**100 Ancient Mysteries Science Can't Explain — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/ancient-mysteries-science-cant-explain/

Tour of ancient mysteries from Indonesia's Bada Valley statues to Assyrian crystal lenses, Sajama lines and Egyptian pyramids, questioning the accepted timeline of human history.

## Key Takeaways

- Many 'unexplained' ancient sites have partial, debated, or evidence-based explanations rather than being fully mysterious.
- Dating and provenance uncertainty, especially for stone and non-organic materials, fuels much speculation.
- Early excavation records were often incomplete, limiting modern reinterpretation.
- Alternative hypotheses (lost civilizations, ancient technology) generally lack support from specialists, though gaps in knowledge remain real.

## What the video covers

- Opens with the Bada Valley in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where giant weathered stone figures and megalithic stone jars (Kalamba) stand, carved from rock not native to the site, with undetermined ages ranging over 2,000 years.
- Describes local oral traditions about the statues, including tales of petrified people and figures that supposedly shift position.
- Examines the Nimrud rock crystal lens from Assyrian Mesopotamia (around 2,700 years old), debating whether it was decorative inlay or a magnifying tool, and the Petinato telescope hypothesis tied to Saturn descriptions.
- Discusses the Golan Heights stone structures revealed by aerial survey after 1967, appearing as scattered rock from ground level.
- Covers the Sajama lines in Bolivia, spanning roughly 22,000 km and about 15 times larger than the Nazca lines.
- Reviews undeciphered scripts such as the reverse boustrophedon inscriptions and the Rongorongo-like or Phaistos-style symbols, noting disagreement among transcriptions.
- Presents Tairona/Latita-era gold and platinum objects from Pacific Colombia-Ecuador and the Hawara and Lalibela-style monumental constructions.
- Addresses Egyptian pyramid and Aztec/Teotihuacan-related dating debates, including Cummings' sediment-based age estimates later tested by radiocarbon dating.
- Mentions the Mexico Pyramid of the Sun mica sheets and Maya-style indigo-clay pigment (Maya blue) requiring heating to 100-150°C.
- Overall framing questions the completeness of the archaeological record while noting that many claims remain contested by specialists.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction: Ancient Mysteries and Gaps in History
2. 01:00 Bada Valley Statues and Stone Jars of Sulawesi
3. 18:20 The Nimrud Rock Crystal Lens
4. 40:00 Golan Heights Stone Structures
5. 55:00 The Sajama Lines of Bolivia
6. 71:40 Undeciphered Scripts and Inscriptions
7. 90:00 Ancient Gold and Platinum Artifacts
8. 110:00 Pyramid Dating Debates and Monumental Construction

Answers

## Questions about this video

What are the Bada Valley statues and why are they mysterious?

The Bada Valley in Sulawesi, Indonesia, holds giant carved stone figures and stone jars made of rock quarried elsewhere and transported in. Their ages are uncertain, estimated between 1000 BC and 300 AD, and no written records or clear oral traditions explain who made them.

Was the Nimrud rock crystal a telescope or a decorative object?

The Nimrud crystal, about 2,700 years old, magnifies roughly three times and is shaped by deliberate grinding. Most specialists consider it decorative inlay or possibly a magnifier for reading small script, and the telescope claim linked to Saturn descriptions is widely disputed.

Why is the Golan Heights structure site hard to recognize?

From ground level the stone structures look like scattered rock. Their true layout was only revealed by aerial survey after 1967, showing a much larger pattern than walkers had noticed.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:10

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There is an unsettling feeling that comes from staring at an ancient mega structure that completely [music] defies explanation.

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You look at the sheer mass of the stone, the precision of the cuts, and the desolate landscape surrounding it. And a heavy realization [music] sets in regarding how little we actually know.

00:31

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We like to think we've pieced together the story of human civilization. We are taught that centuries of archaeology have given us a clear picture of who came before us, what they built, [music] and how our world came to be. But the

00:45

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moment you veer off the accepted timeline [music] you're left staring into a void of missing human history.

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Tonight, I want to take you to the physical locations that make us [music] question just how much of that story we really know. Much of what we imagine about the ancient world relies on reference points we can logically

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comprehend. But buried deep inside a cave in the mountains of northern Israel, archaeologists uncovered stone tools dating back nearly 574,000 years. Beneath the forests of Europe, thousands of claustrophobic tunnels disappear straight into the earth, their entrances deliberately sealed centuries

01:23

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ago for reasons we cannot explain. And deep within the Amazon, in regions textbooks insisted were never inhabited by humans, we are uncovering the remains of massive ancient cities. Who built these places? What happened to the people who lived there? And just how

01:42

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much of the ancient world is still waiting to be found? Over the next 4 hours, I'll take you deep underground across forgotten landscapes and into the remains of worlds that vanished long before ours began. And I think a few of

01:55

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the things we're going to find along the way will surprise you. So get comfortable. Our first stop takes us deep into the Indonesian mountains to a valley filled with giant stone faces where the story begins with a mystery

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nobody [music] has managed to solve. The road into the Ba Valley takes hours, winding up through mountain forest in central Silhouesi, one of the larger islands of Indonesia. Eventually, the trees thin out and the land opens into a

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wide green basin ringed by hills with rice patties and a few scattered farms below. Standing in the middle of all that, waist deep in long grass, are enormous carved stone figures. Palindo is the one most people come to see. 4 m

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of solid stone leaning at an angle like it stopped halfway through falling over with a carved face, defined eyes, and arms held tight against the body. The name is sometimes translated as the entertainer, though people in the valleys have long called it the watcher.

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Centuries of tropical rain have worn the features soft, so the expression is hard to read, and it looks out toward the hills on the far side. There are hundreds more like it across Bada and the neighboring Basoa and Napu valleys.

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Some stand upright in open fields. Others lie tipped over at the treeine or half buried where farmers simply work around them. Alongside the figures are the Colomba, huge round tubs hollowed from solid rock. several large enough to climb into, weighing several tons each,

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a few still with their original stone lids lying nearby. Water storage has been suggested for them, as has rice, trade goods, or burial, and human bones have reportedly turned up in connection with a few, though the tubs vary enough in size and

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shape that they may not all have done the same job. The stone itself is what catches people out.

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Geologists who examined the figures found the rock does not match the ground they stand on. It was quarried elsewhere and carried in, sometimes across long stretches of difficult jungle with no roads, no wheeled vehicles, and no animals in the region capable of

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dragging a 4 m block that heavy through thick forest. Then there is the age. Estimates run from 1,000 BC to,300 AD, a spread of more than 2,000 years. Because dating depends on organic material like charcoal or bone. And these are solid

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stone with nothing of the kind reliably attached. No written records describe who carved them. [music] And the communities living there today have no oral tradition reaching back that far.

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When outsiders first documented the statues in the early 20th century, local people already spoke of them as ancient beyond memory. The stories that survive are much later. One says the figures were living people turned to stone as punishment. Another has them as

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guardians watching the land. There is a persistent tale in the valleys that they shift position when nobody is looking.

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Central is difficult country to work in. The valleys are isolated and the sustained excavation poured into megalithic sites in Europe has never arrived here. The land now falls inside Lore Lindu National Park and Indonesian and international researchers have been

05:39

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steadily cataloging and mapping the figures along with guarding against damage and theft. In 1850, a British archaeologist named Austin Henry Leard was digging at Nimrod, an Assyrian capital in what is now northern Iraq. Nimrude was a city of

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palaces, temples, and enormous carved reliefs, and Leard had already made his name there, shipping winged bulls and wall panels back to London and filling museum galleries with them. Among the smaller finds that season was a piece of rock crystal oval about 4 cm across,

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flat on one side and ground into a curve on the other. It sits in the British Museum now made around 2,700 years ago in the Assyrian Empire. One of the great powers of the ancient near east, held up

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to the light, it magnifies. The curve has a focal length of roughly 11 cm, so it brings light to a point at that distance. and enlarges anything held close by about three times. The grinding is deliberate and even, which is the

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detail that has kept people arguing about it for over a century. The Assyrians worked crystal and stone to a high standard. And plenty of specialists take the view that this is decorative, a piece of inlay from furniture or jewelry

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shaped because the shape looked good. Nothing about that is unreasonable. polished domes of rock crystal turn up in Assyrian contexts and nobody argues those were optical instruments. The alternative reading came from the Italian scholar Javanni Petinado who suggested Assyrian astronomers might

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have used lenses like this one as a crude telescope. His argument leaned on certain Assyrian descriptions of Saturn that appear to mention a ring of serpents around the planet, a detail you should not be able to make out without

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magnification. Most astronomers and historians who have examined the crystal disagree [music] partly because the optical quality is poor enough to be close to useless for looking at the night sky and partly because those texts can be read other ways. There is a

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middle position that gets less attention. Assyrian scribes wrote in kunai form pressing wedge-shaped marks into wet clay and some surviving tablets carry scripts so small that reading it with the naked eye is genuinely hard work. A magnifying glass would have been

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useful to anyone doing that for a living. And this crystal would have done the job comfortably. No Assyrian text mentions a tool of that sort, which is not proof either way, but it leaves the idea untested.

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The find itself came out of a period when Assyrian archaeology was moving fast and recording standards were nothing like modern ones. Leard's teams were working at enormous scale, often prioritizing monumental sculpture over small objects, which means the exact

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context of the crystal, what it was found alongside and what room it came from, was never documented with the precision that might have settled the question.

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Nobody on the ground ever noticed it. The structure spreads across a plateau in the Golden Heights between Israel and Syria. And from ground level, it reads as scattered rock, which is exactly what it looked like to everyone who walked

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past for centuries. It took an aerial survey after 1967 to reveal what was actually sitting there. From above, the site resolves into rings, circles of stone wall set one inside another, the outermost measuring around 150 m across, with a mound of piled rock at the

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center, roughly 20 m wide and 5 m high. The walls are built from unworked basaltt, an estimated 40,000 tons of it, gathered and stacked without any shaping of the individual stones. The Hebrew name is Gilgal Rafaim, the wheel of

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giants. In Arabic, it is Roujam Elhhiri, the stone heap of the wild cat. Both names come from people who found it already standing and had no better explanation than anyone does now. It dates to the early Bronze Age, somewhere

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around 3000 BC, putting it ahead of Stonehenge in its finished form and ahead of the Egyptian pyramids. Moving and stacking that volume of rock needed a large workforce over a sustained period, and there is no settlement nearby, big enough to account for the

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labor. People were coming in from somewhere else, and somebody was organizing them, feeding them, and directing the layout while the work went on. The central mound holds a burial chamber, but it appears to have been added later, well after the rings went

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up. So, whatever the site was originally built for was something other than a tomb. The most discussed idea has been astronomical. Researchers noted that certain openings in the walls appear to line up with sunrise at the summer solstice and with other key points in

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the solar year, which would make the whole thing an enormous stone calendar. Others have proposed a ceremonial center or a site tied to rituals for the dead.

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That astronomical reading took a hit in 2024. A study using geomagnetic analysis modeled how the ground itself has shifted over the past 5,000 years and concluded the plateau has rotated enough since the Bronze Age that today's alignments would not have matched the

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sky when the rings were built. If the modeling holds, the calendar explanation becomes very hard to sustain. The site has also been difficult to study for reasons that have nothing to do with archaeology. It sits in contested territory. Access has been restricted at

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various points and surrounding land has been used for military training. All of which has slowed the kind of long-term excavation a structure of this scale would normally attract.

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They usually turn up when a plow breaks through or a field collapses under a tractor or someone digging a foundation in an old Bavarian village puts a spade through into empty air. There are thousands beneath the farmland forests

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and village edges of southern Germany, Austria and parts of central Europe and they have been appearing this way for centuries. They are called erdstall tunnels from a German term meaning roughly earth stable. The scale is the first surprise. Most passages run about

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60 cm wide and a little over a meter high, so an adult has to crouch or crawl the whole way. They wander for anywhere between 20 and 50 m. occasionally widening into a slightly larger chamber, then contract into what researchers call

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sliproughs. Gaps so tight you have to go in head first, flat on your stomach, and push yourself along. What is inside them is almost nothing. No household rubbish, no hearths, no storage remains, no bones, no burials. A few have given up a

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scrap of charcoal or a fragment of pottery, which is how any dating has been attempted at all, but set against any space where people actually lived or worked. They are empty. Somebody put serious effort into digging them and

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then left them alone. The tool marks in the walls and the small amount of datable material point to the medieval period, somewhere between the 10th and 13th centuries. That is recent enough that somebody should have written this down. Medieval Europe kept detailed

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records of land, labor, building work, and church business, and not one surviving document clearly describes digging or using an airdall. Hiding places are the usual explanation. Refues for villagers during raids, though anyone who has been inside points to the

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ventilation problem, and the fact that a slip- is not something you move a family through in a hurry. Food storage runs into damp conditions and awkward access.

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A number of researchers have landed instead on a ritual or spiritual function tied to folk belief about the dead in the underworld, which accounts for both the effort involved and the absence of practical remains. The digging itself was done with simple iron

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tools, and the marks are still visible in the walls where the diggers worked. Many tunnels appear to have been deliberately sealed at some point after they were finished, [music] packed with earth, and closed off, which is part of

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why so many are only found by accident. Whoever made them seems to have gone to some trouble to close them behind themselves.

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On a wooded slope in Asuka, in Japan's N Prefecture, there is a block of granite weighing somewhere around 800 tons. It measures roughly 11 m long, 8 m wide, and just under 5 m high. The sides have been cut flat. A ridge runs along the

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top, and sunk into the upper surface are two square holes, each about a meter across and a little over a meter deep, cut. The name is Masuda Noiwafun, the rock ship of Masuda, which comes from its shape rather than from any known

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ancient [music] name. It sits on the hillside with no obvious connection to anything around it. And to reach it, you climb a set of steps up through the trees from the village below. Asuka was the political center of Japan in the

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sixth and seventh centuries AD, the period when Buddhism arrived from the Asian mainland, [music] and the imperial court was based in this valley. The area is scattered with carved stone from that era, small figures, basins, and strangely worked

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boulders that have picked up names like the monkey stones and the turtle stone. Nothing else in the region comes close to this block in scale. One long-standing explanation ties the stone to Masuda Pond, a reservoir built nearby with the block serving as a monument

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commemorating its construction. Another treats it as the unfinished base of a tomb with the two square holes cut to receive structural pieces that never arrived. There are large stone tombs elsewhere in Assuka, and some researchers have pointed out

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similarities in the cutting style, suggesting the block may have been abandoned partway through conversion into a burial chamber. A third reading treats it as an astronomical marker positioned to line up with the sun or particular stars at certain points in

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the year. The flat top and the ridge have been proposed as sighting features, though no alignment has been demonstrated that convinces most specialists.

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Whether the block was hauled to this hillside or carved from rock already sitting there, working stone at that weight with 7th century tools was a considerable undertaking, and the precision of the flat faces and the square cuts is what keeps drawing people

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back. The surface has weathered heavily over 13 centuries with moss and lyken across much of it, but the cut lines are still sharp enough to trace with a hand.

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No inscription survives and no contemporary record names it. The block of granite at Asuka has no writing on it at all. Our next stop has the opposite problem and it turns out to be just as unhelpful.

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Around 80 km south of Addis Ababa in the central highlands of Ethiopia, a line of weathered gray slabs rises out of a green field. There are 36 of them standing at the site called Tia, leaning at slight angles, some reaching 2 m

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tall, their flat faces densely covered in carved symbols. The most common symbol looks like a sword. It appears again [music] and again across the stones, sometimes several on a single slab, and the number varies from stone to stone. Alongside the swords are

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shapes that resemble leaves or plants, geometric marks, and a recurring design that some have compared to a stylized human figure. The carving was done with obvious care and follows some system the carvers clearly understood, but nobody today can read it. Excavations confirmed

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what the stones were doing there. Each one marks a grave. The remains found underneath belonged largely to young adults, buried in a flexed position with the body deliberately arranged. So this was a cemetery with each carved slab standing over someone the community

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thought worth commemorating with a considerable amount of stonework. The swords have drawn the most attention partly because of that varying count [music] from stone to stone. It may indicate rank or a tally of deeds or something about how the person died. The

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young age of many of the dead [music] has led to suggestions of conflict, though that remains speculation.

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Whatever the swords meant, they [music] meant something specific because the carvers were consistent about them. Tia is only one cluster among thousands.

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Across central and southern Ethiopia, standing stones of this kind are scattered through the landscape in groups, most of them fallen, eroded, or lost over the centuries. Tia survived in good enough condition to be studied and protected and in 1980 it was recognized

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[music] as a UNESCO World Heritage site as the finest surviving example of the tradition.

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The dating site somewhere between the 10th [music] and 15th centuries AD based on the excavated remains and limited evidence though some researchers suspect the tradition reaches further back. That uncertainty is part of the wider problem. No surviving oral tradition

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among the peoples of the region explains the site. No written record from any source describes who raised the stones or why. The symbols cannot be translated because there is no related script to compare them against and no key of any

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kind. Ethiopia's megalithic stale have received a fraction of the attention directed at comparable sites in Europe and the near east. Many of the thousands of stones scattered across the region have never been excavated or even properly recorded. Spread as they are

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across difficult terrain with limited funding for survey work. Tia represents a small protected sample of something much larger that nobody has systematically studied.

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2,000 years ago, Chinese craftsmen were producing a pigment that modern physicists did not fully understand until the 21st century. It is called Han purple or sometimes Chinese purple and it turns up on the terracotta army on ceramics on painted wooden objects and

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on ornamental beads from the Han dynasty and earlier. The color is a deep violet blue and it does not occur naturally in that form. Somebody had to make it.

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Making it is where the difficulty starts. Han purple is a barerium copper silicut which means it requires barerium copper and silica combined and heated to a precise temperature somewhere between 800 and 1,000° C.

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Go above that range and the compound breaks down. Go below it and it does not form at all. The Chinese chemists who produced it were working within a narrow window and hitting it consistently enough to supply pigment across the

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empire for centuries. The ingredients themselves raise questions. Barryium is not an obvious material to reach for and there is no clear evidence of how Chinese craftsmen worked out that it belonged in the mixture.

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One suggestion connects the process to to tauist alchemists who were experimenting with minerals in pursuit of longevity compounds and may have stumbled onto the recipe while trying to produce something else entirely. Another points to glass making since barerium

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appears in some Chinese glass of the same era and the pigment may have come out of that industry.

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Then there is the behavior of the material itself which was only documented properly in 2006.

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Researchers at Stanford University found that when Han purple is cooled to near absolute zero and exposed to a strong magnetic field, it loses a dimension.

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The waves moving through the material stop traveling in three dimensions and start traveling in two, a state called a Bose Einstein condensate.

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Nothing about ancient China explains this, and nobody in the Han dynasty could have known it was happening. It is a property of the compound that sat undiscovered inside the pigment for 2,000 years. The recipe was eventually lost. Production of Han purple appears

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to have stopped around the end of the Han Dynasty, roughly 220 AD, and the pigment does not appear in later Chinese work. Whatever knowledge produced it, whether it lived with a small group of specialists or depended on a supply

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chain that collapsed, went out of use and was not recovered until modern chemists reconstructed it in a laboratory.

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In 2013, a group of Russian researchers traveled into the Gornaya Shorya region of southern Siberia in the Camarov area near the Al Thai Mountains following local reports of unusual stone formations on a remote mountain side.

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What they photographed when they got there has been argued about ever since. The mountain is covered in enormous rectangular blocks stacked in courses like masonry. The faces are flat, the corners are angular, and the blocks sit on top of one another in a way that

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reads from a distance like a colossal wall. The researchers estimated that some of the individual blocks weighed well over a thousand tons, with a few claims running considerably higher than that. The expedition was led by Gorgji Sedorov, and the photographs that came

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back circulated quickly among people interested in ancient construction. If those weight estimates are anywhere near accurate, the blocks would be several times heavier than the largest worked stones known from any ancient site on Earth, which is the claim that put

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Gornaya on the map. Geologists who have looked at the site take a [music] different view. The region is granite and granite fractures along natural joint planes, splitting into rectangular shapes with flat faces and sharp corners under the right conditions.

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Freeze thaw weathering over long periods can separate those blocks and stack them in ways that look deliberately placed.

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The formation in this reading is entirely natural, and the resemblance to masonry is a trick of geology, producing shapes the human eye reads as built. The site has never received a full archaeological survey. It sits in remote [music] difficult country with limited

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access and the initial documentation came from an expedition working outside mainstream academic structures. No excavation has been carried out. No dating has been attempted [music] and the weight estimates come from visual assessment rather than measurement.

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The Inca ran an empire stretching several thousand kilometers down the spine of South America with road networks, storehouses, tax records, census data, and military logistics. And as far as anyone has been able to establish, they did all of it without

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writing. What they had instead were kipu. A kipu is an assembly of knotted cords, usually cotton or camelid fiber, with a main cord running horizontally and dozens or sometimes hundreds of pendant cords hanging from it. Each pendant carries knots tied at different

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positions and further cords branch off from those. Around a thousand of them survive in museums and private collections today. The numerical part has been understood for a long time. The knots record numbers in a base 10 system with position along the chord indicating

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place value. So, a cluster of knots high on a cord means hundreds, and a cluster lower down means units. Spanish chronicers described Inca administrators reading off census figures, storehouse contents, and tribute owed. And the surviving queu confirmed that accounting

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was a major function. The open question is whether that was the only function. Some quipu do not fit the numerical pattern. The knots are tied in ways that do not resolve into readable figures.

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The chord colors and spin directions vary in ways that seem deliberate, and the structures are more complex than a tally would require. Spanish accounts from the colonial period mention quipu being used to record histories, genealogies, and narratives with

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specialists reading stories from them aloud. Harvard researcher Gary Uton has spent years building a database of surviving queu and analyzing their structure, arguing that the combination of color, ply direction, knot type, and position amounts to a coding system

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capable of carrying far more than numbers. A small number of queu have been matched to Spanish colonial documents which offers a rare chance to check accord against a known text but no general decoding has been achieved. The Spanish burned quipoo in large numbers

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during the 16th century treating them as idolatrous objects which removed most of the record before anyone thought to write down how they worked.

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There is a shape on the island of Monorca that exists nowhere else on Earth. Picture a slab of limestone standing upright and balanced across the top of it, a second slab laid flat forming a giant letter T. The tallest

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reach over 3 and 1/2 m and the stones involved weigh several tons each. They are called tawulas from the Catalan word for table and there are around 30 of them scattered across this small island in the Balaric Sea. They were built by

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the Talotic culture, a Bronze Age society that developed on Minorca and neighboring Morca from around 1,000 BC.

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The name comes from Tallayots, the large stone towers these people raised across the islands and they were prolific builders. But the tala belongs to Minorca alone and to nobody else anywhere in the world. Balancing a multi-tonon capstone on a single upright

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takes real precision. The vertical slab has to be set deep enough to bear the load without tipping and the horizontal stone has to sit centered across it. Get it slightly wrong and the whole arrangement falls. The Taliotic builders

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managed it repeatedly without metal tools capable of easily shaping limestone, and many of their talas have stayed upright for close to 3,000 years.

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No tala stands alone. Everyone sits at the center of a horseshoe-shaped enclosure, a curved stone wall wrapping around it and opening outward on one side. And that opening almost always faces south.

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Excavations at the bases have turned up animal bones, particularly young animals, along with evidence of fires and offerings. Bronze figurines have been recovered from inside the enclosures, including one resembling an Egyptian style figure, which points to contact with the wider Mediterranean.

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A 2016 study led by researcher Fabio Silva examined the orientations and proposed that the southern openings framed the constellation Centurus and specifically the bright star Alpha Centuri low on the horizon during the period the Talas were in use. Because

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star positions shift over millennia that alignment would have been visible then in a way it is not now. The researchers connected it to a possible healing cult.

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The taliotic world ended with the Roman conquest of the Balarics around 123 BC. Whatever the talis meant, the knowledge left with the people who held it.

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Whatever the talis meant went out of the world with the talotic people. That happens a lot in this field. And it happens in a particularly frustrating way when somebody leaves behind writing that nobody alive can read.

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In 1928, two brothers named Gorgi and Nicola Kristovich were working in the Rod Mountains of southern Bulgaria near the village of Stovo when they came across a rock face carrying marks. The marks ran in a horizontal band about 3 m

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long and a little over 30 cm high cut into the stone of a natural rock shelter above a river gorge. There were somewhere in the region of 50 characters. Word reached academic circles fairly quickly and Bulgarian scholars began arriving at the site to

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examine it. What they found was a script that did not match anything in the known record. It was not Greek, not Latin, not Cerrillic, and not any of the scripts associated with the peoples who had historically occupied the region.

