30/1/2017 5ShockinglyAdvancedAncientBuildingsThatShouldn'tExist

5 Shockingly Advanced Ancient

Buildings That Shouldn't Exist
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By Eric Yosomono (http://www.cracked.com/members/Yosomono/) ,

Welldone Quibranza (http://www.cracked.com/members/DanBranza/) ,
Alaric Penname (http://www.cracked.com/members/RedFive/)
March 07, 2013 3,150,656 views

The achievements of ancient cultures tend to be woefully unappreciated -- we think of

the people as loincloth-wearing savages, and when we're proven wrong by some
impressive feat of engineering, we just make a bunch of documentaries about aliens. But

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the engineers of times past were nothing to sneer at, and some of their
accomplishments make ours seem slightly embarrassing.

Advertisement

5 Derinkuyu's Massive, Ancient Underground City

Bjorn Christian Torrissen (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu_Underground_City.JPG)

Derinkuyu's underground city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_Underground_City)

was discovered in the 1960s in Turkey, when a modern house above ground was being
renovated. Much to the relief of everyone present, the 18-story underground city was
abandoned and not swarming with mole people.

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Master Tourism (http://www.mastertourism.com/2011/08/derinkuyu-underground-city.html)

"Do you want to ood it again, just to be sure?"

Hidden for centuries right under everyone's noses, Derinkuyu is just the largest of
hundreds of underground complexes built by we're-not-sure-who-exactly around the
eighth century B.C. To understand just what's so phenomenal about this feat of
engineering, imagine someone handing you a hammer and chisel and telling you to go
dig out a system of underground chambers capable of sustaining 20,000 people
(http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/turkeyderinkuyu.htm). And not one of those fancy
modern chisels, either -- we're talking about something dug with whatever excavating
tools they had 2,800 years ago.

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Dutch Art Institute (http://dutchartinstitute.eu/archived/cappadocia/blog/200806.html)

"Get the Jim-digger. He still has some ngernails."

The city was probably used as a giant bunker to protect its inhabitants from either war or
natural disaster, but its architects were clearly determined to make it the most
comfortable doomsday bunker ever. It had access to fresh owing water -- the wells
were not connected with the surface to prevent poisoning by crafty land dwellers. It also
has individual quarters, shops, communal rooms, tombs, arsenals, livestock, and escape
routes. There's even a school (http://www.environmentalgrati.com/adventure/news-
worlds-beneath-worlds-derinkuyu-underground-city), complete with a study room.

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The Straits Times (http://singaporeseen.stomp.com.sg/stomp/sgseen/the_travel_bug/565880/mysterious_underground_city_in_turkey_thousands.html)

And doodles of boobs on the desks of the study room.

Even now, the site hasn't been fully excavated, so we haven't found the golf course or
the football stadium yet.

4 Hypogeum of Hal-Sa ieni Has Bizarre Acoustic Properties

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Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photo_Ellis_Hal_Salieni.jpg)

On the island of Malta is a prehistoric underground megalithic structure known

awesomely as the Hypogeum of Hal-Saieni, which sounds like the title of Terry Gilliam's
next movie. It was discovered by accident in 1902 when some workers were digging a
hole and broke through the ceiling. Oh, and they also found about 7,000 skeletons
(http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/maltahypogeum.htm) all clustered near the entrance.
So, that's creepy.

Since most humans inherently lack common sense, the workers decided to take a look
around, instead of eeing from whatever it was that 7,000 people clearly died trying to
escape. Luckily, rather than having their faces melted off by some Indiana Jones
MacGun, they found something truly astonishing.

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The Malta Experience (http://www.themaltaexperience.net/?p=84)

"Holy shit, there's a Wae House down here!"

The three-level underground structure is made entirely out of megalithic stones, and was
built who knows when. What surprised people even more was when they found out that
male voices could reverberate throughout the entire complex
(http://www.otsf.org/Archaeoacoustics.htm) if the person was standing in a certain spot.
But here's the kicker -- the effect only worked if the speaking voice was in the 95 to 120
Hz range, so women's voices don't usually generate the same effect. Whoever built the
Hypogeum actually invented sexist architecture.

It gets weirder: If you're a man chanting at roughly the 110 Hz frequency, the entire
temple complex turns into this bizarre trance-inducing room that seems able to stimulate
the creative center of the human brain (http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/march-
2012/article/ancient-builders-created-monumental-structures-that-altered-sound-and-
mind-say-researchers).

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The Malta Experience (http://www.themaltaexperience.net/?p=161)

And if you really want to mess with people, just chant "rhubarb."

Simply put, by merely standing inside that temple complex while someone was chanting
in the proper location, you actually enhanced your religious experience
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEasFt7FtG8). And that's all we really know about this
place. We have no idea who built it or how they pulled it off. All we know for certain is
that they had a knowledge of acoustics that is still baing scientists to this very day. Our
modern attempts at recreating the effect in our own basement have varied in success,
depending on how much whiskey we've consumed beforehand.

