Deep Memory/ Clues to a deeper past
← Cluster index
Cluster · 1 line of comparison · 1 without an established route · 1 motif family · 3 registered objects

Andean accounts

Mesopotamian accounts

1 separate line of comparison join these two traditions in this collection. 1 of them has no established route.

All threads in the collection Map Dates

Motif families: Teachers & travellers

Cultural context

Andean accounts

Selected colonial witness to a tradition whose earlier history needs separate evidence.

Registered dated episodes: 1,572 CE to 1,572 CE.

  • Viracocha1572 CE · written witness · recording
Cultural context

Mesopotamian accounts

Literary traditions with multiple periods and surviving witnesses; their recording dates do not date the narrated events.

Registered dated episodes: 300 BCE to 399 CE.

  • Oannes3rd century BCE · composition · composition, 4th century CE · compilation · witness
Line 01 · Evidence examined

Teachers from another world

Oannes, Viracocha and Quetzalcoatl, compared at the level of passages.

Account · editorial paraphrase

A creator and teacher travels through the Andes and departs across the sea.

ViracochaCentral Andes
Account · editorial paraphrase

A being from the sea teaches people, then returns to the water at night.

OannesMesopotamia
What appears to correspond
  • Teaching or institutions are associated with each figure.
  • Water or sea departures occur in different parts of the selected accounts.
What differs or remains uncertain
  • Arrival from the sea, nightly return to the sea and final departure across it are different events.
  • Recording dates are not the dates at which the traditions began.
  • The compared accounts do not establish one matching promise of personal return.
Transmission check

No route established in this review

No transmission sequence for this specific comparison has been established in the sources reviewed. That is not proof that contact was impossible.

This comparison also reaches Nahua accounts.

Open the full dossier: groups, dates and sources →

Keep in the frame

What would move this cluster forward?

Collected comparisons accumulate; they do not compound into proof. Each line still needs its own dated sequence.

  • Expand local versions and indigenous-language witnesses.
  • Blindly code event sequences with independently checked translations.
Follow the evidence

Sources & scope

Provisional editorial records with no independent specialist sign-off. Review stages describe how far sources were checked, not the probability of a historical connection.

  1. project · Deep Memory

    Teaching figures: primary-source audit

    29 inspected passages. The sea-arrival, teaching, departure and promised-return motifs do not all occur together in the compared accounts.

  2. primary-text · Berossus / Eusebius

    Berossus through Eusebius, Chronicle I

    Oannes appears from the sea, teaches and returns to it at night. Berossus’s work survives through later witnesses and translation.

  3. primary-text · Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa

    History of the Incas (1572)

    Colonial witness for Viracocha; the recording date is not the origin date of the tradition.

  4. primary-text · Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators

    Historia general / Florentine Codex

    Sixteenth-century witness. See the project’s Q1–Q4 locators for teachings and departure, with translation qualifications.

  5. claim · Graham Hancock

    Fingerprints of the Gods: author’s account

    Primary source for Hancock’s broad proposed relationship between Old and New World monuments and traditions, not a source for each guest author’s claim.