The Brahman charts of the sky show a large difference from what modern astronomers would expect to find. Calcutta being removed 180° longitude from Baffin Land, the Brahman charts would rather correspond to a position of the earth in which the axis would pierce the globe at Baffin Land, close to the present magnetic pole. The change in latitude of other regions to the west and to the east of India would have been smaller.
It is probable that twenty-seven centuries ago, or perhaps thirty-five, the present North Pole was at Baffin Land or close to the Boothia Felix Peninsula of the American mainland.
The sudden extermination of mammoths was caused by a catastrophe and probably resulted from asphyxiation or electrocution. The immediately subsequent movement of the Siberian continent into the polar region is probably responsible for the preservation of the corpses.3
It appears that the mammoths, along with other animals, were killed by a tempest of gases accompanied by a spontaneous lack of oxygen caused by fires raging high in the atmosphere. A few instants
2 In the direction of Queen Mary Land of the Antarctic continent.
3 Greek authors referred to the mummifying quality of ambrosia; they described the process of pouring the fluid ambrosia into the noses of the dead; this was the process used by the Egyptians also in applying their drugs for mummification; the Babylonians used honey for that purpose.
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later their dying or dead bodies were moving into the polar circle. In a few hours northeastern America moved from the frigid zone of the polar circle into a moderate zone; northeastern Siberia moved in the opposite direction from the moderate zone to the polar circle. The present cold climate of northern Siberia started when the glacial age in Europe and America came to a sudden end.
It is assumed here that in historical times neither northeastern Siberia nor western Alaska were in the polar regions, but that as a result of the catastrophes of the eighth and seventh centuries this area moved into that region. This assumption implies that these lands, to the extent that they were not covered by the sea, were most probably places of human habitation. Archaeological work should be undertaken in northeastern Siberia with the purpose of establishing whether these now uninhabited tundras were sites of culture twenty-seven centuries ago.
robin-bobin
In 1939 and 1940 "one of the most startling and important finds of the century" (E. Stefansson) was made at Point Hope in Alaska, on the shores of Bering Strait: an ancient city of about eight hundred houses, whose population had been larger than that of the modern city of Fairbanks, was discovered there, north of 68°, about 130 miles within the Arctic Circle.4
"Ipiutak, as the location of this ancient city is called by the present Eskimos, must have been built before the Christian era; two thousand years is thought a conservative estimate of its age.
The excavations have yielded beautiful ivory carvings unlike any known Eskimo or other American Indian culture of the northern regions. Fashioned of logs, the strange tombs gave up skeletons which stared up at the excavators with artificial eyeballs carved of ivory and inlaid with jet. . . . Numerous delicately made and engraved implements, also found in the graves, resembled some of those produced in North China two or three thousand years ago; others resemble carvings of the Ainu peoples in northern Japan and the natives of the Amur River in Siberia. The material culture of these people was not a
4 By F. G. Rainey and his colleagues under die sponsorship of die American Museum of Natural History in New York; the results of their expedition were published in die anthropological papers of the museum.
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simple one, of the kind usually found in the Arctic, but elaborate and that of a sophisticated people, in this sense more advanced than any known Eskimos, and clearly derived from eastern Asia." s
In Central Alaska, where the ground has been frozen for many centuries, animals with flesh still attached to their bones have been excavated. "Bones of extinct as well as living species of mammals have been found in most of the regions. . . . They remain not as fossilized bones but in a frozen state, and in some cases, ligaments, skin, and flesh adhere to the bones."6 During the season of 1938, "almost the entire skin of a super-bison, the hair remaining," was found in the Fairbanks area.
"Some of the artifacts found after the stripping at depths of 18 to 20 meters below the original surface may have been on or near the surface originally, but the position of others tends to associate them with extinct animal bones at great depths. The recognizable artifacts are implements of chipped stone, bone and ivory."7
In 1936-1937, in a small area designated as Ester, several implements were found, as well as numerous burned stones, in association with mammoth, mastodon, bison, and horse bones, at the bottom of the muck deposits in Ester Creek, some twenty meters below the original surface.8 In 1938 similar finds were made at Engineer Creek at the bottom of the muck, forty meters below the original surface of the soil.9
These vestiges of life and culture far beneath the surface of the ground are, for the most part, remnants buried in catastrophes prior to that described in the present chapter; among them are also remains of culture and life engulfed in the cataclysms of the eighth and seventh centuries.
When the earth's rotation was disturbed, waves of translation moved eastward, because of inertia, and poleward, because of the recession of the waters from the equatorial bulge where they are held by the rotation of the earth. Thus Alaska must have been swept by waters from the Pacific.
6 Description by Evelyn Stefansson in her book, Here Is Alaska (1943), pp. 138 ff. 6 F. G.
Rainey, "Archaeology in Central Alaska," Anthropological Papers of the Museum of Natural History, XXXV, Pt. IV (1939), 391 fi. T Ibid., p. 393. 8 By P. Maas. »By J. L.
Giddings.
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Towns similar to those unearthed in Alaska, and possibly larger ones, will most likely be found in Kamchatka, or farther to the north on the Koluma or Lena rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. The conditions that preserved mammoths with flesh and skin on their bones must have had the same effect on human beings, and it is not excluded that human bodies encased in ice will be found, too.
robin-bobin
A problem the archaeologists will have to solve is that of clarifying whether the extermination of life in these regions of northwest America and northeast Asia, resulting in the death of mammoths, took place in the eighth and seventh or fifteenth century before the present era (or earlier)—in other words, whether the herds of mammoths were annihilated in the days of Isaiah or in the days of the Exodus.
CHAPTER 8
The Year of 360 Days
PRIOR to the last series of cataclysms, when, as we assume, the globe spun on an axis pointed in a different direction in space, with its poles at a different location, on a different orbit, the year could not have been the same as it has been since.
Numerous evidences are preserved which prove that prior to the year of 365J» days, the year was only 360 days long. Nor was that year of 360 days primordial; it was a transitional form between a year of still fewer days and the present year.
In the period of time between the last of the series of catastrophes of the fifteenth century and the first in the series of catastrophes of the eighth century, the duration of a seasonal revolution appears to have been 360 days.1
In order to substantiate my statement, I invite the reader on a world-wide journey. We start in India.
The texts of the Veda period know a year of only 360 days. "All Veda texts speak uniformly and exclusively of a year of 360 days. Passages in which this length of the year is directly stated are found in all the Brahmanas." 2 "It is striking that the Vedas nowhere mention an intercalary period, and while repeatedly stating that the year