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3 The Ancient Marib Dam Worked for 1,000 Years

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Bernard Gagnon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marib_dam.jpg)

Yemen is a country rich in dust and poor in water, which is why in ancient times the
empire that controlled it, the Sabaens, built a great dam
(http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/06/yemen-in-focus/) in 750 B.C. Because
subjugating a populace is thirsty work.

Kelly Mecham/Panoramio (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/1391550)

Which, coincidentally, is also the slogan of the failed sports drink Stalinade.

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The dam, which was cheated out of being one of the "ocial" Seven Wonders of the
World, was nevertheless regarded one of the greatest feats of engineering of the pre-
industrial age. After all, building a dam isn't like putting a bunch of stone monoliths in a
big circle. You have to have canals, gates, sluices, and spillways, and the whole thing has
to be waterproof, or else everybody living on the wrong side of it might wake up
drowned one morning.

The Sabaens managed all this before the existence of concrete, and their dam stood for
over 1,000 years. In comparison, modern dams built with our advanced technology last
for around 50 years (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2666/how-long-are-
dams-like-hoover-dam-engineered-to-last), or 100 if they're really something.

Nabataean Travel & Trade (http://nabataea.net/marib.html)

Even with the Best Buy extended warranty, it's just not worth it.

The Great Dam of Marib was about 2,000 feet long (almost twice as long as the puny
Hoover Dam), and while it stood, it converted ancient Yemen into a fertile oasis, what
was then known as the kingdom of Sheba (of "Queen of Sheba" fame). Because

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everything has to fall down eventually, the dam (https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?

ie=UTF8&t=h&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=206460401082313666953.00046e8d9402aade394c0&l
nally burst around A.D. 600, bringing down much of the agriculture system and
converting the area into the sandy fun park it is today.

2 Pumapunku Is Made of Bizarrely Complex Interlocking Stones

Brattard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:7_Puma_Punku.jpg)

Pumapunku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku) is a city built by the Tiwanaku

people of ancient Bolivia. What sets it apart from just any old ancient city is the almost
weird precision of the stonework that would make modern builders envious. Look at this
shit:

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World Mysteries (http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_PumaPunku.htm)

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Herbert Eisengruber/paleoseti.com (http://paleoseti.com/)

Worst box of Alpha-Bits ever.

Using crude technology, they pioneered a kind of construction that used hundreds of
large, identical building blocks to make buildings like you and I would make a house out
of LEGO. To make cuts as straight and precise today, we'd reach for some kind of laser
cutter. They used chisels and rulers.

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Janikorpi (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puma_Punku_carvedrock_3.JPG)

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No word on whether they had interchangeable snap-on hair.

To keep the buildings structurally sound, they even used a form of metal I-cramps similar
to what we would use today to keep the giant blocks in place in case of an earthquake.

Pumapunku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Interlock_1.jpg)

Or really rough sex.

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These aren't just little cinder blocks, either. The largest of the stones is 25 feet long and
17 feet wide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku), and has been estimated to weigh
around 130 tons (for comparison, that's only around 20 or so standard semi trailers). Yet
somehow, with no technologies like wheels, cranes, or even a writing system, the
Tiwanaku people moved these giant rocks to the Pumapunku site and shaped them into
perfect, complex forms.

Like all good mystery civilizations, the Tiwanaku eventually vanished, but their work was
so impressive that the next empire to come along, the Inca, thought they were gods
(http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/tiwanaku/history.html) and that Pumapunku was
the center of the world. It's a shame we can't ask them what they think of America.

Continue Reading Below

1 Gobekli Tepe Was Built Before Humans Knew How to Grow Food

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Berthold Steinhilber/Smithsonian Magazine (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html)

Back in the 1960s, surveyors in Turkey found an ancient buried complex composed of
huge stone pillars arranged in a circle like Stonehenge, some of them 30 feet tall. What
really knocked the monocles out of their eyes, however, was that this was much older
than Stonehenge ... 6,000 years older.

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Teomancimit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gobekli_Tepe_2.jpg)

The hieroglyphics translate to "First!"

So those massive, ornate limestone pillars were carefully carved from a nearby quarry
using hunks of int rock and their bare hands.

Having been dated to around 9000 B.C., Gobekli Tepe is thought to be the oldest
human construction
(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/19/111219fa_fact_batuman). That's further
back than any of the ancient sites you learned about in history class. In fact, it's in the
Stone Age, where the only things we knew how to build were likely to fall over in a stiff
breeze.

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Teomancimit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe,_Urfa.jpg)

It was truly the golden age for Big Bad Wolves.

In fact, the site even predates agriculture, which means that the people who built it were
still chasing mammoths rather than planting crops. Discovering that this complex of
massive stone pillars was actually built by Encino Man, as National Geographic puts it,
"was like nding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife
(http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text/2)."

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Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GobeklitepeHeykel.jpg)

While riding a unicycle.

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