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around for a long time, from the most distant past up to this very day. Not long ago Gordon Cooper participated in an archaeological expedition to South America that discovered the remnants of a very old and very advanced civilization dating back more than five thousand years. Pottery, sculptures, and hieroglyphs very similar to Egyptian artifacts of the same period were discovered, confirming once more the theory the Egyptian and American cultures had a common origin.
    It is quite natural for a famous astronaut to be interested in ancient astronauts, but one may still wonder whether Cooper did not acquire his sudden interest in extraterrestrial civilizations by seeing for himself in space, things that he did not have the right to tell us.

THE CONSTANT OF NINEVEH
    For thousands of years, astrologers and mathematicians have been greatly impressed by the majestic regularity of the stars moving in the skies. For millennia they tried hard to discover the secrets of this marvelous clock. These sky watchers realized that a very long period of time, one probably encompassing millions of years, had to exist that would represent in even numbers, the revolutions of all the celestial objects. At the end of such a constant period, all the bodies of the firmament would again find themselves in their original positions on the band of the zodiac.
    These astrologers and mathematicians called this time span the 'great constant' or the 'great year', but did not know that indeed this number existed and had been calculated tens of thousands of years before their time to be used by early civilizations, but then lost and forgotten as cataclysmic natural disasters and wars destroyed one civilization after another. The astrologers tried in vain to find the great constant and finally gave up. But now, by a chain of strange coincidences, this magic number has been found on an old clay tablet from Nineveh.
    Around the middle of the nineteenth century there was a French consul, Paul Emile Botta, in Mosul, in what is now Iraq, who had very little to do. To kill time Botta took long horseback rides into the desert and the hills surrounding the city. He noticed that some of the mounds had so perfectly rounded forms that they could not have been made by nature. Also, old pottery shards were found on many of these hills, indicating that these sites were ancient human habitations.
    One day in 1840 Botta gave into his urge to dig up one of the round mounds to see what was inside. He started excavating the Kuyunjik hill on the Tigris River, just outside of Mosul. Besides the usual broken pottery he found a great number of clay tablets in different sizes, but mostly measuring uniformly 17 by 22 centimetres or, as was discovered later.12 by 16 Sumerian fingers of 14 millimetres each. These tablets were covered with cuneiform characters, produced with an angled stylus. At the time there was much talk about and interest in this form or writing, but no one had deciphered it yet.
    Cuneiform inscriptions had been discovered for the first time during the fifteenth century in the ruins of Persepolis, in Persia, the ancient capital of King Darius I. In 1472 the ambassador of Venice at the Persian court. Giosophat Barbaro, described these tablets, as did in 1602 Antonio de Gouveia. tne ambassador of Portugal at the same court and the explorer Pietro della Valle, who brought the first samples of cuneiform tablets pack to Europe.
    Luckily no one at that time could understand these writings; because if the Pope hag read their message and discovered that it was the Earth that turned around the sun, or that the biblical version of the Flood was nothing out a pale reflection of the saga of Gilgamesh, or that a great pan of Genesis was inspired by Sumerian legends, it is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to the old clay tablets and to the people who found or read them.
    Consul Botta tired fast from his efforts to collect broken pottery and clay tablets and