The Ra Expeditions, Page 2

  Why? Because no one knows who was the first person to reach America. Columbus, most school books say. But Columbus did not discover America. He rediscovered America. Columbus was an extremely capable and courageous man, who sailed out into the unknown because he was convinced that the world was round, and that he would not tumble over the edge. Columbus marks a turning point in history; he changed the way of life of a whole world, gave birth to mighty nations and was responsible for the growth of skyscrapers where only bushes and scrub had grown before. But he did not discover America. He was the first to show the rest of the world the way to America, but he only arrived there in the year a.d. 1492.

  When was America discovered? Nobody knows. The first man to set foot on American soil had no method of calculating time.

  He had no calendar. He could not write. His geographical concepts were too limited for him to realize that he had reached a new continent hitherto untrodden by man.

  The first representative of homo sapiens to go ashore in America was a homeless, nomadic hunter and fisherman who spent his life, as his forefathers had, roaming the frozen coasts of Arctic Siberia, until one fine day he found himself on the eastern shore of the ice-covered Bering Strait, without suspecting that only the v^ld beasts had roved here before him. We do not know if the discoverer of America came walking across frozen water, or paddling with his crude fishing tackle in a frail craft along the naked shore of tundra and snowdrifts. All we know is that the first man to die on American soil was probably born in Arctic Asia. We also know that the discoverer of America was ignorant of agriculture and architecture, metal and weaving; that he clothed himself in the skin of wild animals or pounded bark; and that his weapons and tools were of bones and stone, because he was still a pure Stone Age man.

  Science does not yet know for certain when the descendants of the first discoverers of America began to spread southward through Alaska and down through the whole of North, Central and South America. Some believe that the settlement of the New World began about fifteen thousand years before Christ. Others maintain with equal conviction that this time span should be doubled at least. All agree, however, that the first step into America was taken in the Arctic North by unorganized flocks of savages whose numerous descendants were to become known to the present world as the vwde variety of aboriginal American Indians.

  The narrow gap between Arctic Asia and Alaska was always open for man to cross, and many recent discoveries indicate that primitive family groups continued to move back and forth in both directions between Siberia and Alaska. The Aleutian chain of islands and the Japan Current to the south also provided a bridge for those who had seagoing vessels. Inside America, from Alaska in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south, the rising generations settled in igloos, in v^ngwams, in leaf huts and in caves, for as man moved southward he was to encounter every variety of climate and nature. Through intermarriage in isolated groups and through new migrations and mixing, a long chain of highly distinctive Indian tribes began

  to develop inside America. Not only did they differ strikingly from one another in facial type and body build, but they spoke quite unrelated languages and evolved completely different ways of life.

  Then came Columbus. On October 12, 1492, he landed on San Salvador in the West Indies with his standard and his cross, and in his wake followed Cortes, Pizarro and all the other Spanish conquis-tadores. No one can ever deprive Columbus of the glory of having flung open the doors of America to all these peoples v^'ho had not already struggled in across the Arctic ice. But we Europeans easily forget that there were thousands of non-European people waiting to receive him on land. And on the mainland, behind the islands where he had landed, great empires with high cultural achievement were seemingly prepared for a visit from across the sea. Their scholars told the Spaniards that white-skinned, bearded men had come over the sea once before, bringing with them all the secrets of civilization. The arrival of the Spaniards caused surprise neither in Mexico nor in Peru; they were not received as "discoverers" but as voyagers repeating an ocean crossing held to have been achieved long before by culture bearers who had come to their forefathers at the dawn of traditional history.

  And it was certainly true that this part of America was no longer inhabited by primitive hunters and fishermen, such as those who had originally made their way down from the ice fields of Siberia. In those far from stimulating tropical zones, where the trade winds and the mighty ocean current from Africa had carried the Spaniards themselves ashore, they were met by learned men who themselves produced paper books and taught history, astronomy and medicine. Among the natives who received them were true scholars who could read and write, with a system of their own. They had organized schools and astronomical observatories. Their mathematical astronomical and geographical knowledge was so astonishing that they had worked out the movements of important celestial bodies with maximum accuracy, calculated the positions of the equator, the ecliptic and the tropics, and were able to distinguish between the fixed stars and the planets. Their complicated calendar system was more accurate than the one used in Europe in Columbus' day and they began their precise chronology, the Mayan year o, with the year 3113 b.c, by our calendar. Their physicians mummified

  eminent people with professional skill where the climate allowed preservation, and like the ancient Egyptians they performed trepanning, or true cranial surgery, without killing the patient, an operation unknown to European surgeons until several generations after Columbus.

