Dear Jacopo Fo,
I am a neo-graduate in engineering, and since many years fancier of
the mysteries of the archeology and of the origin of the human civilization.
The NEXUS magazine has recently published (No.15-16-17) one of my articles
dedicated to the mysteries of the pyramids. I would be very thankful to
you if you want to read the following letter in which I take the liberty
to move some criticisms to the conclusions of your recent book "The
Big Fraud of the Pyramids". I have attended your "teachings"
in TV, and your live show of last summer in Varazze, it is like as I'd
know you in person.
Years ago I read your excellent book "The Real History of the World",
that has taught me to suspect of all that on history books is presented
like an acquired truth. The history of the science has been written by
lonely characters who have encountered with the dogmas and the preconceptions
of their epoch, then obsolete when the bulk of experimental contraries
data to the wrong hypotheses of the past was so strong to result obvious
to whoever. Naturally also today the "official" science has his unassailable
dogmas:
the theory of the evolution of the Homo Sapiens beginning with African primates in the last 3 millions of years (I am not a creationist, I explain myself better afterwards);
the concept of linear development of the human civilization, seen like a slow but continual progress;
the mathematical certainty that intelligent extraterrestrials civilizations (that however must exist in a big amount using a probabilistic calculus) on no account could reach us, or even worse they couldn't have done it in the past, because of the insuperable limit of the speed of the light (thanks to the theory of relativity of Einstein, how kind of him!).
As soon as I have seen the publicity of Alcatraz I have ordered your book, ascertaining how much what became my preferred matter of discussion (with a certain disappointment of my friends) impassioned you. I've read many of the books that appear in your bibliography (and after I'll mention other books which are not listed), but on some matters we reached very far convictions. While you effectively dismount boor prejudices, you don't notice that you yourself are affected by some cultural preconceptions.
Let's see some examples.
THE EGYPTOLOGISTS-MARTIANISTS DISTINCTION
Albeit motivated by reasons of synthesis, this distinction in 2 categories is rather reductive and above all ungenerous towards Graham Hancock which ISN'T A MARTIANIST AT ALL. He simply claims that a TERRESTRIAL civilization, scientifically and technologically advanced, was able to realize some incomprehensible works of the past. A presumably global civilization (diffuse on all the Earth with homogeneous cultural characteristics) that could have fluorished before the last glacial era and could have had big difficulties due to a planetary cataclysm of a certain type that determined the raising of the level of the oceans in the period 12000-8000 B.C.
He doesn't believe at all that the builders of the pyramids came from
Orion (an hypothesis suggested by Giacobbo and Luna) and above all he doesn't
think that primitive people were too stupid to know the constellations
(so they would be teached by aliens). On the contrary he considers the
complex astronomic knowledge of the civilizations of the past like a heritage
of thousands of years of observations of the celestial vault. So what is
the problem? It's sufficient to speak about Atlantis and about the Deluge
and you are labeled for ever like a martianist! Don't you think that such
an attitude is analogous to the one used by the stubborn professors of
history who have no discrimination? It's sufficient to exit only a little
from the lines of the dogma and you are considered in the same way of a
fortune-teller. Think to the CICAP of the nice Peter Angela: according
to them there isn't any difference among astrologers, ufologists, alternative
medicine researchers, wizards, researchers of disappeared civilization,
etc.
THE DATINGS
However, leaving momentarily the aliens, we have ascertained the fact that the Sphinx has been eroded by the rain-water of the 7,000 B.C. Instead egyptologists continually deny the evidence too, asserting that it's a matter of infiltrations of damp from the sand to the limestone or of a phenomenon of crystallization of the rock (videotape Fabbri Video: Egypt, Who Built the Sphinx).
As far as we know us the lionine statue could already have been there since 20,000 years and have suffered the erosion afterward, without counting that it rained very much also before, around 11,000 B.C., as you report in another page of your book. In fact a collaborator of John West, the geophysicist Thomas Dobecki, using the geosismical analysis, highlighted that the surface alteration of the limestone penetrates in the body of the Sphinx for 0,9 m in the back part, 2,4 m in the front part, demonstrating that THEY WERE CARVED AT THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF DISTANCE THE ONE FROM THE OTHER (Colin Wilson, From Atlantis to the Sphinx). Then the estimated age of 10,500 B.C. proposed by Hancock is very cautious, and not hazardous.