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Whoever cut these letters was using a writing system that appears here and effectively nowhere else. Bulgaria sits in a part of Europe with deep and tangled history. The Thrians occupied this territory for well over a thousand years. A culture known for extraordinary

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gold work and elaborate tombs and they are the obvious first suspect. The problem is that the Thrians mostly wrote in Greek characters when they wrote at all and no independent Thrian script has ever been confirmed. [music] If the Stovo inscription is Thrian, it

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represents a writing tradition we have almost no other evidence for. Attempts at reading it have produced a spread [music] of competing answers and no agreement. Some researchers have proposed a connection to ancient Greek dialects. Others have argued for links

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to Slavic languages or to the scripts of the ancient near east or to writing systems from the Aian world. A few have suggested the marks might not be writing at all, but natural cracks in the rock that happened to run in a line or later

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graffiti misread as something ancient. That last possibility is taken more seriously than you might expect because the stone has weathered badly. The rock shelter is exposed. The surface has degraded over the decades since 1928, and the characters that were recorded in

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early drawings are now harder to make out than they were when the brothers first spotted them. Several of the published transcriptions disagree with each other about what individual marks actually look like, which makes any decipherment attempt shaky from the

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start. Dating has never been resolved either. Estimates have ranged across a couple of thousand years from the Bronze Age through to the medieval period with no material recovered from the site that could anchor it. There is no settlement

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immediately attached to the rock shelter and no associated finds that would give a context. The inscription sits where it always has on a rock face in a wooded gorge and the total body of evidence remains those 50 or so characters and

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the drawings made of them a century ago. 92 artificial islands built out into a lagoon made from an estimated 750,000 tons of basaltt that is Nan Madal sitting off the eastern shore of Pompei, one of the islands of Micronia in the

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western Pacific. The site covers around 18 square kilometers of shallow water and tidal flats and the islands are separated by a network of canals which is why it sometimes gets called the Venice of the Pacific. People traveled between them by canoe. The building

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material is what makes the place remarkable. The walls are built from columnar basaltt, long hexagonal shafts of volcanic rock that form naturally when lava cools slowly. These columns were stacked in alternating layers, log cabin style, one course running one way

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and the next course crossing it, [music] building up walls that in places reach seven or eight meters high. The largest individual stones weigh around 50 tons.

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The basalt did not come from anywhere near the site. [music] The quaries are on the other side of Pompei, several kilometers away across difficult island terrain, and the stone had to be moved from there to the lagoon. Pompei is mountainous, heavily

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forested, and the people building Nanmadal had no metal tools, no wheels, no draft animals, [music] and no pulleys. How 50-tonon bassalt columns crossed that island and were then floated or dragged into position on artificial islands in a lagoon is not

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settled. Local Pompean tradition has an answer. The stories say two brothers Olypa and Olopa arrived from somewhere overseas and raised the stones by magic flying them through the air to their positions. The brothers founded the Sodellur dynasty which is the ruling

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Speaker A

line that mainstream archaeology also credits with the site. The Sodellur ruled Pompei from Nanmadul from roughly 1100 AD until around 1628 when they were overthrown and the site was abandoned not long after. Construction on the eyelets appears to have begun

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Speaker A

considerably earlier than the sodeller period with radiocarbon dates pointing to activity on the site from around 1180 A for the megalithic building and evidence of human presence in the area going back much further possibly to the 1st century AD.

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The scale of it is the puzzle that keeps coming back. [music] Pompei is a small island and estimates of the population available to do this work do not sit comfortably alongside 750,000 tons of stone. The site was a ceremonial

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and political center with separate eyelets serving different functions. Some held tombs including the massive walled enclosure of Nandawas, the royal mortuary. Others housed priests or were used for food preparation or for the ritual mixing of a drink made from cava.

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The sodellure kept the island's nobility living at Nanmadul where they could be watched. Nobody lives there now. The canals still fill and empty with the tide. Mangroves have grown up through parts of the ruins and the walls have

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collapsed in sections. Pompeans have long regarded the place as dangerous to visit after dark.

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Speaker A

Cairo's Egyptian Museum holds a stone object roughly 70 cm across, carved from shist, a stone that flakes and splits along its layers and is genuinely difficult to work. It is shaped like a shallow bowl with a raised hub at the

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center and three curved loes fold inward from the rim toward the middle, leaving thin sections of stone between them. The loes are evenly spaced, the curves are consistent, and the whole thing is thin enough in places to be fragile. It came

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out of the ground in 1936. The British archaeologist Walter Brian Emory was excavating at Sakura, the vast burial ground south of Cairo, working on the tomb of an official named Sabu, who was a son of the pharaoh Anajib.

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That places the object around 3000 BC in the first dynasty, right at the beginning of Egyptian dynastic history and over 400 years before the Great Pyramid. The shape is the problem.

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Speaker A

Nothing else in Egyptian material culture looks like this. Egyptian stone vessels are well represented from this period. Thousands of them and they follow recognizable patterns of bowls, jars, and plates.

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The disc of Sabu does not fit those patterns, and no second example has ever been found. The conventional explanation treats it as an ornamental bowl or an incense burner, possibly a decorative piece made for the tomb. Some researchers have proposed it was a lamp

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Speaker A

with oil pooling in the lobe sections. Others have suggested it copies the shape of a plant or a flower rendered in stone for ritual purposes. The alternative reading, which has circulated widely, looks at the three loes and the central hub and sees a

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Speaker A

mechanical component, something like a flywheel or an impeller from a pump. Proponents point out that the shape would work for moving fluid if it were rotated and that the precision of the carving suggests function rather than decoration. Against that, shist is a

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poor choice for a working machine part being brittle and prone to shearing along its layers and there is no other evidence of rotating machinery anywhere in first dynasty Egypt. Working the object at all was a serious undertaking.

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Shist splits easily. The loes are undercut and producing that shape by grinding and abrasion without breaking through the thin sections would have taken enormous patience and a very steady hand. Whoever made it was skilled and they made it for somebody important

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Speaker A

enough to be buried at Sakara in the reign of a king. In the summer of 1992, a farmer in the village of Xian Bacon in Ja Jang Province, eastern China, decided to find out how deep one of the local

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Speaker A

ponds actually went. The ponds had been there as long as anyone could remember, always full, used for irrigation and fishing, and nobody had ever touched the bottom with a pole. He had recently pulled a fish weighing over 30 lb out of

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one of them, which did not fit a pond of that size. He bought a pump, talked three neighbors into helping, and started draining it.

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On the 9th of June, after 5 days of continuous pumping, the water dropped enough to expose a stone staircase descending into the dark. They brought in four more pumps and kept going for 17 days. What emerged was a hall carved out

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Speaker A

of solid rock. The ponds were not ponds at all. They were openings in the roof of an enormous underground chamber, one of 24, that turned out to be cut into the hillside beneath the village.

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14 had already collapsed at some point in the past, leaving 10 intact. The scale takes a moment to absorb. The average chamber covers around 1,000 square meters of floor with ceilings ranging from 15 to 30 m high, the upper

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end matching the interior of a cathedral. The floors are flat. The ceilings are cut at a consistent 45° angle. The walls are vertical. All of this was held consistent across chambers cut through irregular variable sandstone. Every surface, floor, walls,

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and ceiling alike, carries parallel chisel marks set at 60°, evenly spaced, maintained at the same angle even across curved transitions where holding a fixed angle is genuinely difficult.

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Researchers examining them have described the consistency as machine-like. They serve no structural or decorative purpose. They are simply the signature of whatever tool removed the rock. There is no soot anywhere. The chambers are fully enclosed and cutting stone to this precision in the dark

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would require light. But every form of ancient lighting burns something and leaves carbon on nearby surfaces. The ceilings and walls have been examined for soot deposits and none have been found. The removed rock has never been located either. The total volume runs to

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hundreds of thousands of cubic meters which converts to millions of tons of sandstone [music] and spoil heaps on that scale takes centuries to erode to invisibility.

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The surrounding hills and farmland show no sign of it. Dating has proved equally resistant. There are no inscriptions, no artifacts, and no organic material recovered from sealed contexts. The commonly cited date of the spring and autumn period around 700 to 400 BC comes

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not from direct evidence, but from the absence of any reference to the caves in later Chinese records, which is a reasonable inference and not a date.

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Miners working the pyrohilite deposits near Autotoall in South Africa have been pulling small stone spheres out of the rock for decades. They are typically 2 to 4 cm across, reddish brown to dark in color, some close to perfectly round and

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Speaker A

others flattened into a disc shape. A number of them carry grooves running around the equator. And on some of those, there are three parallel grooves spaced evenly apart. The rock they come out of is the interesting part. The

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Speaker A

pyrohilite deposits at Autoall are dated to roughly 3 billion years old, which is well before any life more complex than bacteria existed anywhere on Earth. The spheres are embedded in that rock, which means they formed while it did. The

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grooves are what drive the argument. Three evenly spaced parallel lines cut around the equator of a small sphere looks manufactured. And that appearance has fed decades of speculation that these objects are artificial. The remains of technology from a period long

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Speaker A

before anything should have been making technology. Some accounts have claimed the spheres are perfectly balanced to a degree that machining could barely achieve or that they rotate on their own in sealed display cases. The geological explanation identifies them as

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Speaker A

concretions which form when minerals precipitate out of solution around a central point and build up in layers producing rounded masses inside sedimentary or volcanic rock.

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Concretions are common worldwide and come in a range of shapes including spheres and discs. Analysis of the clerks objects has found they are made of hematite and [music] wallistanite minerals consistent with natural formation in that geological setting.

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The grooves have a natural explanation too. They correspond to fine layers in the surrounding rock and where a concretion formed across a boundary between layers. The difference in the material produces a ridge or groove around the sphere as it weathers.

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Speaker A

Several grooves means several layer boundaries. Evenly spaced because the layers themselves were evenly spaced.

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The balance and rotation claims have not survived examination. Museum staff at Clerks Museum, where a number of the spheres are held, have stated that none of them are perfectly balanced and none rotate on their own. Those spheres sat

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Speaker A

in South African rock until mining equipment cut them loose. Something comparable happened beneath a street corner in England, except what came out of the ground there was carved by hand. In August 1742, workmen in Royston, a market town in Hertfordshire,

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Speaker A

were digging in the buttermarket to set new benches for the traders. Their tools hit a buried millstone. Underneath it was a shaft packed with soil and rubble, dropping into the chalk bedrock.

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Speaker A

Everyone assumed treasure. A small boy went down on a rope to look and came back with a handful of earth. It took several days to clear the shaft properly. And when they did, they were standing in a bell-shaped chamber cut

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into solid chalk 5 m across, 7 m high, tapering to a point at the top. The walls were carved. Figures and scenes in low relief running around the whole chamber from waist height upward.

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Originally painted, now faded to pale outlines. St. Catherine is there with her wheel. St. Christopher carries the Christ child across water. St. Lawrence stands beside the grid iron he was martyed on. There is a crucifixion, a horse, a figure

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Speaker A

holding a sword, and a heart pierced by a hand with dozens of smaller marks crowded into the gaps between. Royston sits at the crossing of two ancient roads, the Icknneal Way and Man Street.

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And the town has been documented for centuries. No deed, no church record, no town account mentions anyone cutting a chamber beneath the marketplace. The Knights Templar are the usual candidate.

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Speaker A

The order held land in the area and ran a weekly market in Royston before being suppressed across Europe in 1312 with members arrested and interrogated, which would account for a chamber nobody wanted on paper. Several carvings have been read as fitting Templar

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iconography, though the readings depend heavily on who is doing the reading. Other suggestions include the Augustinians, a later hermit living in the chamber, a Freemason lodge, and a private chapel for some group that needed to stay out of sight. The

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carvings are hard to date on style alone, and the fill was cleared out in 1742 by people looking for gold who threw away whatever was in it without recording anything. You can visit it now through a tunnel cut in the 1790s. 18th

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Speaker A

century illustrations show the carvings considerably sharper than they are today, and the paint is gone.

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Speaker A

RAF pilots flying mail routes across Jordan and Syria in the 1920s kept reporting shapes below them. The basalt planes were covered in stone structures running for kilometers in forms that meant nothing from ground level. One of the pilots, Percy Maitelland, wrote it

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up in 1927 and mentioned that the Bedawin called them the works of the old men. The name stuck.

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Satellite imagery has since pushed the count into the hundreds of thousands, spread from Syria and Jordan down into Saudi Arabia and across to Yemen. The desert kites are the best understood.

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Speaker A

Two low stone walls converge over a distance that can run several kilometers, narrowing toward a small enclosure where they meet. Animals driven between the walls found the space closing in until they were funneled into the [music] pen at the end. A single

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kite could take an entire herd of gazelle, which means organized communal hunting rather than a few people with spears, and it means a lot of meat at once. Some are dated to around 7,000 BC and stayed in use for thousands of years

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afterward. The wheels are harder. Circular structures about 25 m across with spokes running out from a central hub. Hundreds of them mapped so far.

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They are not defensive. They have no clear relationship to the kites and nobody has established what they were doing. Some contain burials, though those appear to have been added later.

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There are pendants, lines of small canaires trailing away from a larger tomb, and there are gates, rectangular arrangements of low walls that have resisted explanation entirely. Gates are the oldest type identified with estimates putting some past 7,000 [music]

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years. Almost none of it is visible on foot. The walls are often knee height, dark stone on dark ground, and someone walking through the middle of a kite would see scattered rock. The shapes only resolve from the air, which is why

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Speaker A

nothing was known until aircraft started crossing the region. Mapping has run well ahead of excavation. The Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project has cataloged enormous numbers of these structures, but most have never been visited on the ground.

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In the grounds of the Oshiko Shrine in Takasagago, western Japan, there is a block of stone roughly 6 m on every side, weighing somewhere between 5 and 600 tons. It rests on a narrow point with water pulled around and beneath it.

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So from a distance, it looks like it is floating on the surface of a pond. It is called Ishino Hoden, the stone treasure hall. It is still joined to the bedrock underneath, which is what holds it up, but the connection is slim enough that

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the illusion works, and the water never drains away. Local tradition holds that the pool has never gone dry, even through drought years, and the shrine treats the stone itself as a deity. The block was cut from the surrounding rock

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and then abandoned. The faces are flat and deliberate. A large protrusion sticks out from one side like a prow, roughly 4 and 1/2 m long, which is the feature that gives the stone its shiplike appearance and accounts for

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some of the local names attached to it. There are notches and worked sections around the base where material was taken away and the quarry face it came from is still visible behind it with the channel where the workers separated it from the

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rock. Tool marks are still legible on parts of the surface. The hillside it sits on is a working quarry district and has been for a very long time. The stone here is a soft volcanic tough called Takasagago stone quarried in this area

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for centuries and used in construction across the region including in Osaka Castle. Soft is relative.

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It is easier to work than granite [music] which is why the shaping was achievable at all. But moving a block of this weight is a separate problem entirely and one nobody solved. The shrine's own tradition says two deities

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Speaker A

came to build a palace here in a single night and were interrupted before they finished leaving the stone where it sits. The archaeological reading places it in the Kofun period roughly the 3rd to 7th centuries AD when keyhole-shaped

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Speaker A

burial mounds were being raised across Japan and large stone chambers were being cut for tombs. Under that interpretation, Ishino Hoden was meant to be a sarcophagus or a tomb component and was left partway through either because the commissioning family lost

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their position or the stone developed a flaw or something else intervened. A second theory connects it to the same broad period as Masuda Noiawaune, the 800 ton granite block in N. Both are large worked stones. Both were abandoned

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unfinished and both belong to a stretch of Japanese history when stonework was being attempted at a scale not seen before or after. Whether the same tradition produced both is unresolved.

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It has been written about for a very long time. The Harima nokuni fudoki, a regional gaziteer compiled around 715 AD, describes it as an ancient thing of unknown origin, which means it was already old and already unexplained by

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the early 8th century. Whoever stopped work on it had stopped centuries before the earliest Japanese writers arrived to look. The site drew attention again in the 19th century when a German physician named Philip France Fonibold who spent years documenting Japan for European

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audiences recorded and illustrated it. Excavation around the base has been limited partly because it is active shrine ground and the extent of the stone below the waterline has never been fully established.

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Speaker A

Road builders quarrying gravel from a mound near Lomas de Takami Chapa in Veraracruz, Mexico, pulled a slab out of the pile in the late 1990s. Greenish serpentine, 36 cm long, 21 wide, about 12 kg. One face carried 62 carved

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Speaker A

symbols in horizontal rows. Villagers kept it. Word reached archaeologists eventually and in 2006 a team including Steven Houston of Brown University and Maria Delarman Rodriguez Martinez published an analysis in science arguing that the symbols were writing and the

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earliest writing found anywhere in the Americas. The date comes from pottery and figurine fragments found in the same gravel consistent with anch phase around 900 BC. Theme ch were the earliest major culture in Miso America based on this

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stretch of the Gulf Coast known for the colossal carved heads and for a religious tradition that later cultures including the Maya drew on. If the block is ch and if the symbols are writing, it predates every confirmed Misoamerican

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script by several centuries. The argument for writing rests on structure. There are 62 symbols made up of 28 distinct signs and several of those repeat in the same sequences more than once. That pattern is what you get when

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Speaker A

language is being recorded rather than decoration applied. The rows read horizontally and the surface has been scraped and recarved which suggests the stone was used more than once. Nobody can read it.

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The signs do not match any later script closely enough to work from, and there is only one block, so there is nothing to compare it against. A few symbols look like objects, insects, and plants, and what might be a throne, but that

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gets you nowhere on its own. It has drawn skepticism, mostly because it came out of a gravel quarry rather than a dig. So, the context was destroyed before anyone recorded it, and the dating rests on material found loose in

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the same heap. The science analysis looked at the wear and the carving technique and concluded it was genuine.

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In 2007, a Kazak economist named Dmitri Day was going through satellite imagery of northern Kazakhstan looking for something unrelated when he spotted a square on the ground in the Turai region.

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It was made from a grid of earth mounds and ran several hundred meters on each side. He kept looking and found more.

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There are over 200 recorded now across the turge step. Squares, crosses, rings, and lines built from low mounds and trenches, the largest covering more ground than the Great Pyramid. One of them, a three armed swastika shape about 90 m across, is made from timber rather

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than earth. The mounds themselves are modest, typically less than a meter high and around 10 m across, but there are hundreds of them in a single figure, arranged with enough regularity that the pattern holds across the whole structure. They named the largest one

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theki square, and it has become the best known of the group. It is made up of 101 mounds laid out in a grid measuring roughly 280 m along each side with diagonal lines running corner to corner.

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Getting that right over that distance on flat ground where you cannot step back and check your work means somebody was surveying. [music] NASA photographed several of the sites from the International Space Station in 2015 at the request of researchers, which is

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largely how they reached wider attention. Nothing had been recorded before satellite imagery. The mounds are low, the step is enormous and flat, and at ground level, the shapes do not exist. People had been driving past and grazing animals on them for generations

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without registering anything. Dating has come back across a widespread. Optically stimulated luminescence, [music] which measures when mineral grains last saw sunlight, has returned results, suggesting some go back around 8,000 years. Others look far more recent with some figures potentially connected

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to medieval step cultures. The Mahanjar culture, hunter gatherers in the region between roughly 7,000 and 5,000 BC, have been proposed for the oldest, which would put them alongside or ahead of the first monumental building in Europe.

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Mobile hunter gatherers are not who you expect to find building permanent earthworks several hundred meters across. That takes planning, organization, and a reason to stay put long enough to finish. It also takes a large enough group working together that

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somebody has to be feeding them while the work goes on, which is a difficult arrangement for a population that moves with the seasons.

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The interpretations on offer have all been argued from imagery rather than from digging. Territorial markers visible to groups crossing the step is one. Ritual or burial function is another. And a small number of the mounds have produced burials, though

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these look like later reuse rather than original purpose. Solar observation has been proposed with the diagonal lines and corner mounds read as sighting points, though no alignment has been demonstrated convincingly. Excavation has been minimal. The region is remote,

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funding is limited, and Kazak archaeology has historically directed its resources toward the burial mounds, the Kurans, which are far more visible and produce grave goods. Work by day, alongside researchers from Costa University has continued, and a joint project with Vius University has done

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some of the dating, but the overwhelming majority of the 200 sites have never been touched. Kazakhstan's earthworks were built by people who left almost nothing else behind. In West Java, the argument runs the other way over a site

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Speaker A

that has been visited and photographed for two centuries and still cannot be dated to anyone's satisfaction.

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Speaker A

Gunnarang is a hill in the highlands of West Java, Indonesia, about 2 hours south of Jakarta by road, standing roughly 885 m above sea level. The top is covered in columner basaltt, the hexagonal volcanic rock that forms naturally when thick lava cools slowly.

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And here those columns are stacked into terraces, walls, and rough enclosures across five separate levels. The terraces climb the hill in steps connected by a stone staircase of around 400 steps running up the northern slope.

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People in the surrounding villages have used the site for a very long time and the name translates roughly as mountain of enlightenment or mountain of light.

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Dutch colonial officials documented it formally in 1914 and it appears in survey notes before that listed as a megalithic site of local interest.

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[music] For most of the 20th century it sat in that category without much attention. [music] The accepted dating placed construction somewhere between 500 BC and the early centuries AD, which made it a significant Indonesian megalithic site. [music] And nothing

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more unusual than that. That changed in 2011 when a geologist named Danny Hillman Natawiji Jaja began working there with a team. Natawi Jaja is a specialist in earthquake geology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and the methods his team brought to the hill

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Speaker A

were geoysical rather than conventionally archaeological. They ran ground penetrating radar across the site, took electrical resistivity readings, conducted seismic tomography, and drilled core samples down into the hill itself. What they reported was that the hill is not really a hill. Beneath

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the visible terraces, they describe buried layers of arranged stone extending down 30 meters and possibly further with what they interpreted as chambers and voids at depth.

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Radioarbon dating on organic material pulled from the core samples came back with ages reaching 27,000 years with one layer at around 22 m depth returning dates in that range. If those numbers describe construction, Gunnong Padang would be the oldest built structure

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anywhere on Earth by an enormous margin. It would predate Gobecletepe in Turkey by roughly 15,000 years, predate agriculture, and predate the end of the last ice age. The team published their findings in the journal Archaeological Perspection in October 2023,

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arguing the site was built in stages over tens of thousands of years. The paper was retracted in March 2024.

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The publisher WY and the journal editors concluded after investigation that the radioarbon dates themselves were accurate but had been misapplied.

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The soil samples that produced those dates had not been shown to contain any evidence of human activity. Dating buried soil tells you when that soil formed. [music] It does not establish that anybody shaped the stone sitting in it.

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Speaker A

Geologists reviewing the work made the same point about the bassalt columnar jointing produces regular hexagonal shafts and on a volcanic hillside those columns fracture slump and collapse into stacked arrangements that can look deliberately built without anyone having touched them. Similar formations exist

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across Java and elsewhere in the world without anyone proposing they are architecture. Natuijaja has disputed the retraction publicly and continues to stand by the interpretation arguing that the reviewers applied standards to his work that would not be applied

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elsewhere. The disagreement has been sharp and it has taken place partly outside academic channels. There is a political dimension to it as well.

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During the earlier phase of the work, the Indonesian government took considerable interest in the site.

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President Suzilo Bambang Yud Hoyono visited. Funding was directed toward excavation and the project acquired a national profile. A group of Indonesian archaeologists wrote a formal letter of objection arguing that the geological team was working outside its expertise and that political enthusiasm was

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driving conclusions ahead of the evidence. The surface terraces themselves are not in dispute. Somebody arranged those basalt columns into walls and platforms across the top of the hill and the site is genuinely ancient by any measure. Whether anything beneath them

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was built and by whom is where the whole thing sits. In 1848, a Croatian official named Mihajlo was traveling in Egypt and bought a mummy as a souvenir. He was a low-ranking officer in the Hungarian Royal Chancellery on a trip that was

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Speaker A

part tourism and part collecting, and the purchase was unremarkable for a European traveler in Egypt at that time.

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He brought it back to Vienna, stood it upright in the corner of his sitting room [music] and used it as a talking point for visitors. At some stage, he unwound part of the linen wrapping and put the strips in a separate display

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case, apparently because he liked how they looked. Whether he noticed the writing on them is unclear. If he did, he seems to have assumed it was Egyptian, which was a reasonable guess given where the mummy had come from.

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Barage died in 1859, and the mummy passed to his brother, a priest in Slovenia, who had no interest in it at all. In 1867, he donated the whole thing to what is now the archaeological museum in Zagreb. A German Egyptologist named

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Speaker A

Hinrich Brooks examined the linen that year and recognized the writing was not hieroglyphic but assumed it was some form of Egyptian script and [music] left it there. 10 years later Brooks was talking with the explorer Richard Burton about runes and the conversation

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prompted him to look at the linen again. This time he realized the script was not Egyptian at all. What he had was at Truskin. The Atruscans occupied central Italy before Rome absorbed them. running a network of cities across what is now

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Speaker A

Tuscanyany [music] Umbria, and Latio from around the 8th century BC. They were wealthy, technically capable, and heavily influential on early Rome, which took a great deal of its religious practice, [music] engineering, and even some of its political structure from them. By

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Speaker A

the first century BC, they had been fully absorbed, and their language had stopped being spoken. That language is the problem. At Rusruskin is not related to Latin, Greek or anything else in the Indo-Uropean family, and it has no known

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living relatives anywhere. The alphabet was borrowed from the Greeks, which means any Atruscan text can be sounded out and read aloud with reasonable confidence.

