A helicopter lands in the African bush for the first time. None of the natives has ever seen such a machine. The helicopter lands in a clearing with a sinister clatter; pilots in battle-dress, with crash-helmets and machine-guns, jump out of it. The savage in his loin-cloth stands stupefied and uncomprehending in the presence of this thing that has come down from heaven and the unknown 'gods' who came with it. After a time the helicopter takes off again and disappears into the sky.
Once he is alone again the savage has to work out and interpret this apparition. He will tell others who were not present what he saw: a bird, a heavenly vehicle, that made a terrible noise and stank, and white-skinned creatures carrying weapons that spat fire. The miraculous visit is fixed and handed down for all time. When the father tells it to his son, the heavenly bird obviously does not get any smaller and the creatures that got out of it become weirder, stronger and more imposing. These and many other embellishments will be added to the story. But the premise for the glorious legend was the actual landing of the helicopter. It did land in the clearing in the jungle and the pilots did climb out of it. From that moment the event is perpetuated in the mythology of the tribe.
Certain things cannot be made up. I should not be ransacking our prehistory for space travellers and heavenly aircraft if accounts of such apparitions only appeared in two or three ancient books. But when in fact nearly all the texts of the primitive peoples all over the globe tell the same story, I feel I must try to explain the objective truths concealed in their pages.
'Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not ...' (Ezekiel 12:2.)
We know that all the Sumerian gods had their counterparts in certain stars. There is supposed to have been a statue to Marduk = Mars, the highest of the gods, that weighed 800 talents of pure gold. If we are to believe Herodotus, that is equivalent to more than 48,000 lb of gold. Ninurta = Sirius was judge of the universe and passed sentence on mortal men. There are cuneiform tablets which were addressed to Mars, to Sirius and to the Pleiades. Time and again Sumerian hymns and prayers mention divine weapons, the form and effect of which must have been completely senseless to the people of those days. A panegyric to Mars says that he made fire rain down and destroyed his enemies with a brilliant lightning flash. Inanna is described as she traverses the heavens, radiating a frightful blinding gleam and annihilating the houses of the enemy. Drawings and even the model of a home have been found resembling a prefabricated atomic bunker; round and massive, with a single strangely framed aperture. From the same period, about 3000 B.C., archaeologists have found a model of a team with chariot, and driver, as well as two sportsmen wrestling, all of immaculate craftsmanship.
The Sumerians, it has been proved, were masters of applied art. Then why did they model a clumsy bunker, when other excavations at Babylon or Uruk have brought much subtler works to light? Quite recently a whole Sumerian library of about 60,000 clay tablets was found in the town of Nippur, 95 miles south of Baghdad. We now possess the oldest account of the Flood, engraved on a tablet in six columns. Five antediluvian cities are named on the tablets: Eridu, Badtibira, Larak, Sitpar and Shuruppak. Two of these cities have not yet been discovered. On these tablets, the oldest deciphered to date, the Noah of the Sumerians is called Ziusudra; he is supposed to have lived in Shuruppak and also to have built his ark there. So we now possess an even older description of the Flood than the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. No one knows whether new finds will not produce still earlier accounts.
The men of the ancient cultures seem to have been almost obsessed with the idea of immortality or rebirth. Servants and slaves obviously laid down voluntarily in the tomb with their masters. In the burial chamber of Shub-At, no less than seventy skeletons lay next to each other in perfect order. Without the least sign of violence, sitting or lying in their brilliantly coloured robes, they awaited the death which must have come swiftly and painlessly—perhaps by poison. With unshakeable conviction, they looked forward to a new life beyond the grave with their masters. But who put the idea of rebirth into the heads of these heathen peoples?
The Egyptian pantheon is just as confusing. The ancient texts of the people on the Nile also tell of mighty beings who traversed the firmament in boats. A cuneiform text to the sun god, Ra, runs:
'Thou couplest under the stars and the moon, thou drawest the ship of Aten in heaven and on earth like the tirelessly revolving stars and the stars at the North Pole that do not set.'
Here is an inscription from a pyramid:
Though art he who directs the sun ship of millions of years.'
Even if the old Egyptian mathematicians were very advanced, it is odd that they should speak of millions of years in connexion with the stars and a heavenly ship. What does the Mahabharata say? 'Time is the seed of the universe.'
In Memphis the god Ptah handed the king two models with which to celebrate the anniversaries of his reign and commanded him to celebrate the said anniversaries for six times a hundred thousand years. Need I add that when the god Ptah came to give the king the models he appeared in a gleaming heavenly chariot and afterwards disappeared over the horizon in it. Today representations of the winged sun and a soaring falcon carrying the sign of eternity and eternal life can still be found on doors and temples at Edfu. There is no known place in the world where such innumerable illustrations of winged symbols of the gods are preserved as in Egypt.
Every tourist knows the Island of Elephantine with the famous Nilometer at Asswan. The island is called Elephantine even in the oldest texts, because it was supposed to resemble an elephant. The texts were quite right—the island does look like an elephant. But how did the ancient Egyptians know that, because this shape can only be recognised from an aeroplane at a great height? For there is no hill offering a view of the island that would prompt anyone to make the comparison.
A recently discovered inscription on a building at Edfu says that the edifice is of supernatural origin. The ground plan was drawn by the deified being Im-Hotep. Now this Im-Hotep was a very mysterious and clever personality— the Einstein of his time. He was priest, scribe, doctor, architect and philosopher rolled into one. In this ancient world, the age of Im-Hotep, the only tools the archaeologists allow its people for working stone are wooden wedges and copper, neither of which is suitable for cutting up granite blocks. Yet the brilliant Im-Hotep built the step pyramid of Sakkara for his king, who was called Zoser. This 197-ft-high edifice is built with a mastery that Egyptian architects were never quite able to equal afterwards. The structure, surrounded by a wall 33 ft high and 1,750 ft long, was called the 'House of Eternity' by Im-Hotep. He had himself buried in it, so that the gods could wake him on their return.
We know that all the pyramids were laid out according to the position of certain stars. Is not this knowledge a bit embarrassing in view of the fact that we have very little evidence of an early Egyptian astronomy? Sirius was one of the few stars they took an interest in. But this very interest in Sirius seems rather peculiar, because seen from Memphis Sirius can only be observed just above the horizon in the early dawn when the Nile floods begin. To fill the measure of confusion to overflowing, there was an accurate calendar in Egypt 4,221 years before our era! This calendar was based on the rise of Sirius (1st Tout= 19th July) and gave annual cycles of more than 32,000 years.