It would seem that if the life span of men before the Flood was much longer, perhaps in the hundreds of years, and that if even for a few centuries after the Flood men still managed to live to ages of three and four hundred years of age, then it would be probable that there would have been a fairly high level of knowledge and technical sophistication of the sciences at that time. After the Flood, as the former civilization had been destroyed along with the previous world, the first economies of these early survivors would be "hunter gatherer" societies, people would have to start again from scratch, using stone tools and primitive implements to survive. Migration would occur as they began to multiply over the face of the earth again, yet they would still retain much of the great knowledge handed down to them from the antediluvian world, and this is what we find with the pyramids of Egypt, the highly advanced geometric calculations of the ancient Greeks, the complex mathematical and astronomical calculations accomplished by the early Meso-American civilizations, and the sudden appearance of civilizations in China, Sumeria, India and South America testifying to the legacy of a former time of highly advanced culture. All of these early civilizations sprung into existence fully advanced at the beginning of their cultures, only to gradually decline in sophistication and grandeur over centuries of time.

Early Chinese history began in 2697 B.C. during the time of the Yellow Emperor, Huang Ti, yet we find in many treatises, such as The Yellow Emperors Book On Internal Medicine, traditionally ascribed to Huang Ti, an already highly developed science of medicine, along with sophisticated character writing and botany. Modern science is only now beginning to appreciate and incorporate some of this ancient field of medicine, chiefly through the study and practice of acupuncture, as well as in the clinical study and use of plants listed in their ancient herbals.
The earliest examples of Chinese writing are the Oracle Bones from the second millennia B.C.
Imre Galambos wrote: "The inscriptions on these bones tell us that by 1200 BC Chinese writing was already a highly developed writing system which was used to record a language fairly similar to classical Chinese. Such a complex and sophisticated script certainly has a history but so far we found no traces of its predecessors." (Imre Galambos © 2000 Logoi.com)

Since in any botanical study of medicinal properties of plants, probably 99.9% of the plants would be entirely useless for a certain disease, and many plants in the wild are toxic, it would take many thousands of years of cultural continuity to develop the extensive herbals used in ancient Chinese, Aryuvedic (Hindu), and Aztec medicine, and yet from the earliest times these cultures had extensive and accurate herbal knowledge.

All of the ancient herbalists classed plants according to their medicinal value. According to the Ebers Papyrus, dating from 2,000 years before Christ, there were at one time 2,000 practicing herbal doctors in Egypt to choose from. Dioscorides, a Greek physician of the first century A.D., listed over 500 plants useful for medicinal and aromatic purposes. During the Dark Ages Christian monasteries carried on the tradition and knowledge of herbology, often hand-copying many of the ancient texts. In some of the frontispieces of Bibles from that period we find recorded the names of useful herbs for treating various diseases. Within a century of the invention of movable type in 1453, 32,000 copies of Dioscorides book had been printed. It is well known that the father of patent medicine, Samuel Thomson, was an herbalist and used his knowledge of American Indian herbal cures, along with the traditional ancient Herbals, when he began to select the most useful plant compounds for certain diseases and patented them in 1813. It is his work and that of other herbalists, such as the Christian sect known as the Shakers, who grew and marketed herbs in New York during the early 1800's, that formed the basis of the modern science of pharmacology.

We are finding out that certain Hindu herbs traditionally used for cancer, Boswellia for example, contain unique chemical properties called boswellic acids that have been found useful in the treatment of various forms of carcinomas, and that is just one among thousands of herbs listed in the Hindu herbals used since antiquity. Had modern western medical outlook not been prejudiced by an evolutionary, Euro-centered ethnic bias, medicine might have made much more rapid and richer advancement in the treatment of certain diseases.

The Aztecs were so advanced in their art of medicine that many writers, Soustelle among them, have said that their system of medicine was actually more modern and scientific than that being practiced in Europe at the time of the Conquest. In the sixteenth century, King Phillip ll of Spain sent his personal physician, Francisco Hernandez, to Mexico in 1570 to learn Aztec medicine. After spending seven years there of intense study he compiled an extensive herbal, along with an extensive encyclopedia on their medical knowledge. Portions of his work were eventually published after his death in Italy and in Mexico, though unfortunately many parts were destroyed in a fire. Largely unexplored, this could be a phenomenal area of research. Father Sahagun wrote that they had a large body of written and oral herbal wisdom, knowledge of many minerals used for the curing of illnesses, used anesthetics and set fractures and broken bones, and used a type of bloodstone that stopped hemorrhaging. ⁽⁶⁾

The study of language has perplexed scholars for years, since every tribe and culture on the face of the earth, no matter how primitive, have quite intricate, advanced linguistic patterns, showing no evidence of any evolutionary development from a primitive system of guttural growls and grunts, as evolutionists tell us language developed. In fact, certain tribes that live practically in a stone age culture in parts of South America and in Africa have languages that are more complex in many ways than modern English, German, Russian, etc. spoken by more technologically advanced cultures. The ancient Greek language in which much of the early New Testament was written has many more subtle nuances for phrases than some of the modern languages that it has been translated into.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat has written: "Hypothesis about the origin of writing generally postulate an evolution from the concrete to the abstract: an initial pictographic stage that in the course of time and perhaps because of the carelessness of scribes becomes increasingly schematic. The Uruk tablets [some of the earliest forms of writing ever found] contradict this line of thought. Most of the 1,500 signs are totally abstract ideographs; the few pictographs represent such wild animals as the wolf and the fox or items of advanced technology such as the chariot and the sledge. Indeed, the Uruk texts remain largely undeciphered and an enigma to epigraphers." ⁽⁷⁾

The ancient Babylonians, thousands of years before Christ, knew of complex angular geometric relationships, they worked extensively with the quadratic equation, cubic relations, advanced algebraic equations, and had knowledge of secant relationships. ⁽⁸⁾ There is also evidence that they knew of the four major moons of Jupiter, as well as the rings of Saturn, which had not been "re-discovered" until comparatively recent times with the development of the modern telescope.

There is evidence that as recently as the thirteenth century the memory of the former achievements from a forgotten age was still extant. Roger Bacon (1214-1292), a Franciscan monk and scientist wrote what had been thought to be only amazing predictions of modern technological achievements seven centuries ahead of his time, but a careful reading reveals that he was actually writing of what had formerly been accomplished by man: "Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili ["at inestimable speed"], as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device . . ." ⁽⁹⁾

The world is literally filled with unmistakable evidence for those who have not been blinded by traditional archeological theories and have eyes open to see that there was a former highly advanced civilization that produced wonders equal in scope to many of the achievements of modern technology.
Take for example the interlocking metal cogs and wheels forming part of a computerized star planetarium, modern in design and yet thousands of years old. It was found off of the coast of a Mediterranean island in the spring of 1901 by Greek sponge divers who had run into bad weather and sailed off of their normal course, eventually being forced to cast anchor by the island of Antikythera, located between Greece and the island of Crete. During the course of their diving they discovered the wreckage of an ancient, submerged sailing vessel, with some curious bronze objects in the ships cargo, among which were four pieces of a very sophisticated, bronze differential gear assembly.

