This week we welcome back Professor Robert Temple and discuss a book he wrote on
ancient lenses that I had found to be spectacular. We don't have a record
of lenses, but he was able to find over four hundred examples of ancient
lenses that were used for optics, for reflecting the sun, and for telescopic
viewing of our neighboring planets. This is unknown to archaeological science and was rejected
by Egyptologists when it was first announced over twenty three years ago. All this
and more today on Earth Ancients, or Saturday, December ninth, twenty twenty
three. This is Earth Ancients. I'm your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey,
there they are. How are you come on in and have a seat.
I hope you're doing well today. I discovered, really I discovered Robert
Temple. A few years ago we had him on to discuss the serious mystery.
Prior to that, he came on and wrote a book about plasma call
the New Science of Heaven. And he is a fascinating guy. And I
discovered that he has written a number of books on his interests. His focus
on anomalies, which, as you know, that's a lot of my interests
as well. But this book we're talking about today and the interview subsequent interview
with Robert is on a book called The Crystal Sun, rediscovering a lost technology
of the ancient world. And Robert and I are like minded, and his
thinking is similar to Hancocks and a lot of other people we have on the
show. And one of the narratives that you'll discover today is the fact that
our history is written by a group of people who have been trained in a
way to observe and to compare. And this is what are anthropology archaeology is
all about. They compare what they know, and anything that is questioning that
knowledge is rejected. And what is fascinating about our talk today is the discovery
of lenses. These are lenses for eyeglasses, These are lenses for telescopes.
And I have been trying for years to connect and find evidence for telescopic viewing
of the heavens with lenses. And I'm talking about the Maya, of course,
And for years I've been traveling down to Mexico and taking people down to
see the various sites, and always when I'm down there, I'm trying to
get bits and pieces of data that confirm my hypothesis that the Maya had lenses.
Well, in this book today The Crystal Sun, you'll discover and hear
Robert describing his discovery of over four hundred and fifty different lenses from antiquity,
the oldest being almost six thousand years old, which is found in Egypt.
And you will never ever hear an Egyptologist or an archaeologist describe these because it's
not in their education. It's not allowed in the university setting. And this
is a phenomenon that we've crossed over multiple times. If you are a funded
archaeologist, and when I say funded, that means money from universities or private
institutions, you have to follow their guidelines for what is acceptable and what is
not acceptable. And according to Robert, the discussion of ancient eyeglasses telescopic lenses
is off. The is not a discussed phenomenon. In fact, it's summarily
rejected. Now, how can that be. Someone were to discover a machine
that cut granite in some cavern in Egypt, would that be widely accepted.
It looks like it probably would not be because it would change our understanding of
the historical notions of the ancient Egyptians, and this is what we are running
into now with more and more archaeologist and university funded search. If it does
not follow within a certain narrative, it's not validated and summarily rejected. This
is scary. This is scary because we have to wonder what is being covered
up, what is being rejected because it doesn't fit a paradigm, it doesn't
fit a narrative of ancient people. If we found a handheld computer in meso
America, would that be covered up? Would it be rejected? Robert Temple
tells me that when he was researching the OMEC, he discovered that they had
an understanding of magnetism that is off the charts. They understood magnetic stone,
magnetic rock, and they used it in a way we don't understand. When
he brought this up to the field archaeologists that were around Leaventa and San Lorenzo,
which is another OMEC site, they rejected his consideration of this possibility of
an ancient meso American culture understanding magnetism. It doesn't compute to them. And
again, this is scary. If you are closed off to new discoveries,
to new possibilities, then we're screwed. How the hell can we conceive of
a peep of a scientist rejecting a discovery that disputes his education. Well,
that's what's going on. If it doesn't fall within their education, they do
not allow it to exist. And Robert mentions in his book Discussions with Archaeologists,
by the way, the Crystal Sun was written twenty in the year two
thousand, that's twenty three years ago. And the other thing that's really sad
is when he would ask various field archaeologists about his discoveries, they would say
that that's impossible, that they head lenses. So this is scary. This
is really scary. It's making me wonder if we have a suppressed history,
suppressed in the fact that our ancestors had sophisticated tools, had sophisticated lenses,
had sophisticated devices that cut granted, had the ability to see the heavens with
telescopic lenses that were very very sophisticated, that had convex and concave cut crystal
lenses that could zero in on the planet Mars, Venus, Saturn, in
those other planetary bodies that are our cosmos. Why would you reject it?
Well, because it's not part of the education that these anthropologists, archaeologists and
Egyptologists have taken. They've gotten their PhDs according to a certain book. Is
is that education so restrictive that you can't have an open mind? Well,
I think what it is is it's kind of a collective. The universities are
funding digs and if you follow the line of thinking about a certain people,
certain ancient culture, you're in good shape. If you go outside the box
and begin questioning them, questioning their science and bringing in new discoveries that do
not fall within the parameters of the known culture, then it's a problem.
Then we're not going to give you funding. Then we're not going to grant
you a PhD. This is what we're dealing with right now. And this
is why I'm writing this book on the Maya because can you believe that in
the history of the Mayan culture, in the decipherment of their life language,
which we only have about seventy five eighty percent of it the ciphered, we
did not consult reference or acts, which's the same as consult any of the
daykeepers, any of the elders, any of the shaman who were around the
century tell us about your ancestors. Our understanding of the Maya is based on
university research without the consulting of the people who live in the millions around these
ancient sites. That is criminal in many many ways. And what I've discovered
is not only the language is very very myopic, very centrally focused on European
research. A lot of the other discoveries are focused on comparative studies. In
other words, who else built their roads like that? Well, the Romans
built very very sophisticated roads, but they're not like the Maya roads. The
Mayan roads were built to last for hundreds of years. In fact, the
engineer, the forensic engineer, Jim o'conn wrote a whole section in his book
on Maya Science on the sophistication and the brilliance of not only the building construction,
but the sockbes, the white roads that the Maya built in the hundreds
of miles. And that brings up another point mayanists archaeology that studies Maya people
do not believe they had the will, and yet throughout the museums in Mexico
and Guatemala you can find toys that have wheels, Mayan toys that have wheels
attached to them. You also find little wheelbarrows, You find little wagons and
things that have wheels on them that are attributed to Maya people. They didn't
have the wheel, and yet they built highways that run for hundreds and hundreds
of miles. It's because we only have excavated one percent of the Mayan culture,
and yet we automatically discount the possibilities they could have engineered the wheel.
So this is why we have Earth ancients. This is why we questioned history,
and we questioned those who are the historians of these ancient cultures, and
why I love interviewing anomalists like myself who are questioning the doctrines that have been
handed down about ancient people. So are Today continues our end of the year
series, The best of the Best. Today's program is Lost Technology of the
Ancient World, and my guest today is Robert Temple God. I've been running
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love it. We have Robert Temple with us again this week, and if
you remember, we had him recently to discuss a groundbreaking book, The Serious
Mystery, and then initially we had him talking about a new science of heaven
which has to do with plasma, which was my introduction to Robert's work.
But I gotta tell you, Robert is really the ultimate anomalist, and he
is somebody who I believe has an eye for history that is just very,
very unique. And I discovered a book that he wrote in two thousand called
The Crystal Sun, Rediscovering a Lost Technology of the Ancient World. And I
got to tell you, as somebody who's writing about ancient cultures, the Maya
specifically, this book knocked me off my feet and I had to have Robert
back, and I wasn't sure if he would remember because it was twenty three
years ago he wrote this book. I thought to myself, I might get
an email from Robert thinking or saying, Cliff, you know what, that
book's too long ago. I just don't remember it. I can't interview with
you. But thankfully Robert is lucid enough on this to provide a detail.
So Robert, welcome back to Earth. Ancients. It's great to have you.
Thank you, Cliff, very good to be back. And I enjoy
talking to you because you've got a great sense of humor and a deep source
of knowledge. Thank you, I appreciate it. I want to go as
far back as we can on this first of all the books over five hundred
pages, which means that you may have initially made a discovery and then it
just cada kind of cascaded. Is that how it started? Where you someone
recommended something to you, or you discovered something at the British Museum, and
then it just cascaded into on and on and on and on. Well,
I tell at the near the beginning of the book, or at the beginning
of the book, I tell the story of how this all began, because
it became a thirty year search and it started over lunch. Now. Ever,
since nineteen sixty six when I first met him, until his death,
I was a great friend of Arthur C. Clarke and the man who wrote
two thousand and one. In fact, I watched two thousand and one being
made for a couple of years and got to know Stanley and so on,
and that's how I met Arthur in sixty six. And so in fact he
wrote the introduction too. I noticed that, Yeah, he introduces the book.
