Submitted by Mind-Matters-Not t3_z109pu in todayilearned
A friend of mine keeps saying the Aztecs built their temples on even older temples that even they had no idea who built. And apparently their writing say as much. Anyone got any sources to prove or disprove this.
This is often true of any major historical site. For the Aztecs and Mayans, they often built pyramids over/atop other (previous) smaller ones. Generally the site location is what was important; either a source of water, a spring, specific fault lines, etc.
The old saying about real estate was true even for them: Location, location, location!
Watched an interesting special on the great pyramid and they suggested the 'guts' of the structure is just fill sand and not the bricks laid on the outside. Since no one has really explored the interior besides the tunnels and burial chambers etc. Would make sense. I wonder if all pyramids were just basically fancy exteriors and sand interiors.
>The adobe brick pyramid stands 25 metres (82 ft)[3] above the surrounding plain, which is significantly shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza's height of 146.6 metres (481 ft), but much wider, measuring 300 by 315 metres (984 by 1,033 ft) in its final form,[3] compared to the Great Pyramid's base dimensions of 230.3 by 230.3 metres (756 by 756 ft).[4]
That's cool, but I think when most people think 'largest pyramid' they are probably thinking of height, not volume.
Girth is always under appreciated.
Ehhh, idk. “Tallest” obviously means height, but “largest?” I definitely thought of a wider base structure when I heard “largest.” But then again, I’ve seen some indigenous ruins during my travels so maybe I was already primed for that.
I liked Pratchett's comment on it. Something like, "It ends up that what cities are built on is mostly older cities."
Like matryoshka dolls?
I’d assume that in the long run the sand-filled ones will detoriate. At least I think they wouldn’t be able to maintain the steep angles of some of the prominent pyramids (gizeh)
Not in my house.
Yeah but "Giza" is a fuckload easier to say so...
This is true because there's tons of pyramids in Egypt that are completely falling apart and you just don't ever see them on TV. There's around 113 pyramids in Egypt and we typically only see the early ones, the later ones were constructed more cheaply and fell apart.
I would think so too, but it was an interesting theory....given how many blocks would have to be made and never seen on the interior....so just throw a bunch of whatever material you can find and coat it with those bricks. Plus it's not like they get a lot of rain there to eat away at it. Still something I wish I could go back and time and see how it was built. Why the hell am I getting downvoted?
They found something like 9 different "Cities of Troy" built right on top of each other dating back all the way to the early Bronze Age.
Thats pretty much Graham Hancocks argument in Ancient Apocalypse. Im pretty sure you can google and find some sources yourself...
I've been there. Went on a tour through the tunnels. That place was fascinating!
Ancient Apocalypse sounds interesting. I'm interested in the subject of pre-flood civilization. What could they have achieved. I wanna don't go off the deep end but like Atlantis and crystal tech. In the field of quantum science time crystals are becoming a real science. Basically perpetual motion engines. Wonder if the ancient could have achieved something similar. I watched a video over how the pyramid could have truly been a giant battery. They got down to the science of it. And it would have rung like a bell. Wonder what that coulda been used for. Link to real life time crystals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal?wprov=sfla1
Yup. A lot of churches were built over pagan temples when Christianity swept through the world. For the location and convenience mostly. Also, it would probably be easier to convince vikings to start adopting a radically different religion if going go church is as similar an experience as possible to going to whatever temple they used to have. The cynic in me imagines “dear vikings, come to our church, it’s where your temple used to be. We preach love and tolerance and we’re keeping things as “normal” as possible, we won’t tell you about eternal damnation until we’ve hooked you in with everlasting life in paradise” would be the best tactic.
Visocica in Bosnia and Rtanj in Serbia are literally confused for mountains.
Troy 6 or 7 is believed to be the Troy from the Trojan War & The Iliad.