Gamma-ray photographs of this mechanism were taken in 1971 to provide more data on the internal construction. In 1974 Professor Derek de Solla Price of Yale University determined that these objects were part of a well designed set of differential gears accurately measuring the cycles corresponding to the lowest common denominator of the orbits of the moon and the sun, which is 235 lunar months. The orbital cycles of the planets could also be calculated on it. This amazing computer-calculator has been dated back to at least 87 B.C. Although some critics such as Steibing ⁽¹⁰⁾have attempted to downplay the importance of this remarkable device as being merely a by-product of Hellenistic science, differential gear assemblies of this caliber were not thought to have even existed until shortly before the eighteenth century. The ability and ingenuity in measuring and casting this instrument required a remarkable degree of technological skill. ⁽¹¹⁾

Fragments of what are now considered to be ancient electrical batteries were found in 1936 by a German explorer under the sands of Iraq and are now in the Baghdad Museum. The outer casings were made of clay, containing copper rods running through iron cylinders inside the casing, with bitumen on the ends. Although the significance of these devices has been disputed by some modern evolutionists, they do display a great deal of sophistication in their make up, though even if one single unit would not put out a great amount of wattage (although a series of them would), there can be little doubt as to their potential use as genuine batteries, nor do these same critics have any explanation as to why they were built in the manner in which they were. Some archeologists have made the incredible argument that they probably weren't batteries because after thousands of years there was no electrolyte left in them. This is typical of the excuses evolutionists use when confronted with this kind of evidence. Although Steibing attempted to dismiss them as not actually being batteries, he admits himself that he had no idea what they were used for. ⁽¹²⁾

An iron pillar in New Delhi, India, 22 ft. high, dating back to at least 500 A.D., was forged with a high degree of metallurgic skill, as the iron is so pure that a thin coating on its surface formed by oxidation prevents further deterioration from occurring, thus it has shown nearlyno sign of rust through the centuries although being exposed to the elements, and modern metallurgists are amazed by the technology of the forgers who accomplished this. ⁽¹³⁾

Damascus steel was the hardest steel ever known until fairly recently. Swords of this high carbon steel were made as far back as two thousand years ago. The swords that the Crusaders used were made of Damascus steel during the middle ages. The formula whichthey used to forge this steel with was lost centuries ago and it has never been duplicated. It has only been with the advent of modern technology that we can now make steel with the tensile strength of Damascus steel.

Many of these pieces of evidence of a former highly developed scientific technology lost to present day knowledge had lain in Museums around the world for years as curiosities until modern science had developed to a point to where we understood what they actually were! A centuries old crystal lens that required a high degree of precision math and technology to create was found in the desert sands of Assyria. It dates from at least six hundred years before the common Christian era. A. Hyatt Verrill wrote: " . . . a true lens made from quartz was discovered by Dr. Layard at Nimrud, near Nineveh, in Assyria . . . In 1853 Sir David Brewster, F.R.S., exhibited this lens at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir David, who had devoted a lifetime to optics, declared it to be an exceptionally finely and accurately ground lens. It is now in the British Museum." (Verrill, Americas Ancient Civilizations, pp.306; Museum of Antiquity, L. Yaggy and T.L. Haines, A.N., pp.346)."

An ancient man-made canal runs across the entire nation of Thailand. It is thousands of years old, and whoever the unknown genius was who designed it had a great knowledge of engineering sophistication, for unlike the two modern canals, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, it has no need of sluice gates to control the level and flow of the water. This must have required an incredible amount of technical skill and knowledge of hydraulics to excavate. It would have been a truly stupendous feat for even a modern nation to have attempted to create.

High up in the Andes in South America there was once an ancient culture that existed long before the Incas conquered Peru, that had erected the gigantic stone monuments found at Tiahuanaco and Sacsayhuaman. Modern archeologists claim that within only a few hundred years before the Spanish conquest the Inca culture developed from a state of savagery and then built these giant edifices, despite the fact that the Incas had no metal tools for stone working, no carts or wagons used for transport, no pulleys or winches for hauling and hoisting heavy objects, no practical use of the wheel, and no heavy draft animals such as horses or oxen to help haul the huge blocks of stone up the mountains and lift them into place. Even though the Incas had crowbars there is no indication that they understood the application of the lever.

Archeologist A. Hyatt Verrill and his wife Ruth explored the West Indies, the Guineas and Central and South America for more than forty years, conducting many expeditions into remote regions of South America. Verrill wrote in Americas Ancient Civilizations: "The origin of the ancient Peruvians has always been a most intriguing mystery. They seem to have had no beginning, no evolutionary development, no intermediate steps from barbarism to high cultures and from cultures to an advanced civilization. As far as any known evidences to the contrary are concerned they seem to have sprung spontaneously, fully developed from the deserts and the Andes. In the Andean region, where the ancient civilization reached its peak, no traces of a primitive or archaic culture have ever been found; the most ancient remains showing a cultural development equal to if not superior to the latest pre-Columbian remains."

"Innumerable theories, suppositions and fanciful ideas have been offered in explanation of this mystery, but even the most plausible of these have never been substantiated by facts. As we know that a civilization cannot be developed all at once it is obvious that the Peruvian civilizations must have been introduced from some other area . . ."⁽¹⁴⁾

The Incan capital city of Cuzco was built with an incredible amount of engineering skill, and yet even many of these Inca structures were built on top of the foundations of earlier structures that predate any known Incan culture. In many cases the Incas built around and on top of the ancient stone work, or filled in parts that had been damaged by earthquakes. Even at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1528 the Incas told the Spanish conquistadors that the titanic edifices of stone at Cuzco had "always been there."

These Incan fortresses were made out of blocks of andesite, some of the hardest rock known, with some of these single blocks of stone weighing over 3oo tons each, yet they were so perfectly fitted together without mortar that even a knife blade could not be inserted between them. The terraced citadel of Sascahuaman was 60 feet high and more than a third of a mile long. How could a culture with no metal tools have carved out huge blocks of stone from rock so hard that no ordinary stone chisel would be able to cut into it? It would take lifetimes for the stones to be properly cut to fit together in the perfect manner that we find them!

What was the origin of these ancient monuments constructed by some pre-historic culture hidden beyond the mists of historic (but not Biblical) time? Sascayhauman is a mighty stone fortress built upon an artificially leveled mountain top above Cuzco. Verrill wrote that it "is as well designed and laid out as any fortress built by our modern army engineers. But to see it one would feel that it must have been made by giants. Everywhere are enormous blocks of stone weighing fifty, one hundred or even two hundred tons with many that weigh more than three hundred tons, each and every one as accurately and smoothly cut and surfaced and as perfectly fitted as are the smaller blocks forming the walls and buildings in Cuzco." (Verrill, pp.245)

Even more incredible is that to accomplish this feat, most of these stones had been quarried from 60 to 200 miles away and then brought up to the summit of the steep mountains over rough country, across rivers, and over great ravines! The largest crane in the world today would not be able to move something so massive over such distances. Even with our present state of knowledge no engineer has any good solution as to how they did it. Attempts have been made to float blocks of stone part way along the river system weighing only a fraction of the amount of the ones that were used by these ancient people, and even this was no small task. ⁽¹⁵⁾

Verrill describes some of these achievements in his classic America's Ancient Civilizations: "The most striking and remarkable features of Cuzco and other ancient Peruvian Andean cities are the stupendous, amazing walls constructed of most perfectly cut stones put together without mortar or cement, yet so accurately fitted together that even today a thin one hundredth of an inch blade cannot be inserted between them."

No two stones are alike, some weigh up to twenty tons, some are hexagonal in shape, others have twenty four and even thirty-two angles, yet the "edges of every stone are smoothly, evenly, sharply beveled or chamfered" (Verrill).

Verrill further wrote of the advanced state of stone masonry and mathematics required to have hewn and fitted these stones: "No expert modern stone mason working with the best steel tools and the most highly perfected stone-cutting machines could produce anything more accurate. Anyone at all familiar with stone working can see that each and every block must have been mathematically planned and laid out beforehand, for it manifestly would have been impossible to life the immense blocks in and out and gradually trim them to a fit."

"Moreover, in many cases the stones are cut in such shapes that they could not have been laid in position but must have been pushed into place between the adjoining stones. . . The only way in which stones could have been fitted with such incredible accuracy was by cutting each block to extremely fine measurements or by using a template, a process that would indicate advanced knowledge of engineering and the highest mathematics . . . Evidently, also the cutting of these stones and the building of the wall was neither very difficult or slow work, for they are everywhere in and about Cuzco and throughout the surrounding territory, and very often where a roughly, hastily built wall of cobbles or rubble would have served just as well." (Verrill, pp.243-244.)

