Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  Hapgood explains such anomalies with the suggestion that a high civilization, which was subsequently destroyed, may have existed and mapped the world to near-modern levels of precision during the Ice Age. He further proposes that after the destruction of that hypothetical civilization some of the maps survived and were handed down from generation to generation, being copied and recopied many times as the original materials on which they were drawn perished. Perhaps facsimiles preserved and passed on in this manner eventually ended up lodged in the great libraries of late antiquity – notably at Alexandria in Egypt, which was for a long while a world centre of navigational and astronomical science. Perhaps some of the facsimiles were amongst other salvaged documents rescued from the fire that is said to have destroyed the Alexandria library in the early centuries of the Christian era. Perhaps a handful found shelter in other archives in the Middle East. Perhaps from there, after a few more centuries had passed, they were looted by Crusaders and redistributed around the Mediterranean where their value as navigational charts was recognized by mariners. And perhaps then, in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a new era of copying began in which information from the highly revered and generally accurate ancient maps was integrated with the observations and measurements of contemporary sailors to create navigational charts of astounding accuracy. Since the Mediterranean was at that time conceived of by its inhabitants as the centre of the world, it would have been quite natural for the copyists to focus most of their work on reproductions of the Mediterranean and neighbouring coastal regions – even if their source documents showed a far wider area …

  All speculation of course. Except the part about the sudden appearance at around the end of the thirteenth century, of uncannily good maps of the Mediterranean and immediately neighbouring parts of the Atlantic. That is completely true. They are called portolans or portolanos and several hundred have come down to us – all of which, eminent cartographers are agreed, show the influence of a single source map, now lost, that the great map historian A. E. Nordenskiold called ‘the normal portalano’. Rarer, but fortunately still also surviving, are a handful of world maps and portions of world maps in recognizable portolan style – and it is mainly amongst these that the alleged similarities to Ice Age coastlines and topography are observed.

  Many years have passed since Hapgood published his famous Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966 and there have been huge improvements in the technology for calculating post-glacial sea-levels. Moreover, although he has been repeatedly attacked and vilified by scholars who claim to have ‘debunked’ his work, the essential mystery upon which he touched remains unsolved to this day.

  I’m not interested in reviewing Hapgood again – read Fingerprints, or better still read Hapgood! But in the light of the good inundation data we now had from Glenn Milne I asked Sharif to cast a fresh eye over some of the more intriguing ancient maps that Hapgood had drawn attention to and to look for others that might have a bearing on the problem. I suggested he exclude Antarctica from the search, since I had paid enough attention to it in 1995. And on the same grounds of redundancy I told him to ignore any correlations that Hapgood himself had already written up. I only wanted material that hadn’t been observed and argued about before, that correlated well with the inundation maps, and that was substantial enough to withstand the rigours of hostile academic scrutiny.

  It seemed a lot to ask for – a real long shot – but then in February 2001 Sharif e-mailed me about a map of India that he had been investigating. What was remarkable about this 1510 Portuguese map was the fidelity and degree of detail with which it which it portrayed areas of the Indian coast as they had last looked 15,000 years ago.

  I was already in India when I read the e-mail on my laptop on 23 February 2001. I had just flown into Tamil Nadu from the Republic of Maldives, where I had spent four days working with the Channel 4 film crew.

  The same night, after we had checked into the Fisherman’s Cove hotel in Mahabalipuram, where we would be filming the next morning, we received confirmation from the NIO that their team had relocated the U-shaped structure at Poompuhur and would be ready to dive with us on the 26th.

  13 / Pyramid Islands

  The Redin came long before any other Maldivians. Between them and the present population other people had also come, but none were as potent as the Redin, and there were many of them. They not only used sail but also oars, and therefore moved with great speed at sea …

  Thor Heyerdahl

  Republic of Maldives 18–23 February 2001

  This is the Maldives. Imagine you are flying in a specially equipped plane, under an endless blue sky over endless blue ocean … The plane is very fast and manoeuvrable, you can go where you want in it, and yet all you see is blue -just blue above and blue below.

  Suddenly, in the distance, far away where the sky meets the water, your eye catches a glint of … something on the horizon. You turn the plane towards it, skimming at 200 metres over the ocean with little waves breaking into white horses below you.

  Soon land comes into view – just a curving feather of sand no more than a kilometre wide and three kilometres long, adorned with plumes of lush green palm leaves seeming to float in a sea that is now not merely blue but that grades into incredible shades of azure and turquoise. Passing directly overhead you see an area cleared of jungle packed with tiny houses built out of white coralline limestone blocks and separated from one another by an orderly network of streets brushed with white coralline limestone sand – so that the whole Lilliputian village glares like a mirror in the morning sun.

  You take the plane higher to get a better view (remember this is an imaginary journey and you can go as high as a satellite if you want), and you see that the stunningly beautiful but tiny inhabited island over which you have just flown is part of an even more stunningly beautiful ring of even tinier uninhabited islands and sandbars also shaped as rings and crescents and ellipses. This ring in its turn reveals itself to be just one of countless other rings and crescents and ellipses lying side by side to form a much larger ellipse in the ocean – the outer rim of a great Maldivian atoll 50 kilometres wide and more than 100 kilometres long. The atoll encloses a lagoon of hardly smaller dimensions (since the rim islands themselves are narrow), and within the lagoon are scattered dozens more small coral islands and sandbars in which the essential patterns of the entire Maldives chain – circles, ellipses, crescents – repeat themselves again and again.