Yeah, but he's the one responsible for starting it all off in the
first place, because he asked me to lunch one day in London in a
little Italian restaurant that he liked, along with a friend of his whom I
hadn't met before, who was the Avalon Professor of the History of Science at
Yale University, and his name was Derek Price. Derek was a very interesting
and fun guy, very open minded and very brilliant. So there we were,
the three of us, and what did we talk about? Anomalies because
we all love anomalies and oddities and anything it's a bit weird, and trying
to figure out what it might mean. So Derek had come to London to
do some research, and because he was based in New Haven, Connecticut,
of course, and so I said, well, what are you researching?
You said, well, I hope that among the other things I'm doing,
that I have time to go back to the British Museum and look at the
ancient lens again. I said the what did you say, ancient lens?
Yes, yes, there's a there's an Assyrian lens in the British Museum that
was excavated in the nineteenth century by the famous excavator of Nimroud Layard. That's
l A. Y Ar d anyone who knows about the archaeology of that area
will know Layard's name. And he found this object in the throne room of
Kings Are Gone the second and along with all sorts of treasure and whatever.
And so Derek said that it was a lens made of rock crystal. I
said, but I didn't know there were any ancient lenses. He said,
oh, yes, yes, well there's this one. And that's why I
want to learn more about it, because they've got to try to figure it
out. Now. I need to point out that Derek was the man who
personally discovered the Antikythera mechanism. Oh my god. Really, he was in
the Athens Museum one day studying all sorts of strange things and there was this
metallic ball I don't know the exact size, and it is all sort of
damaged by seawater. It had been discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of
the island called Anti Kythra, which is the island which is opposite to Kithra,
hence the Anti Kythera they call it. And there was this ancient sea
wreck from I think the first century BC, and they found this thing,
and he was trying to figure out what it was. It was a bit
clunky, and it slipped out of his hands and fell onto the hard floor
and it cracked open. Not the sort of guy you normally wanted the museum,
but this thing cracked open and he saw, good God, I see
metallic gear wheels inside this, this coruscated rusty metallic ball. It's a machine.
And so he wrote the first book about that wowk, which is now
very famous because everybody's writing about it and talking about it over the decades since
he did that, which was back in the sixties, And in fact,
it was in the late sixties that I met him and he told me all
this. It was all fresh information. And I don't know if he'd even
published his book yet. So he was always doing that kind of thing and
not breaking everything everything, And so I said, but Derek, tell me
more about this, this lens. This, I would like to know more
about this, because after all, I was at that point I was living
in London. I now go back and forth between London and the countryside.
But he told me it was in the etherology department, et cetera. And
so I went looking for it later, and it's called the Layard Lens.
It's had many other names. And to cut a long story short, because
this went on and on. I've given a history of the different information cards
put in front of it when it was on display. Then when it started
attracting too much attention, the British museum authorities got nervous and they removed it
from display and put it back in the basement so nobody could see it,
and maybe everybody forget about it because they were getting too many inquiries saying,
what's this. Maybe it's a spaceman because Eric Fandanakin had become interested, not
that he knew anything about it, but he did publish a photo of it
in Chariots of the Gods without actually any explanation, because you know, he
was collecting stuff like that to put in his book. Yeah, and so
everybody wanted to know about this. You know, was it brought to earth
buying flying saucer and that kind of thing. Well, it certainly wasn't,
but it was made on earth. It might as well have come from a
flying saucer, because it's the most amazing object in the whole first chapter of
my book. And here's the book, right the crystal sun, very thick,
five hundred and thirty eight pages. Now it has eleven appendices, ten
of which were removed from the paperback. But he wants the whole thing with
all the real information. Get the hard back, not the paperback, if
you can. So. I I finally managed to study this lens and I
photographed it. It. It was definitely a lens for aiding a vision,
and I photographed it. I'm looking for the correct picture now, Oh,
I have to go to the black and white photos. There. Can you
see? Yeah, in the ocular cavity as it's called, in front of
some guy's eye. It's a remarkable piece of car of cutting too, isn't
it. Yeah? I took that picture, and so I learned how to
measure lenses. I became an associate of the College of Optometrists. I can
use a spherometer and I measure with my millimeter. I went to work on
this. You you totally took it in. I wrote the most definitive report
on it. I had my eye eye magnifire, and I was studying the
scratching patterns on the surface, and I was computing the diopters and doing the
whole thing. In other words, I became basically an opthalmologist for a while,
and so call me an optician, and so I hope the optics of
this are okay. So what we discovered was that it had been grown ground.
This is raw crystal. There had been a perfect lens at one point.
It has flaws in it now which were caused by the pressure of having
been buried for thousands of years with things on top. But when it when
it was cut and ground, it was a perfect piece of crystal with no
ghostly claws and totally transparent. It still is transparent mostly, And it was
a ground toruidally rather than in the normal fashion. And to accommodate a case
of individual astigmatism. Wow. Now astigmatism means that you have very irregular and
uneven focused and this lens is such that you could go out in the street
and if you found enough people with a stigmatism, you would eventually find someone
whose particular patternment of astigmatism perfectly matched this lens. Now, the amount of
trial and error to be able to learn how to do that, and this
is the eighth century b C. We're talking about. It was such an
amazing feat that it had to have been done for a powerful potentate a king
in other words, and because it was left in Sargon's throne room, but
he moved to another location and left that behind, we believe that it belonged
to one of the kings he conquered, and he took the booty, because
there's a lot of booty in the throne room, and so it could even
have been an early king of Israel whom he conquered. Whose lens it was,
but whoever was using that lens had to be very powerful because it would
have taken months to grind this thing, and they would have had to do
many dummies to correct for the astigmatism by trial and error, over and over
and over many many versions before they got it perfect. And it's a fantastic
technological feat. So this was the lens that Derek Price told me about.
He didn't know any of this, He only knew that it looked like it
might be a lens. So I did this study and I wrote the whole
history of everything that everybody had ever said about it since it's discovered by Layard.
So that was the That was a paper that eventually became the Crystal Sun.
Is that what your suggesting? No, I was already writing a book,
but it's okay, chapter one, chapter one, okay. So it
starts out by saying how I did, how I came into this, that
it was Arthur and Derek who got me started. Then I went all the
trouble I had getting access to the lens, and about how the museum tried
to hide it. They kept changing the description, they would never admit that
it was a lens. And if you had asked any archaeologist then, and
it's probably the case still today, were there lenses magnifying lenses in antiquity?
They say, oh, of course, not no, And then they start
gabbling on about Galileo and his telescope and and so what I did was I
I thought, I'm going to look and see if they're other lenses. And
I went to museums all over many countries, and I had to stop when
I got to the point where I had discovered more than four hundred and fifty
of them. Amazing, just amazing, They're everywhere. There were forty eight
crystal lenses excavated by Schliemann at Troy alone, a huge number from Carthage.
There are Egyptians ones, there are Greek ones. In fact, I even
own a sixth century BC Greek one. Is it possible that the layered lens
was older than say three thousand years old? See? I mean, what
would you say, is the oldest lens that you have recovered or is historically
described, because we're going to get into that in a minute about descriptions of
optics. Well, the oldest lenses that I found as lenses that you can
still see and still work are the Fifth Dynasty Egypt. Now we know that
they had to have them in the Fourth dynasty as well, and indeed I
present proof in the book that they had them at least by three thousand,
three hundred BC as magnifiers to engrave miniature carvings on pieces of ornamental ivory which
were excavated by Gunta Dreyer at Abydos also known as Abydos, in a predynastic
Egyptian grave. So we have proof that magnifying lenses existed at least by three
thousand, three hundred BC, which is five three hundred years ago. Yeah,
five thousand, three hundred years ago. So what would you say.
I mean, we're going to get into burning lenses and telescopes here in a
second. But is it your automatic conclusion or that of we don't know why
archaeologists are not accepting this because it's in their face, but that they had
uh physicians in antiquity who were specialists in carving lenses for people that had myopic
conditions or others like you say, stigmatisms. Well, yes, speaking of
myopia. Whereas most ancient lenses that survive are convex, which of course are
from longside pres biopia, myopia or short sightedness has to be corrected by a
concave lens, and there was an industry of producing concave lenses on the coast
of what's now Turkey and on certain islands off the coast of Greece, and
so there are a number of crystal concave lenses magnified which caused the image to
become smaller instead of larger. We also have a type of lens which is
convex on one side and curves inwards. That's called a concave on the other
side. So it's like that, that's called a meniscus lens. And the
surviving eye of the bull's head righton drinking vessel of the Minoans has a perfectly
carved meniscous lens. So they had convex ones with flat bottoms. That's called
plano convex. They had convex on both sides, that's called byconvex. Then
they had concave, and then they had the meniscus. And you can have
a concave with a flat bottom as well. And so these are the types
of lenses. They do different things. And if you want to use them
to start a fire with the sun's rays, that needs to be come VECs.
