Chariots of the Gods

Chapter Six - Ancient Imagination And Legends Or Ancient Facts?

According to my previous observations there were things in antiquity that should not have existed according to current ideas. But my collector's zeal is by no means exhausted with the finds already accumulated.

Why? Because the mythology of the Eskimos also says that the first tribes were brought to the north by 'gods' with brazen wings! And the oldest Red Indian sagas mentioned a thunderbird who introduced fire and fruit to them. Lastly, the Mayan legend, the Popol Vuh, tells us that the 'gods' were able to recognise everything: the universe, the four cardinal points of the compass and even the round shape of the earth.

What are the Eskimos doing talking about metal birds? Why do the Red Indians mention a thunderbird? How are the ancestors of the Mayas supposed to have known that the earth is round?

The Mayas were intelligent; they had a highly developed culture. They left behind not only a fabulous calendar, but also incredible calculations. They knew the Venusian year of 584 days and estimated the duration of the terrestrial years at 365.2420 days. (The exact calculation today: 365.2422!) The Mayas left behind them calculations to last for 64 million years. Later inscriptions dealt in units which probably approach 400 million years. The famous Venusian formula could quite plausibly have been calculated by an electronic brain. At all events, it is difficult to believe that it originated from a jungle people. The Venusian formula of the Mayas runs as follows:

The Tzolkin has 260, the terrestrial year 365 and the Venusian year 584 days. These figures conceal the possibility of an astonishing division sum. 365 is divisible by 73 five rimes, and 584 eight times. So the incredible formula takes this form:

(Moon)-20 x 13 x 2 x 73 = 260 x 2 x 73 = 37,960

(Sun)-8x13x5x73=104x5x73=37,960

(Venus)-5x13x8x73= 65x8x73 = 37,960

In other words all the cycles coincide after 37,960 days. Mayan mythology claimed that then the 'gods' would come to the great resting place.

The religious legends of the pre-Inca peoples say that the stars were inhabited and that the 'gods' came down to them from the constellation of the Pleiades. Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian cuneiform inscriptions constantly present the same picture: 'gods' came from the stars and went back to them, they travelled through the heavens in fireships or boats, possessed terrifying weapons and promised immortality to individual men.

It was, of course, perfectly natural for the ancient peoples to seek their gods in the sky and also to give their imagination full rein when describing the magnificence of these incomprehensible apparitions. Yet even if all that is accepted, there are still too many anomalies left.

For example, how did the chronicler of the Mahabharata know that a weapon capable of punishing a country with a twelve years' drought could exist? And powerful enough to kill the unborn in their mothers' wombs? This ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, is more comprehensive than the Bible and even at a conservative estimate its original core is at least 5,000 years old. It is well worthwhile reading this epic in the light of present-day knowledge.

We shall not be very surprised when we learn in the Ramayana that Vimanas, i.e. flying machines, navigated at great heights with the aid of quicksilver and a great propulsive wind. The Vimanas could cover vast distances and could travel forwards, upwards and downwards. Enviably manoeuvrable space vehicles! This quotation comes from the translation by N. Dutt, 1891:

'At Rama's behest the magnificent chariot rose up to a mountain of cloud with a tremendous din ...'

We cannot help noticing that not only is a flying object mentioned again, but also that the chronicler talks of a tremendous din. Here is another passage from the Mahabharata:

'Bhima flew with his Vimana on an enormous ray which was as brilliant as the sun and made a noise like the thunder of a storm.' (C. Roy, 1889.)

Even imagination needs something to start it off. How can the chronicler give descriptions that presuppose at least some idea of rockets and the knowledge that such a vehicle can ride on a ray and cause a terrifying thunder?

In the Samsaptakabadha a distinction is made between chariots that fly and those that cannot fly. The first book of the Mahabharata reveals the intimate history of the unmarried Kunti, who not only received a visit from the Sun God, but also had a son by him, a son who is supposed to have been as radiant as the sun itself. As Kunti was afraid—even in those days—of falling into disgrace, she laid the child in a little basket and put it in a river. Adhirata, a worthy man of the Suta cast, fished basket and child out of the water and brought up the infant

Really a story that is hardly worth mentioning if it were not so remarkably like the story of Moses! And, of course, there is yet another reference to the fertilisation of humans by gods. Like Gilgamesh, Aryuna, the hero of the Mahabharata, undertakes a long journey in order to seek the gods and ask them for weapons. And when Aryuna has found the gods after many perils, Indra, the lord of heaven, with his wife Sachi beside him, grants him a very exclusive audience. The two of them do not meet the valiant Aryuna just anywhere. They meet him in a heavenly war-chariot and even invite him to travel in the sky with them.

