The Official, Authorized Website of Egerton Sykes & His Honest-to-Goodness Science of Atlantology

Archaeological Evidence for Atlantis

Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy studies the relationships between archaeological sites and astronomical phenomenon.

In ancient times, the court astronomer was held responsible for any failure of the Sun or Moon to pass through an eclipse at the scheduled moment. When a man’s life depends on the accuracy of his predictions, his knowledge of the heavens is quite apt to exceed his knowledge of the world in which he is living so precariously. It was not believed that the astronomer exercised any control over the Sun, Earth, and Moon, but because the astronomer was in close touch with their daily motion, he must be in a position to foresee and foretell any departure from normal.

Modern astronomy, as apart from astrology, may be said to have started in the early seventeenth century with the discovery of the astronomical telescope by Galileo. In the early 1500’s, Copernicus produced his theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa, but it took the telescope to prove his theory. Early in his adventures on the seas, man realized that the movement of the Moon governed the tides. Accurate observations of the stars and planets were demanded in the eighteenth century by the navigators of the world’s ships, who were not only concerned with their exact position in the sea but also the times of high and low tide.

On June 27, 1964, M. Jarman lectured at the Brighton Conference of the Atlantis Research Center on astronomy and archaeological dating, and stated that, “Since Kepler and Newton discovered the laws governing the motions of heavenly bodies, it has been possible to predict both the future and past positions of these bodies.” In the August 1964 issue of Atlantis, Jarman published Astronomy and Archaeological Dating I, A General Survey.

Sykes stated in Atlantis in 1967,

"It is tempting to assume that astronomy was one of the sciences generated from Atlantis, but here we are faced with the fact that the New World astronomers were far ahead of the Old World ones... the various Mexican calendrical systems, which differed in details, while being basically the same, were accurate as far back as we can trace, whilst the European systems were very much out of kilter until 1752 when the famous adjustment of twelve days was made in Britain. It is generally assumed that the ancient Egyptians had considerable knowledge of astronomy, but unfortunately, no astronomical papyri have come down to us..."

In the March 1956 issue of Atlantis, Robert A. Bradley published Ancient Hindu Astronomy. The Hindu acknowledge Asuramaya of Atlantis as the compiler of tables on which their astronomy is based. Asuramaya credits them to Narada, who either evolved them or gave credit in such a manner than the historians failed to record it. The Hindu claim to have traced the course of human events back 1700 million years ago — a period that includes three major catastrophes that depopulated the Earth without greatly altering its orbital characteristics. The records are admittedly broken by long periods of silence due to the necessity of each succeeding civilization learning out of its own experiences, and learning how to interpret the scattered records of the preceding civilization that frequently perished before the new races were born. Back to section top.

In the January 1967 issue of New World Antiquity, C.A. Burland published Primitive Astronomy. In ancient Egypt, the Sun was associated with the god, Ra, and the stars were souls of the dead. In Greece, planets were associated with major deities. The Aztecs realized that Venus came into inferior conjunction with the Sun every five-hundred-and-eighty-four days and used this fact in calendar construction. The Mayans and their cousins dated Transits, yet the mechanics of the system employed are unknown. The Egyptians used the regular return of the star Sirius to the same part of the sky at a given time each year to predict the date of inundation of the Nile. The Egyptian temples at Abydos, Annu, Dendrah, Luxor, Memphis, Nagada, Thebes, and Tel el Amarah, all seem to have been oriented to particular stars. The Greeks and Babylonians knew the eclipse cycles well. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they encountered races whose knowledge of astronomy was several hundred years ahead of theirs. The only people who appear to have kept reliable astronomical records in the Old World were the Chinese, who noted more than sixteen stellar explosions, eighty-four novae, and every passage of Halley’s Comet between 4 BC and AD 1661. In 1868, M. Oppert read a paper at the Brussels Congress that affirmed, from data derived from the astronomical observations of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, that 11,542 years before our era, man had reached a stage of civilization to be able to make accurate astronomical calculations. Ancient rock carvings discovered in the 1970’s in Armenia, exhibited a considerable amount of astronomical knowledge indicating that inhabitants as early as 8000 BC divided the year into twelve parts. Transits of Venus are rare and occur in pairs, and were an important feature of Meso-American calendrical systems.

Astronomers using records of eclipses of the Sun and Moon, transits of Venus and Mercury, dates of novae and supernovae, and passages of comets and meteor swarms, can evaluate a date to within a plus or minus figure as good as any carbon dating.

The first recorded monument dating a transit of Venus is from Guatemala, from Stela I at El Castillo, near St. Lucia Cotzumahualpa, Guatemala. The Chichen Itza Transit is of interest because it was recorded in Maya glyphs although it occurred within the period of Toltec rule.