And they knew all about these different types of lenses. Now that's not
to say that they had textbooks like we have today on optics, that any
of this was necessarily written down. The craftsmen were specialists who had spent their
whole lives grinding crystal, and by the time the Romans came along, they
were mass producing lenses of glass. In fact, there was one lens excavated
in the city of London of Roman day which I've inspected. It's in the
Cooming Museum and it's known as the Cooming Lens, which was not even carved
out of glass, it was in fact pressed. They were mass producing these
lenses by pouring glass into molds. Wow. And they also they had all
kinds. The Romans had unbelievably fancy things, so they would have a oz
and then they might have a part of it that would magnify what was in
the oaz and the rest wouldn't. And with glass trickery. A lot of
these things are preserved in the museums in Germany from Roman Gaul and also the
Vikings. And this is much later in date, this is only a thousand
years ago. They had a huge lens producing industry in Sweden and on the
island of Gotland, which is Swedish, and I've been there and I spent
weeks there studying gigantic numbers of Viking lenses, and the people on the island
of Gotland had this big collection of them that were so thrilled because nobody had
ever studied them and measured them before. And they actually translated my report on
them into Swedish and published it in a Swedish archaeological journal. And I can
say that the only archaeologists in the world regionally speaking who welcomed my research with
open arms were all the Scandinavians and the in Finland and in Sweden. Now
this lens industry was the province. It was a secret technology of the Eastern
Vikings who were Swedish, and the Norwegian Vikings who were round the other side.
They were the western ones. They didn't know how to do it,
and the Swedish Vikings wouldn't tell them how because it was their moneymaker. They
were selling these lenses all over the balltic see that you find them in Latvia
and Estonia, and a lot in Finland. And I went there and studied
them at Helsinki and wrote a report. The report on the Finnish lenses is
one of the appendices of the hardback of the book. And so we have
this this fantastic lens industry of the Swedish Vikings. But I'll tell you one
of the things they could do that nobody else that I know of could do.
They were able to make magnifying lenses the size of water drops. These
were excavated at a site called Sigtuna, which is one of the more famous
Viking sites. And the Swedish archaeologists are so incredibly careful that while sipping through
all the soil and everything, if they saw a rain drop sized bit of
crystal, they saved it. A lot of archaeologists wouldn't be bothered. They
think it's well, it's just rubbish, But in fact they've collected some of
these and they magnify up to three times and the size of a rain drop.
Now this can be valuable for if you're carving miniature stuff. And the
magnifying lenses used for craftsmen who are ceiling graving and carving very fancy stuff for
royal people and so on. They had to have these magnifiers because you start
to get alongsided when you're older, and just as you're at the peak of
your skills for engraving on crystal or glass, you're starting to go funny with
your eyes, your sight. They needed their own lenses to do their work.
And then they also the Romans discovered that you could fill a glass sphere
with water and it became a fantastic magnifier, and they used to suspend them
by ropes. And in the Middle Ages the people were using these. They're
called schuster kugel. A kugel is a sphere in German. I don't know
why they were called schuster, but the shuster spheres which would be suspended by
all the people doing a craftsmanship who were losing their sight because they were middle
aged and these are unbelievably common, and telescopes were used in antiquity. I've
got on the cover of the book. I'll show you once more. This
guy here, his front is in the museum. It happens. It's a
It was excavated on the Acropolis, a fragment of oz with a picture of
a Greek guy looking through a telescope. And I've discovered what they used for
the tube being it was a particular type of giant Fennel stalk, which was
perfect for having a telescope. Toube because let me explain what a telescope is
so that people aren't too shocked. It doesn't sound too futuristic. If you
have a magnifying lens in your one hand and a magnifying lens in the other
hand, and you think, no, wonder, what would happen if I
look through them both at the same time. Any went like that, that's
a telescope, right, except you haven't inverted in and if you if you
had a third lens, then the images turned upside down and becomes rectified to
its right way up. But all you have to if you're looking at the
surface of the Moon or at the Milky Way, as the Greek philosopher Democratist
did, who was a contemporary of Plato. We know that he said that
the Milky Way consisted of lots of stars which looked like a mass, but
in fact they are separate stars close together. And that was because he was
using a telescope, a rulimentary telescope, and when you do that, you
can see that, Oh, I say, it's not just a sea of
milk, it's separate stars. And he also said that the Moon was covered
in mountains and valleys, just like the Earth. And we all thought that,
we all thought he was making this up and this was just a funny
story. Before we get into telescopes, I want to I want to conclude
a couple of thoughts that you describe regarding optical lenses. If and you studied
optics, if you have a condition, myopathy other problems with your vision to
make a crystal, wouldn't the expert have to study the eye itself if you
were doing the astigmatism one, yet you would you would have you would have
to understand the anatomy of the eye. Well, I don't know, it
could just be you. Is it clear on the left but not on the
right, you'd have to do it by trial and errors. So there have
to be some form of deduction to get the lens to be a good correction.
Is that yeah, okay, yes, But they did do ophthalmological operations
and things in antiquity. I didn't discuss that side of things in the book,
which has quite enough in it as it is. There's a lot of
evidence for the fact that in ancient times they knew a fair amount about the
eye and it's anatomy. And of course Aristotle is very important in this because
he was the great dissector. He wrote a book called Dissections, So he
was an anatomist, absolutely dissecting human bodies in four hundred and fifty types of
animals. Okay, that's before they outlauded in the Middle Ages, of course.
Yeah. Well, what he did was he was a very unusual man.
He befriended the prostitutes because he was very interested in pregnancy and generation,
as he called it, in other words, how you can get pregnant,
the seed in the egg and all that, how did it all work?
Was he was the probably the world's first embryologist, you might say, and
he befriended the prostitutes, which of course no other decent person would do,
because you know, they're only prostitutes. But he he made friends with them,
because he'd make friends with anybody. When he was studying fish, he'd
go out with the ordinary fishermen and they'd say, look, we see what
that octopus doesn't. And he wrote this all up me. But the thing
is that with the prostitutes he would be able. They would give him their
aborted or still born babies to study, and he would be He would pay
them, and he could study their anatomy and in ways which might become might
be considered slightly improper. But a Fault was a scientist, and anyway,
nothing was improper in ancient Greece, and so he he there was no way
he could be stopped from trying to get the answers to the mysteries of nature.
And so we did this giant book called the Dissections, which was like
a huge thing that high you can imagine, with very detailed illustrations. And
he gave the original copy to Alexander the Great, who had been his student,
But of course he kept another one, and the only account of this
lost book of four hundred and fifty autopsy reports on every kind of animal,
including elephants and crocodiles, and everything that Alexander's men would send to him.
The only one that survived is the very careful description of the chameleon, not
with the illustration, but the very detailed description of the comeleon. And that's
an example. It survives in his very lengthy zoological works, which of which
I've read every word. And not many people consider that because they got on,
but I see, I had to review them for Nature magazine, and
so I had to read every word in every footnote, and and check the
the vocabulary, and go into all the detail. And so the I realized
that the description of the chameleon, which occurs in there, which has been
excerpted from his main text of Dissections, was a piece of that book.
And I even wrote an article about that separately. But he was interested in
these two he was. He talked about tubes you can look through and see
things better, but he didn't mention the lenses. But lenses are mentioned by
Aristophanes, the playwright who was a generation before Aristotle, in his play called
the Clouds. He was he wrote farces, and and so he wrote one
in which he made fun of Socrates. In fact, he was two generations
before Aristotle, because he was one generation earlier than Playtime. He was making
fun of Socrates. And he has Socrates talking to another chap called Stripsid's,
and the other guy is worried about the fact that he owes money to somebody
and he's got he's got documents which show the debts that he ows. And
Socrates says, well, there's one way you can get out of trouble.
Go down to the local shop where they's apparently sold these to anybody for for
a small sum by a lens, and hold it in the sun and burn
burn up the documents at a distance, and then he won't have the evidence.
This is all meant to be a big joke, but what it reveals
is that lenses were so common you could go buy them at the corner shop.
Yeah, and start a file with them. Yeah. This is what's
so important about your book is that you give references in various commentaries and various
letter writing that different different people exposing this technology and exposing the lens. I
want to talk real briefly about a portion of your early book that reveals the
Cairo lenses and I'm curious because you're telling us that optical technology is in place
in antiquity. But if the Egyptians, I think you say, in the
in the Old Kingdom that you found, is it possible that the Egyptians inherited
from an earlier civilization, pre dynastic civilization. Does that feel right to you?