In regard of the pyramids of Giza, like you well know, they ARE MISSING THE COATING that eventually would have suffered the erosion of the rain, in case that they have not been built from 5,000 to 3,500 B.C. like you claim. Furthermore the datings with C14 besides being often unreliable cannot offer informations about the age in which the stones were made ready for use.
The legitimate suspect that various Egyptian monuments date back to
more ancient periods is confirmed by the fact that in many other places
of the Earth we find submerged constructions (that go back to the period
in which the level of the sea was lower) that archeologists refuse to accept:
a wall 600 m long, constituted by big polygonal blocks at 7 m of depth, off the Bimini coast, in the Bahamas Islands, discovered and studied in the 1968 by the archeologist Manson Valentine (fossilized mangroves would date it to the 9-10,000 B.C.);
kilometrical rectilinear roads that start from the coasts of the Yucatàn and of Florida and vanish in the Atlantic Ocean;
alignments of menhirs, on the coasts of West Europe, which continue under the sea;
a cromleck (a circle of stones) photographed on the bottom of the lake of Loch Ness (P.Kolosimo);
submerged tunnels near the isle of Rapa Nui;
submerged harbors reported to be in the Indian and Pacific Oceans; in particular in Micronesia where, nearby the Island of Pohnpei, numerous columns and megalithical submerged blocks are found at a depth of around 30 m (D.H.Childress, Lost Cities of Ancient Lemuria and the Pacific);
finally the images of the submerged ruins, at 20 m of depth, near the Japanese island of Yonaguni in the archipelago Ryu Kyu, in the Cina Sea, studied by the oceanographer Kimura (G.Hancock, The mirror of the Sky), that went round all the world without arising any remarkable effect in the academic world.
We remember also that in Tiahuanaco, the pre-incaic city on the Titicaca lake, different fragments of crockery and the observable friezes on the famous Door of the Sun, represent heads of ELEPHANTS, TOXODONTS and other mammals extinct in South America between the 12,000 B.C and the 10,000 B.C.
If we add to this the results furnished by archaeoastronomy, we discover
that:
in Tiahuanaco, the sanctuary of the Kalasasaya is aligned according to the journey that the sun crossed more than 14,000 years ago, according to the studies of the professor Arthur Posnansky in the thirties, confirmed last year from other astronomers;
the sanctuary of Amen-Ra at Karnak in Egypt is aligned according to the skies of the 12,000 B.C., as it results from studies already made in the twenties [in both these cases the calculations are based on the shift through the millenniums of the point of sunset in the winter solstice, due to the change of inclination of the terrestrial axis in respect to its own orbital plane].
But it's not enough.
Historic sources considered reliable even by orthodox egyptologists
(the Stone of Palermo, the Papyrus of Turin, the List of the Kings of Abido,
the writings of Maneto, Herodotus, Diodoro Siculo) speak about a very
long predynastical era, and they report lists of kings that follow
one another for 30,000 or 40,000 years before the I Dynasty.
Additionally a DETAILED CARTOGRAPHY OF THE PREHISTORIC EARTH was left
to us from an unknown civilization. They are nautical maps drawn by European
cartographers of the '500, copied from documents, maybe originally preserved
in the Library of Alessandria. Such papers achieve a level of knowledge
incompatible with the epoch in which they have been realized, and they
report the correct longitude of places distant thousands of kilometers
one from another, they plot the presence of earths unknown at that time.
Other maps point out glacial icecaps on North Europe, the Sahara occupied
by a green lowland rich of rivers and lakes, a strip of land in place of
the narrow of Bering, morphological characters compatible with the CLIMATE
OF THE GLACIAL ERA between the 15,000 B.C. and the 10,000 B.C. Among
these papers I recall the map of Piri Reis and the one of Oronteus
Finnaeus which depict the topography of the antartic continent free
from the ices, as demonstrated by a study of the United States Air Force
in 1960 (Charles Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Kings of the Sea).
