Nan Madol is considered one of the strangest buildings of antiquity. Situated on the tiny Pacific island of Ponape, this city without windows and doors took 250 million tonnes of basalt to build, which is comparable in volume to the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Some basalt beams are larger in size and mass than any of the two million blocks in the Cheops pyramid. Nan Madol has long been abandoned, its walls, looking through dense mangrove thickets, bring superstitious horror to those people who now live nearby.
Pacific Venice
In the era of the great geographical discoveries, sailors from Spain, Portugal, Holland and England, returning from distant voyages, told many incredible stories about the wonders of the Pacific islands. People scientists, as a rule, considered such stories to be ordinary sailor tales. Not many people believed the story of the Spanish captain Alvaro Saavedra, who in 1529 told about the amazing island of Ponape, lying between the Hawaiian archipelago and the Philippines. Saavedra claimed: the island has ruins of temples, palaces, incomprehensible large structures, stone embankments. According to him, the abandoned city vaguely resembled Venice.
For almost three centuries, geographers considered Ponape a legend, while the island during its circumnavigation of 1826-1829. on the sloop Senyavin was not visited by the Russian navigator Fyodor Petrovich Litke. It was he who first drew up maps of the island, described its mysterious ruins and mapped the neighboring islets. Examining the ruins, Litke was convinced that the inhabitants had left the city long ago, and only on the opposite side of the island in primitive conditions lived a handful of natives. Unfortunately, all the information about Ponap collected by Litke was lost in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society and was never fully published.
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In 1857, the ruins of Nan Madol were superficially surveyed by the American Gyulik. and a little later - the Pole Kubari, who settled on the island and made the first relatively detailed plan of the mysterious ruins. In the end
In the 19th century, the English rogue and adventurer Christian reached Ponape, who subjected the ruins of Nan Madol to a real plunder, but he himself almost died at the hands of local residents who wanted to take revenge on him for the desecration of the revered ancient tombs.
Goddess Nanunsunsan
The first serious archaeological study of Nan Madol was undertaken a little later by the German scientist Paul Hambruch, who established that all the islets in the lagoon are of artificial origin. He mapped 92 of these artificial islets, the channels between which are literally teeming with electric eels. By 1914, Hambrukh and other researchers established that there were about 800 stone structures in Nan Madol, including fortress walls and port buildings. The main temple was built from megalithic blocks. Around all the buildings, unknown builders erected a five-meter high wall of cyclopean masonry.
From the words of the aborigines, Hambruh established that the island was once ruled by the prince Sau Deleur, who became the founder of a dynasty of fifteen kings-priests. Allegedly, they were responsible for the construction of these buildings. He also wrote down the legend of the islanders about the main goddess of Nan Madol - the turtle Nanun-sunsan. A palace with a pool was built for her, and the goddess herself was decorated with mother of pearl. On holidays, the priests took her on a boat along the canals and shouted divinations on her behalf. Then the goddess was fried and solemnly eaten. In 1958, the Americans found thousands of shells of such goddesses at the bottom of a swampy reservoir inside the temple.
Already at that time, archaeological discoveries on Ponapa gave rise to a lot of fantastic hypotheses. Some researchers claimed that the remains of the legendary Atlantis were found on the island; others saw in the stone buildings traces of the Inca colonialists who allegedly reached the island from Peru.
It has been hypothesized that Ponape was an outpost of the Egyptian pharaohs in the Pacific Ocean. Over time, other popularizers of science will go so far as to declare the structures of Nan Madol the work of the ubiquitous aliens.
Platinum sarcophagi
I must say that in 1946, Ponape became a US protectorate, after which it was declared a closed zone - nuclear weapons tests were planned on the neighboring islands. During World War II, the island was occupied by the Japanese. But only after 1958, when American archaeologists were allowed to start researching Nan Madol. thanks to the stories of the natives, it became known that during the occupation the Japanese were excavating in many parts of the island, finding something and taking it away.
The islanders talked about some metal objects, sculptures and sarcophagi. The Americans then sent an official request to Tokyo, but the Japanese authorities replied that they did not know anything about it. However, over time it became known that the Japanese managed to find in the ground among the walls a large number of sarcophagi made of pure platinum. According to some reports, the sarcophagi were hollow inside, according to others, the bodies of unusually tall people rested in them.
The Americans worked on a large scale on the island until 1986, making many archaeological discoveries during this time. On 58 islets within the lagoon, they found the tombs of priests and tribal leaders. While exploring the tower called Nan Duvas, scientists were in for a surprise: a large tunnel, carved in coral limestone, going under the waters of the lagoon.
It turned out that all the man-made islands in the lagoon were connected by a network of underground corridors and caves. At depths of 85 and about 100 feet near the island, stone columns and some kind of stone structures were found falling to the bottom. These constructions could once have been part of the embankment of the city surrounding Nan Madol, but … 12 thousand years ago.
Later, Australian explorer David Chile-dres and his team found on the underwater boulders off the coast of Ponape the same crosses and squares that were photographed by Japanese scuba divers off the coast of the famous Yonaguni Island.
And in the late eighties, a researcher interested in magnetic anomalies in the basalt beams of Nan Madol, attached a pocket compass to a coded one from massive walls. “The arrow was spinning and spinning without stopping,” Childres recalls.
Where typhoons are born
The first European colonists drew attention to the strange electromagnetic phenomena inherent in the ruins of Nan Madol. At night, electrical discharges, ball lightning and some glow were often seen running along the walls. The natives considered these walls to be something like the abode of evil spirits, and among them there was a strict taboo on visiting Nan Madol at night.
When in 1907 the German governor of the Marshall Islands by the name of Berg visited Ponape, he laughed at the native superstitions. Wanting to dispel stupid prejudices, he went to spend the night among the ruins. Berg was found dead the next morning. Doctors were unable to establish the cause of death, but most likely it was caused by the very same electrical anomalies.
Curiously, there is Kosra Island about 340 miles southeast of Ponape. on which there are very similar ruins of buildings of magnetized basalt, called Insaru. The same canal embankments, walls and cyclopean structures made of basalt beams. The only difference is that the European colonialists turned the ruins of Insaru into quarries at the beginning of the 20th century and thereby caused irreparable damage. That, nevertheless, did not prevent in our time the American researcher Frank Joseph from drawing attention to the fact that both Ponape and Kosrah are located in the very place of the Pacific Ocean, where powerful typhoons most often arise.
Since modern science associates the occurrence of typhoons not only with temperature changes, but also with the phenomena of the electromagnetic plane, Joseph suggested that in ancient times Nan Madol and Insaru influenced the high-altitude layers of the atmosphere, like the modern American HAARP installation or the Russian Sura. They made nascent typhoons rain down there and lose their strength, saving the metropolis - Atlantis - from their destructive effects. In that epoch immeasurably remote from us, they probably represented a more complex complex than now, from which time has left only stones. Much later, judging by the data of radiocarbon analysis, in the 13th century, people appeared on Ponapa again. But these were already savages who did not even know ceramics.
Andrey CHINAEV
Secrets of the XX century March 2012