During World War II, L. Taylor Hansen published a series of articles on the astronomy of the Red Indians. He mentioned a Pawnee Star Map, over 300-years old, which showed the double stars Miser and Alcor, and also Borsalis, the star between Lyra and Corona. Hansen referred to the use of Venus by both the Pawnees and Apaches in their religious ceremonies. Sykes felt that the use of Venus so far north tended to show that the astronomical knowledge had come up from the south from the Aztecs and Mayas, as it was possible to view the transits of Venus from southern Mexico, and far more difficult to do so in the areas inhabited by the Pawnees and Apaches.

Velikovsky stated that the dangerous proximity of Venus occasioned the tremendous catastrophes on Earth. In Atlantis in 1952, George Hinzpeter wrote Velikovsky and his Theory , illustrating the pitfalls of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s idea that within the period of recorded history Venus was not a planet but a huge comet thrown off by Jupiter, and that before settling into its orbit, it approached critically near to our own planet, and precipitated tremendous catastrophes in 1495 BC. Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision aroused great interest in Great Britain and the United States with its description of the terrifying darkness; great hailstones from the tail of the comet; floods; and a change in direction of the Earth’s rotation. Hinzpeter illustrated that Velikovsky’s theory was impossible based on the laws of celestial mechanics and contradicted by ancient historical records. Venus calendars, based on the planet and not the comet Venus, were known to the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Mayas. Ample records of the time around 1500 BC exist in the annals of the Near East, and not one single report mentions such cataclysmic events.

The fallacy that the Earth, and not the Sun, was the center of the solar system, governed modern astronomy until the sixteenth century. Over many tens of thousands of years, man has left symbols and emblems scattered over the Earth, which are completely meaningless until an astronomer recognizes the petroglyphs as the work of men to whom the major movements of the Earth’s axis (or poles) in relation to the polar constellations were as familiar as the alternation of day and night. Ancient annalists paid attention to comets; however, it is only Halley’s Comet that astronomers know well enough to trace back thousands of years. Halley’s Comet is the only one large comet known to reappear at regular intervals. Halley’s has a typical planet orbit with near circular ellipse and a period of 74.7 to 79.6 years. It was Professor Kamienski, using celestial mathematics, who calculated the periodicity of Halley’s Comet back in time to 9542 BC.

Respected astronomer Michael Kamienski, (November 24, 1879 to April 18, 1973), who was the world’s leading authority on Halley’s Comet, commented that the Atlantean catastrophe has usually been assumed to be due to volcanic upheavals in the Atlantic Ocean, “...but nowadays, it is becoming commonly accepted that some portion of the tail or even the head of Halley’s Comet, broke off and plunged into the Western Atlantic, leaving an enormous crater...” Kamienski was a member of the Atlantis Research Center, the International Astronomical Union, the Polish Astronomical Society, Warsaw Scientific Society, Astronomical Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Associate Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of London. In July 1967, Kamienski wrote The Comet of the Biblical Deluge for Atlantis.

Pyramids are a type of religious astronomical structure known in the Old World from Memphis to Babylon, in the South Seas, and in Meso America. Both Mexican and Egyptian pyramids show knowledge of astronomy and the principles of architecture. On chronological grounds alone, we can dismiss the fact that the Mexican pyramids evolved directly from those in Egypt; however, this does not mean that when the Maya were learning to evolve calendrical systems, astronomy, and architecture, they acquired the concept of pyramids from the Old World.

C.A. Burland published an interesting piece titled Ziggurat, a Puzzle of Culture Distribution in the July 1950 issue of Atlantis. In the article, Burland stated,

"The closest parallel to the Mesopotamian Ziggurat is; however, to be found in the two great civilizations of pre-Columbian America. The forms are closely similar, more perhaps in Peru than in Mexico and, what is more, the interpretation of these forms is similar. The Tower Reaching unto the Heavens... Babel itself is a picture of the type idea; each stage of the Ziggurat represents a different level of the heavens, until the top one shelters the house of god. The numbers of the stages vary according to the god worshipped, because the gods were conceived as planets and so moved in their proper level in the harmony of the spheres..."

In 1967, Sykes wrote The Megalith Builders to comment on the considerable astronomical knowledge of the megalith builders, and ten years later followed up, in the January 1977 issue of New World Antiquity with The Megalithic Bandwagon. He posed some still unanswered questions: 1) were the builders a race or culture? 2) what was the reason for building an elaborate calendrical computer in Callinish in the Shetlands, a site of almost frightful desolation? 3) why were they built?

In the January 1971 issue of Atlantis, L.M. Young reported in Lunar Notation on Upper Paleolithic Remains, that recent work on Stonehenge by Gerald Hawkins and Professor Alexander Thom demonstrated that Bronze Age populations employed elaborate calendrical computations that obviously required a lengthy observational process before the knowledge could be embodied into the structure. Computations and analyses made on the artistic bones and stones of the Ice Age and the period following, as well as on the engraved and painted rock shelters and caves of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe show evidence of lunar observation in notational sequences. It is explicitly clear that ancient man noted astronomical phases, especially those relating to the Moon.

