Much of what we consider to be the product of European science was known to mankind in ancient times, but later, for one reason or another, was forgotten. Moreover, since the science of other human cultures has developed in a completely different way than ours, knowledge that is not yet known to us may be hidden in the preserved monuments.
Today we know that the pharaohs (authored pharaohs?) Invested in the pyramids the achievements of science, the origin and methods of which we do not know. We find there the number "pi", an accurate calculation of the length of the solar year, the radius and weight of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, the astronomical law of the precession of the equinoxes, the value of the degree of longitude, the actual direction to the north and, probably, many other, not yet deciphered data.
The dispute is about tenths, and nevertheless, the construction of the pyramids testifies to a technique that remains completely incomprehensible to us. It is an artificial mountain weighing 6.5 million tons. Blocks weighing up to 12 tons each are fitted to each other with a half-millimeter precision. Most often, the most flat thought is expressed: the pharaoh had a colossal number of slaves. It remains to be explained how the problem of accommodating these huge crowds was solved? And what are the reasons for such a crazy enterprise? How were blocks removed from the quarries? Classical Egyptology allows only the use of wet wooden wedges driven into cracks in the rock as a technique. The builders had only stone hammers and saws made of soft copper. And what further thickens the mystery: how were they hewn,stones weighing 12 tons were lifted and fitted? In the 19th century, we had the greatest work to transport two obelisks, which the pharaohs forced to transport by the dozen. And how did the Egyptians illuminate the rooms inside the pyramids? Until 1890 we knew only lamps that smoked and covered the vaults with soot. However, there was not the slightest trace of soot on the arches of the passages in the pyramids. Well, did they catch sunlight and direct it inward using an optical system? No lenses were found.did they catch sunlight and direct it inward with an optical system? No lenses were found.did they catch sunlight and direct it inward with an optical system? No lenses were found.
No tools for scientific calculations were found, nothing that would indicate a complex technology. Or is it still worth admitting that amazing architects and decorators, just to satisfy the megalomania of their pharaoh, removed, transported, decorated, lifted and brought together with an accuracy of half a millimeter 2.6 million blocks of the Great Pyramid, in size and configuration, accidentally came into their heads. And all this by the forces of slaves, who created it all with pieces of wood and saws for cutting cardboard and dragged everything on themselves? We know almost nothing about what happened five thousand years ago. We also do not take into account that the searches were carried out by people for whom modern civilization is the only possible technical civilization. It is possible, nevertheless, that a thought completely different from ours could create a technique,no less perfect. Measuring tools and material handling methods that have nothing to do with what we know, leaving almost no trace.
Usually, modern scientists are inclined to attribute the grandiose scale of ancient Egyptian construction to the religious obsession of the builders or the tyranny of the pharaohs, who, they say, could afford to ruin the whole country in order to leave a memory of themselves for centuries. Explaining the unknown by religion is a common method. It is much easier to assume all kinds of crazy ideas than to admit the possibility of another level of knowledge and technology. Meanwhile, when recently in Japan they wanted to build a copy of the Cheops pyramid, it turned out that modern Japanese construction equipment does not allow to grind stones with such precision as the ancient Egyptians did.
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It is possible that many other objects considered cult in our time are in fact examples of the technology of ancient civilizations. For example, a completely random visit to the Baghdad Museum by the German engineer Wilhelm Koenig was necessary to discover that the flat stones found in Iraq and labeled as "objects of worship" were in fact electrical batteries that operated two thousand years before Galvani.
Modern researchers point to the amazing antiquity of civilizations on the American continent. Cortez was amazed to discover that the Aztecs had the same level of civilization as the Spaniards. But today we know that they lived on the remains of a higher culture - the culture of the Toltecs. The Toltecs built gigantic monuments to America. The solar pyramids of Teotihuacan and Sholul are twice the size of the Cheops pyramid. But the Toltecs themselves were descendants of a more perfect Mayan civilization, traces of which were found in the jungles of Honduras, Guatemala, Yucatan. Buried in the chaos of the jungle, civilization is much older than the Greek and just as significantly superior to it. When did she die and how? In any case, they died twice, for the missionaries here too hastened to destroy the manuscripts, smash the statues, and destroy the altars.
