Ancient Sites and Artefacts

[Mystic Wanderer]

Ollantaytambo: Ancient Megalithic Engineers

Located in southern Peru, around 45 miles northwest of the city of Cuzco lie the remains of the ancient city of Ollantaytambo. Located at an altitude of 2,792 meters (9,160 feet) above sea level, Ollantaytambo lies in an area the Inca people once called the Sacred Valley and this marvel of architecture once served as both a temple and a fortress, Mainstream historians claim Ollantaytambo was built around 1440 AD by the Inca Emperor Pachacuti. Archeologists today, believe Ollantaytambo was built upon the ruins of a far older city and they are not sure of the origins of that city. Ollantaytambo is a marvel of engineering and architecture, it is a fortress, and complex city and many questions have been raised throughout history regarding the construction of this ancient site. Today one of the most asked questions probably is in regard to the incredible sized blocks of stone that were used in the construction.

Some of these over-sized rocks are found at the highest levels of Ollantaytambo, particularly six of these monoliths that are placed in a line, according to researchers they were brought to Ollantaytambo from another mountain, across the plain, river and then they were brought up the mountain.

The Nazca Lines: Blueprints of the gods?

What is the exact purpose of the Nazca Lines? Were these intricate shapes some sort of ancient blueprints? Markers? Were they ancient runways as some suggest? Or were they ancient art, left behind by a long lost civilization that once inhabited the region? The truth is we don’t know. The largest figure found at Nazca is approx. 1000 feet and the longest one goes for 9 miles. Why Nazca? How were they built? To what purpose?

According to archeologists, these mysterious drawings were created by the Nazca people, they flourished in the region between the 1st and 8th century A.D.

The lines were formed by the careful removal of the reddish iron-oxide pebbles that make up the desert surface. Once exposed, the underlying dirt, which contains high amounts of lime, hardened and resistant to erosion. Some of the parts of Nazca have amazing designs highly accurate triangles that are a mystery. Some of the triangles look like they were made by something that literally pressed the ground down at least 30 inches with incredible force, now could the ancient Nazca have done this? With their feet? How would you press down a six-mile “perfect” triangle into the desert?

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Sacsayhuaman: An Ancient Alien Fortress?

This ancient site is compared in magnitude to other ancient sites like Puma Punku or Tiahuanaco. The ancient fortress of Sacsayhuaman is believed to hold secrets which predate the Inca themselves, it is an ancient site filled with mystery and magic, and offers more questions than we are able to answer.

Interestingly, this ancient megalithic complex dates back, at least, a millennium, making it one of the oldest ancient establishments on the planet, yet few of us know of its existence. The builders of this ancient site left behind precisely cut blocks of stone that have challenged our modern-day builders in many ways. Just like we see at Puma Punku, we find that the ancient builders of Sacsayhuaman had the technology to quarry giant blocks of stone, move them to the site where they wanted to build and then stack, cut and articulate these massive blocks into– what are in some cases almost indestructible structures, so this is really impressive.

The Piri Reis Map: An Ancient Map Created By Even Older Maps

While there are numerous things discovered from ancient mankind’s past, there some discoveries that literally question everything we know about our history. This is the case of the Ancient Piri Reis map found in 1929 during the restoration of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul Turkey. This controversial (ancient) map describes in high detail the geography of the American Continent with such a precision that it looks as if it was put together with the aid of aerial photography. However, the map was made at a time when mainstream history tells us there were no flying vehicles on Earth and mankind’s technology was very limited. The map composed by Ottoman admiral Piri Ibn Haji Muhiddin Memmed, aka Piri Reis, is, in fact, part of maritime navigation collection called Bahriye which is basically composed of 210 partial maps, dated around 1513 and 1528. The perfection and details displayed on the map have been the subject of debate for years among scholars who cannot understand nor explain how this map even exists. Today, numerous enigmas remain about the Piri Reis map, especially with regards to Latin America and the Southern regions of our planet.

