Do We Know What We Think We Know About ... - TheUFOStore.com

ATLANTIS CONNECTION
Continued from Page 43
ocean to transform into the first human.
Both the Haida and Sumerians have had a
long love affair with the sea. The Sumerians’ vocabulary
contains hundreds of nautical terms.
They also share with the Haida unique stories
about amphibious god ancestors with tails. The
god Oannes was half man, half fish. During the
day Oannes taught the Sumerians how to write
and many of the other arts of civilization before
returning to the sea as night fell.
Rand was further intrigued when Gwaai volunteered
that there is a genetic trait uniquely
prevalent among the Haida that results in a
high incidence of ankylosing spondylitis, a form
of inflammatory arthritis; intrigued, because he
knew that the disease is rare and that Egypt’s
powerful pharaoh, Ramses the Great, also suffered
from AS; a painful and potentially debilitating
condition that attacks the skeleton, particularly
the neck, pelvis, and spinal column.
Medical scientists, seeking an answer to the
mystery of the prevalence of the condition in
this remote northwest corner of Canada, had
tested the Haida by taking hair samples for
DNA analysis. (The Haida Nation eventually
stopped the undertaking when it was learned
that the scientists had introduced an undeclared
anthropological agenda into their tests. They
discovered that the Haida blood samples were
to be DNA compared with other tribes for different
research purposes. The Haida felt tricked
and withdrew their cooperation.)
The severity of AS’s symptoms reminded us
of Robert Brinchurst’s description of Skaay, the
blind Haida myth teller who was “an old man
with a crippled back and a beautiful mind”
from A Story as Sharp as a Knife: the Classical
Haida Mythtellers and Their World. It seems likely
that the blind poet also suffered from AS.
Ninety-three percent of people with ankylosing
spondylitis carry the antigen HLA-B27,
including half of the Haida—among the highest
percentage in the world. Significantly, thirty-six
percent of the Navajo (also known as the
Dine)—the largest tribe of First Nations in
North America—are also burdened with the antigen.
As we’ve seen, the Haida and Dine are
usually grouped together linguistically into the
“Na-Dene” language group.
What are the chances that these two North
American peoples would share a rare medical
condition with a powerful dynasty from halfway
around the world?
“Among the pharaohs of the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth dynasty of Old Egypt, at least
three had ankylosing spondylitis: Amenhotep
(Amenophis) II, Ramses II (‘The Great’) and his
son Merenptah.” Egypt’s geographic proximity
to the Sumerians, whose language and myth
match so well with the distant Haida, suggests a
70 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 95
Now officially Haida Gwaii, these were formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands.
painful physical link between the three cultures.
Both Egyptian and Sumerian civilization were
largely dependent upon the same crops: wheat
and barley. These critical founding crops came
to Egypt via Sumer and helped launch the powerhouse
that became Egyptian civilization.
Ramses the Great, (Ramses II) one of the
most famous of all the pharaohs, is often featured
in the story of Moses and the Exodus.
He suffered from AS and was so badly crippled
that, gruesomely, before his corpse could be
lowered into the sarcophagus, the mummifiers
were forced to break his neck so that his body
would lie flat.
Merenptah was Ramses the Great’s thirteenth
son. Like his father, his remains exhibit
all the unique hallmarks of ankylosing spondylitis.
That father and son should bend beneath
the same affliction is not unusual since AS is
assumed to be primarily genetic. What is curious
is the fact that a third mummy, that of
Amenhotep II, also exhibits signs of AS, even
though he was not a direct ancestor of either
Ramses the Great or his son, Merenptah.
Since Ramses the Great’s father had ascended
the throne through a military coup—not
through inheritance—AS must have entered separate
Egyptian dynasties through divergent
bloodlines. As Gwaai pointed out, for three
pharaohs to have developed full-blown AS, its
prevalence must have been high within the
royal family of the New Kingdom of Egypt.
Gwaai’s idea made sense. What didn’t make
sense was the fact that counter intuitively,
Egypt’s closest neighbors, the Ethiopians to the
south and the Berbers to the west exhibit extremely
low rates of HLA-B27. Although another
potential contamination route, the Mediterranean
Sea, lies to the north there was no
successful sea invasion of Egypt by which the
affliction could have been introduced until the
Roman period.
So how did the HLA-B27 antigen arrive in
ancient Egypt? The answer, it seems, might be
found in the bloodlines of the foreign pharaohs
who ruled immediately before the eighteenth
and nineteenth dynasties.
For centuries no intruder dared invade
Egypt. The Egyptians grew smug in their security
and independence. This blind spot offered
a clear opportunity for imaginative invaders
wielding a revolutionary new weapon. So
it was that the Hyksos descended from the east
in horse-drawn chariots that moved so swiftly
that the Egyptians had no time to marshal a defence.
The Hyksos, according to the ancient
Egyptian historian, Manetho, came from the
Persian Gulf, the homeland of the Sumerians.
With their grand victory they brought the seeds
of ankylosing spondylitis. The damage the disease
ultimately inflicted on the Egyptian royal
families and the curious trail it followed to 150
isolated islands on the other side of the world
would only be revealed many ages later by a
late nineteenth century device, the X-ray, when
its uncompromising eye revealed the pharaohs’
crippled skeletons.
Bryan Stykes, author of The Seven Daughters
of Eve has developed a technique by which
DNA can be extracted from ancient bones.
This new science could prove the radical theory
of an ancient link between the Haida and the
Sumerians. The discovery of such a link would
open the door to the idea that these people,
who are today separated by such a great distance
but remain connected by a rich mutual
legacy of myth and language could have shared
a common motherland—a lost island paradise—
an Atlantis. The possibility is as haunting as the
mist that drifts across the water and around the
totems of Haida Gwaii, obscuring the ancient
legends inscribed there.
The above has been adapted by the authors from
their original research for their recently published book
Atlantis Beneath the Ice.
Subscribe or Order Books, DVDs and Much More!