In many areas, Mayan science was superior to that of the Greeks and Romans. Deep knowledge of mathematics and astronomy allowed them to perfect the chronology and science of the calendar. They built observatories with domes oriented better than the 17th century Paris observatory. The exact duration of the solar year was established by them at 365.2420 days, and after long calculations we came to an almost exact number of 365.2422 days. The Egyptians may have reached the same degree of approximation, but in order to admit this, one must believe in the contested correspondences of the pyramids, while the Mayan calendars are in our hands.
The high plateaus of Bolivia and Peru resemble another planet. The air pressure is half that at sea level, and yet people live there. Their settlements rise to an altitude of 3500 m. They have two liters more blood than we have, instead of five million blood balls - eight, their heart beats slower. The radiocarbon method shows that humans lived here 9000 years ago. The latest data allow us to push this date back by at least 21,000 years. It is entirely possible that people who knew how to process metals, possessed observatories and possessed science could build giant cities 30,000 years ago.
During the frequent earthquakes in the Andes, the structures of ancient cities were never damaged, while many buildings erected at a later time using modern construction technology were destroyed. It turned out that each block of these ancient structures mates with neighboring ones like pieces of a puzzle picture, forming an inseparable connection. How it was built remains a mystery.
Peruvian explorer and philosopher Daniel Rousseau set out in 1952 to study the Marcahuasi desert plateau at an altitude of 3800 m in the Andes. This is a lifeless plateau that can only be reached on horseback. Rousseau discovered there animals and human faces, carved into the rock and visible only during the summer solstice in the play of chiaroscuro. He found there statues of animals from the Secondary Period, such as the Stegosaurus; as well as lions, turtles and camels, completely unknown in South America. One hewn hill depicts the head of an old man. It is impossible to determine the age of the image using the C-14 method: no organic residues. Geological features are lost in the darkness of centuries.
Some of the irrigation work carried out by the Prainka, we could now carry out only with great difficulty, and even then using powerful electric turbodrills. And why did people who did not know wheels build huge paved roads? American archaeologist Hayat Burrill has devoted thirty years to the study of the disappeared civilizations of Central and South America. In his opinion, the construction work was carried out not by ancient tools for cutting stones, but by a radioactive composition that corroded granite - a kind of engraving on the scale of large pyramids.
Easter Island, 3000 km off the coast of Chile, is the same size as Jersey. When the first European, a Dutch navigator, landed in 1722, he thought the island was inhabited by giants. On this piece of volcanic Polynesian land, 593 huge statues rise. Some of them exceed a height of 20 m and weigh 50 tons. When were they erected? How? As a result of studying these mysterious monuments, it is believed that three levels of civilization can be distinguished there, of which the most perfect was the most ancient. As in Egypt, huge blocks of tuff, basalt, lava are fitted together with amazing art. But the relief of the island is rugged, and a few small trees cannot serve as material for skating rinks. How were the stones transported? And can we talk about a colossal number of unskilled workers here? In the 19th century, the population of Fr. Easter numbered 200 people - three times less than the statues. On this island of barren soil, where there have never been beasts of burden, it is unlikely that more than three or four thousand people could ever live. And what then?..
Just like in Africa and South America, the first missionaries who landed on Easter Island made sure that all traces of a dead civilization disappeared. At the foot of the statues lay ancient wooden tablets covered with hieroglyphs - they were burned, and a small part was sent to the Vatican library, where many secrets are already kept. Did they seek to destroy the remnants of ancient superstitions or to erase evidence of other knowledge?
In 1950, the Library of Congress of the United States received copies of maps of the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis from the 16th century as a gift from Turkey. According to surviving Turkish documents from those times, these maps were redrawn from old maps, presumably of ancient Egyptian origin. They unmistakably show not only all the continents and oceans known by that time, but also the still unexplored interior regions of America and the still undiscovered Australia and Antarctica. In 1952, Arlington G. Mallory, an eminent cartographer, examined these documents. He stated that the relief of North America, the drawing of the mountains and lakes of Canada, the contours of the shores at the northern tip of the continent and the relief of Antarctica (covered with ice and with great difficulty mapped in our time using sophisticated measuring instruments) are completely accurate.