It also helped to rebrand the holidays they already knew and practiced
Absolutely, I think that’s a part of keeping things “business as usual” as much as they can. Enticing or convincing someone is a lot easier if you do it bit by bit, rather than completely up-ending their view of the world in one fell swoop. You start with the positives, then you get to the negatives once they’re already pretty much on board.
It’s manipulative, but it’s also effective.
Tla-chihoo-ate-petl almost getting it.
New new York will happen, one day.
Because they are.
The most ridiculous part to me is that when the Spanish got to the site, all they saw was a religiously significant hill so they compulsively built a church right on top. So now there’s this awkward Spanish church on top of the excavated pyramid and they’re both historically significant so they have to share
"But it's wide girl!"
Newest Amsterdam
Cholula sauce is good, but I wouldn't built a pyramid or a temple dedicated to it.
For a lot of religions providing a schedule and set of meanings for holidays feasts and festivals is arguably more important to how followers interact with the religion than almost any other factor. Especially in an agricultural society where those holidays and festivals frequently serve to remind people when planting and harvest seasons are beginning and ending, which is why most religions following solar calendars tend to have a few holidays near solstices and equinoxes, and even with lunar or lunar-solar calendars like Hebrew you tend to get fairly close shots to that part of the solar year.
Nah. Semir Osmanagic already did his part to empirically overturn the religion of modern archeology with his work at Visocica. Modern archeology can only counter with ad hominem. Rtanj will be next. It’s amazing people still believe the granite at Giza was cut with copper chisels. Long past the time to break the chains of the Darwinian-Abrahamic-Google-Elon-Musk mind prison.
The Pyramid at Giza is the tallest pyramid in the world, however. It stands at 146.6 metres tall as opposed to the Pyramid at Cholula's 25 metre height.
Interestingly, the stigma against eating horse meat in European culture actually came to be as it was considered a delicacy with religious connotations among various pagan peoples in Europe (if I recall correctly - can’t be fucked to google that). So instead of co-opting the horse meat tradition it instead became shunned, in contrast to many other traditions which were integrated into Christianity
Why don’t you study to become a scientist if you believe in all of this interesting stuff?
Christianity in a nutshell. Jesus' birthday was moved from summer to the end of December so it could co-opt the practices of Saturnalia, while most early Scandinavian churches were built at sites that were considered to be sacred in Norse mythology. The ability to adapt to and utilize local practices as so to make its own teachings and methods more palatable is one of the main reasons why Christianity is the world's most popular religion.
Hmm ... it's a good start. Uh, yeah, it's definitely big alright. I just wonder if it's too big, y'know? I mean, are people gonna be remembering me or the pyramid?
> the granite at Giza was cut with copper chisels
That's not something that archaeologists are generally arguing for though.
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Watched it but his premise is wrong.
Capitalism is wrong lmao
Yes. An Amazon warehouse might be larger in volume, but not as impressive as a skyscraper
Not your fault, but definitely some misinformation here. I started down this rabbit hole by calculating the volume based on the dimensions you provided. Doing so shows Giza having a significantly larger volume (2.6 million cubic meters compared to 0.79 million for Cholula). Checking references on Wikipedia reveals that the “largest” claim is based on the overall complex and not on the pyramid itself. So saying “largest archaeological site of a pyramid” is correct but “largest pyramid by volume” is not.
TIL Giza pyramid is still the largest. Thank you!!!!
Well no shit, no-one's watching it because they believe him lmao
I'm not watching it expecting holy writ but the dating on these monolithic structures is interesting.
Netflix documentaries are a bit American for my liking though. Short bits of high attention extreme theories, spoon fed
I visited the great pyramid of Cholula. My friend and I woke up so hungover and made it to the lobby couch of our hotel where we passed out again. Eventually we wake up to our cab driver calling our names. We forgot we arranged him to come take us to the pyramid on our day off. We muster up the courage to go, stopping at a pharmacia along the way to get some meds. We get dropped off near the base of the pyramid and my friend immediately tells me he's gotta find a place to puke.