Verrill asks, "How were such titanic blocks of stone brought to the top of the mountain from the quarries many miles away? How were they cut and fitted? How were their raised and put into place? No one knows, no one can even guess. There are archaeologists, scientists, who would have us believe that the dense, hard andesite rock was cut, surfaced and faced by means of stone or bronze tools. Such an explanation is so utterly preposterous that it is not even worthy of serious consideration. No one ever has found anywhere any stone tool or implement that would cut or chip the andesite, and no bronze ever made will make any impression upon it. Moreover, even were there stone hammers and picks capable of cutting the rock it would have required lifetimes, centuries, to have hewn a three hundred ton or even a fifty ton block of the stone into anything even approaching the monoliths that are there by thousands. Furthermore, every engineer, every stone mason who has examined the Cuzco stone work has declared that it would have been utterly impossible to have cut, fitted and chamfered them without using a chisel and a maul; that only by striking a chisel a sharp blow could the stones have been cut. But no one has ever found a stone chisel capable of cutting the dense hard rock. A stone chisel, even if of a material harder than the rock, would be shattered and broken when struck. Even had the ancient Peruvians possessed tools of tempered steel it would have required a vast army of expert stone masons many lifetimes to have cut and fitted the tens of thousands of the blocks that are in Cusco, alone, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of others at Ollantay, Veracocha, and elsewhere."

Verrill described the incredibly difficult task of constructing these edifices: "To quarry and cut a block of stone weighing several hundred tons and transport it across many miles of rough country, ferry it over wide rivers, and lift it to a mountain top would be a titanic undertaking even today. Railways would have to be built, immense steam cranes used and steel cables and pulleys employed. To be sure it is no great feat for a modern steamship to lift a hundred ton locomotive and swing it aboard ship, but that is simply a lifting job and adequate power and derrick booms are all that are needed. But it is quite another job to carry such a weight overland and across rivers and to the summit of a thousand foot mountain. How such feats were accomplished by the ancient Peruvian engineers no one can satisfactorily explain. If man power alone were used it would have required so many men hauling and tugging that they would have been in one another's way. And how could they have fastened the necessary thousands of ropes to a stone monolith?" And yet we find that "hundreds upon hundreds of them were transported." After the gigantic blocks were moved to the mountain top, they were cut and precisely fit with no mortar or cement so that even the "thinnest knife blade cannot be inserted between them."(pp.256-257 Verrill)

As has been stated, these walls were made of andesite, an extremely hard rock that even a diamond drill would have difficulty cutting into. Verrill conducted an experiment (Ibid., pp.245) with five Indian laborers in Panama to see how easy it would be to cut into diorite rock, much softer and easier to work with than andesite. He selected a section of a broken column in some Chocle ruins and had them work on a rough design he had drawn on the column. Although they worked from morning to night for ten days they made no noticeable impression on the column and merely succeeded in wearing out their tools.

In Verrill's day many archeologists derided the idea that there was an ancient culture before the Incas that had achieved such a high degree of technology, despite the evidence that Verrill and others had shown. "Many of the great cathedrals of Europe were hundreds of years in the building," wrote Verrill, " Hundreds of highly skilled artisans worked steadily, equipped with excellent tempered steel tools, cutting and carving, setting stones in place; living and dying with their work unfinished and leaving their sons, their grandsons and their great grandsons to carry on until, after centuries, the building was completed."

It took the Europeans over a millennia to reach the standard of culture and knowledge to achieve these vast enterprises. Verrill's response to the preposterous notions of archeologists such as Steibing, ⁽¹⁶⁾ who claim that the Incan culture had only been a few centuries old when the Spanish conquered them and that the ancient ruins in Peru only dated from a civilization that began with the Incan Emperor Manko-Kapak around 1300 A.D. was "Tommy rot!" Even at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1530 the Incas had no knowledge of when or by whom the magnificent structures were built.

Verrill mentioned that the cathedral of Notre Dame was 551 years in its construction, Rheims 200 years, Tours 380 years, Nantes 406 years, Canterbury 400 years, Worms 100 years, and St. Stephens 200 years. "Yet according to some of these modernizing archeologists the Peruvian Indians, equipped with nothing better than stone and bronze implements, erected hundreds upon hundreds of palaces, forts, walls and temples and other structures far larger, more massive and entailing fully as great a knowledge of engineering, mathematics and stone cutting as any building in Europe, all in the brief space of less than three hundred years from the time they were primitive savages dwelling in thatched huts?" (Verrill,pp.248)

Today scientists finally are forced to admit in the light of the overwhelming evidence that the Moche and Chimu cultures of Peru predated the Incan culture by hundreds, and possibly thousands of years. The Valdivian civilization in Ecuador dates back to 3000, B.C., whilethe remnants of a pre-Incan culture in Peru known as the Chimus has been unearthed, where it was discovered that they used quite a sophisticated technique for the gold leaf finishing on their ornaments, which was an electro-plating process to gild their metal sculptures with gold! ⁽¹⁷⁾

In order to accomplish this task they needed first of all an electric current and then they would have had to heat the gold to be gilded up to temperatures in the neighborhood of 1450 degrees Fahrenheit! Not only was a knowledge of producing and harnessing electrical current necessary, but a sophisticated knowledge of physics, thermodynamics, and chemistry would have been needed as well. The Chimus also preformed successful brain surgery, as evidenced by skulls that have been found with remarkably skillful incisions cut into them. One skull that had a silver plate inserted in it showed clear evidence that the patient survived the operation and lived for many years afterward, as the bone had grown around the edges of the plate. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Verrill wrote: "On the contrary, all the evidence indicates a culture or a civilization long outdating the Incan culture and far surpassing it in many respects. There are no transitional remains showing that the one merged into the other." (Verrill pp.246-248) It is apparent that the Incas inherited much of their knowledge from their remote ancestors, and these grand edifices were built by a pre-historic civilization that was by no means primitive, perhaps dating from before the Flood of Noah itself. Whatever the case, normal archeological schemes of a band of primitive hunter-gatherers migrating down into South America from the Berring Straight of Alaska and within a few generations erecting such fantastic edifices with merely a stone age knowledge and culture makes no sense whatsoever.

The old Berring Straight theory for the origin of all of the inhabitants of North and South America was actually proposed at the beginning of the eighteenth century by a Catholic monk, and this has become the standard thesis ever since, despite the fact that there are a number of racial differences between the South American Indians and Mongoloid people of Asia, the long, narrow, often Roman shape of the nose of the Incas instead of the smaller, flatter nose found among almost every oriental race being just one example. Recent tests in genetic racimisation studies have thrown this old conjecture into doubt as well.

Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institute said of the North American Indians, the supposed ancestors of the South American Indians, "The last big breakthrough occurred in the 1920's and '30's with the discovery that Paleo-Indians were here toward the close of the Ice-Age, nearly 12,000 years ago, hunting giant bison and mammoths. Now the cumulative evidence from a host of sites convinces most of us that man was here many thousands of years earlier. But so far we haven't found that unarguable site that established to everyone's satisfaction just who these people were or when they came." ⁽¹⁹⁾

The thesis that the South American Indians had developed their culture and learning within the span of a mere two or three hundred years old development from a primitive hunter-gatherer society as most archeologists have been trying to pawn off on the public for years, is utterly preposterous. The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu. It stretched from the border of modern day Ecuador to central Chile, a span equal to the distance from New York to the Panama Canal. They not only excelled in building projects, they had a highly developed science of agriculture, with an extensive irrigation system of aqueducts to water their crops, so well constructed that sections of it are still usable today. The name for the Andes Mountains came from the Spanish term andanns, which meant terraced hillsides. Their water system consisted of perfectly fitted conduits that spanned mountains and ravines. They had cultivated many varieties of cotton, maize, squash, beans, potatoes (potatoes are not native to Ireland, Europe got the potato from Peru), peppers, cacao, squash, tomatoes, several distinct varieties of peanuts, pumpkins, melons, avocados, and sweet potatoes. They had more than a few varieties of corn, black corn, field corn, sweet corn, and popcorn.

