Ancient Apocalypse S1 E2

Transcript from the Netflix Series Ancient Apocalypse S1 E2 - "Stranger in a Time of Chaos".

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In Cholula, Mexico's oldest continuously-inhabited city, the journalist inspects the world's largest pyramid for signs of a forgotten past.

Graham: Are we a species with amnesia? Could we have forgotten a vital part of our own story? I'm Graham, and many archaeologists hate me for trying to find out.

The notion of a lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age is extremely threatening to mainstream archaeology because it rips the ground out from under that entire discipline.

It removes the foundation.

I don't care about that.

There's people that come along and because of their impact, it changes the way people look at things.

Graham is a man who, despite all of the insults, and all of the people disparaging his work he has trekked on and on and on.

What I care about is learning the lessons of the past in order to clear away that fog that surrounds prehistory.

And it's a fog because there's no documents.

We have to build our picture of the past from fragmentary evidence.

Folk stories, legends, myths.

These for me are all important evidence.

And one of the most mysterious and revealing mythologies in prehistory comes down to us through the ancient cultures of Mexico.

Graham: In my search for a lost civilization, I've come to a land of fertile valleys and simmering volcanoes. This is the Puebla region, east of Mexico City. The site of this country's oldest continuously inhabited city, Cholula. Today, a modern metropolis of over 100,000 people, it holds an ancient secret at its heart. History is written by the victors. That's especially true in Mexico. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Cholula in 1519, they massacred its inhabitants, obliterating not only their culture, but also almost all traces of the more ancient cultures that had preceded them.

But the invaders couldn't erase everything.

The conquistadors had first assumed this hill was just that, a hill, and they built a church on top of it.

But this hill isn't the natural feature it's often mistaken for.

In fact, it's the most massive monument ever built anywhere in the world.

And yet, chances are you've never heard of it. This is the Great Pyramid of Cholula. After centuries of neglect and pillaging, it's impossible to understand the sheer enormity of what once stood here. But we do have some idea of what it must have looked like in its prime. It's estimated that the Great Pyramid of Cholula rose to at least 213 feet, 65 meters. Evidence suggests it was originally dedicated to the ancient Mexican god of rain and floods, whom the Aztecs knew by the name of Tlaloc. Built mostly with mud and straw adobe bricks, it wasn't as tall as Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, but it was larger with nearly three times the footprint, measuring 400 by 400 meters at its base, roughly 30 football fields, making this the largest monument ever constructed by any civilization anywhere. Archaeologists quickly established that work on the pyramid was completed around eight centuries ago, 1200 AD or thereabouts. But when they began cutting tunnels through the body of the structure, they were stunned by what they discovered inside. It's a surreal feeling descending into the largest pyramid on Earth. Within are beautiful murals depicting mythological scenes and creatures... and tantalizing glimpses of many layers of construction. Do they offer clues to this site's biggest mystery? Could it be part of a global legacy left behind by an ancient, advanced civilization of prehistory? I'm joined by one of the world's leading experts on the Great Pyramid of Cholula, University of Calgary anthropologist and archaeologist, Geoff McCafferty.

We're in the heart of the most massive monument ever built anywhere in the ancient world.

You get almost the same sense as when you go into a church.

You know, there is a tangible sense of an aura of that power.

These tunnels were excavated by Mexican archaeologists.

There are a total of eight kilometers of tunnels.

That's extraordinary. Eight kilometers?

Yeah.

Graham: Using these tunnels, archaeologists made an astounding discovery. The Pyramid of Cholula is simply the latest in a whole series of more ancient pyramids hidden beneath. Inside is an even older pyramid, dating back to 800 AD or so, and beneath that, another one dating at least 200 to 500 years earlier. Until like a series of Russian nesting dolls, we get to what's thought to be the first and oldest pyramid built here, still an impressive 120 meters square and 17 meters or 56 feet high.

When did construction first begin here?

So, the earliest evidence of construction of the ceremonial zone dates to about 500 BC.

It was a good size pyramid. Then, over time, it was expanded, sort of larger construction over the top of the other.

Graham: So this pyramid-building project must have been carried out by multiple generations over a span of 1,700 years, and possibly longer, a fact now acknowledged by archaeologists. Yet modern scholarship knows next to nothing about the original architects or why they chose to build a pyramid here. Precisely the mysteries that most interest me.

Do you get the sense that something may be missing from the archaeological and historical story of ancient Mexico?

Geoffrey: Well, not to be overly dramatic, but I think that a better understanding of Cholula would fundamentally change the perception of Mesoamerican history.

