The Incredible Technological Precision of the Ancients

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Probably this. Not sure about "ultra", but it's there.

Yeah as you noted not particularly 'precise' I use to picnic there while waiting for the LAN flight to come in

Listen to a designer/builder give his professional opinion regarding the technology of the pyramids: Link

Originally posted by Mary Rose
Listen to a designer/builder give his professional opinion regarding the technology of the pyramids: Link

In this video, Dunn makes a number of statements that are absolutely arbitrary. For example, regarding ultrasound. Why did Egyptians use ultrasound? Because Dunn said so. Typical.

As to the contractor describing how hard it is to build a pyramid -- I'm sure that even a US Marine, an elite soldier, would find it difficult to engage an enemy with a bow and arrows, something that was done routinely in large scale battles for thousands of years. Why? That Marine is not trained for that. Same goes for that modern builder - he can only think in terms of modern machinery. Egyptians didn't have that luxury, so they did massive projects with some substantial manpower involved.

Originally posted by Hanslune

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Probably this. Not sure about "ultra", but it's there.

Yeah as you noted not particularly 'precise' I use to picnic there while waiting for the LAN flight to come in[

Cool. Is it worth a visit?

reply to post by buddhasystem


Absolutely, isolated, serene, stay a week, walk the perimeter of the island, sleep in the quarry, kewl place

Originally posted by buddhasystem
Probably this. Not sure about "ultra", but it's there.

Exactly. But the reason I mentioned Rapa-Nui is not the precision as such, which not as high as in Machu-Picchu, but still very good. The most important part is the style in which the stones are fitted to each other, using trapezoid shapes and occasionally leaving a hole which is then filled with a small stone peg, also perfectly fitted. This is not your ordinary way of building walls. This is a 'trademark' of that civilization. It is as if they are telling us, 'Look what we can do with the stone, this is how we do it'. Everything that was built on top of such stonework across all of the places was much worse in quality and used grout. So this regularity across presumably different cultures, and most importantly pertaining to the oldest layer of stonework clearly indicates widest cultural exchange if not one large culture/civilization. This civilization most likely traveled all over the globe and handled giant stones with ease not known to us today.

Originally posted by mrkeen

Originally posted by buddhasystem
Probably this. Not sure about "ultra", but it's there.

Exactly. But the reason I mentioned Rapa-Nui is not the precision as such, which not as high as in Machu-Picchu, but still very good. The most important part is the style in which the stones are fitted to each other, using trapezoid shapes and occasionally leaving a hole which is then filled with a small stone peg, also perfectly fitted. This is not your ordinary way of building walls. This is a 'trademark' of that civilization. It is as if they are telling us, 'Look what we can do with the stone, this is how we do it'. Everything that was built on top of such stonework across all of the places was much worse in quality and used grout. So this regularity across presumably different cultures, and most importantly pertaining to the oldest layer of stonework clearly indicates widest cultural exchange if not one large culture/civilization. This civilization most likely traveled all over the globe and handled giant stones with ease not known to us today.

This probably resulted from using loose stones instead of the more difficult task of cutting them out of a quarry. The dating of the structures that used large stones (since you are using that as a indicator of this civilization 'x') means they floated around for thousands of years, doing nothing for hundreds of year then going dormant for awhile, then re-emerging to move stone around while at the same time always seemlessly adapting the local culture. Oh what do you consider a 'giant' stone - what approx weight?

Originally posted by Mary Rose
One of the books Christopher Dunn lists as of related interest at the end of The Giza Power Plant is Forbidden History, edited by J. Douglas Kenyon, of Atlantis Rising. It is a compilation of 42 essays.

Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization was published 2005 by Bear & Company.

I am inspired by the opening words of the book:

To the growing number of scientists and scholars willing to risk their professional prestige, perks, and privileges for the sake of something as ephemeral as the truth.

Thank you, God, for the movers and shakers of this world.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
Thank you, God, for the movers and shakers of this world.

Last time I checked, people who you call "movers and shaker" neither moved nor shook stuff much at all, with the possible exception of shaking you up by selling you a fraudulent, charlatan book, and moving money out of your bank account in the process.

To the growing number of scientists and scholars willing to risk their professional prestige, perks, and privileges for the sake of something as ephemeral as the truth.

Hopefully, they'll grow rapidly in the coming months, as momentum shows itself.

Originally posted by Mary Rose

To the growing number of scientists and scholars willing to risk their professional prestige, perks, and privileges for the sake of something as ephemeral as the truth.

