Previous part: Mysterious peoples
The aliens, who found themselves at a considerable distance from their home planet and lacked technological equipment for mining, acted simply and ingeniously, creating slave miners. Without making significant investments in production and transferring people to self-sufficiency, they mercilessly exploited their slaves, who, with the help of primitive tools, “gave out on the mountain” the minerals necessary for the newcomers. Especially valuable for the aliens was not gold or silver, but tin, which the Sumerians called "heavenly metal." There was even a narrow specialization among the ancient tribes. For example, tin mining was carried out only by the Kessarite tribe, who previously lived in the territory of modern Iran.
The ancient mines of the Stone Age, in which our ancestors worked, extracting minerals for newcomers, are found in various regions of the planet - in the Urals, Pamirs, Tibet, in Western Siberia, North and South America, and Africa. In a later period, people used ancient mines for their own needs, extracting ore from them for the production of copper, tin, lead, iron.
A hieratic text in the New Egyptian language that has survived to our time (it is kept in the British Museum) says that the Egyptian pharaohs for a long time used the reserves of copper from the warehouses left by the ancient kings. This fact is confirmed by the "Testament of Ramses III" [5] (1198-1166 BC):
I sent my people on a mission to the Atek Desert [on the Sinai Peninsula] to the large copper mines that are in this place. And [behold] their boats are full of it [copper]. Another part of the copper was sent dry, loaded onto their donkeys. Have not heard [similar] before, since the days of the ancient kings. Found their mines full of copper, which is loaded [in quantity] tens of thousands [pieces] on their boats, leaving under their supervision to Egypt and arriving whole under the protection of [the god] with the raised hand [of the god Shin - the patron saint of the eastern desert], and which piled in a heap under the balcony [of the royal palace] in the form of numerous pieces of copper [in number] hundreds of thousands, and they are the color of three times iron. I gave all people to look at them as a curiosity.
The people living near Lake Victoria and the Zambezi River have a legend about the mysterious white people who were called "Bachwezi". They built stone towns and villages, laid canals for irrigation, cut pits from three to 70 meters deep in rocks, trenches several kilometers long. According to legend, the Bachwezi knew how to fly, treat all diseases and reported events that took place in the distant past. The aliens mined ore and smelted metals. They disappeared from the face of the Earth as unexpectedly as they appeared.
In 1970, the Anglo-America Corporation, a mining corporation, recruited archaeologists to find abandoned ancient mines to reduce the cost of finding new mineral deposits in South Africa. Large areas with mines up to 20 meters deep have been discovered in Swaziland and elsewhere, according to Adrian Boschier and Peter Bumont. The bones and charcoal found in the mines are 25 to 50 thousand years old. Archaeologists have come to the conclusion that mining technology was used in ancient South Africa. The artifacts found in the mines testify to a sufficiently high level of applied technologies, which were hardly available to people of the Stone Age. The miners even kept track of the work done.
The earliest evidence of iron production in Africa is found in the vicinity of Taruga and Samun Dikia, settlements belonging to the Nok culture located on the Jos plateau in Nigeria. Experts date the furnace for the production of iron discovered here 500-450 BC. e. It had a cylindrical shape and was made of clay. The slag pits were dug into the ground and the bellows tube was at ground level.
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In 1953, miners at the Lion mine in the Wattis area, Utah, USA, while mining coal at a depth of 2800 meters, stumbled upon a network of ancient tunnels. Underground coal mines, made by unknown miners, had no communication with the surface and were so old that the entrances to the mine were destroyed by erosion.
University of Utah professor E. Wilson put it this way:
There is no doubt that these passages are human made. Despite the fact that no traces of them were found outside, the tunnels appear to have been led from the surface to the point where the current excavations intersected … There is no apparent basis for dating the tunnels.
Professor of anthropology at the University of Utah Jesse D. Jennings denies that these tunnels could have been made by North American Indians, and does not know who the ancient miners were:
First, to perform such work, a direct need for a given area for coal is necessary. Before the arrival of the white man, all cargo was transported by human porters. In terms of terrain, there is no evidence that Aboriginal people burned coal in the Wattis area.