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Gunung Padang: Older than the ‘oldest’ Pyramid on Earth?

Gunung Padang is surely one of the most controversial discoveries ever made on the surface of the planet. According to reports, we are looking at a lost civilization, an unknown history and breathtaking construction that challenges everything we know about history, rising in Indonesia around 20,000 years ago. According to stamens from Geologist Dr., Danny Hilman could hide the remains of a lost temple that could date back 20,000 years. Hilman believes that the site (Gunung Padang) is of great cultural and historical importance since it contains the remains of a huge Pyramid that was built some 20,000 years ago, by a lost civilization, adding that it may have been built for worship or as a giant astronomical instrument. Like many other discoveries in the past, Gunung Padang has been dubbed by many mainstream scholars as a hoax and nothing more. While studies seem to point otherwise, it seems that the mysterious Pyramid of Indonesia and the 20,000 years old civilization behind it will remain for some time, one of history’s greatest enigmas.

Megaliths of Baalbek: A Colossal… Mystery

Located east of Lebanon, 86 kilometers northeast of the city of Beirut, in the valley of Beqaa, near the border with Syria lie the ruins of a gigantic megalithic platform that remains as one of the greatest enigmas for researchers who have come to study it. Legends say it is a very sacred place. The temple was built on top of a ruined mound, so even before Greek and Roman times, this majestic place was considered to be holy.

Mainstream archeology has different points of view when it comes to the exact age of the site. According to conventional archeologists, it was a Phoenician sanctuary dedicated to the god Baal, it was a Greek City called Heliopolis (City of the Sun) and since the time of Emperor Augustus, it was a Roman colony. The truth is, the exact age remains a mystery, but some researchers consider this ancient megalithic site as being at least 12.000 years old but could possibly be over 20,000 years old. Among the most intriguing of these megaliths is the Trilithon, and here is the cool part: three colossal blocks measuring 22 meters in length, 4.5 m high and 3.5 m wide. Their weight ranges between one and two thousand tons. These three huge megaliths are positioned on a row of six blocks of granite that measure each, 10 meters in length and 4 height and weighing over 300 tons. Some researchers argue that these megaliths are not “foundation stones” as they have always been declared as it appears as if it was essential that the largest of the stones were position on top, and not at the bottom making the whole edifice become an inverted structure.

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The Antikythera Mechanism: An Ancient Computer

It is considered as one of the most incredible ancient devices ever discovered on our planet. The Antikythera mechanism, is according to researchers around the world, a product of ancient Greek ingenuity, and there is no other instrument like it, nothing found until today compares to the Antikythera mechanism and better yet, there are no recorded texts that would suggest that something like it ever existed. The device was discovered by chance, as a storm deviated a group of divers in the 1900’s.

They reached the island of Antikythera between Peloponnese and Crete and while diving, they discovered the remains of a Roman ship that sunk around 65 B.C. Inside the wreckage, this mysterious device was discovered. The Antikythera mechanism is basically made out of wood and bronze. Its dimensions are 31.5 centimeters in length, 19 centimeters wide and has a thickness of 10 centimeters. Researchers believe that the system of gears was protected by a wooden box, which is now almost totally destroyed. The device had two doors, one at the front and one at the back with astronomical inscriptions covering most of the exterior of the mysterious mechanism.

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The Ancient Babylonian Tablet

Prior to studying the history of science and cuneiform in 2005, Ossendrijver was an astrophysicist who in 2012, published a book of new translations for the known Babylonian tables featuring astronomical calculations and tables.

“Although it is known that the geometry was used from around 800 BC, we did not know that it was used to calculate the position of the planets, “says Ossendrijver.

The researcher has spent the last 14 years examining the Babylonian cuneiform tablets kept in the British Museum. No one had ever found a Babylonian astronomical calculation that leveraged their impressive knowledge of pure geometry until Ossendrijver did it, who described it as “small bunch of four weird trapezoid computations” between 2,000 and 2,400 years old, writes National Geographic.

