The National Repository of American Indian Heritage in Maryland contains one of the most anomalous artifacts - a 1,400-year-old telephone. This amazing legacy of a disappeared civilization has gone down in history along with it. Scientists assure that the ancient device retains its amazing functionality, although it has now become too fragile to conduct further experiments with it.
It is stored in a special container in a microclimate. The repository curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist specializing in the study of the civilizations of the Central Andes, told Smithsonian magazine that only one such device was discovered, incomprehensibly emerging in a society that did not even have a written language.
Matos calls it a marvel of acoustic engineering. It consists of two resin-coated telephone tubes, each about eight centimeters long, with membranes in them. The tubes are connected by a twisted cotton thread. This invention belongs to the civilization of the Chimu Empire, which flourished in northern Peru. These people created a hydraulic system of irrigation canals and turned the desert into irrigated fertile land, they made great achievements in the processing of metals. However, this phone still looks like a very mysterious invention, as if a time traveler in the past tried to assemble it from scrap materials. The telephone fell into the hands of the Prussian aristocrat and traveler Baron Walm von Scholer during his excavations in Peru in the 30s of the last century. He carefully transported his numerous finds to New York and donated them to various American museums and depositories.
It is known that in the Chimu empire, settlements were built, separated by numerous walls, consisting of citadels. The rulers could not, due to their status, communicate face to face with those who occupied a lower social position, in part for security reasons. Therefore, they needed some means of remote communication, apparently, this served as an incentive for the creation of a prehistoric telephone.