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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

serene.<br />

The Akapana Pyramid in far-off Tiahuanaco had also been surrounded<br />

by water, which had been the dominant motif there—just as I now found<br />

it to be at Teotihuacan.<br />

I began to climb the Pyramid of the Moon. It was smaller than the<br />

Pyramid of the Sun, indeed less than half the size, and was estimated to<br />

be made up of about one million tons of stone and earth, as against two<br />

and a half million tons in the case of the Pyramid of the Sun. The two<br />

monuments, in other words, had a combined weight of three and a half<br />

million tons. It was thought unlikely that this quantity of material could<br />

have been manipulated by fewer than 15,000 men and it was calculated<br />

that such a workforce would have taken at least thirty years to complete<br />

such an enormous task. 22<br />

Sufficient labourers would certainly have been available in the vicinity:<br />

the Teotihuacan Mapping Project had demonstrated that the population<br />

of the city in its heyday could have been as large as 200,000, making it a<br />

bigger metropolis than Imperial Rome of the Caesars. The Project had<br />

also established that the main monuments visible today covered just a<br />

small part of the overall area of ancient Teotihuacan. At its peak the city<br />

had extended across more than twelve square miles and had<br />

incorporated some 50,000 individual dwellings in 2000 apartment<br />

compounds, 600 subsidiary pyramids and temples, and 500 ‘factory’<br />

areas specializing in ceramic, figurine, lapidary, shell, basalt, slate and<br />

ground-stone work. 23<br />

At the top level of the Pyramid of the Moon I paused and turned slowly<br />

around. Across the valley floor, which sloped gently downhill to the<br />

south, the whole of Teotihuacan now stretched before me—a geometrical<br />

city, designed and built by unknown architects in the time before history<br />

began. In the east, overlooking the arrow-straight Street of the Dead,<br />

loomed the Pyramid of the Sun, eternally ‘printing out’ the mathematical<br />

message it had been programmed with long ages ago, a message which<br />

seemed to direct our attention to the shape of the earth. It almost looked<br />

as though the civilization that had built Teotihuacan had made a<br />

deliberate choice to encode complex information in enduring monuments<br />

and to do it using a mathematical language.<br />

Why a mathematical language?<br />

Perhaps because, no matter what extreme changes and transformations<br />

human civilization might go through, the radius of a circle multiplied by<br />

2pi (or half the radius multiplied by 4pi) would always give the correct<br />

figure for that circle’s circumference. In other words, a mathematical<br />

language could have been chosen for practical reasons: unlike any verbal<br />

tongue, such a code could always be deciphered, even by people from<br />

22 The Riddle of the Pyramids, pp. 188-93.<br />

23 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 281. See also The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 178<br />

and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 226-36.<br />

181

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