner of this curious artifact wrote to the well-known investigator of anomalies, Brad Steiger, and informed him that the vessel is still unidentified after more than 100 years. Although he wrote at some length about the bell-like object in his 1971 book, Atlantis Rising, Steiger could offer nothing new on it. According to Milton Swanson of Maine, “It had been given to Harvard College, but because of its mysterious origin they relegated it to a closet. The building supervisor finally brought it home to Medford, Massachusetts.” Mr. Swanson sold it to me just before passing away in his eighties. Through the years I have had so-called experts look at it, and no one ever came up with an answer. Its age and use are just unexplainable. It is almost black, but the metal

appears to be composed of brass with zinc, iron, and lead. The inlay is pure silver, and the application of lacquer was necessary to protect it. Perhaps it is a burial ash container of some kind.

I hoped to learn something more definite at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which operates a state-of-the-art analysis laboratory built in cooperation with M.I.T. Its examiners ran the object through a thorough battery of tests for two years, which failed to confirm its origin. Privately, however, geologists dated the bell’s rock matrix to approximately one million Years Before Present. None of them, of course, would dare go on record with their conclusion for fear of ridicule, despite the evidence of acid testing to determine credible time-parameters. The very suggestion of a man-made object dating so long ago is anathema to most scientists.

A far older artificial item was embedded in Cretaceous rock. It was found by Max Hahn near London, Texas, in June 1934. Tests verified the hammer head is of metal, with an iron purity that resists erosion, and which would be difficult to duplicate, even today. The metal in the hammer seems to be similar to the metal in the axe of Oetzi, the 5,000-year-old remains of the so-called “ice man” recovered 10,000 feet high in the Alps, three years ago. The same is true of the hammer broken out of Cretaceous stone. Chemical analysis demonstrated that the find is all that is claimed for it: a man-made object of relatively recent times, but encased by stone that is roughly 70 million years old.

The hammer is unquestionably man-made, and it had to be in existence before it could be encased by the Cretaceous stone matrix. But clearly, it cannot be, because modern man (Homo sapiens) has only existed for the last 100,000 years. Until the lingering paradox of the bell and hammer has been resolved, these two objects represent the most challenging mystery of their kind. They represent the idea that both came to be encrusted through natural processes still to be discovered by science, or the prehistory of the human race is radically different than the current theories explain it.

Bermuda Triangle Reveals Ancient Roots

An area of ocean east of Florida is infamous for the unexplained disappearance of airplanes and sea-going vessels. Through its reality is still hotly debated, the so-called “zone of death” may have been familiar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of our continent, many centuries ago. Renowned for his ability to translate mathematical languages encoded in ancient structures, Carl Munck applied his insightful expertise in Ancient Americans, June, 2001 issue to reveal the ancient roots of a very contemporary phenomenon.

Did Ancient Americans Know About the “BermudaTriangle”? by Carl P. Munck

Authorities have been so perplexed by the hundreds of ships and aircraft losses in the Bermuda Triangle, and unable to find answers, that they have thrown their hands up in despair. We cannot just turn off the traffic in the region. Not only is it bad business, but tourism might go bust.

We have all heard the term, wind sheer, a definite hazard to aviation. But suppose there is something called “electromagnetic sheer,” which is just as deadly if one enters it at the wrong angle and at the wrong moment in time? Is such a phenomenon real? Amazingly, the prehistoric inhabitants of North America appear to have known about that perilous area of ocean we call “the Bermuda Triangle,” and left monumental hazard signs which still exist.

For example, why does the mile-long panther effigy in Florida’s Everglades, at the western tip of the Triangle, walk so carefully on its heading of 36 degrees? The effigy can be recognized from the air, resembling the shape or outline of a large cat. What is he, largest of all the cats, trying to warn us about? Second in size to the Panther Mound is the five-thousand-foot-long “Device” effigy at Portsmouth, Kentucky, with its 12-foot-high and 40-foot-wide walls. Interestingly, this riflelike effigy points southwestward at an azimuth of 216 degrees, or just the opposite of the Panther’s 36-degree heading.

Almost midway between Kentucky’s “Device” and Florida’s Panther is Georgia’s Rock Eagle effigy. It is one of a handful of aboriginal North American monuments that were rendered in stone. Does it really represent the eagle which was so revered by the Indians? If so, its anatomy is all wrong. An eagle’s wings are large, and its body is small. This effigy more resembles a turkey. As is the Panther Mounds, Rock Eagle’s azimuth is 36 degrees. Why the consistency? The slow-stepping Panther is made of earth—soft, as a cat should be. But why a rock bird? Birds are not hard. Could this be another warning, as if one flies at high speed on an unseen heading of 36 degrees in this part of the world, he might slam into something unseen? The cat, a land creature, should not walk in this direction, nor should anything that flies. There is a certain sense to it.