It is a black hole.

It is a black hole in Mexican history.

Do you think there was something here before that first pyramid was built?

The pyramid was built over an important spring.

Graham: Yeah.

The spring represents a passageway into the underworld...

Mmm.

...so it was clearly an important sacred space as well as a ceremonial focus.

The fact that the pyramid was the structure that was chosen to be built upon that site is not accidental.

On the contrary, I believe it's a critical clue to understanding the motivations of the original builders, because that repeats a theme that we find all around the world.

We've already uncovered evidence of a similar terraced pyramid in Indonesia at Gunung Padang that also has a sacred spring at its heart. It's a pattern found not just in Mexico or Indonesia.

That's the case with the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In my view, that is the first sacred place on the Giza plateau, and the pyramids are later built on top of it to honor it.

The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán sits on top of a natural cavern.

They modified it somewhat and then, they built a pyramid on top of it.

But the first thing was the place itself, the sacred place, and the pyramids mark this.

You start off with a place that for one reason or another is regarded as sacred, that had a special magnetism that people could sense that made it important and that made it matter.

The Great [[Pyramid of Cholula]] shares another key feature with ancient pyramids all around the world. Hints of hidden chambers. Not long after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a reliable eyewitness, Father Bernardino de Sahagún, reported that the Great Pyramid of Cholula was full of mines and caves within. Today, modern investigators have confirmed that observation.

One of the former archaeologists found, somewhere inside the pyramid, an open room.

And there were tunnels leading into it.

It's never been published.

I don't know what the current situation is.

That's a very tantalizing hint.

You think so?

Has that room ever been excavated? Has it ever been revisited?

Not that I know of.

Graham: Why hasn't this inner chamber ever been revisited? What secrets could it hold about the intentions of the original builders? Regardless, the fact that the Great Pyramid of Cholula has a hidden inner chamber at all, like its cousins in Gunung Padang and Giza, is yet another striking feature shared by these structures. And there's more.

So it's pretty well established that the structure is oriented to the setting sun on the summer solstice.

That's correct.

The sun is setting between the two volcanoes to the west, so it's very much a solstice-related orientation.

We know that the indigenous Mesoamericans were very clued into astronomical cycles.

Graham: As were the ancient Egyptians, who built their Great Pyramid of Giza to align precisely to true astronomical north. The fact that these ancient pyramids, whose builders supposedly had no contact with one another, have so much in common is a mystery. Is it just coincidence? I don't think so.

The general view that archaeology puts forward, is that pyramids were built in the form that they have 'cause that's the easiest way to make a high building.

The problem is that these structures are universally associated with very specific spiritual ideas.

What happens to us after death?

This is always connected with pyramid structures, and that's the case whether you find them in Mexico or whether you find them in ancient Egypt or whether you find them in Cambodia or whether you find them in India.

It's a detail that defies the accepted mainstream view that various human civilizations around the world, independently invented pyramids. What it suggests to me is that something else was going on behind the scenes.

Could we be witnessing the unfolding of some extraordinary master plan?

A shared legacy from a lost global civilization that provided the seeds and the spark of inspiration from which many later civilizations grew.

It's a possibility that leads me to ask whether the pyramid-building project at Cholula could have much older origins than most archaeologists want to believe. What about the dating of the structure?

Are there carbon dates from the earliest phases?

No. We've had ceramics that are similar to ceramics from the basin of Mexico dating to, like, 1000 BC.

Does that give us enough to be confident about the whole story?

No. No, I would say absolutely not.

And there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done throughout the prehistory of Mexico.

Yeah.

I'm not disputing the archaeological evidence that dates the first monumental construction on the site of the Great Pyramid of Cholula to around 2,300 years ago, but there are older pyramids in Mexico.

And what really interests me are the ideas that underpin them all.

By 1519, when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, Cholula's Great Pyramid had fallen into disrepair. But when they realized it was much more than just a hill, and asked who built it, the locals regaled them with a fascinating legend.

According to myth, the Great Pyramid of Cholula was the work of a race of giants.

Once upon a time, there were giants in ancient Mexico, until the rain god Tlaloc grew angry and sent a great flood to destroy them. Only seven survived the cataclysm. Fearing that a second deluge might follow, the giant Xelhua, known as the architect, went to Cholula, and with the help of its people built a massive artificial mountain out of bricks, a pyramid, and dedicated it to the worship of Tlaloc, the rain god.

Archaeologists regard this as just a fanciful tale, but I think that by ignoring it completely, we're in danger of missing some important clues to the origins of this incredible place.

