From a detailed map ahead of its time to a lost civilization in China, here are 8 of
the most mysterious artifacts ever found that have challenged the way we see history!!
8.
The Piri Reis Map
The Piri Reis map is considered the first map of the world.
Created in 1513, it was drawn by Ottoman admiral and cartographer Hagii Ahmed Muhiddin Pira,
aka Piri Reis, who compiled military intelligence and created a detailed map.
Only one third of the original map remains, drawn on gazelle-skin parchment.
It shows the Atlantic Ocean, with detailed depictions of the west coast of Europe and
North Africa, Atlantic islands like the Azores and the Canary Islands, and all the way to
the eastern coast of Brazil.
The map may also show Japan and the mythical island of Antillia.
Piri Reis credited maps drawn by Christopher Columbus as a source, which have since been
lost.
Reis also stated he used ten Arab maps and four maps from India that he obtained from
the Portuguese, who were accomplished explorers in their own right.
Besides being an amazing piece of history it is now at the center of a huge mystery.
It appears to show Antarctica centuries before it was officially discovered.
The coast of the frozen continent is revealed in great and accurate detail, but without
ice.
The last time Antarctica was not completely frozen over was nearly 6000 years ago, and
the true shape of the continent has only recently been confirmed.
Somehow, the map shows something that Piri Reis should have been in no position to know,
and something that he in theory would have never been able to find on a map during his
time.
Professor Charles Hapgood from the University of New Hampshire had studied the map for years
and published a book in 1965 stating other things that researchers could not explain.
The map was also drawn using the Mercator Projection, which wasn’t used by cartographers
until later.
Drawings of coastlines are so accurate that many are proposing that it was actually created
by some ancient super-civilization with aerial capabilities!!
7.
The Baghdad Battery
The Baghdad Battery could almost be considered 3 artifacts in one.
It is a terracotta pot that contains a copper cylinder and a single iron rod.
The top of the rod is separated from the copper by a layer of bitumen, which acts as a plug
or stopper.
The rod and cylinder fit snugly into the opening of the jar, but the copper cylinder isn’t
watertight, so any liquid in the jar would also make contact with the iron rod.
It has been suggested that the artifact could have been used for electroplating gold onto
objects made of silver.
If the pot was filled with an acid or alkaline liquid, like vinegar or lemon juice, then
the theory was that this would be sufficient to produce an electric charge.
Unfortunately, there is no proof that electroplating was done anywhere at this point in human history,
and the artifact is extremely inefficient as a battery.
Tests and simulations done by Mythbusters and other academics have shown that the more
the Baghdad Battery is used, the lower the charge it produces.
Sticking a probe into a lemon will provide more of an electrical current than the battery.
Most archaeologists believe its purpose was much more mundane and that jars like these
were used to hold papyrus scrolls.
The Battery was lost along with numerous other priceless objects when the National Museum
of Iraq was looted in 2003.
6.
The Sanxingdui Jade
In the spring of 1929, a farmer in the quiet village of Sanxingdui in China’s Sichuan
province was digging a well when he discovered a large stash of amazing jade artifacts.
They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, and Chinese archaeologists scoured
the area for years looking for more evidence of the lost people who had made these artifacts.
It wasn’t until 1986 when two massive sacrificial pits were discovered, each one containing
thousands of gold, bronze, jade, ivory and pottery artifacts that were unlike anything
that had ever been found in China.
These were the remains of an ancient culture dating back 3,000 to 5,000 years – a culture
nobody had even suspected existed before.
The artifacts in the sacrificial pits had been broken and burned prior to being carefully
buried as offerings to ancient gods.
The objects included: the largest bronze masks ever discovered; the largest and best-preserved
bronze statue of an upright human figure; a 12-foot-tall bronze tree; axes, tablets,
sculptures with animal faces, dragons, snakes, birds, human-like heads with gold foil masks;
and knives, rings, a giant wand and a complete sacrificial altar.
The artifacts were radiocarbon dated to the 12th-11th centuries BC, effectively rewriting
the history of early China.
Prior to this discovery, the accepted history was that Chinese culture began in the north
and spread out from there.
This discovery proves that there was a thriving and distinct culture in the south, never described
in any historical texts and otherwise completely unknown.
Archaeologists have linked the Sanxingdui culture with the ancient Shu dynasty, but
exactly who they were and what happened to them remains a mystery.
5.
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written and hand-illustrated book that was probably composed
in northern Italy during the Renaissance.
The vellum pages are full of drawings, sketches and writing in a language no one understands.
The original has been carbon-dated to around 1404 to 1438.
It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who purchased the codex in 1912.
The book is written in an unknown writing system.
Codebreakers from the US and Great Britain, including the team that deciphered the Nazi
enigma machine, have been unable to decipher the text, which is written from left to right.
The book has many missing pages, but 240 still remain and you can access the book online
or even get a copy on Amazon if you want to take a crack at the code!!
Most pages have illustrations or diagrams, and some are foldable sheets.
The subject matter appears to be divided into six sections: herbal, astrological, biological,
cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.
The illustrations are pretty confusing as many show plants and animals that don’t
even exist!
There are Latin inscriptions in the margins, but these don’t really help make sense of
the manuscript, either.