There are numerical data in the Mahabharata that are so precise that one gets the impression that the author was writing from first-hand knowledge. Full of repulsion, he describes a weapon that could kill all warriors who wore metal on their bodies. If the warriors learnt about the effect of this weapon in time, they tore off all the metal equipment they were wearing, jumped into a river and washed themselves and everything that they had come into contact with very thoroughly. Not without reason, as the author explains, for the weapon made the hair and nails fall out. Everything living, he bemoaned, became pale and weak.

In the eighth book we meet Indra in his heavenly jet chariot again. Out of the whole of mankind he has chosen Yudhisthira as the only one who may enter heaven in his mortal frame. Here, too, the parallel with the stories of Enoch and Elijah cannot be overlooked.

In the same book, in what is perhaps the first account of the dropping of an H bomb, it says that Gurkha loosed a single projectile on the triple city from a mighty Vimana. The narrative uses words which linger in our memories from eye-witness accounts of the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini: white-hot smoke, a thousand times brighter than the sun, rose up in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes. When Gurkha landed again, his vehicle was like a flashing block of antimony. And for the benefit of the philosophers I should mention that the Mahabharata says that time is the seed of the universe.

The Tibetan books Tantyua and Kantyua also mention prehistoric flying machines, which they call 'pearls in the sky'. Both books expressly emphasise that this knowledge is secret and not for the masses. In the Samarangana Sutradhara whole chapters are devoted to describing airships whose tails spout fire and quicksilver.

The word 'fire' in ancient texts cannot mean burning fire, for altogether some forty different kinds of 'fire', mainly connected with electric and magnetic phenomena are enumerated. It is hard to believe that the ancient peoples should have known that it is possible to win energy from heavy metals and how to do so. However we should not oversimplify and dismiss the old Sanscrit texts as mere myths. The large number of passages from old texts already quoted turns the suspicion that men encountered flying 'gods' in antiquity almost into a certainty. We are not going to get any further with the old approach which scholars unfortunately still cling to: 'That doesn't exist... those are mistakes in translation ... those are fanciful exaggerations by the author or copyists.' We must use a new working hypothesis, to wit one developed from the technological knowledge of our age, to throw light on to the thicket behind which our past lies concealed. Just as the phenomenon of the space-ship in the remote past is explicable, there is also a plausible explanation of the terrible weapons which the gods made use of at least once in those days and which are so frequently described. A passage from the Mahabharata is bound to make us think:

'It was as if the elements had been unleashed. The sun spun round. Scorched by the incandescent heat of the weapon, the world reeled in fever. Elephants were set on fire by the heat and ran to and fro in a frenzy to seek protection from the terrible violence. The water boiled, the animals died, the enemy was mown down and the raging of the blaze made the trees collapse in rows as in a forest fire. The elephants made a fearful trumpeting and sank dead to the ground over a vast area. Horses and war chariots were burnt up and the scene looked like the aftermath of a conflagration. Thousands of chariots were destroyed, then deep silence descended on the sea. The winds began to blow and the earth grew bright. It was a terrible sight to see. The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings. Never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon and never before have we heard of such a weapon.' (C. Roya, Drona Parva 1889.)

The story goes on to say that those who escaped washed themselves, their equipment and their arms, because everything was polluted by the death-dealing breath of the 'gods'. What does it say in the Epic of Gilgamesh? 'Has the poisonous breath of the heavenly beast smitten you?'

Alberto Tulli, formerly Keeper of the Egyptian Department in the Vatican Museum, found a fragment of a text from the time of Tuthmosis III, who lived about 1500 B.C. It relates the tradition that the scribes saw a ball of fire come down from heaven and that its breath had an evil smell. Tuthmosis and his soldiers watched this spectacle until the ball of fire rose in a southerly direction and disappeared from view.