Perhaps that architect who appeared in Cholula after a great flood, wasn't a physical giant, but one of the intellectual giants of an advanced civilization lost to history. We shouldn't expect the evidence to be easy to find, precisely because, as at Cholula, ancient monuments are often located directly on top of still older constructions, obscuring their origins. About a two-hour drive to the northwest, another remarkable site offers me my next clue. Perched atop this uniquely-shaped hill is an ancient Aztec complex known as Texcotzingo.

Here at Texcotzingo, we encounter a pyramid again, this time a creation of the Earth herself.

It's easy to understand why this place could have exerted a powerful magnetism on the ancients.

Pyramids clearly mattered in ancient Mexico.

Here, in the 15th century, the Aztecs built a remarkable network of garden terraces and pools fed by cleverly constructed aqueducts that carried water down from a reservoir at the mountain's top. It's like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Mesoamerican style. But intriguingly, from my investigations, all of it was dedicated to the same ancient god associated with the earliest pyramid at Cholula... Tlaloc, the god of rains and floods, whose cult long predated the Aztecs.

Archaeologists believe that the Aztecs were the first to pay attention to Texcotzingo, but could this incredible site be much older?

The Spanish conquistadors took it for granted that Texcotzingo was entirely the work of the Aztecs, and that is what most archaeologists will tell you too. But what if the [[Aztecs]] simply renovated and added to a site originally created by a much older civilization? Author Marco Vigato believes the evidence suggests that's exactly what happened.

This site was clearly reworked over a very long period of time.

The rock was a very hard type of porphyry stone.

If you look around at the site here, you see that some of the stone surfaces are very heavily weathered.

Some parts of the site that clearly show evidence of erosion must have continued for thousands of years, taking into account this is an extremely hard type of stone.

Graham: Right. So in your view, the Aztecs, well, we know they were latecomers, but they found this site at least partially worked already and they took it over and developed it further.

Right.

Graham: It's a radical thought. Could a much older culture have carved out some of the more unusual features on the side of the hill? Like these deeply-weathered megaliths strewn on the ground. And this chamber carved out of the bedrock.

This was almost certainly a pre-Aztec site.

Mmm-hmm.

It was simply reoccupied and reused.

Graham: It's a conclusion archaeologists would dispute, but there's some relevant evidence to consider. Not far away, in a dried-up riverbed at the foot of a mountain, a huge statue of the rain god Tlaloc was uncovered. The largest single cut stone in the entire Americas. Archaeologists have dated it to around 700 AD, long before the Aztecs dominated these lands. It's proof that Tlaloc, the rain god, had already been worshipped in this area by earlier cultures, perhaps under several different names, for nearly a thousand years, and maybe longer. In fact, Tlaloc, as a mythological character, goes back all the way to the earliest known cultures of prehistoric Mexico. And he's not alone.

The global floods sent by the rain god sets the stage for the appearance of the most intriguing character in Mexican mythology...

Quetzalcoatl.

After the Great Flood, a stranger from the east landed on Mexico's shores riding on a boat with no paddles, said to be carried by serpents. His name was Quetzalcoatl, meaning, "the feathered serpent." He and his followers taught the locals how to grow crops and domesticate animals. He gave them laws and instructed them in the ways of architecture, astronomy and the arts. They worshipped him as a deity. But after being violently ousted by the followers of a Mexican war god, Quetzalcoatl sailed away towards the east, promising one day to return.

( drums beating )

( native music playing )

The legend of Quetzalcoatl has been told for generations, even down to today.

( man singing in Nahuatl language )

We get a description of a heavily bearded individual.

He sounds a bit like a foreigner from across the ocean, and he brings the gifts of civilization.

( man continues singing )

Graham: What I find so astonishing is how often we've heard this story from cultures that supposedly had no connection with ancient Mexico.

( blowing conch shell )

The setting is always the same. There has been a giant cataclysm.

The world has been plunged into darkness, floods, chaos everywhere.

Society is collapsing.

( thunder rumbling )

And then out of the darkness appears a figure who has knowledge of what is necessary to make a civilization.

And that figure teaches the demoralized survivors of the cataclysm how to start civilization again.

In ancient Greek mythology, it's the Titan Prometheus who, after a great flood, shares with humans the secret of fire. In the South American Andes, pre-Inca civilizations describe a robed, bearded figure named Viracocha, who emerged from a great lake and taught the local people how to create amazing works of masonry that still exist today. Even in the Pacific, Polynesian legends talk of Maui, who created their islands by pulling them up from the ocean floor, and then taught the islanders to work with stone tools and to cook their food.