From all this we deduce that during the last glaciation, on the Earth
there was much more movement than what one can think and that the fluorishing
of the human civilization must be decidedly antedated. Moving back of 10,000
years the origins of the first human cultures is certainly a revolutionary
fact, but not so esoteric or paranormal. Instead, just in the field of
the archeology, empirical discipline pre-eminently, one sees the negation
of the scientific method and the hysterical reactions of the orthodox researchers
who, faced with the datings furnished by the Sphinx and by the Japanese
monument of Yonaguni, exclaim: "It's not possible, because in that epoch
a civilization evolved enough to be able to realize those works didn't
exist on the Earth" (!!!).
It's not purely an act of faith the will to attribute an age of 15,000
years to the Big Pyramid of Giza, but also an hypothesis based on a world
historic context, supported by numerous circumstantial proofs, such as
the STELE OF THE INVENTORY, which explicitly affirms that the Big Pyramid
and the Sphinx already existed in Giza a lot before the kingdom of Cheops.
All this facts widen the perspective of the history and I don't think that
there are still archeological elements sufficient to limit in time
the appearance of the pacific matriarchal civilization of the Neolithic
period, that was already present in a period between the 13,000 B.C. and
the 10,000 B.C., responsible of a precocious and inexplicable development
of the agriculture, in the regions of the upper Nilo (the so-called ISNAN
CULTURE). All the evidences neglected by egyptologists make me think that
Egypt (but not only) was populated by evolved men for a period grater than
15,000 years: simply, they hadn't still dug in correct places, still covered
by the sands.
And think to the cultural analogies that may be found in the ancient
civilization of each corner of the Earth (not explainable with the intercontinental
trips of the Egyptian, Chinese and Phoenician navigators in historic epoch):
in the architecture: the pyramids of X'ian in China and those of Teotihuacan; the architectural style with irregular joints of the Temple of the Valley of Giza, of the Peruvian megaliths, of the Island of Easter (Rapa Nui);
in the religious beliefs: the ceremonies for the immortality of soul in Mexico, in Egypt, in Indo-China, in Micronesia;
in the writing: symbols of Rapa Nui and of Mohenjo-Daro, Chinese and Olmech ideograms, hieroglyphics of Egyptians and Micmac Redskin ;
in the somatic lineaments: Olmech and Egyptian Negroids, Caucasians in America;
in the mythology: the symbol of the Dragon and of the Feathered Serpent in America, in China, in Oceania; the traditions that refer to the precession of the equinoxes (G.de Santillana, H.von Dechend, The Mill of Amleto); the myth of Deluge.
You assert that primitive men lived in all the parts of the world the same
trauma of a disastrous flood, and that they have built tumulus with a very
similar structure because they had the same material necessities. It seems
to me that there is a great difference between tumulus and pyramid and
that the function of filter for the water, taken alone, it's not sufficient
to explain the similarities of the architectural form. Moreover lately
they have found some pyramids similar to the Aztec ones in the territory
of the Altai, in the southern Siberia, very far from the belt of hot climate.
I believe that, at the moment of the catastrophe, a civilization already
existed and that it has been interrupted in his evolution in around 11,000
B.C. Otherwise how could be the myth of the Deluge diffused among all the
people of the Earth, with the same narrative details? This could be explained
only admitting one of these hypothesis:
in that epoch a homogeneous planetary civilization existed;
an advanced but localized civilization, forced to migrate because of the cataclysm, diffused among the remaining populations the story of the Deluge (in addition to various civilizing teachings);
all the populations which remember the Deluge descend from only one ancestor civilization (that seems quite improbable to me, because of the short 12,000 years period passed).
EGYPTIAN TECHNOLOGY, CONSTRUCTIVE TECHNIQUE AND PURPOSE OF THE
PYRAMIDS
The datings are a secondary problem, if compared with the evident technological anachronisms. I'm amazed by the way in which you talk about the problem of the technical means used by the ancient populations of the Nile without really facing it. As you affirm at page 29, respect to the predynastical vases of stone: "Certainly such masterpieces required the use of diamond bits or extremely delicate water drills ". And which are these delicate tools? Those designed at page 92? I don't believe it! The working tools found in the archeological sites of the pharaonic and predynastical epoch are totally incompatible with the very refined products of the Egyptian science of constructions.
