@sS, it's an experience with rides, apparently, check it out

@Indy, see how insidious it is? You start thinking about Nazca lines and then before you know it youre actually reading Chariots of the Gods and thinking "hmmm i never thought of it like that.."

The reality is that there truly are mysteries regarding early human history and tantalising clues to sophisticated devices and advanced knowledge of mathematics and science that are difficult to explain away. The Great Pyramid really does align to the cardinal points of the compass with a degree of precision that is hard to match even today. It also sits on the line of latitude that covers more land surface than any other. The mathematical ratios used in it's building are such that even empirically the Ancient Egyptians must have knowledge of pi, squares roots and trigonometry, several thousand years before the Greeks. And the Pyramid site at Gizeh is far older than ahs been credited, the Sphinx complex well predates the Pyramids, the Sphinx itself may be up to 3500yrs older than the Pyramids, making Egyptian history go much farther back than is generally believed (the vertcial erosion on the Sphinx is caused by falling water and by that and ice-core samples from the Antarctic show that Egypt's climate wasn't wet enough for that kind of precipitation unless you went back 3500yrs to when the Sahara was grassland)

Also, there are 3 large ocean-going barges in tombs around the Pyramid complex, in near perfect nick. wtf do you want a barge in the desert for? unlike the things we know chugged up and down the Nile (and still do) these aren't flimsy inland waterway things for royalty to lounge around on, these are proper ships which could have sailed round the world, huge they are. Simply saying "its a religious thing to do with the afterlife" is copping out, especially when you consider that the earliest Egyptian histories are all to do with their founders being saved and carried to them by water.

Unfortunately, ridiculous obsessions with aliens, Atlantis, and bible-thumpers mean that all this is obscured by nutters and so it loses any intellectual credence. But there are genuine questions that need investigating. unf EvD's rot continues to cast a shadow over real research.

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...there are squillions of fools...

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Squillions, ey? Good one Taw

So this dude is just ripping real mysteries... and then messes them up and says that he found em'? What a j*rk. Do i got it right?

pretty much. he also downright makes stuff up. still he makes a tidy living out of it, unlike real historians and archaeologists

@Taw - cc: Locutus

I meant the real line on what is thought about the Nasca lines. I've never bought the EvD message to space aliens story. I was wondering if anyone has worked out whether there was any "obvious" in the sense of if you dig about a bit you'll find it candidate of explanation.

You and Locutus dance around this pre-history civilization stuff quite a bit but never go beyond mentioning it in tangential areas. At the same time, you've just dismissed Atlantis. I assume you do so as Atlantis, the legend, does not place itself chronologically in the right frame with what you've mentioned or what Loc has mentioned..... although.... and no offense Loc but..... the references you have made of these things tends to make me think of mumbo jumbo things.

Either of you care to start a thread to pursue this

it's a big subject, ok? it's reallyhard to discuss and not let it wander off into the lunatic fringe. Besides which, a lot of the evidence is circumstantial and on it's own means sod all, but put together sensibly it becomes quite convincing.

My dear friend Locutus and I do share a similar interest in this but he waxes more on the mystical side, I'm interested in the chronologies and tying missing pieces together.

Atlantis - i dismiss the popular conception of Atlantis, true, because it's sh*te. But something really did happen. to cut a long story short, i think the Atlantis story we have now (the actual source in Plato's Timaeus) is a syncretic legend which is sevral different strands of legend/history that got mixed up. plato relates the tale as told him by a family tradition of one of his ancestors weho visited Egypt and got the story off an Egyptian priest who himself was retelling an oral tradition.

We know that there was some sort of Flood/Deluge. We know there were devasting volcanic eruptions. We know that for a long time there was a dark age where little was recorded, land went out of cultivation, civilisation declined, petty wars were endemic. basically all thes e strands got mixed up later on in different civilisations hence why you have the same stories told different ways all across the Eurasian world. hell if you look hard enough at the Plato source you'll see half of it's just a retelling of the Iliad! even poor old Plato got confused (thats why he cuts the story dead)

I would like to believe that prior to the last ice age there was an advanced civilisation (not necessarily as advanced as us, and def. not aliens) somewhere in the Indian Ocean region that preserved much of its knowledge from natural disaster bu disseminating it to primitive cultures in the Middle-Eastern region, notably Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. this elegantly deals with several major problems as to the origins of early civ and explains the sudden dev of hieroglyphics from apparently nowhere, and accounts for the obsessive secrecy and curiously powerful knowledge of Egypts preiests. Howvere there is no actual eveidence for this at all. But the problems remain all the same.

