The Testimony, August 2001330

Prophecy, Historyand Archaeology

EDITOR: Tony Benson, 26 Tiercel Avenue, Norwich,NR7 8JN. Tel./Fax 01603 412978;

e-mail: rabenson@globalnet.co.uk

Before the Flood (2)Tony Benson

IN THE PREVIOUS article we introduced theidea that there would have been an advancedcivilisation before the Flood, and began look-

ing at evidence that supports this. We continuelooking at the evidence in this article.

Astronomical knowledgeOne feature brought out by a number of authorsis the advanced astronomical knowledge appar-ently possessed in ancient times. In what followsI put forward some evidence for this, gleanedfrom various books, but I cannot of course vouchfor the accuracy of it.

One example concerns Sirius, or the Dog Star,the brightest star in the night sky. In 1862 it wasdiscovered that this was in fact a double star,and that it takes fifty years for one to travelround the other. Yet it is said that there are an-cient Egyptian texts that indicate that they knewthat Sirius was a double star, a fact which, itmust be stressed, cannot possibly be discernedwith the naked eye.

Even more remarkable was the claim madeby Robert Temple in The Sirius Mystery (1976)that a West African tribe, the Dogon, has pre-served the knowledge that Sirius is a doublestar, and even of the fifty-year cycle of rotation.They claim to have learned this from the Egyp-tians of old. But how did the Egyptians knowthis? Was the information known by those wholived before the Flood and passed down to theEgyptians, who were descended from Mizraim,son of Ham the son of Noah? If so, did peoplebefore the Flood observe the heavens throughtelescopes and find out this information? Per-haps so, but there may be another explanationthat we will consider later.

Another remarkable fact concerns the promi-nent group of seven close stars known as thePleiades, or Seven Sisters (in fact only six can beseen clearly), referred to in Job 38:31: “Canstthou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades[mg. the seven stars] . . . ?” (cf. 9:9); and Amos

5:8: “seek Him That maketh the seven stars”.1

This group of stars is also known as the SevenSisters by the native peoples of North America,Siberia and Australia, evidence of a common an-cestry in relatively recent times, and perhapsalso of a common fund of astronomical knowl-edge. It is noteworthy that Job is a very earlybook, yet we have in it God talking of the con-stellations to Job, which means that at this earlytime he had a good knowledge of the night sky.Perhaps the names used for the constellationshad been used for a long time before Job, beinginherited from the pre-Flood age.

A favourite topic of the various writers I con-sulted is the idea that certain ancient buildingswere built on astronomical principles. There arethree main areas involved: ancient temples inCentral and South America, the Pyramids ofEgypt and the many stone circles (such as Stone-henge) and burial mounds of northern Europe.This is a very complicated subject (too compli-cated for me), but generally it is maintained thatthese very ancient buildings reflect a muchgreater knowledge of astronomy than is gener-ally thought to have existed in those times, andthat is all we need to know for the purposes ofthis article.

The Pyramids of EgyptPeople have always been fascinated by the Pyra-mids.2 Many books have been written aboutthem, and many strange ideas have been put

1. The Hebrew does not mean ‘seven stars’ but rather‘heap’ or ‘group’. The modern Arabic name for thePleiades means ‘heap’ or ‘group’, and it is thereforeassumed that it is the Pleiades that are being referredto in Scripture.

2. By the Pyramids we usually mean the group of threelarge (though one is considerably smaller than theother) pyramids outside Cairo, but it should not beforgotten that there are others elsewhere in Egypt,though not as spectacular.

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forward about them, such as claims that theycontain hidden messages obtainable from vari-ous calculations derived from their measure-ments. I have not read any specific books aboutthe Pyramids, but some of the books I have readdo refer to them in some detail, and there aresome interesting points made which are relevantto the theme of these two articles.

The orthodox view of the Pyramids is thatthey are tombs of pharaohs of what is known asthe Old Kingdom of Egypt, which is convention-ally dated as spanning the period 2700 B.C. to2200 B.C. approximately, dates which cannot beright if the chronology of Genesis is taken liter-ally, because the Flood occurred in the middle ofthat period. The building of such massive struc-tures is considered to have been feasible, giventhe availability of huge numbers of people. Theenormous stone blocks of which the Pyramidsare constructed are presumed to have beenhauled into place up massive earth ramps bylarge teams of people.

The orthodox view is held by historians andarchaeologists. The challenge to these views hascome mainly from experts in other fields whomaintain that it is simply not feasible for thePyramids to have been built in the way statedabove, and that the conventional dating of thePyramids is also open to question. Here are somepoints made.1 The Old Kingdom of Egypt covers dynasties

III to VI.3 The pharaohs who, under the con-ventional view, built the Pyramids were ofdynasty IV. The pharaohs of the dynastiesbefore and after dynasty IV built pyramids,but they were structures far inferior in sizeand building techniques to those of dynastyIV. It does not make sense that such advancedtechniques should suddenly emerge and thenbe lost just as suddenly. It is therefore sup-posed that the Pyramids were built at a muchearlier age by a more advanced civilisation.