Verrill tells us that in the four hundred years since Europeans reached the shores of America even the best agriculturalists have failed to produce a single distinctive new variety of corn that was not already known to the ancient Peruvians. In fact, at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532, the Peruvians had already developed frost-proof tomatoes and potatoes, mote corn, purple insect-proof potatoes and varieties of squash.(Verrill,pp.265-266)

Verrill wrote: "To have cultivated and hybridized and developed food and other plants from the original wild forms to their highest perfected state would have required countless centuries, and to have domesticated and bred unknown wild animals to the status of llamas, Guinea pigs and dogs would have required fully as great a period of time. Yet the most ancient Peruvian people (aside from the pre-pottery coast race) possessed all of these,proving beyond all controversy that the various cultured people who we consider the most ancient were, in reality, the descendants of people who had devoted ages to the cultivation and perfection of plants and animals. No race, no matter how well equipped, no matter how industrious and intelligent, could by any remote possibility have accomplished such results in a few hundred years." ⁽²⁰⁾

The Incas and their predecessors excelled in creating marvelous textiles, as fine or better in quality than anything that has been made since. They knew of every weave that we know of today, as well as a few that were too intricate to be reproduced on modern mechanical looms. Modern shirting has roughly 60 cross threads per inch, whereas the Peruvians were able to weave 250 and as much as 500 threads into the same space. ⁽²¹⁾

They also produced prosthetic limbs for warriors wounded in battle. The Peruvians did know of the wheel, they simply never made any practical use of it, one obvious reason for this being that they did not have large, heavy draft animals such as horses or oxen available for domestication to make the use of large wagons and chariots efficient. Prior to the Spanish conquest the Incas had a federal system of government quite similar to the British parliamentary system. They had a royal emperor, but he was by no means absolutely supreme. He had a cabinet of four men whom he appointed and who had to agree with any decree that he ruled on, otherwise it would not pass into law. There was a "Supreme Court", known as the Apu-Auquis, that could revoke any law made by the Emperor. Each district had its own governor, and each village had its own mayor known as a Suyuyoc as well as a town council known as Auquis. The mayors and town officials were voted into office in regular elections by the people.

The Inca had a system of highways made of set stones that was well maintained and covered seven thousand miles, in fact it was longer than the old Roman Empire. They had state supported "rest stops" for travelers along the highway, roadside inns where grain and supplies was stored at regular intervals. They had a system of transmitting messages by mirrors during the day and by torches at night so that reports could be sent for hundreds of miles across the empire in only a matter of hours. Their remarkable highway system had suspension bridges that spanned rivers, it went over mountain passes, and in one place tunneled straight through nine hundred feet of solid rock underneath a mountain. Their water system consisted of graded and fitted stone pipes, viaducts and canals that ran for hundreds of miles. They had a sanitary system of underground stone pipes accurately graded with sluice gates to control the run-off into canals. (Verrill, pp.207)

Their High Priest was next in importance to the supreme Inca, (originally the word Inca meant the Ruler of the people, later it came to mean the entire culture), but he had to obey the laws like all the rest of the people, and the budgets for the church and state were separate. Socially there were not great distinctions among the people, with the exception of the royal household and the priesthood, every community was planned in advance, the aged and sick and orphans were taken care of, often the Inca had the poorest land, since he as Emperor was supported by the state. In 1589 Mancio Sierra wrote that when the Spaniards conquered Peru they found no thieves, liars, or lazy persons in the Empire. There were records of governors having been put to death for taking land that belonged to the people. Their mathematics were quite advanced, it had to be to administrate the taxes for such a large Empire, they could do rapid calculations on hand held rope calculators known asquipus, made of different colored, braided fibers with knots of various positions and sizeswoven into them to indicate dates and measurements. There is also an interesting Incan "abacus" used to calculate with, although it is in reality no actual abacus in the sense that we know of, it is a combination of squares laid out on a flat table with a possible base five system to count with (this is based on my own conclusions and subject to change with more research).

I have a copy of one of these interesting devices, and am quite convinced that when once mastered it could rival a pocket calculator.

The fact is, the Incan Empire survived for more than five hundred years without serious problems, a remarkable reign among world powers. Prescott's classic History of the Conquest of Peru (1848) is among the better sources for information on the Incan Empire, as well as Verrill's excellent work. ⁽²²⁾

Even though the Incan Empire had expanded greatly in geographic terms prior to the Spanish conquest, this did not necessarily mean that there was a corresponding cultural development. Like the old Roman Empire that had inherited much of its' culture from the earlier Greeks, who in turn owed much of their civilization to the earlier Aegean, Minoan, and Middle Eastern civilizations, this "Rome of the New World" inherited much of their knowledge from their forbearers, imposing the Law of the Inca on their conquered neighbors much as the Pax Romana was maintained throughout the Empire of Rome, thus what was thought to have been a development was actually a legacy from a former age.

Another monument in stone giving testimony to the fact that these inhabitants of the New World were the inheritors of a grand culture passed down from the vanished civilization of their ancestors would be the ruins of Tiahuanaco that sit high up in the Andes mountains of South America near Lake Titicaca, just over the border of Peru in Bolivia. At 13,500 feet above sea level it is much too high an altitude and location for any normal commercial center to prosper. Nearly any city in ancient and modern times needed to be built near the sea or a river system, or where a trade route would conveniently pass near it, and Tiahuanaco is obviously not situated close to any ocean or large river system, yet it has ancient docks and quays, indicating that it was once a seaport, which runs counter to modern geological, and paleological formulas, since it is traditionally believed that the mountains were raised millions of years before man arrived on the earth.

The Incas had no idea who the people were that built the immense structures at Tiahuanaco either. The stone steps alone at the "Temple of the Sun" weighed forty to fifty tons each. At the western edge of the Temple of the Sun is the great Gateway of the Sun, a massive structure with intricate carvings made out of andesite. Many of the stone slabs weigh from one hundred to two hundred tons , while blocks of stone fifty to one hundred tons are strewn about everywhere.

Brazilian Professor Arthur Posnansky devoted nearly fifty years to the study of the ruins of Tiahuanaco and determined that it was part of an amazing astronomical arrangement for finding the solstices and months of the year. So accurately were these built that "careful measurements with micrometer gauges and other modern instruments showed that nowhere was there a variation of more than one fiftieth of an inch from true while the straight edges of the carvings showed no unevenness when a steel rule was placed upon them." (Verrill, pp.207)

They did not work by guesswork, since levels and plumbs used for measuring were found near the ruins, but no single tool has ever been found that could have been employed for the cutting of these monuments.

From 1926 through 1940 engineers, astronomers, and mathematicians worked on the ancient astronomical alignments of the huge buildings and calculated the amount that the earth had changed on its axis since they were built, determining that the ruins dated back to roughly 10,000 years B.C.! The extreme age of this is confirmed by fossilized human skulls discovered there that are in the museum at La Paz.

Evolutionists have no method to date these ruins, as we have seen from Gowlett sites that are less than 300,000 years old are too young to date by potassium-argon and uranium lead methods, the other method used to measure ancient human settlements (besides stone tools) is Carbon-14, which is extremely inaccurate.

The only explanation for these cultures and for the tremendous monolithic building projects found all over the world is that there was once a highly advanced civilization that had technical skills far beyond anything that we have any knowledge of today who produced these monuments, a remnant civilization left over from before the Flood of Noah itself. It is interesting that the name Tiahuanaco in the Incan language means "The Place of the Dead," or "The Place of Those Who Were."