Well, we don't know the answer to that, but what I can
say is that it would have been impossible for anybody, no matter how clever
they were, even if they came down from outer space, as some people
say, you couldn't do it without optical surveying instruments. Now, if you
have a surveying instrument and stick a little miniature telescope on it for your sighting
of the exact angles and so on, that's known as a theodolite. That's
the name of the instrument which has the little telescope on top, and then
it shows the angles and you do your sighting with that. The precision of
alignment of those gigantic pyramids is so perfect that it is physically impossible for it
to have been accomplished by any means other than optical surveying, which meant that
they could not have been built without the existence of lenses, and that's conventionally
thought to be the Fourth dynasty, the oldest lenses. I've actually seen a
Fifth dynasty and they are in the museum, and I had the photographs of
them, which I took in color. But the the lenses certainly existed before
that, because the Fifth Dynasty lenses are so perfect. They're they're perfect.
I mean you had to be really on top of lens technology to produce them.
And uh, and so they certainly existed by whoever built the pyramids,
let us say that it really was kep Brin and Cufu and Cofre. I
personally think that they usurped them and that they were actually older. But yeah,
that's a separate subject, and we don't in my view, we don't
know who built the pyramids or exactly when. But in my book Egyptian Dawn,
I report the results of dating study that my Greek colleague and my wife
and I did as an archaeometric team going around Egypt with official permission, I
might say, redating everything. We found a date for the pyramids that was
much earlier than the Fourth Dynasty according to the conventional chronology. But if you
change your chronology. It could still be fourth dynasty, but they can't both
be true. But that's a separate issue discussed in a separate book, another
big fat book called Egyptians. We'll have to have you back for that one.
We're going to take a commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves,
and we will return with my guest today, Robert Temple, discussing his
book on ancient lenses. We'll be right back. My guest today is Robert
Temple, who wrote a fabulous book in two thousand called The Crystal Sun,
Rediscovering a Lost technology of the ancient world. This is all about ancient lenses
used for glasses reflecting the sun and telescopes. I'm thinking and visualizing SETI,
the first wearing glasses. And you know, if this technology was around,
why doesn't anybody talk about it? Why don't the egyptologists, Why don't the
archaeologists? What are they? Him and haw and basically say, and you
write about this, no lizards existed in ancient times. Well, let me
tell you what happened to my book after it was published in Oxford. Now
you probably you know that Galileo was threatened with being burnt at the Stake,
like his predecessor Giordano Bruno by the Captulic inquisition, because he was a magician.
He claimed to be looking through a tube to see the stars, and
he maintain change that the Earth was going round the Sun, and the Catholics
didn't like that a bit. So what he did was he decided he didn't
want to be burnt at stake. That he sort of apologized and fudged.
But so when the Catholic inquisitors came to see him, at first he tried
to talk his way out of it by showing them. So he said,
just look through my telescope and you can see for yourselves, and they all
refused, they wouldn't look through Galileo's telescope. Oh my god, the same
thing has happened with my book, and I'll tell you the story. Well
what happened in Oxford. So the professor of archaeology at Oxford is a very
enlightened chap He was, in fact an expert on the Kulkian civilization, which
is where Jason went to find the Golden Fleece, and it's the far end
of the Black Sea in the country now called Georgia. So that was his
special field. But he got hold of The Crystal Sun, this is before
I ever met him, and decided that it was wonderful. And he's the
professor of archaeology at Oxford. So he said to all his students, you
have to read this book by Robert Temple called The Crystal Sun. But his
students started coming back to him and saying, well, we can't find it
in the Oxford Library. I should say that the main library for Oxford University
isn't called the Oxford University Library. It's called the Bodleyan Library because it was
founded by a man called Bodley and it's named after him, the Bodileyan Library.
So they would come back and say, well, we can't find that
book in the Bodileyand so the professor went along to the head of the Bodleyan
and he said, look, I've brought you a copy of a book called
The Crystal Sun, which you don't seem to have here, and I'm sending
my students to read it because it's part of their studies. And I'm giving
you a copy for you to deposit to save you the trouble of ordering one.
And the man said, we would not stop that book in this library.
He said, what do you mean. I'm the professor of archaeology and
I'm telling you that I needed for my students, and I want you to
stock it in the library at the university's library. We refuse. So they
refused to take the book, and it's still not there, and they didn't
want anybody to read it or see it. So he went down the road
to the Ashmoleum Museum, which is an archaeological museum in Oxford, with which
he was obviously connected, and he deposited that copy in the library of the
Ashmolean Museum. And he said to me, Robert, I wanted to make
sure that it was at least one copy of your book somewhere in Oxford in
case anybody really needed to see it, that they could at least go there,
and I will be sending my students there. But you we have here
an example of the head of the Bodily and Library refusing to take my book
and put it on the shelves. What's the reason that they have to rewrite
history or it's such an anomaly that it frightens people. What is the what
is the reason for not carrying the book for students? He refused to give
a reason to the professor. But what do you do? You what's your
suggest what's your feeling on why he would refuse to keep the book in his
library. You see, if you read The Crystal Sun and you realize and
see the photographs and all the evidence that I've found over four hundred and fifty
examples of what all the world's archaeologists said could not and did not exist,
and I proved all of them wrong at one stroke. They've all been wrong,
apart from the Oxford man. Well, it's too embarrassing, isn't it,
And so the only thing to do is to pretend it doesn't exist,
to conceal it, and to try to prevent anybody ever seeing it. But
wait, let me just stop you for a minute. You're not naming names
in the book, like this guy's an idiot, this guy, You're not.
You're not rudely claiming that all of archaeology is blind for not finding these
lenses. You're just revealing new data. Well, they don't want they don't
want new data. Okay, I don't want to have to change. They've
been saying that that this kind of technology was impossible in antiquity and many books
a state that lenses began in the Middle Ages, and and and they simply
don't want to have to admit that things are different than what all these rather
pompous people have been preaching to the public all these years. Now, it
wasn't always like that, because I record two hundred and fifty years worth of
comments by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where it was freely admitted that
there were ancient lenses. But of course those comments are also concealed and never
quoted. And that the famous historian of art called Vinckelmann, who created the
history of art as a discipline, he admitted that there were ancient lenses.
Many people did. But in the modern era, I think it goes against
the myth of progress. You see, we live in a society now where
every day of every year things get better and better, and they go up
and up and up and up and up, and there's a sort of steady
progress upwards because we're so modern and we're so clever, and we have all
this fabulous technology, and aren't we brilliant and we're superior to people in the
past, you see, according to this myth, and if you come up
with evidence that people in the past weren't as stupid as the pompous experts of
today claim to hold on to their myth. That blows the myth. And
then you might have people asking awkward questions like, well, if they were
so good it lenses in threey three hundred BC, and then after the collapse
of the Roman Empire they kind of disappeared, you know, all this business
about People would start asking about the Dark Ages and why was it caused?
And why did technology vanish? And what about the myth of steady progress upwards,
that that humankind is going up up every year, getting better and better
and better and better. But we're not in fact at the moment. We
live in a society of utter decodence and collapse of knowledge, and the universities
are more concerned with pronouns than knowledge and what. We live in an era
where disciplines like Egyptology, for instance, are being cut. I know some
lovely people who've got their PhDs in egyptology and cannot find a job, cannot
find a job anywhere in the world because those departments are being shut down.
There's no grant money. Nobody cares who's in authority about knowledge anymore. Everything's
become politicized, and everything's geared for social engineering, and knowledge has looked upon
as a useless pastime for fools. And so the whole edifice of what we've
all been trying to build for thousands of years by research and thought and works
of philosophy and science and art and culture and so on, it's all looked
upon as valueless today, and so we have a complete collapse of learning,
and there aren't any great scholars anymore. When I was younger, I knew
many, and I worked very closely with the greatest scholar of our times,
Joseph Needham. He was fantastic, and I worked within few years. And
let me just ask you real quickly, Robert, that in some ways I
understand what you're saying about progress perhaps being different. Things are shifting in the
old systems of study are different, and learning and so forth. But if
you have a base of evidence that telescopes were used by the ancient Egyptians,
Babylonians and so forth, we're going to talk about this in a minute,
this would help us understand how we have clarity of a planetary study by these
ancient people who wrote about this. My big problem right now, and I
want to ask you later A point is I'm a mayanist. They're telling us
that they were able to see the planets with the naked eye. It's nearly
impossible. In the Dresden Codex they have details of Venus that are not visible
by the naked eye. They had observatories that I believe included telescopic viewing.
Yes, at Chichen for instance. Yeah, yeah, at the observatory.