Several mines have been discovered in North America, in which an unknown civilization was extracting minerals. For example, on the island of Royal (Lake Superior), thousands of tons of copper ore were mined from an ancient mine, which was then mysteriously removed from the island.
Several furnaces for smelting metal from iron ore have been discovered in southern Ohio. Farmers in this state sometimes find metal products in their fields.
Images of "miners" with mysterious tools like jackhammers and other tools designed for mining can be found in various regions of the world. For example, in the ancient capital of the Toltecs, the city of Tula, there are reliefs and bas-reliefs depicting gods clutching objects in their hands that resemble plasma cutters more than tools of the Stone or Bronze Age.
On one of the stone columns of the city of Tula there is a bas-relief: the Toltec deity holds a "miner's" tool in his right hand; his helmet is similar to the headdresses of the ancient Assyrian kings.
On the territory of the Toltec state in Mexico, many ancient mines were discovered, in which gold, silver and other non-ferrous metals were previously mined. Alexander Del Maar, in The History of Precious Metals, writes:
With regard to prehistoric mining, it is necessary to put forward the premise that the Aztecs did not know iron, and therefore the question of mining by the mine method … is practically not worth it. But modern prospectors have uncovered ancient mines in Mexico and evidence of mining developments that they considered to be prehistoric mining sites.
In China, copper mining has been carried out since ancient times. To date, Chinese archaeologists have explored 252 vertical shafts, sinking to a depth of 50 meters, with numerous horizontal adits and manholes. At the bottom of adits and mines, iron and bronze tools were found, once lost by miners. Copper deposits were mined from the bottom up: as soon as the ore in the adit dried up, a new one was set up, located higher in the vertical shaft of the mine. Since the ore was delivered to the surface in baskets, waste rock from new adits, so as not to lift it, was simply dumped down into abandoned mine workings. The adits were lit with forked sticks of burning bamboo stuck into the walls.
Numerous ancient mines exist in Russia and in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Ancient mines were found in the foothills of the Northern Altai, Minusinsk Basin, in the Orenburg region, Lake Baikal, near the Amur River, in the Southern Urals, in the Ishim River basin, in a number of regions of Central Asia, as well as in the Caucasus and Ukraine. L. P. Levitsky published in 1941 a brochure "On ancient mines", which contains a map showing the places of several hundred mining operations of the earth's interior, in which mainly copper, tin, silver and gold were mined. In the ancient faces of many mines, stone hammers made of hard rock were found, made in the form of a polyhedron or a flat cylinder. Bronze picks, wedges and chisels were used to break off the ore. In some mines, skeletons of dead people were found.
In 1961, not far from Arkhyz (Western Caucasus), on Pastukhovaya Mountain, geologists discovered old mines. V. A. Kuznetsov, who studied mine workings, noted:
… Ancient miners and miners acted with great knowledge of the matter: they walked along the vein and selected all the lenses and accumulations of copper ore, not stopping at insignificant inclusions. Awareness at that time is amazing, because there was no special scientific knowledge in geology and mining. Already in hoary antiquity, people were able to skillfully conduct a kind of geological exploration and for this purpose they explored the inaccessible mountain ranges.
Chudskie mines (from the word "chud") is a collective name for the most ancient ore workings, traces of which were found in the Urals, Western Siberia, and Krasnoyarsk Territory. The book by E. I. Eikhvald "On the Chudskie Mines" contains detailed information about them:
The mines began to operate in about the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC. e.; the largest production falls on the XIII-XII centuries BC. e.; mining ceased in the 5th – 6th centuries AD. e. in Western Siberia and in the XI-XII centuries AD. e. in the Middle and Northern Urals. When driving the Chud mines, ancient miners used stone hammers, wedges, pestles, crushers; horn and bone picks; copper and bronze, and then iron picks, picks, hammers; wooden troughs, ladders; wicker baskets, leather bags and mittens; clay lamps, etc. Development of mineral deposits usually began with pits; Having deepened along the fall of the deposit by 6–8 meters, usually funnel-shaped, slightly inclined and tapering shafts, sometimes with a small section of adit, and along the veins - orts, passed. The depth of the workings was on average 10-14 meters;some reached significant sizes (for example, a copper quarry near the city of Orsk 130 meters long and 15–20 meters wide), since ore mining in them was carried out for hundreds of years.
