pyramid was probably never going to be understood. All that was certain
was that it had not been merely decorative or ceremonial. On the
contrary, it seemed almost as though it might have functioned as some
kind of arcane ‘device’ or machine. Deep within its bowels, archaeologists
had discovered a complex network of zig-zagging stone channels, lined
with fine ashlars. These had been meticulously angled and jointed (to a
tolerance of one-fiftieth of an inch), and had served to sluice water down
from a large reservoir at the top of the structure, through a series of
descending levels, to a moat that encircled the entire site, washing
against the pyramid’s base on its southern side.6
So much care and attention had been lavished on all this plumbing, so
many man-hours of highly skilled and patient labour, that the Akapana
made no sense unless it had been endowed with a significant purpose. A
number of archaeologists, I knew, had speculated that this purpose might
have been connected with a rain or river cult involving a primitive
veneration of the powers and attributes of fast-flowing water.
One sinister suggestion, which implied that the unknown ‘technology’
of the pyramid might have had a lethal purpose, was derived from the
meaning of the words Hake and Apana in the ancient Aymara language
5 H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco: The Measuring System of the
Oldest Civilization, Faber & Faber, London, 1956, p. 16.
6 For a detailed discussion of the hydraulic system of the Akapana see Tiahuanacu: II,
pp. 69-79.
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still spoken hereabouts: ‘Hake means “people” or “men”; Apana means
“to perish” (probably by water). Thus Akapana is a place where people
perish ...’7
Another commentator, however, after making a careful assessment of
all the characteristics of the hydraulic system, proposed a different
solution, namely that the sluices had most probably been part of ‘a
processing technique—the use of flowing water for washing ores,
perhaps?’8
Gateway of the Sun
Leaving the western side of the enigmatic pyramid, I made my way
towards the south-west corner of the enclosure known as the Kalassaya. I
could now see why it had been called the Place of the Upright Standing
Stones for this was precisely what it was. At regular intervals in a wall
composed of bulky trapezoidal blocks, huge dagger-like monoliths more
than twelve feet high had been sunk hilt-first into the red earth of the
Altiplano. The effect was of a giant stockade, almost 500 feet square,
rising about twice as far above the ground as the sunken temple had
been interred beneath it.
Had the Kalasasaya been a fortress then? Apparently not. Scholars now
generally accept that it functioned as a sophisticated celestial
observatory. Rather than keeping enemies at bay, its purpose had been to
fix the equinoxes and the solstices and to predict, with mathematical
precision, the various seasons of the year. Certain structures within its
walls, (and, indeed, the walls themselves), appeared to have been lined
up to particular star groups and designed to facilitate measurement of
the amplitude of the sun in summer, winter, autumn and spring.9 In
addition, the famous ‘Gateway of the Sun’, which stood in the north-west
corner of the enclosure, was not only a world-class work of art but was
thought by those who had studied it to be a complex and accurate
calendar carved in stone:
The more one gets acquainted with the sculpture the greater becomes one’s
conviction that the peculiar lay-out and pictorialism of this Calendar cannot
possibly have been the result merely of the ultimately unfathomable whim of an
artist, but that its glyphs, deeply senseful, constitute the eloquent record of the
observations and calculations of a scientist ... The Calendar could not have been
drawn up and laid out in any other way than this.10
My background research had made me especially curious about the
Gateway of the Sun and, indeed, about the Kalasasaya as a whole. This
7 Ibid., I, p. 78.
8 The Lost Realms, p. 215.
10 The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, pp. 17-18.
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was so because certain astronomical and solar alignments which we
review in the next chapter had made it possible to calculate the
approximate period when the Kalasasaya must originally have been laid
out. These alignments suggested the controversial date of 15,000 BC—
about seventeen thousand years ago.
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Chapter 11
Intimations of Antiquity
In his voluminous work Tiahuanacu: the Cradle of American Man, the late
Professor Arthur Posnansky (a formidable German-Bolivian scholar whose
investigations at the ruins lasted for almost fifty years) explains the
archaeo-astronomical calculations which led to his controversial re-dating
of Tiahuanaco. These, he says, were based ‘solely and exclusively on the
difference in the obliquity of the ecliptic of the period in which the
Kalasasaya was built and that which it is today’.1
What exactly is ‘the obliquity of the ecliptic’, and why does it make
Tiahuanaco 17,000 years old?