Avebury, one of several famous megalithic stone circles in England, was first brought to the world’s attention in 1663 by John Aubrey and then by Dr. Stukely in 1723. The stones are shaped to conform to definite designs as visible in the night sky now as they were 40,000 years ago. The outer circle of one-hundred monoliths, some greater than fifty tons, were set twenty-seven feet apart (the number twenty-seven constantly appears in megalithic circles), and within the great circle there were two other double concentric circles. In the January 1958 issue of Atlantis, Firth Scott wrote Poles, Priests, And Pyramids, Chapter 5, Avebury. Back to section top.

Since Arthur Posnansky’s first publication of the monolithic gateway of the great temple at Tiahuanaco, the hieroglyphs inscribed on it fascinated experts. In 1929, German scientist Edmund Kiss visited Tiahuanaco and found four-hundred-and-forty-seven hieroglyphs on the gateway. Kiss recalled that Hoerbiger had calculated that the immediate predecessor of Luna would, at one period, have circled the Earth four-hundred-and-forty-seven times per year; thus, Kiss deduced the gateway to be some type of calendar. In 1947, H.S. Bellamy and Peter Allan tested calculations to derive more secrets from the monolithic calendar gateway. In 1957, P. Allan reported in Atlantis that the well-preserved carvings of so distinctive a character on the Gigantic Head (the remains of an Idol) were based on the eclipse cycle at the time of two-hundred-and-eighty-nine lunations in 192 days. One year later, Allan studied photographs of the Zunagua Monolith of Tiahuanaco, which was carved with symbolism in the familiar style of Classical Tiahuanaco, and tentatively concluded that the eclipse cycle on which the symbology was based consisted of two-hundred-and-fifty-seven lunations in 224 days. Again, the findings supported Hoerbiger’s Theories. Paul Allan published Aspects of Tiahuanaco. The Gigantic Head in the May 1957 issue of Atlantis.

There needs to be much cooperation between astronomers, archaeologists, and anthropologists as evidenced by the Vela X Hypothesis. In the March 1977 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes published The Vela X Nova in Relationship to History. Three American astronomers, John C. Brandt, Stephen Maran, and Theodor Stecher, were interested in the Vela X Super Nova that produced the Gum Nebula, and appealed for assistance from archaeologists who might have noted petroglyphs in their records referring to the event. George Michanowski noted that both the Sumerians and Assyrians recorded the sudden appearance of a giant star dedicated to Ea in the Vela constellation, and the Babylonians had a copy of the Sumerian Star List or Mul Apin which recorded the sudden appearance of a great star in the southern skies which they named Mun Ki, sacred to Ea. Back to section top.

In 1970, Louis Winkler, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, wrote The Pleiades in Ancient Times for the May 1970 issue of New World Antiquity, and stated that the oldest specific reference to the Pleiades dates back to the latter part of the third millennium BC. In Asyut, on an Egyptian coffin lid, was pictured a bull with the Pleiades as the brush of his tail. The Babylonians referred to the Pleiades in the second millennium BC in the form of hieroglyphics on clay tablets. The Maori, an aboriginal people in Polynesia, used the Pleiades as a seasonal calendar and considered the Pleiades the most important stars in the sky. The Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans employed the stars for agricultural purposes. Ancient peoples have been aware of this conspicuous compact cluster of stars since the dawn of history near the beginning of the third millennium BC, and references were made shortly after mankind learned to write. Many ancient records refer to the seven members of the cluster even though only six are conspicuous today. As early as the third century BC, the Greeks referred to the missing seventh Pleiad, suggesting that one of the members may have decreased in intrinsic brightness over time.

The Pleiades were named after the seven daughters of Atlas — Alcyone, Merope, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Sterope, and Celeno. They were also known as the Atlantides or Hesperidae, later as Virgiles to the Romans. Pleiades comes from the Greek word to sail; thus, they were possibly the earliest known navigational aids for navigators.

Professor N. Boneff, who held the Chair of Astronomy at the University of Sofia, was a member of the Bulgarian Institute of Astronomy and a friend of the Atlantis Research Center since it was first founded in 1948, published An Asteroid as the Possible Cause of the Atlantis Catastrophe in the Annals of the University for 1948 (Abstract published in the third issue of Atlantis in 1949). Boneff postulated that the tidal effect of an asteroid passing close to, or even striking the Earth a glancing blow, might have caused the submersion of Atlantis. He did not believe that the physical loss of Atlantis as told by Plato was caused by earthquakes and volcanic activity, particularly at such a recent date. Boneff leaned toward the tidal theory and mathematical principles of mechanics by Mach to explain the catastrophe.

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