Voyages of the Pyramid Builders by Robert Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Penguin Putnam/Tarcher, $24.95, ISBN 1585422037 Reviewed by Peter James
IN THE early 1990s geologist Robert Schoch invaded the limelight with a sensational claim about the Sphinx. In his view the monument’s heavy erosion shows that it was carved millennia earlier than the accepted date of about 2500 BC. Voyages of the Pyramid Builders rehearses the arguments and offers answers to his critics. Here Schoch moves his interest from the Sphinx to the pyramids, tackling what he perceives as another major puzzle: the widespread distribution of ancient pyramid-shaped structures in both the Old and New Worlds.
In a meandering account, Schoch rehashes both familiar and less familiar arguments for transatlantic and transpacific contacts, trawling in red herrings like Thor Heyerdahl’s futile Ra experiment. (Why a boat built of papyrus reeds when the Egyptians had wooden ships?) After much toing and froing, Schoch finally plumps for the homeland of pyramid building, and “civilisation” per se, in a continent-sized landmass that once connected the southeast Asian archipelago (Sundaland). The idea is difficult to evaluate as Schoch reports no direct geological evidence, let alone archaeological. There is much evidence for rising sea levels above the Sunda Shelf, based on sea bed cores and palynology, but not for a lost civilisation. Sundaland, we are told, disintegrated under rising seas between 6000 and 4000 BC. Survivors carried the idea of pyramid-building throughout the Old World and also to coastal Peru, where at Aspero there are some remarkably early “pyramids” (more accurately “ziggurats”), dating to the 4th millennium BC.
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According to Schoch, American pyramid building later died out, until it was reintroduced to the Olmecs in the 12th century BC by Chinese mariners of the Shang Dynasty. Despite heavy hints, Egypt’s role in the New World picture is left unclear.
Is this complicated journey worth the effort? As the pyramid is the most stable building structure achievable, archaeologists have never had difficulty in seeing the wide variety of roughly pyramidal shapes around the world as the fruits of independent invention. And while we should no longer see precolumbian America as hermetically sealed from outside influence, pyramid building remains one of the weakest of all parallels between Old and New World cultures. The strongest case for discussion in this nebulous area was made by Joseph Needham, from mundane matters such as paper technology. Unfortunately paper, unlike pyramids, does not generate publishing contracts.