Tales Of An Ancient Empire

[Fe Kittner]

Hiddenwithin the ancient city of Ephyra lies the mysterious Necromanteion, a site veiled in cryptic rituals and mythological lore. Revered as a conduit to the underworld, this enigmatic sanctuary facilitated communion with departed spirits. In its cryptic chambers, pilgrims and priests engaged in rites seeking counsel from the deceased. The eerie ambiance and subterranean maze echo the reverberations of a time when the living sought guidance from the realm of the dead.

Cape Matapan, where rugged cliffs meet the churning seas, embodies the fabled entrance to the underworld, Hades. The untamed beauty of this cape whispers of a realm where mortal souls embarked on their journey to the afterlife. The restless waves and wind-blown cliffs are imbued with the enigmatic legacy of a place where the boundaries between the mortal world and the realm of shades were believed to intertwine, leaving behind an eerie trace of spiritual transcendence.

The Heraklion Archaeological Museum, a repository of ancient artifacts, holds more than historical relics. Among its treasures lie unsettling artifacts and objects that evoke ancient myths and inexplicable phenomena. The mysterious Phaistos Disc, adorned with cryptic symbols, remains an unsolved enigma, while statues and artifacts whisper tales of ancient rituals and beliefs, casting an eerie shadow over the museum halls.

Myths have fed the imaginations and souls of humans for thousands of years. The vast majority of these tales are just stories people have handed down through the ages. But a few have roots in real geological events of the past, providing warning of potential dangers and speaking to the awe we hold for the might of the planet.

These stories encode the observations of the people who witnessed them, says geoscientist Patrick Nunn, of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, who has studied the links between natural hazards and stories told in the Pacific.

In ancient Greece, in the town of Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, there was a temple devoted to the god Apollo. Within a sacred chamber, a priestess called the Pythia would breathe in sweet-smelling vapors emanating from a crack in the rock. These vapors would send her into a state of frenzy during which she would channel Apollo and speak gibberish. A priest would then turn that gibberish into prophesies.

Science: The temple was a real place, and scientists have discovered two geologic faults running beneath the site, now in ruins. Gas was likely emanating from those fissures when the oracle was in action. But researchers have been arguing over the contents of the euphoria-causing gaseous mix. Theories include ethylene, benzene or a mix of carbon dioxide and methane.

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, wrote of a great civilization called Atlantis founded by a race of people who were half god and half human. They lived in a utopia that held great naval power. But their home, located on islands shaped like a series of concentric circles, was destroyed in a great cataclysm.

In the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Sita, the wife of the god Rama, is kidnapped and taken to the Demon Kingdom on the island of Lanka. Bears and monkeys help Rama and his brother Lakshman by building a floating bridge between India and Lanka. Rama leads an army of monkey-like men and rescues his wife.

Science: On the night of August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos, a volcanic lake in Cameroon, released a deadly cloud of carbon dioxide, killing 1,700 people sleeping in nearby villages. A smaller degassing event at Lake Monoun two years earlier killed 37. Carbon dioxide can build up in waters at the bottom of volcanic lakes such as these, where it is kept dissolved by the pressure of the lake water above. But seismic activity can trigger a sudden release of the gas, which will travel along the ground and suffocate anyone caught in the cloud. Such events might have been behind the exploding lake of the Kom legend.

Science: Lark Shoal sits at the eastern edge of the Solomon Islands, part of a ridge that flanks the 5,000-meter-deep Cape Johnson Trench. An earthquake could have sparked a landslide that let the island slide into the trench, Nunn says. Underwater maps have revealed several islands submerged under hundreds of meters of water. Islands have probably been sinking in this region for a million years.

The chaskis were a relay system of couriers that ran through mountains, tunnels, and bridges which were all part of the Inka Trail (Qhapaq an). Although the Inkan empire lasted only about 100 years, interrupted by the Spanish invasion, they were built on the ancient wisdom and technology of the peoples they subjugated to expand their territory.

