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THE RHODES CALCULATOR 97
ground under and around the pyramids near Cairo we will probably
find it. We know that, as a rule, all the other pyramids
stand on top of underground systems of passages and temples,
sometimes whole subterranean villages, and it would be very
surprising if the Great Pyramid of Cheops didn't follow the rule.
We are bound to find those hidden chambers some day, and
once we find them, we will have evidence that it was astronauts
from space who elevated us to our present pedestal.
Most of the ancient civilizations used the Sothic year to calculate
the ages of mankind and of the world in fantastically high
numbers. The Hindus estimated man was 4.32 million years old
and the earth 4.32 billion. The Mayas arrived at far greater numbers.
But the Sothic year is the basis of all great cycles known by
either Mayas, Hindus, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, or others
that we know of. Aside from the cyclic relationships that were
built in the Rhodes calculator, the Egyptians also used others, all
based on Sothis-Sirius, who for them was the "good God who
makes all things green grow." One of these regular repetitions
came every 1,460 Sothic years, or 1,461 civil years of 365 days
each. Then both these years coincided with each other on July
19, the day when the Nile starts to rise, as the Egyptians
believed, by the command of the Sothis, the Dog Star. These
long Sothic cycles were documented by Egyptian astronomers as
having occurred on July 19 in the years 1320 B.C., 2780 B.C., 4240
B.C. and 5700 B.C. The Sothic cycles are bringing us far in the
past indeed.
The Rhodes calculator and the recently so popular Piri Reis
maps that show the ancients knew the Antarctic continent are
both copies of much older originals. And since neither bronze
nor parchment are very durable materials, the survival as well as
the rediscovery of these items do make one wonder if there
wasn't some of what I describe as benevolent intervention of the
This astronomical calculator, discovered in 1900 at the bottom of the
Aegean Sea west of Crete and probably built more than 2,000 years
ago, was based on a long-forgotten Egyptian cycle of 27,759 days, or
76 Sothic years of 3651/4 days each. By means of gear trains, this
cycle was divided into eighteen difiFerent astronomical cycles. The cycles
indicated here are the most accurate that could be obtained with
a minimum of gear trains.