They must have had lenses. They must have had telescopic lenses to see these
things because they wrote about it. Now in your case, in your case
where you're describing European Middle Eastern optics, there's a number of people we can
quote who wrote about the celestial bodies with such a great degree of detail that
they had to have telescopes. Wouldn't the scientific community go yes, now,
I can see how these ancient people came about this knowledge. Well, of
course, what you've said makes perfect sense. That's the trouble with it.
Okay, you're a troublemaker, Cliff. Well, I'm an anomalist like you
are. You look for these these bits of information that kind of fitted all
together, you know, I mean, this entire book is such an anomaly
that, I mean, I'm not sure what What was the reaction when it
came out by the scientific community was some of them are just you know,
avoiding it. I'm sure in total silence. Really it didn't exist. It
couldn't be critical size because everything's referenced another You can't criticize the book. There's
nothing wrong with it. The fact is that the only way they could defeat
it was to completely and totally ignore its existence. So what were the reviews?
You must have had one single review? You're kidding me? Well,
on the back of the book that you have Sunday Times writing the focus is
as wide and as deep as civilization itself. And then it says the reviewer
says frighteningly clever. Yes, that's on the back of the paperback, because
there was an article in the Sunday Times magazine that said that it was an
article, not a review, and the other quote, maybe there was a
review in the press, but no, no archeologists ever reviewed the book.
But was it? I mean, what did Nature magazine review it? Did?
Oh no, they would never no, how about it? Tipic America
was around then? How about them? Well, now I was myself a
reviewer for Nature magazine for many years for history of science books before this came
out. But you see, not that many years ago, twenty years ago
or whatever it was, everything started to change. I used to write science
articles for the London Sunday Times every Sunday because they had a whole page of
science, and that's long gone. They don't have science articles anymore ever.
And I was involved in the journalistic world when I was younger. I co
edited a magazine, and I was a science report for Time Life for six
years out of the London Bureau. And I wrote for old papers and all
the magazines and for the Sunday Times, and everybody wanted to do things.
Then. The public was full of curious people. Maybe they were self taught,
maybe they were intellectuals who had actually been to university, doesn't matter.
The fact is people had curiosity then, and curiosity was still encouraged. But
in the past twenty twenty five years, cur curiosity has become something that you're
not supposed to have, and you're supposed to believe what you're told and never
question anything. The media, all the publisher's been bought up, and all
the newspapers have been bought up by four or five major international multinational cooperations,
and everything's homoginized, and you see there are no differences anymore. You get
all these different names of publishers appearing on books, but those are all lists
owned by big companies. So, for instance, if you go to Random
House, they own about and The Crystal Sun was published by an imprint of
Random House called Century. I used to go there all the time and you
would see the list of about fifteen famous publishers' names on the board at the
reception, all of which had been bought by Random House. The smaller publishing
houses they've all been bought up, and so they don't have independent views anymore.
And it's just a pretense to put a different name on a book to
make it look diverse. And then after I left Random House there they merged
with Penguin, so Penguin Random House. And see everything's getting giant and run
by accountants and salesmen, so the editors don't have any authority anymore. If
they want to publish a book, they have to go on bended knee before
a conference of salesmen to say I want to publish this book. And then
the salesmen growl at them because they know their power, and they say,
Oh, nobody's gonna buy that. That would that wouldn't make us enough money.
And so the sales department makes all the editorial decisions. Now wow,
and then if there's a if there's a company attitude and you don't follow it,
you lose your job. So if they're not interested in archaeology books,
you wouldn't dare commission one because you'd be fired. Yeah, I hear you.
Let's jump back into this wonderful book. I you have a full chapter.
And you hinted on this on the miniature carvings, and this is so
fascinating because it's been described as a whole industry of artisans who created these bits
of jewelry. Talk about the it's a vessel in the Cairo Museum dated three
thousand BC that has been carved with such fine intricacy that they had to have
used lenses of some kind to see the work. Yes, those were the
ivory pieces that I mentioned earlier that were excavated by a dryer at a Bidos
from a tomb of that date. We know the date because we know the
date of the tomb and three thy three hundred pc. Strangely enough, there
there a lot of the carvings consist of pictures of people who whom Egyptologist is
simply called by the name of Canaanites, not that anybody knows what a Canaanite
really was, and they weren't official Canaanites in existence that early. But because
they don't know what to call them, because they don't know who they were,
they only know they came from the area of Palestine, they call them
cane Nights. And they were so ministry you can't even see them without a
magnifying glass, and you certainly couldn't colve them without a magnifying glass. And
Dryer himself, who was the head of the German Institute in Cairo, and
we did dating work with him. He was a very nice man, but
very very dull and dreary. And to give an example of what he was
like, he's been by the time I knowually he'd been thirty five years at
about us, which was this great burial site and just down the road from
an hour's drive from the fantastic temple of Denderra. Well you mean the Hathorp
Temple. Yeah, okay, so I said to him at one point,
I didn't call him Gunter because he was a bit formald doctor dryer. It
must be so wonderful, but you'd have been living here for thirty five years.
You must. It's so near to the temple of Dender. You must
have gone there all the time to look at it. How wonderful it is.
And he said to me in a dreary voice, he said, I
went to once or twice in thirty five years. So then I said to
another friend who was the head of the Swiss Institute. A friend then called
a horse Yaritz. I said, Horst, what's wrong with Gunter? I
told him it's wonderful that he spent thirty five years one hour's drive away from
Dendra and he could go and see it all the time. And he said,
you only been there once or twice. Of course laughed, and he
said, Robert, you have to understand about Gunter. He does tombs,
he does not do temples. Okay, this is what they're like. And
if you don't focus narrowly, you don't get a grant, you don't get
a promotion. Egyptologists, through whom they are not enough jobs, live in
a state of perpetual terror because if they can't get the grant for the next
year year's work there, they're finished. Their careers are over. Yeah,
any of them have had career collapse. There's no money. I know this
because my wife and I run the Ancient ecpt Foundation and we have personally funded
through that foundation a five year project at the Temple of Esna to clean the
astronomical ceiling, because there are only two astronomical ceilings in Egyptian temples, and
the one at the ones at Dendra, and the other one was at Esna,
which was covered in black sook from centuries of fodd cities. And what
Isna is is a very large town on the bank of the River Nile,
one hour south of Luxor. Well, I haven't been there. It must
be, it must not be on the tour it wasn't it is now there's
so many tourists are flocking there now to see the results of this work that
the Egyptians are going to have to build a hotel to hold. Yeah,
you want to see. It has now been declared to prestige project because the
fantastic revelations of the ceiling or the astronomical ceiling with the Zodiac and everything of
the Temple of Esna are so fantastic, and the colors had been so perfectly
preserved by centuries of soot that they are the best preserved colors in any ancient
Egyptian temple or monument anywhere in Egypt, except perhaps for the inside the tombs.
And it's absolutely spectacular. So it's now on the tours, all the
tours going there suddenly, and of course the Ana people aren't ready for this.
That's ees Na Esna sometimes yeah Esna, sometimes spelt I s Na because
you can you can write Arabic in different ways in English letters, but generally
e s Na Esna. So anybody going to Egypt, they all go to
Luks or get a taxi it's an hour's ride, doesn't cost a thing,
and go for a day or half a day to see the temple at Esna
and look up at the ceiling and the columns and the walls. Now,
as we were the funders for this project for five years, it was the
work was done by the Germans and the Egyptians. We didn't actually clean the
ceilings ourselves, my god, it takes forever to do that. The fact
is that I heard that they were doing some work at ESNA, and I
contacted Professor Christian Lights at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and I said,
I understand you're going to go to ESNA to do something. And he
said, yes, we've been giving some money to clean a column or two
or something like that, just to so that there was something that the here
tourists could see. And I knew that he was the world's leading expert on
ancient Egyptian astronomy because I know those things. And I said, well,
Professor Lights, I hope you're going to clean the ceiling, because i'd first
seen it in nineteen ninety nine and vowed then that I would clean that ceiling.