It almost seems that it was someone’s creative journal or something but that would be practically
impossible in the 1400’s.
So far this parchment and its author remains a mystery!
4.
The Saqqara Bird
In 1898, archaeologists excavating the Pa-di-Imen tomb in Saqqara, Egypt, discovered the effigy
of a bird made of sycamore wood.
The bird had the head of a falcon and a wingspan of about 7 inches, but that’s where the
similarities to a real bird ends.
For starters, the tail is vertical, like that of an an airplane or a shark!
Its wings are represented as rigid like the wings of a glider.
It has much more in common with a modern flying object than with any bird that ever lived
in Egypt.
An Egyptian parapsychologist, physician and archaeologist named Khalil Messiha has speculated
that the Saqqara bird is evidence that the ancient Egyptians had developed the first
aircraft.
This idea hasn’t been well received in the scientific community, who believe rather that
the bird was part of the masthead of the sacred boats used in the Opet Festival.
The bird with its aircraft shape was most likely meant for the water, not the air.
The Saqqara bird is currently on display at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo.
3.
Dropa Stones
In 1938, Chinese archaeologist Dr. Chi Pu Tei discovered evidence of a long-lost culture
in the caves around Baian-Kara-Ula in China.
Under a thick layer of dust, Dr. Chi found dozens of stone disks that were strikingly
similar to vinyl records.
They were about nine inches in diameter, had a central hole, and were inscribed with a
long spiral groove.
The disks were turned over to a researcher named Tsum Um Nui from the Beijing Academy
for Ancient Studies.
He was able to translate them and announced that not only were the spiral grooves made
up of tiny hieroglyphics, but the inscriptions told the story of a spacefaring people called
the Dropa who crash-landed in the nearby mountains.
These aliens had been hunted by humans because they were short and ugly.
Tsum was roundly ridiculed and went into hiding in Japan, but not before the disks were dated
to be about 10,000 years old.
Russian scientists somehow obtained the disks and put them on a turntable, where they allegedly
noted that the disks began to vibrate and hum when they were played like an LP.
The remainder of the Russian experiment and its results were never published, and the
Dropa discs have since vanished.
Nobody knows where the disks are, and what happened to the Dropa people, if they ever
existed at all.
2.
The Antikythera Mechanism
In 1902, a strange artifact was pulled up out of an ancient shipwreck off the coast
of the Greek island of Antikythera.
The shipwreck dated to about 70 to 60 BC, and the artifact itself has been dated to
about a generation before the wreck took place.
It was first believed to be a gear wheel for steering the ship, but it soon became apparent
that it was much, much more.
Housed in a wooden box, the artifact is a mechanism made up of at least 30 intermeshing
bronze gears.
The largest gear is 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.
The artifact is in 82 known fragments, and there may be more pieces in storage or still
on the sea bed.
In 2012, a team from Cardiff University led by Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth subjected
the encrusted object to high-tech x-ray tomography and high-resolution computer scanning, and
they were able to read faint inscriptions that once covered the outer casing of the
machine.
Based on these inscriptions and the measurements and studies of the gears that had been done
over the years, they have been able to determine that this remarkable clockwork artifact is
in fact the world’s first known analog computer.
The Antikythera mechanism was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for use
as both a calendar and an astrological tool.
It was used to track the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.
Its amazing complexity indicates that simpler predecessor instruments must still exist somewhere,
just waiting to be discovered.
1.
The London Hammer In 1936, at Red Creek outside London, Texas,
Max Hahn and his wife Emma found a strange piece of limestone that seemed to have wood
sticking out of it.
They brought the stone home with them, and used it a curious paperweight.
Then, in 1946, their son for some reason broke open the stone, and what he found amazed him.
Contained within the limestone was a man-made hammer.
The head of the hammer is about 6 inches long (15 centimeters) long, and it has a diameter
of about 1 inch (25 mm).
It was probably intended for fine work.
The hammerhead itself was tested and was shown be made up of 96.6% iron, 2.6% chlorine, and
0.74% sulfur, indicating that it was the product of a blacksmith’s forge.
The hammerhead has not rusted at all since it was freed from the rock.
It’s the same as American tools manufactured in the same area in the late 1800s.
The rock that it was in, Ordovician limestone, probably formed some 400 million years ago.
So how did a late 1800s American hammer end up in a chunk of Ordovician rock?
People have proposed it it proof of time travel, but not exactly.
Limestone is very soluble, and the area of Texas where it was found is subject to flash
floods and occasional torrential downpours.
The limestone had probably been caught in a wet event like this and had formed a solution,
and some hapless carpenter dropped his hammer into the puddle.
As the puddle dried, the limestone formed what’s called a concretion, encasing the
hammer as the rock re-solidified.
It’s a known geographical process, and not really a mystery at all.
As far as science is concerned, known geologic processes can easily explain how this came
to be, even though you have to admit it is very rare.
People believe what they want to believe, though, and the hammer was purchased by creationist
Carl Baugh in 1983.
He put it into his Creation Evidence Museum, where he claims it as outstanding proof of
the Biblical flood story.
Visitors can bring home a replica of the hammer from the museum gift shop which you have to
admit would be a good conversation starter!!
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