Verrill wrote, "For some unknown reason the city (Tiahuanaco) was abandoned before the greatest buildings had been completed. Everything was halted. All work stopped and Tiahuanaco was deserted. . . .What great catastrophe, what threat, what cataclysm caused this no one knows." (Verrill, pp.208). Indeed, what could have thrown these colossal stones around like pebbles, as they were found strewn about the area, in many places a few yards from their original position.

After the Spaniards conquered Peru, they attempted to pull down the remaining blocks of stone from the ancient ruins at Cuzco but were unsuccessful, so they built their churches on top of them. Noted author and science writer Jonathan Leonard wrote of the Incan architecture: "For their finest work they shaped, finished, and fitted massive blocks with such amazing accuracy that the joint between any two of them can be seen as a hairline but cannot be felt with a fingertip." ⁽²³⁾

The great earthquake of 1950 destroyed many of the Spanish structures that had been standing in Cuzco since the time of the colonization, but it had little or no effect on the Incan foundations underneath that these later edifices had been built on. Could they have been originally raised up with the Andes after the time of the Flood?

The entire region of Central and South America is actually full of amazing building projects and sites that testify to an ancient, sophisticated culture, much more advanced and older than traditional archeology would like to admit, although slowly, as more and more evidence is uncovered, the fact becomes undeniable. The origins of the Zapotec of Central America civilization are shrouded in mystery. The Zapotecs had an advanced level of agriculture, astronomical science, mathematics and architecture from their earliest existence, with no signs of having developed them from a more primitive culture, and no record of migration from neighboring societies (William R. Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts).
In the mountains close to Monte Alban in Central America, old ruins were discovered where an entire mountain had been leveled off to form a plain for the Zapotecs to build their city on (Verrill pp.72).

Verrill wrote: "It was the most stupendous, most remarkable feat of engineering ever accomplished by any pre-Columbian race in the New World. Building air strips on tropical islands or on the roughest terrain is child's play by comparison. Even today it would be a tremendous undertaking; with power driven drills, high explosives, bulldozers and drag-lines and all of our modern up-to-date mechanical devices and resources it would take years to accomplish the feat."

Again, the Zapotecs had no wagons, carts, or heavy draft animals.

Verrill asked, "Can anyone actually believe, as archaeologists claim, that the colossal work was accomplished with crude stone implements and that the broken rock was transported in baskets carried on human heads? No one with an atom of common sense and a smattering of knowledge of engineering problems can actually believe that the ancient Zapotecs cut away hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, filled yawning ravines and deep fissures with rubble, leveled an area hundreds of acres in extent and built huge, imposing structures all with no knowledge of steel tools, no explosives, no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden . . . Centuries, tens of centuries would have passed . . . far antedating any indications of highly cultured races now found in Mexico."

The ancient Mayan civilization in the Yucatan peninsula had a positional numbering system that was even more precise than our own modern system. When the Europeans and Romans were still using a primitive system of letters to represent numerical value the Mayan mathematicians already had the concept of zero, over 1,000 years before the Europeans learned it from the middle east and India. Not only were the Mayans quite advanced in their mathematics, they had a calender that was more accurate than our own; they had also calculated the solar year for the earth at 365.2420 days while today we have only narrowed it down to 365.2422 days.

Modern scholars are still wondering how the Mayans had the moon's orbit calculated to 53,059/100,000 of a day, since they had no fractions (or clocks)! They calculated that there were 405 full moons in every 11,960 days: today's astronomers calculate it to be 405 full moons every 11,959.888 days, thus the Mayans were off in their calculations one day for every 292 years, or five minutes every year. They calculated the year for the planet Venus at 584 days, while current astronomers calculate it at 583.92 days, thus the Mayans had a margin of error of 12 seconds per day, yet their calender went back at least 400 million years! ⁽²⁴⁾ Their history begins at roughly the same time as Egyptian history, 3113 B.C., right after the Bible says the Flood occurred,

Scientists have no idea how they arrived at such accurate measurements, since as far as we have been able to determine they had no modern methods to measure time with; no telescopes, no clocks, no hourglasses, no other technical instruments. ⁽²⁵⁾

"Unquestionably the Mayan written or sculptured language was their greatest achievement," wrote Verrill. "In fact, in the opinions of many, it was the greatest achievement of any race either ancient or modern. It must have been developed at a very ancient date and appears to have sprung into use perfected for there are no known truly archaic or evolutionary forms of the inscriptions. (Verrill, pp.41) This would indicate a previous greatly advanced civilization that lay beyond the veil of time, that left their arts and sciences as an inheritance to the Mayans. That civilization was the heritage left from before the Flood of Noah.

Although the Mayans had a most advanced system of writing when the Spanish discovered them, even at that time their culture was in a state of decadence, showing that their civilization was not a development, but a legacy inherited from their more advanced ancestors.
The Spanish found volumes of writings and books that had been handed down from days of former glory, but most of Mayan science and knowledge has been lost forever. Bishop Diego de Landa described first hand what the Spanish priests did when they found these ancient Mayan texts:: "These people also made use of certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books their ancient affairs and their sciences, and with these and drawings and with certain signs in these drawings, they understood their affairs and made others understand them and taught them. We found a great number of books in these characters, and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and caused them much sorrow."

The ancient, deserted city of Tiotihuacan sits roughly 30 miles Northeast of Mexico City. Nobody knows who built it. Nobody really knows when it was built, except from speculation. The Aztecs called it the "City of the Gods," and for good reason. It is at least two thousand years old and was larger than Imperial Rome, with the Pyramid of the Sun looming over the rest of the city, a structure as large at it's base as the great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. From out of nowhere it sprang up in Central American pre-history, this city of ten square miles, each avenue and building perfectly laid out in a grid pattern 15 by 30 degrees east of astronomical north.

Near the center of the City is the great Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The Sun Pyramid is enormous, with a volume of 1,296,000 cubic yards. It is architecturally perfect in it's measurements, as is the Moon Pyramid, and the Great Compound complex in the center of the City. The Sun Pyramid and surrounding living quarters were built on a huge underlying platform 300 yards wide x 395 yards long. The entire city was built on a preconceived plan, which required an incredibly advanced amount of social, economic, and architectural achievement to have accomplished such a task. The city was surrounded by miles of suburbs, and they also ran according to the same plan, even houses built off in the surrounding hills were oriented to the same 15.5 degree North/South direction.

No modern archeological scheme has any notion as to who the people were that constructed it or where they went afterward, the culture disappeared as the builders just as mysteriously vanished into time. How could this great city have been built by a wandering tribe of ragged, hunter-gatherers chipping flint to make hand-axes with?

