Category
Ancient & Historical Mysteries
Antikythera, Voynich, Göbekli Tepe. The deep past still has secrets.
8 articles
The Antikythera Mechanism: The Ancient Greek Computer
In 1901, Greek sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the tiny island of Antikythera, between Crete and the Peloponnese, stumbled on the wreck of an ancient ship laden with bronze and marble statues, glassware, and coins — a Roman-era cargo of Greek treasures that had gone down around the first century BCE. Among the finds hauled to the surface and shipped to Athens was an unpromising, shoebox-sized lump of corroded bronze and rotted wood, easily overlooked beside the museum's new statues. Months later, an archaeologist noticed something impossible protruding from it: a precisely cut gear wheel. Over the following century, X-rays and then advanced computed tomography would reveal that this lump was the wreckage of a hand-cranked mechanical device containing dozens of finely toothed bronze gears — an astronomical calculator that modeled the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets, predicted eclipses, and tracked the cycles of the Greek calendar and the Olympic Games. Nothing of remotely comparable complexity is known to have existed for well over a thousand years afterward. The Antikythera Mechanism is not a hoax, not a fantasy, and — despite the claims of some — not evidence of anything from beyond the Earth. It is something stranger and more moving: a genuine artifact of ancient Greek genius, and a window onto a world of knowledge that was very nearly lost forever. This is its story.
The Moai of Easter Island: The Statues That Walked
Rapa Nui — Easter Island — is one of the loneliest places inhabited by human beings, a small volcanic triangle in the southeastern Pacific more than three thousand kilometres from the coast of Chile and some two thousand from the nearest inhabited island. On this remote speck of land, a Polynesian society created one of the most recognisable bodies of monumental art in the world: the moai, nearly a thousand colossal stone figures, carved from volcanic rock and raised on stone platforms to gaze inland over the people they were made to protect. For centuries, outsiders looked at these statues on their treeless island and asked how so 'primitive' a people could have made and moved them — a question that led, at its worst, to fantasies of lost continents and ancient astronauts, and, more insidiously, to a powerful modern morality tale in which the islanders supposedly destroyed their own environment, felled their last tree to haul their idols, and collapsed into famine and war: a cautionary fable of self-inflicted ecological ruin. Both the wonder and the warning turn out to be built on misunderstanding. The moai are unmistakably the work of the Rapanui themselves; recent experiments suggest they were 'walked' upright to their platforms, exactly as island tradition always said; and the story of ecological suicide has been steadily dismantled, revealing instead a resilient people whose real catastrophe came not from within but from the arrival of outsiders. This is the story of the statues that walked.
Göbekli Tepe: The Temple That Rewrote Prehistory
On a limestone ridge overlooking the plains of southeastern Turkey, near the ancient city of Urfa, stands a place that forced archaeologists to rewrite the earliest chapter of the human story. Göbekli Tepe — the name means 'Potbelly Hill' in Turkish — is a complex of great circular enclosures built from massive T-shaped stone pillars, some more than five metres tall and weighing many tons, many of them carved in relief with foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions, vultures, and other animals. It is staggeringly old. Radiocarbon dating places its construction to around 9500 BCE and earlier, making it roughly eleven and a half thousand years old — some six thousand years older than Stonehenge and seven thousand older than the Great Pyramid. What made the discovery revolutionary was not merely its age but who built it: not a settled society of farmers with cities and kings, but hunter-gatherers, people without pottery, without metal, without the wheel, and without — at least at first — agriculture itself. The prevailing wisdom had long held that monumental architecture was a product of civilisation, something only settled, food-producing societies could afford. Göbekli Tepe stood that assumption on its head, and suggested that the impulse to gather and build something great may have come first. It is a genuine mystery — but a mystery of human achievement, not of lost super-civilisations or visitors from the stars. This is the story of the temple that rewrote prehistory.
The Great Pyramid of Giza: How It Was Really Built
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing, and the most famous building humanity has ever made. Raised around 2560 BCE on the Giza plateau outside modern Cairo as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu, it rose to a height of some 146 metres, built from roughly 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing, on average, over two tonnes each — and it remained the tallest human-made structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years. Its scale, its precision, and its antiquity have made it a screen for every kind of speculation: that it was built by slaves cracking under the lash, or could not have been built by ancient Egyptians at all; that it encodes the mathematical constant pi, the dimensions of the Earth, and prophecies of the future; that it was a power plant, a beacon, or a monument raised with the help of visitors from the stars. Almost none of this is true, and the strangest thing about the Great Pyramid is that the real story of how it was built — recovered from the workers' own village, their cemeteries, the quarries, and even a four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old logbook kept by one of the men who supplied it — is more remarkable than any fantasy. It was built by Egyptians: skilled, paid, well-fed, superbly organised Egyptians, working with copper, stone, timber, rope, and an administrative genius that is the true marvel of the age. This is the story of how the Great Pyramid was really built.
