10.
Terracotta Army Surface Chromium Going on four decades now, scientists have
held the belief that 2000 years ago, the Chinese developed a highly advanced chromate conversion
technology for preventing metal corrosion.
It all has to do with the legendary Terracotta Army, discovered in the tomb of the first
Chinese emperor.
Because when researchers looked at the bronze weapons buried with the warriors, they found
traces of chromium, which they believed was responsible for the preservation of the weapons.
But that’s not the case at all.
A recent analysis of the weapons and the soil from the tomb revealed that there was no chromium
on the weapons.
It all came from the soil itself!
This means the Chinese did not come up with a superior anti-rust treatment after all.
The only reason these weapons are so well preserved after being buried for over 2000
years is because of moderately alkaline pH levels in the soil.
It's natural, not some wild invention from the Chinese.
Still, the Terracotta Army isn't without its mystery.
This fantastic army of life-sized ceramic figures was discovered in three gigantic pits
completely by accident, buried in the mausoleum of Qin Shihuang.
He was the first emperor of unified China, living between 259 and 210 BC.
And while over 2000 ceramic warriors have been found already, scientists believe there
could be thousands more.
They just haven’t found them yet.
There is also the mystery of the remains of the emperor himself.
They still haven't been found and the government is making sure that nobody disturbs his peace
since after all, it is a sacred site!
9.
The Barabar Caves The Barabar Hill Caves are considered the
oldest surviving man-made caves in India.
And that's saying something considering how ancient the subcontinent is and how much history
is hidden across its majestic mountains and valleys.
The Barabar Caves date back to about 322 BC, at the beginning of the Maurya Empire.
They can be found today in Jehanabad, which is near the major town of Gaya.
The region has several caves.
There's the Lomas Rishi Cave with its impressive arch and the exquisitely carved elephants
in the doorway.
There's the Sudama Cave which was dedicated to the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka in 261
BC.
The Karan Chaupar Cave was dug out of the earth specifically to house Buddhist monks.
There’s been no evidence found that monks actually lived here, and there has been little
evidence found that anyone lived in any of the caves.
One of the weirdest things about the caves here is that most aren't actually finished
and none of them seems to have had many purposes.
It was a lot of work to make these caves by hand, then to just give up before they were
finished and leave them empty.
Scientists do not know what Ashoka was thinking when he commissioned the caves.
8.
The Mysterious Sword Inscription A sword from the 13th century was pulled out
of the River Witham in the United Kingdom back in 1825.
The British Museum houses it and looks pretty ordinary at first sight.
The sword weighs only two pounds.
It was made of raw steel, double-edged, and with a hilt shaped like a cross.
But the design of the sword isn’t what has scientists stumped.
It's the inscription made on the blade in gold wire, inlaid directly in the steel.
The inscription has never been deciphered.
It's a random group of letters that appears to have no meaning at all.
According to the British Library, the code is completely incomprehensible.
Nobody knows if it's a magical incantation that was supposed to imbue the wielder of
the weapon with mystical abilities.
They don't know if it was meant as a religious blessing, or simply the signature of the master
forger who created the weapon.
For over a hundred years, this inscription has mystified researchers and stumped even
the most skilled code breakers.
What does this odd group of letters mean?
Nobody knows for sure, but the British Library recently posted information about the weapon
on its website, along with an invitation for readers to help crack the apparently unbreakable
code.
What do you think the code could be?
Let me know in the comments.
7.
The Megaliths of the Yangshan Quarry In the year 1405, Emperor Zhu Di ruled the
Ming Dynasty.
He had just taken the throne from his father, the founder, Zhu Yuanjing.
Because the new emperor wanted to celebrate his father in the grandest way possible, he
built the most impressive mausoleum that China had ever seen.
And so, he invited thousands of the best craftsmen from all over China to come and put their
skills to the test.
The craftsman put together three enormous rectangular pieces that were supposed to be
used for the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum.
But these enormous megalithic blocks were too big to be connected, or even transported
to the site of the actual mausoleum.
And so, the whole thing was a wash.
The giant pieces of rock were abandoned right there at the quarry, and they’ve just kind
of sat undisturbed for 600 years.
But here's where we get to the unexplainable part.