It's just I tried to raise some money and it didn't work at that
time because there was no foundation then. And he said, oh no,
I'm afraid there's no money to pay for us to clean the ceiling. We
won't be doing the ceiling. It's what I really want to do because it's
an astronomical ceiling, and I'm an expert in Egyptian astronomy. Obviously I want
to clean the ceiling, but there's no way we can do it because we
can't find the money anywhere from anybody. I said, well you have,
now I'm giving it to you for as long as it takes. And I
couldn't believe it. But every year he was nervous as the year came to
an end, would I pay for the next year because we didn't have an
agreement written out or anything. I I had dropped dead, that would be
the end of it, you know, And it's all uncertainty. But he
would do his years work and hope that it would be renewed. And of
course it always was, but he didn't know that for sure. And can
you imagine you've cleaned one fifth of a fantastic ceiling, and what if I
didn't renew the grand And so we know how perilous it is for Egyptologists if
they're doing a project or want to do a project, if there's no funding,
they're powerless because they can't raise any money. And I know, I
know a brilliant Egyptologist who's been struck down by an illness and can't get a
job because of lesson to mobility, can't go into classrooms, and you've got
no idea. But this is true in most scholarly disciplines, not just archaeology
and egyptology. Certain aspects of science and technology are well funded because they're useful
to companies and governments and make they make money. And if you want to
try to build a quantum computer, well you can get as much money as
you like if you if you can prove that you've got an idea. But
if you want to study an ancient Egyptian ruin, forget it. There's no
money. And the Egyptian government doesn't have much money because you know they were
they lost all that money for three years during the pandemic from the tourism industry,
and they're always short of change. We're going to take a short commercial
break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will be right back
with my guest today, Robert Temple, discussing his book from the year two
thousand, The Crystal Sun. Will be right back. My guest today is
author Robert Temple, who has written a book on ancient lenses called The Crystal
Sun. And this is a fascinating look at optics in antiquity as well as
telescopic lenses. Let's talk a bit about fire making. Now you write that
at a time, I think this is in that you could buy a crystal
to burn things with Athens. Yeah, talk about about that, because this
is something that I have never heard of before. And you say there was
an industry of making these kind of like a kind of a cool little item
that you kept in your tunic. Talk a little bit about these crystals.
Well, you see, using these lenses to concentrate the rays of the sun
and start a fire well of extreme importance. And we've traced that back to
Monoan times among the Greek part of the world. Are you talking about survival
a fire for survival kind of a situation. No, I'm talking about sacred
offerings on the old offerings. Okay. You see, the fire from the
sun was called fire from heaven. Looked upon his pure fire, the only
fire that wasn't earthly, it was pure heavenly fire. And you had to
use heavenly fire to ignite the kindling on your offer to burn your offering because
to the gods, and you can't just use an ordinary flint or something like
that to start a fire. If you're burning an offering into the gods,
it's got to be heavenly fire that you bring down from heaven through a lens.
And there was an entire mythology built around this, which I decoded because
it's an enormous amount about mythology. In the book and in the Manan Times,
the pattern that the condensed rays of the sun made when passing through a
lens was carved into the stone, so that I have a photograph in the
book of an offering from in fact from Lerner, which is before the Minoans,
where the exact pattern of the rays of the sun is carved into the
stone so that none of it would fall outside the area carved in the shape
of the condensed rays that held the ignition, so it's like not wasting any
heavenly rays, so you could get a perfect beam to start a fire.
Excellent, amazing. And this, this fire from heaven motif was referred to
over and over again. And oh, you get into all kinds of strange
myths, like the Prometheus legend, because you know he was punished because he
brought fire from heaven to humans. Well, he didn't go up to heaven
and come back with fire in his pocket. This refers to him bringing using
lenses. And I have an ancient Greek lens that I bought from a collective
friend long ago who which has a carving on it of Prometheus carrying fire from
heaven, which was It's archaic, and so it can't be any more recent
than the sixth century BC. The lens itself is probably much earlier. Strangely
enough, the fact that the carving is it is a transparent carving, it's
on the surface of the lens, does not an interfere with its I can
find properties any more than a dust on your camera lens can be seen on
your photograph. And so I've got a lot of material in the book about
all this kind of stuff. As you know, I mean, the book
is so packed with information that it's totally mind boggling. It's like you you
felt compelled to deliver bits and pieces of referencing so your reference. I've seen
every chapter, and it's like even the editors are like, Okay, we're
going to leave this guy alone. We're not going to try to edit it.
We're gonna say Temple can unload it whatever he was, and we'll publish
it. Well. I do have very long footnotes, and a lot of
the stuff I moved to the footnotes to take it out of me make it
easier for the reader, and then a huge amount of material was put into
the appendices to get it out of the way of the reader's path through the
book. And I constantly tell personal stories. So, for instance, in
Appendix one, the only one that survived into the paperback, I discussed the
first time I saw the skull of Doom, which is now the most famous
of the crystal skulls from Central America. This is the Mitchell Hedges skull.
Yes, I was a teenager in nineteen sixty three, and I was taken
to the house of Sammy Mitchell Hedges, the daughter. She's the one who
found the skull, and she told me all about how she found it.
It was in Belize at a site called Lubon Tun, which she and her
father were excavating. They discovered it, in fact, in the jungle,
and they cleared all the vines off the Did he do actually believe that they
that because there's a lot of discontent about this skull that it was it's fake,
it's not real, it wasn't cut by ancient people, so forth and
so on. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Well, I can't say definitely,
I'm inclined to believe that it's real. There have been suggestions that that
that her father, Mitchell Hedges, had it made by somebody in the eighteen
and he's or something. He was a strange character. There's a whole book,
an autobiography that wrote called Danger Mai Ally. He befriended this starving Russian
guy and fed him and clothed him for the ages. Who was a refugee
who turned out to be Trotsky? Who's Trotsky? He was one of the
revolutionaries in Russia. Oh oh, okay, learned you know? And then
his book is absolutely astonishing. He he also owned one of the most precious
objects in the world, called the Black Virgin of Kazan icon, which was
credited with having turned Napoleon back when he was in its magic power. The
Orthodox Russian Orthodox believed the Black Virgin turned back Napoleon when he was invading Russia.
Now it was covered with something called a reza, that's ri i z
a, which is a gold covering studied in emeralds, and the world's largest
emerald was on that reza over that icon. And he owned that he was
friends of all the main well, he was a friend of JP Morgan and
all those kind of people of Douven and and all the big dealers and all
the multimillionaires. And he was a very strange man. And he bought a
castle that he lived in called Farley Castle. Sammy took me to see it,
and she said to me, we won't tell them we're coming, because
when I sold it, she said it was bought by Simon the Red,
the king of the Gypsies. So we sneaked around and she showed me all
the garden in the castle and everything, but not on the inside, because
you don't just walk into the King of the Gypsy's house like that. And
she picked a camellia for me and said, press it and keep it forever.
She was very romantic and very interesting, lovely woman, and she talked
about her childhood because she was adopted, you see, and he didn't have
any children, in fact, I don't think he was ever married, but
he adopted this waife who was a French Canadian origin. And later on she
left Readying the town of Reading in England, which is where I met her,
and moved back to Canada, where she did have some relatives that she
had traced, and she lived the rest of her days out in Canada.
So I didn't see her then, because I've actually never been to Canada,
and she was a fascinating woman, and she told me in very great detail
about how she discovered the skull. She did she she found it under an
altar, right. No, she said that she was busy cutting the vines
off of pyramid, which was what they spent most of their time doing,
and as she was pulling the vines away, she noticed something sparkle from between
some of the stones, and she removed the stones and concealed behind the stones
in the side of the pyramid, which normally nobody could ever have known or
found. It's just that the light was in the right angle or something,
and she was pulling the vines off, she pulled some glassy looking thing out
and it was the skull of Doom And as it came to be named,
and it was in perfect condition. It had been concealed there. I would
say that it was never archaeologically lost, it was never buried anything. Okay,
it was kept by some surviving priest or secret society of the descendants of
the Maya, something like that, and that they kept it hidden there where
no one could ever find it unless they knew how many steps up the pyramid
to go and exactly where to look. But she found it by chance,
and it was very cleverly concealed but accessible. It wasn't too difficult for her
to pull it out once she removed the stone that was blocking it, and
that that was where it was, and that it was in perfect condition.
It had never been buried or anything like that, and it had always been
a very priceless, sacred not to mention mystical or magical object for those local
people ever since the collapse of the Maya. That they had kept that because
it was considered to have magical powers, and she believed it did, and
so she was very casual. She handed it to me. She kept in
an velvet mind box, and I said, well can I Can I touch
it? Oh? Yes? And she I was allowed to pick it up
and rested on my shoulder. And a friend who was with me said,
it is something very strange here, because that skull was exactly a replica of
your own skull, Robert. Yes, yeah, I'm sure you didn't pose
for it. And it has a detachable jawa and so it was also cold.
You know, rock crystal can be quite cold and or it can be
quite warm. Rock crystal is a very strange material, and so I described
this and I talked about her and how this all came about. But I
took that out of the main part of the book, and it's Appendix one.
