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Title: 10 Recently Deciphered Ancient Writings
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URL Source: http://listverse.com/2016/05/15/10- ... y-deciphered-ancient-writings/
Published: May 15, 2016
Author: Jana Louise Smit
Post Date: 2016-05-15 18:24:07 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 656
Comments: 9
The ancients recorded their knowledge on scrolls, artifacts, and even cave walls. In some cases, the passage of time has erases our ability to understand a disused alphabet. In other cases, knowledge is purposely encrypted in complex codes understood by only a select (and long dead) few. There are many such ancient writings, pictographs, and ciphers that still defy understanding. Whenever one is cracked, it almost always yields exciting new information. Here are 10 decoded books, paintings, scrolls, and artifacts that allow us an unprecedented glimpse into the secret societies, lost libraries, beliefs, and rituals of Antiquity.
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#3. To: Ada (#0)
Once you've got us in a site like that, clicking for more lists is inexorable -- "no one can eat just one". We or I had talked about how it was water supply vs population that destroyed Angkor Wat, and get this re a place closer to home: About 1,000 years ago, Cahokia was North America’s greatest city, composed of 120 mounds spread out over 15 square kilometers (6 mi2) of the mighty Mississippi-adjacent floodplain. At one point, the city boasted a population of 20,000, larger than that of London and other prominent European centers. Some estimates place an even more impressive 40,000 inhabitants within its ancient city limits. The settlement flourished until about 600–700 years ago when its population— already in decline and reeling from the political struggles inherent to all civilizations—was apparently decimated by some mysterious natural disaster. Now it appears that a series of megafloods was to blame. The discovery was somewhat accidental. Researchers were dredging up sediment from Horseshoe Lake near the city’s epicenter. They were in search of fossilized remains, artifacts, and pollen to gauge the extent of human activity at Cahokia. Instead, they found evidence for numerous past flooding events, which regularly occurred before Cahokia was founded. The floods took a hiatus and then returned with a vengeance around the time that the population declined. Therefore, the city’s great riparian lifeline, which ensured its existence, guaranteed its downfall as well. http://listverse.com/2015/12/22/mysteries-of-the-ancient-world-weve-just- awesomely-solved/ Cahokia is fascinating. Wouldn't it be great to be able to travel back to its heyday for 15 minutes?
Even today its not wise to build on a flood plain; yet the temptation eventually becomes too great.
Listverse addiction -- please release me, let me go!! The mystery of how Romans concocted their famous concrete may have finally been solved by Campi Flegrei, an intermittently dormant volcano under the ancient city of Pouzzoli, which was established by Greek adventurers in 600 BC. In 1982, the inferno came back to life, bubbling its way toward the surface. Within just two years, the ground rose 2 meters (6 ft), making the currently shallow pier almost useless, before a procession of small earthquakes forced an evacuation of Pouzzoli’s 40,000 denizens. Yet, curiously, the volcano did not blow historic Pouzzoli sky- high.Examining why this was so, former resident Tiziana Vanorio—now an experimental geophysicist at Stanford—might have inadvertently solved an age-old mystery.Churning beneath the doomed city, a witch’s brew of hot, mineral-rich waters produces calcium hydroxide (aka hydrated lime). The upwardly bubbling lime combined with ash to create a natural concrete that plugged the caldera, averting a volcanic eruption as gases and fluids vented through cracks in the ductile crust. The concrete formed there is so similar to that in Roman constructions that some clever observer must have noticed that the mixture of local ash and earthen sludge yielded this incredibly tough material. Mining volcanic outflows is dangerous business, so the Romans supplied their own lime to make their concrete.
Might be the volcanic sand. www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/researchers-discover-secret-recipe-roman-concrete-020141
#8. To: Ada (#7)
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/196957-2016-05-15-the-underwater- archaeologist-who-surfaced-not-one-but-two-ancient.htm
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#4. To: NeoconsNailed (#3)
the city’s great riparian lifeline, which ensured its existence, guaranteed its downfall as well.
#6. To: Ada (#4)
#7. To: NeoconsNailed (#6)
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