Robert M. Schoch Ph.D - Forgotten civilization : the role of solar outbursts in our past and future

I dedicate this book to my beloved wife, Catherine (Katie) Ulissey. She has truly been the inspiration and driving force behind it. As is evident in the pages that follow, this book could not have been written without her.

Schoch is a true scientist, following the data wherever it leads, heedless of political pressures or worn-out paradigms. Twenty-two years ago, his redating of the Sphinx launched the New Archaeology. Forgotten Civilization distills all that has happened since into a simple conclusion: that solar activity ended the last cycle of high culture and may destroy ours in turn. Schoch is no scaremonger, no hawker of a pet theory. What we do with this knowledge is up to us, but once digested, it changes everything.

JOSCELYN GODWIN, AUTHOR OF ATLANTIS AND THE CYCLES OF TIME

A special thanks goes to Grzegorz Popawski, who invited me to participate in a conference in Warsaw, Poland, on May 29, 2011, which he organized. This book is an outgrowth of my presentation there.

C. Alicia Schoch, my mother, was touched by this manuscript, which she read in its entirety before she unexpectedly passed away on April 2, 2012. I would be remiss not to acknowledge her lifetime of love and support, as well as the love and support I continue to receive from my wonderful father, Milton R. Schoch.

Forgotten Civilization. A few notes on the title, which was the brainchild of my wife, Katie, are in order.

To place things in context, when I was a youngster the British art historian Kenneth Clark (19031983) wrote and produced an influential thirteen-part television documentary series (first aired in 1969 by the British Broadcasting Corporation) and accompanying book, both of which were titled Civilisation: A Personal View . We were enthralled by the TV series and digested every word of the book, falling under the spell of this uncommon arbiter of taste and excellence, accepting his pronouncements without question. Clark codified for a generation the common concept of what civilization (being British, Clark spelled it as civilisation) was all about, and his views endure among much of the public (or at least the Western European and American public) to this day. For his contributions, Clark received the title Lord Clark of Saltwood (Saltwood is a castle in Kent that Clark purchased in 1955).

In actuality, Clark had a rather narrow view of what exactly constituted civilization. His book and series concentrated on Western European Christian civilization from the period of about 1100 CE through the nineteenth century and had a decidedly English slant to it. About the concept of civilization more generally, leading up to the apparent height of civilization as he viewed it, Clark wrote:

There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio-active.... I dont put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greecephilosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasnt reached again for 2000 yearsbut also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled. Another was round about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europewhere it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of lifeaction, philosophy, organization, technologythere was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence. (Clark 1969, 33; ellipses in the original)

My contention, as I will develop in this book, is that the sudden appearance of civilization circa 3000 BCE of which Clark speaks is not the first appearance of civilization. Rather it is the reemergence of civilization after some five thousand or more years. True, unambiguous civilization is evident during the period of circa 10,000 BCE to 9000 BCE, thousands of years earlier than the dynastic Egyptians and their contemporaries in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. This earliest flowering of civilization has been generally forgotten by humanity, although allusions to it are still to be found in sacred scriptures, traditional legends, and ancient texts; the Garden of Eden, tales of a golden age, and Platos recounting of Atlantis may all be referencing this primordial civilization. Now it is time to recognize its legacy.

... the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night. It is when people are saying, How quiet and peaceful it is that the worst suddenly happens, as suddenly as labour pains come on a pregnant woman; and there will be no way for anybody to evade it.

THE JERUSALEM BIBLE,

1 THESSALONIANS, 5:23

How could I say no? The Chilean ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, who befriended us when I spoke at the first International Conference on Ancient Studies in Dubai (UAE), November 29 and 30, 2008, had invited Katie (Catherine E. Ulissey, my fiance at the time) and me to not only visit him and his family in Santiago, but to join him on a short expedition to Easter Island (which has been Chilean territory since its annexation in 1888). Honestly, I experienced some trepidation when initially considering the trip. On the one hand, this little speck of land is virtually synonymous with ancient mysteries, which for the last twenty years I had devoted much of my life to exploring around the globe, from Egypt to Peru to Japan. Easter Island was a definite on my list of must see destinations. On the other hand, it was a long way to travel for such a short excursion; the plan was to spend just seventy-three hours on the island. What could I accomplish in such a short period of time? But Katie convinced me we should take advantage of the opportunity. So, it was ago. In hindsight, those seventy-three hours on Easter Island changed my life in more than one way!

Something that attracted me personally to Easter Island was its remoteness, for here I reasoned might be preserved ancient traditions that elsewhere were lost or transformed by contact and conquest. Apparently isolated from the rest of the world for centuries or millennialocated in the South Pacific over two thousand kilometers from the nearest inhabited islandthis tiny triangular piece of real estate (just 24.6 kilometers long and 12.3 kilometers at its widest point), was unknown to Westerners until the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen spotted it on Easter Sunday 1722. Easter Island is the home of hundreds of gigantic stone heads and torsos, known as moai, that adorn the island. It is also the source of mysterious undeciphered glyphs inscribed on pieces of wood; known as the rongorongo script, just over two dozen original tablets and objects (such as an inscribed wooden staff) have been preserved and are now scattered among museums around the world. So far undeciphered, although as I will discuss later in this book various gallant attempts have been made, they have been one of the great enigmas of linguistics. Might the moai and the rongorongo texts, I wondered, preserve some kind of legacy, some kind of message, from remote antiquity?