Christopher Dunn, experienced mineralogist, analyzed various granite surfaces, which result polished at the 1/ 50 of millimeter and other manufactured articles perfectly squared (here we don't speak only about cutting the rock with a diamond bit, but about realizing straight and smooth edges). Studying the line of cutting on some "carrots" of granite at Giza it can be deduced that THE TOOLS USED FOR THE PERFORATION HAD A PENETRATION SPEED GREATER THAN THE ONE OF MODERN TOOLS. A vast production of vases in diorite, basalt and quartz, found at Saqqara and at Naqada, presents: cupels with clean incisions 0.16 mm thick, vases, amphoras and other common objects rounded and shaped with symmetry in a way that can be obtained only with lathe-working; perfectly polished surfaces (a crystal lens looks like as it was mechanically ground), jugs and vials with an elegant lengthened and gossamer neck (the rock has been dug from the outside, through an opening few millimeters wide, an operation that is simply impossible still today). These incongruities had been already highlighted by F. Petrie in the last century, but it seems to me that nobody has drawn the logical consequences - such results, obviously, aren't attainable with tools of copper, you can imagine if they were operated by hand! And then here we are in front of the real CULTURAL BIAS: the fact that the ancient civilizations had a technological level comparable or greater than the one we have nowadays is a too insulting perspective for our industrial civilization, heir of the nineteenth century positivism, that considers itself the unparalleled apex of the intellectual evolution of the man, seen like a linear and nonstop walk.
These are the things one needs to realize, and not the stupid things about the numerology of the pyramid, of which I don't give a damn. If people knew the problem of the Naqada vases, they would start to think that the egyptologists don't split between professors and martianists, but between researchers stationary at the ninth century and researchers who have a critical sense.
Sorry for my pedantry, but I also consider insufficient your system for the hydraulic heaving of big blocks. First of all it can't be applied to the most important case, that is to the Big Pyramid, because it has no elevators right for the pourpose in the inside (correct me if I say something wrong). Then in the pyramid of Menkaura, a room, dug directly in the underground, is surmounted by a tweathered roof formed by enormous slabs, almost crunched against the original overseeing rocky wall; then there isn't the material space where the floats can pass - the floats, I remind you, must occupy a volume at least double of the one of the block to lift [the density of the granite is 2.7 times that of the water, so a block of volume V weighs around the triple of a mass of water that occupies the same volume V. Thanks to the thrust of Archimede the block, when bathed, weighs only the double. Then it's necessary to apply floats with at least a size equal to 2V to balance this weight. With such an encumbrance (that besides appears reduced in the drawings at pages 89 and 100 of the book) it's not so easy to make the blocks climb on the narrow elevators of 3.3x5.3 m and install them with precision]. But these remarks are all superfluous, if we think to the megaliths lifted from Preincaic people (Machu Picchu, Sacsahuamàn, Tiahuanaco): blocks of hundredths of tons carried for tens of kilometers up and down through the impervious Andean dales and put in place on top of the mountains, where one can't have a sufficient piezometric load.
For what concerns the method of the counterweight, it's ok, but we have to hold in adequate consideration the attrition that plays in disfavour in both climbing and descending over the walls of the pyramid, that certainly aren't smooth. Assuming a coefficient of attrition between the sleigh and the wall equal to 0.5 (consider that the rolling friction of a wheel of locomotive on a railway is calculated to be m=0.3), it results to me that, to lift a block of 15 tons, it's necessary to load the sleigh with 34 tons, for a total of more than 500 men [look at the figure on page 95, with PB=15 t, a=52°, m(attrition)=0,5, because of the equilibrium we have: PB(sina+mcosa) = PA(sina -mcosa), and then PA= 34 t ].