Next, we go east, off Florida, to a point well within the eastern edge of the Bermuda Triangle. Here we find the Shark Mound of East Bimini Island, 57 miles from Miami, in the Bahamas. Interestingly, 216 degrees is the direction toward which this 500-foot-long shark effigy “swims.” What does this obvious symbol of danger tell us? “If you travel into this zone on a heading of 216 degrees, I’ll have you for lunch!” Perhaps in confirmation of this interpretation, when an R.A.F. Lancaster bomber that had been converted into transport known as the Star Ariel disappeared south of Bermuda on January 17, 1949 during a flight to Jamaica, its last heading was known to have been 216 degress.

Calendar Stone

The so-called “Calendar Stone” is perhaps the most famous pre-Columbian artifact in the world. But few persons awed by its alluring complexity suspect the advanced astronomy that went into its creation. Did the Native Americans really design it, or was this scientific marvel an heirloom from another, much older civilization? And what does it predict for the world in 2012? These are some of the great disc’s enigmas explored in the March/April, 1994 issue of Ancient American.

Restored to its original colors, this re-creation shows how the Aztec “Calendar Stone " appeared to the 15th century residents of imperial capital. Tenochtitlan.

One of the greatest discoveries in American archaeology was made by sewer workers. In front of the large cathedral of the Plaza Mayor, labor crews broke up the pavement to get at Mexico City’s dilapidated drainage system. By the time they worked their way almost parallel to the front of the viceroy’s palace, their picks suddenly struck an unusually hard object just two feet below street level. Clearing away the debris of centuries, they revealed a huge, circular stone decorated with mysterious carvings. A major engineering effort over the next several weeks finally pried the 24-ton disk from its grave, from whence it was transported to lean against the cathedral’s eastern wall.

The Aztec “Vessel of Time” by Frank Joseph

Dusted off and cleaned, the 12-foot-tall monolith could be examined for the first time. Observers beheld a hypnotic puzzle of innumerable, enigmatic figures, similar to the frozen images of a dream. All anyone could deduce from the immense artifact was that it had been sculpted from a single, 3-foot-thick piece of gray-black basalt; faint traces of paint implied the entire face of the object was brightly colored at one time. It belonged to the Aztec Empire, destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors in the early 16th century. Fearing it might come to be regarded as an idol for recalcitrant pagans, the Catholic priests urged their Native American congregations to demonstrate true Christian piety by desecrating the old heathens’ “sacrificial altar.”

Despite superficial damage incurred since its discovery, the Aztec Calendar Stone, as it has come to be known, is housed today in relatively pristine condition at Mexico City’s renowned Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In the more than 300 years after it was found, the great disk has gained recognition as the outstanding symbol of Aztec Civilization. Zelia Nuttall, the early 20th century’s leading archaeologist in Mesoamerican research, valued the Stone as “the most precious and remarkable monument ever unearthed on the American Continent, and one of the most admirable and perfect achievements of the human intellect.” Her high regard for the find, echoed since for four generations of investigators, resulted from the abundance of extraordinary information they deciphered from the monolith.

Today, it is one of the most universally recognized images in the world, its reproduction adorning everything from T-shirts and album covers to tourist agencies and restaurants. Despite its international recognition, few people understand its layered, cryptic meanings. To most, it is no less puzzling, however aesthetically dazzling, than it was to the sewer workers who found it in 1790. The Stone is far more than a “calendar” or an archaeological curiosity. It is an exceptional work of scientific genius simultaneously extending backward and forward in time. And although the origins of the

high-level technology that produced it are shrouded in speculation, the disk’s physical creation is mostly understood. The 50,000-pound slab was hewn from quarries in the mountains near the floating gardens of Xochimilco, south of today’s Mexico City. Then it was somehow transported 30 miles to the main square of the Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlan, and hauled more than half way up the steep steps of the Great Pyramid to a broad landing, where carving began in 1479

A.D., during the reign of Emperor Axayacatl.

Two years later, the painted work was complete, and set up a special, throne-like cradle to face out over the city. There the stone stood for the next 40 years. After Hernan Cortez landed at Vera Cruz with his small army and conquered Mexico in 1519, the Spanish aggressively set about demolishing Tenochtitlan. While the soldiers confiscated all the gold, silver and gems they were able to lay their hands on, the clergy were intent on ecclesiastical matters. Anything they could not smash to pieces, they buried.

In a frenzy of religious zeal, they dislodged the Calendar Stone from its stand and sent it careening down the broad staircase, at the foot of which it crashed, chipped but otherwise intact. Standing righteously over the deposed “altar,” they ordered their enslaved native parishioners to “bury with the stone the memory of the abominable acts perpetrated on it.” After its resurrection nearly three centuries later, the fateful disk has achieved a world-wide interest it never attracted during the four decades it perched on the steps of Tenochtitlan Great Pyramid.

But what does it mean? What is the significance of its curious, sometimes nightmarish imagery? Is it possible to read or decipher its messages? Happily, the Calendar Stone has given up many, perhaps most, but not all of its secrets to the investigators who found themselves challenged by its mystery. Their findings are scattered over several different books. In all their literature, however, there are no references to some decisively important aspects of the Aztec Stone that should seem apparent.