The origin of the Aztec culture is likewise shrouded in mystery. Of the Aztec kingdom of central Mexico, Jacques Soustelle wrote: " . . . the Mexica, or Aztecs, as they were sometimes called in memory of Aztlan, the mythical starting-point of their wandering, never thought of themselves as anything but the heirs of the brilliant civilization that had preceded them." ⁽²⁶⁾

When the Spaniards under Cortez first laid eyes on the cities of the mighty Aztec Empire they were amazed at the advanced architecture and well ordered economy that they came upon. At the great Market place of Tlatelolco they found a thriving, open air market where the populace bartered for jaguar skins, tanned puma, deer and fox skins piled up and ready for sale, falcon and eagle feathers, cacao, innumerable vegetables and herbs, onions, peppers, beans, maize, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, hares, all types of fruit and potatoes, salt, syrup, honey, frog legs, fish, shell fish, housewares, dishes, vases, copper axes, planks and beams of lumber for building, shoes, shirts, skirts, hats, cosmetics, jewelry, torches, firewood, charcoal, dyes and ink, paper made out of bark, bamboo pipes, chairs, stoves, medicines, and ointments. There were barber shops, there were indoor and outdoor restaurants where tortillas and tamales stuffed with pimentos, beans and meat were sold to the busy shoppers, as well as deserts made of honey and maize cakes. There were even security guards known as tianquizpan tlayacaque walking through the crowd to patrol the busy multitude. ⁽²⁷⁾

Cortez and his small band of less than four hundred soldiers at first could not believe their eyes when looking down on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan; they marveled at the beauty and orderliness of this great city of perhaps five hundred thousand to one million people.
Canals ran in among the streets of the city; everywhere small curved bridges arched over the waterways to allow transit on both land and water. Houses with terraced flower gardens and trees were everywhere; parks and meeting houses; temples and the great pyramids. Cortez announced to Charles V of Spain that it surpassed in orderliness, beauty and grandeur any city of Europe at that time, and yet archeologists tell us that it had come from a culture less than two hundred years old, while the cities of Europe had been around for many centuries and were built on the cultural foundations of the Greek and Roman civilizations of many thousands of years past. ⁽²⁸⁾

Although the Aztecs believed in the inexorable law of a universe controlled by cosmic influences, to such an extent that a child's birthdate could determine his character, his family life, and even his probable state in the after life, they also believed that this did not entirely interfere with his free will, but that it merely influenced the type of personality he would have. Though his tendencies toward certain character traits were affected by the time and date of his birth, through fasting, prayers, and abstinence a man could overcome an evil or weak  disposition.

It is also notable that the Aztecs had a public education system that included every child, no matter how poor the family he had been born into. The children were homeschooled until the age of fifteen, although some were enrolled in public schools at the age when they could walk. At any rate, there were two schools that the children had the choice of going to after the age of fifteen. The first was a monastary run by celibate priests who stood vigils during the night, bathed in cold mountain streams during winter, and spent much of their time in prayer and fasting as good examples for their charges. This school, known as a calmecac, was for those designated by inclination or birth to be nobles and officials of state. Actually, a child of even the lowest rank and from the poorest family in Aztec society could enter it if he was worthy enough. The school was extremely rigorous, it could be compared to a modern day military academy.

The students spent much of their time fasting, in penance, and working the land, as well as being instructed in the sciences while being sternly reminded of their duties required of them as future public officials. Soustelle wrote: "The whole emphasis of this education was on sacrifice and abnegation. . . Above all it was a school of self control and firmness towards oneself."(Soustelle, pp.170) Soustelle quotes from Father Bernadino de Sahagun's Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, on a father's advise to his son about to enter one of these schools: "'Listen my son,'said a father to a boy about to enter a calmacac, 'you are going to be looked down upon, humiliated and despised. Every day you will cut agave-thorns (on your skin) for penance, and you will draw blood from your body with these spines and you will bathe at night even when it is cold . . .Harden your body to the cold . . .and when the time comes for fasting do not go and break your fast, but put a good face upon both fasting and penance." Soustelle, pp.170, from Father Bernadino de Sahagun, Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, (Mexico, Pedro Robredo Pub., 1938, Vol.ll, pp.222

The other type of school was called a telpochcalli, and was much less strict than thecalmecac schools. These were in the line of trade schools, the discipline was nowhere near as rigorous, the boys were permitted much more of a social life, although even a graduate of one of these schools had the opportunity of rising to the highest position in Aztec society if he applied himself. Girls were consecrated to the temples at an early age, and taught various arts and crafts by aged priestesses much like the Catholic nuns who run many parochial schools. They lived chaste lives there until they were married.

Women had a highly honored place in Aztec society, the royal line of the Aztecs was originally established by a woman in the lineage of Quetzalcoatl. At Tula a woman had once held supreme power. Even a man of humble origin could become a head of state by marrying a woman of royal blood. note: A peasant became a governer of a province after his marriage to a royal daughter of Itzcaotl. Chimalpahin Qauhtlehuanitzin, (Domingo Francisco de San Anton Munon, Anals, Paris, 1889, pp.108.)

Darwin believed that so-called primitive people such as the Indians of Central and South America (Darwin mentioned them often as "savages" in his Descent of Man) did not hold the institution of marriage in very high esteem: "What ancient nation, as the same author asks, can be named that was originally monogomous?" (Descent, pp.329)
However we find that many nations had a high concept of marriage, the marriage of an Aztec man and woman was accompanied with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, and the new bride and groom spent the first four nights of their honeymoon in prayer before they consumated the marriage. It was only on the fifth day, after they were blessed by a priest, that they entered into a conjugal relationship. Before the marriage, the young man and woman were instructed on all the duties of married life, and the importance of being responsible, faithful, and caring for each other.

Soustelle wrote:"The Mexicans had a lofty conception of public service and of the authority that went with it: the greatest lord was bound to obey the orders of a simple messanger bearing the commands of a court of law. But at the same time the laws and customs were terribly severe: woe to the drunken judge, the over-accomodating judge; woe to the dishonest civil servant. The sentence of the king of Texcoco was always quoted as an example-he, hearing that one of his judges had favoured a noble against a maceualli (person of humble rank), had the unrighteous judge hanged. If the power was very great, the duties were very great."

The higher a man rose in rank, the less time he had for himself. (Soustelle, pp.142.)

The Aztecs vision of the Emperor's role very closely resembled the classic Greek and Chinese ideas of the benevolent Philosopher-King looking over his people as a father did his children, reminding one of the Biblical prophecies of the future David, the beloved of the Lord who will shepherd his people.

In comparison with the corrupt, greedy, and licentious Kings and heads of state in Europe reigning at that time, Soustelle informs us: "All the contemporary documents strongly emphasise this aspect of the ruler as protector. The pattern depends upon him; and in order that this pattern may be good, humane and in conformity with the needs of the people, the emperor must control his passions-they left him in no doubt upon this point on the day of his election . . .It was the sovereign who was to be the first to obey this law of moderation, and to subdue his passions, for everything depended upon him. The enlightened despot was the ideal of the time, the philosopher-emperor able to command himself in order to govern for the good of all." (Soustelle, pp.226-227.)

Father Sahagun wrote of the instructions given to the King in public speeches when he assumed the reigns of head of state: "Lord, now you shall bear the responsibility and care of this nation. The weight of the government will be born on your back. Our god has set the task of governing the people on your shoulders, in your lap and in your arms . . .You oh lord shall carry this nation and nurture it for many years as though it was a child in a cradle . . . Understand lord that from this time henceforth you shall walk along a high and narrow path with great precipices on both your right and your left . . .Show meekness in using your authority . . .Do not speak nor act rashly . . .listen to both those who bring you grievances and to those who speak peacefully . . .be fair to all and punish no one unjustly . . .do nothing in haste or anger . . .Speak not in anger to any person, nor frighten one in your wrath, lest you be despised . . .may your heart be as the heart of an ancient one, strong and immoveable . . .give not your strength over to women . . .your position (icpalli) is not for idle pleasures nor selfish indulgence, much the rather it is one of great responsibility, sadness and penance." (Sahagun, Vol.ll, pp.83-92.)

This type of lofty ideal in government service with its exalted notions of human society were far beyond the brutal, unsophisticated ken of Darwin and his band of evolutionists who have misled us for more then a century in their rather crude notions of the development of human culture.