I call it the Skull of Doom, which was the name that they
adopted for this skull. And so all the people who are into crystal skulls,
of whom there are now a lot, at that time in nineteen sixty
three, nobody had ever heard of it. I was going to ask you,
you don't get into any detail regarding an analysis in the early sixties,
because no one really thought about that. But at any point any people that
you were connected with who had seen the skull, did they make any comments
about the sophistication of the carving? Oh? No, nobody had really studied
it. In fact, I'm the one who told Arthur C. Clarke about
it, and he became so obsessed by it that he used the image of
that skull as the initial image of his many episodes of his television series Okay,
which were I forget what he called the television series, and then there
was a sequel series something about strange whatever. I can't remember what he called
the series, but he used the image of that skull as his main theme
image, the motif. Every program started with the picture of the skull.
And that's because I told him about it. Okay, interesting, Yeah,
I had years ago. I'm not that long ago. In the mid nineties
nineteen nineties, IBM scientists took it here in Santase, California and actually studied
it. He was an expert on lenses and he believes that whoever cut it
had unknown technology. Because of the level of the cutting, they don't understand
what it was cut with, which makes it quite unique. Well, I
remember Sammy saying to me that she had consulted a couple of experts and that
they had said and that this is something that would have had to be ground
over the course of many, many years, two or three human lifetimes by
sand. The polish is perfect. Yeah, To get a huge piece of
crystal that size with not a single flaw in itself was an amazing accomplishment,
and that it would have taken me as much as three lifetimes to grind it
by using sand. Sand. Yeah, and they couldn't understand how it was
possible. Frankly, I don't think anybody using any technology, including our most
advanced today, could really do it. I don't get it. I don't
understand. She didn't understand. Yeah, I think anybody understands, although some
pretend they do it. Well, that's what the whole curiosity of it is
is like it actually transition transitions time. It's beyond I understanding of. As
we conclude, I want to talk about the highlights that you describe on telescopes.
And there is a writer that you describe that lived about sixty four BC
that talks about telescopes Strabo Strabo, and this is a very rare piece of
writing that you were able to find because we have such a little documentation from
that earlier period. Talk about him if he would, and let's introduce the
earliest telescopes that we know about well. Strabo was a man who was independently
wealthy. He was left a large fortune by his father, and he decided
to spend all the money traveling across the entire known world and very detailed books
of very detailed geographies. He was basically the founding father of modern geography.
It was largely topographical. That is, he would describe all the temples and
the shrines and the sacred groves and everything as he went. It wasn't purely
geographical, but he wrote these fantastically detailed accounts of all these weird places that
he visited. And along the way he would say, oh, and I
found this object and that object, and I was told this story and that
story. But he's rather dry. He's not what you'd call lively writer.
He's rather dry, but it's totally spellbinding because of the information, and he
describes the cults and the religions, ceremonies and things within the limits of what
was proper. All ancient writers get to a certain point when they're talking about
religious ceremonies and they stop because they say it would be impious, it would
be against piety to tell the real central secrets. But they give the outside
story. It's very hard to get the real full counts of like the ceremonies
at Eleusis and that kind of thing. I've done a huge amount of research
on that. I've written books about all that sort of thing and talk about
anomalies. In fact, I have discovered the original site of Delphi, actually,
yes, Delphi, with the one that's visited today by the Churich buses.
It's classic Delphi and it was founded about eight hundred BC, and there
was an earlier Delphi much higher up the mountain, eight miles further up,
in fact, the big mountain mountain Parnassis and and I have found that site
and it's prehistoric. It goes back to twenty two hundred BC. And as
you, I mean, you're crunching on prehistoric pottery as you walk on the
site. Actually you have to be careful where you put your feet. And
I paid for some Greek archaeologists to do a trial pit excavations there to verify
the site, and they they did. There's some stone building foundations there and
they found an ivory comb and we we verified the fact that it is the
original Dealthy. So I'm always doing that kind of thing, but unfortunately there's
a limited what one person can do. And and it's financially challenging as well.
I'm sure, yes, it's it's also a bit exhausting when you're climbing
up huge mountains. Yeah. Uh So what's the earliest telescope that we know
about? What is the I mean, I think you write that the Old
Kingdom had telescopes, the Egyptian had telescopes, yet because they had to have
them in order to do the optical surveying to the pyramids. That's the first
bit. But do we do we have known writing where they are describing the
moon or perhaps Mars, or like the Maya were very big on Venus and
some of the slow, slow moving plants that we can see at night.
Well, the trouble with Egyptian writings is that they had no public at least
certainly not in the Old Kingdom period, and anything that was written down was
written for themselves, you know, the priests would would it carved things on
the walls only from the fifth dynasty onwards, mind you, before that in
the Old Kingdom there was never any inscription on any wall. I was absolutely
not done, which is one thing that helps you date things. And I've
done a lot of work on Old Kingdom sites. Actually I've made some discoveries
with Old Kingdom sites, but not as an excavator. I don't have excavated
because you have to have a special excavation permit to do anything of that kind.
But you don't have to be an excavator to find things. And I've
made some very very important discoveries and of course a lot of it's not published.
I've just got too much stuff to write. And I've done a very,
very extensive and detailed study of the Temple of Seti the first and the
Assarian it abide Us, which is on published. I discovered a lot of
important things which eventually, if I can just hang on and not go to
meet the ancestors anytime too soon, and if I have the energy to keep
going, I will have to publish all that. I'm bringing out a book,
my Search for the Palace of Odysseus. You know, Odysseus of the
Odyssey, also in Latin as Ulysses, came from the island of Ithaca,
and he was the king of those islands there, of which Ipica is one.
And I've found the site of his palace, and I've got a book
about that that's coming out soon. But I've got a lot of stuff like
that. It's just a matter of getting it all into print while I'm still
alive, because there's nobody else who could ever do well. You've spent a
lot of time in those places. Talk about the you mentioned a at Karnak
Temple, a telescope that is six hundred yards long. I don't understand that.
Oh, yes, yes, well that's very interesting. That was Sir
Norman Locker, a very famous astronomer, became interested in the Egyptian temples for
astronomical reasons because of the astronomical observations not so much up in the sky as
at the horizons. And so he went to Egypt and he studied all these
places, especially the Great Temple at Karnak. Yes, and he was able
to demonstrate that basically the Temple of Karnak was a six hundred foot long horizontal
telescope to study what happens at the horizon. So that's more of an observational
site survey rather than optics embedded in stone or in tubes. But as far
as we know, there were there. They didn't need to the lenses there
they they're interested in them. The rising of the sun of a solstice,
and it would go down that long term which had buffers the the the the
columns were arranged in such a way, and then they had curtains and so
on to narrow the beam so that when it finally came to the inner sanctum
and struck the wall behind the altar, it would be a disc the and
and the texts described the either the pharaoh or the high priest, or both
depended. If the pharaoh was there, that year would be in the inner
sanctum and they would be alone with raw. But it only lasted two minutes
once a year wow, and it was considered a magical moment of union with
the sun. The pharaoh and the sun would become one. Now they built
a six hundred foot long temple to have this happen. This shows the fanatical
determination of the Egyptians to get the calendar right, because this is all to
do with measuring the precise moments of the solstice, to get the calendar precise,
because the calendar was sacred, because the year was sacred, because it
was ordered by the gods. And there was a tremendous deal about the fact
that it's not an even number of days. It's three hundred and sixty five
days plus affraction, and this really really bothered them. And in fact,
what they discovered is a slight digression, but it's very important. They discovered
that that fraction was a number, which was a sacred number, which is
the same number that you get if you're involved in music theory, and we
know from archaeological evidence that the heptatonic diatonic scale existed at least two thousand,
five hundred BC among the Sumerians and certainly among the Egyptians as well. There's
a if you have octaves in fifths, and you keep going up the keyboard
of the piano, let's say, and playing by octaves, you get to
a certain number of a frequency number, and if you go up by fits,
you get to a slightly different one. And the tiny gap between those
two numbers, because they're not commensurable, is the same as the number of
the fraction of the year that they were able to measure. And the Egyptians,
I've brought written this in some book. Maybe this one knew that they'd
found the same sacred number in music and in astronomy. Therefore it must be
the ultimate secret of the universe. And this knowledge was passed on eventually to
the Greeks, which I discussed a great length. And of course that fraction
came later to be known as the Comma of Patagoras, because he built it.
Goes on and on cliff. The stuff within the crystal sun is simply
overwhelmed me. I mean, it is overwhelming and That's why I had to
have you on the program before you leave the planet, because it's amazing.
The books called The Crystal Sun Rediscovering a Lost Technology of the Ancient World.
And my guest today has been Robert Temple, and we could talk for another
day on the material in this book. I as we conclude, Robert,
I'd like to get your sense of which cultures first of all, of the
four hundred plus lenses you found, any would you say are for telescopes versus
optical correction? Well, simple magnifying lenses were extremely common because they had to
be used by the craftsmen, so they were all over the place. I
mean there must be thousands I have. The easiest to find, is what
you're saying. Oh, yes, because they were in constant use. Okay,
the the ones used for starting sacred fires of course by the priests.