For example, as noted by the Spanish invaders, the broad masses of the Aztec people were beardless. Only some members of the royal elite, such as Emperor Moctezuma II himself, could grow thin patches of facial hair, implying a genetic distinction between the ruling minority and the ruled majority. This distinction is important in any examination of the Calendar Stone, because, at its very bottom, a pair of stylized serpents confront each other with open jaws, from which protrude two human heads. The man on the right sports a mustache and goatee, but his companion on the left is fully bearded. These characters were used in temple-art to portray Tezcatlipocha (“Jaguar”) and Quetzalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”), respectively, the Sacred Twins. Here they represent the Sacred Duality, a sacred concept pervading the universe: light and darkness, hot and cold, hard and soft, good and evil, pleasure and pain, and so on.

Quetzalcoatl was the famous founding father of Mesoamerican Civilization, the culture-bearer of science and art from across the Atlantic Ocean, whose foreign, that is, Old World, origins are underscored on the disk by his full beard. The Feathered Serpent’s appearance on the monolith suggests that its technology was among the gifts he brought from his homeland over the sea. Indeed, the Aztecs did not invent the Calendar Stone. All they did was supplant the names of their own gods for those they copied from the Mayas, whose end preceded the Aztecs by 400 years. Nor were the Mayas responsible for its invention. They obtained it from their predecessors, the Olmecs. Yet, even among these earliest known Mesoamericans, the same calendar shows no sign of having been evolved by them, because the Olmecs were using it in a fully developed form from the earliest days of their society, beginning around 1500 B.C. Alfonso Caso, Mexico’s leading archaeologist, wrote, “This calendar’s development is without doubt very old, and it must have been the creation of a people who attained a high degree of culture prior to that of all the peoples with whose culture we are now familiar.”

If the calendar shows no sign of evolution in Mesoamerica, then comparisons with similar systems overseas lead us foremost to prehistoric Britain. Here, on the Salisbury Plain, stands the country’s most famous megalithic relic: Stonehenge. Seen from directly overhead, its essential resemblance to the Calendar Stone is remarkable. And stripped of its Aztec mythological images, that resemblance grows considerably. Both Stonehenge and the Calendar Stone comprise concentric circles, in which the numbers five and six reoccur as the leading numerological symbols for the site and the artifact. And both were astronomical almanacs, or celestial computers, to determine the positions of various heavenly bodies and the recurrence of particular sky phenomena, especially solar eclipses and lunar phases. Could the same science that made Stonehenge possible also have been responsible for the Mesoamerican Calendar, which suddenly appears fully developed in the 16th century B.C.?

At that time, Stonehenge was approaching the zenith of its use and final building episode. This is not to argue that the inventors of Mesoamerica’s calendar were ancient Britons. More likely, both they and the Olmecs were recipients of an astral technology from some intermediary civilization, as implied in a comparison of relative dates between the megalithic site and the megalithic artifact: Stonehenge’s earliest building stage occurred around 3000 B.C.; the present epoch of the Mesoamerican Calendar opened on August 12, 3113 B.C. The Aztecs claimed that their calendar came into use after their ancestors arrived in Mexico from the deluge that destroyed their homeland, a volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean they remembered as Aztlan.

Although comparisons with “legendary” Atlantis are beyond the scope of this article, they are unavoidable, as they must have seemed to Alexander von Humbolt, Germany’s great explorer-scientist of the early 19th century. He devoted 100 pages of his Atlas Pittoresco to the Aztec Calendar Stone, and, according to Peter Tompkins, author of Mysteries of Mexican Pyramids, “concluded that the peoples of the two continents might have developed their astronomical ideas from a common source. He found evidence for a common origin of the cultures of the two continents,

including systems of both the solar and lunar zodiacs, with many similar animals allotted and even similar sounds of some of the astrological terms.” The Aztec constellation, Colotl Ixayac, the “Scorpion,” is the same constellation, also known as “Scorpio,” in the European Old World.

A third point never discussed elsewhere, at least so far as this writer has been able to determine, is that the Aztec Calendar Stone appears to be only an artistic copy, the hugely oversized representation of an original machine, or, more precisely, some portable instrument, probably no larger than 2 or 3 feet across, for the computation of significant astronomical data. The sculpture, no doubt a faithfully accurate reproduction, however much larger than the original device, plainly shows five or six disks within its shallow bowl superimposed on one another like stacked plates. These were meant to turn either clockwise or counterclockwise independently of each other, aligning with certain points around the calendar to obtain desired coordinates. Its real identity as an apparatus seems underscored by the notches and gears that comprise its outer circles. Certainly, its overall impression, when all its various parts are highlighted separately, is that of a working instrument. Perhaps there was more than one, and the Tenochtitlan Calendar Stone was meant to memorialize astronomical calculators owned by every high priest. In any case, no such device has yet been found to prove that ancient Mexico’s monumental sculpture was the artistic facsimile of an ancient computer, although the monolith itself suggests as much.