Aztec tradition relates many tales of the good King Nezaualcoyotl, by all accounts a historic personage, who shared items from the royal household for those who were poor, aged and sick, and for those wounded in war. Soustelle wrote: "The speeches exchanged between the newly-elected emperor and the chiefs, and his address to the people give an idea of the Mexican conception of the sovereign dignity. He had undoubtedly been chosen by the magnates, but the official theory was that he was chosen by the gods, especialy by Texcatlipoca, he who sees all in his magic mirror; and therefore his first duties were towards them . . .His remaining duties were towards the people: he was traditionally known as 'the father and mother' of the Mexicans. He owed them justice, and he was to struggle for them against famine, so that they might have 'an abundance of the fruits of the earth.' The fundamental ideas of the Aztec monarchy, as they show through the sterotyped official formulae, are not without dignity; there is a sense of the public good, and the feeling of a real unity between the rulers and the ruled. Furthermore, everything goes to show that the emperors took their duties seriously. Reign after reign, they are to be found in the traditional histories zealous not only in increasing the empire and building temples but also in coming to the help of the unfortunate-there is Motecuhsoma l, for example, distributing food and clothing to the entire population, or Auitzotl sharing out 200,000 loads of maize among the victims of the Flood."(Soustelle, pp.90.)

Soustelle (pp.83-84) also tells us that the Aztecs were not unfairly taxed, that there was a system in place to insure that no one was unfavorably burdened. In addition, they had a state pension plan to provide for the elderly. This system of government was remarkable, and shows a greatly advanced civilization with roots dating back far beyond a mere couple of hundred years that modern archeologists tell us it had existed. And yet, where did they attain such a high degree of culture and knowledge from?

Hammond Innes wrote: "From this brief summary of the origins and background of the Aztecs it will be seen that-extraordinary though their race was-they were not the creators of the advanced civilization that the conquistadors found at Tenochtitlan. They inherited it, and there is no evidence that they contributed very much to that inheritance (Innes, pp.96).

I do not wish to entertain the current popularized notion though, as has been the vogue with recent writers, that the Indians in Central and South America lived in some sort of idealized tropical paradise, free from want and disease, and that Europeans were totally bent on brutally enslaving them and were responsible for all of their present ills. The Inca, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations, as has been noted, were not in a state of ascendancy. Many of their common, everyday social customs were hideously barbaric, while surrounded by decadent reminders of the achievements of their forebears.

With all of their cultural development, they were sunk in the deepest levels of depravity in the way that they practiced their religion, while many of their cultural institutions gave little evidence of any type of recent philosophical, theological, or scientific advancements immediately prior to the Conquest by the Spanish in the early Sixteenth Century. This contradiction, of a highly advanced culture existing side-by-side with the basest of social and ethnic practices, with various tribes of Indians taking others captives for use in their cannibalistic orgies and ritual human sacrifices, reminds one of the book Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of young boys stranded on an island without the benefitting constraints of the religious and moral cultural values in civilization to guide them, and they soon reverted to savagery.

Thus it would seem that instead of the culture of Meso-America being on the ascendance when the Spanish arrived, they were actually in a decline, while still preserving the knowledge and culture of a previous civilization that we have no knowledge of, a civilization that began after the Flood of Noah, and whose founders preserved the knowledge of a highly advanced people who lived on earth before the flood itself.

As evidence of this, we see that the various tribes were in a perpetual state of warfare with one another, and the "tax" that the Aztecs put on conquered neighbors was typically an annual tribute of victims to be sacrificed on their bloody alters, often numbering in the thousands.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1492-1581?), a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortez during the conquest of Mexico, wrote in his Verdadera historia de la conquista de la New Espana, "Everywhere in the villages through which we passed between Veracruz and Mexico, there were temples and oratories where human sacrifice had taken place; there were as many of them as there are churches and chapels in Castile . . .There was no banquet that did not call for human flesh."

It has recently been found that even the Peruvian Incas, considered to be comparatively mild in regard to the barbaric practice of cult sacrifice, conducted human sacrifices more often than had previously been thought. When a new Sapa Inca (Emperor) was chosen, as many as 200 children might be sacrificed to appease the gods and ensure a long and prosperous reign. The children were well fed before being sacrificed so that they would not enter into the gods presence crying and hungry. Sacrifices were also conducted during times of famine, disease, or when a military victory was desired. The victims for the sacrifice again, often were chosen from conquered, neighboring tribes as a regular tribute for the bloody deities the Incas worshiped. That these victims were not voluntary offerings is evident from frescos that have survived showing those chosen to be sacrificed chained up in preparation for the event.

When Columbus first came to the New World, he found the dominant tribe in the Carribean, known as the Caribs, eating their enemies, and they commonly castrated any rival male members of surrounding tribes. The best sources that we have indicate that human sacrifice was a comparatively recent historical development among most of these people; the earlier we go back in time the less evidence we find that this bloody rite was practiced in the very beginning of their culture, again showing a gradual decline in civilization, with a gradual degeneration from the original lofty notion of one Supreme, Invisible God who had created all things, into a form of polytheism and spirit worship, where the cultic practice of human sacrifice took place in an attempt to appease various lesser deities.
The Aztec and Inca idols were encrusted by the blood of their sacrifices, and the priests often practicing a form of "channelling" in their roles as sorcerers and mediums, using drugs to practice their divination. Instead of worshiping the one God as perhaps their ancestors, the children of Noah, had done, they became obsessed with searching for guidance from astrology, spirits and oracles.

Englebert give us a rather gruesome depiction of what these first missionaries and soldiers came up against when they marched into the Aztec Empire: "Everywhere, too, Cortez and his soldiers noticed large cages, made of rows of stakes, in which young men and girls were awaiting the day of their immolation. They were well fed; they were given hot baths; care was taken, by providing them with mates, that the vexation of continence should not hinder their fattening process. The richer a landowner was, the more cages he had near his house. In the town of Cholula, where an ambush had been prepared, the invaders saw the urns that were awaiting them, as well as the salt, garlic, and tomatoes that would be used in cooking them."

"They were completely enlightened when, compelled to show them his gods, Montezuma led them to the great pyramid of Mexico. It rose above the sacred citadel where, under the direction of the high priest, five thousand priests, officiating priestly helpers, and young clerics exercised their sacred functions. The visitors climbed the 114 steps that led to the sanctuary of Vichilobos, god of war, and of Tezcatepuca, goddess of the moon."

"There, at the top, was the slaughterhouse."

"Above the slightly convex tables of stone, and upon the men bent double who serve as alters, in the midst of dances and choruses of joy, the priest with his long hair and his wide-sweeping black robe is at work. Assisted by the men who are holding the victim in position, he lays the chest open with one great stroke of his obsidian knife, snatches out the heart, presents it, palpitating, to Vichilobos, then throws it on the brazier where the incense burns. He smears with the blood the snout of the god, sprinkles with blood the walls of the sanctuary, wipes his bloody hands on his robe and runs them through his hair; then he begins again, while the victims roll over and over to the bottom of the great stairway, to be carved up by his colleagues. The thighs and other choice parts are set aside for the devout public, the entrails for the snakes, jackals, and other sacred animals; the denuded skulls are hung in festoons on poles. A cave has been discovered which contained 135,000 of them."

"The slaughter is never interrupted, for Vichilobos is insatiable, and the same is true of his neighbor Tezcatepuca, and likewise of the other divinities of the great temple, the smaller temples, and the private oratories. On festival days-and the Aztec calender is full of them-it is by hundreds and by thousands that the victims are butchered. In 1487, at the time of the dedication of the new temple, the human sacrifices numbered, some say [by the Aztecs own accounts] 72,344, others say 80,400, the most moderate estimate is 20,000-and this in four days. In ordinary times, it is enough to offer from twenty to forty thousand victims in a year. When there is a plethora of fresh meat, it is cut into thin strips that are dried for preserving." ⁽²⁹⁾

The Spanish soldiers were so horrified at these practices that they insisted that the Indian women be baptized by Father Olmedo before they had carnal relations with them, for fear of touching people possessed of the devil.

Another explanation offered at that time by some of the Spanish for the Indians bloodthirsty behavior was rather like an early evolutionary theory. Some of the Spaniards thought that the Aztecs could not be fully human, since rational man would never have practiced such gory rites and cannibalism on such a large scale. This idea was vigorously opposed by the Franciscans, who saw them as fully human, created in the image of God, and worthy of the saving message of the gospel, and who fought valiantly for the rights of the Indians, while working to improve their educational and social status from the time of the conquest on down to the present day.

