Ancient

There have been a lot of secrets throughout the centuries. Sometimes these secrets have been discovered, sometimes they have not. Then there are the rumors of what secrets are said to exist. There are certainly plenty of these rumors all over the net. It is intriguing when we think of what the ancients could have known, that we have no idea of today. You also have to wonder how many of the rumors of what was known are true, or even partially true? The rumors range from ancient Atlantian scientists with death rays to alien wars in our skies, to even conquering gravity to build huge stone cities on mountain tops. It just so happens that if the rumor of anti-gravity isn't true, then we have no way to account for the huge multi-ton stone blocks that were put on mountain tops and built into cities in South America. It was even suggested that the ancient Egyptians might have known about this and used this technique on the giant pyramid.

Rosetta Stone
Photo Source: Public Domain

When we talk about discovering the answers to ancient mysteries one of the foremost finds has to be considered the Rosetta Stone. Many people believe that once the Rosetta stone was found, we discovered the answers to the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Nothing could be further from the truth, it took many years to decipher the ancient Egyptian language and we were not able to do it completely and even today, we do not have the knowledge to decipher it all. The Rosetta Stone was only a partial find. It was a chunk of a bigger stone tablet, so it was incomplete. A British archaeologist stated, "The wretched thing springs surprises on us all the time," The Rosetta Stone had been in the temple of Ptolemy. It was part of a stela, a larger stone slab. It had three versions of hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic and Greek. The stone was discovered by French soldiers in 1799. Thomas Young of England finally was able to decipher a good part of it after another two decades. .Jean Francois Champollion of France also did a lot of work translating it.

Aristotle
Photo Source: Public Domain

There is an ancient book called, the Archimedes Palimpsest.. This incredible book has several hidden passages of commentaries by famous ancients such as Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hieroglyphics. These had already been found hidden in the book, but now works by Aristotle have been picked up in the book using new imaging techniques. So how could all these stuff have been hidden in a book from the 13th century? The story is interesting. The book was a prayer book that was created by John Myronas. In case you are wondering how ancient texts could have gotten into this book that was written well over a thousand years later, the explanation is really quite simple. The book was created using pages that were already written on by others and as luck would have it, some of those people were very famous ancients. As this surviving book was examined over the years as a early medieval example, it was never thought to contain any other works, for who would have thought that the pages were used over? Thank goodness for this, because we can now see the actual original works of these famous people and for that fact alone the book has become priceless. Imaging was done of the book using different wavelengths of light and this is how the secret texts were discovered.

A 30 volume set of historical books was written in the 10th century, by an Arab historian named Abul Hasan Ali Al-Masudi. He had traveled to many different places and became fascinated with the Egyptian pyramids. He claimed that he had found out how the huge blocks were moved. He stated in his text, which was known as the Herodotus, that a magic papyrus was put under the stone that was to be moved. He went on to say that the stone was then struck with a rod made of metal. The stone would then move about 50 meters. They would keep repeating the process until the stone would reach its destination. Here is the question that most people ask when they hear or read this, how did he find out about this since the pyramids were already very old? Was he the victim of a hoax or did he actually find out something that we don't know about today?

Roman Surgical Tools
Photo Source: Public Domain

Another incredible fact that has been discovered about ancient people is that they performed different advanced medical procedures. As hard as it is to believe, text has been discovered and some other evidence, that shows that the ancients had performed brain surgery and people had survived the operations. This fact was verified by skulls that were found that clearly showed healed areas from brain surgery that proved that there had been survivors that lived for years. Plastic surgery was also performed, including nose jobs. This is quite remarkable since the only anesthesia available, that we know about, was opium and this may not have been available in all ancient cultures. Even though reconstructive surgery was largely unknown in the west, it had been practiced for over 2,000 years in India.

There is one thing that I think is very strange about ancient knowledge. I would like you to think about the irony of what I am about to say. The discovery of ancient secrets had to wait, in many cases, for the development of modern technology before they could be found. Does this mean that the ancient stuff was too advanced for people that discovered some of it to know what it were or how it was used? Believe it or not, in some cases the answer is yes. The people that found the Antikythera mechanism had no idea that it could have been an ancient computer and it lay in the basement of a museum for many years. This is an exception, but how many other things have been found that we don't understand yet. This begs the question, could the ancients have been more advanced than us in some areas?

Most of the time secrets are buried in the mysteries of some extinct ancient language that we don't fully understand. It is exciting to find advanced ancient objects and unravel ancient secrets and the chances are that there are still plenty of them out there.