2 The largest of the Pyramids, and thereforecalled the Great Pyramid, is conventionallyregarded as having been built by the phar-aoh Khufu, or Cheops, as the Greeks calledhim. He ruled for twenty-three years. TheGreat Pyramid contains about two-and-a-halfmillion blocks of stone each weighing manytons. To have constructed the Pyramid in thereign of Khufu would have meant laying ablock of stone about every two minutes.4 It isdifficult to conceive of teams of men beingable to do this, especially when it got higher.

3 The Great Pyramid is nearly five hundredfeet high. Construction experts have calcu-lated that a ramp would need to have had agradient of no more that one in ten for it to befeasible to have dragged large stones up it.Such a ramp would have needed to havestarted a mile away. It is considered to havebeen impossible for a ramp five hundred feethigh to have been constructed; it would havecollapsed. If it had existed there would havebeen traces still there, but none exist.

Close to the Pyramids is the half lion/halfman monument known as the Sphinx, which,according the orthodox view, dates to the sametime as the Pyramids. Extensive erosion of theSphinx is attributed to windblown sand parti-cles. However, a geologist who examined it care-fully says the erosion was caused by water,though this is dismissed by ancient historianswho say that the area has been dry since theSphinx and the Pyramids were built. Early Arabhistorians say that the Pyramids were built be-fore the Flood, and Coptic 5 Christian works saythe same thing. This would, of course, explainthe water erosion.

Non-orthodox writers about the Pyramidshave come up with some remarkable ideas toexplain how the great stones of the Pyramidswere lifted and put into place. These include theuse of enormous hydrogen balloons, the use ofmagnetic forces and the use of sound. Allegedly,pictorial and linguistic evidence of these thingsfrom ancient texts and monuments exists, butthis is always very subjective. Whether theseideas are as ridiculous as they sound I cannotsay, but it certainly seems as though the ortho-dox views about the Pyramids and how theywere constructed leave a lot to be explained.

My conclusions from this are:1 The Pyramids may well be a relic of the pre-

Flood age, being built by the “giants [whowere] in the earth in those day . . . mightymen which were of old, men of renown”,those who corrupted God’s way so badly that

3. Egyptian history is conventionally divided into anumber of dynasties, thirty-one in all, labelled withRoman numerals, spanning the period from 3110B.C. to 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great con-quered Egypt.

4. This assumes working in daylight hours only.5. The Coptic Church was a breakaway church estab-

lished in Egypt, and still has many adherents theretoday.

The Testimony, August 2001332

God decided to bring the Flood and start again(Gen. 6:4,12,13).

2 Technologies not now known may well havebeen used in their construction, thoughwhether the speculations about what thesemight have been have any validity is anothermatter.

Other evidence of advanced ancienttechnologyAll kinds of other things are advanced as evi-dence of advanced technology in ancient times.What follows are some examples. What validitythere is in the examples given is difficult to say,and the statements are not, in general, acknowl-edged by experts in ancient history. I suggestthat collectively they indicate that man beforethe Flood could well have advanced much morethan we might have supposed.

In the deserts of Peru there exist what areknown as the Nazca Lines, enormous shapes andfigures made by scratching away black volcanicpebbles and exposing the yellow sand. For ex-ample, there is a 617-foot-long lizard and a 400-foot-long condor (a large vulture). Supposedlythe shapes can only be discerned from the air,leading to suggestions that that is what theywere designed for.

Two boats were found in pits near the Pyra-mids, allegedly of a very advanced design.Twelve boats were discovered in the Egyptiandesert near Abydos, in Upper Egypt, many milesto the south of Cairo, again stated to be of anadvanced design and allegedly 5,000 years old.Were these from the Pre-Flood age?—for theEgyptians were not noted seafarers.

In 1837 a fragment of an iron plate was dis-covered in the Pyramids, yet the Pyramids werebuilt long before men knew how to use iron,according to orthodoxy. The fragment is gener-ally dismissed as a forgery, yet texts discoveredat Saqqara, ten miles south, and dated to thetime of the Pyramids, refer to the use of iron. Weknow from Genesis 4:22 that men knew how towork iron before the Flood.

The pioneer Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie,found bowls fashioned out of diorite, a rock al-legedly harder than iron. It is not known howthe ancient Egyptians managed to fashion these,for diorite can only be fashioned using sophisti-cated modern drills. Likewise there are swan-necked jars made of stone which could only havebeen fashioned using sophisticated lathes. It isargued that these are evidence of a much more

advanced technology in ancient times than isusually supposed.