Pope Paul lll sided with the Franciscans in his Veritas ipsa and Sublimis Deus, written in June of 1537, where he refuted the view of the Indians as mere animals without immortal souls (an early evolutionary view?), and encouraged evangelization and missionary work among the Priests.

The Pope wrote: "There are certain ones who claim that the Indians, not being qualified to receive the Faith, are meant to be at the service of man like domestic animals. This doctrine comes from the devil, who makes use of it to salve the conscience of those who want to enrich themselves at any cost. As Our Lord, in sending forth His apostles, directed them to teach and baptize all nations, the truth is that there is no people on earth which has not the right of keeping its own goods, and which is not called to salvation."

With this correct view as Indians being fellow brothers created by the same God, in His image, and possessing the same noble spark of divine dignity in virtue of this, the friars set about the monumental task of instructing the Indians in the Faith, and met with much success in seeing them turn from their bloodthirsty, cannibalistic rites to faith in Christ. As early as June, 1529, Father Pedro reported that they had built more than one hundred churches, and in 1531 Zumarrraga wrote to King Charles V: "More than twenty thousand idols have been destroyed." (Englebert, pp.33)

Englebert reported: "Now that the question of the nature and predestination of the Indians had been settled, it was for those among the men in Mexico who had taken the vows of religion to devote themselves to making Christians of them. . .Temples, pyramids, sculptures, images-all that recalled the idolatrous past-disappeared. The Indians were instructed and baptized by hundreds of thousands. As early as 1559 the Franciscans, who numbered 380, possessed eighty foundations; the Augustinians, who numbered 212, had forty: and the Dominicans, who numbered 210, had forty also."

What a wonderful testament to the power of the Gospel to turn men from darkness to light, and what a contrast to Darwin's opinion that the Indians of South and Central America were of less worth than cattle. Darwin expressed his confident hope that the more "civilized" races of men, and by this he meant the European races, would, through the process of evolution, replace and exterminate the less civilized races, and with their extinction evolution would be advanced. Were it not for the saving influence of the Gospel, what greater slaughter might have taken place in our history had not men of God been there to take up the mantle in defense of these Indians when the European culture reached their shores.

It should be obvious to any observer that these most ancient civilizations both in the Old World and in the New, were not beginnings, but were merely the remnants of a former, lost, world wide civilization enormously advanced scientifically and culturally. Darwin, writing in his Descent, classified men either as "savages" or as "civilized", and he indicated his belief that the wonderful Indians of South America, the descendants of the architects of these great cultures, were savages barely within the same species of man as modern Europeans, in fact he even said that he would rather be related to monkeys than to one of those "savages". He also expressed his racist belief that eventually these "savages", during the course of evolution, would eventually become extinct as more progressive, civilized nations superseded them. (Descent, pp.597, Benton)

A curious collection of maps, many of them thousands of years old, yet detailing accurate geographic features of North and South America and Antarctica, are yet another inexplicable set of relics that modern evolutionists and paleoarcheologists cannot possibly explain. Land not known until it was re-discovered fairly recently in our own time of history, has been demonstrated to have been charted by people who had knowledge of the world at a period when, by traditional standards, it should have been impossible for them to have acquired this information.

In museums around the world are ancient Chinese maps, many of them maps of the entire world, even detailing the continent of North America, yet charted thousands of years before Columbus. Evolutionists have no explanation for any of this.

We shall look at the 1513 Piri Re'is map of the world. Piri Re'is was a Turkish sea captain with a collection of ancient maps of the earth, some of them so old that they were painted on antelope skin. His real name was Ahmet Muhiddin. He was born in the town of Karaman, near Konya, Turkey, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. His father had been a former pirate who became a notable officer of the Ottoman fleet of Sultan Beyazit ll (1481-1512), and his uncle was the famous Kemal Reis. He sailed under Barbarossa, and eventually became the Commander in Chief of the Fleet of Egypt under the Ottoman Sultan in 1551. Unfortunately, the Governer of Egypt was one of his political enemies, and fraudulently reported that Reis had made off with some of the treasure from a war campaign for himself, and when the Sultan recieved news of this he was in a bad frame of mind toward his Admiral, so he had Reis beheaded in 1554. ⁽³⁰⁾

The Piri Reis map was actually a compilation of other, earlier maps by Reis'own hand, he stated that he made it from twenty older charts and eight Mappa Mundis (Maps of the World), some of which came from the time of Alexander the Great. One of the maps was possibly re-drawn by Columbus, although with some inaccuracies. Many of these maps charted the New World before it had been extensively explored by Europeans. The Amazon River was incorrectly identified on the Piri Reis map as two rivers instead of one, yet the maps still took into account the spherical shape of the world, since on the outer edge of the maps they represent the continents receding from view with a circular face for the earth.

As evidence that these maps were copied from far older source maps, they also had very accurate longitudinal degrees, a feat far beyond the abilities of anyone in the sixteenth century, from whence many of the maps date from. Most other maps made during the late middle ages were far inferior to these copies of ancient maps. The ability to correctly chart longitudinal degrees on maps was not re-accomplished in modern history until the invention of the chronometer in the eighteenth century; the geometry necessary for this accomplishment was not even possessed by most middle age cartographers, even most ancient Greek maps had crude, primitive longitudinal measurements.

These ancient maps were found in 1929 in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul after the hasty departure of the last Turkish Sultan. In 1956 a Turkish naval officer brought a copy of the Piri Reis map as a gift to the U.S. Hydrographic Office, and from there it was brought to Captain A.H. Mallory U.S.N.T., who happened to be an accomplished engineer, navigator, and archeologist. Mallory was fascinated by these maps and became convinced that the Piri Reis map and others represented areas of Antarctica now covered by thousands of feet of ice. These maps eventually were brought to the attention of Professor Charles Hapgood, F.R.G.S., and his students at Keene College, New Hampshire. Even with some discrepancies, the depiction of the coastlines and mountain ranges of Antarctica as far back as 1532 in the Oranteus Finaeus map indicates the existence of an ancient culture with an extraordinary knowledge of the earth's geography from a time before the ice covered the Antarctic Continent!.

Thus these maps had to have been copied from more ancient sources, as they even had details of certain parts of the coastlines of North and South America and accurate details of the mountains and coastline of Antarctica that have been under miles of ice for thousands of years. Explorers had not yet charted these areas during the age of Exploration, yet at the time these maps existed they contained detailed features of Antarctica that were not yet known since the modern science of sonar and radar in the twentieth century had not yet been perfected to detect what the land formations underneath the ice looked like, and Antarctica itself had not been discovered for another two centuries!

The Hadji Ahmed map of 1559, copied from ancient (presumably Greek) maps of the world showed a detailed version of the then uncharted western coastline of the North American before explorers and cartographers had surveyed them. It was even drawn more accurately than the maps of the more familiar east coast then being primitively charted by early Spanish, English and Portugese explorers. It showed the Berring Straight connecting Alaska and Russia, a land feature that geologists say existed thousands of years ago but was non existenct by the time of the middle ages.

Map-makers during the Age of Exploration admitted that they used some of these ancient maps to make their own inferior copies with. Some of the maps had accurate pictures of thebottom of the Atlantic ocean back in the 1700's, but where did they get their information from? The Piri Reis map shows the Sahara Desert with a river system. We know from sonar readings, fossil evidence and space photographs that reveal the underlying topography of the region that one once existed there thousands of years ago, but how did these people who made the map know, if it was only as old as the fifteenth or sixteenth century? Other maps show coastlines and glaciers over parts of Europe that would be correct were they drawn many thousands of years ago. Iehudi ben Zara made a map in 1487 in Alexandria that showed accurate profi