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Understanding the words is a completely different matter. Roughly 250 Atruscan words are securely understood, and almost all of them come from short inscriptions where context supplies the meaning. names on tombs, dedications on gifts, boundary markers, numbers on dice. Longer texts are rare, and most

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surviving Atruscan writing runs to a handful of words. The Liberaeus carries around [music] 1,200 readable words. It is the longest itruscan text in existence by a wide margin [music] and it is the only surviving example of a linen book from the ancient

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Mediterranean world. A format described by Roman writers but otherwise lost entirely. [music] The linen was originally a single book folded in the manner of a concertina rather than rolled and it has been dated to around 250 BC. What can be made out of the

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content is that it is a ritual calendar. Dates appear throughout along with the names of deities, and the text repeats formulaic passages that read like instructions for ceremonies to be performed at particular times. The word for the month of June is legible, as are

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several divine names, including Nethans, the Atruscan equivalent of Neptune. Beyond that, most of the vocabulary appears nowhere else, which leaves nothing to check it against. How an Atruscan lurggical book ended up in Egypt has never been explained. The

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mummy is of an Egyptian woman named Nessihenu, the wife of a tor from thieves, and a separate papyrus buried with her confirms her name and identity.

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She was wrapped somewhere around the first century BC, by which point the Atruscan book was already 200 years old.

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Somebody in Egypt had it, could not read it or did not care, cut it into strips and used it as cloth.

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16,000 tons. That is the estimated weight of a single slab of limestone lying in a quarry on the outskirts of Nanjing in eastern China. It measures roughly 30 meters tall, 5 m thick, and 15 m wide, and it is still partially

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joined to the bedrock it was cut from. No worked stone of that size has ever been moved by anyone at any point in history using any method. The quarry has a documented origin which separates it from most of the objects in this video.

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In the early 15th century, the jungle emperor of the Ming dynasty ordered a memorial steelli made for the tomb of his father, the Hong Wu emperor, who had founded the dynasty in 1368. The Shaoling mausoleum sits a few kilometers

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away on the outskirts of Nanjing, and the Stelli was intended to stand there as a monument to the founder. [music] Yongul had reasons to want the monument to be enormous. He had taken the throne in a civil war against his own nephew

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which made his legitimacy a live question and an overwhelming tribute to his father addressed that directly. The project was ordered around 1405.

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Three separate components were cut at Yang Shan. The base, the body of the tablet and the crowning head, each quarried individually from the limestone. All three are still lying in the quarry where they were made. The base is the 16,000 ton piece. The tablet

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body is estimated at around 8,700 tons and the head at around 6,000. Assembled, the completed steelely would have stood somewhere around 70 m high, which would have made it one of the tallest freestanding monuments in the world. The

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work stopped before any of it moved. The practical problem was straightforward and unsolvable. Having cut the stones, nobody could work out how to transport them, even the short distance to the [music] mausoleum, let alone lift the tablet body into an upright position on

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top of the base. Ming China was capable of extraordinary engineering, including the construction of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the treasure fleets of Jung Hu, and none of it was equal to this. A steel was eventually erected at

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the Xiaoing mausoleum at a far more manageable size, and it stands there today. The Yang Sean blocks were abandoned where they lay. The cut faces are still sharp in places. You can see the channels workers cut around each

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block to separate it from the surrounding rock, the tool marks left in the limestone, and the exact points where the work stopped. Local tradition holds that enormous numbers of laborers died on the site, and a hill nearby is

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said in folk stories to be built from the worn out shoes of the men who worked there. The site is open to visitors now as a park with walkways letting people get close to all three pieces.

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In 1819, workers clearing jungle at the mouth of the Singapore River for Britain's new trading settlement came across a sandstone slab standing at the water's edge. It was roughly 3 m high and 3 m wide and one face was covered in

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inscribed characters worn down by centuries of monsoon rain and salt spray. Nobody could read them. Rubbings and copies were made and sent to scholars in Kolkata and across Europe and the responses came back as Sanskrit, old Javanese, Tamil, Kawi script and

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several other possibilities with no agreement reached at all. Even at that point, the characters were too eroded for confident reading, and the copies made by different people did not match each other in every detail. In 1843, the colonial authorities decided to widen

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the river mouth and clear ground for a new fort and quarters for the settlement's commander. The slab was in the way. They blew it up with gunpowder.

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A handful of fragments were rescued from the debris largely through the efforts of George Samuel Windsor Earl, the colonial surgeon and naturalist who understood what had just been destroyed.

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Some pieces were shipped to Kolkata for study and were subsequently lost in transit or in storage there. Others disappeared entirely. One fragment survives. It measures roughly 67 cm by 80. It is held by the National Museum of Singapore and it carries perhaps 10 to

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15 partial characters, most of them incomplete. The best current assessment dates the stone somewhere between the 10th and 14th centuries and associates the script with old Javanese, though Sanskrit remains a possibility. In that period, the island was a port settlement

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known as Tamasc and later as Singapora with trading connections running across Southeast Asia and beyond. A monumental inscription at a busy rivermouth is entirely consistent with that probably commemorating a victory, a ruler or some significant event at the site. There is

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a much older story attached to the slab as well. The Sajara Malayu, the Malay annals compiled in the 16th century, tells of a strong man named Badang who served the ruler of Singapura and who in a contest of strength against a champion

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from India hurled an enormous stone to the mouth of the Singapore River. The chronicle states the stone remained there afterwards. Whether that account preserves a memory of the slab's placement or attached itself to an object people already found inexplicable

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is not resolvable. With most of the inscription destroyed, the language cannot be confirmed and the text cannot be read. Everything now rests on a single fragment, a set of 19th century drawings made by people who could not read it either. And the

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disagreements [music] between those drawings. Shaven Dewantar sits at 3,200 m in the Peruvian Andes in a narrow valley where two rivers meet about 250 km north of Lima. The site was built and expanded between roughly 1 1200 and 500 BC which

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places it more than a thousand years before the Inca [music] and it drew people from across a wide region of the Andes and the coast. The visible structures are stone platforms with sunken plazas built in stages over several centuries faced with dressed

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stone and originally decorated with carved heads set into the outer walls. Most of those heads have fallen, though one remains in place, and around 40 have been recovered. The interior is where the site becomes unusual. Cut through the platforms is a network of galleries,

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narrow stone-lined passages running on multiple levels inside the buildings themselves. They have no windows and no source of natural light. They twist, branch, change floor height, double back on themselves, and in places narrow to the point where a person has to turn

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sideways. Some connect, others dead end. Deep inside, one gallery stands the Lanzon, a granite shaft 4 1/2 m tall, set upright in a crucifform chamber. It is carved with a figure that combines human features with fangs, clawed hands,

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and snakes in place of hair. The chamber is only reachable through the passages in the dark and the shaft extends up through the ceiling into the level above. John Rick of Stanford University has led research at the site for many

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years and part of that work has focused on how sound behaves in the galleries.

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The passages are acoustically strange. Sound entering them does not travel as expected. Noise produced in one chamber can appear to come from a completely different direction and the irregular shapes scatter and reflect sound in ways that make locating a source difficult.

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In 2001, 20 conch shell trumpets were excavated from one of the galleries dated to around 900 BC. These instruments called patutus are made from strombus shells imported from warm coastal waters far to the north, meaning they were carried a considerable

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distance to get here. Rick's team tested replicas and originals inside the passages. Played in the galleries, the shells produce a sound that fills the space and seems to arrive from every direction at once. The site also has an

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extensive water system built into it with stone channels running beneath and through the galleries fed from the rivers.

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When water moves through them, the sound carries into the passages. And researchers have suggested the flow could be controlled to produce effects at particular moments. Chemical residue analysis on vessels recovered from the site has identified San Pedro cactus, a

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hallucinagen used in Andian ritual for thousands of years. Carved reliefs at Chavin show figures holding the cactus, and a number of carvings depict humans in stages of transformation into jaguars and birds. Snuff tubes, mortars, and grinding stones have been recovered as

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well, consistent with the preparation of hallucinogenic snuff from Vila seeds. The people at Chave left carvings and buildings, but nothing written. 2 and a half thousand km away and several thousand years earlier, someone in northern Greece may have been marking

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wood with something that looks a great deal like writing. In 1932, a dry summer dropped the water level of Lake Castoriia in northern Greece far enough to expose part of the lake bed along the shore. A Greek archaeologist

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named Antonio Keramopoulos went to look at what had appeared and found the stumps of wooden posts standing out of the mud along with pottery, [music] bone tools, and worked flint. The site is called Dispilio after the village next to it. And what Caramopoulos had

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found [music] was a Neolithic lake settlement. People built houses here on wooden platforms raised over shallow water supported on driven piles from around 5600 BC onward. Settlements of this kind are known from alpine lakes across central Europe, but they are rare

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in Greece. and Dispilio is among the oldest yet identified anywhere on the continent. The waterlogged mud preserved things that rot away almost everywhere else. Wood survives in it. So do seeds, fruit stones, textile fragments, cords, and the remains of meals. Excavators at

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the site have recovered wild and cultivated plant material, fishbones, and the timber of the platforms themselves, giving a picture of daily life that stonebuilt sites of the same period cannot match. Systematic excavation did not begin until 1992 when

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George Hormuziatus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloni took over. His team worked through the lake bed for years, mapping huts, hearths, and tools.

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In 1993, they pulled out a flat piece of wood roughly the size of a hand, and one face carried markings. The tablet is cut with a series of symbols arranged in rough horizontal rows. There are around a dozen distinct signs, several of which

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repeat. The wood was radiocarbon dated to approximately 5260 BC. That date is why anyone outside Greek archaeology has heard of it. The earliest writing generally accepted by scholars is Sumerian cunea form and Egyptian hieroglyphs both appearing around 3,300

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to 3200 BC in the near east. The despilio tablet [music] if the marks are writing predates them by 2,000 years and does it in southeastern Europe. Our Musiatus was careful about the claim. He described the markings as a form of

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writing or protoriting and argued they were a deliberate communication rather than decoration, but he did not claim to read them and no decipherment has been offered since. The marks have been compared to the Vinca symbols, a set of

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signs found on pottery and objects across the Balkans from roughly the same period which have prompted the same argument for the same reasons. Both sit in a difficult category. They appear structured. They repeat and they were clearly made on purpose. But there is no

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bilingual text, no later related script, and nothing to establish whether they encode language or function as ownership marks, counting or symbols with fixed meanings that stop short of writing. The tablet itself has not helped matters.

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Once it came out of the waterlogged mud, it began to degrade almost immediately, as ancient wood does when exposed to air, and it went into conservation treatment for years. The condition of the surface now is considerably worse than when it was found, and much of what

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is discussed comes from the initial documentation and photographs rather than the object itself. Excavation at Despilio has continued in seasons since, and a reconstructed Neolithic village has been built on the shore for visitors, with huts raised on piles over

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the water in the way the originals would have stood. About 80 kilometers northwest of Beijing in the Yanking District, there is a cliff face honeycombed with rooms, 117 caves cut into it containing around 350 separate chambers spread across 10

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hectares of hillside on several levels connected by carved steps, ladders, and passages. They are cut into granite.

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That matters because granite is one of the harder stones to work, [music] and this is not rough shelter excavation.

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The chambers have squared corners, level floors, and flat ceilings. Doorways are cut to consistent dimensions. Windows are framed. Inside the rooms, there are raised sleeping platforms of the kind called Kong in northern China, stone shelves and storage niches, carved

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recesses for lamps, and channels cut into floors and roof lines to carry water away. The largest structure in the complex is known as the Guantanzi, sometimes translated as the officials residence. It has eight rooms across two floors with carved stone pillars

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supporting the ceiling and what appear to be a stone bed and other furniture cut in place. The rooms are arranged around a central space and the layout reads as high status accommodation rather than simple dwelling. The site was documented in 1984 [music]

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and opened to visitors later with walkways and stairs added. Since then, it has been studied, cataloged, and promoted as a tourist destination, and the basic facts of what is there are well established. What is not established is who cut it. There is no

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inscription anywhere in the complex. No pottery, tools, or grave goods have been found that securely date the construction. No Chinese historical text describes a settlement of this kind at this location, which is unusual in a country with an exceptionally long and

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detailed written record. Dynastic histories, local gazetters, and administrative documents record an enormous amount about settlements, construction, and population, and a village carved into a granite cliff capable of housing several hundred people should appear somewhere in that record. The most commonly repeated

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attribution is to a people called the Xi or Xi, a group referenced in Chinese sources as living in the northern frontier regions [music] during the Tang Dynasty, roughly the 7th to 10th centuries. A D. The connection is made

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on geographic grounds rather than on any direct evidence from the site, and it functions more as a placeholder than an answer. Other suggestions have included a military garrison, a refuge used during periods of conflict on the northern frontier and a religious

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community. The estimated age generally given runs to around a thousand years, which would place it in the [music] Tang or Liao period. That figure comes from stylistic comparison and from the general history of the region rather than from anything dated at the site

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directly. Water is the practical question that comes up repeatedly. The complex sits high on a cliff face with no spring inside it, and the carved channels indicate the builders were managing rainwater carefully. But a settlement of this size would have

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needed more than that. Whoever lived here was carrying water up from below, which constrains how long the place could have been occupied continuously and by how many people.

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A bronze mirror from Han Dynasty China looks like an ordinary object. A disc usually somewhere between 8 and 20 cm across, polished to a reflective finish on one side and cast with a decorative design on the other. Loops, knobs, or a

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central boss on the back allow a cord to pass through for carrying. Thousands of them survive. A small number behave differently. Hold one of these so that sunlight strikes the polished face and reflects onto a wall. And the patch of

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light on the wall carries an image. Usually, it is the design cast into the back of the mirror appearing in the reflection as though the light had passed straight through solid bronze.

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Sometimes it is a different image entirely, a character or a figure that appears nowhere on the object. The Chinese term translates as light penetrating mirror. Japanese collections hold examples too where they are called makio. The earliest surviving examples

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date to the Han dynasty, roughly 200 BC to 200 AD. And the effect was being described in Chinese writing by the 11th century when the scholar Shenkuo wrote about mirrors in his household that did this and admitted he had no explanation

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for how the mechanism was finally worked out in the 19th and 20th centuries. And it comes down to the polishing. When the mirror is cast, the bronze is thicker where the design sits on the back and thinner in the spaces between. During

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polishing, pressure applied to the face causes the thinner sections to flex very slightly more than the thicker ones. The result is a reflecting surface that is not perfectly flat, but carries minute variations in curvature far too small to

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see or feel that correspond exactly to the pattern on the reverse. Light reflecting off those variations converges and diverges differently across the surface. And at a distance, those differences resolve into an image.

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The physicist William Bragg published an analysis of the effect in 1932 and later work by researchers in China and Japan reconstructed the process in detail. The variation in the surface is measured in micrometers. The remaining question is whether the Han craftsmen understood

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what they were doing. Producing the effect reliably requires controlling casting thickness and polishing pressure to a degree that seems unlikely to happen by accident every time. Yet, the majority of surviving Han mirrors do not do it. One reading is that the effect was

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discovered accidentally and then deliberately reproduced by a small number of workshops who knew the trick without knowing the physics. Another is that it remained an occasional accident throughout. A handful of mirrors complicate this further. There are examples where the image projected is

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not the design on the back at all, but something hidden, including Buddhist figures and inscriptions that do not appear anywhere on the visible object.

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Producing that requires the maker to work the concealed pattern into the surface deliberately, which means knowing the effect exists and knowing how to control it.

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Scattered across the Shang Kuang Plateau in northern Laos are thousands of stone jars. They stand upright on hillsides and open ground arranged in clusters ranging from a handful to several hundred across more than 90 identified sightes. The largest are 3 m tall and

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weigh up to 14 tons. Most are between 1 and 2 m, cylindrical, [music] tapering slightly, hollowed out and open at the top. They are cut from sandstone, granite, conglomerate, and limestone.

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And the quaries they came from have been identified at distances of up to 10 km from where the jars now stand. Partly finished jars remain at some quarry sites, abandoned at various stages of hollowing. French archaeologist Maline Colani surveyed the plane in the 1930s

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and produced the first serious study. She excavated around the jars and found human remains, burned bone, glass beads, bronze and iron objects, and ceramic vessels buried nearby. Her conclusion was that the jars were connected toerary practice, and that reading has broadly

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held up. Later work has found more burials around the jars, including bodies placed in the ground beside them and cremated remains in ceramic containers. What the jars themselves held is less settled. Kelani suggested they were used for cremation or for a

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primary burial where the body was placed inside to decompose before the bones were removed and buried elsewhere, which is a practice documented in parts of Southeast Asia. Some jars had stone discs that may have been lids, though few were found in place. Dating has

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moved considerably in recent years. Work led by Doug O'Reilly of the Australian National University and Louise Shuan of the University of Melbourne, published from 2016 onward, used optically stimulated luminescence on sediment beneath [music] the jars and produced dates suggesting the jars were placed

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between around 1240 and 660 BC. Burials found around them are considerably later. Some from the 9th to 13th centuries AD, which means people were burying their dead around these jars for over a thousand years after they were put there. Local Lao tradition

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explains them as drinking cups made for a race of giants or as vessels used to brew rice wine to celebrate a military victory. The plateau was bombed heavily during the Vietnam War when Laos became the most bombed country per capita in

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history. Unexloded ordinance remains across the region and has restricted archaeological work severely with only a small number of sites cleared and safe to enter. The plane of jars became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019.

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Biblo on the coast of Lebanon north of Beirut has been occupied for around 7,000 years which makes it one of the longest continuously inhabited places on Earth. It was a major Phoenician port trading cedarwood to Egypt and papyrus

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onward to Greece. And the Greek word for book came from the city's name. The alphabet most of the world now uses descends from a script developed by the phoenetians and biblos is central to that story. [music] The aaram

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sarcophagus found there in 1923 carries one of the earliest substantial Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions dating to around 1,000 BC. French archaeologist Maurice Dunan excavated at Biblo across several decades starting in the 1920s and among the material he recovered were objects carrying a script

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that was not Phoenician and not [music] Egyptian. 10 inscriptions were found in total on bronze tablets, bronze spatulas, and stone fragments along with a small number of shorter examples on other objects. The script uses around 114 distinct signs. That number matters.

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An alphabet uses a few dozen signs. A fully logoraphic system like Chinese uses thousands. A count in the low hundreds points to a sy represents a syllable rather than a single sound or a whole word and syllibaries of this type are known from

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the Aian [music] and the near east in the second millennium BC. Dunan published the inscriptions in 1945 and the script has been called the biblos syllibary or pseudohieroglyphic bibbl script. Since some signs resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs in form without

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carrying Egyptian meaning dating has been argued over with estimates ranging from around 2,000 BC to,400 BC placing it somewhere before or alongside the emergence of the alphabet. Decipherment attempts have been made repeatedly.

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Idoard Dorme published a proposed reading in 1946 treating the language as Phoenician and the reading was not accepted. Further attempts have been made since including work by George Mendenhal in 1985 and more recent computational approaches and none has

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produced a result that convinces the field. The corpus is the fundamental problem. 10 texts of any length with around a thousand total sign occurrences is a very small body of material to work from. And there is no bilingual

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inscription pairing the script with a known language. Without that, any proposed reading has nothing to test itself against.

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The TMA Oasis sits in northwestern Saudi Arabia around 400 kilometers north of Medina on the old caravan route that ran between the Arabian interior and the Levant. It is one of the longest inhabited places on the peninsula with

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occupation going back at least 4,000 years and it turns up in Assyrian records and in the Hebrew Bible. The Babylonian king Neabonadus moved his residence there for 10 years in the 6th century BC, leaving his son to run

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Babylon in his absence, which historians still argue about. A few kilome outside the oasis on open desert ground, there is a sandstone block split cleanly down the middle. The two halves stand about 6 m tall and around 9 m across in total,

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and each one is balanced on a narrow pedestal of rock, so they sit slightly raised off the ground.

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[music] Between them is a gap of a few centimeters running the full height of the block. The cut is why people come.

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It is almost perfectly vertical running from the top of the stone straight down to the base and the faces on either side are flat and parallel to each other.

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Stand in the right position and you can see clean desert through the gap. There is very little deviation along the whole length of the split. Both faces carry petetroglyphs.

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Human figures, horses, ibecks, and early Arabian script are cut into the sandstone across the two halves dated to somewhere in the first millennium BC.

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The carvings do not cross the gap, which indicates the stone was already split when they were made. That gives a minimum age for the split of around 2,000 years and says nothing about how much older it might be. The geological

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explanation runs through joints. Sandstone forms in layers and develops planes of weakness running through it.

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And rock tends to separate along those planes rather than randomly. This block sits on pedestals that concentrate stress through its middle. Freeze and thaw cycles. Windworking sand into the crack and any shifting of the pedestals beneath could open an existing joint

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into a full separation over a long enough period. The flatness of the faces comes from the joint plane itself, which is flat because of how the sediment was originally laid down. The counterargument is precision.

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Natural joint separation does occur, and there are other split rocks in the region, but the surfaces usually show steps, curves, and irregularities where the fracture wandered. Al-Nasla is straighter and flatter than most, and the two halves are also close to equal

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in size, which is less common than it sounds. No excavation has been carried out at the block. The Saudi Heritage Commission has documented and protected it as part of the wider TMA heritage area, and there is now a marked visitor

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route, but nobody has dug around the pedestals or taken core samples. The rock art has been recorded as part of regional surveys of Arabian petetroglyphs.

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The Sajama lines cover around 22,000 km of the Bolivian Aliplano, which makes the area they span roughly 15 times larger than the Nazca lines. They sit in the far west of Bolivia near the Chilean border on high plateau country at around

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4,000 m elevation in the shadow of Nevada Sajama, the highest mountain in the country at over 6,000 [music] m. The mountain is sacred in Immara tradition and has been for a very long time. The [music] lines themselves are

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tracks scraped into the desert floor made by clearing away the darker oxidized [music] surface layer of stone and soil to expose the paler ground underneath.

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Individual lines run between 1 and 3 m wide, and some continue for 20 km or more. Estimates of the total combined length across the network reach around 16,000 km, which would make it the largest single body of geoglyph work

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anywhere on the planet. They do not run in parallel and they do not form pictures. They converge, radiating outward from points across the landscape in patterns that look like spokes. The convergence points sit at hills, at villages, at small shrines, and at stone

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burial towers called chulpas, which the Imara built for their dead. Some points have dozens of lines meeting at them.

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The most widely accepted reading connects them to pilgrimage. Walking routes between sacred locations are well documented in Andian practice, and the lines link precisely the kinds of places that would be visited. Anthropologist Johan Reinhardt, who surveyed the network in the 1980s, argued for exactly

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this, treating the lines as a ritual landscape rather than a single constructed monument. Dating scraped ground is difficult because nothing organic is involved. The estimates that exist put the network beginning around 3,000 years ago and continuing in use

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through the colonial period, with some routes still walked within living memory. That makes it a system built up and maintained over an enormous span by generation after generation rather than a single project. The straightness holds across terrain that rises and falls with

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lines crossing hills and gullies without deviating which means somebody was sighting between fixed points rather than walking and clearing as they went.

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Doing that at 4,000 mters, where the air is thin and the population was never large over a combined distance of 16,000 km, represents a sustained investment that is difficult to account for in terms of practical need alone. Very

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little excavation has been done. Most of what is known comes from aerial survey, satellite imagery, and ethnographic work with Amara communities in the region, and large portions of the network have never been walked or recorded on the ground.

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[music] Behind the temple of Si the first at Abidos in southern Egypt, sitting in a pit around 9 m below the temple floor, there is a structure that does not match anything around it. Abidos was one of the oldest and most important religious

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sites in Egypt, associated with Osiris, the god of the dead, and used as a burial ground from the very earliest dynasties. Si the first built his temple there in the 13th century BC. and it is one of the best preserved temples in the

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country. Covered floor to ceiling and painted relief carving of exceptional quality. The Osiran sits directly behind it and the two buildings could not look less alike. Saidi's temple is fine limestone, densely inscribed, decorated across every surface. The Osiran is

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built from enormous blocks of red granite quaried at Aswan and brought roughly 320 km down the Nile. Some of them weighing around 100 tons. The blocks are plain. There are no inscriptions on the original structure at all. No cartes, no relief work,

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nothing. The central hall contains 10 massive granite pillars, each cut from a single block supporting archetraves of comparable size. The masonry is cyclopian, meaning very large blocks fitted together without mortar, and the joints are tight.

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Surrounding the central island is a channel that fills with groundwater. So, the platform appears to sit in [music] water, which is how the building gets its name and its association with Osiris, whose tomb was described as an island surrounded by water. Flenders

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Petri and Margaret Murray excavated the structure between 1902 and 1903 working through the sand that had buried it.