Hopefully, they'll grow rapidly in the coming months, as momentum shows itself.

There isn't any movement this is the classic rehash of the 'Jesus coming soon', 'Disclosure coming soon', etc. Don't hold your breath.......the book is 7 years old........

Originally posted by Hanslune
This probably resulted from using loose stones instead of the more difficult task of cutting them out of a quarry. The dating of the structures that used large stones (since you are using that as a indicator of this civilization 'x') means they floated around for thousands of years, doing nothing for hundreds of year then going dormant for awhile, then re-emerging to move stone around while at the same time always seemlessly adapting the local culture. Oh what do you consider a 'giant' stone - what approx weight?

Several hundred tons. And regarding 'floating around'... well, the dating methods are not precise, sometimes logarithmic, and this floating may result from their precision. Another consideration is a global cataclysm could cause continuous migration. Be it a climate change or a meteorite impact (with the consequent climate change). The Teotihuacan complex, for example, is oriented 12 degrees off north. Giza pyramids are oriented correctly. And there is a great number of instantly frozen mammoths in Northern Siberia. This may mean that there was some cataclysm (an impact?) in between these two events (the building of the two sites). This is not my theory, I am just retelling what I read in various sources. Some believe it was extraterrestrials who built the pyramids in Teotihuacan and Giza, some believe it was Atlants, I believe it was some sort of human civilization which was advanced, but not in current sense of the word. They probably didn't use turbines or combustion engines, but they may have possessed some knowledge which allowed them to move around and process large stones. It seems very logical then to just pick some large stones found nearby, shape them and fit them together. The largest known ones are, of course, the foundation stones in Baalbek. There is absolutely no logic in using such big stones if you don't know how to handle them. Romans didn't know it and they were unable to finish their colossal temple.

foundation stones in Baalbek

. . . The Trilithon is composed of three stones each measuring 19 metres long x 4.2 metres wide x 3.6 metres broad. Hewn from natural crystalline limestone with a specific gravity of about 2.7, from a quarry 1 km mile away, they weigh 870 tons each.

They have been raised to a height of 10 metres and have been so accurately cut and placed that a razor's edge cannot be placed between them. . . .

Meditate on that.

reply to post by mrkeen


Regarding Baalbek, you've seen something like this, right?

First: The three blocks used weight about 800 tons each, the heavy, unmoved block weights about 1200 tons.

Second: The quarry for the blocks lies higher then the temple, about 15 meters. Distance to the platform: about 600 meters, but to get round a ditch the way had to be about 1100 meters long.

Third: A German expedition dug 1904/1905 through to the foundations of the temple. The temple platform is through and through of Roman origin. They found typical roman masonery, roman trash and so on, down to the bedrock. Nothing un-Roman was found! Btw: The temple platform was not built from massive stone, but typically roman honeycombed. Only the outer shell looks like a massive building.

Fourth: The trash you can read about the temple comes mostly from a book from 1864 ("Voyage autour de la mer morte" by Felicien ce Saulcy) and an article from a professor Modeste Agrest, who based his story on a book "published in Paris in 1898" - long befor any serious dig was done. These sources were used by authors like Daeniken and Sitchin. The first real investigation from 1904/1905, published 1921 (Wiegand, Ballbek, 3 bde, 1921-1925), is "forgotten" by these guys.
...
The stones were transported over a path only 600 meters length and about 15 meters *downhill*. The quarry is 1160 meters high, and the temple 145 meters. So it was easy to keep the stones on an even level to their final resting place and it was uneccesary to lift them about 7 meters as some authors claim.

As you might know, Rome is the city with the most obelisks outside of egypt. They stole the things by the dozen and took them home. The heaviest known obelisk weighs 510 tons, and it was transported some 1000's of *kilometers*. This transport was documented by the roman author Marcellinus Comes. The romans even left detailed paintings and reliefs about the ways to move such things : as on the bottom of the Theodosius-obelisk in Istanbul.

If the Romans could carry stones weighing hundreds of tons over huge distances, they surely could sure move an even bigger stone over a very short distance.