More certain is the symbolic meaning of the Aztec Calendar Stone, reading it from the center outward. At its hub is the ghastly visage of the sun-god, Tonatiuh. A flaming fire-pot over his forehead or Third Eye, his tongue lolls for bloody sacrifice, fire blazes from his ears and nostrils, and his talons (in circles on either side of his face) grip human hearts, because he was symbolized by the eagle. He is not alone in this bloody business. Queztalcoatl and Tezcatlipocha, the Sacred Twins mentioned earlier, are likewise depicted with human hearts dangling from their clenched teeth. Here is the real mystery, not only of the Calendar Stone, but of the Aztec people themselves: How could such a race, which achieved

great heights in all the arts of civilization, delight in the most horrific religious practices? The Stone embodies this awful contradiction, but it does not explain it.

Yet, Tonatiuh was among the most popular gods in the Aztec pantheon, because he made human redemption possible when, at the beginning of the world, he threw himself into a fire. Rising from his own immolation, he takes the souls of persons who died heroic deaths into heaven. All others descend into nine levels of hell before vanishing forever like mist. Acceptably heroic deaths included falling in battle for men and expiring during childbirth for women. Voluntarily sacrificing their hearts to the flint knife, represented by his greedy tongue, guaranteed paradise for both sexes. Tonatiuh himself contains a secret that conceals his and perhaps the entire calendar’s real identity and origins. His ferocious expression is the mirror image of a classical facial exercise in Hatha Yoga, known as “The Lion,” which is Sanskrit for “union” or “yoking.” Yoga is an ancient spiritual discipline of physical and mental procedures still used to achieve an inner meditation so profound that its practitioners believe they become one with the universal soul of Creation.

The yogic Lion exercise calls for the extension of the tongue to its limits, the tensing of all facial muscles, widening of the eyes, and stretching of the fingers to resemble lion’s claws, the same posture expressed at the center of the Aztec Calendar Stone. This particular exercise signifies the relief of a tense period, an ending or completion, just as 4-Olin marks the end of a tension-filled epoch, our present Fifth Sun. The yogic Lion and the Aztec face on the disk are both physically and symbolically identical. Yet, the origins of Yoga are lost in the depths of prehistory, its images traced back to the Indus Valley Civilization of the early fourth millennium B.C. Yoga was and still is the dominant spiritual discipline of Asia, particularly identified with ancient India generally and the Buddha specifically.

Previous issues of Ancient American featured several articles by various investigators, who competently established the presence of Hindu and other Asian visitors in the Americas during prehistoric times. Their influence among native society was profound and undeniable, apparently extending to a central position in the Aztec conception of ritual time. Given the extremely important spiritual influence at work behind the Calendars true nature and in its subtle, unrecognized esoteric significance, the Stone is as much a monument to Aztec art as it is to foreigners from Asia. They were probably ancient Hindus, who taught the mythical code of Yoga to the high priests of Tenochtitlan.

Though the Calendar Stone’s earliest origins may have begun with the lost city of Atlantis-Aztlan, the additional appearance of this vital theme from the Far East may be crucial to unlocking the Calendar Stone’s hidden meanings. In other words, if its images are seen as yoga symbols, then the disk may suddenly reveal an incredibly ancient spiritual outlook that once dominated Aztec Civilization and continues to be practiced by millions of people around the world. Surrounding Tonatiuh are four circles, which define his calendrical name, 4-Olin, or 4-Earthquake. He stands for the present epoch in historical time, known as the Fifth Sun, each “sun” representing a separate era.

The Aztecs believed that four worldwide catastrophes took place in the past. Each cataclysm marked the end of a time-period, or Sun, in human history and the beginning of the next. Those that preceded 4-Olin, our time, are hieroglyphically pictured in a quartet of boxes on all sides of Tonatiuh, beginning in order of their latest occurrence with the bottom-right square. In it is 4-AtI, or 4-Water. The picture here shows an overturned bucket dumping out a deluge of water in the form of the goddess of storms on an already halfsunken pyramid. She was Chalchiuhtlicue, “Our Lady of the Turquoise Skirt,” a name that colorfully suggests her identification with

swirling or stormy water. Indeed, she was often represented in religious art as seated upon a throne surrounded by whirlpools of drowning people. It was her disaster that ended a former age of civilized greatness and ushered a new one in Mexico, with the arrival of survivors, the ancestors of the Aztecs.