  Scribe and layman lived together in planned urban societies, with streets, paved roads, aqueducts and sewers, market places, sports grounds, schools and palaces. The urban population lived neither in tents, nor in leaf huts; they manufactured bricks of sun-dried clay mixed with straw, using the same formula as in the adobe of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and built proper houses of two or more stories lined out in regular city plan. The grander structures had halls v^ath colonnades to support the roof, and the walls were decorated with reliefs and artistic frescoes painted in beautiful and durable colors. The loom was in common use and spinning and weaving had reached such a perfection that the Spaniards were shown tapestries and cloaks which in technical accomplishment and skillful composition surpassed anything to be seen in Europe. Professional potters made jars and dishes, jugs and mugs and ceramic models of people and animals involved in all sorts of activities, with an expertise equal to, if not surpassing, the best that the classical cultures of the Old World had been able to produce. And the gold and silver work of the local jewelers, with filigree and inlay, was so highly developed, both technically and artistically, that the Spaniards drew their swords, losing all self-control and conscience in their ecstasy at what they had "discovered." Stepped pyramids of breathtaking magnitude, pillared temples, and the gigantic monolithic monuments of priest-kings towered over the adobe roofs, while regular roads, man-made waterways, and large suspension bridges set their stamp on the landscape. Countless artificially irrigated and terraced fields bulged with varieties of root crops, cereals, vegetables, fruit, medicinal herbs and other cultivated plants. Even the cotton plant had been refined from its lintless and unusable wild state and was professionally cultivated in huge fields as a lint-bearing species. Both wool and cotton were spun, dyed and woven, and sometimes with thinner thread and finer mesh than any fabric ever produced in Europe prior to the twentieth century.

  ONE RIDDLE, TWO ANSWERS AND NO SOLUTION H

  The Spaniards first thought they had circumnavigated the world and reached some of the amazing civihzations of distant India. All the people who received them, irrespective of physical type or cultural standing, were therefore termed "Indians," a name to survive forever in European languages even when the Spaniards knew the mistake they had made and realized they had run into a new world.

  Who discovered whom? Those who were standing on the shore watching the ships arrive from beyond the eastern horizon, or those who were standing on the decks spotting people ashore as land emerged from the western
haze? Informed of the Spaniards' arrival by his organized scouts and messengers, the priest-king was canied to receive the newcomers in his elegant litter with fan and parasol. He, too, like the arriving Spaniards, had bewildered preconceived ideas as to whom he was to meet. The mighty priest-king, like his entire people, was convinced that he himself was descended from the sun through bearded white men, just like those who were now repeating their visit to his country. The occasion called for celebration. His musicians played on flute and trumpet, beat drums and rang silver bells. He came with his bodyguard and a standing army of many thousands of men. His scouts had found a handful of Spaniards coming ashore and making their way across country toward the capital.

  Precisely the same thing happened in the Aztec's mighty kingdom of Mexico as subsequently in the gigantic empire of the Incas in South America. A small handful of Spaniards with white skins and beards vanquished those huge empires virtually without firing a shot, simply because the scribes and priests on the shores where they landed had either hieroglyphic records or verbal religious traditions which stated that white men with beards had brought the gifts of civilization to their forefathers before they eventually passed on to foreign regions with their teaching, promising to return. All American Indian tribes were beardless. They could not grow hair on their chin. This peculiar feature was common to all descendants of the golden-brown stock who had filtered in from the Arctic north. But the Spaniards, when they were "discovered" by the Indians on land, were bearded and white-skinned like the culture heroes of all local

  tradition. Although a mere handful, they were therefore warmly welcomed back both to Mexico and Peru by the mightiest absolute monarchs of medieval time.

  Great culture centers had once been strung like a row of beads from the Aztec and Maya kingdoms in the north to the Inca kingdom in the south, yet never outside this central area which abounded in the legends about the arrivals of white and bearded men. Aboriginal American civilization never spread beyond the tropic zones to those parts of America where the climate has stimulated men in our day to great enterprise and industry. The rest of the world caught only a brief glimpse of the New World's great civilizations before they collapsed and disappeared almost as abruptly as they had become known. The curtain that Christopher Columbus drew aside for his contemporaries was quickly pulled across again by his successors. Only a few decades passed before America's pulsating civilizations crumbled in ruins, ceased to function, and partly by annihilation, partly by integration, took new forms that make it easy for us Europeans to believe that everything positive, everything which smacks of culture, is due to ourselves, while any exotic, murky aspects are the heritage of the pre-Columbian era. We gained this impression because the gold-hungry conquistadores, v^th the Cross for alibi, were so quick to draw the curtain again for their massacres, before anyone had fully realized what had been found on the other side of the globe.

  What had really happened in Mexico and Peru before Columbus and his followers turned up in America? Was the ignorant Stone Age man from the Arctic tundra alone responsible for planting the seeds of all that the Spaniards found? Or were there other roads to ancient America? Had man mixed blood in America before Columbus, like in every other corner of the world? Had descendants of barbarians from Arctic Asia received voyagers who landed in the Gulf of Mexico in the morning of time, when civilization also spread from Africa and Asia Minor up to the coasts of barbaric Europe?