Some of the tech used in Egypt before that is documented here,

Herodotus described moving the 580 ton "Green Naos" under Nectanebo II: "This took three years in the bringing, and two thousand men were assigned to the conveying of it ..." (History, 2.175) Pliny wrote of the transportation of an "eighty cubit" obelisk under Ptolemy II:

According to some authorities, it was carried downstream by the engineer Satyrus on a raft; but according to Callixenus, it was conveyed by Phoenix, who by digging a canal brought the waters of the Nile right up to the place where the obelisk lay. Two very broad ships were loaded with cubes of the same granite as that of the obelisk, each cube measuring one foot, until calculations showed that the total weight of the blocks was double that of the obelisk, since their total cubic capacity was twice as great. In this way, the ships were able to come beneath the obelisk, which was suspended by its ends from both banks of the canal. The blocks were unloaded and the ships, riding high, took the weight of the obelisk

So yes, it's pretty smart. But no tractor beam for you!

EDIT TO ADD: also another link.

What can I say, people are awesome. They could really move objects in hundreds of tons over hundreds of miles. Mediate on this.

I've just read a very interesting statement.

It is in an interview of author Peter Tompkins by Atlantis Rising Magazine in Issue #3:

The writer has found his plans thwarted, not only by publishers. One idea to use a promising technology he had chanced upon, to virtually X-Ray the Great Pyramid, was apparently blocked by Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Antiquities Authority.

Politics much?

Here's another interesting excerpt:

During his Mexico experience, Tompkins succeeded, at great expense and difficulty, in filming the effect of the rising and setting sun at equinox on the temple at Chichen Itza. It's absolutely staggering, he relates, but you can see that snake come alive, just on that one day. It goes up and down the steps. We filmed it and it's just beautiful. How did they orient that pyramid so that would happen only on the equinox?

Yes, how did they do that?

I searched YouTube looking for Peter Tompkins' original film and didn't find it.

But this did come up:

Uploaded by passagetoroma on Apr 27, 2011

Very rare opportunity shot. 2+ minute video is of the descent of Kukulkan/Quetzalcoatl on the steps of the pyramid of El Castillo in Chichen Itza. What makes it rare is that all seven diamonds appear and no clouds interrupt the transition.

The time lapse footage was shot entirely by hand using a Canon T2i shot in a prone position. I forgot and left my intervalometer in my hotel, so I was forced to have to hold and shoot, approx. 1 shot every 5 seconds for about 1.5 hours. Needless to say, this was quite the challenge, but I think it came out ok.

Luckily, the clouds completely disappeared when the first diamond appeared. As you can see, I was able to capture all 7 diamonds at the end of the sequence.

(According to Wikipedia the pyramid at El Castillo is also known as the Temple of Kukulkan.)

reply to post by buddhasystem


Thanks for the quotes and links. If ancients used only simple means of transporting and cutting those stones, then I still call them an advanced civilization, especially because of that. We today would not manage anything on a comparable scale. Today we need a lot of reasons and bureaucracy to carry out much simpler tasks. So let it be Romans, or Mayans, or Egyptians, but they had this special ability to do grand things. Maybe we underestimate ourselves today, that's why we seek complex explanations.

Originally posted by mrkeen
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

Thanks for the quotes and links. If ancients used only simple means of transporting and cutting those stones, then I still call them an advanced civilization, especially because of that.

Wait wait, it's a complete departure from what was suggested in this thread. For God's sake, there was a mention of CAD/CAM engineering, assertion that powerful ultrasound machines were used, and all sorts of similar stuff like gigantic radial saws (nowhere to be found). You and I may appreciate the fact that the ancients possessed smart and working techniques for accomplishing what they did accomplish with these rocks, but the fact remains that the thesis in the OP is pure bullcr@p.

We today would not manage anything on a comparable scale.

Did you bother to check? We move objects much heavier than the biggest rocks the ancients have ever moved, and we do it with great skill. There are many examples of complete buildings being moved, much heavier than the monoliths mentioned here, and not as durable -- you really need to take care to not damage the delicate structure of the building (still heavy as hell).

So why do you say something as incorrect as "we would not manage"???

As an aside note, the Space Shuttle equipped for launch weighs 2,030t, and we manage to hurl it into space at a few miles per second. I'm sure the Romans would be impressed. And if this is not "grand" enough for you, I don't know what is.

reply to post by buddhasystem


The DAI completed a report on Baalbek some time ago. Here is the thread in which Blackmarketeer discusses it

The link

The seventh post down

Realizing that it's not just the Egyptians who were incredible, it's the ancients in general, I asked for and received a change of the title of this thread to "The Incredible Technological Precision of the Ancients."

Furthermore, it's not just the precision in stone cutting and aligning that's incredible, it's astronomical knowledge.

And any other amazing knowledge of the ancients which is a form of advanced technology. How about medicine? And what else?

reply to post by Mary Rose


If you have a lifetime as a stonemason it ought to look "perfect".