10.
The Third Eye A shocking number of ancient civilizations
placed great importance on the third eye.
But did you know that we all actually have one?
You might know the third eye more scientifically as the pineal gland.
This gland is actually behind the area between a person’s eyes in the brain and is shaped
like a pea.
In ancient times, Greek doctors believed there was something inside the head that controlled
the flow of psychic energy, a substance they called pneuma.
But the third eye goes back even further, to Hindu mythology.
Many important Hindu deities are depicted as having an actual third eye opening up on
their forehead.
The eye was represented in Hindu mythology as awakening and enlightenment, which one
could use to reach a higher realm of existence.
The third eye was also important in ancient Egypt.
For example, the Eye of Ra was considered a powerful symbol and can be found drawn on
sarcophagi, in ancient temples, and in hieroglyphics.
The Egyptians associated the third eye with wisdom.
Even today we don’t completely understand what the pineal gland does.
We know it is vital to our circadian rhythm and regulates the hormone melatonin which
helps you sleep.
It also plays a role in how you make decisions and how you perceive reality.
But how did the ancient people know this?
Where did they get this idea of the third eye between the forehead?
No matter where you look in the ancient world, the third eye was there!
Perhaps the ancients were just much more in tune with the body without all these modern
day distractions!
9.
The Birdman If you've ever visited Thailand, you've more
than likely seen the national emblem of the country.
It's a creature that looks like a human/bird hybrid called the garuda.
Its roots can be found in Buddhist and Hindu mythology, a half-man and half-bird that once
carried the god Vishnu on its back.
In the old Hindu legends, it’s said that while Vishnu was being carried across the
world on the back of this mutant bird, he descended to several places and manifested
himself as a great ruler.
In the ancient Kingdom of Siam, it was believed Rama was one of these manifestations of Vishnu.
Rama is the most important person in ancient Thai history.
The kings of old are believed to be direct descendants of Rama, the father of the Thai
people – and to this day, Thai kings believe themselves to have his blood!
That means, to them at least, that they also have the blood of the god Vishnu.
The garuda, or the birdman, is such an important figure that it's on just about every government
seal and legal document.
A very similar creature was associated with Maya kings over 1000 years ago.
Starting around the year 550 AD, maybe even before, Maya kings and queens participated
in performances in which they would impersonate an avian deity and dance around.
This deity was half man and half bird, and looked almost identical to the garuda in Thailand.
It was directly linked to the Maya royals.
The image of this creature can still be found in ancient tombs and on old Maya textiles.
There are even sculptures of this thing still preserved in museums.
We don't know exactly what correlation there is between these two bird deities, but they
sure do seem to be almost the same creature.
8.
Fairies Fairies are mythological beings with a much
deeper history than most people realize.
Fairies were considered by many ancient civilizations to be metaphysical beings, creatures that
live in a different realm, but are sometimes able to interact with the physical world.
They've gone by many names, such as the Tuaha De Danann in Ireland, the Huldufolk in Iceland,
and the Manitou in North America.
They always have different names and always behave a little differently in cultural folklore
– but in the end, they're all fairies.
In fact, where do you think the term “fairy tale” comes from?
The belief in fairies isn't even that ancient in the grand scheme of things.
As recently as 1691, the reverend Robert Kirk from Scotland suggested in a paper that fairies
live in a parallel reality as a secret commonwealth with their own morals and own civilization.
He suggested fairies are only visible to special clairvoyants, and only at certain places.
This belief that only certain people can see the fairies and that they’re part of their
own hidden world brushing against the invisible fabric of our own is in just about every single
myth from every culture that spoke of them.
They were everywhere from Ireland to Iceland to North America.
Sadly, we don't know where it all started or who came up with them first.
Somehow, the idea of miniature creatures like physical spirits pervaded almost every culture
that has ever existed.
7.
The Forbidden Fruit The story of the forbidden fruit is not only
in the Bible - it's everywhere, in dozens of cultures across the globe!
Many of us are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, where Eve eats the forbidden
fruit that gets them both kicked out of paradise.
But there are many other stories involving apples getting people in trouble that you
might not know.
For example, the Trojan War allegedly started all because of an apple.