Researchers are confused because they don't think the ancient Chinese would have carved
such giant blocks of stone if they hadn't thought they could transport them to the tomb
of the emperor.
There's just no way they wouldn't have known beforehand that the rocks would be too heavy.
The stones were carved with incredible precision.
Very smooth walls, no evidence of chisel marks, as if they had been cut using lasers.
This has caused some experts to speculate that these rocks may have had nothing to do
with the mausoleum, and may have been an abandoned project by somebody with some serious technology.
And in another weird coincidence, one of the largest stones at the Yangshan Quarry supposedly
points directly at Teotihuacan on the other side of the world like a big gray arrow.
6.
The Mystery of the Celtic Wood On October 9, 1917, 85 Australian soldiers
marched into a Celtic wood in Belgium’s West Flanders.
Almost none of them came back out, and to this day, nobody knows exactly what happened
inside that forest.
It was here in Belgium where some of the worst combat in WWI took place.
The landscape had been torn apart by shelling, the fertile fields had been reduced to a scorched
wasteland, and in October the rain had turned the place into a muddy swamp.
The Australian men of the 10th Battalion were selected to go into the forest and perform
a raid on the German position.
Those 85 soldiers marched into the fog of the forest and only 14 came back.
According to Charles Bean, an Australian historian who wrote about the war in 1917, those 70
Australian soldiers were never found.
They went into the forest expecting to take on the Germans, but were seemingly swallowed
by the mist and evaporated.
They weren't taken as prisoners, their bodies were never found, and their 14 surviving comrades
couldn’t explain what happened after they walked into the woods.
Some say the soldiers were massacred and their bodies disposed of.
However, there's no record of it, not even from German sources.
So far as we know, those men never even made it to the Germans.
It's one of the biggest mysteries, if not the greatest mystery, of all of WWI.
If the bones of the missing men of the 10th Battalion do show up, they would not only
offer a huge missing piece of the puzzle but it will also give their souls some much-deserved
rest.
5.
The Floating Shiva Temple 900 years ago, the kings of the Palampet area
of Warangal, in what is modern India, commissioned the construction of what was to be a truly
inspiring temple.
This turned out to be the Ramappa Stapathi, one of the few temples in the entire south,
actually named after its architect.
The medieval temple was built surrounded by other smaller temples, all of them dedicated
to various Hindu deities, but mostly Shiva.
What’s so interesting today is that the temple was made out of floating bricks!
Of course, these bricks can't hover in midair.
But what they can do is float on water!
The temple was constructed using some extremely impressive technology, considering the time
and place.
It allegedly took 40 years to build, between 1173 and 1213 AD.
The temple was built over an enormous platform of sandstone, with sand filled in underneath
it as a kind of shock absorber in the case of an earthquake.
The bricks themselves were made of clay mixed with acacia wood and a type of fruit called
myrobalan, which gave them a lower density than water.
But it doesn’t end there.
The builders also employed special granite pillars on the outside that reflect light
into the inner sanctum, keeping it bright inside all day no matter where the sun is.
It’s a unique temple because of this advanced technology, and nobody is exactly sure how
they came up with it, especially the floating bricks.
4.
The Herxheim Ritual Site The Herxheim Archaeological site in Germany
has been picked apart since the 1990s.
Despite that, scientists don’t know exactly what to make of it.
A considerable number of human skeletons were found here, and not a single one of them was
ordinary.
At least 500 human remains have been discovered, each one with proof of a deformity, or broken
in some mysterious way.
These weren't normal burials, and experts believe there could be over 1000 individuals
inside the ground here who have yet to be found.
It's mind-boggling because so many bodies couldn't have possibly come from the small
villages in the area.
The site is at least 7000 years old.
Settlements in this region were tiny, maybe with a dozen families each.
And yet hundreds of victims were thrown into this pit, all of them with evidence that they
had been gruesomely butchered!
Archaeologists aren't sure what to think, but they do have one rather disturbing theory.
Scientists say the villagers here may have practiced cannibalism, and that the dead people
in the pit were prisoners, slaves, or abducted from outside their villages.
They were then brought to Herxheim, ritually sacrificed, and then consumed in bloody ceremonies.
This hypothesis comes from the fact that many of the skeletons show the exact same markings
as animals that were butchered to be eaten.