  You urge the plane higher still, look down at last on the entire archipelago stretched out below you around the curve of the earth and discover that it consists of an assembly of similar atolls, twenty-six of them in all, strung together like the pearls in a necklace and draped in the form of an elongated ellipse 754 kilometres long from north to south and 118 kilometres wide from east to west.

  Each atoll is the product of coral growth around the edges of a submerged volcanic mountain peak:

  In a scenario played out over hundreds of thousands of years, coral first builds up around the shores of a volcanic landmass producing a fringing reef. Then when the island, often simply the exposed peak of a submarine mountain, begins slowly to sink, the coral continues to grow upwards at about the same rate. This forms a barrier reef which is separated from the shore of the sinking island by a lagoon. By the time the island is completely submerged, the coral growth has become the base for an atoll, circling the place where the volcanic landmass or island used to be. The enclosed lagoon accumulates sand and rubble formed by broken coral, and the level of this lagoon floor also builds up over the subsiding landmass … Coral growth can also create reefs and islands within the lagoon …1

  The lagoon floors are all submerged today, but at the Last Glacial Maximum, when sea-level was lower by about 120 metres, the huge basins within each and every one of the Maldives atolls were all dry land …

  You fly the plane lower again, spiralling downwards towards the sea, zooming in on one atoll, one emerald-green island. Within a
beach perimeter of startlingly white sand it seems at first to be just thick palm jungle from one side to another and apparently uninhabited.

  Then you spot a clearing in the jungle less than half a kilometre from the sea. You fly closer. In the heart of the clearing, with a tree growing on its summit, is what looks like a conical hill. Closer still and you discover that the hill is not a hill at all, and it is not quite conical either.

  It is a ruined and partially collapsed pyramid about the height of a two-storey building.

  The necklace

  The four-day trip that we made to the Maldives immediately before returning to India on 23 February 2001 was not intended to be an expedition to search for underwater ruins – hardly practicable in such a short time in an archipelago of almost 1200 tiny islands extending through eight degrees of latitude across 90,000 square kilometres of ocean. In all that mass of blue water the total area of dry land is presently less than 300 square kilometres and many scientists are of the opinion that even this remnant may be submerged before the end of the twenty-first century by rising sea-levels linked to global warming.2

  The threat of extinction that hangs over the Maldives and its unique culture serves as a reminder that the world’s oceans can and do rise, and that when they do they can swallow up low-lying countries – and all their history – with not a trace left visible above the water. And if that is true today, deep in what has so far been the most placid interglacial of the past 2.5 million years, then it doesn’t take much imagination to work out how things must have been in the world when sea-levels were rising crazily between 15,000 and 7000 years ago.

  Besides, thanks to the ingenuity of modern science, we have inundation maps to tell us the story – perhaps still not with 100 per cent accuracy (although that is being refined all the time) but based on the best data presently available.

  And what the maps tell us about the Maldives is that the necklace of scattered coral atolls of which the archipelago now consists was almost continuous land at the Last Glacial Maximum, broken only by intermittent channels, bays and inlets, occupying perhaps 50,000 square kilometres out of the total of 90,000 square kilometres that the Republic presently encloses within its territorial waters. In other words, some 49,700 square kilometres of the Maldives that was above water between 21,000 and 16,000 years ago is underwater today.

  In my investigation of the riddle of Kumari Kandam I could hardly ignore this lost antediluvian landmass in the Indian Ocean that had stretched towards the equator from a point roughly parallel to the extended southern tip of Tamil Nadu during the Ice Age. Even today the much reduced Maldives are a barrier to shipping, but 16,000 years ago, had anyone been sailing in these parts, they would have been confronted by an 800 kilometre long line of cliffs running north to south effectively blocking the east-west passage. Hypothetical Ice Age seafarers wanting to sail east or west would have been more or less obliged to make their way through one of two deep-water channels – the ‘One and a Half Degree Channel’ (so named because it slices across the Maldives one and a half degrees north of the equator) and the ‘Equatorial Channel7, then as now about 50 kilometres wide, which separates South Huvadhoo Atoll (in the northern hemisphere) from Addu Atoll (in the southern hemisphere).

  So rather than the dots in the ocean that they are today, the Maldives 16,000 years ago would have been formidable. If such a thing as ‘Kumari Kandam’ ever did exist, centred as the myths suggest on the antediluvian coastal margins of southern India and Sri Lanka, then might it not also have included the great barrier islands of the Maldives just a few hundred kilometres to the south-west? As I noted in chapter 11, such a hypothesis would explain the old Tamil traditions which tell us that Kumari Kandam once extended into the Indian Ocean some ‘700 Kavathams’ (about 1500 kilometres) beyond modern Cape Comorin.