i think its safe to say that human history is a lot older than given credit for, and that chronolgies need to be heavily revised. the ancient world knew far more about mechanics, time, energy and the nature of the universe than we generally give them credit for, something we should be proud of, as it shows how clever humans can be even in primitive societies. there's no doubt that there was/is a body of esoteric scientific knowledge that was practiced but kept secret from the masses and was held in common by a variety of civilisations and cultures. unf by its very nature we only have glimpses of it, and then through second hand sources.

but no aliens.

as far as the Naca lines go, this imho is much the same phenomena as our own chalk figures. almost every culture put sit gods in the sky; and not all the Nasca shapes are viewed from above anyway, some are on the sides of mountains. Its quite possible that what developed was not one big project but an accumulation over the years of paths between shrines, dousing lines for water which was a scarcity) and guidelines for traders, which eventually gained a significance all their own. Again, no aliens, and not even any superscience. Nothing that can't be done with sticks and string and something to draw on.

tbh the Nasca lines don't actually interest me that much. there are however other pre-Columbian mysteries in the New World that are more intriguing to me, like the Thunderbird/Quetzacoatl, and the "Giants" of the N.American interior, and the mysterious metal deposits at the interesection of ley lines found by Mason & Dixon.

but not Bigfoot as i know he lives with the Hendersons now.

sorry about the typos, i've lost me specs and I'm as blind as a bat without em.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/7/2004 5:23:15 AM

Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/7/2004 6:04:37 AM

@Taw,

You mean the flood legends, for example? Gilgamesh, etc.? The actual age of the Mediterranean in its current iteration? The Black Sea and all that?

I'm not so clear on your note of something in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Isn't there a techtonic ridge that runs in the middle of it that's many millions of years old? Hard to imagine a land mass existed there that would have had a surface that matured for long enough to support an ecosystem that would include human settlement.

errr yeah that's the tricky part, which is why i said "like to believe" although to be fair as sea levels were a lot lower in the past, "land mass" might have been no more than just some big islands since inundated, a process which is going on today. That's pure speculation on my part btw and i don't expect anyone to go with it, I haven't even convinced myself yet. it's just that the Indian Ocean fits geographically for this hypothesis. told you it was all circumstantial

i was talking about the Flood legends partly. Unfortunately with these really old myths and legends they get pretty mixed up with each other. Which flood is being talked about at any one time? Does the Epic of Gilgamesh refer to the inundation of the Black sea, or the not-uncommon flooding of the Mesopotamian plain? Which one does the story of Noah refer to? What about Deucalion & Pyrrha? Do they all refer to one original mass destruction by water, or different ones at different times? then of course there is a completely separate "Flood from Heaven" which is synchronous with the fall of Troy and the start of the Achaian Dark Ages.

About time i came clean about this anyway - I'm talking about the Lost Continent of Mu, which has always interested me. Not Atlantis or Lemuria but Mu, Mother of All the People. OK there's loads of rubbish churned out about it and the Nazis didn't help, and I don't believe all that Thule Gesellschaft drivel either, but I think there's some mileage in Mu.

here's a brief and colourful introduction, i don't actually agree with this guy much but he does cover the basic ground even if he is a bit of a t*sser

Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/7/2004 1:45:29 PM

@Taw

Thanks for the link. Uh. This stuff is too nebulous for me I am sorry to say. I am having difficulty tracking the timing. e.g. There were no dinosaurs 10 to 12 thousand years ago... obviously person mentioning the same wasn't up on the paleontological record.... etc., etc. You're right, its a big subject but also a very thin one.... chasing whisps and vapors it seems.

At least EvD's name didn't show up, thank goodness.

I just read that rubbish by E. Velikovsky again, "Worlds in Collision" just to see how seductive this stuff is. When you read it, it's so well done and quite convincing even though the other half of your brain is saying "this is drivel, put it down and go and do something useful."

it really is a load of waffle, but there IS something behind it. ut you can spend a lifetime chasing this stuff down and come to no conclusion whatsoever. Graham Hancock did a good job on the Ark of the Covenant in "Sign and the Seal" which I've got to admit has me reasonably convinced athough some his leaps of logic and assumptions really stick in me craw.

but so much of this stuff is nebulous fantasy and wild leaps and made-up facts and wishful thinking.