We find an outdoor washroom, each stall has a shower curtain as a door and you have to pay some pesos to get in. My friend pays the man who stands outside his shower curtain the entire time he pukes. Part way through puking, gun shots erupt, terrifying. Except these were not gun shots, they were fireworks from a top the pyramid, I can only imagine my friend's feelings at this moment.
We embark up the very long path of the pyramid, the air feels great and gets better the higher we go, helping with our hangover. We get to the top and there's a Spanish church there. Apparently the Spanish buried the entire pyramid and built a church a top to rid the original culture. We also paid a few pesos to go through the tunnels where you can actually see some of the buried pyramid. Outside the stones are so old and so well carved, I was impressed.
After making our way down and with nothing in particular to do we hear loud music bumping so we decided to walk that direction. All of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of the Mexican independent day festival, the roads are closed and blankets and tarps are strung all across the street as make shift roofs.
There are all sorts of nick nak shops and food vendors everywhere. Most of the Mexicans were sipping on micheladas (beer, clamato and Tabasco) in giant American style cups. We were not daring enough for this but my friend tried horse meet and I tried the shrimp.
We walked for hours but I think my favorite memory was a 5 year old girl pushing a wheel barrel filled to the brim with some sort of fried caterpillars. It was a sight to be seen and major cultural shock.
We walked the festival up and down twice. This was still one of my favorite memories of Mexico. I love Peubla.
It was also built 3500 years later.
It's absolutely fascinating to me how this parallel development happened. There is no evidence of communication between the Americas Eurasia Africa at this time.
For context:
This was built right around the same time Europe started building Castles. Windsor Castle wouldn't be built for another 300 years though.
China was in the Song dynasty and was building really tall Pagodas around this time. They weren't quite ready for their biggest push on The Great Wall of China, that would come about 300 years later, though some sections were already 1500 years old at this point.
I'm only partway through the series, but.... the host is going from ancient monument to ancient monument pointing out stuff that archaeologists have missed/dismissed because of that pesky 'science'. He seems to be building up (ba dam tish) to some kind of global flood theory.
Pretty sure that our ancestors built pyramids because that's the best way to pile rocks so they stay up. And a global flood is literally not possible (science!) But seeing as how settlements are typically built at a water source, most of those settlements have probably flooded at some point, so pretty much all mythologies have a flood story.
I never said i believed in anything. But time crystals are in fact real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal?wprov=sfla1
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Yes something like that
My favourite part was when he interviewed an amateur geologist about the channeled scablands in Washington because all the professional geologists use science instead of shrugs to explain how it formed.
I really enjoyed it because I got to learn a out some cool places I didn't know exist. I spent a lot of time on Google between episodes.
I think on the show he mentioned it's the largest footprint for a pyramid.
I agree he tried to build it up to a future flood, but I have to disagree on the premise as you state it.
I understood him primarily describing how cultures could have existed long before modern archeologists theorize. I think where he describes a future flood is probably just a silly scare tactic for viewership.
I think if you continue through the series you'll see more what I'm talking about. I didn't start to enjoy it more until maybe halfway through.
He thinks that once the ice age ended, that global sea levels rose almost 400 ft, flooding most of the existing human settlements and cities. He had to assume that there was some cataclysmic event that caused the ice to melt relatively suddenly.
I'm pretty sure he is building up to the Younger-Dryas impact theory. Something like a series of meteor impacts 12,000 years ago caused rapid changes in climate. It's not just about a "flood" its that during the last ice age the sea level was hundreds of feet lower. Since humans like to build on the coasts this would have drowned any existing ancient civilizaitons
google the olmec people its widely believed they came way before the Aztecs and had very similar architecture and stone carving as pacific islanders and the religion mirrored the hindu beliefs. Many of the facial features of the carved statues resemble african features which people have also contemplated.
That's Randall Carlson you are dismissing.