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Murray published the findings and the debate about the building's date started immediately. The conventional attribution is to STI the first based on its position behind his temple and on inscriptions found in the passage connecting the two structures. Those

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inscriptions are new kingdom and name STI. The objection is that they appear only on the later editions, the passage and some surrounding elements and not on the granite core itself. The alternative reading treats the granite structure as considerably older with STI building his

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temple next to something already standing and connecting it. Supporters point to the style which resembles old kingdom construction at Giza far more than new kingdom work. the complete absence of decoration in a period when Egyptian builders decorated everything

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and its depth relative to the surrounding ground which suggests it was built when the local surface level was much lower. Water erosion on the granite has been cited by geologist Robert Shock and others as indicating prolonged exposure to rainfall rather than the

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wind weathering typical of later monuments which would push its construction back toward a wetter climate period. The building is flooded for much of the year and has been since it was uncovered. The rising water table around Abidos, driven partly by modern

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irrigation, has made access difficult and slowed further excavation considerably. In 1996, a Chinese writer named Bayou traveled to Mount Baong, a rocky hill in the Kaidam Basin of Chingghai province in northwestern China, about 40 km from the town of Dingha. The basin is high

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desert over 2 and a half thousand meters up, dry and largely empty. There are three caves on the southern face of the hill, two of which have collapsed.

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Inside the accessible one, Bayou found what looked like rusted iron pipes running through the rock. One appeared to run from the cave floor down into the ground. Another ran from the ceiling toward the hill above. [music] More pipes were found outside the cave on the

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shore of nearby Tosen Lake, protruding from the sand and embedded in the lake bed, ranging in diameter from a few centimeters down to the thickness of a toothpick.

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Reports of the find reached Chinese newspapers, and in June 2002, an article in the state-run press described the pipes and raised the possibility that they were evidence of ancient technology or of visitors from elsewhere. Coverage spread quickly and Delinga began

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attracting visitors. Analysis was carried out at a smelting plant in the region and the results reported that the pipes were around 30% feric oxide with significant quantities of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide along with roughly 8% of material that could not be

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identified. The lack of identification in that last portion became the detail most widely repeated. The geological dating of the surrounding sandstone put the rock at millions of years old, and some reports claimed the pipes themselves were dated to around 150,000

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years, well before any iron smelting anywhere on Earth. Lu Shaolin, the engineer who conducted the analysis, and other Chinese researchers who followed up, offered a different explanation. The pipes appear to be natural formations, specifically pseudomorphs, where minerals gradually replace organic

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material over long periods. Tree roots pushed into sediment, buried, and then slowly replaced by ironrich minerals leeching through the rock would produce hollow tubes of exactly this kind.

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Studies published in 2003 using atomic emission spectroscopy reported finding organic plant material inside some of the pipes along with structures resembling tree rings which supported the root explanation. Similar formations have been documented elsewhere in the world, particularly in areas where

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ancient forests were buried by sediment and iron rich water moved through afterward. The site is now a local tourist attraction marked with a monument and the surrounding area has been developed around the story.

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Small clay statues from southern Mesopotamia made around 7,000 years ago show human bodies with the heads of lizards. The ubade culture occupied the region that became Sumer in what is now southern Iraq from roughly 6,500 to 3800 BC. They were among the first people

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anywhere to build large permanent settlements on the Mesopotamian flood plane, developing irrigation, making painted pottery, and constructing the early temples that would eventually become the ziggurats of later Sumerian cities. Almost everything that followed in Mesopotamia grew out of them. The

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figurines come mainly from two sites, Ur and Aridu, excavated in the 1920s and 1940s.

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Leonard Woolly, best known for his work on the royal tombs at Ur, recovered a number of them, and more came from Aridu, which the Sumerianss themselves regarded as the oldest city in the world. They are small, typically around

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14 cm tall, made from fired clay. The bodies are human and often stylized, and many of the figures are female, some shown holding infants at the breast.

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Others stand with arms at their sides or holding a staff. The heads are the distinctive part. They are elongated with a projecting snout, slit eyes set at an angle, and shaped skulls that give a reptilian appearance.

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Some figures carry clay pellets applied to the shoulders and chest, which excavators have interpreted as representing scarification or bammen decoration. Mainstream interpretation treats them as stylized human representations rather than depictions of reptiles.

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The argument runs that Ubide artistic convention favored elongated heads and angular features, that cranial deformation through binding infant skulls was practiced in the region, and that a nursing mother is about as human a subject as exists. The lizard reading

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comes from applying modern eyes to a stylistic tradition that had different priorities. The counterargument notes that eubade potters were producing finely painted ceramics with controlled detail in [music] the same period which suggests the figures look this way because the makers intended them to.

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Whether the intent was to show a deity, a spirit, a mask or a human with deliberate features is not resolvable from the objects alone. No ubi writing exists. The culture predates Cooney form by several thousand years, which means

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there is no text explaining what these figures were for, and the archaeological context they came from were mostly burials in domestic areas rather than temples.

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In the Janabad district of Bihar in eastern India, a pair of rocky hills rise out of otherwise flat farmland. Cut into them are seven chambers carved directly into solid granite and the interiors are polished to a mirror finish. The Barabar caves are the oldest

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surviving rock cut caves in India. Four of them sit in the Barabar hill itself and three in the nearby Nagarajjuni hill and several carry inscriptions that date them precisely. Three of the Barabar caves were dedicated by the emperor

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Ashoka who ruled the Morian Empire across most of the subcontinent in the 3rd century BC with dates corresponding to around 260 to 250 BC. The Nagjuni caves were dedicated by his grandson Dasharatha. The inscriptions record that the caves were given to the Ajivikas, an

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aesthetic religious order that was a contemporary rival of Buddhism and Janism and which later disappeared entirely. The best known chamber is the Lomus Rishi cave and the entrance is what most people photograph. It is carved to imitate a wooden structure

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with a curved arch and a decorative band showing a row of elephants approaching a stupa worked in relief. The carving copies the appearance of bent timber and thatch, which is how buildings were made at the time, translated into granite.

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Inside is where it gets interesting. The chambers are simple in plan, typically a rectangular outer hall with a smaller vated inner chamber, some with a domed or barrel-shaped ceiling. The walls, floors, and ceilings are polished to a reflective surface. You can see your own

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face in the granite. The polish extends across the full interior into corners, across curved ceiling surfaces, and around the vaulted ends. Granite is a hard coarse grain stone with quartz, feldspar, and mica in it. And the individual crystals have different

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hardnesses. Polishing it evenly means araiding all of those components down to the same plane, which requires progressively finer abrasives and an enormous amount of work. Doing it on a flat surface is difficult. Doing it inside a chamber on a curved ceiling

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reaching into corners with Morian tools is a level of finish that has no obvious parallel in the period. The same polish appears on the Ashoken pillars, the freestanding columns Ashoka erected across his empire, several of which survive with their surfaces intact.

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Marian polish is a recognized category in Indian art history and how exactly it was achieved is still discussed. The acoustics are the other feature. Sound in the chambers behaves unusually with speech and singing producing long sustained reverberation and a hum that

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continues well after the sound stops. The Lomis Rishi and Sudama caves have been measured by researchers interested in ancient acoustics and the effect is a consequence of the geometry and the reflective surfaces rather than anything designed in a way we can identify. The

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caves were unfinished in places. Lomus Rishi has a section of interior that was left rough with the polishing incomplete and cracks in the rock have been suggested as the reason work stopped.

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Forester visited in the 1910s and used the caves as the basis for the Marabar caves in a passage to India, including the echo that unsettles the novel's central character.

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Easter Island sits in the South Pacific around 3,000 km west of Chile and it is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. The nearest inhabited land is Pit Karen Island 2,000 km away.

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Polynesian settlers reached it somewhere between 800 and 1200 AD and built the Moai, the enormous stone heads that made the island famous.

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In 1864, a French missionary named Ueno arrived and became the first outsider to live on the island for an extended period. In his account of what he found, he wrote that in every house there were wooden tablets covered in carved

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characters which the islanders kept but seemed to treat as objects rather than as texts to be read. By then the island had been through catastrophe. Peruvian slave raiders had taken around 1500 people in 1862 and 1863, a substantial

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share of the population and including much of the ruling and priestly class. Those returned afterward brought smallpox with them. Within a few years, the population had collapsed to a few hundred people. The tablets are called rangarango.

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26 objects carrying the script survive. Scattered across museums in Europe, Chile, the United States, and elsewhere.

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Made mostly from wood, including driftwood, and in some cases pieces of European ore. The characters are cut in shallow relief arranged in lines and [music] written in what is called reverse bastidon meaning you read one line left to right then rotate the

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tablet 180° [music] to read the next. There are somewhere between 120 and 600 distinct signs depending on how variants are counted. Many of them showing human figures, birds, fish, and plants. Nobody can read them. Attempts have been made

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continuously since the 19th century and a small number of partial readings have been proposed. Steven Fiser argued in the 1990s that certain sequences represent creation chance. Others have identified what appears to be a lunar calendar on one tablet based on

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repeating sign sequences that match the number of nights in the Rapanoui [music] month. Neither result has produced a working decipherment. The problems are fundamental. There is no bilingual text.

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The total corpus amounts to around 15,000 characters, which is small for a decipherment. The Rapanui language survives, but the tablets may be recording an older form of it or a specialized ritual register, and nobody who could read them lived long enough to

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teach anyone else. Attempts were made. Bishop Florentine Yaoen in Tahiti found a Rapanui man named Mtoro who chanted while looking at the tablets and jaen recorded the chants. Later scholars concluded Mtoro was describing the pictures rather than reading them.

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Recent radiocarbon dating on several tablets published in 2024 returned a date for one piece, placing the wood in the 15th century before European contact, which supports the script being an independent [music] invention rather than a response to seeing European

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writing. In 2015, divers working a shipwreck off the coast of Gala in southern Sicily brought up 39 metal ingots from the seabed. The ship had gone down around 300 m offshore in shallow water dated to roughly the 6th century BC and it had

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been carrying cargo when it sank. The ingots were an alloy. Analysis using X-ray fluoresence found they were made of copper around 75 to 80% mixed with zinc at 15 to 20% with traces of nickel, [music] lead and iron. That combination

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is brass. Producing it deliberately in the 6th century BC required a specific technique since zinc boils at a lower temperature than copper melts. So, it cannot be added directly. The process used in antiquity involved heating copper together with zinc ore and

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charcoal in a sealed vessel. So, the zinc vapor was absorbed into the metal. The find was announced alongside a claim that attracted considerably more attention than the metallurgy. The ingots were identified as oricalum, a metal described by ancient Greek writers

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and most famously by Plato. In the dialogue citus, written around 360 BC, Plato describes Atlantis and mentions that Oricalum was mined there, second in value only to gold, and that the walls of the citadel were covered in it so

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that the metal flashed with a red light. Earlier Greek writers including Heissiod mention orical as well and Roman authors describe it as a valuable alloy used in coinage. The word appears in Greek as a compound meaning mountain copper.

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Sebastiano Tusa the Sicilian archaeologist who led the work connected the ingots to the ancient descriptions and the story traveled quickly. Jala was a Greek colony founded around 689 BC and by the 6th century it was a wealthy city

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with workshops producing metal work. So a ship carrying valuable alloy ingots into the harbor fits the archaeology cleanly.

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Whether these ingots are what Plato meant is a different question. Ancient sources are inconsistent about what oricalum actually was, and the term may have covered several different metals or alloys at different times, or may have been partly legendary. The

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identification rests on the alloy being unusual and valuable in the right period rather than on anything in the ingots themselves naming them. 47 more ingots were recovered from the same wreck in 2016, bringing the total to 86. The

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recite has produced Corinthian helmets and amphetal. In 1902, workmen cutting sistns for new houses in Paola on the island of Malta broke through the roof of an underground chamber. They kept working and said nothing because reporting it would have

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stopped construction. Word got out eventually and the site was examined in 1903 by Father Emanuel Maghre, a Jesuit priest and archaeologist who began clearing it. Mara died in 1907 before publishing and his notes were lost which removed a substantial portion of the

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record of what was found in the upper levels. The Mysticles Zamit took over and completed the excavation. What they had was a complex cut into the limestone across three levels reaching around 10 and 1/2 m below the surface with

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chambers, passages, steps, [music] and halls carved out of solid rock. The whole thing was made using stone tools and antler picks starting around 4,000 BC with the deeper levels cut later.

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Roughly 7,000 people were buried inside it over the period of use. The upper level is the oldest and simplest. The middle level contains the finest work, including a chamber carved to imitate the facade of a built temple with

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trilithon doorways and corbelled ceilings copied in negative from the freestanding stone temples above ground on Malta. Ceilings in several chambers carry painted spirals in red ochre.

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Among the only surviving prehistoric wall painting in the Maltese Islands, the room that gets the most attention is called the oracle room. It is a small chamber with a niche cut into one wall at around head height and sound made

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into that niche behaves unusually. A deep male voice produces a resonance that carries through the chamber and into adjoining spaces and the effect is noticeably stronger at certain pitches.

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Researchers have measured it. Studies have reported a strong resonance frequency at around 110 hertz which sits in the range of a low male voice. And a separate study by an international team including researchers from the Italybased Rupestrian Archo Acoustics

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project reported effects on brain activity in listeners exposed to that frequency. The findings have been contested and the sample sizes were small. Among the objects recovered was the sleeping lady, a small clay figure of a woman lying on her side on a couch

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around 12 cm long dated to roughly 3000 BC. It is one of the most reproduced objects in Maltese archaeology. Visitor numbers have been capped since [music] 2000 at 80 per day because breath and body heat were damaging the ochre

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paintings. Around 3,100 BC in the city of Susa in what is now southwestern Iran, people began writing on clay tablets using a system that nobody has ever read. Susa sat in the plane of Kustan on the eastern edge of the Mesopotamian world

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and it was one of the major urban centers of the ancient near east occupied for over 5,000 years. The culture there was Elomite, a civilization that existed alongside Sumer and Babylon for millennia, fought wars with them, traded with them, and

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was eventually absorbed into the Persian Empire. French excavations at Susa, beginning under Jacqu de Morgan in the 1890s and continuing for decades, recovered large numbers of clay tablets.

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Around 1,600 of them carry a script now called protoelomite used for roughly 200 years from around 3100 to 2900 BC before being abandoned.

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The tablets are administrative. The numerical system on them has been worked out and it is complex using several different counting systems [music] depending on what was being counted with separate sets of signs for discrete objects, for grain measures,

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for areas of land, and for livestock. That much can be read with confidence, which means we can tell that a tablet records a quantity of something without knowing what the something is. The non-numerical signs are the problem.

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There are around 1,400 distinct characters, which is a very large sign inventory, and most of them appear only a handful of times across the whole corpus. Signs that appear once or twice give a decipherer nothing to work with.

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The script appears to have developed in response to Mesopotamian protouni form, which was being used at Uruk slightly earlier, and it shares the numerical systems and the general administrative approach. The signs themselves are largely different which suggests the

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Elommites took the idea of writing and built their own version rather than borrowing the system. Jacob Dah at the University of Oxford has led the most sustained modern effort running the Cooneyiform Digital Library initiative's work on protoelamite and using

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reflectance transformation imaging a photographic technique that captures surface detail from multiple light angles to read worn tablets that were previously illeible. The project has published highquality images of the corpus and crowdsourced analysis. Dah has noted that the scribes made errors,

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that the script shows signs of being used without full standardization, and that it may have been taught badly or used by people who did not fully understand it. Whether the underlying language is Elomite, [music] which is itself a language isolate with no known

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relatives or something else entirely has not been established. Souza's tablets have sat in museums for over a century with no context problem.

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Everything about them is documented. The next site has the opposite situation entirely, sitting under an English seaside town with no record of who built it or when.

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In 1835, a man named James New Love was digging a duck pond in a field behind his house in Margate, [music] a coastal town in Kent. His spade went through into a void. He lowered his son Joshua into the hole on a rope with a candle

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and the boy came back up describing passages underground with walls covered in shells. What new love had opened was a chalk tunnel about 21 m long leading to a rectangular chamber known now as the rotunda and beyond that into a

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rectangular room called the altar chamber. Every surface running along the walls of the passage and around both chambers is covered in mosaic made from shells pressed into a backing. The total comes to around 4.6 million shells across roughly 2,000

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square ft of surface. The shells are mostly local muscle, cockal, welk, oyster, and limpit. All of which could be gathered from the Kent coast along with flat winkles and scallops. They are arranged into patterns rather than scattered, forming borders, panels,

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rosettes, trees, stars, and repeating geometric bands, with some sections showing what have been interpreted as figures or symbols. The shells were originally their natural colors, and the whole thing would have been considerably brighter before Victorian gas lighting coated the surfaces in soot.

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New Love opened it to the public in 1837 as a paying attraction, which it has remained ever since. He also in the process made it very difficult to establish anything about its origin because a commercial venture with an

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owner selling tickets has an obvious incentive that muddies the record. Nothing in the documentary history of Margate mentions it. No deed, no estate map, no parish record, no account of construction. Margate was a wellocumented town and building an

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underground complex on this scale would have required labor, materials, and time. Dating has proved genuinely difficult. Shell and mortar samples have been tested, and radiocarbon dating on the mortar has produced results, but the presence of chalk in the local soil

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contaminates carbon dating in a way that skews results. Thermoluminescence testing has been attempted on the mortar as well. The results have not settled the argument.

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The theories cover a wide range. One holds that it is a Regency or Georgian folly built by a wealthy landowner as a decorative curiosity since shell grotto were fashionable among the English gentry in the 18th century. Against that

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known shell grotto of that period are documented in estate papers considerably smaller and typically attached to a house rather than buried in a field with no visible entrance. Another proposes a much older origin with suggestions running from a Roman shrine to a

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Phoenician temple to a prehistoric site, none of which have evidence behind them. A third suggestion is that it was built by a secretive group, possibly Masonic, as a meeting place, which would account for the absence of records. The soot

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damage from the original gas lighting is permanent and has darkened much of the shell work.

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Karahepe sits in the tect mountains of southeastern Turkey about 35 km east of Gobecepe and it belongs to the same world. Both are part of a cluster of sites across this region built by hunter gatherers around 11,500 years ago before pottery

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before agriculture before the wheel. The site was identified in 1997 during a regional survey and surface finds indicated something significant, but serious excavation did not begin until 2019 under NecMI Carl of Istanbul University. What has come out of the

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ground since has made it one of the most closely watched sites in archaeology. The structures are circular and semi-ubter, cut into the bedrock with T-shaped pillars standing within them.

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the same pillar form that defines Gobbec. The pillars carry carvings of animals, including snakes and human figures. The chamber that has drawn the most attention is a room cut directly down into the limestone with 11 phallic pillars standing in a row around the

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perimeter. Each carved from the bedrock itself rather than placed [music] there. They rise from the floor, meaning the entire room was quarried out around them and they were left standing as the rock was removed. Doing that requires knowing

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exactly where every pillar will be before you start cutting because there is no way to correct a mistake. Set into the wall of that same chamber emerging from the rock at the level of the pillars is a carved human head. It is

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life-sized with a neck extending back into the wall and the face has a distinct expression with a prominent nose and chin. It appears to be looking into the room watching the pillars.

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Nothing quite like it exists elsewhere. A channel runs through the floor of the room and the chamber connects to an adjoining space through a narrow opening which some researchers have suggested was used for ritual movement between the [music] two. Like Gobeclete, the

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structures at Carahantepe were deliberately buried at some point after they stopped being used. Phil was brought in and packed around the pillars, which is why the site survived so completely and which raises questions about why anyone would go to that effort

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to close down a building rather than simply abandoning it. The site sits within a group now referred to by Turkish archaeologists as the Tsheller, the Stone Hills, a project running across a dozen sites in the region. Only a small fraction of Kahantepe has been

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excavated with geoysical survey indicating a great deal more structure still underground. Platinum melts at 1,768° C. No furnace anywhere in the ancient world reached that temperature. and European metallurgists could not work the metal until the 18th century. On the

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Pacific coast, where Ecuador meets Colombia, there is an island called Latita, and the culture that occupied it between roughly 600 BC and 400 AD was producing platinum objects, masks, nose ornaments, beads, small figurines, and decorative work. Some of it combining

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platinum with gold in the same piece. The region's rivers carry platinum in aluvial deposits, small grains washed down from the mountains and mixed in with the gold that the same rivers produce. Anyone panning for gold in these waters would have found platinum

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grains alongside it, which is how the material became available in the first place. The technique the Latalita smiths developed is calleding. [music] Rather than melting the platinum, they mixed platinum grains with gold dust and heated the mixture. Gold melts at 1,64°,

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which is well within reach of a charcoal furnace with a blowpipe. The molten gold flows around the platinum grains and binds them together. And with repeated heating and hammering, the platinum particles diffuse into the gold and the whole mass becomes a workable alloy. The

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result can then be forged, cut, and polished like any other metal. The finished objects show the two metals used together deliberately with platinum providing a white surface against the yellow of gold, and some pieces have platinum overlaid on gold or inlaid into

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it. The craftsmanship is fine with detailed work on small ornaments. is the same principle used in modern powder metallergy where materials with very high melting points are bonded without being melted. The Latalita smiths arrived at it independently around 2,000 years before it was

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understood in Europe. Latalita itself was a ceremonial center with earthn mounds and the site was heavily looted from the 19th century onward with enormous quantities of gold and platinum work removed and melted down or sold before any systematic archaeology took

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place. What survives in museums represents a fraction of what was there. When Spanish colonists encountered platinum in the same rivers in the 16th century, they regarded it as a nuisance, an unworkable white metal contaminating the gold, and named it platin, meaning

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little silver. In 1961, a Romanian archaeologist named Nikolai Vlassa was excavating at Tartaria, a village in the Muresh Valley in Transennylvania.

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The site belonged to the Vinca culture, a Neolithic people who occupied much of the central Balkans from around 5700 BC, known for their figurines and for the marks they cut into pottery. In a pit at the site, Vassa found the remains of a

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body badly decomposed and possibly dismembered along with 26 clay figurines, a shell bracelet, and three small clay tablets.

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Two of the tablets have holes bored through them, suggesting they were worn or hung. All three carry in sized markings. The largest [music] is round, roughly 6 cm across, divided into four sections by cut lines with symbols inside each section, including what

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looks like a goat or antelope figure, a tree, and abstract signs. The others carry lines of symbols in rows. Velasa published the find and suggested the markings were writing, comparing them to early Sumerian pictoraphs.

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That comparison put the tablets into a much larger argument because the Vinca culture predates Sumer by a considerable margin. The dating is where it gets difficult. Vassa's stratographic record was not precise and the fine circumstances have been questioned.

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[music] Radiocarbon dating of associated bone from the pit returned dates around 5300 to 5200 BC, which would make the tablets around 2,000 years older than the earliest Sumerian writing. Some researchers have argued the tablets were intrusive, deposited later into an older

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layer, though no direct dating of the tablets themselves has been possible because fired clay cannot be radiocarbon dated. The symbols belong to a wider body of marks known as the Vinca symbols which appear on hundreds of objects across the Balkans, mostly on pottery.

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Around 210 distinct signs have been cataloged across the whole corpus. The argument over whether any of it constitutes writing has run for 60 years. The case for is that the signs are standardized, repeat in combinations, and appear in sequences.

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The case against is that they appear mostly on pots rather than in contexts where records would be kept, that no sequence runs long enough to look like a sentence, and that the total corpus shows no development over time, which

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writing systems normally display. The tablets were badly damaged during early conservation [music] when they were baked to harden them, which removed any possibility of further analysis on the original clay.

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In 1932, a pilot named George Palmer was flying between Las Vegas and Bllythe, California, following the Colorado River when he looked down and saw figures cut into the desert floor. The Ble and Taglios sit on terraces above the river

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in the Colorado desert on the California side near the Arizona border. There are six figures across three locations made by scraping away the dark layer of desert pavement. The surface of stones darkened over time by weathering to expose the lighter soil underneath.

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Three of the figures are human, the largest measuring around 53 m from head to foot. Two are animals generally described as four-legged, possibly mountain lions or horses. One is a spiral. The human figures have their arms outstretched, and the largest of

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them lies with a smaller animal figure beside it. None of them are visible from the ground in any meaningful way. The scraped lines are wide but shallow, and at ground level, a person walking across one would see a change in the surface

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stone without registering a shape. The figures only exist from the air. The Mojave and Quin people who have lived along the lower Colorado River for a very long time connect the figures to their creation traditions. The human figures have been identified with

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Mastamho, the creator of the earth and the river in Mojave tradition and the animal figures with Hatakula, a mountain lion associated with the creation story.