Archaeologists say that these civilizing heroes are just inventions of the ancients' elaborate fictions, but I find the similarities hard to ignore.

What if these accounts describe the survivors of an advanced civilization that was lost in the great cataclysms of flood and fire that we know occurred near the end of the last Ice Age?

The myths of Mexico and the story of Quetzalcoatl in particular, are tied to just such an apocalyptic moment. And Marco believes there's a record of it just a few hours' drive south of Mexico City, amongst the ancient temples of Xochicalco. Like Cholula, this city was originally built by an indigenous culture we know little about in the 7th century AD. Here, you'll find the remains of two large pyramids. One dedicated to the rain god, and the other dedicated to Mexico's civilizing hero, Quetzalcoatl. I've come here to learn more about these so-called mythical characters.

For archaeologists, myths are fanciful and fragmentary.

They ignore them completely in their attempts to reconstruct the past.

But here at Xochicalco, some researchers see an attempt to create a permanent record of one of the most important myths in ancient Mexico.

A record they believe that preserves a forgotten episode in prehistory.

Wrapped around the four sides of Quetzalcoatl's temple are intricate carvings of this deity in his manifestation as the feathered serpent. Clearly, he was an important figure even back in 700 AD. But Marco believes these glyphs carved in stone may reveal missing details from his origin story.

What's special about this temple?

So what you have on the lower tier of the pyramid is really a representation of the arrival of Quetzalcoatl that unfolds on the three sides...

Yeah.

...of the pyramid until we get here to the first significant glyph, here.

And what you see there is a flaming temple.

You have these scrolls of smoke or fire.

Graham: As though it's on fire.

Right. Exactly.

What about the coils of the serpent around it?

How do you read those in this context?

Marco: Right, well, this is the tail of the serpent.

Yeah.

So, it wraps around this flaming temple.

It almost looks like a wave hitting...

Okay.

...the temple from the side.

You could almost see that as a representation of an island.

So, we have a temple which is on fire and waves are washing over it in your reading?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Give me your interpretation of this scene, Marco.

Marco: Well, you have this clearly powerful sitting figure who looks like on a raft of snakes that's almost heading away from the direction of this flaming temple.

Graham: What you're seeing here is the depiction of a cataclysm which occurs in a certain place, which Quetzalcoatl then is a survivor of.

You have this idea of the god coming from a land that was destroyed.

And what you have is the arrival of the god Quetzalcoatl here in Mexico as a founder of Mesoamerican civilization.

It's a chronicle that goes back to a very remote past.

Graham: Marco's reading of the temple's glyphs as a depiction of an ancient apocalypse flies in the face of all archaeological opinion. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong.

The Temple of The Feathered Serpent is about 1,300 years old, and archaeologists are right to say that there was no global cataclysm in that epoch that could have inspired the Quetzalcoatl myth.

This misses the point.

The tradition is certainly much older than the temple.

How much older? No one knows.

But there's one period of prehistory that fits the bill perfectly.

Geologists have confirmed that there was an ancient apocalypse of some kind. A period of great cataclysms and floods that had as big an impact here as it did nearly everywhere else in the world... sometime at the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,800 years ago. Could the story of Quetzalcoatl's arrival date back as far as that?

I do not question the age of the structure itself.

What you have here is just the telling of a story that is in fact much older.

So, perhaps what's sadly lacking in archaeology is an archaeology of ideas.

Perhaps they focus too much on the dates of a particular construction and don't consider the ideas that it's expressing.

Marco: Right.

Graham: If we're willing to look back beyond the artificial horizons that archeology sets, then the myth at once begins to make sense, not as a fanciful account of imagined events, but as a true record of a lost and forgotten past.

Archaeologists reject any such suggestion, but I find it impossible to ignore how widespread these tales of civilizing heroes are.

Sometimes speaking of gods, sometimes of humans, who come in a time of chaos after the great cataclysm.

Teaching the skills of agriculture, architecture, engineering and astronomy to the survivors.

In these traditions, I believe the fingerprints of a lost civilization are to be found.

So, where was this lost civilization based before the cataclysm that destroyed it? There are many possibilities that have never been properly considered. Because, as we've seen, at the height of the last Ice Age, the planet looked very different. But further clues await us a quarter of the way around the world. There, just as in Cholula, dozens of immense temples were believed to have been built by an ancient race of giants, on islands that once weren't islands, in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. And that's where my journey takes me next, to a gigantic riddle in stone. The mysterious megaliths of Malta.