We generally use 'largest' to mean 'biggest' or most grandiose or something of that sort and building a 150m high pyramid is orders of magnitude harder than building a 25m high one an extra 75m long on each side. Hell, when it comes to pyramids the narrower the base to the height, the more challenging it is.
What about that pyramid thing that’s underwater next to Japan? How big is that?
Correct he’s building to the YDIH and then claims, with out evidence, that there was civilization that existed and spread their knowledge all over the world. He does this with zero evidence to support the idea of a lost civilization
and the ruins of old new york will be in the sewers!
This is a really silly question but how does this work, exactly? Are they directly on top of one another? Is there just some weird midway period where everyone's house is half buried and they build another story? I've always been puzzled by the mechanics of this
He doesn’t do this without evidence. He uses myths from across different cultures, and temples and their relation to astronomy to suggest a lot of these different structures are older than believed. It’s fine to not believe that is sufficient evidence, but to pretend he just came up with it and didn’t try to back it up with evidence is just false.
Also, it doesn’t seem like he’s saying there is a single lost civilization, but several that were ended due to the climate disaster.
Objectively: he’s been claiming for a long time that civilization is much older than we think and there were advanced civilizations that were wiped out by some cataclysm and the ancient, sophisticated wonders were signs that some history and methods were passed down orally by survivors. The rise of the Younger Dryas Impact could be seen as something that corroborates (or simply coincides with) his theory as well as the ever-increasing “age” of civilization as seen in Gobekli Tepi and similar sites. Subjectively: There are a lot of naysayers, but it’s fair to say that over the past few years his theories have generally looked better and better. I think he’s a bit off the deep end with how “advanced” he proposes they were, but I think it’s very interesting (and plausible) there were civilizations lost to time. Even if we vanished, there’d be no signs left after ten thousand years and the Younger Dryas was like 12,000 years ago.
Is it plausible? Of course but there’s no physical evidence for it and then the claim that they sailed all over the world spreading knowledge to other civilizations, yeah his conjecture is bullshit. The time to believe in ancient lost civilizations is when there is evidence to back it up, not a crackpot journalist making claims to sell bullshit books
He definitely just came up with it any number of civilizations could independently build structures in relation to astronomical bodies, they can all see the sky, it’s a huge stretch to claim it’s because a lost civilization told them too. There is no physical evidence to back up his claims.
Are you alright man?
I knew what I was looking for. Hey there's this dude in the balkans who claims this mountain is actually a pyramid. But it totally isn't.
Like it's a goofy idea. So I came down here, check you guys out, see who you all are what you guys say about it...
>Long past the time to break the chains of the Darwinian-Abrahamic-Google-Elon-Musk mind prison.
You're pretty deep on the crazy there end eh bud?
You're really framing this in a strawman way. He does at times suggest that leap, but he more often is pointing out valid evidence of structures that go against the modern timeline of progress and is saying the current timeline is incorrect. Gobekli Tepe and the megalithic templea at Malta are both worth studying much more and in my eyes are strong evidence to reconsider the timeline of human technological capability.
Gobekli Tepi IS the evidence for it. What do you need, a VHS and guidebook?
When you go there they call it the largest pyramid by volume.. I think a recount is necessary.
Yeah that’s not what is claimed at all though. It seems like you’re trying very hard to strawman the position. I’d suggest actually watching it or at least trying to understand what is being stated before jumping to “he just made it all up”.
He gives a few speculations on why they might have built these structures this way, but none of them were “some ancient civilization told them to.”
The Bimini Road, a uniform and leveled structure dozens of feet below sea level, consistent with what sea levels would have been during the last ice age, is enough evidence for me that the age of civilization and the age of many of our great megoliths is worth further examination
Just watched a documentary on this!
(Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix, ep. 3)
Again, 12000 years ago, not exactly a possibility for a ton of physical evidence. Things do, suspiciously, keep getting older…
I think the strong reactions, like yours, to the mere notion that it’s possible we don’t know everything about ancient history is even more fascinating than the theories, however outlandish.