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Ceremonial dancing at these locations is part of the oral tradition. Dating has been attempted using cation ratio analysis on the desert varnish, [music] the dark coating that reforms slowly on exposed rock, and results have ranged widely. Estimates run from around 900 AD

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to considerably older, with some assessments suggesting a range spanning a thousand years or more of creation, [music] meaning the figures may not all be the same age. Damage is a serious problem. Tire tracks from vehicles crossing the terraces cut across parts

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of the figures. And once the desert pavement is disturbed, it does not restore. Fencing was installed around the main figures in the 1970s by the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the land after decades [music] of unrestricted access.

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The Bllythe figures needed an aircraft to be seen at all. The next [music] site needed pumps because for most of the last century it has been full of water.

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Beneath the Giza plateau under the causeway that runs from the pyramid of Kafra down toward the valley temple, there is a vertical shaft cut through the limestone bedrock. It descends through three levels to a depth of around 30 m and at the bottom there is a

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chamber with a rock island in the middle surrounded by a carved channel that holds water. The Egyptians associated the arrangement with Osiris, god of the dead, whose tomb was described as an island in water, which is where the

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shaft gets its modern name. The upper level is the shallowest and least remarkable, containing chambers cut into the rock with evidence of New Kingdom burial use roughly 3,500 years ago. The second level is where the structure becomes difficult to account

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for. Chambers were cut from the bedrock and enormous granite sarcophagi were installed inside them. The granite came from Aswan 900 kilometers up river and each box weighs somewhere in the region of 40 tons. Getting granite from Aswan to Giza was a substantial operation

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[music] involving river barges and overland holage. getting it down a vertical shaft into a chamber cut at that depth through passages narrow enough that a single misjudgment would wedge a block permanently and seal everything below it is a different kind

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of problem. 19th century visitors reported seven sarcophagi on the second level. Two remain. The other five are gone with no record of when they were removed or where they went. And neither of the survivors carries any inscription.

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That absence is unusual. Egyptian coffins from the dynastic period normally name the occupant and carryerary text and these carry nothing.

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The third level holds the island chamber with four square pillars standing around a central platform cut from the bedrock and a granite sarcophagus set on top of it. The lid alone weighs between 11 and 12 tons. Zahi Hawas led the most recent

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systematic excavation of the lowest level in the late 1990s, pumping out water, clearing accumulated mud, and hauling material up the shaft. He described it as among the most physically demanding excavations of his career, working with modern pumps, electric lighting, and mechanical

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ladders. The water is the part nobody has resolved. 19th century descriptions put the level at around 10 to 15 cm above the chamber floor, shallow enough that the island, the pillars, and the sarcophagus were clearly visible. The carved channel

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around the island is a deliberate feature of defined width and depth, which means the builders expected water at a specific level. Groundwater seeping through fractured limestone does not reliably produce that. Today, the level is considerably higher, and the lower

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parts of the chamber are submerged. Visitors who spend time in the deepest level report headaches and nausea, consistent with poor air quality in a space connected to the surface only through narrow vertical passages. During construction, workers would have been

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cutting limestone, generating dust, burning lamps that consumed oxygen, and hauling debris upward over a period that must have run to months or years. No ventilation system has been identified in the shaft.

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The oldest pottery in the world comes from Japan, and it was made by people who had not invented farming. The German period ran from roughly 14,000 BC to 300 BC, which makes it one of the longest continuous cultural periods anywhere on

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Earth. And the name comes from the Japanese for cordmarked, describing the decoration pressed into the clay.

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Fragments recovered from Odai Yamamoto in Amori Prefecture have been dated to around 14,500 BC. And material from the Fukqui cave in Nagasaki runs to a similar range. That timing breaks the standard sequence. Pottery is normally associated with settled agricultural

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societies because pots are heavy, fragile, and useless to people moving constantly, and because farming produces surpluses that need storing. The Jon were hunter gatherers who fished, collected shellfish, hunted deer and boar, and gathered nuts. And they were making ceramics several thousand years

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before agriculture existed anywhere. What made it work was the environment. The Japanese archipelago is rich enough in marine and forest resources that people could stay in one place without farming. And German sites include substantial settlements with pit dwellings occupied over long periods.

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Sanai Maruyama in Almori occupied from around 3900 to 2200 BC covers roughly 40 hectares and includes large timber post structures with one arrangement of six chestnut posts each around a meter in diameter. Residue analysis has established what the early pots were

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for. Work published in 2013 by a team including Oliver Craig of the University of York examined charred deposits on the interior of vessels from Japanese sites and found lipid signatures from marine organisms, meaning the pots were being used to cook fish. Making ceramics to

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process seafood is a practical answer to a practical problem, and it does not require agriculture at all. The decoration developed enormously over the following 10,000 years. Middle German vessels from around 3000 BC, particularly the flamestyle pots from the Nigata region, carry elaborate

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sculptural rims with swirling projections that rise well above the body of the pot, applied to vessels that were still being used for cooking. Some had to have been awkward to handle, and the effort invested in them goes far

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beyond function. The Jon also produced dog, small clay figurines, of which around 15,000 have been recovered. The later Shakoki dog made around 1,000 BC have large goggle-like eyes with horizontal slits, exaggerated hips, and bodies covered in patterned lines.

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Almost all recovered dog are broken, and many appear to have been deliberately damaged before deposition.

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Around 210 distinct signs have been cataloged from the Vinca culture, and nobody can say whether they mean anything. The Vinca occupied the central Balkans from roughly 5700 to 4500 BC across what is now Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and neighboring areas in a

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network of large settlements along the Danube and its tributaries. Some of their sites held several thousand people, making them among the largest communities in Europe at the time. They were smelting copper by around 5000 BC at Bellode in eastern

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Serbia which is currently the earliest confirmed copper metallurgy anywhere in the world. The type site was found in 1908 by Miloya Vasich a Serbian archaeologist excavating a mound at Vincelo Berberto on the Danube near Belgrade. The mound turned out to be

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over 9 m deep containing layer upon layer of settlement [music] and Vasich dug there across several decades. Among the material recovered were objects carrying insized marks. The signs appear on pottery, on figurines, on spindle whirls, and on other small items cut

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into the clay before firing. Over a thousand marked objects have been found across vinta sites. The signs themselves are simple crosses, chevrons, zigzags, combs, spirals, dots, and combinations of straight lines. Some appear in sequences of several signs together, and

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certain combinations recur across different sites, which suggests shared meaning rather than individual invention. The argument over whether this constitutes writing has run since the 1960s, sharpened by the Tartaria tablets found in Romania and by the radiocarbon revolution, which pushed

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Vinca dates back far enough that any writing here would predate Sumerian cuniform by around 2,000 years. Shaunwyn produced the first systematic catalog of the signs in the 1980s, identifying the core inventory.

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Harold Harmon has argued the system represents genuine writing. Most specialists in early scripts disagree, and the objections are specific. The signs cluster on pottery and personal objects rather than in administrative contexts. No sequence runs long enough to look like a sentence. There is no

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evidence of the system developing over the 1500 years the culture existed. Whereas real scripts change as they are used and the sign inventory is too large for an alphabet and too small for a lographic system. The alternative readings treat the marks as ownership

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marks, potter's signatures, counting notations, or religious symbols with fixed meanings that stop short of recording speech.

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Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century BC and wrote that the building he saw at Hara surpassed the pyramids.

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He described 12 roofed courts around 3,000 chambers half above ground and half below and said the Egyptian priests let him walk the upper level but refused him entry to the underground half.

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Hawara sits at the entrance to the Fume about 100 km south of Cairo beside the mudbrick pyramid of Aman Hat III a middle kingdom pharaoh who ruled around 1860 to 1814 BC.

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Strao visited a few centuries after Herodotus and described the same building, emphasizing how difficult it was to move through without a guide and noting that the roofs were formed from single enormous stones. Flender's Petri excavated south of the pyramid in the

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late 19th century and found an enormous foundation field, [music] a level platform of stone covered by later debris with the building above it stripped away. He identified it as the labyrinth and concluded the structure had been quarried for its stone across

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centuries until nothing remained above ground. Petri also reached the burial chamber beneath the pyramid itself. It had been cut from a single block of polished yellow quartzite weighing around 110 tons, roofed with quartzite slabs of around 45 tons each. He

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described the polished surfaces reflecting his candle. Rising groundwater has since flooded the lower passages and that chamber is now underwater with no photographic record of it. The possibility that Petri's foundation was actually a roof with the underground half heroditus described

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still intact below it has driven several modern surveys. In 2008, the Mataha expedition, funded by Belgian researcher Lua Cordier, ran very lowfrequency electromagnetic surveying south of the pyramid and reported rectangular anomalies forming connected geometric patterns, with some features extending

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to depths beyond [music] 17 m, well below Petri's level. Dordier has since stated publicly that he was barred from returning to Egypt [music] following the work. Later satellite-based scanning projects reported structures at considerably greater depths along with a

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large anomaly at the center of a proposed underground gallery described as metallic. None of this has been confirmed by excavation and remote sensing at those depths is difficult to interpret with confidence.

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Excavation in the labyrinth area resumed in 2026, exposing masonry and the Middle Kingdom Foundation level.

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At the site of Monte Alto on the Pacific coastal plane of Guatemala, there are stone sculptures of heads and figures with a property nobody built into stone deliberately anywhere else in the ancient world. They are magnetic. The sculptures are large bassalt boulders

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carved into human forms with rounded [music] faces, closed or half-closed eyes, and swollen bodies, which is where the informal name comes from. 12 of them are known from Montialto and related figures appear at other sites in the region. The style is associated with the

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Olme, the earliest major Mesoamerican civilization based on the Gulf Coast from around 1,400 BC or with cultures influenced by them. Though the Montialto sculptures have also been attributed to a distinct local tradition and dated variously between 1800 BC and 500 BC.

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Vincent Malmstrom of Dartmouth College tested the sculptures with a compass in the 1970s and the needle moved. The magnetism is not distributed randomly through the stone. In several of the heads, the magnetic poles sit at specific points, most often at the right

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temple and at the navl on the bodies. The basalt itself explains the magnetism. Volcanic rock containing magnetite can acquire magnetization as it cools in the Earth's magnetic field and boulders in this region carry it naturally. What is harder to account for

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is the positioning. If the carvers were working boulders at random, the magnetic poles would end up anywhere on the finished sculpture. Finding them repeatedly at the temple and naval suggests the sculptors were locating the magnetic point in the raw boulder first

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and then carving the figure around it. Doing that requires a way of detecting magnetism. Load stone, naturally magnetized magnetite, occurs in Meso America, and a grooved hematite bar recovered from the Mech site of San Lorenzo, dated to around 1,000 BC, has

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been interpreted by some researchers as a possible compass or load stone pointer, though the interpretation is disputed. Mommstrom published on the Monte Alto magnetism from 1976 onward and connected it to wider [music] questions about Mesoamerican awareness of magnetism and astronomy. The Montalto

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sculptors were shaping individual boulders. In Louisiana, a different group of hunter gatherers moved close to a million cubic meters of soil, and they appear to have done it fast.

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Poverty Point sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi flood plane in northeastern Louisiana and it was built around 1700 to 1100 BC by people who did not farm. The layout is six concentric ridges arranged in a C-shape opening toward the river with the outer

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ridge measuring roughly 1200 m across. Between the ridges are shallow swailes where the earth was taken from. Outside the ark stands several mounds. The largest of which, mound A, rises around 22 m and contains something in the region of 238,000

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cub m of earth. That mound is the part that has caused the most argument.

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Excavation and soil analysis led by Tristram KD of Washington University in St. Lewis examined the layers within it, looking for signs of the weathering, erosion, or vegetation growth that would appear if construction had paused between phases. There were none. The

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soil column shows continuous deposition from bottom to top. No rainwash surfaces, no rooe intrusion, no period of exposure. The conclusion KDR's team reached, published from 2009 onward, is that mound A was built in a single sustained effort lasting somewhere

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between 30 [music] and 90 days. Estimates of the labor involved run to thousands of people carrying baskets of earth continuously in a Gulf Coast summer with no draft animals and no wheeled transport. The people who did it were hunter gatherers. There is no

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evidence of agriculture at Poverty Point. No domesticated plants in the archaeological record and the food remains point to fish, deer, nuts, and wild plants. Every model of how monumental construction begins assumes farming surpluses, and settled hierarchy came first. The site was a trade center

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on a considerable scale. Stone recovered from poverty point came from as far as the Great Lakes, the Appalachian, and the Ozarks, arriving by river across distances exceeding a thousand km.

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Copper from the Great Lakes region, Galina, steotite from the Appalachian, and enormous quantities of CH were all brought in and [music] worked on site.

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Among the most common finds are poverty point objects, small fired clay shapes molded by hand and used for cooking. The soil in this area contains no stone at all. So, heating clay balls in a fire and using them in an earth oven replaced

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the hot rocks that people elsewhere used for the same job. Millions of them have been found, and the fingerprints of the people who squeezed them are preserved on many. There is no evidence of a resident population large enough to

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build the site. The dwelling remains on the ridges suggest periodic rather than dense occupation which means the workforce came from somewhere else assembled, built and left. Poverty Point became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014.

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The Kitan ruled northern China and Mongolia for 200 years, invented two separate writing systems, and left almost nothing that can be read. They were a nomadic people from the step northeast of China who established the Liao dynasty in 9007 AD, [music]

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controlling territory from Manuria across the Mongolian plateau and into northern China, ruling a mixed population of step nomads [music] and Chinese farmers. At their height, they were the dominant power in the region.

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[music] And the Russian word for China, Katai, comes from their name. In 920 AD, the founding emperor Aba Ooji ordered the creation of a script for the Kitan language, which produced what is now called the Kitan large script. It was

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based on Chinese characters with around a thousand signs, each standing for a word or a morphe. 5 years later, according to the histories, the emperor's brother, Dieella, developed a second system after meeting envoys from the Weaguers and seeing their alphabet.

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This became the katan small script and it works differently. Signs are grouped into blocks with each block forming a word and the individual signs within represent sounds [music] rather than whole words. There are around 450 of them. Running two unrelated writing

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systems side by side for the same language is unusual and both were used simultaneously for the duration of the dynasty. The Liao fell in 1125 to the Yersin and Kitan writing continued in limited use for another century before

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disappearing. In 1191, the Jin dynasty formally abolished it. After that, the scripts went out of the world entirely and by the time anyone tried to read them again, the language was gone too.

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Kitan belonged to the Mongolic family, which helps, but the surviving evidence is thin. Around 50 inscriptions are known, most of them memorial stones from tombs along with a smaller number of bronze mirrors, seals and fragments. The total body of text is small and much of

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it is formulaicerary language. Progress has been made on the small script which is more tractable because its signs represent sounds.

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Chinese and Japanese researchers working through the 20th century established phonetic values for a portion of the signs and dates, titles, personal names, and genealogies can now be read from some inscriptions.

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Daniel Cain published a detailed study of the small script in 2009. The large script has proved far harder.

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With each sign standing for a whole word and no bilingual text of any length, most of the corpus remains unread.

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The stones at Pumapunku are andite and sandstone and the andesite blocks are cut with interior right angles, flat planes and channels that meet at precise intersections. The site sits at nearly 4,000 m on the Bolivian Aliplano, part of the larger complex of Tijuanaku

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near the southern shore of Lake Titaka. Tiwanaku was the center of a state that dominated the southern Andes from around 500 to 1,000 AD with construction at the site beginning considerably earlier and Puma Punku itself has been dated to

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around 536 AD based on organic material from the lowest foundation levels. The most discussed objects are the H blocks, anesite pieces cut into a shape that resembles the letter H with recessed interior faces, sharp internal corners, and matching dimensions across multiple

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examples. They were made [music] to interlock, fitting against each other to form walls without mortar. Several dozen survive along with blocks carrying drilled holes of consistent diameter, grooves running in straight lines with evenly spaced small holes along them and

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faces cut flat enough to sit tight against neighboring stones. And is hard, considerably harder than the sandstone used for the platform beneath. The nearest andite source is on the Copa Cabana Peninsula around 90 km away across the lake which means the stone

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arrived by water or around the shoreline. The sandstone came from a quarry roughly 10 km south and the largest sandstone slab at the site weighs around 130 tons. How the Andesite was worked is where the disagreement sits. Jean-Pierre Prozson, an

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architectural historian at Berkeley who spent years studying Indian stonework, demonstrated experimentally that stone hammers can produce flat faces and sharp edges in hard stone and documented the quaries and the tool marks. His conclusion was that the work is

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achievable with the technology available requiring extraordinary skill and enormous [music] time. Others have pointed to the interior right angles and the regularity across multiple blocks as difficult to produce by percussion since a hammerstone striking into a concave corner has

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nowhere to go. The consistency between blocks has also been read as indicating some form of template or molding. The site was heavily damaged long before archaeology arrived. Spanish colonists quaried it for building material. The blocks were broken up for railway

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ballast in the 19th century and treasure hunting disturbed the layout. Almost nothing at Pumapunku stands where it was placed.

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In March 1952, a team excavating cave 3 at Kumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea found two rolled sheets of copper at the back of the cave.

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Everything else recovered from the caves at Kumran was written on parchment or papyrus. This was metal and it had corroded so badly that unrolling it would have shattered it. It sat for 4 years.

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In 1955 and 1956, the scroll was taken to Manchester College of Technology where Professor H. Wright Baker cut it into 23 strips with a fine circular saw, reading the text off the inside of each strip as it came away. The text is

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[music] a list. It names 64 locations and describes quantities of gold and silver buried or hidden at each one along with vessels, incense, and other valuables.

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The totals, if read at face value, come to several tons of precious metal. Everything about it differs from the other Dead Sea Scrolls. Those are religious texts, biblical manuscripts, commentaries, community rules written on organic material in formal scribal

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Hebrew. The copper scroll is an inventory written on metal in a Hebrew closer to later Mishnik forms with the letters hammered into the surface rather than inked. It also contains groups of Greek letters at the end of some

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entries, seven in total, which nobody has explained. The locations are described in terms that would have been clear to anyone who knew the landscape and are useless now. Entries refer to a specific system, the tomb of a named

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person, a particular gutter, a certain staircase with distances given in cubits. Without the reference points, none of it can be followed. John Marco Allegro, one of the original scroll editors, mounted an expedition in 1960 to search several proposed sites.

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Nothing was found. The debate over whether the treasure was real has run since the text was first read. One position holds it is a genuine inventory of the Jerusalem temple treasury hidden during the Jewish revolt against Rome in

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66 to 70 AD which would account for the quantities and for recording it on a material that would survive. Another treats it as folklore or a symbolic text given the amounts involved. A third suggests it records the wealth of the

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Kumran community itself. Though the totals sit awkwardly against a small aesthetic settlement. The scroll is held by the Jordan Museum in Ammon.

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11 churches stand in the Ethiopian highlands, carved downward into solid volcanic rock. Each one cut from a single mass of stone with no blocks assembled and no mortar anywhere.

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Lai sits at around 2,500 m in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia. The churches are attributed to King Gabbre Mecll Liba of the Zagwe dynasty who ruled in the late 12th and early 13th centuries and the traditional account

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holds they were built during his reign as a new Jerusalem after Muslim conquests made pilgrimage to the actual Jerusalem difficult for Ethiopian Christians. The method is subtractive.

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Workers began at ground level and cut trenches down into the rock, isolating a block on all sides, then carved that block into a church from the outside in, hollowing the interior afterward through doors and windows. There is no

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possibility of correction. A misjudged cut cannot be filled and a collapsed ceiling cannot be rebuilt.

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Bet Yorgis, the church of St. George, is the most photographed. It stands in a pit around 12 m deep, cut into the shape of a Greek cross when viewed from above with a roof carrying three nested cross reliefs. The walls carry windows in

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multiple styles and the interior contains carved columns and a do ceiling, all of it original rock. The churches are connected by a network of trenches, tunnels, and passages cut through the rock between them, some running underground in complete

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darkness. One tunnel is traditionally walked in the dark as part of pilgrimage. Drainage channels were cut to carry rainwater away and a stream running through the site was named the Jordan.

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Scale and dating are the live questions. Producing 11 churches at this size within the reign of a single king would require an enormous sustained workforce and the traditional account of 24 years is difficult to reconcile with the volume of rock removed. Some

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researchers, including work by David Philipsson of Cambridge, have argued that parts of the complex are considerably older than the Zagway period, with some structures possibly originating as fortifications or non-religious rock cut works several centuries earlier and being converted to

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churches later. Ethiopian tradition credits angels with completing the work at night. The churches remain in active use with services held and priests resident. UNESCO listed the site in 1978 and protective shelters were erected over several churches in the 2000s to

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slow water damage. Ethiopian tradition explains Laabella with angels. Byzantine writers were rather more guarded about their own great achievement and the secrecy worked well enough that the formula is gone.

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Museums across the Middle East hold thousands of small ceramic vessels, usually around 10 to 15 cm tall, shaped like a sphere or a teardrop with a narrow [music] neck. The walls are thick, often several millime, far heavier than the vessel needs to be for

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its size. They turn up across Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, dating mostly between the 9th and 14th centuries.

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Archaeologists spent a long time calling them beer vessels or mercury containers. Residue analysis changed that. Testing on the interiors has found traces consistent with Nafta, [music] a flammable petroleum distillate and in some cases sulfur and other combustible materials. The thick walls make sense

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once you know what was inside because the vessel needed to survive being thrown [music] and then break on impact against something solid. Nafta occurs naturally across Mesopotamia and Persia, seeping to the surface in oil richch ground, and it had been known and used

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for centuries before anyone weaponized it systematically. Islamic chemists worked out distillation processes for refining it into more volatile fractions, and the term naft covers both the raw material and the weapon. Armies in the medieval Islamic world fielded specialist troops for this called

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nafatun who wore fireproofed clothing treated with talc and vinegar and threw the vessels by hand or launched them from siege engines. Arabic military manuals from the period describe the preparation, the handling and the tactics and they treat the material as a

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standard part of the arsenal rather than as a novelty. The related and more famous weapon is Greek fire. Developed by the Byzantines around 672 AD and credited by Byzantine writers with saving Constantinople from Arab fleets.

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It was projected through bronze siphons mounted on ships. It stuck to whatever it touched and it burned on water which made it devastating against wooden vessels and effectively impossible to extinguish by the usual means. The Bzantines kept the composition

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restricted to a small number of families and treated it as a state secret. Emperor Constantine IIIth wrote that the formula had been delivered by an angel and that anyone revealing it should be cursed, which is the kind of protection

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that works until the people who know it die. By the time Constantinople fell in 1453, the formula had already been lost.

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Modern attempts to reconstruct it propose a base of refined petroleum with additives such as pine resin, sulfur, or quick lime heated and pressurized before projection, though no reconstruction has reproduced all the described properties at once. The ceramic grenades are the

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surviving physical evidence of the wider tradition, and enough have been recovered that the weapon was clearly in general use rather than exceptional.

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Around 4,000 BC on the plains of what is now Ukraine, Muldova, and Romania, there were settlements holding somewhere between 10 and 15,000 people. Nothing in Mesopotamia reached that size for another thousand years. The culture is called Kucateni Trielia, named after

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sites in Romania and Ukraine where it was first identified in the 1880s and 1890s. It ran from around 5,500 to 2750 BC and produced some of the finest painted pottery in Neolithic Europe with elaborate spiral designs in red, black

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and white. The largest settlements are known as mega sites and the biggest of them, Taliani in central Ukraine covers around 450 hectares. Maidenetska and Nebolithka are comparable. Magnetometry survey across these sites carried out by teams from Keel University and Durham

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University among others has mapped the layouts in detail without excavation revealing thousands of individual houses. The plan is consistent. Houses are arranged in concentric ellipses ring within ring with a large open space at the center and radial streets running

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outward. At Nebolithka, the survey identified around 1,400 structures. The houses were built from waddle and dob on timber frames, two stories in many cases with clay floors and ovens inside. Then the entire settlement was burned down.

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This is the part that has occupied researchers most. Across the mega sites, the houses show evidence of intense burning hot enough to vitrify the clay in places, which requires far more fuel than an accidental fire in a do

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structure would supply. The pattern is too consistent and too complete for [music] accident and the burning appears to have happened at intervals of roughly 60 to 80 years after which the settlement was rebuilt. Sometimes on the same spot and sometimes nearby.

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Experimental archaeology has tested what it takes. Reconstructions burned at Nebolithka [music] by a team including John Chapman and Berka Gdarska of Durham University required substantial additional fuel packed into the buildings to reach the temperatures seen in the archaeological record. The

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proposed explanations include ritual closure tied to a generational cycle, the deliberate ending of a settlement when its founding generation died, sanitation, or a response to declining soil fertility in the surrounding farmland. What the sites lack is equally notable. There are no palaces, no

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obviously elite houses, no fortifications in most cases, and no cemeteries. For settlements of this size, sustained over centuries, the almost total absence of burials has never been explained.

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Quip stands on a limestone ridge at 3,000 m in the Amazon region of northern Peru, and the outer wall runs up to 19 m high in places.

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The fortress was built by the Chachapoa, a people who occupied the cloud forest on the eastern slopes of the Andes from around 900 AD.

