If you go to your, in the University of Pennsylvania here, the museum the Museum of Science of the Museum of Pennsylvania has the task of doing archaeological work on the great diggings here in Northeast Thailand. And in Northeast Thailand we have a placed called Ban Chiang. If you will look at your National Geographic Magazine of Christmas time three years ago the cover story is of the Ban Chiang discovery. There they have found a culture, and many of the things in it, the quality of the culture, like discovering the Etruscans an incredibly beautiful design. Here we have a culture going back to what do we have Egypt, 8,000 years we have a culture going back 15,000 years. This is by far the earliest known. It is now completely conceded that this is where the Bronze age began. And this is where these water people came in here. In other words I am quite there is more and more realization now that life really has come this way rather than the working assumption of the Europeans that really, the land people, that they were so smart and so forth.

The, I think in your day you'll learn more and more that this will be confirmed, and confirmed and confirmed, whether it is by the very old people you find on the East Coast of Africa because the traffic that comes there across the Monsoon seas you go right across that Indian Ocean back and forth, and that's all involved in it.

And I've been as I said to you last time a great deal in Africa and in South Africa and the South East African Coast I really feel very powerfully what I'm telling you about. The Mombasa, the there was a Professor at the head of the architectural department at Capetown, Thornton White, when I was invited to go there in 1958. He was an architect who had been trained, first he went to Oxford and then he went to Harvard a cultural man. And Thornton White told me that after, just the end of World War II, the English were spending a great deal of money as yet, guarding the East Coast of Africa here against smuggling. There was enormous smugglings going on on the Indian Ocean. The British had decided at the time of World War II that the British Empire was all over. I think, historically, the people of England will get very great credit for, as far as I know, it's the first really top sovereignty that has ever really deliberately taken themselves apart. They assumed that they really were through. I talked to some of their leading statesmen as they were going to, coming into World War II and they said that this was going to happen. And they really deliberately pulled back, and pulled back, and pulled back. They've not really been pushed out, but they did absolutely voluntarily as a basic this chapter of history is all over.

At any rate, they were wondering whether to keep on looking out for this smuggling, so they had then, their Navy ships for years were used to prevent the smuggling. And Thorton White, my architectural friend, had been born in the island of Mauritius, here in the Indian Ocean here it is and he had done architectural town planning for the island of Mauritius. Because of his familiarity with this Indian Ocean area, he was made, designated by the English government, to look into the matter of whether it would be wise for the English to keep on trying to stop smuggling to protect the businesses they had here, or not. and so, he, in the monsoon seas, the ships that cross the Indian Ocean come down here and at Mombasa they beach them out and clean them, clean their bottoms and so forth and get them ready to go back this way. It's an annual thing, going with the winds. And the whole so the big fleet of the Indian Ocean, dhows, comes in there. So Thorton White went there at the time when there would be the highest concentration. When he got there, he said that he was taken to meet three or four of the top dhow captains, and it turned out that one that seemed to be there as far as they seemed to have an Admiral he was the Admiral of their fleet.

And Thorton White, I want you to remember that he had been to Oxford and to Harvard, and he had experienced what we call culture at any rate. Thorton White said to me that these dhow captains that he met the leading ones were the most cultured human beings he had ever met anywhere around the world. He said there was nothing to compare to them. And he was astonished at their knowledge! They said to him that there was a curve in human affairs, these curves of acceleration, and it gets then finally to a peak, and then where there is a fall-off, there is a shoulder form, and it really is a very constant curve nature has shown here. When something stops, it doesn't stop right away, there is a fall off. And they said, to their own satisfaction, they had actually been trading across the Indian Ocean, their forebears, their law and their knowledge of the sea, one captain to another, that they had been doing this for l0,000 years. And they said, here's a curve of 10,000 years, and if your the English can stop us, the deceleration curve would take 300 years, so you might as well tell them that. He said, incidentally, when he arrived there they knew he was coming, and they knew all about him. The underground had it very clear and they put on an exposition for him that showed him so he went back and told the English they might as well give it up, and they did give up that East Coast work.