If all of this sounds strangely similar to the destruction of Atlantis, beginning with the obvious 4-Atl, the impression deepens when we learn that, on her feast day, Chalchiuhtlicue was honored by the priests, who collected reeds and ceremoniously placed them around her temple to signify her identification with Aztlan, the island home of the Aztec’s forefathers. The ritual name for Aztlan (literally, “Place-in-the-Water”) was “Field of Reeds,” a metaphor for “great wisdom” or literacy, because reeds were used as writing utensils. Coincidentally, on the other side of the world, the Ancient Egyptians wrote in the “Book of the Dead,” a guide for souls to the next world, that their ancestors came from a great island in the Distant West, called Sekhet-aaru, or “Place of Reeds.” The reed-pen had the same symbolic significance for learning in Egypt.

The Sun that preceded 4-Atl appears bottom-left of Tonatiuh. Known as 4-Quihuitl, or “Fire from Heaven,” it depicts another up-turned bucket, this time dumping flames on a pyramid. It appears that 4- Quihuitl signified some large-scale meteor fall that devastated pre-Atlantean civilization. Upper-left, 4-Ehecatl, or “Windstorm,” is an eagle breathing at a pyramid, as a dragonfly scoots away. The first and earliest Sun is upper-right, 4-Ocelotl, or “Jaguar,” in which early humans and a race of giants were destroyed by wild animals. This box is unique, because it is the only square that does not feature a pyramid, implying that 4-Ocelotl took place before man attained civilization.

The next ring surrounding this central section of the Suns, or ages, contains the 20 day-signs of the Aztec month. Their original names, translations, and aspects begin top-right, going around to

complete the circle: Xochitl (Flower, Life), Tecpatl (Flint, Violence); it also stood for the concept of zero and, as mentioned above, Tonatiuh’s horrid tongue. As though to emphasize an Asian-American connection sited earlier, the Hindus and early Mesoamericans were the only ancient people who used zero in their computations.

Continuing around the ring of day signs is Olin (Earthquake, Limitations), Cozcaquauhtli (Vulture, Disease), Cuauhtli (Eagle, Time), Ocelotl (Jaguar, Transformation), Acatl (Cane, Emptiness), Quihuitl (Fire from Heaven, Judgement), Ozornatli (Monkey, Baser Instincts), Itzcuintli (Dog, Loyalty), Malinalli (Grass, Peace), AtI (Water, Life-Death), Tochtli (Rabbit, Sensitivity), Mazatl (Deer, Harmony), Miquiztli (Skull, Death), Coatl (Serpent, Change), Cuetzpallin (Lizard, Dreams), Calli (House, Preserver), Ehecatl (Windstorm, Travel), and Cipactli (Alligator, Earth).

Each month had its own ceremonies, which ranged from requests to Tlaloc, the rain-god, Altcualcaco, or “Wants Water,” and the spring celebration, Tlaxochimaco's “Birth of Flowers,” to military parades of the Ochpaniz, “Month of Brooms,” and the Atemoztli “Fall of Waters” music festival, culminating in the Izcalli mass-sacrifice of tens of thousands of victims. These holidays are included here for their insight into Aztec society. As someone once said, “Show me how a people celebrate, and I will tell you what they are.”

With the exception of the Sacred Twins at the bottom of the Calendar Stone, the remaining four rings depict no mythically symbolic themes, but are given over entirely to mathematical notation. Even the smallest details, to the lone dot and a single diagonal line, signify arithmetical values. For example, the squares at the outer perimeter contain representations of the manguey plant, whose leaves and stem each add up to a Xiuhmolpili, a unit of 365 days. The 10 dots around each manguey represent a decade. There are 20 such squares on the Stone, in addition to two other squares surrounded on three sides by 16 dots, for an additional six years. Here, we have a repetition of the

sacred numerals five and six mentioned earlier, and cited by Plato in his account of Atlantis, the Kritias, as the holy numbers used for the construction of religious objects and structures.

The Calendar Stone’s eight pointers, or indicators, were each mounted on different rings of the instrument after which the great, sculpted object was modeled. As a ring was turned to a different position, its arrow pointed to the desired computation. The four larger indicators, raised over the four lesser pointers, are the Major and Minor Cardinal Directions, respectively. They also stand for the eight divisions of the Aztec day, from sunrise to sunset in eight intervals of three hour duration each. The Aztec year was begun and divided by solstices, equinoxes, and days of the zenith, celestial events all accurately computed by the Calendar Stone.

Its innermost arrow, atop the ring encircling Tonatiuh, indicates the day when the sun stands at its highest point directly over Mexico City, which, considering the Stone’s original position on the steps of Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid, is entirely appropriate. At that time, it held small obelisks known as gnomens around its edge. They threw shadows over different details of the sculpted face, pointing to the days when solstices, equinoxes, and zeniths would occur. They also recorded the annual rotation of the circumpolar star groups, and the apparent course of the sun each year. Clearly, the monolith represents a surprisingly high level of astronomical computer science.

