Birdman," of whom multiple depictions have survived in the Mississippi Valley. He is unmistakably part falcon, part man, just like the god Horus of t… - Graham Hancock

Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow — we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely — through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.
Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of 'world ages' of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.

The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: "He who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is
therein, and the measurer of the earth.

Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight—and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.