But of course, this is just a theory right now and scientists don’t know for sure the
extent of carnage that happened here.
3.
The Robot God 2000 years ago, in Greek mythology, there
was an extremely odd story about a robot god named Talos.
According to the legends, Talos was an automaton, an artificial life form with advanced intelligence
crafted by Zeus himself from Mount Olympus.
Zeus was helped by the god of the forge, Hephaestus, and together they made a construct of bronze.
This living machine had a single vein that ran from his neck all the way down to his
ankles and kept him alive using a special liquid metal for lifeblood.
And upon each ankle was a special bolt that prevented this miraculous liquid from leaking
out and causing the destruction of the great automaton.
This is fascinating for a lot of reasons.
The robot god was mentioned first around 700 BC.
That’s about 2700 years ago.
And in the years that followed, he actually became pretty popular.
Talos can be found on coins, in ancient paintings, and even portrayed with an enormous set of
wings, like some kind of big bronze angel.
Most historians agree Talos was the invention of some extremely creative writer in Greece.
But some wonder if the idea wasn't rooted more firmly in reality.
What I mean is that Talos sounds an awful lot like a real machine.
A bronze outside coating, hydraulic hoses running from his head to his toes, supplying
his systems with oil.
It’s almost as if the Greeks actually happened upon some big mechanical man, perhaps brought
down from the heavens by visitors from outer space.
But since they didn't know exactly what to make of a mechanical being almost 3000 years
ago, they simply described him as a mythical deity, and he faded into the obscurity of
legend.
What do you think?
2.
Castilly Henge A very rare stone circle has just been discovered
in England, a prehistoric henge in Cornwall that had somehow gone unnoticed until last
year!
It's being called Castilly Henge, and it's very strange because it's shaped like a horseshoe
instead of a circle like most henges.
Back in 2021, overgrown vegetation was removed from the site to reveal the imprint of where
this impressive monument had once stood.
There isn't any evidence of it left except the marks on the ground, looking like an enormous
horse had left its footprint there.
Researchers had to use ground-penetrating radar to bring the site back to life, discovering
the seven points where its megalithic stones would have been standing thousands of years
ago.
The horseshoe-shaped henge is 225 feet (68m) long and about 205 feet (62m) wide, that's
around half the size of a soccer field.
British researchers believe it was created around the year 2700 BC, around the time the
inhabitants of the island had just figured out how to farm grains.
Sadly, the henge is just as mysterious as the hundreds of others scattered across Britain
and Ireland.
It was probably used for some kind of ritual, but then again, it might have been an ancient
observatory.
It's a genuine mystery, especially since all the enormous stones that once composed the
structure are nowhere to be seen.
They're just gone as if they’d never been there at all.
1.
What Happened to the Three Brothers Jewel?
One of the most enduring mysteries from medieval Europe has to do with a very rare and precious
jewel.
It's called the Three Brothers Jewel, and its earliest mention in history dates back
to 1419.
The jewel consisted of three massive pearls in a pyramid shape, each one carved in a large
rectangle.
There were also four other circular pearls attached to the jewel, making it a truly impressive
artifact.
We know that in 1467 this jewel was inherited by Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy.
He carried the jewel with him up until he was defeated by the Swiss at the Battle of
Grandson in 1476.
According to legend, his precious talisman was stolen from his tent in the middle of
the night, then made its way to the Magistrate of Berne.
In 1504, the jewel was sold.
It was sold again to King Henry VIII, passed to his successor Edward VI, and then finally
stashed in the royal treasury for safekeeping.
The jewel was taken from the treasury in 1554 and given to Mary I when she married Philip
II of Spain.
Basically, this thing jumped from one English monarch to the next.
It was worn by Elizabeth I in 1585.
And it wound up in the Tower of London in 1623.
By 1626 it was in the Netherlands, and shortly after pawned in Rotterdam.
And that was where the saga of this mysterious jewel ended.
After 1650, it was never seen again.
After 200 years of being worn by the kings and queens of England, it was just gone.
To this day, nobody knows where the beautiful jewel is.
What do you think happened to the Three Brother Jewel?
Let me know any theories you have in the comments and be sure to hit that subscribe button if
you haven’t yet.
Thanks for watching and come back soon for more fascinating videos!
See you, bye!