But, in my, of greatest interest to me, Thorton was deeply convinced of their, that they had really good reason to believe that they had been navigating for at least l0,000 years. And when we get to finding there is an extraordinary culture 15,000 years ago, it would be right on that route. It gets to be very interesting.

I, my total subject in which I am dealing in here with you, I'm I gave you the name NAGA quite a long time ago, because, in the, there are the NAGAS right here in India. In this area where people first came up on the land, NAGA is a name that means "the sea serpent." And to the water people, if you looked at the horizon at any time at sea, you see that back, the snake's back of the great sea serpent's back out there. And if you come up on a mountain and look down on where the sea comes into the into the land, it is obviously that way we would call it a river, but it is quite clearly when you can see the shape of the water, he was a serpent sea serpent. And, incidentally, in the art form of the Maori's which is absolutely fascinating to them water is normal an island is a whole in the ocean. They look on the harbor as the penis of the ocean going into that land. The sea is a positive, and the land is a negative. I want you to really feel that the sea is normal, as in this great motion. It is a very different kind of a tradition, and it can it is mighty! And yet it has extraordinary things.

We find now the navigation they were doing. They were sailing by the rising of this star and the setting of that star I didn't mention these navigational tools that Thor Heyerdahl talks a lot about in his EASTER ISLAND book, where they found these strange sticks crossing, and so forth, which they thought was some kind of decoration and so forth but they were all navigational tools. Now, that's all thoroughly confirmed today. The NAGA is in Japan the name for the river is NAGALA, or really female NAGA. There is a great deal that goes into the kinds of things I talk to you about in my NAGA business.

The in the in Japan, the name for the roof, the ceiling of the house is the same is the name of the word for the bottom of the boat. I'm quite certain that the first people who began to get into in contradistinction to dug outs and outriggers and grass boats getting into ribs, where the stiff ribs made possible, really, very large bellied boats. And those ribs, then, the rib boat people, I was lucky to be in Cairo at the time when that sun boat was found about 20 years ago, and they let me in to see it.

That same year I visited Norway at Oslo and saw the boat that they had found deep in the mud the Viking boat. The Viking boat, and the Egyptian sun god boat were the same boats! Their plankings had been lashed together. They had their ribs, and they had their thwarts see the thwarting of the ribbing was made it was absolutely the same boat that I was astonished by it. I am quite certain then that while people learned to sail into the wind, as I gave you yesterday the business that you could tack and you can really work to windward, and people did work to the westward, in great contradistinction to the people who, probably, for other, in untold thousands of years, did drift on rafts. It's pretty easy to design a raft just take a number of logs falling into the sea and tie them together. And people did get around on rafts, so they had to drift where the currents took them, and where the winds took them.

But the people who began to develop the sailing boat, and the prevailing currents of the world are from west to east, so I think that this is what Thor Heyerdahl showed up in his KON TIKI, was that rafts could circumvent follow all those great currents of the Pacific, but I think that the early raft people who went from the South Seas, get up on the land, will also go over to the Americas, both the east and west coast of North America and the west coast of South America. But now I have a water people who are starting westward instead of going eastward. A very different kind of a world. And, you could if there was no wind blowing, you could row. And it is really interesting that and you could paddle. But the paddling dug outs were very poor the very best of them you see in Thailand today, the King's great barges, there were several hundred paddling sailors on board.

The Vikings had rowing. I think, then, people rowed to the westward. I think the Vikings are the water people completely out of this area because on the Viking boat in Norway there is a NAGA head, the most extraordinary kind of a sea serpent head. And it is very complexly designed, and it's exact counterpart has been found on the island of Borneo. I think, long before you could sail to windward, then you rowed to the windward, so that the prevailing winds coming from the west of the rowed boats got there a little earlier.