Okay. And they had these in China too. I haven't mentioned China,
but that's that's also in the book, because you know, I wrote a
whole book about Chinese technology, right and called The Genius of China. Did
you go to any Did you go to the National Museum in Mexico City and
find lenses there? No but I know that there are lenses in Mesoamerica.
What museums are they? Are they in or did you have somebody contact you
that was finding them? In field study, I came across evidence of them,
and I spoke to people who knew about them, but I was never
able to go there myself. And I wrote this book before there was an
enginet and two thousand your two thousand really nineteen ninety nined was published in two
thousand. Oh, you can find out distant things more easily now. So
again, of the four hundred lenses you're saying, quantity were used for starting
fire and then there was ultimately for magnification manification. All you need to do
is take too magnifying lenses and hould them up together and you've got your telescope
and stick them in a tube so you don't know they could have doubled up.
You see, it's that man really meant your telescope. So the other
question I have is obviously, if they're in the museums, they are missed,
you know, identifying them as whatever, crystal or whatever, so you're
you have to reinterpret them. Yes, these were all hidden in the basements.
None of them are called lenses. Nobody would admit they were lenses.
What do they call them? Objects? Oh? Or or like a raw
crystal stones or something? There still objects medallion or they don't know. And
they make out that totally transparent piece of crystal was an item of jewelry.
But you can see it's not gonna be much of a jewelry. You can
see the clothing behind it, and it's completely ridiculous. On occasions they would
they would say that it's it looks rather like it's in the shape of a
lens, and so we'll call it a lenoid shape. But they would never
admit that it's a lens, never, because they're convinced that they could not
be lenses. And I found over and I had I had to stop.
I mean, you could spend your life on New thousands. They're everywhere,
They're everywhere. That's amazing. I for those of you listening, it's always
a pleasure to speak to Robert. But he is going to help me put
together a small gallery. And I'm going to use the photos that are in
this book. You can see them on our Facebook page. Quote to Earth
Ancients on Facebook either that, I'll have them both on the group page as
well as the fan page, and this will include the black and white as
well as the color photographs, which are phenomenal. And you can see exactly
what we've been talking about because in some cases Robert's being very specific about concave
versus convex and the cuts, and there's actually a diagram in here on actually
how they are cut. Right. Yes, at the beginning of the book,
I show drawing of the five types of lenses and give them so that
before people even really get into the book, they know that basic information.
You have to know the types, You have to know what convex is and
what concave is. There are many people who actually don't know the means of
those words, and why would they. Yeah, so I say, this
is a convex lens. This is plano convex, buts flat on one side
and curved outwards on the other. That's plano convex. Plano means plat.
And then then you have a by convex, which means it's it's contact on
both sides. Then you have a concave lens which dips, and then you
have like a concave lens convex lens on one side and concave on the other
to it. It goes along like that like that, and that's called a
meniscus lens. But they're very rare. There is a Minoan one, a
famous Manoan one, or the eye of the bull's head right on. Okay,
excavated by the guy who excavated the Manan ruins. And would you say
that for the telescope you have to have a convex and concave lenses to magnify
the stars, or you have to have two convex lenses. Two convex lenses.
Okay, so one brings it in and then the other one magnifies it.
Well, it's for some reason it works if you look through the two
at once. You don't have to be a stone age genius. If you've
got a lens in one hand on a stone and a lens in the other
hand to say, I wonder, okay, I can see all these things
magnified. I wonder what would happen if I tried looking through them both at
the same time. That's a stick them in a tube, get them at
the right distance from each other for the leg right, and you've got your
evential telescope. Now your image will be upside down, but you can rectify
that with a third lens, which flips the image back to the right way
up. That's called a rectifying lens because it flips the image back in the
way that you're used to seeing it, right Robert, how can people get
a hold of you? I don't have your website in front of me.
What's what was your web? Well? I have a website. It's Robert
Dash Temple hyphen dash. You can't run them together, Robert dash Temple dot
com. Okay, and that's my personal website. Two of my books have
dedicated websites of their own. The one called Egyptian Down is Egyptian Dawn dot
com. And the one called The Sphinx Mystery is the Sphinxmistery dot com.
And all the color photos are there for those. Robert, it's been a
real pleasure and we're gonna definitely have to have you back Egyptian Don. I
haven't looked at yet, but I looks like a real great piece of work.
Thank you very much for your your book The Crystal Sun, and I'm
looking forward to really digging into it a little deeper when I have more time.
But thanks for joining me today. Well, Claire's a great pleasure,
and I wanted to say to all your listeners and all your viewers, all
your admirers, of whom they must be a great many, that you are
a wonderful God. Thanks appreciate it. You know, it's curious. I
have this intuition that there's a lot of gems out there like the Crystal Sun
and authors like Robert Temple that are just kind of under the wavelength or under
the radar. I've mentioned in the past, people like Charles Ford who wrote
at the turn of the century about strange discoveries he had made and strange rumors
and did their best to kind of find the evidence behind him. But Robert
Temple is unique, and I keep finding bits and pieces that not only helped
me in understanding my questions, but I find that a lot of other people
are having their questions answered as well. This book, Crystal Sun is out
of print. I did find it on Amazon. I think I paid twelve
dollars for it, and you can get on Amazon. It's a used book,
but I am sure you can get it in other book resources if you
go online. If you're not a fan of Amazon, there's used bookstores everywhere.
It's a definite book for your library. It is huge, it's over
five hundred pages, and you know, you just got to take it one
step at a time. When I first looked at it, I was jumping
all over the place. The photographs are excellent. And by the way,
I will be reproducing entire pages from this book of the ills of the actual
photos for you to review because they're outstanding. And as I mentioned at the
beginning of the program, this is stuff that is being edited out of our
consciousness because the historians don't believe it's important. But if you are digging a
little deeper into history and you want to know more, and you want to
know if they had telescopes, And by the way, how did the Maya,
how did the Chinese? How did the Egyptians know so much about the
planets that are in our solar system? This is the obvious reason they had
telescopes. God, so you have solved a mystery. And by the way,
there is a lot more in this book that did not come up in
our interview. He mentioned crystal skulls, but there's also highly polished plates for
reflecting. There's a hint at reflecting telescopes. The burning crystals to light fires
ceremonially is another area. There's just a lot more that we didn't have time
to cover that is featured in this book. So I highly encourage you to
go out and get a copy because there's so much more to cover in there.
So great they have Robert Temple on the program. We will have him
back. I also want to mention that Robert sent me an article that he
wrote in nineteen seventy nine on magnetism in Mesoamerica, specifically Omec culture magnetism.
Apparently they had discovered a number of magnetic bars and other what looks like tools
that were used that were magnetized, and there's questions about that, and he
tries to answer that. You can find that article on Facebook on Earth Ancients
on the fan page, the Facebook fan page. It's a challenge when you're
out getting everybody gifts and you're wondering, you know, what about me,
what's going on? I deserve a gift, and one of the best gifts
you can give yourself is a trip with Earth Ancients to Egypt or Turkey or
in the fall of twenty twenty four, we will be in Mexico. It's
gonna be the Yucatan tour. I just finished the fine tuning on it.
We've had information about our tours for years. We started doing tours in twenty
seventeen, and I've been touring before that with different organizations. Our tours are
wonderful and I don't see that lightly. The food, the experience, the
itinerary is excellent, and I'm really excited to mention that our Egyptian tour will
be uh will have some other additions that we're not going to mention right now,
but they are fabulous temples that have never been seen by the general public
will be on the tour. We also go to Memphis, which has the
one of the only outdoor museums that is filled with relics that will just blow
your mind. For the full itinerary on either Egypt, Turkey which is in
August, or Mexico, go to Earth Ancients dot Com forward Slash Tours get
on board before the end of the year. You get a few hundred bucks
off if you use the code get Grant Egyptian Tour twenty twenty four. Again,
these are world class tours, extremely reasonably reprised. These are wonderful tours.
You will have a blast. If you go to our Facebook page or
Facebook can go to Earth Ancients you will see examples of the various places we
go and you can see Muhammad is our tour guide and he is a pleasure
to travel with. His team will make sure if you travel to Egypt or
Turkey that you are treated and experience world class tour. And that means the
minute you jump into Cairo or you fly into Istanbul for Turkey, your tour
begins and everything's handled for you. It's a fantastic organization to work with at
Salad Tours and I've been using them for years. You'll love the tour.
I hope you can join us Earthancients dot com, forward Slash Tours. All
right, that's it for this week. I want to thank my guest today
Robert Temple, Gail Tour and in London, Mark Foster. You guys rock
all right, take care, we will and we will talk to you next time.