All the texts quoted date from millennia before our era, The authors lived on different continents and belonged to different cultures and religions. There were no special messengers to spread the news in those days and inter-continental journeys were not an everyday occurrence. In spite of this, traditions telling almost the same story come from the four corners of the world and from innumerable sources. Did all their authors have the same bee in their bonnet? Were they all haunted by the same phenomenon? It is impossible and incredible that the chronicles of the Mahabharata, the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the texts of the Eskimos, the Red Indians, the Scandinavians, the Tibetans and many, many other sources should all tell the same stories of flying 'gods', strange heavenly vehicles and the frightful catastrophies connected with these apparitions, by chance and without any foundation. They cannot all have had the same ideas all over the world. The almost uniform texts can only stem from facts, i.e. from prehistoric events. They related what was actually there to see. Even if the reporter in the remote past may have exaggerated his story with fanciful trimmings, much as newsmen do today, the fact, the actual incident, still remains at the core of all exclusive accounts, as it does today. And that incident obviously cannot have been invented in so many places in different ages. Let us make up an example:

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.

Admittedly the old astronomers had plenty of time to observe the sun, moon and constellations, year in, year out, until they finally decided that all the constellations stand in the same place again after approximately 365 days. But surely it was quite absurd to base the first calendar on Sirius when it would have been easier to use the sun and the moon, besides leading to more accurate results? Presumably the Sirius calendar is a built up system, a theory of probabilities, because it could never predict the appearance of the star. If Sirius appeared on the horizon at dawn at the same time as the Nile flood, it was pure coincidence. A Nile flood did not happen every year, nor did every Nile flood take place on the same day. In which case, why a Sirius calendar? Is there an old tradition here, too? Was there a text or a promise which was carefully guarded by the priesthood?

The tomb in which a gold necklace and the skeleton of an entirely unknown animal were found probably belonged to King Udimu. Where did the animal come from? How can we explain the fact that the Egyptians had a decimal system already at the beginning of the First Dynasty? How did such a highly developed civilisation arise at such an early date? Where do the objects of copper and bronze originate as early as the beginning of the Egyptian 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 destroyed by the 63rd Inca ruler Pachacuti IV. In the library of Alexandria 500,000 volumes belonging to the learned Ptolemy Soter contained all the traditions of mankind; the library was partly destroyed by the Romans, the rest was burnt on the orders of Caliph Omar centuries later. An incredible thought that invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts were used to heat the public baths of Alexandria!

What became of the library of the Temple at Jerusalem? What became of the library of Pergamon, which is supposed to have housed 200,000 works? When the Chinese Emperor Chi-Huang ordered the destruction of a mass of historical, astronomical and philosophical books for political reasons in 214 B.C., what treasures and secrets went with them? How many texts did the converted Paul have destroyed at Ephesus? And we cannot even imagine the enormous wealth of literature about all branches of knowledge that has been lost to us owing to religious fanaticism. How many thousands of irretrievable writings did monks and missionaries burn in South America in their blind religious zeal?

That happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. Has mankind learnt anything as a result? Only a few decades ago Hitler had books burnt in the public squares and as recently as 1966 the same thing happened in China during Mao's kindergarten revolution. Thank heavens that today books do not exist in single copies, as in the past.

The texts and fragments still available transmit a great deal of knowledge from the remote past. In all ages the sages of a nation knew that the future would always bring wars and revolutions, blood and fire. Did this knowledge perhaps lead these sages to hide secrets and traditions from the mob in the colossal buildings of their period or to preserve them from possible destruction in a safe place? Have they 'hidden' information or accounts in pyramids, temples or statues, or bequeathed them in the form of ciphers so that they would withstand the ravages of time? We certainly ought to test the idea, for far-seeing contemporaries of our own day have acted in this way—for the future.

In 1965 the Americans buried two time capsules in the soil of New York so constituted that they could withstand the very worst that this earth can offer in the way of calamities for 5,000 years. These time capsules contained news that we want to transmit to posterity, so that some day those who strive to illuminate the darkness surrounding the past of their forefathers will know how we lived. The capsules are made of a metal that is harder than steel; they can even survive an atomic explosion. Apart from 'daily news' the capsules also contain photographs of cities, ships, automobiles, aircraft and rockets; they house samples of metals and plastics, of fabrics, threads and cloths; they hand down to posterity objects in everyday use such as coins, tools and toilet articles; books about mathematics, medicine, physics, biology and astronautics are preserved on microfilm. In order to complete this service for some remote and unknown future race, the capsules also contain a 'key', a book with the help of which all the written material can be translated into the languages of the future.