The Nazca Lines: Giant Drawings in the Peruvian Desert
On the arid, wind-still plateau between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in southern Peru lies one of the most extraordinary bodies of ancient art on Earth: hundreds of vast figures and lines etched into the desert floor, so large that many are only fully legible from the air. There are straight lines running ruler-true for kilometres across the pampa; there are trapezoids, triangles, and spirals; and there are some seventy or more great biomorphic figures — a hummingbird, a monkey with a curling tail, a spider, a condor, a heron, a dog, a pair of hands, a flowering tree, and a humanoid figure on a hillside so often nicknamed 'the Astronaut.' They were made by the Nazca people, and by their Paracas predecessors, across roughly a thousand years around the start of the common era, by the simple and ingenious method of clearing away the dark, iron-stained stones of the desert surface to expose the paler ground beneath. Because it almost never rains here, and the wind barely stirs, the drawings have survived for two millennia. How they were made is, in fact, no mystery at all; the techniques are well within the reach of the people who made them, and required no view from the sky and certainly no help from beyond it. The genuine and unsolved question is why — what these enormous figures and lines were for. This is the story of the giant drawings in the desert.
Stonehenge: The Great Stone Circle of Salisbury Plain
On the open chalk downland of Salisbury Plain in southern England stands the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: a ring of enormous standing stones, some capped by level lintels, arranged with a precision that has drawn wonder and speculation for more than a thousand years. Stonehenge was not built in a day, or in a single lifetime, or by a single people. It grew over roughly fifteen hundred years, from about 3000 BCE, beginning as a simple circular earthwork and cremation cemetery and culminating, centuries later, in the great stone architecture we know — the towering sarsens quarried from the hills to the north, and the smaller 'bluestones' brought, astonishingly, some 150 miles overland from the mountains of west Wales. Its builders, working with antler picks, timber, rope, and muscle, dressed the stones with woodworking joints translated into rock, raised lintels weighing tonnes onto uprights, and aligned the whole monument to the rising and setting of the sun at the solstices. For centuries, outsiders credited the achievement to anyone but the people who actually managed it — to Merlin and giants, to Druids, and in our own age to visitors from the stars. The truth is that Stonehenge is the work of prehistoric Britons of extraordinary skill and organisation. How they built it, we largely understand. Why they built it is a question we are still, carefully, trying to answer. This is the story of the great stone circle.
Roanoke: The Lost Colony and the Word Carved in the Post
In 1587, more than a hundred English men, women, and children were left on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina, to build the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. They were a civilian colony, families intending to make new lives, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh and governed by an artist named John White, whose own daughter and infant granddaughter — Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World — were among them. Soon after their arrival, beset by hardship and conflict, the colonists persuaded White to sail back to England for supplies and reinforcements. He intended to return within months. Instead, war with Spain and the crisis of the Armada kept him from crossing the Atlantic for nearly three years. When White at last set foot on Roanoke again in August 1590, on what would have been his granddaughter's third birthday, the colony was gone. The houses had been taken down in orderly fashion, the site enclosed by a palisade, and there was no sign of the people — no bodies, no battle, no clear distress. The only clue was a single word, carved into one of the posts: CROATOAN, the name of a nearby island and of the friendly Native people who lived there. White took it as a message that the colonists had relocated, but a storm prevented him from sailing to find them, and he was forced to leave without ever learning their fate. He never saw his family again. For more than four centuries the disappearance of the Roanoke colonists has been one of the most haunting mysteries in American history. This is the story of the Lost Colony and the word carved in the post.
The Voynich Manuscript
Sometime between 1404 and 1438 — the period to which the University of Arizona's accelerator mass spectrometry laboratory carbon-dated four samples of its vellum in 2009 — someone, almost certainly in northern Italy, produced a 240-page illustrated manuscript in a script that no one before or since has been able to read. The codex is now held as MS 408 of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It is one of the most studied documents in existence. It has been examined by the leading cryptographers of two centuries — including the team at the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service that broke Japanese diplomatic codes in 1940 — and by the leading natural-language statisticians and machine-learning researchers of the present generation. Every claimed decipherment, of which there have been several dozen, has been rejected by the broader academic consensus. The script — colloquially 'Voynichese' — exhibits statistical patterns that resemble those of natural human languages while corresponding to no known language. The illustrations are recognizably medieval in style but depict, in their botanical sections, plants that match no identified species, and in their balneological sections, scenes of small naked female figures in green pools connected by what appear to be plumbing systems. The manuscript surfaced in the historical record in 1639 (a letter from a Bohemian alchemist to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher), disappeared again, and re-emerged in 1912 when the Polish-American bookseller Wilfrid Voynich purchased it from a Jesuit college near Rome. It has been at Yale since 1969. The Beinecke made it freely downloadable in 2020. The case file is mathematical, philological, and codicological. It is open in every sense.
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