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The Inca called them the warriors of the clouds. They lived in a landscape of near permanent mist, steep forested ridges, and deep river gorges. And they built in stone at altitude across a wide territory. The site covers roughly 6

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hectares along the ridge, 600 m long and about 110 wide, containing more than 400 circular buildings inside the walls.

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Estimates of the volume of stone used run higher than that of the great pyramid of Giza, which is partly a function of the walls and partly of the massive artificial platform built up to level the ridgetop.

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Access is the feature everyone notices. There are three entrances, and each one narrows as it goes, funneling from an opening wide enough for several people down to a passage that admits one person at a time between sheer walls rising on

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both sides. The main entrance runs for around 20 m and ends at a width where a single defender could hold it. The circular houses are built from fitted stone, many decorated with freezes and zigzag and romboid patterns cut into the

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outer walls. Some have carved stone heads set into them. Inside the floors carry hearths, grinding stones, and storage pits, and burials have been found beneath house floors. One structure, called the Tintero, or inkwell, is an inverted cone 12 m

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across, wider at the top than the base, with an interior chamber. What it was for has not been established with suggestions including a solar observatory, a ceremonial space, and a repository connected to burials.

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Federrico Kaufman Doy and later Alfredo Narvay have led substantial work at the site. Excavation has produced evidence of violent destruction in the late period with burned buildings and unburied bodies left in place, some showing signs of trauma dated to around

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the time of the Spanish arrival. The Chachapoa were conquered by the Inca in the 1470s after prolonged resistance, then decimated by disease within decades of Spanish contact. Estimates suggest the population fell by over 90%.

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A cable car was open to the site in 2017, and in 2022, a section of the outer wall collapsed, closing Quap to visitors for several years.

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Speaker A

A bassalt slab roughly a meter and a half tall was pulled from the Akula River near Lamohara in Veraracruz, Mexico in 1986.

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One face carries the image of a ruler in elaborate headdress. The rest is covered in around 535 glyphs arranged in 21 columns. The Stila carries two dates in the long count, the Mesoamerican calendar system, corresponding to 143 and 156 AD, that places it earlier than

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the bulk of surviving Maya inscriptions and in a region between the old heartland and the Maya area. The script is called Ismian or sometimes epiolme and the corpus is tiny. Besides the Lam Mohara Stala, there is the Tuxla

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statueette, a small jadeite figure of a duck build human found in 1902 and dated to 162 AD, a handful of fragments and one or two disputed pieces, perhaps a dozen objects in total. In 1993, John Justison and Terrence Kaufman published

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a proposed decipherment in science, arguing the language behind the script was an early form of Zouquan, part of the mixan family still spoken in the region. Their reading produced a narrative about a ruler, warfare, and rituals, and they extended it to the tux

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statueette in a follow-up. The decipherment has not been accepted by the field. Steven Houston and Michael Co published a direct challenge in 2003, testing the Justison and Kaufman system against a newly recovered inscribed object, a mask fragment, and reporting

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that applying their values produced no coherent result. Justison and Kaufman responded that the test object was not suitable. The corpus size is the central obstacle. [music] around 12 texts, most of them short, does not provide enough repetition to test a proposed reading

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independently, and any decipherment built on that material risks being unfalsifiable. The Lamohara Stella itself was damaged after recovery. It sat in a museum in Zalapa and suffered a crack, and portions of the text have deteriorated since the initial documentation.

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Speaker A

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is the largest artificial mound in Europe. It stands 31 m high, covers around 2 hectares at the base, and contains roughly 248,000 cubic meters of chalk and earth. It sits within the Aberry landscape in southern

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England, a few kilometers from the Aberry stone circle and close to West Kennet Long Barrow. And it was built around 2400 BC in the same broad period as the later phases of Stonehenge, 25 km to the south. People have been digging

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Speaker A

into it for over 300 years, looking for a burial. In 1776, a team of Cornish miners sponsored by the Duke of Northland sank a shaft from the summit down to the base. They found nothing. In 1849, John Mayweather drove a tunnel in

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from the side to the center. Nothing. In 1968 and 1969, Richard Atkinson excavated with BBC funding and television coverage, driving a large tunnel through the mound and found no burial, no chamber, no central deposit of any kind. What Atkinson did find was

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the construction sequence, and the 1968 tunnel, plus later work by English Heritage, established how it was built.

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The mound went up in stages, beginning with a gravel core, then successive layers of chalk quaried from a surrounding ditch built as a series of stepped drums with retaining walls of chalk blocks. The steps later filled in to create the smooth profile. One step

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near the top was left visible and can still be seen. Preserved beneath the base, sealed by the first layer, was a turf and top soil surface containing insects, moss, and plant material, including winged ants, which only take flight in late summer. That has been

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read as indicating construction began in July or August of a particular year. The 1776 shaft and the 1849 tunnel were never properly backfilled. In 2000, after heavy rain, a hole around 14 m deep opened in the summit where the old

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Speaker A

shaft had collapsed. English Heritage carried out a stabilization program between 2007 and 2008, excavating the historic tunnels, recording what was exposed and filling the voids with chalk. The purpose has never been established. No burial has been found.

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The mound is not obviously defensive, and it sits in a valley rather than on high ground, overlooked by the surrounding hills.

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Speaker A

Everyone digging into Silbury Hill expected to find something buried at the center. At Teotiwakan, they found something buried under a pyramid, and nobody expected it at all.

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Speaker A

Teayoti Wakan sits about 40 km northeast of Mexico City, and it was the largest city in the Americas at its height, somewhere around 450 AD, holding perhaps 125,000 people. The Aztecs found it abandoned centuries later, named it the

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place where the gods were born, and had no idea who built it. Neither do we. The language, the name, and the ethnic identity of the founders are all unknown. In the 1900s, during work at the site, excavators exploring the

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pyramid of the sun found sheets of ma laid between layers of the structure. Micah is a mineral that splits into thin flexible sheets, transparent or translucent, and it was used in various ancient contexts as a decorative inlay, which would be unremarkable if the

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sheets here had been placed somewhere visible. They were not. The micica was laid in as a layer within the construction, covered over by the material above it, with no way to see it once the pyramid was finished. at a

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separate structure nearby, now called the Micah Temple. Two sheets each, around 30 square meters, were found beneath a stone floor, again sealed and invisible. The mineral analysis is where it gets awkward. Mika has a chemical signature that varies by deposit,

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allowing a sample to be traced to its source, and testing indicated the Teotiwakan Mika was of a type found in Brazil, roughly 5,000 km away. That figure has circulated widely and it has also been questioned with some researchers pointing to closer Mexican

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sources in Waka that could account for at least part of the material. The sourcing has never been settled with a comprehensive published study which leaves it in an unsatisfying position.

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What is not in dispute is that somebody went to the trouble of obtaining large quantities of Micah [music] and then hiding it inside buildings. Micah has properties that make speculation easy.

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Speaker A

It resists heat. It does not conduct electricity. And it blocks certain kinds of radiation, which is why it appears in electrical insulation and furnace windows today. Those properties have fed suggestions about deliberate technical use. The more grounded reading treats

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the micica as ritual. Teayoti Wakan builders placed offerings and deposits within their structures routinely, including shells, obsidian, figurines, and animal remains, and a layer of reflective mineral fits that pattern.

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Speaker A

The point of an offering is that it is inside the building, not that anyone sees it. Much of the micica was removed and sold in the early 20th century before the site had any real protection, which means the original quantity and

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Speaker A

distribution [music] are unknown. Woot steel was made in southern India from around 300 BC and blades forged from it carry a surface pattern of watery bands and streaks that cannot be polished off because it runs through the metal itself. The process started with

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Speaker A

iron ore smelted in small clay crucibles sealed with charcoal, green leaves and sometimes wood, then heated in a furnace for hours. The organic material provided carbon and the sealed crucible allowed it to be absorbed into the iron under

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controlled conditions. What came out was a cake of highcarbon steel, typically 1 to 2% carbon, which is far higher than the rot iron used across most of the ancient world. The ingots were exported west along established trade routes to

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the Middle East where smiths in Damascus and elsewhere forged them into blades. That is where the name Damascus steel comes from though the steel itself was Indian. The finished swords acquired a reputation across medieval Europe for holding an edge and resisting

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shattering. The pattern comes from bands of iron carbide particles distributed through the metal formed during slow cooling and then aligned during forging.

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Reproducing it requires controlling the carbon content, the cooling rate and the forging temperature within narrow limits. And getting any of them wrong produces ordinary steel or a brittle failure. Production stopped around the middle of the 18th century [music] and

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the technique went out of use before anyone recorded it in detail. Attempts to reproduce it in Europe in the 19th century, including work by Michael Faraday, whose father was a blacksmith, failed to get the pattern. In 2006, a

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Speaker A

team led by Peter Poffler at the Technical University of Dresden published work in Nature reporting that they had dissolved the surface of a 17th century Damascus blade in acid and examined the residue with an electron microscope. They found carbon nano

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Speaker A

tubes, cylindrical carbon structures a few nanometers across along with nanowires of iron carbide. Their proposal was that trace elements in the specific Indian ores, particularly venadium, acted as catalysts during the repeated heating and forging cycles, producing the nanoructures that give the

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steel its properties. If that reading holds, the depletion of those particular ore deposits would help explain why production stopped and why nobody could restart it elsewhere. Later work has questioned aspects of the interpretation and the field has not fully settled.

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Speaker A

A serpent runs for 411 meters along a ridge in southern Ohio. Its body coiled into seven winds, its tail wrapped into a tight spiral, its open jaws closing around an oval. The Great Serpent Mound sits in Adams County on a plateau above

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Speaker A

Brush Creek. It is an earthwork built from packed soil and clay over a stone foundation around a meter high and 6 m wide along most of its length. There are no burials inside it and no artifacts within the mound itself, which is

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unusual for the [music] region and has made dating it very difficult. Frederick Ward Putnham of Harvard's Peabody Museum excavated and restored the mound in the 1880s after raising funds to buy the land and prevent it being plowed [music]

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out. He attributed it to the Adena culture who occupied the region from around 800 BC to 100 AD and who built several burial mounds nearby including two conicle mounds close to the serpent itself. In 1996, a team including Robert

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Fletcher and Bradley Leper took charcoal samples from within the mound and returned radiocarbon dates around 1070 AD, which pointed instead to the Fort Ancient Culture, a later and unrelated group. That result was widely accepted for over a decade. In 2014, the picture

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reversed again. William Roma and a team including Edward Herman of Indiana University took new core samples from undisturbed sections and obtained dates around 300 BC, swinging the attribution [music] back toward the Adena and suggesting the 1070 dates came from later repair work

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rather than original construction. The disagreement has not [music] been resolved. The alignments have generated their own literature. The head of the serpent points toward the summer solstice sunset and the coils of the body [music] have been argued to align

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with solstice and equinox sunrises. Clark and Marjgerie Hardman published on the solstice alignment in 1987.

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Speaker A

The plateau the mound sits on is the edge of a crater roughly 8 km across formed by a meteorite impact [music] around 300 million years ago. The geology there is unlike the surrounding region with faulted and folded rock and

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the mound sits directly on the disturbed ground. Maroidic can be read aloud. It cannot be understood. The sound values of every character are known. So any meoidic inscription can be pronounced with reasonable confidence. And almost none of the resulting words mean anything to

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anyone. The kingdom of Kush occupied Nubia along the Nile in what is now Sudan and it lasted for around a thousand years. At its height, Kushite kings conquered Egypt and ruled [music] it as the 25th dynasty in the 8th

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Speaker A

century BC. The capital later moved south to Maroi and the kingdom continued until around 350 AD, building pyramids in greater numbers than Egypt ever did, with over 200 at Maroi alone. For centuries, the Kushites wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Around 300 BC,

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Speaker A

they developed their own script for their own language in two forms. [music] A hieroglyphic version for monuments and a cursive version for everyday writing.

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Speaker A

There are 23 characters, which makes it an alphabetic system with some salabic features. Francis Llewellen Griffith, a British Egyptologist at Oxford, worked out the sound values between 1909 and 1911. He used a Marowitic and Egyptian bilingual inscription and the appearance

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Speaker A

of known royal names in both scripts and within 2 years he had the phonetics essentially solved. The language behind the sounds has resisted everything since. Miritedic does not appear to be related to Egyptian or to any Semitic language. The leading proposal places it

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Speaker A

in the Neil Saharin family with Claude of the French National Center for Scientific Research arguing since the 2000s for a connection to the Northern Eastern Sudanic branch which includes the Nubian languages. That work has produced proposed meanings for a number

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of words, though it remains a working hypothesis. Around 2,000 texts survive, most of them shorterary inscriptions from tombs and stellle following repeated formulas. Names, titles, family relationships, and offering formulas can be identified from context and repetition. Longer texts exist, but are

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rarer, and there is no substantial bilingual document of the kind that cracked Egyptian. Six blocks of pink riolyte stand in a row on a terrace near the top of a mountain in the sacred valley of Peru.

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Speaker A

The tallest rise above head height, the largest weigh in the region of 50 tons.

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And between the largest of them, the builders inserted thin vertical spacer stones to lock them together. Olante Tambbo sits at the western end of the valley northwest of Cusco. The town below is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in South America.

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Still laid out on its original Inca street grid with water running through carved stone channels along the roadsides.

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Above it rise agricultural terraces and above those the ceremonial complex. The construction is credited to Pacudi, the emperor who expanded the Inca from a regional power into an empire in the 15th century, who took the site by conquest and rebuilt it as a royal

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estate. The wall of the six monoliths formed part of the temple of the sun and it was never finished. The riolyte did not come from this mountain. It was quarried at Kachikhata high on the slopes on the opposite side of the

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valley several kilome away. Each block had to come down that slope, cross the valley floor, cross the Urubamba River, and then be hauled up the mountain side on the far side, gaining hundreds of meters. The Inca had no wheeled

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transport, no iron tools, and no draft animals capable of hauling weight. Jeanpierre Proson surveyed the quarry in detail in the 1980s, mapping three extraction areas along with ramps, retaining walls, roads built specifically to move stone, and worker camps. Partly shaped blocks remain at

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the quarry, abandoned at different stages, showing the sequence the workers followed. Scattered along the route are the tired stones, blocks that were quarried, shaped, and started on the journey and then left where they stopped. Some sit on the valley floor,

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others partway up a slope. An old Andian story says they grew tired and refused to move, weeping where they sat. The river crossing has never been fully explained. The Urubamba is fast and prone to rising, [music] and the

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standard proposal is that temporary causeways were built out into the water to create a surface for dragging, then dismantled afterward. Work stopped when the Spanish arrived. Manco Inca held Olante Tambbo against a cavalry attack led by Hernando Pizaro in 1536,

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flooding the plane below the terraces by opening the irrigation channels and bogging down the horses. He withdrew when reinforcements came, and the unfinished blocks have sat on the terrace ever since. Olanti Tambbo's builders were moving stone up a

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mountain. Roughly 7,000 years earlier and half a world away, people were arranging much smaller stones in the Egyptian desert and the arrangement points at the sky.

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Nabla sits in the Nubian desert of southern Egypt around 100 km west of Abuol in country that is now among the driest on Earth. 10,000 years ago it was not. Monsoon rains reaching further north than they do today filled a

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seasonal lake here and people moved into the basin to use it. They were cattle herders. The archaeology shows seasonal occupation around the lake from roughly 9,000 BC with hearths, pottery, and deep [music] wells dug to reach water once

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the surface lake dried each year. Cattle burials appear at the site. [music] animals interred in stoneline chambers which points to cattle holding ritual significance long before the dynastic Egyptians made the same association.

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Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University worked the area from the 1970s onward and [music] led the excavations that established the sequence. In 1974, his team came across an arrangement of stones that had been partly buried by sand, and clearing it

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revealed a circle roughly 4 m across, made from small slabs set upright with a scatter of larger stones around and within it. Inside the circle are two pairs of upright slabs set close together, forming what look like narrow

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gaps or sight lines. One pair runs roughly north to south, the other is offset. And Wendorf and the astronomer J. McKim Malville working together argued that this second pair aligns with sunrise at the summer solstice as it would have appeared around 4,800 BC.

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[music] Their paper appeared in nature in 1998. The timing mattered in practical terms because the summer solstice in this region coincided with the arrival of the monsoon rains that filled the lake which would make a marker for that date

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genuinely useful to people whose whole occupation of the basin [music] depended on the water arriving. Beyond the circle there are larger stone structures, some with buried megaliths placed in pits beneath them and lines of standing stones running for hundreds of meters

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across the basin. Malville and others have proposed alignments with bright stars, including Sirius and Arcturus, and those claims have drawn more disagreement. Since stellar alignments are harder to establish than solar ones, and the margins for error widened considerably, the circle was moved. In

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the early 2000s, [music] concerns about erosion and looting led to the original stones being removed to the Nubia Museum in Aswan, where the arrangement has been reconstructed. Replicas now stand at the original location.

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Maya blue does not fade. Murals painted with it in the Yucatan have sat through 1500 years of tropical heat, humidity, salt air, and monsoon rain, and they are still blue. Acid does not strip it.

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Alkali does not strip it. Modern solvents that dissolve most organic pigments leave it alone. The color appears across Meso America from around 300 AD on murals, pottery, sculpture, and ritual objects, and it is closely associated with the reign god Chak.

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Objects and people destined for sacrifice at the sacred cenote at Chichenitsa were painted with it. An excavation of the cenote recovered a thick layer of blue sediment on the bottom, built up from the pigment washing off offerings thrown into the

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water over centuries. Working out what it was made of took most of the 20th century. Indigo extracted from the leaves of the indigo plant provides the color and indigo on its own is a fairly ordinary organic dye that degrades like

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any other. The second component is polygorkite, a clay with an unusual internal structure containing microscopic channels running through it.

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The chemistry was pieced together across decades with important work published by Dean Arnold of Wheaten College and by teams in Italy and Spain. The indigo molecules become locked inside the clay's channels physically trapped rather than simply mixed which shields

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them from the light, heat, moisture, and chemical attack that would otherwise break them down. Heating is required to make it happen. The clay and the indigo have to be combined and heated to somewhere around 100 to 150° C which

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drives water out of the clay channels and allows the dye to enter them. Arnold's later work at Chichenitsa, published in 2008 with colleagues, examined a bowl recovered from the cenote containing the residue of copal incense and found paleorskite and indigo

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within it, which suggested the pigment was being manufactured on site during the ritual itself rather than prepared in a workshop beforehand. Production stopped after the Spanish conquest, and the specific process was lost. 20th century chemists reconstructed it independently rather than recovering any

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recorded method. Cattle ranchers clearing rainforest in the Brazilian state of acre in the 1970s and 1980s exposed something underneath.

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As the trees came down, enormous geometric earthworks appeared in the cleared ground. squares, circles, hexagons, and connected combinations of shapes cut into the soil as ditches with banks alongside them. They are called the acre geoglyphs. More than 450 have

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now been identified across the state and into neighboring Bolivia, and satellite survey suggests a great many more remain under forest that has not been cleared.

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Individual enclosures range from around 90 to 300 m across with ditches cut up to 4 m deep and 11 m wide and straight causeways running between some of them.

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Denise Sha of the Federal University of Parah and Marty Personin of the University of Helsinki led much of the systematic work dating the structures to between roughly 200 BC and 1,000 AD and mapping the distribution. What the excavations did not find is [music]

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domestic rubbish. Habitation sites produce enormous quantities of broken pottery, food waste, [music] hearths, and post holes, and the geoglyph enclosures produce very little. A small amount of ceramic, some charcoal, occasional deposits near the entrances.

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The interiors are largely empty, which points toward ceremonial or gathering use rather than settlement.

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[music] The implications for the forest itself have been the bigger argument. Building these required clearing substantial areas of what was assumed to be untouched primary rainforest. Soil core work published in 2017 by Jennifer Watling of the University of S. Paulo

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and colleagues examined phytooliths microscopic silica particles from plants in cores taken at geoglyph sites. The results indicated the forest had been managed rather than clearfelled with bamboo forest thinned and palm species encouraged over centuries and the enclosures built into gaps in a

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landscape people had been shaping for a long time. Estimates of the pre-cont population of western Amazonia have been revised upward considerably as a result.

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Choco Canyon runs through the high desert of northwestern New Mexico. And between roughly 850 and 1150 AD, it held the largest buildings in North America.

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PBlo Bonito, the biggest of them, contains around 650 rooms across four stories, arranged in a D-shape around a plaza with more than 30 kas, the circular ceremonial chambers of the ancestral PBLO people. A dozen or so of these great houses stand in the canyon

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along with dozens more across the wider region. The canyon is a hard place to live. Rainfall is low and unreliable.

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The growing season is short and there is very little timber. Over 200,000 trees were used in the construction of the great houses. Ponderosa pine, fur and spruce and dendrochronology combined with strontium isotope analysis has traced the sources to mountain ranges 80

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km away and more. The beams were cut, stripped, dried and carried in without draft animals or wheels. Roads run out from the canyon in straight lines. They are up to 9 m wide, engineered with cut banks and stone curbing, and they hold

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their bearing across terrain rather than following contours, [music] cutting stairways into cliff faces where necessary. The Great North Road runs for around 50 km almost due north, and then [music] stops. The Chones had no carts and no pack animals, which makes a 9 m

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wide road a considerable investment for foot traffic. The astronomy is documented in detail. Several great houses are aligned to cardinal directions with high accuracy. Kasa Rinkonada, a great ka has its main axis within a fraction of a degree of true

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north. [music] Anna Sofier's solstice project identified the sun dagger on Faja but in 1977, a spiral petroglyph behind three stone slabs where shafts of light mark the solstesses and equinoxes. And the site also registers the lunar standstill cycle, an 18.6 six-year rhythm in the

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moon's rising position. Several building alignments across the canyon track that same cycle. Food had to be imported.

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Cho's soils could not support the population indicated by the architecture and analysis of maze recovered from Pueblo Bonito has traced it to fields tens of kilome away. The canyon was largely abandoned by around 1150 AD during a prolonged drought.

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Cyprus sits in the eastern Mediterranean, close enough to the Levant, Anatolia, and the Aian to trade with all of them. And in the late Bronze Age, it did exactly that, exporting copper across the region. Around 1550 BC, people on the island began writing

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in a script now called Cypro Manoan. It appears to derive from linear a the undeciphered manoan script from cree and it was used for roughly four centuries before falling out of use around 1050 BC. Arthur Evans the British

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archaeologist who excavated NSUS and named linear A and linear B also named Cypro Maninoowan on the basis of that resemblance.

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Amelia Mason later divided the surviving material into subgroups labeled CM1, CM2, and CM3 based on where the texts were found and how the signs differ and argued they might represent separate scripts or separate languages. That division is still debated. The corpus is small and

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awkward. Around 250 objects carry the script, and most of them are short. Clay balls roughly the size of a marble make up a large portion of the total each carrying just a few signs and their function is not understood. There are

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also inscribed clay tablets, cylinder seals, pottery and metal objects. The most substantial text comes from Enkcomi, a major Bronze Age city on the east coast where a tablet carrying several hundred signs was recovered.

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Between 50 and around a hundred distinct signs have been identified depending on how variants are counted which fits a syllary where each sign represents a syllable. Some sign shapes resemble linear B characters and linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventress

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and turned out to be Greek. Applying linear B values to Cypro Maninoan produces nothing readable. The later cpriate syllary used on the island from around 800 BC descends from Cypro Maninoan and was itself deciphered because it was used to write Greek with

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bilingual Greek and Phoenician inscriptions providing the key. Working backward from it has not solved the earlier script mainly because the underlying language of Cypromanoan is probably not Greek. The leading candidate is criate, a language attested in later criate inscriptions written in

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the criate syllary that can be pronounced but not understood and which appears unrelated to Greek or to any other known family.

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Around 70 hill forts in Scotland have walls that have been melted. The stone has fused into a glassy mass, dark and slaggy in places with individual blocks welded to one another and the surfaces running smooth where the rocks softened

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and flowed before setting again. Roughly a hundred more examples are scattered across Europe in France, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and Portugal. John Williams, a mineral surveyor, published the first account in 1777 after examining forts in the Scottish Highlands, including Noc Farrell and

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Craig Fadri near Inesse. He recognized the walls had been subjected to fire and argued the effect was deliberate. The temperatures required are the difficulty. Turning stone to glass takes heat somewhere between 1,00 and 1,200° C, sustained long enough to work through a wall

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several meters thick. An open wood fire burns at around 6 to 800° and loses heat in every direction. A forge reaches the required range only in a small enclosed space with forced air. Verier Gordon Child, one of the most influential

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archaeologists of the 20th century, ran experiments in 1937 and 1938 with Wallace Thorncraftoft, building replica timberlaced walls at PL Collier and Ray Hoy and setting them al light. They achieved partial vitrification in small patches. Ian Rston repeated the work in

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1980 at East Tulos near Aberdine, building a section of wall and burning it for over 20 hours, reaching around 800° and producing some fused material, but nothing resembling the extent seen at the real sites. The forts were built

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with timber laced through the stonework, horizontal beams running through the wall to bind it, which is documented across Iron Age Northern Europe. Burning that timber would generate heat inside the wall itself.