It was the apple of Eris, the goddess of discord, that made all the gods of Olympus begin to
fight.
In Norse mythology, the gods were only immoral because they ate special apples.
In The Arabian Nights, there was a magical apple that could cure humans of all diseases.
The proverb “an apple a day will keep the doctor away” was first printed in 1866,
yet apples have been considered magical for over 2000 years.
In the original story of Adam and Eve, there isn't actually an apple.
It's just an unspecified fruit.
It could have been a fig, a grape, even a pomegranate or a grapefruit.
The forbidden fruit being an apple didn't come around until around the 12th century,
when apples were deemed bad by the church because of a misunderstanding of the Latin
word “malus,” which means both apple and evil.
Why do you think so many ancient cultures thought apples were magical?
Let me know your thoughts and theories in the comments and don't forget to subscribe
before the end of the video!
:) 6.
Giants Among Us The idea of giants is nothing new.
Giants appeared in Greek mythology, in South American mythology, Celtic mythology, you
get it.
Anywhere people told stories, there were at least one or two myths of giants.
But just how real were giants?
Since they were talked about in basically every culture that ever existed, could they
have been real, physical beings?
The answer is that nobody really knows.
What we can say is that in North America, there are over 1000 recorded accounts of skeletons
being uncovered that were over 7 feet (2.1 m) tall.
From coast to coast, skeletons have been found with strange anatomic anomalies.
Back in 1873, the Smithsonian Annual Report claimed that scientists discovered 17 skeletons
that each stood over 7 feet, with one roughly 8 feet (2.4 m) tall.
These were discovered in Illinois at an ancient burial site.
However, most of the information on these supposed giants has been wiped out or lost.
The bones themselves are nowhere to be found, and modern scientists refuse to even discuss
the matter.
Either there really was a race of giants that inspired the cultural stories told by men
and women from North America to China, or scientists in the 1800s were lying.
5.
World Mythologies Many scholars believe that every mythology
in the world, from the beliefs of the ancient Greeks to the legends of the Slavic people,
all copy the same mythical theme.
They may be different stories, but they were all birthed from one specific idea.
Scholars believe this because when you look at world mythologies, it's hard to ignore
the glaring similarities they all share.
For example, almost every myth shares the same origin story for life and the universe.
That's to say from blackness and chaos came human existence.
In Hindu mythology, there was nothing until Vishnu created Brahma from a lotus, and Brahma
went on to create the world.
In ancient Greece, Nyx, a huge bird living in a vast nothingness, laid an egg that turned
into Chaos, which then created the various primeval gods.
In Norse mythology, the great void of Ginnungagap was all there was until the heat of Muspelheim
and the cold of Niflheim touched and birthed the universe.
Just about all myths are this similar, from the great flood to the stories of the younger
gods defeating the older gods.
They're all basically the same storyline, but with different characters, seemingly with
their roots in the same prehistoric stories.
We don't know what these stories were, as they were probably around way before these
civilizations even took root.
But whatever people talked about around campfires ten thousand years ago, their stories lived
on to become the same myths and legends we know today.
4.
The Evil Eye The curse of the evil eye is a cultural phenomenon
that exists across the world.
Back in the days of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, the evil eye was said to induce
insomnia, fatigue, diarrhea, and all kinds of other illnesses.
The evil eye could be used on a cow to make its milk dry up.
The evil eye could even make a fruit tree wither and die!
The curse of the evil eye is mentioned in the Bible, it can be found in the Koran, and
it's even in Shakespearean plays.
And yet it's not completely universal.
Even though belief in the evil eye was widespread in the ancient world, it wasn't everywhere.
In 1976, folklorist John Roberts did a cross cultural survey and discovered 36% of world
cultures believed in it.
In ancient India, children were thought to be especially susceptible to the curse of
the evil eye.
These days, it's still considered taboo to publicly praise a child because some people
believe it will draw the attention of the evil eye.
Parents of a praised child have even been known to ask the person who gave the compliment
to spit in the child's face just so the evil eye doesn’t notice them.
Do you believe in the evil eye?
Or did you grow up hearing about it?
Let me know in the comments below!
3.