The real name of the Calendar Stone was Cuauhtlixicalli (literally, the “House of the Eagle,” the “Eagle Bowl,” or, closest to the real meaning of its name, “The Vessel of Time”). It was not a calendar in a restricted, modern sense, but a complex, sophisticated almanac for divination. For it was not Tonatiuh that the Aztecs really worshiped, but the greater power he symbolized: time, as signified by the eagle and the sun, monarchs of the sky. To the Aztecs, the God of Time seemed to be a fitting supreme deity, because he brought everything into existence. It was said that he destroyed everything,

and brought everything into being again as a cycle of creation, new forms, destruction, and recreation.

As described, the Aztecs believed that the world had been successively destroyed four times before by overwhelming cataclysms that obliterated society and virtually exterminated all mankind. After years of misery and hardship, the survivors were always able to rebuild, eventually flourishing as before in civilized greatness, but only so long as they obeyed the will of heaven. When again they grew corrupt, the gods sent them another holocaust, and whoever was spared had to start the slow ascent back to civilization all over.

It was of the utmost importance, therefore, that society be run strictly within the observable laws of Nature, as perceived in the time tables of the heavens, the regular movements of celestial bodies, and revealed each day to the 150,000 inhabitants of Tenochtitlan by the great disk gleaming from the steps of the Great Pyramid. As Peter Tompkins writes of Zelia Nuttall, she saw the Stone as “a calendar designed to control the actions of all the human beings of the state, bringing their communal life into accord with the periodic movements of the heavenly bodies.” The Aztecs’ awe of the cycles of time absolutely dominated their lives, because they believed that moral law and cosmic law did not influence each other, but rather, were one and the same.

A similar situation would result if the U.S. legal system were substituted by the rules governing astrology, rules rigidly enforced on the population as federal laws. A person’s fate was socially set by his horoscope, and the day-sign under which he or she was born, determined everything in a person’s life, including the profession taken in adulthood, even an infant’s name. Each day had its own deity, whose glyph was a stylized portrait of its functions and character.

La Malinche, Cortez’s native mistress, was a Spanish mispronunciation of her real name, Ce Malinalli, “One-Grass,” of the Aztec Calender. Even the Aztecs’ most popular national pastime was laid

out in a cross-version of their calender. Patolli, a board game in which players gambled heavily as testimony to their faith in the gods, was made up of 52 squares to reproduce the 52-year cycle of the Eagle Bowl. Marriages were contracted, travels undertaken, rituals enacted, wars declared, treaties enacted, buildings erected, business deals concluded, sexual activity allowed or forbidden—in fact, virtually every movement was regulated by the Vessel of Time.

It was a device perfected with more than 30 centuries of use, involving the best brains of at least four Mesoamerican cultures: the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, and Aztec. Millennia of painstakingly recorded celestial observations and so much high-level science went into the Cuauhtlixicalli for so long that modern investigators are still finding surprises in its challenging complexity. As an astronomical alarm clock for alerting humanity to impending doom, the great and terrible disk seems to have worked only too well. It predicted for Emperor Moctezuma the disastrous return of the Feathered Serpent, on Reed-One, or the Christian year 1519—precisely when Cortez first set foot in Mexico.

At the very top of the Stone perches a glyph comprising a square, in which a manguey plant is surrounded on three sides by 13 dots, each representing the 13 “heavens,” which made up one “Sun,” or time period. This glyph is, in fact, known as “Reed-Thirteen” and signifies the end of a “World,” or major epoch. In this case, the year 1479 A.D.—exactly 13 years before Columbus landed on the Atlantic shores of Mexico, marking the beginning of the end of the Aztec world.

Reed-Thirteen’s prediction of, or coincidence with (depending on one’s point of view), the Spaniards’ devastating arrival calls into question why the Calendar Stone came to be made when it was. It is an eminently valid question, in light of the Aztecs’ obsession to do the right thing at the right time, all the time. Certainly, something as momentous as the creation of the colossal and intricately carved

monolith was not undertaken arbitrarily by a people fanatically dedicated to timely procedures. Construction on the great disk began in 1479, the same year of the fateful glyph. Indeed, Reed-Thirteen not only occupies the top position of the Stone; it is pointed to on both sides by arrow heads and beneath by the uppermost indicator, as though all the elements of the Calendar were culminating in this particular sign.

It is the outstanding and supreme date of the whole object, and suggests that the Stone was made just then, because the astrologer-priests determined that 1479 to 1492 would simultaneously encapsulate the year of its creation and the year of their society’s downfall. It was primarily to foreshadow this doom that the disk was constructed when it was and set up to hang over the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan. To them, it was a monstrous clock, winding down the last years of the Aztec Empire and reminding them to prepare for the inevitable end of their world. Hence, all the graphic references around the horrid face of Tonatiuh, the personification of time in its utterly destructive aspect.

Certainly, the most disconcerting message of the Calendar Stone for our time is its prediction of 4-Olin, the Fifth Sun—the fifth worldwide destruction yet to come. The Aztecs believed that so long as man lived in harmony with the predictable rhythms of the universe, he could indefinitely postpone that destruction. But if he fell into sin once more; if he preferred greed and selfishness to the laws of Nature, the “World” would be destroyed just as surely as those which preceded his. This Fifth Sun, in which our present time occupies the final years, is set to end through the power of 4-Olin, or “Earthquake.”