There are stories too of artefacts being discov-ered in rocks supposedly many millions of yearsold. These include: a fashioned plank in a setting500,000 years old; spearheads, ladles, grindingtools and stone axes discovered by Californiangold-miners in rocks dated anything up to fifty-five million years old; a gold chain in a lump ofcoal and iron items in a block of sandstone dated387 million years old. These are advanced bysome as evidence that man has been around a lotlonger than is usually thought. To us, of course,this is evidence against the orthodox dating ofrocks. They are not many millions of years old,but the product of the Flood, with the artefactsfound in them being relics of the pre-Flood civi-lisation.

The real visitors from spaceThere are two schools of thought amongst thosewho maintain, against orthodox views, that tech-nology in ancient times was much more advancedthan is normally thought. The first says that infact man has been civilised for much longer thanis often thought, with past civilisations beingwiped out in catastrophes with a few survivorspassing on the technology to later generations.Whilst this gains support from evidence of pastcatastrophes upon the earth, this is not an ac-ceptable theory because it is against Bible teach-ing about a recent Creation.

The second school of thought claims that tech-nologies were introduced to men on earth byvisitors from space. The evidence offered for thisis twofold. Firstly, there are the claims that an-cient monuments depict spacecraft. Pictorial evi-dence offered for this simply does not lookconvincing, however. The second line of evidenceis the existence in many cultures of stories ofvisits by ‘gods’ who gave instruction in agricul-ture, the arts and technology, and gave laws.These ‘gods’, it is argued, were in fact visitorsfrom space. This theory, I suggest, comes nearerto the truth. The earth has been visited by beingsfrom space, and is still being visited by them,though unseen by men. They are, of course, theangels, who come not from some planet orbitinground a remote star but from a locality not dis-cernible by the strongest telescopes: heaven.

We are not directly told in Scripture that theangels instructed man in the practicalities of life,but surely by implication they must have done.We are told that “the LORD God took the man,

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and put him into the garden of Eden to dress itand to keep it” (Gen. 2:15). This must have meantAdam being given some instruction by the an-gels as to what to do. The implication of “thevoice of the LORD God walking in the garden inthe cool of the day” (3:8) is that the angels usedto commune with Adam and Eve at the end ofeach day. What did they talk about? It is reason-able to suppose that there was regular instruc-tion from the angels about the practicalities ofliving, such as fire, for example. We are told that“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORDGod make coats of skins, and clothed them” (v.21). We know that this had a symbolic meaning,pointing forward to the means that God wouldultimately provide for the covering of sin, butsurely Adam and Eve would have learned at thistime the skill of making clothes.

It is true that Genesis 4:20-22 states that it wasthose of the line of Cain who made musical in-struments and were able to manufacture itemsfrom metal, but did they learn these techniquesfor themselves or was this development of thearts and technology based upon instruction origi-nally given by the angels?

And what of the giving of laws? We do notread specifically of laws being given to man un-til the revealing of the Law by angels to Moses.Yet Abraham, said God, “kept My charge, Mycommandments, My statutes, and My laws”(26:5). Were these all given specifically to Abra-ham? Or were they laws which had been givento man by God through the medium of angelslong before, perhaps before the Flood?

Evolutionists believe that polytheism (the wor-ship of many gods) developed into monotheism(the worship of one god), but if we accept Bibleteaching we must believe the opposite. The wor-ship of the one true God, with a multiplicity ofangels to do His will, became corrupted into abelief in many gods, with a king of the gods overthem (such as Zeus in Greek mythology). If earlyman had been instructed by the angels in arts,crafts, agriculture and so on, then we can seehow this might have been corrupted into a beliefthat the ‘gods’ had instructed mankind in thesethings.

The evidenceWhat then is the evidence from non-Scripturalsources concerning the instruction of early manby the angels? This is what one writer says: “Inthe classical mythologies of all civilisations, agri-culture is fundamentally of divine origin. It ar-

rived in different ways from different deities andunder various circumstances, but the underly-ing theme is recognisable”.6 Just as there are sto-ries from all over the world of a universal flood,showing that the Biblical Flood story is true, sothere are stories of divine beings instructingman’s ancestors in agriculture, surely a refer-ence to angelic instruction of Adam and Eve andperhaps later ones too.

