Discoveries from Space

FROM SPACE continued

Many of the world's early civilizations developed around river-connected irrigation systems from
which grew the great ancient cities with walls, pyramids and high temples built on stone or brick
pyramids with stepped levels.

These civilizations shared a common dedication to Astronomy (a number of the towers and pyramid
structures were used as Observatories) and evolved a sophisticated knowledge of the stars, the
planets and the measurement of time, which in later centuries was lost.

As these cultures and their irrigation systems were destroyed by warfare and other disasters,
most of them disappeared, although their vestiges are increasingly identifiable by aircraft obser-
vation over the desert, under the sea and deep within the jungle.

A similar irrigation and pyramid culture seems to follow a fairly regular path around the world; from
central Mexico and Yucatan to North Africa and Egypt, the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East,
Iran and the Indian subcontinent.

They were generally located following a line along 30deg N latitude, an area frequently called
the "Pyramid Belt" of the Earth.

This circling belt of pyramids, along which civilization, wherever it first appeared, seems to have
moved East and West and only later to the North and South, before resuming its path, "jumps" the
Atlantic Ocean.