Furthermore, in my opinion it continues to be a mystery the reason why
the ancient Egyptians worried so much to build the trunks of pyramid of
Giza in such a way if they had to be only simple wells for the water. Why
to orient them northward with such a precision? Why to build courses of
stones so well aligned and flanked? From what part should the water filter
in a heap of that kind? And not only this. According to you the pyramids
following the 4,000 B.C. (among which those of Giza) would have been built
taller and taller to function also as a fortification against the armies
of the invading warriors. Frankly the care and the precision employed in
the pyramid of Cheops seem quite exuberant in respect to their functions,
especially if they are the result of a housing of emergency, realized to
withstand the pressing invasions. Finally it's worth to notice that the
angle of natural inclination of the sand doesn't have any relation with
the static properties of the Great Pyramid. The angle of attrition of 45°-52°
has to do with the equilibrium of the loose heaps (sand, gravel) not with
the structures formed by coherent material (rocky heaps). With the technique
used for the pyramid of Cheops a cube could be built, that would equally
stand very well.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE WORLD?
One of the chapters of your book about the real history of the world which fascinated me was just the first, where you spoke about the anatomical origins of our race and about the way in which our ancestry lost the hair. I suggest you a book that will leave you greatly surprised: Forbidden archeology, the secret history of the human race, by the US citizens Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson (the original work is a treatise 900 pages long, completed in 1994 and dedicated to the insiders; afterward a reduced version has come out, addressed to the vast public, published this year by the Gruppo Editoriale Futura). After eight years spent in searching in the scientific literature of the last century and a half, M.Cremo demonstrates that THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION of the Homo Sapiens (appeared in the last 300,000 years), beginning from African monkey hominids 4 millions of years old, IS TUTALLY UNFOUNDED. Contrarily, tens of finds in all continents testify the presence of anatomically modern men in eras a lot preceeding the Pliocene, which means from around 2 millions of years ago up to 50 millions of years ago (and over).
Such discoveries happened with a particular frequency in the second half of 1800, in every region of the world, by many scientists of the epoch, severely criticized for the inability of the scientific dominant caste to accept the real antiquity of the human race. The reports related about tools of various manufacture, traces of use of the fire, skeletons of Homo Sapiens found in places of France, of England, of Italy, of America, in very ancient stratigraphical positions, carefully certified by geologists. Among the supporters of "heretical" theories we find also the evolutionist Alfred R. Wallace and the celebrated Louis Leaky (who later on changed his ideas for matters of financing his searches).
The dogmatic conviction that the man had developed only in the Pleistocene (in the last 2 millions of years) was already popular in the last century, in the climate of enthusiasm aroused by the new theory of the evolution of Darwin. Then, at the end of 1800 and at the beginning of 1900, with the discovery of the Homo Erectus at Java and in the extreme East, it was arbitrarily decided that the line of the genus Homo began 1.5 millions of years ago. Today, this concept is so deep-rooted that can't be criticized any more. In the last 150 years, "anomalous" discoveries that contradicted the official chronology have been violently attached and rejected by the scientific community: the real stratigraphic position of the finds is doubted, they don't acknowledge the anatomical characteristics, they insinuate suspicions on the seriousness of the involved researchers, up to their dismissal or defamation.
Contrarily the finds recognized as official have been often unburied
on the surface, in not too clear conditions, arbitrarily composing
the pieces belonging also to different species. This has happened with
the Man of Java, with the Homo Habilis (that it is a pure
invention of the antropologists) and with our presumed more ancient ancestor,
the Australopitecus, whose various branches are so confused that
we can't understand who descends from who. The mythical Lucy was a little
more than a manlike ape, that because of the bony structure and the opposable
hallux was suitable for the life on the trees, and not for the erect station.
They weren't certainly specimens of her species, Australopitecus Afarensis,
to leave the famous foot-prints of Laetoli in Tanzania that are indistinguishable
from the track of a modern human foot and they date back to 3.6 millions
of years ago.
The book of M.Cremo contains all the bibliographic references necessary
to reconstruct the real hidden history of the humankind, and I believe
that, in the future, it will become the starting point for a radical archeological
revolution.
I care a lot for your opinion on these matters and I hope in your reply.
With liking,
Mauro Quagliati
