Free Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken

Egyptian court and certainly had access to the venerable library rooms. Moses was a receptive and learned man; indeed he is supposed to have written five of his books himself, although it is still an unsolved puzzle in what language he could have written them.
    If we work on the hypothesis that the Epic of Gilgamesh came to Egypt from the Sumerians by way of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and that the young Moses found it there and adapted it for his own ends, then the Sumerian story of the Flood, and not the biblical one, would be the genuine account.
    Ought we not to ask such questions? It seems to me that the classical method of research into antiquity has got bogged down and so cannot come to the right unassailable kind of conclusions. It is far too attached to its stereotyped pattern of thought and leaves no scope for the imaginative ideas and speculations which alone could produce a creative impulse.
    Many opportunities for research into the ancient East undoubtedly foundered on the inviolability and sacredness of the Books of the Bible. People did not dare to ask questions and voice their doubts aloud in the face of this taboo. Even the scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ostensibly so enlightened, were still caught in the mental fetters of the 1,000-year-old errors, because the way back would inevitably have called in question parts of the biblical story. But even very religious Christians must have realised that many of the events described in the Old Testament cannot really be reconciled with the character of a good, great and omnipresent God. The very man who wants to preserve the religious dogmas of the Bible intact ought to be interested in clarifying who actually educated men in antiquity, who gave them the first rules for a communal life, who handed down the first laws of hygiene and who annihilated the degenerate stock.
    If we think in this way and ask questions like this, it need not mean that we are irreligious. I myself am quite convinced that when the last question about our past has been given a genuine and convincing answer SOMETHING, that I call GOD for want of a better name, will remain for eternity.
    Yet the hypothesis that the unimaginable god needed vehicles with wheels and wings to move from place to place, mated with primitive people and dared not to let his mask fall remains an outrageous piece of presumption, as long as it is unsupported by proof. The theologians' answer that God is wise and that we cannot imagine in what way he shows himself and makes his people humble is really dodging our question and is unsatisfactory for that reason. People would like to close their eyes to new realities, too. But the future gnaws away at our past day after day. In about twelve years the first men will land on Mars. If there is a single, ancient, long abandoned edifice there, if there is a single object indicating earlier intelligence, if there is one still recognisable rock drawing to be found, then these finds will shake the foundations of our religions and throw our past into confusion. One single discovery of this kind will cause the greatest revolution and reformation in the history of mankind.
    In view of the inevitable confrontation with the future, would it not be more intelligent to use new imaginative ideas when conjuring up our past? Without being unbelieving, we can no longer afford to be credulous. Every religion has an outline, a schema, of its god; it is constrained to think and believe within the framework of this outline. Meanwhile, with the space age, the intellectual Day of Judgment comes ever nearer. The theological clouds will evaporate, scattered like shreds of mist. With the decisive step into the universe we shall have to recognise that there are not two million gods, not twenty thousand sects or ten great religions, but only one.
    But let us continue to build on to our hypothesis of the Utopian past of humanity. This is the picture so far:
    Dim as yet undefinable ages