Ancient Geniuses What I like about archaeology is how it gives us a window into the past. Sometimes that window gives us a totally unexpected view. One of the things which amazes me one of the most, is the fact we can still find incredible structures and graves in places like Rome, Egypt and Turkey to name only a few places. It seems Turkey has ruins everywhere, this is because so many civilizations have been there. There are things going on in these finds which blow our mind. Take for example the underground cities which were found which could hold over 10,000 people with all their food, water and animals. How did they ever carve them out of the rock with the primitive tools they had? There are so many examples of incredible abilities by ancient people it is almost unbelievable. Take some of the achievements of the Romans. The Romans decided they needed a tunnel built through a mountain and it would be faster if they started on both sides and met in the middle. This would be tricky even today but they not only did it, they were accurate to within an inch. How did they accomplish this? They may have learned the secret from the ancient Greeks who built a tunnel from both ends which was about 3,400 feet. It was named the Tunnel of Eupalinos and built in the sixth century B.C. It ran through Mount Kastro. It was only the second known tunnel to be built this way. It is said they used picks, chisels and hammers and did it accurately using geometry and trigonometry. The tunnel was used as an aqueduct for supplying water to Samos. It had to be hidden to protect it from its enemies. When the tunnel was built from France under the English Channel using modern methods it did not meet in the middle but was off by 3.5 meters, which is about 11 feet 6 inches. We were not able to equal the feat the ancients had performed. Of course, this was fixed. There are still arguments going on about how the Great Pyramid in Egypt was built. Many archaeologists claim a channel was dug to the pyramid so the great Egyptian ships could pull right up to the pyramid with their stone blocks. A ramp was constructed and sheer manpower was used to drag these blocks so they could be piled on the blocks already there. We are talking about moving 2,300,000 stone blocks which had an average weight of 2.5 tons with some weighing up to between 50 to 80 tons. Think about trying to drag these stones upward without even the use of wheels. There is another opinion about the stones used in the Great Pyramid and it is these are not stones but were poured into place somehow. Could the ancient Egyptians have figured out how to pour some sort of liquid stone like we do with cement? There are those who believe this. Maybe the clue is in some of their other ancient structures. They would build these tall structures using carved stone for columns and such which were cut into layers and sand would be piled up until it reached the top of the construction and then they would pile the next pieces on and put more sand on the pile again. Repeating this procedure until they reached the top of the structure and it was finished. Next, they would remove the sand and free the structure. One of the biggest shocks took place when a device was found, which came from the ancient Greeks, which was thought to be too advanced to exist. It was a mechanical computer. It was found in an ancient Roman era shipwreck and is known as the Antikythera Mechanism. It was found in 1901 and lay in the basement of a museum for many decades until a scientist figured out what it might be. The problem was it was covered with corrosion from being in the water for over 2,000 years. Another problem was only about 1/3 of the mechanism was found, making it harder to figure out. After reconstruction it was determined to be the world’s first computer. Scientists think it was used not only to predict eclipses and astronomical events, but might have been useful for navigation. One of the things scientists were shocked to see were precise complex gears. It was believed gears first came about in the era of the first mechanical clocks, well over a thousand years later. Here is something I have to wonder about, just the fact the ancient Greeks knew how to create metal gears should have pushed technology further ahead than it did. Yet, we have seen nothing else using these complex gears, why is that? The ancient Greeks had steam, gears, primitive automation but none of this was picked up by later races and indeed was left to rot by the later races of Greeks. Perhaps this had something to do with the Roman takeover? We really do not know how many advanced inventions have been lost. We might have learned more if the Romans had not burned the greatest library in the ancient world, the great library at Alexandria, Egypt. This single event in history could have cost us hundreds of years of advancement. Tens of thousands of the most important scrolls were deposited into the library for study. Alexandra gained a reputation as a place where the smartest people resided. While it is thought the Romans advanced civilization, they may have been responsible for a great setback. I often wonder why they would have destroyed these scrolls? It seems so shortsighted. Imagine the things they could have learned. It seems to me the Romans’ main interests were war and building and they could have felt they were not very interested in anything else such as science, even though there were some very smart Romans. I am talking in general. I bet those smart Romans were very upset when they learned the library was destroyed. Some of the ancient inventions took us thousands of years to figure out such as the invention of Damascus steel. We struggled with that for a very long time. The reason we wanted to find out how it was made was it was far stronger than the steel we were using. When we had a problem with rotors failing in jet engines, we turned to Damascus steel to solve the problem. It seems the ancients were better steel makers then us to that point. We owe a lot to our ancient relatives, they may have been more primitive in some ways, but they accomplished some incredible things which leave us amazed even today.
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