To this date, the culture of the Inka is pretty much alive in the peoples of the Andes. The impressive constructions still stand to give testimony of their knowledge and ingenuity. Their language, Quechua, is spoken by millions of people across South America.

I hope this book serves as a way to incite curiosity about the Inka empire and all the amazing pieces of its history. The backmatter includes a glossary of words in Quechua, and facts about the Inka society.

The book is a fun read-aloud for young kids, or it could also be used to open conversations about kindness and doing the right thing with older grades. At the same time, it could serve as an engaging introduction to social studies about South America.

This game can be used in a Spanish language classroom using commands in Spanish. I hope these activities are helpful, but beyond that, I hope to instill in your students a desire to learn more about the great civilizations that populated the American continent before the Spanish invasion. These cultures continue to thrive today in our indigenous communities, and in our collective memory.

A recently-built walkway circles the excavated portion of the site. Three concentric stone walls enclose spaces sometimes dotted with towering 18-foot tall T-shaped pillars. For such pillars, each weighing about ten to twenty tons, no method of construction can do without a significant amount of human labor. No one can say with confidence what construction techniques were used, and what timelines were considered acceptable for their completion. Medieval cathedrals famously took decades or even centuries to finish. Decade-long planning and consistent construction would be quite the discovery in its own right, forcing us to reevaluate our conception of Neolithic society. Tellingly, estimates by archaeologists put the human labor requirement for extracting the pillars and moving them from local quarries to be about five hundred people. Assuming usual estimates of Neolithic population density, this would have been quite the organizational feat.

The New World is usually assumed to have been separated from the Old World for most of its history, ever since melting glaciers allowed the originally Siberian peoples of Beringia to move southward into modern Canada and settle the rest of the Americas some 16,500 years ago. Assuming such a degree of isolation, the origin of Mesoamerican civilizations would be independent of whatever happened in regions such as the Fertile Crescent, providing us a natural laboratory from which we could learn more about the human extended phenotype.

The implications of this natural experiment are dizzying when we consider it together with discoveries made on the island of Crete in 2009. The stone tools found there were dated to be at least 130,000 years old. Even with lower sea levels at the time, the Mediterranean island could only have been reached by boat. The tools are so old that they are attributed to Homo erectus, a species of our genus Homo that first emerged 2 million years ago.

This leaves us with only two possibilities for how the workers building Gbekli Tepe were fed: pastoralism or agriculture. This is why, though archaeologists presume Gbekli Tepe to have predated agriculture by thousands of years, agriculture-driven development is likely the right theory after all.

When thinking about the dating of agriculture it is important to remember that Gbekli Tepe was rediscovered rather than discovered. In October 1994, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was reviewing archives of known sites, trying to decide where to dig next. A site description caught his attention: a hill that had first been excavated in a 1963 survey by the University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago, but abandoned soon after. Despite finding stone tools, they had assumed the tops of the massive limestone pillars to be medieval tombstones dating to the Byzantine Empire.

The discovery of Sumerian cities, now considered to be the very beginning of recorded history, was itself an archaeological surprise. In the declining Ottoman Empire of the 19th century, British, French, and then German archaeologists dug and explored modern-day Iraq, searching for remnants of the much younger Assyrian civilization. The search was partially fueled by a desire either to find evidence for or against biblical accounts of history. Higher criticism had at the time transformed the Bible from a sacred authority in its own right into just another text that had a history that could be examined.

Excessive skepticism of what were thought to be myth-ridden sources also played a significant role in this era. Scholars of the 19th century no longer considered the Iliad and Odyssey to be poetic accounts of actual events. The city of Troy itself was considered a myth. It took a well-funded eccentric outsider named Heinrich Schliemann, Iliad in hand, to identify a previously explored site in Turkey as the likely location of Troy. Schliemann was an adventurer rather than a professional and was found guilty by a Greek court of smuggling jewelry and other golden artifacts found at the site out of the Ottoman Empire. The matter was settled with Schliemann paying 50,000 gold francs to the Constantinople Imperial Museum, as well as handing over some of the artifacts.

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