This does not mean that seismic activity alone will be the agency of our destruction. Rather, “Earthquake” is a poetic or ritually descriptive title, meaning that the next cataclysm will be a rebellion of the whole

Earth against mankind. In other words, an ecological catastrophe. That the Aztecs or their scientific predecessors so many centuries ago could have envisioned such a planet-wide disaster for our environmentally self-destructive age lends an eerie credence to the ominous Calendar Stone. It developed, as mentioned above, from previous time-keeping systems. In fact, the Aztec stone disk seems hardly more than a physical expression of the much earlier Maya version, which specified that the present age, or Fifth Sun, will come to an end on an early 21st century Winter Solstice. A modern computer simulation, known as “Voyager,” reveals that on the morning of 21 December 2012, when the Sun is one degree above the horizon at the equator (73 degrees West), the ecliptic will intersect with the galactic ecliptic to place the Sun at the very center, in the “cross-hairs” between the solar path and that of our galaxy. The ecliptic is a line the Sun follows across the sky.

Though the ability of Maya astronomers predicting this cosmic event more than two millennia ago with such pin-point accuracy seems remarkable, it is nothing compared to the real significance of their prediction. From our Earth-bound perspective, the Sun moves into the ecliptic crosshairs only once every 26,000 years. Astronomers refer to this moment as the Precession of the Great Year of the Equinox. But late advances in astrophysics tend to confirm that this great Precession is entirely subjective and theoretical—meaningless—because observations extending out into space beyond 18,000 light-years disintegrate. In that case, 2012's Winter Solstice sunrise takes place only once in the whole history of the universe! More amazing still, modern scientists did not even discover the whereabouts of the galactic center until 1963. How could the ancient Maya have known its exact location? And why did they choose this cosmically unique event as the date to terminate their calendar?

According to the Aztec astronomer-priests, our Fifth Sun, which began 5,106 years ago, is supposed to come to an end between December 21st and Christmas Eve, 2012. Or will it be the eve of something else?

Niebra Disc Proves Evidence of Pre-Columbus Explorers

Critics arguing that sailors before the time of Christopher Columbus lacked a navigational instrument needed to find their way across the Atlantic Ocean were challenged when such a piece of ancient maritime technology was found at the turn of the 20th century. Its discovery was preceded 100 years earlier by a similar, though more complex, apparatus dredged up in a Greek fishermans net off the coast of Antikythera, in the Aegean Sea. “It was like finding a turbo-jet engine in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” exclaimed an astounded archaeologist 60 years later, when the object’s identity was finally understood. These two, sophisticated instruments are physical proof that ancient man did indeed possess the scientific means to cross the oceans of the world. Their very existence suggests they must have been used for that purpose during the deep past, as described in the February, 2004 issue of Ancient American.

The Niebra Disc was considered high technology in the Ancient World.

Germany’s Bronze Age Disc: A Transatlantic Device? by Dr. R.M. de Jonge 8c J.S. Wakefield

In 1999, a bronze disc was looted from a prehistoric grave in the neighborhood of Sachsen-Anhalt, in the Harz Mountains of Germany. Three years later, the curious object was recovered and has since begun to throw new light on connections between the Old and New Worlds during the deep past.

With a diameter of 32 centimeters and weighing 2 kilograms, the strange, metal disc is unlike anything previously found in Europe. It is partially covered with pieces of gold-plate, though in some places gold-plating is missing. The 3,000-year-old grave from which it was taken is located within a circular-shaped wall system 200 to 350 meters up Mount Mittelberg, in Niebra, close to a tributary of the Weser River, 250 kilometers from the North Sea coast. The bronze disc contains a relatively high quantity of arsenic, and the gold is contaminated with other substances. But these contaminants and strong corrosion of the surface, together with its context in the grave in which it was found, date the object to circa 1600 B.C.

On the front side of the Niebra Disc, as it has come to be called, appears a large solar image with some damage to its gold plating, and the representation of a crescent quarter moon. Either side originally featured strips of gold-plating, now missing from one side. The celestial images might signify the eastern and western horizons, usually conceived of as land or mountains in ancient pictographs. A cup or bowl-shaped object at the bottom (4) possibly perhaps symbolizes the Milky Way, while a group of seven stars (22) is most likely meant to be the Pleiades. There are 23 other stars on the Disc, making for a total of 30 stellar images. The stars to the left of the crescent lunar image appear to represent the planets Jupiter (13) and Venus (12). Interestingly, the relative position of (11) corresponds to a super nova (a stellar explosion) documented by Chinese astronomers around 1600 B.C., just when the Niebra Disc was made.

