Culture & Community: Alternative History

Back in the ‘60s, there was a common belief among the more cosmic hippies that the social historians had it wrong when they said that we humans elevated ourselves from primitive status some seven to ten thousand years ago and began slowly working towards the eventual goal of creating the U.S. Constitution, Ford automobiles and the Windows operating system. According to this theory, humans had developed a highly advanced technological society in the past, long before the dawn of known pre-history, but had somehow managed to destroy their civilization by misusing their technology.

The Sphinx stands guard over the Pyramids at Giza. How old is it really?

In those days the cold war was at it’s apex, we were fighting a “police action” in Vietnam and, for about fifteen minutes every Saturday afternoon, air raid sirens were tested in every town in America, scaring the daylights out of us all. It’s no wonder, then, that we thought that if a prior civilization had done themselves in, they probably did it with a nuclear war. Thirty years later, we know that human beings are much more ingenious than that and realize that a technological civilization could find countless ways to end it all, like air pollution, water pollution, genetic engineering or irradiation. The list continues to grow, seemingly by the hour.

I was reminded of this old hippie belief a few days ago when a friend sent me an email of an article she found on the Atlantis Rising web site. The article, Top 10 Out-Of-Place Artifacts, was written by Joseph Robert Jochmans, and it begins by restating the view that most museums and history textbooks present the case that “humanity started from primitive beginnings, and steadily progressed upward in the development of culture and science.” These orthodox historians present their evidence in the form of artifacts that are displayed in a manner that neatly fits their preconceived hypothesis.

“Yet many other tantalizing bits and pieces unearthed offer a very different story of what really happened,” Jochmans says. “Called out-of-place artifacts, they don't fit the established pattern of prehistory, pointing back instead to the existence of advanced civilizations before any of the known ancient cultures came into being.” These out-of-place artifacts, which would seem to disprove accepted theories, are an embarrassment to most historians, so they get hidden in back rooms and the public only gets shown examples that support common “knowledge” of how history developed.

An example of one of these out-of-place artifacts would be an electric battery that was unearthed in Iraq and which dates back to 250 BCE. This discovery was made by Dr. Wilhelm Kong, an Austrian archaeologist, while rummaging through the basement of the Baghdad Museum in 1938. What he found was a six inch-high clay pot that contained a cylinder of sheet-copper. “The edge of the copper cylinder was soldered with a 60-40 lead-tin alloy comparable to today's best solder,” Jochmans reports in his article. “The bottom of the cylinder was capped with a crimped-in copper disk and sealed with bitumen or asphalt. Another insulating layer of asphalt sealed the top and also held in place an iron rod suspended into the center of the copper cylinder. The rod showed evidence of having been corroded with acid.”

Kong evidently realized immediately that he’d stumbled across an ancient electric battery, and went on to discover several more hidden away in the museum, all dating to the same period. He was to later find other electric batteries that had been unearthed from Sumerian remains in southern Iraq. These were even more ancient than the original find, dating all the way back to 2,500 BCE.

Other examples of out-of-place artifacts that Jochmans cites in his article are hieroglyphic drawings of what appears to be vacuum tubes in Egypt, a fifth century metallic pillar in New Delhi that utilizes metallurgy techniques that were supposedly unknown at the time, and a geared devise from 50 BCE for calculating the movement of the sun and moon. However, he leaves out what is probably the most stunning example of an out-of-place artifact ever discovered: the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza.

In his book Serpent In The Sky, John Anthony West reports that one of the most respected scholars on ancient Egypt, Schwaller de Lubicz, observed that the severe erosion evident on the body of the Sphinx is due to water and not sun and sand. This would place the building of the structure to before 10,000 BCE, since that’s the last time the area is known to have been flooded, meaning that the Sphinx pre-dates the known history of ancient Egypt. Subsequent carbon dating of the structure indicates that this ancient mystery is at least 100,000 years old and possibly dates back a quarter of a million years or more.

The orthodox historians would tell you that’s impossible because, according to them, there weren’t any people as we know them on the planet that far back.

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