In 1735, south of Yekaterinburg, in the area of the Gumeshevsky mine, significant quantities of ore with a high copper content already mined by ancient miners ("the great nest of the best copper ore") were discovered on the surface of the earth, as well as traces of ancient collapsed mines with a depth of about 20 meters and crumbling quarries. Perhaps something forced the miners to hastily leave their place of work. Abandoned copper picks, hammers, and the remains of wooden shovels were found in the workings of the Gumeshevsky mine.
The ancient mines in Transbaikalia and the remains of smelting furnaces in the Nerchinsk area were already known under Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich. In the letter of the head of the Nerchinsky prison, Samoila Lisovsky, it is written:
Near the same places from the Nerchinsk prison in thirteen bottoms there were towns and yurts, many inhabited, and mill stones, and earth talus, not in one place; and he de Pavel [the Russian envoy] asked many old people, foreigners and Tungus and Mungal people: what kind of people lived in that place before this and started cities and all kinds of factories; and they said: what kind of people lived, they do not know and have not heard from anyone.
The number of small mines and pits in Russia is in the thousands. There are many ancient quarries and workings where copper was mined using a progressive overburden method: soil was removed above the ore deposits, and the deposit was developed without additional costs. In the east of the Orenburg region, two such mines are known: Ush-Kattyn (four ancient quarries with dumps of copper ore, the largest of which is 120 meters long, 10–20 meters wide and 1–3 meters deep) and Yelenovsky (30 x 40 meters and a depth of 5–6 meters). The conducted mineralogical and geochemical studies made it possible to establish that copper-tourmaline ores, similar to those of the Yelenovo ones, were one of the sources of raw materials for metallurgical production in the ancient city of Arkaim.
In 1994, an open mine Vorovskaya Yama was discovered in the Chelyabinsk Region, which is located in the Zingeyka-Kuisak interfluve, 5 kilometers from the Zingeysky village. The ancient mine has a rounded shape, 30–40 meters in diameter, 3–5 meters deep and is surrounded by waste rock dumps. According to experts, about 6 thousand tons of ore with a copper content of 2-3% was mined at the mine, from which about 10 tons of metal could be obtained.
Traces of ancient mine workings are found in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In the region of Lake Issyk-Kul at the deposits of gold, polymetallic and tin ores in 1935, traces of ancient mining operations were found.
In 1940, a geological expedition led by E. Ermakov discovered in the hard-to-reach spurs of the Pamirs a horizontal drift with branching length of about 150 meters. Local residents informed geologists about his location. In the ancient mine, the scheelite mineral was mined - tungsten ore. By the length of the stalagmites and stalactites that formed in the drift, geologists have established the approximate time of mining - 12-15 thousand years BC. e. It is not known who needed this refractory metal with a melting point of 3380 ° C in the Stone Age.
A very long ancient cave mine Kanigut is located in Central Asia, it is also called the "Mine of extinction". Silver and lead were mined there. When inspecting these workings in 1850, a large number of passages and decayed wooden supports were discovered, which served to strengthen the arches of the artificial cave. The length of the huge mine, which has two exits to the surface, 200 meters apart, is about 1.6 kilometers. The path through this labyrinth from one entrance to another takes at least 3 hours. According to local legends, under Khudoyar Khan, criminals sentenced to death were sent there, and if they returned without silver, they were killed.
The total volume of rock delivered "to the mountain" and processed in ancient mines is impressive. For example, in Central Asia, in the area of the Kandzhol deposit ("the path of ancient miners"), which is located 2 kilometers north of the Utkemsu River, there are traces of ancient workings stretching in a strip for 6 kilometers. Previously, silver and lead were mined in the mines. The total volume of mine dumps is up to 2 million cubic meters, the volume of visible mine workings is about 70 thousand cubic meters. At the Jerkamar deposit, more than a hundred ancient mines have been discovered with large dumps around them. The total number of ancient workings in Almalyk is about 600. The volume of excavated rock is more than 20 thousand cubic meters.