  The disappearance of prehistory

  The ancient history of the Maldive islands is almost completely unknown3 and their inundation profile suggests that their prehistory, if any, may have been lost beneath the rising seas at the end of the Ice Age. The matter is further complicated by the presence of an alarming ‘gravity anomaly’ centred here. In layman’s terms what this means is that the archipelago is situated at the bottom of an enormous trough in the surface of the Indian Ocean itself – this trough being created by a strong local gravitational field which some believe may be linked to the mass of sunken mountains on top of which the Maldives atolls have grown. Like other gravity anomalies (several similar troughs have been measured in the world’s oceans by satellites) it is not certain that this one has always remained in exactly the same location, or that its depth has always remained the same, or that it always will do so in the future.4

  Very little archaeology of any kind has ever been done in the Maldives, but the view of most orthodox scholars is that ‘the first settlers probably arrived from Ceylon not later than AD 500 and were Buddhists’.5 Other authorities argue for an earlier date – back to about 500 BC – and note some south Indian, specifically Tamil, Hindu religious influence.6 Thor Heyerdahl, who is one of the few to have conducted archaeological expeditions in the Maldives and whose book The Maldives Mystery is the only serious attempt to get to grips with the problems of the islands’ ancient history, believes that they were settled much earlier than that – perhaps by 2000 BC or even 3000 BC – and that they may have played a part in an archaic Indian Ocean trading network involving ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamian and Indus-Sarasvati civilizations.7 So far Heyerdahl has not been supported by the few carbon-dates obtained from the Maldives – none older than AD 5408 – but in this as other matters he may yet be proved right. What we do not know about these islands far exceeds what we know:

  Usually the history of a nation begins with a potent king founding a dynasty. The Maldives is a definite exception. A long dynasty of kings was already there before known Maldive history started. This kingdom ended when Maldive history began. The last king was made a sultan by a pious foreigner who came by sea and started local history. He caused all the kings to disappear into oblivion, except one, the one he himself converted. With neither arms, nor with any Maldive blood in his veins, he introduced a new faith, new laws, and founded the present Moslem Maldive state.9

  In other words, not only has the Maldives suffered the incursions of the sea and the usual depredations of time but also it was converted, in the year AD 1153 (the year 583 of the Holy Prophet), to the Islamic faith,10 which led to further attrition of ancient structures, artefacts and inscriptions. As my old friend Peter Marshall, author of Journey Through the Maldives, explains:

  Recorded history only begins about the time of the conversion of Maldives to Islam … As Christians in Europe begin their calendar from the birth of Christ and tend to dismiss all earlier religions as pagan, so Maldivians follow the Islamic calendar. Until recently they had very little interest in what happened before. Not only was Maldivian pre-Islamic history suppressed but most pre-Muslim artefacts were destroyed.11

  So what archaeologists are left to work with in the Maldives, above the water at least (and nobody has yet looked underwater), is almost certainly just a fraction – and perhaps an extremely unrepresentative fraction – of what was once there.

  Even so, buried deep in the jungle of islands up and down the archipelago -some uninhabited and all off-limits to tourists – there are several dozen partially collapsed and heavily overgrown pyramids, up to ten metres high, with their sides oriented to the cardinal directions. Although in a state of ruin today, these mounds of compacted earth and stone, in some cases with stepped courses of closely jointed megalithic masonry to be seen exposed under the earth fill, have a sombre and looming presence as they emerge out of the jungle. Called hawitta by the local people, the precise function and origin of these mounds have not been confirmed – though the carbon-dates put their construction between roughly AD 500 and 700.12

  Most scholars think they are Buddhist stupas (relic mounds), which probably they are. Unimpeachably Buddhi
st sculptures, reliefs on stone and artefacts have been found amongst the ruins and some of the pieces are recognizably similar to other Buddhist work of the same period from India and Sri Lanka -so there is no doubt that Buddhism was extensively present on these islands in the centuries before the coming of Islam.13 Indeed, a Sanskrit text of Vajrayana Buddhism dating back to the ninth or tenth century AD is the earliest surviving legible inscription thus far found in the Maldives.14

  Still, as a number of observers have noted, there seems to be something strange about this Maldivian Buddhism. Could it be some other religious influence showing through – maybe a form of Hinduism that had preceded the Buddhist faith to the Maldives? Certain striking sculptures of grotesque human faces with bulging eyes, twirled mustachios and curved cat-like fangs ‘may recall Hindu deities’,15 admits Arne Skjolsvold, an archaeologist with the Kon-Tiki Museum – who nevertheless prefers to explain such images as expressions of a localized subculture of Tantric Buddhism.16

  There may be clues in Dhivehi, the Maldivian language. It belongs to the Indo-European family and is related to Sanskrit and thus also to Sinhalese, one of the two languages of Sri Lanka (the other being Tamil). Sinhalese has been heavily influenced and modified by its contact with Tamil,17 and, according to Clarence Maloney, a Tamil/Dravidian sublayer exists in Dhivehi also, which suggests that ‘Hinduism was present in the Maldives before the Buddhist period.18