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which is the mechanism most researchers accept. What remains unresolved is how that produces the volume of vitrification found at some sites where the melting runs through long sections of wall rather than appearing in isolated patches. Dating puts most

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Scottish examples between around 700 BC and 300 AD. Why anyone would do it is the other half. Vitrification weakens a wall rather than strengthening it since fusing the stone destroys the interlocking that holds a dry stone structure together. And several

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vitrified forts show evidence of collapse afterward. Proposals include destruction by attackers, ritual closure of a site, or an attempt at strengthening that backfired.

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In 1982, a Turkish sponge diver named Memed Chaker mentioned to his captain that he had seen metal biscuits with ears on the seabed off Uluban near Cash on the southern Turkish coast. The description reached the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M

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University which recognized it as oxhide ingots, the standard Bronze Age form for transporting copper. Excavation ran from 1984 to 1994 under George Bass and Somal Pulak in water between 44 and 61 m deep.

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Divers made over 22,000 individual dives across 11 seasons, working in short shifts because of the depth. The ship went down around 1320 BC. It was roughly 15 m long, built of cedar using mortise and tenon joinery, and it was carrying

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one of the richest cargos ever recovered from the ancient world. There were 10 tons of copper in 354 oxhide ingots and around a ton of tin, which together make bronze in almost exactly the correct ratio. There were 175 glass ingots in

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cobalt blue, turquoise, and lavender, the earliest intact glass ingots known. There was ebony from Africa, ivory in the form of hippopotamus and elephant tusks, tortoise shells, ostrich eggshells, amber from the Baltic, cypriate pottery, Canaanite jars holding Terabinth resin, and a gold scarab

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bearing the name of Nefertiti. Material on board came from at least nine different cultures, including Mcinian Greece Cyprus Egypt Canaan Assyria Nubia, Sicily, and the Baltic. Where it was going has never been established.

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The cargo composition and the ship's position suggest a route running counterclockwise around the Eastern Mediterranean, which was the standard pattern, but the mix of goods fits a royal shipment as easily as a trading voyage, and no destination can be read

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from the contents. Among the finds was a wooden writing tablet with ivory hinges, the earliest known book form, with recesses that would have held wax.

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A broch is a dry stone tower, round, tapering slightly as it rises, with walls up to 5 m thick at the base and a single low entrance. The wall is hollow, built as two concentric skins with a stairway and galleries running up

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between them, bonded by flat stone slabs. There are around 500 of them, and they exist in Scotland and nowhere else on Earth. Most stand in the north and west across Caesland, Orcne, Shetland, and the western isles.

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They were built between roughly 400 BC and 100 AD. Musa Brock in Shetland is the best preserved, still standing 13 m high with its internal stair intact, which allows a reasonable estimate of what the others looked like. The hollow

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wall is the defining feature and it is a genuinely sophisticated piece of drystone engineering. Building two skins tied together with through slabs produces a structure lighter than a solid wall of the same thickness while remaining stable and the internal void

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houses the stair. Nothing comparable appears in Iron Age building anywhere else. Excavation has found domestic material inside. Hearths, quarns, pottery, animal [music] bone. Evidence of internal timber floors supported on a ledge running around the inner wall called a scarcement. People were living

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in them. What they were for has been argued over for a century. The defensive reading treats them as fortified homesteads with the thick walls, single entrance, and guard cell beside the door pointing to security. Against that, the towers are too numerous and too small to

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represent a coordinated defensive system, and many sit in locations with poor visibility. The alternative treats them as status architecture. Building a Brock required a substantial investment of labor and skill, and the height would have announced the occupants standing

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across the landscape. Ian Armit of the University of Leester has been among those arguing this position, treating the Brock as a prestige house that borrowed the language of defense. Roman writers never described them despite Roman fleets circumnavigating Britain and the Norse

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who later settled these islands reused several as they found them. In 1984, a marine archaeologist named Ahoud Galilei was surveying the seabed off Atlet Hifa on the Israeli coast looking for shipwrecks.

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Storms had shifted the sand and what had been uncovered was a village. Atlet Yam sits between 8 and 12 m below the surface, 400 m offshore, and it was occupied between roughly 6,900 and 6,300 BC. It is among the largest and best

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preserved submerged Neolithic settlements known anywhere. The seabed sand sealed the site from oxygen which preserved organic material almost perfectly. Excavators have recovered wooden posts still standing in their original positions, plant remains, fish bones, [music] animal bone, and human

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skeletons lying where they were buried. The waterlogged conditions kept material intact that would have decayed entirely on land. Stoneuilt structures survive, including rectangular houses with paved floors, along with a freshwater well cut around 9 m deep through the seabed rock.

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Thousands of fish bones from a single species, gray trigger fish were found in one deposit, stored and processed in quantity. Near the center of the site stands seven stones, each weighing up to 600 kg, set upright in a semicircle

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around a freshwater spring. The stones have cup marks cut into them. Nothing at the site explains the arrangement. Two skeletons recovered from the site. A woman and a child buried together showed lesions on the bone consistent with tuberculosis, and DNA testing published

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in 2008 confirmed mcoacterium tuberculosis. Those remain among the oldest confirmed human cases of the disease. The well was eventually filled with stone and refues, which has been read as the water turning brackish as the sea rose. The site went under as

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global sea levels rose after the last glacial period. And one proposal argued by Maria Pesky and colleagues at the Italian National Institute of Geoysics in 2007 holds that a collapse of the volcanic flank of Mount Etna around 6,000 BC generated a tsunami that struck

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the Levventine coast. The abandonment of [music] Atllet Yam with tools and goods left in place has been connected to that event, though the dating is not exact enough to confirm it.

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The treasury at Petra stands 40 m high, cut into a sandstone cliff face in southern Jordan with columns, pediments, capitals, and figures carved in relief.

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It is not a building. Nothing was assembled here. The entire facade was cut away from the living rock, working from the top down. Petra was the capital of the Nabotans, an Arab people who controlled the incense trade routes

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running north from southern Arabia through the desert to the Mediterranean. They appear in the historical record from around the 4th century BC. They grew wealthy on frankincense and myrr and they carved several hundred monumental tombs and temples into the

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cliffs of a hidden valley reached through a narrow gorge called the sik. The method was subtractive and unforgiving. Workers began at the top cutting scaffolding niches and working downward removing the stone in front of the intended facade as they went. There

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is no correction available. A misjudged line cannot be filled and a broken cornice cannot be replaced and the carving had to be planned completely before the first cut because the scaffolding was removed as the work descended. The water engineering is the

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less photographed achievement. Petra sits in desert receiving around 150 mm of rain a year. And the Naboteans built a system of dams, sistns, ceramic pipes, and channels that captured flash flood water and spring flow and distributed it through the city. The pipe diameters

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were calculated to control flow rate and prevent the system running full, which reduces turbulence and pressure damage.

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The city supported perhaps 20,000 people. The sake itself carries channels cut along both walls and a dam was built at the entrance to divert flood water away from the gorge which was rebuilt in the 1960s after modern flooding killed

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tourists inside. Nabatan building above ground was largely conventional masonry and much of the freestanding city has collapsed. The rockcut facads survived because they are part of the cliff. A Swiss traveler named Johan Ludvig Burkhart reached the site in 1812,

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disguised and claiming he wished to sacrifice a goat at a nearby tomb and brought the first modern European account back. Birkhard traveled in disguise to reach Petra because the region was closed to outsiders. Three centuries earlier, an Ottoman admiral

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was collecting charts from sources that were closed in a different way. In 1929, staff cataloging material at the top capa palace in Istanbul came across a piece of gazelle skin parchment among the collections. It was a fragment of a world map roughly 90x 63 cm signed

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and dated by an Ottoman admiral named Piri Race in the year 1513. Piri Race was a real and wellocumented figure. He was a naval commander and cgrapher who served the Ottoman Empire, fought in several Mediterranean campaigns, and compiled a substantial book of sailing

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directions called the Kitab of Bahrier. He was executed in 1553 following a failed campaign in the Persian Gulf. The surviving fragment shows the Atlantic with Western Europe and North Africa on the right, the coast of Brazil and the

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Caribbean on the left, and a land mass running along the bottom edge. Piri Race wrote notes directly onto the map explaining where he got his information, [music] which is unusual and useful. He listed around 20 source charts, including Portuguese maps, Arab charts,

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and one he attributed to Christopher Columbus. The Columbus connection is genuinely interesting on its own terms.

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No map drawn by Columbus survives, and if Pirates had access to one in 1513, this fragment may preserve something of it. The [music] argument that made the map famous concerns the southern land mass. Charles Hapgood, a history professor at Keen State College,

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published maps of the ancient sea kings in 1966, arguing that this coastline represents Antarctica drawn without its ice sheet, and that the source material must therefore date to a period before the continent was glaciated.

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Hapg good students had worked through the map's geometry as a classroom project and the book proposed that an advanced maritime civilization had mapped the world in deep antiquity and that fragments of their work survived in later charts. Antarctica was not cited

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until 1820. The ice sheet has been in place for millions of years. The cardographic reading is more mundane and fits the map better. The southern land mass runs continuously from the South American coast, bending eastward, which is how coastlines were commonly drawn

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when a chart ran out of room on the parchment. 16th century maps frequently show a hypothetical southern continent, Terra Australas, based on classical theory rather than observation, and the shape does not match the Antarctic coastline closely when the distortions

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of the map projection are accounted for. Piri Rice himself wrote that the southern portion came from a Portuguese chart and that the coastline there was uncertain.

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In 1929, a farmer named Yandoeng was digging a ditch near his village in Sichuan Province, southwest China, when he struck a pit filled with jade. The find circulated locally. Some pieces were sold and an English missionary and amateur archaeologist named Vivean

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Donathornne eventually brought it to wider attention. Limited excavation followed in 1934. Nothing much happened for another 50 years. In 1986, workers at a local brick factory digging clay broke into two large pits. What came out of them was

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unlike anything in Chinese archaeology. The pits held over a thousand objects dated to around 1200 to 1100 BC contemporary with the Shang dynasty in the Yellow River Valley some distance to the northeast. Among them were dozens of bronze heads life-sized and larger with

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angular features, sharp noses, thin mouths, and enormous protruding eyes. Several had been covered in gold foil.

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One bronze mask measures around 1 and a3 meters across with cylindrical eyes [music] projecting 16 cm out from the face and ears spread wide. There was a bronze figure standing 2.6 m tall, including its base. Hands held in front

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of it, forming a ring as though gripping something now missing. There was a bronze tree nearly 4 m high, cast in sections carrying birds and fruit on its branches. None of it matches Shang art.

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Shang bronzes are ritual vessels covered in dense geometric decoration and human faces barely feature. The Sanchi material is figurative, monumental, and stylistically unrelated, produced by a culture with metallurgical capability equal to anything in China at [music] the time. Almost everything in the pits

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had been deliberately broken and burned before burial. Bronzes were smashed, ivory was charred, jades were shattered.

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Over 60 elephant tusks were recovered. No writing has ever been found at the site. No Chinese historical text mentions the culture, and no royal tombs or cemetery have been located, which leaves the population and social structure entirely unknown. Six further

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pits were located in 2019 and excavated through the early 2020s, producing thousands more objects, including a bronze figure carrying a vessel on its head and a gold mask weighing around 100 g.

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The Rohan CEX runs to 448 pages written in a script nobody has identified in a language nobody has identified illustrated with 87 drawings.

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It surfaced in Hungary in 1838 when Count Gustav Batani donated his family library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The collection came from Rohon, a town now called Rekennits on the Austrian side of the border. And a catalog of the Batani library from 1743

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lists a Hungarian prayer book in octavo format, which may or may not be this object. The paper has been examined. It is Venetian [music] and the watermark dates it to somewhere between 1529 and 1540 which establishes when the material

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was made rather than when it was written on. The script uses somewhere between 150 and 200 distinct symbols by most counts which is roughly 10 times the size of most alphabets. The lines run right to left and the text is dense with

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around 9 to 14 lines per page. The illustrations give the only real clue to content. They show scenes with crosses, crescents, and what look like religious and military subjects, including figures in landscapes, and what appear to be battles.

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Crosses, crescents, and swastikas all appear, which has been read as suggesting a context involving Christianity, Islam, and possibly other traditions coexisting.

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Proposed readings have not converged. Sumerian, Hindi, Old Hungarian, Deian and Romanian have all been argued for.

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Vora Inakyuk published a proposed translation in 2002 treating the language as vulgar Latin spoken by Vlak producing a history of 11th century warfare. Mahesh Kumar Singh claimed a brahmy based reading in Hindi. Neither has been accepted. Levente Zotan Kerali

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and Gabbor Tokai have made the most methodical recent progress publishing from 2018 onward. They have identified structural features including chapter divisions, numbering and passages that appear to correspond to gospel narrative and they have argued the codeex is a

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religious text possibly a Bible related work written in a code rather than a natural script. A number of scholars including Carly Sabo in 1866 have argued the whole thing is a forgery. Most likely the work of Samuel Literati

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Nemesis, a Transian antiquarian and known manufacturer of historical fakes who died in 1842. Doera sits on an island called Kadir in the Ran of Kuch, a vast salt flat in Gujarat, western India. The island is surrounded by desert that floods with

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seaater during the monsoon and bakes white the rest of the year. There is no perennial freshwater source. A city of around 15,000 people lived there for 1500 years. Doera was one of the largest settlements of the Indis Valley

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civilization occupied from roughly 3,00 to,500 BC. The Archaeological Survey of India began major excavation in 1989 under RS Bisht who worked the site for over a decade. What Bish's team mapped was a city given over to water. 16

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reservoirs have been identified occupying somewhere around 10% of the total walled area. The largest measures around 73 m long, 29 wide, and 10 deep, cut down into the bedrock with stepped sides and stone lined walls. A series of

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them ring the city connected by channels. [music] Two seasonal streams, the Mansar and the Manhar, run either side of the site. The builders damned both, cut channels to divert the flood water into the reservoir system, and built storm drains to [music] move water

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through the city. Rock cut wells fed the tanks and a stepwell within the castle area reaches down to the water table.

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The city itself is laid out in three parts. A fortified upper town, a middle town, and a lower town with the hole enclosed by walls built of dressed stone rather than the mud brick used at most Indis sites. Near the northern gate,

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excavators found 10 large signs of the indiscript made from gypsum inlay which had been mounted on a wooden board above the gateway and fell when the wood decayed. It is the largest indis inscription known and like everything else in that script, it cannot be read.

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Doa was listed by UNESCO in 2021. The Great Pyramid has eight sides. Each of the four faces is divided down the center by a shallow indentation running from the apex to the base so that each face consists of two planes meeting at a

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very slight angle. The depression is around half a degree which works out to roughly a meter of inward deviation at the center of a face over 230 m of base length. Nobody sees it from the ground.

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The effect is visible only from the air under particular lighting when the sun strikes at an angle that puts one half of a face in shadow while the other catches the light. Flender's Petri recorded the hollowing in his survey of

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Giza published in 1883 measuring the casing stone sockets and noting the deviation. Pmisurier and others discussed it subsequently and an aerial photograph taken by British Air Force pilot P. groves in 1940 showing the shadow line down the southern face at

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Equinox is the image usually reproduced. Explanations divide between deliberate design and consequence. The design reading holds that the indentation was intended either for structural reasons, adding stability by keying the casing into the core or to produce the light

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effect at Equinox or as an optical correction similar to the intasis used on Greek columns to make straight lines appear straight. The alternative treats it as a byproduct. The core of the pyramid was built around an outcrop of

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natural bedrock and the casing stones were laid against a stepped core structure. [music] Settling over 4 and a half thousand years combined with the removal of the outer casing in the medieval period which left the underlying core exposed could produce

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apparent hollowing without any original intent. The casing is the difficulty. The pyramid was originally sheathed in polished ta limestone almost all of which was stripped for building material in Cairo after an earthquake in 1303 loosened it. A handful of casing stones

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survive at the base. Whether the finished cased pyramid showed the concavity at all cannot now be established. The casing stones of the great pyramid were stripped and carted off to build a city. On a small island in the Pacific, the opposite happened,

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and a city of stone was left standing in the forest with nobody to take it apart.

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Leu sits just off the eastern shore of Kosray, one of the islands of the Federated States of Micronesia in the central Pacific. It covers less than a square kilometer.

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Across that small piece of ground, there are walls up to 6 m high, built from bassalt columns and coral, enclosing compounds tombs canals and courtyards. The walls are made the same way as those at Nan Madal, 600 km to the

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west. Long hexagonal columns of basaltt formed naturally when lava cools slowly stacked in alternating courses like logs. One layer running one way and the next crossing it. Individual columns weigh several tons. Kosai has basaltt but not on leu. The stone was quarried

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on the main island and moved across the channel and a good deal of the island itself was built up from coral fill and reef material to extend the buildable area outward into the lagoon. Estimates put the reclaimed portion at more than

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half the island's current surface. The city was the seat of the Casan Paramount Chiefs called the Tassra and it functioned as the political and religious center of the island.

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Construction is generally dated to around 1250 to,400 AD with the site remaining in use until the 19th century. At its height, Leu held perhaps 1,500 people drawn largely from the ruling class while the general population lived on the main island and

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supplied the city with food. Inside the walls, the layout divides into around a 100 walled compounds connected by narrow paved lanes and canals that filled with the tide. compounds contain dwellings, feasting houses, and separate structures for preparing saka, a drink made from

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the root of a pepper plant used in ritual and in maintaining social rank. The royal tombs are the most substantial structures. Two of them called insu and enol are built as truncated pyramids of stacked basult with internal chambers

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reached through narrow passages. A chief's body was placed inside for a period. Then the bones were removed, cleaned, [music] and deposited in a deep part of the lagoon. Ksray's population collapsed after European contact through introduced disease, falling from several

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thousand to a few hundred by the 1880s. The chiefly system that maintained Leu ended, the compounds were abandoned, and forest took the site. Modern Lulu town has been built across much of the archaeological site with houses, roads, and a hospital, standing among and

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sometimes on top of the ancient walls. Baantine ships carried bronze tubes mounted at the bow and through them they projected a liquid that caught fire on contact with the air, stuck to whatever it hit, and continued burning on the

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surface of the sea. The weapon appears in the historical record in 672 AD during the first Arab siege of Constantinople. Byzantine sources credit its introduction to a Greek speaking engineer from Syria named Kolinos who arrived in the capital as a refugee and

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brought the formula with him. The Arab fleet was destroyed [music] and the same weapon was used again in 717 and repeatedly over the following centuries.

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The delivery system is described in reasonable detail across Byzantine sources. A heated pressurized container held the substance connected by a pump to a bronze siphon that could be aimed.

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Smaller handheld versions existed along with ceramic grenades. Operating it aboard a wooden ship with fire and pressure involved was dangerous to the crew and accounts describe accidents.

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What went into it has never been recovered. The Bzantines restricted the formula to a small number of families and treated its manufacturer as a state matter. Emperor Constantine IIIth writing in the 10th century in a book of instruction for his son stated that the

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substance had been delivered to the first Christian emperor by an angel that it was to be made only in Constantinople and that anyone who revealed the method to foreigners should be excommunicated and executed. The secrecy held by the

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13th century the Bzantine themselves appear to have lost it and no reliable description of the composition survives from any period. Modern reconstructions propose a base of crude oil or refined petroleum available from seeps around the Black Sea and in the Caucasus with

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additions such as pine resin to thicken it and make it adhere sulfur and possibly quick lime which reacts with water and generates heat. Heating and pressurizing before projection would account for the sources describing thunder and smoke accompanying its use.

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John Halden of Princeton built a working reconstruction with Colin Hughes in 2002 for a television project using a bronze pump and heated crude oil and successfully projected burning liquid across a distance. The system worked.

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Whether it matched the original composition is not something the experiment could establish. On the morning of September 7th, 1902, a farmer plowing a field at Trundholm Mo in northwestern Zealand, Denmark, turned up pieces of bronze. The field had been

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pete bog until it was drained, and [music] what his plow had broken was an object that had been placed in the water around 3,400 years earlier. The Trundolm sun chariot is a bronze disc mounted on a wheeled frame pulled by a bronze

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horse. The disc is around 25 cm across. The whole object roughly 60 cm long and it dates to about 1,400 BC in the Nordic Bronze Age. One face of the disc is covered in gold leaf decorated with concentric circles of spirals and zigzag

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bands. The other face is plain bronze with a similar but simpler decorative scheme and no gold at all. That symmetry is the part that carries the meaning.

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Bronze Age Northern European belief, as far as it can be reconstructed from rock carvings and objects, involve the sun being carried across the sky during the day and returning through the underworld or across the sea at night. A disc

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gilded on one side only, mounted so it can be drawn along, reads as a model of that journey. Drawn from left to right, the gold face shows, which corresponds to the sun traveling east to west across the daytime sky. Drawn back the other

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way, the dark side shows. The casting is technically accomplished. The horse and the disc were made by lost wax casting, and the spiral decoration on the gold foil was applied using stamps.

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Metallurgical analysis has shown the bronze contains tin that must have been imported. Since Denmark has neither copper nor tin, meaning the metal arrived through trade networks running to Central Europe and beyond, the object was deliberately deposited in the bog.

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Bronze Age Northern Europe produced large numbers of bog deposits, objects placed in water as offerings and never recovered, and the chariot appears to have been broken before it went in. It is held at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and appears on the

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Danish 1000 Crona note. In December 2000, a survey vessel belonging to India's National Institute of Ocean Technology was running sonar in the Gulf of Kat off the coast of Gujarat as part of a pollution monitoring program. The sonar returned images of

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structures on the seabed. The Gulf is a shallow inlet with some of the most extreme tidal ranges in the world up to 11 m and the water is heavy with silt which makes visibility close to zero and diving difficult. The sonar images

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published and discussed from 2001 onward showed what were described as regular geometric features across an area running roughly 9 km by 3 at depths of around 30 to 40 m. Interpretations offered included foundations, walls, a grid layout, and what were called great

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baths. Dredging recovered material from the seabed. The finds included pottery fragments, beads, sculpture fragments, hearth material, fossilized bone, and a piece of wood. The wood was radiocarbon dated by the Berbal Sani Institute of Pelleobbotany to around 7,500 BC. and a

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second sample produced a comparable date. Merly Manohar Jooshi, then Indian Minister for Science and Technology, announced the fine publicly in 2002 as evidence of a civilization older than any known, predating the Indis Valley by several thousand years. The objections

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came quickly and have not gone away. The dated wood was recovered by dredging rather than from a sealed context, meaning it could have washed into the Gulf from anywhere. and the Gulf of Combat receives sediment from several major rivers. Ancient wood occurring

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naturally in riverbborne deposits is common. The artifacts have the same problem, having been dredged rather than excavated. The sonar imagery itself has been questioned by marine geologists who have argued that the extreme tidal currents in the Gulf scour the seabed

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into channels and ridges that can appear regular in sidescan sonar and that the resolution was not sufficient to distinguish construction from natural formation. No systematic underwater excavation has been carried out and the conditions make it extremely difficult.

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Sema Chiian wrote his history of China around 100 BC, roughly a century after the death of the first emperor. And he described the tomb in some detail.

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Beneath the burial mound, he wrote, "The workers built a model of the empire with the rivers and seas rendered in flowing mercury set in motion mechanically and the heavens depicted above with the constellations picked out in pearls.

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Crossbows were rigged to fire on anyone who broke in. Chin Shiuang unified China in 221 BC, ending centuries of waring states, standardized the script, the currency, and the axle width of carts, and began construction on his tomb complex near

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modern Shian. Siman records 700,000 workers involved and says those who built the inner chambers were sealed inside to protect the secret.

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The burial mound still stands, a flattened earth pyramid originally around 115 m high, now weathered to about 76. The Terra cotta army, discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974, sits in pits well over a kilometer east of it and forms only a small part

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of a necropolis covering around 98 km. The mound has never been opened. Soil testing has been carried out repeatedly.

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Surveys from the 1980s onward have recorded mercury concentrations in the soil above the burial chamber far higher than the surrounding area. And the distribution is uneven with the highest readings concentrated in patterns that some researchers have mapped against the

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geography of the Chin Empire's rivers. A study published by Chinese researchers in 2020 reported continued elevated readings and suggested the mercury is escaping through cracks. Remote sensing has established the outline of what is underneath. Geoysical survey has identified a chamber roughly 80 m by 50

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at a depth of around 30 m surrounded by a thick wall of rammed earth with what appear to be staircases and internal structures.

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The Chinese authorities have declined to excavate. The stated reasons are conservation since the terracotta figures lost their painted surfaces within hours of exposure to air in 1974.

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And the mercury, which would present a serious hazard to any excavation team. The first emperor's tomb has been surveyed from every angle and never opened. On a lava field in central Mexico, there is a city that has been

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opened, mapped, and walked through. And it raises a question nobody has answered about how anyone lived there at all.