The Dzhezkazgan copper deposits in Kazakhstan, re-discovered in 1771, were developed in prehistoric times, as evidenced by huge waste rock dumps and traces of mining operations. In the Bronze Age, about a million tons of copper ore were mined here. 200 thousand tons of ore was extracted from the Uspensky mine. About 100 thousand tons of copper were smelted in the Dzhezkazgan area. Currently, over 80 deposits of copper, tin and gold-bearing ores have been discovered in Kazakhstan, which were used for the extraction of metals in ancient times.
In 1816, an expedition led by mining engineer IP Shangin discovered vast ancient waste rock dumps in the Ishim River area. The report says:
… this mine was a rich source of industry for those who worked on its development …
Shangin roughly estimated the waste rock near Mount Iman: the weight of the ancient dumps is about 3 million poods. If we assume that only 10% of copper was smelted from the mined ore, then the metal obtained weighed about 50 thousand tons. There are estimates of copper mining, based on the analysis of mine dumps, according to which the volume of copper mined in antiquity is about half the capacity of the entire deposit. Thus, in the distant past, about 250 thousand tons of copper were smelted.
In 1989, an archaeological expedition of the Academy of Sciences of Russia led by Professor E. N. Chernykh studied numerous ancient settlements of miners in the Kargalinskaya steppe (Orenburg region), dating back to the 4th – 2nd millennia BC. e. The total surface area with traces of old mine workings is about 500 square kilometers. During the excavations, miners' dwellings, numerous casting molds, remains of ore and slag, stone and copper tools and other items were discovered, indicating that the Kargalinskaya steppe was one of the largest mining and metallurgical centers of antiquity. According to archaeologists' estimates, from 2 to 5 million tons of ore were extracted from the ancient Kargaly mines. According to the calculations of the geologist V. Mikhailov, only in the Orenburg mines of the Bronze Age so much copper ore was mined that it would be enough to smelt 50 thousand tons of metal. For unknown reasons, in the II millennium BC. e. copper mining ceased, although mineral reserves were not depleted.
Cossack officer FK Nabokov in 1816 was sent to the Kazakh steppe to identify ancient abandoned mines and mineral deposits. In his report ("Major Nabokov's Daily Journal"), he gives a lot of information about the old mines:
The Anninsky mine … was processed by the ancient peoples along all the stretches. The embankments produced by these developments are now covered with dense forest and occupy about 1000 square fathoms … These pits contained in one pood from 1 to 10 pounds of copper, except for silver. According to approximate calculations, this mine should contain ores of about 8,000 cubic fathoms, or up to 3,000,000 poods … Baron Meyendorff found different signs of copper ore on Ilek and on Berdyanka. This last mine seems to have been described by Pallas. He calls it Saigach and writes that a well-preserved, extensive and in many places developed ancient adit was found in it, during the cleaning of which cakes of fused copper, melting pots of white clay and bones of workers covered with earth were found. They immediately found many pieces of petrified wood,but did not notice anywhere the sign of smelting furnaces.
Judging by the total volume of copper ore or tin mined in ancient mines, humanity of the Bronze Age should have literally filled itself up with copper or bronze products. In the distant past, copper was produced in such quantities that it would be enough for the needs of many generations of people. Nevertheless, in the burials of noble people, archaeologists find only individual objects made of copper, which at that time was highly valued. Where the "surplus" of metal disappeared is unknown. It is curious that in the area of many ancient mines no traces of smelting furnaces have been found. Apparently, the processing of ore into metal was carried out in another place and in a centralized manner. There is nothing incredible in the fact that aliens, using the free labor of slave miners, extracted minerals from the bowels of the Earth in this way and took them out to their planet.
"Extraterrestrial footprint in the history of mankind", Vitaly Simonov
Next part: Giants of jealousy. Part one