Look into the water erosion questions about the Sphinx and Robert Schoch. Pretty interesting stuff and also branded “fringe”.
I mean I think a pyramid is kind of an easy design to fall upon. It's what's inside and the layers that make them so amazing right?
Yes, as new evidence is discovered we change and adapt our theories to fit the evidence, that’s how science works. The time to believe something is when there’s evidence, pardon me for not wanting to take a journalist at his word.
The farther you go back, the more abstract things get. There is “evidence”, it’s a matter of if you believe it and how you interpret it. Someone sees an ancient road buried under the sea, others see a rock formation.
Which is why I default to scientific consensus, and the scientific consensus around the Bimini Road is that it’s a naturally occurring geological formation
At least 5, could even be more.
The other thing we are battling against is that we know historical Christianity and Islam (other regions i'm sure as well) were masters at building on top of historical sites, burying them and replacing the older cultures.
Can't tell if this is a troll or a disturbed individual. That Visocica sun energy stuff is seriously batshit though.
Someone just listened to rogan and Graham Hancock
The show describes him as an amateur geologist and author in the little blurb under his name. If he has more credentials they should have used them.
To be fair, all Graham Hancock ever does is strawman “mainstream” archaeology.
Destructions of libraries is another aspect; Viking raids, library of Alexandria, sack of Baghdad.
Wild story
The Spanish did not bury the pyramid. The pyramid was long abandoned and overgrown and looked like a hill to them. They had no idea it was a pyramid for centuries.
These are usually long periods of time apart, sometimes centuries. In the case of Troy it's been burnt down/destroyed a few times. I guess over time the remains get eroded or new dirt ends up ontop of the old and people just build ontop of that.
It always seems like somehow these things fall down under the floor and im sure there is someone who understands this stuff better than I that can explain how buildings end up being below ground level over time other than "dirt gets on it"
He definitely makes too many leaps, like constantly. The whole "Let's talk about Atlantis" moment made me cringe during the series. There is some valid evidence of interesting things from longer ago than the 6000 years currently accepted.
Why almost every culture was building pyramid ? It was some alien shit or geometry easy that way ,?
What about the Bass Pro Shop?
Exactly, it was super fun to watch, but doubt many watch it because they wanted evidence of ancient civilizations.
The great pyramid of hot sauce.
I think I discovered the issue here. The Cholula pyramid is largely a flat top. So the volume would be better represented as a cubic rectangle then a pyramid shape, which will drastically increase the volume calculation. Maybe they didn't actually finish the pyramid. It is said to be almost 2x the volume of Giza, and of course if you watch netflix there are numerous smaller pyramids hidden inside.
What an awesome story.
This makes me want to go on holiday and wake up hungover to go on some long, wandering peregrination amidst ancient culture and then more drunk later.
"Known to exist in the world today" makes me wonder if we know of bigger ones that were destroyed.
A bit americannnn for my taste. Lol the guy isn’t even American
Maybe i didn't mean the guy but the way the "documentary " is made
This recent thread is an excellent start - as is this other thread and also this excellent thread
In short,
Because Hancock has stripped away all context for his observations, he can make whatever claims he wants. And because most readers have no familiarity with archaeological literature outside their high school history books, they don't know how much information Hancock is not telling them.
More recently, Hancock has shifted to theories that violate that first scientific fundamental. His book America Before is the culmination of his obsession with the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
Sensationalized unproven claims while dismissing science is absolutely bad and should not be encouraged.
^(Note: 95% of this comment isn't my own stuff, but copy-pasted from the linked threads)
It's entertainment. I don't read too much into it. It aligns with my own thoughts that there must have been some other civilization before the current. I don't care if people thinks it's debunked, because honestly nobody knows for certain. It's a fun thing to think about that doesn't harm anyone.
Greetings from Cholula Pueblo Mágico my friend!!!
Landlubber77 t1_ix86zix wrote
Tlachihualtepetl is what my asshole says after I eat Cholula hot sauce, incidentally.