In a recent article in this magazine there was avery interesting reference to a god called Oanes,who was said to have instructed the people ofancient Assyria in the arts, sciences and agricul-ture.7 Oanes is depicted as having fish scales onhis body. At Lake Titicaca, high in the Andesmountains of South America, there is a depictionof a god of similar appearance, perhaps reflect-ing the same tradition. The Incas of this areaworshipped a god they called Viracocha, or al-ternatively Kon Tiki,8 depicted as a bearded whiteman, who was believed to have come across theoceans with followers and instructed them inmedicine and agriculture.

Similar stories are attached to the chief god ofthe Aztecs of ancient Mexico, Quetzalcoatl, calledby the Mayans who also inhabited this areaKukulkan. We read of this god as follows:

“He was believed, for example, to have intro-duced the knowledge of writing to CentralAmerica, to have invented the calendar, andto have been a master builder who taught thepeople the secrets of masonry and architec-ture. He was the father of mathematics, met-allurgy and astronomy and was said to have‘measured the earth’. He also founded pro-ductive agriculture, and was reported to havediscovered and introduced corn—literally [sic]the staff of life in these ancient lands. A greatdoctor and master of medicines, he was thepatron of healers and diviners, and disclosedto the people the mysteries of the propertiesof plants. In addition he was revered as a

6. Jack Harland, Crops and Man, cited in When the SkyFell in—In Search of Atlantis, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1995.

7. See “The story of Jonah and the Yanush legend”,Barbara Spencer, Jun. 2001, p. 258.

8. The Norwegian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl,called his 1947 expedition which made him famousafter the name of this god. Heyerdahl set out toprove that the Pacific islands could have been settledby immigrants from South America sailing the Pa-cific in balsa-wood boats.

The Testimony, August 2001334

lawgiver, as a protector of craftsmen, and asa patron of all the arts”.9

Similarly, the Egyptians believed that one oftheir major gods, Osiris, taught them agricul-ture, especially the cultivation of wheat and bar-ley and the making of agricultural instruments,and gave them laws. He is also said to have gonewith others to other countries to teach them thesame things.

The Aborigines of Australia have their storiesof beings who came from the sky and taughtthem knowledge before a great flood came uponthe earth. The apocryphal Book of Enoch refersspecifically to angels teaching men before theFlood. In both Central American and Egyptiansources the instruction came to an end becauseof a time of wickedness and violence, whichwould correspond to the situation depicted inGenesis 6 and which caused God to bring theFlood upon the earth.

There are, however, Biblical ways of explain-ing these persistent stories of men receiving in-struction by the gods. The three possibilities are:1 Instruction by angels after Creation, as de-

tailed above;2 Instruction of the survivors of the Flood by

angels;3 Instruction of the descendants of the sons of

Noah by Noah and his three sons, the solesurvivors of the pre-Flood age.

Regarding the second possibility, there is someindication in the ancient records of instructionby ‘gods’ after a time of catastrophe (the Flood),and perhaps the angels had to carry out theirwork of instruction a second time.

Regarding the third suggestion, Noah and hissons would clearly have needed to pass on in-struction on a whole range of matters to theirdescendants. They lived to a much greater agethan their descendants, and as time went on thesesurvivors of the pre-Flood age, who would haveretained a knowledge of what man had learntfrom Creation onwards, would have been re-garded with awe. We can see how, in a timewhen the worship of the one true God was beingcorrupted into polytheism, Noah and his sons

might have come to be regarded as gods them-selves.

In the annals of ancient Egypt, Babylon andIndia there are apparently stories of ‘sages’ whotaught the world after the Flood. The Egyptiansin particular revered their ancestors, who hadtaught them many things, calling them ‘the shin-ing ones’ and ‘the ancestor gods of the circle ofthe sky’. This could be a reference to angels or toNoah and his sons, falsely elevated to become‘gods’. The later writer Clement of Alexandria(A.D. 150-222) spoke of certain gods worshippedby the Egyptians as being wise men from beforethe Flood.

ConclusionThere are a number of conclusions from this shortstudy:1 The orthodox view of history is based on the

false teaching of evolution, which says thatcivilisation gradually developed from theprimitive to the sophisticated.

2 There are a number of facts that do not fitwith this view, but which are brushed asideor dismissed altogether by orthodoxy.

3 Those who put forward these facts use themeither to claim that advanced civilisationshave existed on the earth for a long period oftime or that civilisation was established onthe earth by visitors from space. Both ideasare, of course, totally unacceptable to believ-ers in Creation as taught in the Bible.

4 There is an alternative explanation for theevidence put forward by these unorthodoxwriters, namely that there was an advancedcivilisation on the earth before the Flood, andthat stories of man being instructed by godsare either distortions of instruction beinggiven by the angels to men, or refer to thesurvivors of the Flood instructing their de-scendants.

(Concluded)

9. Graham Hancock, Fingerprint of the Gods—A Questfor the Beginning and the End, Heinemann, London,1995, p. 105.

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