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Cantona sits on a hardened lava flow in the state of Pueba east of Mexico City at around 2,000 m elevation.

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The ground is black volcanic rock, broken and sharp, and the site covers roughly 12 square km, which makes it one of the largest prehispanic cities in Meso America by area. There are more than 3,000 walled residential patios, over 500 cobbled streets, and around 24

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ball courts, which is the highest concentration of ball courts at any single Mesoamerican site. The ball game was played across the region for 2,000 years with a rubber ball and stone hoops or markers and it carried ritual as well

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as sporting weight. Having 24 of them in one city is unusual by a considerable margin. Nothing at Cantona is morted.

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[music] The entire city, walls, streets, platforms, pyramids, and ball courts is built from drylaid volcanic stone fitted without any binding material at all.

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The builders used the rock that was already underfoot and stacked it. The layout is defensive to an unusual degree. Access into the city runs through a single main causeway, and the streets are narrow and walled, creating controlled routes rather than open

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squares. Most Mesoamerican cities are organized around large public plazas. Cantona has very few. The occupation ran from around 600 BC with the city at its height between roughly 600 and 900 AD holding perhaps 90,000 people. It sat on the

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trade route carrying obsidian from the Oamel's Zaragoza source, one of the largest deposits in Meso America down toward the Gulf Coast and obsidian working was the economic base. Water is the problem nobody has solved. The site has no river, no lake, and no spring.

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Rainfall in the region is low. The volcanic ground drains immediately and the surrounding land is poor for farming. A population of 90,000 needs a great deal of water every day and how Cantona supplied it has never been established. No major reservoir system

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has been identified. Work published in 2012 by a team including Tryy Batacharia of the University of California examined sediment cores from a nearby lake and found evidence of prolonged drought in the region [music] between 500 and 1150 AD. The city was abandoned around 1050

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AD. Four cones of beaten gold survive from Bronze Age Europe. The tallest stands 88 cm. The gold is hammered to a thickness of around a tenth of a millimeter. And the entire surface is covered in stamped concentric bands of circles, discs,

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wheels, and rings. The largest, known as the Berlin gold hat, was made from a single piece of gold, weighing around 490 g. Producing it required hammering one lump of metal outward into a cone nearly a meter tall without tearing it,

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then working the decoration in with stamps and punches. Three were found in southern Germany and one [music] in western France. The Aventon cone came out of a field in 1844. The Shiferstat cone was plowed up in 1835 with three bronze axes placed

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around its base. and the Ezlesorf BH cone was found in 1953. The Berlin example surfaced on the antiquities market in 1996 with no recorded fine spot at all. They date to between roughly 1400 and 800 BC. For a

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long time, they were cataloged as voses or as ceremonial vessel covers. The interpretation as headgear came later, supported by the shiferstat cones brim and by depictions in Bronze Age rock art showing figures in tall pointed hats. In the late 1990s, Wilfried Mangan, then

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director of the Berlin Museum of Prehistory, examined the decoration and argued it was a calendar. The bands of symbols, he proposed, encode the relationship between the lunar and solar year, allowing the wearer to calculate when the two cycles fall out of step,

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and when an extra month needs adding. Counting the symbol groups in particular ways produces figures matching the matonic cycle, the 19-year period after which lunar and solar calendars realign.

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The reading has supporters and critics. Getting the numbers out requires selecting which bands to count and how to group them, and different approaches produce different results. What is agreed is that the hats were high status ritual objects, almost certainly worn by

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priests or rulers, and that whoever [music] made them was an exceptional goldsmith. A Roman docahedron is a hollow bronze object about the size of a fist with 12 flat pentagonal faces. Each face carries a circular hole cut through it and the

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holes are different sizes on different faces. At each of the 20 corners where the faces meet, a small knob sticks out.

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Around 120 have been found along with a handful of Eosahedra with 20 faces. They turn up across northwestern Europe in Britain France Belgium Germany Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, and almost nowhere else. None have been found in Italy, Greece, Spain, North

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Africa, or the Eastern Provinces, which is the first curious thing about them. They date to the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. Sizes range from around 4 to 11 cm.

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Most are bronze. A few are stone. No Roman text mentions them, not one across the entire body of surviving Latin literature, technical writing, military manuals, and correspondence. for an object produced in quantity across several centuries and several provinces.

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That silence is difficult to account for. The proposal's number in the dozens. A gauge for measuring the diameter of pipes or coins using the varied hole sizes. A device for calculating optimal sewing dates by sighting through the holes at a star. A

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knitting tool for making glove fingers, which has been demonstrated to work in practice, but has no Roman period evidence behind it. A candlestick based on wax residue found inside one example.

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A rangefinder for artillery, a children's toy, a religious or divinatory object. The fine spots have been used to argue both ways. Several came from coin hordes and from graves, which points to value and possibly ritual significance rather than a

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workshop tool. Others came from military sites and settlements. A docahedron found at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire in 2023 by a volunteer archaeology group drew considerable attention partly because it is among the largest and best preserved and partly because it was

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found in a pit with no other associated material. The smaller stones at Stonehenge, the ones standing inside the great Sarsen circle, came from Wales. Herbert Henry Thomas, a geologist with the Geological Survey, established this in 1923, matching the rock to outcrops in the

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Pcelli Hills of Pembrochure around 240 km from Salsbury plane. There are roughly 43 of them surviving from an original number probably closer to 80.

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They weigh between 2 and 4 tons each. The name blue stone covers several different rock types, mainly spotted doerite along with riolyte and volcanic ash. All of which take on a bluish cast when wet. Two quaries have since been

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identified and excavated. Mike Parker Pearson of University College London led work at Kin God Dog and Craig Rosi Felen in Pemrochshire [music] publishing from 2015 and found the working faces where pillars had been detached along with stone wedges, hammerstones, and

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artificial platforms built to receive the stones as they came down. Charcoal from the quarry sites dated the extraction to around 3000 BC. [music] Several centuries before the blue stones were erected at Stonehenge. That gap led to a further proposal at Juan Mann a few

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kilometers from the quaries. Parker Pearson's team excavated a dismantled stone circle with empty sockets, one of which matched the crosssection of a blue stone standing at Stonehenge. The argument published in 2021 was that a Welsh circle was taken down and moved

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wholesale to Salsbury plane. That reading has been contested with other researchers questioning the dating and the socket match. The alterone, the largest of the non-Sarsson stones at 5 tons, was long assumed to come from South Wales as well. Analysis published

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in Nature in August 2024 by a team including Anthony Clark of Curtain University matched its mineral composition to the Orcadian basin in northeast Scotland around 750 km away.

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How the stones traveled is unresolved. Glacial transport has been argued repeatedly with the proposal that ice carried Welsh rock to Salsbury plane and Neolithic builders used what was already there, though no blue stone erratics have been found in the area.

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Frank Gadio, a French marine archaeologist, spent 4 years surveying Abu Kirbay off the Egyptian coast near Alexandria before his team found anything. In 2000, working with magnetometers and sonar in murky water at a depth of around 10 meters, they

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located walls, columns, and colossal statuary under 2 m of sediment. The city was Thonis Heraclean, known to the Egyptians as Thonus, and to the Greeks as Heraclean, and it had been lost since roughly the 8th century AD. Greek

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writers had described it. Heroditus recorded that Paris and Helen stopped there before the Trojan War. Strabo mentioned it. Its actual location had been unknown for so long that some historians had treated it as semi-leendary. It was Egypt's primary

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Mediterranean port before Alexandria was founded in 331 BC. Sitting on the Canopic branch of the Nile, where the river met the sea, and every ship entering Egypt from the Greek world passed through it and paid duty there.

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[music] The site has produced an enormous quantity of material. statues of the god Happy over 5 m tall. A granite statue of a TMIC queen, more than 700 ancient anchors, 64 shipwrecks, gold coins, lead and bronze weights, and a black granite

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steelely of Nectaneo. The first carrying a decree about taxation recovered intact and legible. The temple of Aman Garab stood at the center. Gadio's team found it collapsed with the columns and blocks lying where they fell rather than scattered. and beneath and around it

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deposits of ritual objects placed in the canals. The city went under gradually. The Nile Delta here is built on soft clay and sand and the weight of stone buildings on saturated ground causes liquefaction where waterlog sediment loses strength and behaves like a fluid.

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rising sea levels, subsidance of the delta, and probably earthquakes combined over several centuries. And by the 8th century AD, the whole city had settled beneath the bay. Excavation continues with only a small percentage of the site investigated so far. Heracle's gold

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coins came out of the sediment, looking much as they went in, because gold does not corrode. On the Peruvian coast, smiths worked out how to make an object look like solid gold when there was barely any gold in it.

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Hold a moce ornament in your hand and it looks like gold. Test the metal and you find it is mostly copper. The Mochce controlled the northern coastal valleys of Peru between roughly 10 and 800 AD, building adobe pyramids, running

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irrigation networks across the desert and producing some of the finest metal work in the ancient Americas. Their goldsmiths worked with an alloy called tumbaga, a mixture of gold, silver, and copper. And in many surviving pieces, the gold content is under 10%. The

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process that turns that into a gold surface is called depletion gilding. The object is made from the alloy, then treated with an acidic solution, which the moche produced from local mineral sources, including potassium nitrate, common salt, and alum. The acid attacks

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the copper and silver at the surface and dissolves them out, leaving behind a skin of almost pure gold a few microns thick. Heating and burnishing then consolidate that skin into a smooth continuous surface. The result is metallergically bonded rather than

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applied so it does not flake or peel the way gold leaf or plating does. Objects treated this way 1500 years ago still look gold today. Heather Lechman of MIT published the foundational work on this in the 1970s and 1980s [music] analyzing

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moche and related objects and establishing how the process worked. Her argument went further than the chemistry. She proposed that the point was not to counterfeit gold cheaply but to express a cultural idea about essence where the surface reveals what the

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object is fundamentally made of rather than disguising what it is not. The Mochi also electrochemically plated copper with gold and silver using a similar acid chemistry to deposit metal onto a surface without any electrical source which is a separate technique and

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equally sophisticated. The scale of the work became clear in 1987 when Walter Alva excavated the tomb of the Lord of Sepan at Haka Rajada. An undisturbed elite burial containing hundreds of objects in gold, [music] silver, copper, and gilded alloy,

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including nose ornaments, headdresses, and back flaps. The Tarim Basin sits in the far west of China in what is now Shing Jang, ringed by the Tian Shan, Kunlun, and Pameir mountains, and filled in the center by the Taklamakan desert. The salt in the

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soil and the extreme dryness preserve organic material to a degree matched almost nowhere else. Bodies have been coming out of the sand there for over a century. Swedish explorer Sven Hayden and later Folk Bergman documented [music] burials in the early 20th

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century and Chinese excavations from the 1970s onward recovered hundreds more. The best preserved retained skin, hair, eyelashes, and clothing. The oldest from the cemetery at Xiah date to around 2000 BC. They were buried in boatshaped wooden coffins covered in cattlehide

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with tall wooden poles marking each grave, and the coffins were laid on the surface and covered with sand rather than dug in. Their appearance caused the argument. Many have light brown or reddish hair, tall builds, and facial features that struck early observers as

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European rather than East Asian. Some were buried in woven woolen textiles with twill weaves and plaid patterns comparable to bronze age cloth from central Europe. Victor Mayer of the University of Pennsylvania pushed the question into wider attention from the

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1990s arguing for a connection to Indo-Uropean populations migrating east across the step possibly linked to the Tarians who spoke an Indo-uropean language documented in the region from later manuscripts.

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Genetic work published in Nature in 2021 by a team including Christina Wariner [music] and Yinq Kui produced a different answer. Analysis of 13 individuals from Xiao and nearby sites found they were not migrants at all. Their ancestry traced almost entirely to ancient North

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Eurasians, a population that was widespread during the last ice age and had become genetically isolated in the tar by the Bronze Age.

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The culture around them was anything but isolated. Their diet included wheat, millet, and dairy. Their textiles drew on western traditions, and their burial practices were their own.

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Kihachiro Aratake was looking for hammerhead sharks. A local diver running tours off Yonauni, the westernmost island of Japan around 100 km east of Taiwan. He was surveying a new site in 1986 when he came across a formation about 25 m down. It is a mass of

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sandstone roughly 150 m long and 20 m high with flat terraces, straight edges, right angled steps, and what looked like a broad platform, a channel, and a section resembling a staircase.

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Masaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukuse, began studying it shortly afterward and has argued since that it is at least partly worked by human hands. His case rests on the right angles, the flat surfaces,

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features he interprets as tool marks and drilled holes, and what he reads as carvings on the rock face. He has proposed the structure dates to the end of the last ice age when sea levels were low enough for the site to stand above

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water somewhere around 10,000 BC. Robert Shock of Boston University dived the site and reached the opposite conclusion. The sandstone here is finely bedded and fractures along horizontal planes and vertical joints which produces flat surfaces meeting at right angles naturally. Comparable formations

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exist above water on Yonauni itself. where the same geology creates step-like terraces without anyone touching them.

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Neither position has been settled. No artifacts have been recovered from the site, no tools, no pottery, no worked stone that could be dated independently of the formation itself. The sea level history is not in dispute. The area was

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dry land at the end of the last glacial period. And if anyone was living on that coast, whatever they left is now underwater.

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Roman harbor walls have been sitting in seawater for 2,000 years and are stronger now than when they were built.

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Modern marine concrete begins degrading within decades. The Romans used a mix of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater with chunks of volcanic rock as aggregate.

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Vituvius writing around 25 BC described the recipe and specified ash from the region around Poti near Naples which is why the material is called Potana. Marie Jackson of the University of Utah led work analyzing drill cores from Roman

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marine structures published through the 2010s and identified what was happening. Seawater percolating through the concrete dissolves components of the volcanic ash and drives the growth of new interlocking crystals within the matrix, including aluminous toberite, a rare mineral that is difficult to

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manufacture in a laboratory. Those crystals reinforce the structure over time. Modern Portland cement is designed to be chemically inert once cured, and any reaction with seawater breaks it down. The Roman material does the reverse. A second piece was published in

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2023 by Admir Massik and colleagues at MIT, addressing small white lumps of lime found throughout Roman concrete, which had long been treated as evidence of careless mixing. The team argued these classs are deliberate, produced by hot mixing with quick lime rather than

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slaked lime, [music] and that they act as a repair system. When a crack forms and water reaches a lump, the lime dissolves and recristallizes, sealing [music] the crack. They tested it by casting samples with and without the clasts, cracking both, and running water

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through. [music] The Roman style samples sealed within 2 weeks. The Pantheon Dome in Rome, unreinforced concrete spanning 43 m, has stood since 126 AD and remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

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A lava field covers the southern edge of Mexico City. Black rock stretching across several square kilm and a circular stone structure rises out of it. Quilkco is a stepped pyramid, round rather than square, roughly 120 m across at the base and around 18 m high. Built

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in four tiers with ramps running up two sides, it was built from earth and rubble faced with volcanic stone.

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Starting around 800 to 600 BC, which makes it one of the earliest monumental structures in the Valley of Mexico, the settlement around it grew to perhaps 20,000 people. And for several centuries, Quiquilo was the dominant center in the valley. Contemporary with

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the early growth of Teayotiwa Khan 40 km to the northeast. The Zetal volcano erupted around 245 to 315 AD. Lava flowed across the southern valley, burying the city and the surrounding farmland under rock several meters thick in places reaching partway up the

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pyramid itself. The population left and the balance of power in the valley shifted decisively to Teayotakan. Manuel Gamo excavated the pyramid between 1917 and 1922, cutting through the lava to reach the structure, and the site is still only

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partially cleared with much of the ancient city under solid basaltt. The argument that followed concerned dating.

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Byron Cummings, working at the site in the 1920s, examined the sediment layers between the pyramid and the lava and concluded from deposition rates that the structure might be far older than anyone had assumed with figures around 8,500 years proposed. Later, radiocarbon

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dating on material from the site along with dating of the sidel eruption itself [music] brought the chronology back to the accepted range. Much of the lava field was quarried for building stone in the 20th century and [music] modern

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Mexico City has been built across it. Kuiquilo was buried under rock that arrived on its own. In western India, workers remove something in the region of 200,000 tons of rock deliberately and what they left behind is the largest

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monolithic structure on Earth. The [music] Kyasa temple at Ura in the Indian state of Maharashtra was not built. It was excavated.

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Workers started at the top of a basalt cliff and cut downward, removing rock until a temple was left standing in the hole they had made. Everything is one piece of stone. The main shrine rises 30 m. The courtyard around it measures

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roughly 80 m x 46. And the complex includes gateways, galleries, freestanding pillars, two life-sized stone elephants, and a bridge between structures. All of it carved from the same continuous mass of rock. Nothing was assembled. Nothing was quarried elsewhere and brought in. And there are

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no joints anywhere. [music] The excavation is credited to Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty who ruled from around 756 to 773 A. The work is generally placed in the 8th century with some elements added later. Estimates of the rock removed run to around 200,000

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tons cut out with hammers and chisels and carried away. [music] The method reverses everything about ordinary construction. A conventional builder can correct a mistake, replace a damaged block, or adjust a plan partway through.

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[music] Here, every cut is permanent. Working downward from the roof of a 30 m shrine means the topmost carving is completed before the sculptors have reached the level of the doorways below it and the whole design must be held in

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the mind or on a plan before a single chisel touches the rock. Three trenches were cut into the cliff face first isolating a block of basaltt which was then worked inward and downward. The interiors were hollowed through the

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doorways once the exterior had taken shape. The surfaces carry an enormous amount of sculpture. Panels from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata run along the walls. And one of the best known shows the demon king Raana shaking Mount Kyash with the deities above him

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reacting. The base of the main shrine is carved as a row of elephants appearing to carry the structure on their backs.

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Allora contains 34 caves in total, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jane cut over roughly five centuries along the same escarment. and Kyasa is cave 16. Traces of white plaster survive in places indicating the temple was originally coded to resemble the snow-covered Mount

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Kaash in the Himalayas that it was named for. Arthur Evans bought a hillside in Cree in 1900 and started digging. What came out of the ground over the following years was a palace complex at Nasus, covering several acres with storooms,

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staircases, drainage, painted walls, and a civilization nobody had known existed. He named it Minoan after the legendary King Minos. Among the finds were clay tablets carrying two different scripts.

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Evans called them linear A and linear B. Linear B was cracked in 1952 by Michael Ventress, an English architect who had become interested in the problem as a school boy after hearing Evans lecture.

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Working with the classicist John Chadwick, Ventress established that linear B recorded an early form of Greek, which meant myian Greeks had been running NSOS in its later period. The tablets turned out to be inventories listing sheep, oil, chariot wheels, and

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personnel. Linear A came first used from around 1800 to450 BC and it remains unread. Around 1,400 documents carry it most of them small clay tablets from Haga Triata and other sites along with inscriptions on vessels, stone offering tables and metal objects. A

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number of the signs are shared with linear B and applying linear B sound values to linear A produces pronouncable words. None of them mean anything in Greek or in any other identified language. The vocabulary that comes out is not Greek, not Semitic, and not

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matched to any known family. The numerical system is understood along with the general structure of the documents, which appear to be administrative records of commodities.

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Certain signs recur in positions that suggest they function as headings, and the layout of the tablets follows patterns comparable to linear B. The corpus is the constraint. Linear B survives in thousands of tablets from multiple sites. Linear A survives in a

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fraction of that. Most of the texts are very short and there is no bilingual inscription anywhere.

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Esther Salgarella of Cambridge published work in 2020 tracing the structural relationship between the two scripts in detail, establishing how linear B was adapted from linear A.

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In 1900, sponge divers sheltering from a storm anchored off the small Greek island of Antiqua between Cree and the Pelpines.

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One of them, Elias Stadiatus, went down in a canvas suit and copper helmet and came back reporting bodies on the seabed. What he had seen was a wreck full of bronze and marble statues lying at around 45 m. The Greek government

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funded a salvage operation through 1900 and 1901, and the divers brought up statues, glassware, jewelry, and coins.

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Among the material was a lump of corroded bronze and wood, roughly the size of a large book, which sat in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for months until it split open and someone noticed a gear wheel inside it.

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The ship went down around 70 to 60 BC. The mechanism inside was made somewhere around 150 to 100 BC and it contained at least 30 interlocking bronze gears cut by hand with teeth a millimeter or two across. Derek Dala Price, a physicist

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and historian of science at Yale, X-rayed the fragments in the 1970s and published the first detailed reconstruction.

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Later work using computed tomography led by Tony Fre and Mike Edmunds with imaging by Xtech and Huelet Packard read inscriptions on interior surfaces that had never been visible and established the gear ratios precisely. The device tracked the sky. A hand crank drove the

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gear train and dials on the front and back displayed the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac. the phase of the moon through a rotating half-silvered ball, the dates of eclipses, the matonic cycle governing the relationship between

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lunar and solar calendars, and the 4-year cycle of the panh helenic games, including the Olympiad. One gear train uses a pin and slot arrangement to model the moon's varying speed across the sky, which is the observable effect of its

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elliptical orbit. That required understanding that the motion is irregular and building a mechanical analog of it. Nothing of comparable complexity survives from anywhere for the next thousand years. Geared astronomical clocks appear in Europe in the 14th century.

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The Voyage manuscript runs to around 240 vellum pages written in a flowing script nobody has identified, illustrated with plants that do not exist, naked women bathing in green pools connected by pipe work, and circular diagrams filled with stars. Wilfred Voyage, a Polish book

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dealer, bought it in 1912 from the Jesuit college at Villa Mondreon near Rome. Along with other manuscripts, the order was selling quietly. He spent the rest of his life trying to have it read.

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The vellum was radiocarbon dated at the University of Arizona in 2009 to [music] between 1404 and 1438.

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Ink analysis found nothing inconsistent with that period. A letter found with the manuscript written in 1665 by Johannes Marcus Marcy of Prague states that Emperor Rudolph II bought it for 600 duckets and believed it to be the work of Roger Bacon. Marginal notes and

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ownership marks trace it through several hands in 17th century Prague, including the alchemist Gayorg Bares. The text runs to around 35,000 words using somewhere between 20 and 30 distinct characters. It behaves statistically like language. Word frequencies follow the distribution found in natural

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languages. Certain characters cluster at the beginnings and ends of words and the structure differs between sections of the book. The illustrations divide the manuscript into apparent sections covering plants, astronomy, what looks like biology or balology, pharmaceutical preparations, and dense pages [music] of

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text. Almost none of the plants can be matched to real species. Cryptographers have failed on it repeatedly. William Freriedman, who broke Japanese diplomatic ciphers in the Second World War, worked on it for years with a study group and concluded it might be an

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artificial language. Proposed solutions have continued to appear and have not held up, including readings in Hebrew, Turkish, protoromance, and nawatal.

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[music] The hoax argument has been made seriously, most prominently by Gordon Rug of Keel University, who demonstrated in 2004 that text with comparable statistical properties could be generated using a grill and a table of syllables, a technique available in the

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16th century. The 2009 dating complicates that since it places the vellum a century earlier. It is held at the benica rare book and manuscript library at Yale.

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A Kurdish farmer working a field near Shanurfa in southeastern Turkey kept hitting stone with his plow. In 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt read a survey report from the 1960s that had dismissed the mound as a medieval

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cemetery, went to look [music] at it, and recognized what the broken limestone actually was.

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Gobecepe is a complex of circular enclosures built around 9,500 BC. That places it roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge and 7,000 before the Great Pyramid. In a period when agriculture did not exist anywhere, [music] pottery had not been invented, and the

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people who built it were hunter gatherers. Each enclosure is ringed by T-shaped limestone pillars with two larger pillars standing at the center. The tallest reach 5 1/2 m and weigh up to 16 tons. They were quarried from bedrock a

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few hundred meters away where one unfinished pillar still lies in place and moved without draft animals, wheels or metal tools. The pillars are carved.

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Foxes boores snakes cranes scorpions, vultures, and spiders appear in relief across the surfaces. The central pillars in several enclosures carry arms bent at the elbow with hands meeting at the front along with belts and loin cloths which makes them

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stylized human or supernatural figures rather than plain supports. Schmidt excavated the site from 1995 until his death in 2014. Geophysical survey indicates around 20 enclosures in total of which a handful have been excavated.

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Estimates suggest less than 5% of the site has been dug. The enclosures were deliberately backfilled. At the end of their use, each was packed with rubble, animal bone, and debris, sealing the pillars where they stood, which is why

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they survived upright. The question of what it means for the standard sequence, has not settled. Domesticated eorn wheat has been traced genetically to Caracada, a mountain around 30 km away, dated to shortly after Gobecletepe was built. And Schmidt argued the gathering came first

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and farming followed from the need to feed the people who came.

Topics: ancient mysteries archaeology Bada Valley Nimrud lens Sajama lines undeciphered scripts megalithic lost civilizations pyramids ancient technology

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