Bes & the Devil The temple of the goddess Hathor at Dendera,
located on the western bank of the Nile in Egypt, dates back to around the 1st century
BC.
The temple is decorated with a lot of interesting reliefs, including a carved image of Queen
Cleopatra.
But there's one image at the temple significantly uglier than the supposedly beautiful Cleopatra.
It's a frightening character who appears in several different places, not only at this
temple but at others throughout Egypt and Europe.
The creature has a squat and stocky body, he kind of looks like a dwarf, and he has
a thick tongue that rolls down his chin.
His beard also ends in twisting spirals.
He has a tail between his legs, and his name is Bes.
He was an Egyptian deity associated with what some might think of as the good things in
life.
The Egyptians adored him because he represented adult affection, alcohol, music, and all the
things that would have been fun in the miserable days of the ancient world.
His likeness was put all throughout Egypt because he was believed to ward off evil spirits,
kind of like gargoyles at medieval churches.
The people loved him because he represented what was basically a gluttonous, fun-loving
lifestyle.
But here's the thing.
Some scholars believe Bes became the foundation for the European representation of the devil.
His popularity spread out from Egypt and into Mediterranean societies.
In the first millennium, the Phoenicians and the Romans were lovers of Bes.
People even had his face tattooed near their private areas as an attempt to ward off sexually
transmitted diseases.
Yikes.
Now, when gods like Bes began to lose their popularity, they didn't lose their relevance.
The goddess Isis and her son Horus were some of the earliest representations of the Virgin
and the Child in Christian iconography – and Bes transformed into the devil.
When you see the fork-tongued demon in Christian artwork, know that they stole the idea from
the much more ancient, and much-more fun loving Bes.
2.
Ancient Music In the 1930s in England, archaeologists came
across one of the most spectacular burial mounds ever found.
It dates back to the medieval times, to the 7th century.
We know it today as the Sutton Hoo archaeological site.
It contained a huge ship that was buried underneath the ground and used as a burial chamber, filled
full of treasures.
The ship was massive, over 75 feet(23 m) long.
Thousands of artifacts were excavated from it, including a lyre.
It was the first time a musical instrument from the days of the Anglo-Saxons was discovered
and it was a massive breakthrough.
But here's something interesting.
At an archaeological dig in the southwest of Kazakhstan, archaeologists found a lyre
from the 4th century, about 300 years before the lyre at Sutton Hoo.
The musical instrument was studied by scholar Dr. Gjermund Kolltveit from Norway, who says
it's practically identical to the lyre from Sutton Hoo!
Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, located beneath Siberia, beside Mongolia, and above Kyrgyzstan.
It's about as far as a person can get from England, and so it makes no sense that the
lyres could have anything to do with one another.
Yet they are basically identical.
It’s bizarre because it means despite the distance, the cultures in these two very different
places managed to dream up one of the first musical instruments in the world, crafting
their own versions with shocking similarity.
1.
Egypt & China Even though the ancient Egyptians and the
ancient Chinese never had any communication with one another, they still had an awful
lot of stuff in common.
In fact, the primitive cultures in each region were shockingly similar, specifically with
their creations.
Let’s take a snaffle for example, a mouthpiece made of bronze that was used to help horse
riders steer their animals either left or right.
It was an ingenious invention.
One of them was found in Egypt dating back to 1200 BC, with another found in China dated
to around the same time.
It's weird because both civilizations invented the same solution to the same problem at roughly
the exact same time.
And yet nobody had ever traveled from China to Egypt 3000 years ago.
Archaeological excavations in these countries have revealed that both cultures kept dogs
as pets.
The earliest cities in China and Egypt used the same kinds of simple dwellings.
They both used the same tools for washing.
The only difference was how they decorated their stuff.
They had extremely similar beliefs and nearly identical structures and tools, but their
styles were different.
Each culture was unique, there's no arguing that.
It's just that they both created virtually the same things at the same time and archaeologists
don't understand how.
Really, how could they have had so many of the same ideas with no contact?
Thanks for watching!
Which one of these cultural coincidences shocked you the most?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and for more great stuff, remember to subscribe
and check back soon!
See you then, bye! :)