Ossendrijver concluded that the trapezoidal calculations were a tool to determine the movement that traces Jupiter on a daily basis. The calculations present in the tablet record a period of 60 days, which began on the first night when the Gas Giant was observable in the sky after nightfall and shows that ancient Babylonian astronomers knew how to calculate the area under a curve in order to determine a numerical value. This indicates, says Ossendrijver in the journal Science, the ancient Babylonian astronomers had developed abstract mathematical concepts that relate to the movement, position and time, fundamental aspects that are used by any modern-day mathematician or physicist.

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Antiochus I Soter

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Antiochus I Soter, (born 324 bc—died 262/261), king of the Seleucid kingdom of Syria, who ruled about 292–281 bc in the east and 281–261 over the whole kingdom. Under great external pressures, he consolidated his kingdom and encouraged the founding of cities.

Antiochus was the son of Seleucus I, founder of the Seleucid kingdom, and his Sogdian queen, Apama. When an invasion of nomads threatened the eastern possessions of his father’s realm (between the Caspian and Aral seas and the Indian Ocean), Antiochus was appointed king (292). He restored some of the damage caused by the invaders and rebuilt three cities. Because his father still had interest in expanding the eastern trade, Antiochus dispatched a noted geographer and general to explore the environs of the Caspian Sea.

After his father’s assassination in 281, Antiochus succeeded to the entire realm, but he was immediately beset by revolts in Syria (probably instigated by Egypt), by independence movements in northern Anatolia, and by a war led by Antigonus II Gonatas, ruler of the Greek cities and Macedonia. In 279, after the Gauls invaded Greece and almost ruined Antigonus, he and Antiochus signed a pact promising not to interfere with one another’s territory. The next year, however, 20,000 Gauls crossed into Asia Minor, and the independent states in the northern part recruited them to harass Antiochus. He was preoccupied with the pacification of Syria until 275, when, utilizing Indian elephants brought from the east, he defeated the Gauls, who were afterward settled by their allies in Phrygia to make it a buffer state. The Ionian city-states that Antiochus had spared from the Gauls’ ravages hailed him as a god and named him Soter (“Saviour”). In 275 the alliance with Antigonus, now fully in possession of Macedonia, was cemented by marriage to Antiochus’ half sister.

Following the Gallic incursions in Greece, Antiochus encouraged Greek immigration to his realm and established many new cities in Asia Minor to serve as counterweights to the Gauls. He built other cities in Iran to forestall the Parthian threat to his eastern frontier, and he probably fostered a revival of Babylonian culture and religion to counteract Persian influence. At Babylon he rebuilt the ancient Esagila shrine, although he moved the city’s populace to a great Seleucid city a short distance away on the Tigris River.

The aggressions of Ptolemy II of Egypt caused continuous friction with Antiochus. In 279 he lost Miletus, in southwestern Asia Minor, and in 276 the Egyptians invaded northern Syria. But Antiochus defeated his opponent, repelled him, and secured an alliance with the Egyptian ruler’s half brother who ruled Cyrene. After Ptolemy married the energetic Arsinoe II, however, the war turned against the Seleucids, and about 273–272, Phoenicia and the coast of Asia Minor were lost to Egypt.

The continuous troubles in the west caused Seleucid control in the far eastern part of the empire to weaken. In 280 Antiochus made his eldest son king in the east, but he proved incompetent. Between 266 and 261 Antiochus was drawn into a war with Pergamum, and in 262 he suffered a defeat and lost additional territory. Soon afterward he died, leaving his son Antiochus II as successor.

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That sure is a beautiful view!

It is written that some of the ancient gods were represented with wings in the ancient drawings/statues. I'm wondering if the design on top of his headdress could represent feathers, showing a connection to those winged "gods"? Or are those indicating pyramids... also a symbol of great importance?