The oldest epic texts in India, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, describe airships that flew in the sky at the beginning of time. They looked like "azure clouds in the shape of an egg or a special luminous ball." They could make many revolutions around the Earth. They were set in motion by "an etheric force hitting the ground during takeoff" or "by means of vibration emanating from an unknown force." They made "gentle and melodic sounds", emitted "sparkle like fire", their trajectory was not straight, but seemed like a "long wavy line, approaching or moving them away from the Earth." The material from which these shells were made is determined in these works (about three thousand years old and, undoubtedly, written from much more distant memories), as consisting of several metals, some of which were white and light, others red.
How should these descriptions be interpreted? The easiest way to write off messages about aircraft is imagination, imagination. But wouldn't even a skeptic be alerted by the following detail: Indian gods and heroes are fighting in the heavens not on dragons or birds, but on piloted aircraft with terrible weapons on board? Almost all peoples of the world have legends about "winged horses" and other "air transport", but Indian sources contain technical characteristics, information on the principle of operation of engines and materials necessary for the construction of "air chariots" - vimanas.
Three substances: two solid and one liquid - obtained in the laboratory in accordance with the formulas outlined in the book, were recently demonstrated by the scientist Narin Sheth at the national symposium "Science and Technology in Ancient India" held in Hyderabad. And this is strong evidence that the ancient Indian documents are not fiction.
The weapons of the ancient Hindus also boggle the imagination of even the people of our era of nuclear energy. There is a strange description in Mausola Parva, incomprehensible both to the ethnographers of the 19th century and to us. It looks like this: “This unknown weapon, iron lightning, a giant messenger of death, has reduced the entire tribe of Vrishnis and Andhakas to ashes. The charred corpses were even impossible to identify. Hair and nails fell out, pots broke for no apparent reason, birds turned white. After a few hours, all the food became poisonous. Lightning turned into fine powder."
In the "Mahabharata" a certain "shell" is mentioned, the explosion of which is "as bright as 10,000 suns at their zenith." Its use is truly terrible in its consequences and leads to the death of all living things. Professor Oppenheimer, struck by the picture of nuclear testing, recalled this passage about "thousands of suns." Of course, after acquaintance with the "Mahabharata", an analogy arises between the episode described in it and the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but this is unlikely to be unambiguously correct: we are children of our time and think in terms of this time. The superweapon in the Indian epic has several names, and all of its varieties have a truly unimaginable destructive power - they can “burn this whole transitory world”.
In the forties in Madras a small edition of the book "The War in Ancient India" was published. This fundamental work belongs to Professor V. R. Dikshitar. What kind of weapons and military equipment are not here! Equipment for secret tracking of the enemy and shelter from his means of detection, a huge variety of varieties of "fire weapons", "death discs", perfect vehicles.
It seems that it was her super-powerful weapon that destroyed the ancient Indian civilization. Exploring the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists D. Davenport and E. Vincenti came to the conclusion that the city was destroyed by one powerful explosion. The area of the epicenter is clearly delineated, where all buildings were leveled to the ground. From the center to the outskirts, the destruction gradually decreases. Among the ruins, melted stones and pieces of clay were found, which were once heated to a temperature of about 1500 ° C, and then quickly cooled down. The overall picture is very similar to the aftermath of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the ancient Indians used the knowledge they have lost not only for military purposes. In India there is still a pillar - "Ashoka's Column", made of pure iron. Since its erection (III century BC), this column has not rusted. Modern metallurgists would give a lot to learn the secret of making stainless iron …
The "Black Pagoda", also built in the first centuries BC, has survived to this day in India. Its roof is crowned with a monolithic stone slab weighing 2000 tons. Even modern construction equipment is not capable of lifting such loads.
In one of the caves in northern India, inscriptions were found, accompanied by astronomical maps, fixing the stars in the position in which they were 13 thousand years ago.
Let's go back to Europe. In 1900, sponge seekers discovered near the island of Antikythera (Greece) the remains of a sunken ancient ship, from which they raised many bronze and marble objects. Carefully examining the finds, the Greek archaeologist V. Stais noticed that the remains of a mechanism are visible in the pieces of bronze. Further research revealed that the device was made in the 1st century. BC. and is a mechanical astronomical clock with several dials showing the movement of the sun and planets. The device was similar to modern clock mechanisms, it had many gear wheels. None of the experts assumed that the ancient Greeks knew this.
Ancient Greece and Rome are of particular interest to us, because their example can be traced: how exactly science and technology can be lost and completely forgotten.