According to the dictionary definition it is ‘the angle between the plane
of the earth’s orbit and that of the celestial equator, equal to
approximately 23° 27’ at present’.2
To clarify this obscure astronomical notion, it helps to picture the earth
as a ship, sailing on the vast ocean of the heavens. Like all such vessels
(be they planets or schooners), it rolls slightly with the swell that flows
beneath it. Picture yourself on board that ship as it rolls, standing on the
deck, gazing out to sea. You rise up on the crest of a wave and your
visible horizon increases; you fall back into a trough and it decreases.
The process is regular, mathematical, like the tick-tock of a great
metronome: a constant, almost imperceptible, nodding, perpetually
changing the angle between yourself and the horizon.
Now picture the earth again. Floating in space, as every schoolchild
knows, the axis of daily rotation of our beautiful blue planet lies slightly
tilted away from the vertical in its orbit around the sun. From this it
follows that the terrestrial equator, and hence the ‘celestial equator’
(which is merely an imaginary extension of the earth’s equator into the
celestial sphere) must also lie at an angle to the orbital plane. That angle,
at any one time, is the obliquity of the ecliptic. But because the earth is a
ship that rolls, its obliquity changes in a cyclical manner over very long
periods. During each cycle of 41,000 years the obliquity varies, with the
precision and predictability of a Swiss chronograph, between 22.1° and
1 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 89.
2 Collins English Dictionary, London, 1982, p. 1015. In addition, Dr John Mason of the
British Astronomical Association defined obliquity of the ecliptic in a telephone interview
on 7 October 1993: ‘The earth spins about an axis which goes through its centre and its
north and south poles. This axis is inclined to the plane of the earth's orbit around the
sun. This tilt is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The current value for the obliquity of
the ecliptic is 23.44 degrees.’
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24.5°.3 The sequence in which one angle will follow another, as well as the
sequence of all previous angles (at any period of history) can be
calculated by means of a few straightforward equations. These have been
expressed as a curve on a graph (originally plotted out in Paris in 1911 by
the International Conference of Ephemerids) and from this graph it is
possible to match angles and precise historical dates with confidence and
accuracy.
Posnansky was able to date the Kalasasaya because the obliquity cycle
gradually alters the azimuth position of sunrise and sunset from century
to century.4 By establishing the solar alignments of certain key structures
that now looked ‘out of true’, he convincingly demonstrated that the
obliquity of the ecliptic at the time of the building of the Kalasasaya had
been 23° 8’ 48”. When that angle was plotted on the graph drawn up by
the International Conference of Ephemerids it was found to correspond to
a date of 15,000 BC.5
Of course, not a single orthodox historian or archaeologist was
prepared to accept such an early origin for Tiahuanaco preferring, as
noted in Chapter Eight, to agree on the safe estimate of AD 500. During
the years 1927-30, however, several scientists from other disciplines
checked carefully Posnansky’s ‘astronomic-archaeological investigations’.
These scientists, members of a high-powered team which also studied
many other archaeological sites in the Andes, were Dr Hans Ludendorff
(then director of the Astronomical Observatory of Potsdam), Dr Friedrich
Becker of the Specula Vaticanica, and two other astronomers: Professor
Dr Arnold Kohlschutter of the University of Bonn and Dr Rolf Muller of the
Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam.6
At the end of their three years of work the scientists concluded that
Posnansky was basically right. They didn’t concern themselves with the
implications of their findings for the prevailing paradigm of history; they
simply stated the observable facts about the astronomical alignments of
various structures at Tiahuanaco. Of these, the most important by far was
that the Kalasasaya had been laid out to conform with observations of the
heavens made a very long time ago—much, much further back than AD
500. Posnansky’s figure of 15,000 BC was pronounced to be well within
the bounds of possibility.7
If Tiahuanaco had indeed flourished so long before the dawn of history,
what sort of people had built it, and for what purpose?
3 J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N. J. Shackleton, ‘Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of
the Ice Ages’, in Science, vol. 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976, p. 1125.
4 Anthony F. Aveni, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, University of Texas Press, lago, p.
103.
5 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 90-1.
6 Tiahuanacu, II, p. 47.
7 Ibid., p. 91.
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Fish-garbed figures
There were two massive pieces of statuary inside the Kalasasaya. One, a
figure nicknamed El Fraile (The Friar) stood in the south-west corner; the
other, towards the centre of the eastern end of the enclosure, was the
giant that I had observed from the sunken temple.