Its surface also suggests a human face or head. What seems to be a complete “eye” is beside a crescent, or half-closed eye. Below them, there is a smiling mouth. At the sides might be hair, ears, or ear-spools. Contemporary petroglyphs sometimes depicted sun-faces, apparently representing a solar deity, and in Egyptian temple art, the sun-god was usually depicted rising from the eastern horizon, with the Moon in the west, the direction of the land. Each day, Ra traversed the sky from horizon to horizon, and each evening he sailed in his celestial ship to the other side of the world. His vessel was sometimes shown as an upside-down boat in the sky, or an upright sun-boat on water. Similarly, there may be no conventionally understood “up” or “down” on the Niebra Disc, because it might have been intended as a three-dimensional instrument, including the four Cardinal Directions, plus a vertical, skyward dimension.

Its Pleiadian constellation and 23 other stars correspond to the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, at 23 degrees north. The latitude was said to be holy by followers of solar religions around the world, because at noon on midsummer day the Sun is directly overhead at this latitude, having moved up from the south. After holding this latitude for a couple of days, the Sun begins a slow movement back toward the south. Most European megaliths incorporate this sacred position, underscoring the conclusion of archaeo-astronomers that the Paleolithic structures, such as Britain’s Stonehenge, were deliberately oriented to significant celestial phenomena. The Niebra Disc’s separate stars also corresponded to the latitude of the southern Egyptian empire at 23 degrees north, the geographical mid-point of Ra’s religious cult.

The Disc’s 30 stars coincide with the latitude of the Nile Delta, the center of the northern Egyptian kingdom, at 30 degrees North. The group of seven stars may also represent the same degrees of latitude of Egypt from 23 degrees north to 30 degrees north. In the hierarchy of deities immediately beneath Ra, the god of resurrection, Ausar (known as Osiris in Greece and to the rest of the outside world), and the sky-god, Horus (originally Hr) correspond to the pair of “eyes” on the “face” of the Niebra Disc, which, consequently, represents the spherical Earth, and especially the North Atlantic Ocean. Its “mouth” is Ra’s sun-boat, sailing toward the west. Details of the crossing may be encoded in the placement of the stars on the face of the disc.

Let us assume that the “boat” is upright on the ocean, with the moon near the eastern horizon, and the Sun moving toward the west. Usually, in megalithic petroglyphs, the center of the eastern horizon is the Straits of Gibraltar, on the coast of the Old World. The Tropic of Cancer leaves the continent of Africa at 23 degrees North, synonymous for the disc’s 23 stars. This is the historic place they wanted to cross the ocean in honor of the sun-god, Ra.

In the bowl, or “boat” image on the Niebra Disc are three stars (1, 2, 3) which correspond to the three island groups of the Cape Verde Islands, off the West African coast. Below the centers of the Sun and the Moon are 15 stars, the latitude of the most southern Cape Verde Islands (15 degrees north), and the sailing direction from there, 15 degrees west south west, to South America, as well as Cape Gracias-a-Dios, the east Cape of Honduras, also at 15 degrees north. The 15th star touches the western horizon, where the culture of Central America begins. The Disc’s 30 stars comprise the correct length of the Southern Crossing, 30dl (distance lines), or 30 degrees, equal to 3,333 kilometers.

On the left side of the Sun is another star (15), the position of which is associated with Maya ceremonial centers along the North

Coast of Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala at 16 degrees north. Above them are two more stars (17, 18) at the center of Olmec Civilization near the southern basin of the Gulf of Campeche at 18 degrees north. Above these, are two more stars (19, 20), bordering the northern border of the Olmec world at 20 degrees north. The center of the western horizon (formerly in gold on the Niebra Disc) corresponds to the southern coast of the Gulf of Campeche and is clearly situated on the artifact west south west of the center on the eastern horizon. It thus agrees with latitudes for Gibraltar at 36 degrees north, confirming the discovery of America before the 1600 B.C. date for the Niebra Disc).

At its top appears the 21st star (21) corresponding to the northeast Cape of Yucatan at 21 degrees north. The 22nd star gives the latitude of southwest Cuba at 22 degrees north. If the group of seven stars did, in fact, signify the Constellation of the Pleiades, their appearance in the sky may have coincided the end of the sailing season each late autumn. They likewise join two more adjacent stars (22, 23) to form the Azore Islands. The moon on the Disc then corresponds to Madeira. If we count two more stars behind the eastern horizon of the gold object (15, 16), their total number would be 32, encoding the latitude of Bermuda at 32 degrees North.

Through the use of encoded latitudes such as these, the Niebra Disc reveals itself as an ancient astrolabe. It was a navigational instrument that enabled Bronze Age sea-farers to complete their transatlantic voyages to and from America millennia before this device was re-invented in the High Middle Ages. The discovery of this singular artifact shows that pre-Classical sailors were, in fact, aided by a maritime technology sufficiently advanced to allow successful round-trip expeditions between the Old and New Worlds many centuries before Columbus.

Joseph, F (2006). Discovering the mysteries of ancient America : lost history and legends, unearthed and explored. USA: Mark Book Press

Download this book here.