The ancient Romans had an extensive knowledge of architecture and urban planning. In the 1st century AD. they built 6-storey houses; Europeans learned this again in the 19th century. (of course, tall towers were also built in the Middle Ages, but this is much easier than building a building with a large area). The dome of the Pantheon in Rome has a diameter of 41 m. In the Middle Ages, Europeans did not know how to build domes at all; only in the Renaissance there appear small domes 15-20 m long, and only by the end of the 18th century. in the construction of domes, European architects reached the level of the ancient Romans.
Ancient Roman buildings built after the adoption of Christianity display a much more primitive building technology than during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Christian basilicas seem to be copied from one another, consist of many repeating elements and do not have domes. The situation was somewhat better in Byzantium, but even there the builders did not have the methods of accurate calculation of the structure of the building and they built it at random. The dome of the Cathedral of Sophia in Constantinople collapsed several times during construction; in the end it was made smaller than the original design, and with a huge margin of safety. For the same reason, Orthodox churches are made with many small "domes" that can be built without any calculations.
The reason that caused such a rollback is well known: during the establishment of Christianity, the church destroyed most of the scientific and philosophical works, and the scientists themselves, too. The Library of Alexandria was first burnt down by fanatical Christians. The builders of the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages did not know any construction calculations at all; they either copied elements of earlier buildings, or acted on a whim, at their own peril and risk.
The buildings of the Romanesque style do not even contain a supporting frame, known to the ancient Greeks from time immemorial, and to the Romans from the Carthaginians, and also appeared in the later ancient Babylonian buildings. In Romanesque buildings, the entire wall performs the load-bearing function, which requires significantly (5-7 times) more stone.
In the XI century. an event significant for all medieval architecture happened: in France, in one of the monasteries, the ancient Roman treatise of Vitruvius "On Architecture" was discovered. After studying this treatise, medieval builders again learned how to build frame buildings, which led to the emergence of a new style - the Gothic. It was in those days that secret lodges of masons arose, which were later transformed into Freemasonry. The possession of the information contained in the treatise of Vitruvius made it possible to reduce the cost of construction by almost 10 times - due to the saving of stone and more advanced technology.
Medieval builders could not understand only one thing in Vitruvius's treatise: how to build domes. If Gothic buildings require only four mathematical operations for their calculation, then in order to calculate the dome, you also need to know the square root extraction. If the ancient Romans knew how to do this in a "column", like multiplication and division, then in the Middle Ages the very concept of a root was forgotten.
They remembered him thanks to the university in Cordoba, which was conquered from the Arabs. In the Muslim world at that time, science was more advanced than in Europe. Then the church could no longer afford to stifle any knowledge: Christians were pressed everywhere by Arabs and Turks, science and technology were needed for war. Therefore, the scientific achievements of the Arabs did not gather dust in the monasteries, but were used in business, which was the beginning of the Renaissance.
So, there are two reasons why science and technology can be forgotten:
1. Conscious destruction of scientific knowledge and its carriers for religious or political purposes. We can see this in the example of Christian Europe. Chinese emperors also burned books in droves they considered harmful.
2. The death of a highly developed civilization as a result of some catastrophe. Example - Mohenjo-Daro; probably not the only example. Moreover, even if scientific knowledge is preserved for posterity, but they are not sufficiently developed to use it, it may perish purely by accident. Thus, in Byzantium, all ancient scientific and artistic texts were brought to the library in Constantinople. Such centralization ruined them: the library burned down in 1203 during the storming of Constantinople by the crusaders. This would not have happened if literary monuments were not just kept in the library, but read and used in business: then copies would be made from them.
If knowledge is presented not in documents, but in the form of more durable artifacts, then there is a risk that his descendants simply will not understand, as happened with the batteries in the Baghdad Museum. So, we know that knowledge is laid in the Egyptian pyramids, but we could decipher from it only what we ourselves knew. It's just that the style of thinking of the Egyptian and our civilizations is very different. What seemed obvious to the ancient Egyptians is completely unusual for us. If we want to perpetuate our scientific knowledge in the same way, then distant descendants who do not know our culture are also unlikely to understand it, even if their own science is at a sufficiently high level.
Used extracts from books:
J. Bergier, L. Povel "Morning of the Magicians", A. Belov "Anthropological detective", N. Glazkova, V. Landa "Space traces of disappeared civilizations".