Lost Civilisation Discovered

A senior Indian official reported today (January 16, 2002) the discovery of submerged ruins at a depth of 40 metres in the Gulf of Cambay, off the coast of Gujurat in northern India.

The Cambay discovery was made about a year ago by India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). Graham Hancock, photographer Santha Faiia and a Channel Four film crew accompanied the NIOT on their most recent expedition as part of Hancock’s forthcoming book and television series Underworld, which is scheduled for publication and broadcast in early February (see our Bookshop section). Unfortunately, the extreme tidal currents in Gulf of Cambay have so far prevented any attempt to capture underwater footage of the structures themselves. Instead, the ruins have been investigated through high-resolution sonar scans and through the recovery of around 2,000 artifacts from the site, including pottery, beads, broken pieces of sculpture, a fossilised jaw bone and human teeth.

The sonar scans have so far revealed that the Gulf of Cambay actually holds two cities beneath its waters, both situated beside ancient river courses. One of the cities extends for at least nine kilometers along the ancient riverbed, and at least two kilometers away from it, giving a minimum surface area of 18 square kilometers. The outer limits of the city have not yet been found, and further investigation may well reveal that the city is even larger than this. There are remains of a dam more than 600 metres long across on one of the ancient river courses. The scans have also revealed that the cities consist of numerous rectangular buildings with foundations that have been sturdy enough to survive thousands of years of pounding by the violent tidal currents. The NIOT have produced density analyses of the foundations compared with the silt between them, which suggest that the foundations are built of a uniform substance of great density – probably stone blocks.

Initially, those archaeologists who chose not to dismiss the submerged city as a hallucination assumed it belonged to the Harappan Civilisation, which flourished in Pakistan and northern India between around 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. However, Graham Hancock has pointed out that geological models of sea-level rise strongly suggest the site is much older than that. Geologist Glenn Milne at the University of Durham believes that the site was probably submerged at the very end of the last Ice Age between 7,700 and 6,900 years ago – pushing the date of the city well back into the prehistoric era.

Glenn Milne’s estimates were recently confirmed by radiocarbon dates achieved by two Indian laboratories from a piece of wood recovered from a shallow layer of the site. One laboratory dated the piece of wood to 6,500BC, and another dated it to 7,500BC. The NIOT hope to obtain datable material from deeper layers of the site on a future expedition, and this may well push back the age of the submerged city even further.

These dates, combined with the astonishing size and complexity of the city, effectively disprove the orthodox view of the origins of civilisation, which holds that civilisation first began with the Sumerians around 3,100BC. The Near East, which is regarded by archaeologists as the first cradle of civilisation, has nothing to rival this lost prehistoric civilisation. The submerged city of Cambay is at least 150 times larger than the largest Near Eastern settlements of 7,500BC, such as the village of Catalhoyuk in Anatolia. If farming is considered to be a necessary precursor for civilisation, then orthodox models of the origins and spread of agriculture may also have to be re-written.

The beginning of history will itself have to be pushed back at least 4,000 years, because the Cambay cities have already yielded evidence of writing. A piece of stone has been recovered with an unknown scipt engraved on it in a circular pattern. Some of the characters in the script look rather similar to characters that appeared in the Harappan script which appeared 4,000 later and which still remains undeciphered.

Graham Hancock has long argued that conventional views of the origins of civilisation are wrong and that we should pay more attention to ancient flood legends from around the world. In Underworld he points out that while the Cambay discovery will be a shock to Western archaeology, it is unlikely to come as a great surprise to the people of India. The ancient Vedic texts, which are at the heart of Hindu religion, already tell of an early civilisation of great sophistication that was submerged beneath the sea at the end of the last Ice Age.

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The Times of India have a short on-line article about this amazing discovery, which can be reached by following the link below...