  This was precisely the question. And the answer was no. Obviously no. Probably no. Or possibly. ... I felt a coil of rope grinding into my back and sat up a little uneasily in the tent. Possibly. . . . The question tormented me. I settled myself more comfortably on the ropes. I could see no solution. It was no use pondering. I was

  simply thinking the same thoughts all over again. If the ancient civilizations of America had developed locally in Mexico or Peru, the archaeologists should be able to trace the sites where gradual development had taken place. But wherever a center of civilization was found in Mexico or Peru, excavations proved that it had arrived in fully mature form, developing local variants later on. There was no clear beginning to be found anywhere. So the answer should be obvious: Importation. If civilization, begun suddenly without local evolution, it must have been imported. Infiltration from overseas. Obviously. The only trouble was that at the time when the great civilizations were beginning to flourish in the New World, some centuries before Christ if present theories hold good, a couple of thousand years had passed since corresponding culture had ceased to exist in Egypt. So the answer was not obvious at all. We were stuck.

  Then why build a papyrus boat? My thoughts floated away again, via America, right out into the Pacific. There I was on my home ground. It was there that I had devoted all my time to research and field work. I had been visiting Egypt simply as a tourist when I saw the first wall paintings of reed boats in the Valley of Kings four years earlier. I had recognized the type of boat at once. It was of the same general type that the pyramid builders in northern Peru had painted on their ceramic pots when their civilization flourished in South America, long before Polynesia was inhabited. The largest reed boats in Peru were depicted as two-deckers. Quantities of water jars and other cargo were painted in on the lower deck, as well as rows of little people, and on the upper deck the earthly representative of the sun-god, the priest-king usually stood larger than all his companions, surrounded by bird-headed men who were often hauling on ropes to help the reed boat through the water. The tomb paintings in Egypt also portrayed the sun-god's earthly representative, the priest-king known as the Pharaoh, like an imposing giant on his reed boat, surrounded by miniature people, while the same mythical men with bird heads towed the reed boat through the water.

  Reed boats and bird-headed men seemed to go together, for some inexplicable reason. For we had found them far out in the Pacific Ocean too, on Easter Island, where the sun-god's mask, the reed boats with sails, and men with bird heads formed an inseparable trio among the wall paintings and reliefs in the ancient ceremonial

  village of Orongo, with its solar observatory. Easter Island, Peru, Egypt. These strange parallels could hardly have been found farther apart. They could hardly furnish better proof that men must have arrived independently at the same things in widely separated places. What was even more strange was that the aboriginal people of Easter Island called the sun ra. Ra was the name for the sun on all the hundreds of Polynesian Islands, so it could be no mere accident. Ra was also the name for the sun in ancient Egypt. No word was more important to the ancient Egyptian religion than Rd, the sun, the sun-god, ancestor of the Pharaohs. The one who sailed reed boats, with an entourage of bird-headed men. Giant monolithic statues as high as houses had been erected in honor of the sun-god's earthly priest-kings on Easter Island, in Peru and in ancient Egypt. And in all three places, solid rock had been sliced up like cheese into blocks as big as railroad cars and fitted together in stepped pyramids designed on an astronomical basis according to the movements of the sun. All in honor of the common ancestor, the sun, ra. Was there some connection, or was it just coincidence?

  Centuries ago, when sail still ruled the sea, it was usual to assume that the ancient civilized people were capable of almost unlimited movement. After all, Magellan, Captain Cook and many others had sailed round the world once or twice with only the wind to help them, so why not? But then we invented the propeller and the jet, and as the world grew smaller and smaller for rising generations, we began to get the idea that it must have been larger and larger going back through the ages, until in the days before Columbus it must have been endless, and before that the oceans were impassable.

  The year 1492 has a magical effect on us all. It was then that Columbus sailed to America. It was then that the world first became round. Before that time, the earth had been flat. The sea had been flat also, so that everything that floated on the currents and winds must necessarily have tumbled off the edge. Actually, we know today that the world was round also before Col
umbus, but it was somehow not completely round, more like a hat where anything that went far enough out on the ocean currents would fall off at the brim.

  Nothing could float over the abyss and into the unknown before 1492, not even a reed. After Columbus had made our planet round, however, nothing tumbled over the edge. Anything with buoyancy

  that followed the natural current from Africa would land on the other side, on the new coasts that had turned up, either on the islands where Columbus himself had landed, or on the long tropical coast just behind. Columbus sailed over, a sort of St. Peter, with the keys to the New World. After him came caravels by the hundreds, and other small sailing vessels in their thousands. Twentieth-century adventurers keep on every year to cross the Atlantic by dinghy, row-boat, fifteen-foot sailing craft, rubber raft, amphibian jeep and kayak.

  Columbus patented the Atlantic. Before him, America could only be reached on bare feet, or in moccasins, across the endless snow-covered ice that stretches along the Siberian wasteland in the bitter cold of the Arctic. Up there no one could plant cotton or build towns of brick houses. On that point everyone agrees. But how then did the fur-clad Arctic migrants get the idea of cultivating cotton to be spun into thread and woven into garments when they moved down into the drowsy climate of the tropics? One should think that in the warm jungle leaves and bark cloth might have served their need. And why did they hit on the idea, down in the sedative torrid zone, that they should mix straw with clay and mold regular building bricks so that they could live in proper houses like in the Old World? Here agreement ends. Here the schism begins among those who have been looking for the answers to the puzzle.