A group of engineers from Westinghouse Electric had the idea of presenting the time capsules to posterity. John Harrington invented the ingenious decoding system for generations yet unknown. Lunatics? Visionaries? I find the realisation of this project beneficial and reassuring. It's nice to know that there are men today who think 5,000 years ahead! The archaeologists of some remote future age will not find things any easier than we did. For after an atomic conflagration none of the world's libraries will be of any use and all the achievements that make us so proud will not be worth twopence, because they have disappeared, because they have been destroyed, because they have been atomised. It does not even need an atomic conflagration to ravage the earth to justify the New Yorkers' imaginative action. A shifting of the earth's axis by a few degrees would cause inundations on an unprecedented and irresistible scale—in any case they would swallow up every single written word. Who is arrogant enough to assert that the sages of old could not have conceived the same sort of idea as the far-sighted New Yorkers?

Undoubtedly the strategists of an A- and H-bomb war will not direct their weapons against Zulu villages and harmless Eskimos. The will use them against the centres of civilisation. In other words the radioactive chaos will fall on the advanced, most highly developed peoples. Savages and primitive peoples far away from the centres of civilisation will be left. They will not be able to transmit our culture or even give an account of it, because they have never taken part in it. Even intelligent men and visionaries who had tried to preserve an underground library will not have been able to help the future much. 'Normal' libraries will be destroyed in any case and the surviving primitive peoples will know nothing of the hidden secret libraries. Whole regions of the globe will become burning deserts, because radiation lasting for centuries will not allow any plants to grow. The survivors will presumably be mutated and after 2,000 years nothing will be left of the annihilated cities. The unbridled power of nature will eat its way through the ruins; iron and steel will rust and crumble into dust.

And everything would begin again! Man may embark on his adventure a second or even a third time. Perhaps once again he would take so long to re-emerge as a civilised being that the secrets of old traditions and texts would be closed to him. Five thousand years after the catastrophe, archaeologists could claim that twentieth-century man was not yet familiar with iron, because, understandably enough, they would not find any, no matter how hard they dug. Along the Russian frontiers they would find miles of concrete tank traps and they would explain that such finds undoubtedly indicated astronomical lines. If they were to find cassettes with tapes, they would not know what to do with them; they would not even be able to distinguish between played and unplayed tapes. And perhaps those tapes might hold the solution to many, many puzzles! Texts which spoke of gigantic cities with houses several hundred feet high would be pooh-poohed, because such cities could not have existed. Scholars would take the London Tube tunnels for a geometrical curiosity or an astonishingly well-conceived drainage system. And they might keep on coming across reports which described how men flew from continent to continent with giant birds and referred to extraordinary fire-spitting ships which disappeared into the sky. That would also be dismissed as mythology, because such great birds and fire-spitting ships could not have existed.

Things would be made very difficult for the translators in anno 7000. The facts about a world war in the twentieth century that they would discover from fragmentary texts would sound quite incredible. But when the speeches of Marx and Lenin fell into their hands, they would at last be able to make two high priests of this incomprehensible age the centre of a religion. What a piece of luck!

People would be able to explain a great deal, provided sufficient clues were still in existence. Five thousand years is a long time. It is a pure caprice on nature's part that she allows dressed blocks of stone to survive for 5,000 years. She does not deal so carefully with the thickest iron girders.

In the courtyard of a temple in Delhi there exists, as I have already mentioned, a column made of welded iron parts that has been exposed to weathering for more than 4,000 years without showing a trace of rust for it contains neither sulphur nor phosphorus. Here we have an unknown alloy from antiquity staring us in the face. Perhaps the column was cast by a group of far-sighted engineers who did not have the resources for colossal building, but wanted to bequeath to posterity a visible, time-defying monument to their culture?

It is an embarrassing story: in advanced cultures of the past we find buildings that we cannot copy today with the most modern technical means. These stone masses are there, they cannot be argued away. Because that which ought not to exist cannot exist, there is a frantic search for 'rational' explanations. Let us take off our blinkers and join the search ....

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