Carved in red sandstone, worn and ancient beyond reckoning, El Fraile
stood about six feet high, and portrayed a humanoid, androgenous being
with massive eyes and lips. In its right hand it clutched something
resembling a knife with a wavy blade like an Indonesian kris. In its left
hand was an object like a hinged and case-bound book. From the top of
this ‘book’, however, protruded a device which had been inserted into it
as though into a sheath.
From the waist down the figure appeared to be clad in a garment of fish
scales, and, as though to confirm this perception, the sculptor had
formed the individual scales out of rows and rows of small, highlystylized fish-heads. This sign had been persuasively interpreted by
Posnansky as meaning fish in general.8 It seemed, therefore, that El Fraile
was a portrayal of an imaginary or symbolic ‘fish man’. The figure was
also equipped with a belt sculpted with the images of several large
crustaceans, so this notion seemed all the more probable. What had been
intended?
I had learned of one local tradition I thought might shed light on the
matter. It was very ancient and spoke of ‘gods of the lake, with fish tails,
called Chullua and Umantua’.9 In this, and in the fish-garbed figures, it
seemed that there was a curious out-of-place echo of Mesopotamian
myths, which spoke strangely, and at length, about amphibious beings,
‘endowed with reason’ who had visited the land of Sumer in remote
prehistory. The leader of these beings was named Oannes (or Uan).10
According to the Chaldean scribe, Berosus:
The whole body of [Oannes] was like that of a fish; and had under a fish’s head
another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the
fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a
representation of him is preserved even to this day ... When the sun set, it was the
custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep;
for he was amphibious.11
According to the traditions reported by Berosus, Oannes was, above all, a
civilizer:
In the day-time he used to converse with men; but took no food at that season;
8 Ibid., I, p. 119.
9 Ibid., II, p. 183.
10 Myths from Mesopotamia, (trans, and ed. Stephanie Dalley), Oxford University Press,
1990, p. 326.
11 Fragments of Berossus, from Alexander Polyhistor, reprinted as Appendix 2 in Robert
K. G. Temple, The Sirius Mystery, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1987, pp. 250-1.
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and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art. He
taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and
explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them
distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect fruits; in short,
he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and to
humanise mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing
has been added materially by way of improvement ...12
Surviving images of the Oannes creatures I had seen on Babylonian and
Assyrian reliefs clearly portrayed fish-garbed men. Fish-scales formed the
dominant motif on their garments, just as they did on those worn by El
Fraile. Another similarity was that the Babylonian figures held
unidentified
objects in both their hands. If my memory served me right
(and I later confirmed that it did) these objects were by no means
identical to those carried by El Fraile. They were, however, similar enough
to be worthy of note.13
The other great ‘idol’ of the Kalasasaya was positioned towards the
eastern end of the platform, facing the main gateway, and was an
imposing monolith of grey andesite, hugely thick and standing about
nine feet tall. Its broad head rose straight up out of its hulking shoulders
and its slab-like face stared expressionlessly into the distance. It was
wearing a crown, or head-band of some kind, and its hair was braided
into orderly rows of long vertical ringlets which were most clearly visible
at the back.
The figure was also intricately carved and decorated across much of its
surface almost as though it were tattooed. Like El Fraile, it was clad below
the waist in a garment composed offish-scales and fish symbols. And,
also like El Fraile, it held two unidentifiable objects in its hands. This time
the left-hand object looked more like a sheath than a case-bound book,
and from it protruded a forked handle. The right-hand object was roughly
cylindrical, narrow in the centre where it was held, wider at the shoulders
and at the base, and then narrowing again towards the top. It appeared to
have several different sections, or parts, fitted over and into one another,
but it was impossible to guess what it might represent.
12 Ibid.
13 Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia,
British Museum Press, 1992, pp. 46, 82-3.
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Assyrian relief of fish-garbed figure.
Images of extinct species
Leaving the fish-garbed figures, I came at last to the Gateway of the Sun,
located in the north-west corner of the Kalasasaya.
It proved to be a freestanding monolith of grey-green andesite about
12½ feet wide, 10 feet high and 18 inches thick, weighing an estimated
10 tons.14 Perhaps best envisaged as a sort of Arc de Triomphe, though
on a much smaller scale, it looked in this setting like a door connecting
14 Figures and measurements from The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 92.
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