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Sunken City Found Off Of India
Raindeer writes "A city only known from old myths about seven pagodas and thought by Western scientists not have existed, was found off the coast of India. The myths speak of six temples submerged beneath the waves with the seventh temple still standing on the seashore. The myths also state that a large city once stood here which was so beautiful the gods became jealous and sent a flood that swallowed it up entirely in a single day. " With the purported discovery of a city off of Cuba, as well as the the finding of Herakleion underwater archaeology is doing well.
Just maybe, human civiliation is a lot older and spread much wider, earlier, than we tend to believe.
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Actually, this city has sunk because the sea levels have risen since the last ice age. U see, during the last ice age, much of the ocean's water was locked up in ice. Sea level was about 300 feet lower than it is today. As the ice melted over several millenia, sea levels rose to their present levels.
Anyway, I think we would see some real evidence for a world engulfing flood that occured only 5,000 years ago. Using the bible's genealogy and stuff, scholars have pinpointed the year of Noah's flood according to the bible. It supposedly was around 2700 BC. Funny that the egyptians and the Sumerians never seemed to notice it!
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
The island is called Thera - "Fear" in Greek according to the TLC Documentry. One problem is that the explosion occurred 900 instead of 9000 years prior to Plato's original story. This however can be explained by difference in number systems, or clerical errors.
Here is the text as requested by some users:
An ancient underwater city has been discovered off the coast of south-eastern India.
Divers from India and England made the discovery based on the statements of local fishermen and the old Indian legend of the Seven Pagodas.
The ruins, which are off the coast of Mahabalipuram, cover many square miles and seem to prove that a major city once stood there.
A further expedition to the region is now being arranged which will take place at the beginning of 2003.
'International significance'
The discovery was made on 1 April by a joint team of divers from the Indian National Institute of Oceanography and the Scientific Exploration Society based in Dorset.
Expedition leader Monty Halls said: "Our divers were presented with a series of structures that clearly showed man-made attributes.
"The scale of the site appears to be extremely extensive, with 50 dives conducted over a three-day period covering only a small area of the overall ruin field.
"This is plainly a discovery of international significance that demands further exploration and detailed investigation."
During the expedition to the site, divers came across structures believed to be man-made.
One of the buildings appears to be a place of worship, although they could only view part of what is a huge area suggesting a major city.
Jealous Gods
The myths of Mahabalipuram were first set down in writing by British traveller J. Goldingham who visited the South Indian coastal town in 1798, at which time it was known to sailors as the Seven Pagodas.
The myths speak of six temples submerged beneath the waves with the seventh temple still standing on the seashore.
The myths also state that a large city once stood here which was so beautiful the gods became jealous and sent a flood that swallowed it up entirely in a single day.
One of the expedition team, Graham Hancock, said: "I have argued for many years that the world's flood myths deserve to be taken seriously, a view that most Western academics reject.
"But here in Mahabalipuram we have proved the myths right and the academics wrong."
Scientists now want to explore the possibility that the city was submerged following the last Ice Age.
If this proves correct, it would date the discovery at more than 5,000 years old.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Perhaps if he's looking for such evidence FOR a flood he should also check out the mountains of evidence AGAINST a global flood. While this document deals largely with the Noah's Ark myth, it has a good deal of information on the geological and logistical problems associated.
They have discovered what they think to be the site of the great flood, around 5500BCE around the Black Sea. The idea is that it was a large, freshwater lake before then judging from the shellfish they've dug up in core samples. After the 5500BCE layer they find only saltwater shellfish. The earth wall at istanbul collapsed and the sea rushed in, doubling the size of the Black Sea.
The Babylons did notice, for there is a legend of Gilgamesh searching for the survivor of the great flood, which eventually turned into the Noah story in Genesis from what I understand of it.
And even if it isn't the origin of the biblical flood, it's still a pretty cool discovery.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The case against seems to be that (a) the earliest settlements accepted by most archeologists go back perhaps 6000 or 7000 years, and these are flimsy houses built of wood, reeds, thatch etc - not monolithic dressed stone covering many thousands of acres. Secondly, if these civilisations existed, they would surely have built in OTHER places than right next to shore lines -- where are their ruins on land? In one of the programs he looked at a stone-age Japanese society (one I hadn't heard of previously) - however these are " only " 5000 years ago, and built using wood.
Of course there are plenty of lunatics, new age freaks and other riff-raff -- the "jesus was a spaceman, UFOs built Atlantis" types -- who should of course deserve nothing more than laughter, pity and contempt. (Try to explain the distinction to my girfriend though... *sigh*... a great way to teach oneself patience and forbearance... =)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Similar stories of a great flood are recorded within many cultures besides the Judeo-Christian Bible. For example, as I am sure everyone here as already heard in many history/literature classes, The Epic of Giglemesh. The American Indians also have a tail of a man getting into a boat because of a great flood. One could debate as to whether the flood covered the earth, only part of the earth, or possibly it appeared to these people that is was the whole earth because the known earth to them at this time was quite vast, but in reality it was only a part.
It's not that they're intent on proving it; it's just that there's little or no evidence of any large settlements before then. What artifacts we do have are consistent with loosely organised, unsepcialised hunter-gatherer type societies. No big conspiracy, honestly.
And are you American by any chance? If you lived in Europe you'd realise the Romans left a LOT of stuff behind. And of course Roman civilisation goes back a couple of thousand years BC.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
For the same reason most people think the Internet was created in 1996. Sure, it existed much longer. I started using email, ftp, and gopher back in the mid 80's. But we didn't have MS Outlook, we didn't have IE, we didn't have Netscape. All the sudden, in 1996, the WWW blossomed, and all these tools became available. WWW became the "Internet". Hardly anyone believes anything could possibly have existed before 1996. Finding a fully graphical web browser that was written in 1975, like finding a massive city over 10000 years old would be a huge surprise- if not impossible.
Homo Sapiens has been around for some 250k years. But they were our predecessors- we are classed as Homo Sapien Sapien- who've only been around for about 40k years. The Cro Mags. The difference between the Homo Sapiens and Homo Sapein Sapiens is that the latter, us, settled down, started farming, domesticating animals, using bows and arrows to hunt.
So while we can't rule out there were massive civilizations by an known race of humans (or aliens), judging by what science has uncovered, the cro mags were the first to settle in community groups that gave rise to civilization as we know it.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The Rig Veda is widely believed as the most ancient script. Bhagavad Gita is what has been preached by Lord Krishna during the Mahabharata time, so it would be fairly yound document.
Interestingly, the first verse of Rig Veda says something like this (paraphrasing...)
"There was no truth before life, no falsehood, no sky, no space. Where was all hidden, who dug it up? Where was all the water?"
Sastry
Why does everyone say 'the end of the last ice age'? We are still in the middle of an ice age that just happens to be in a slight recession. Just because half of the US isn't covered in ice doesn't mean it's not an ice age. In fact, we are about 1.6 million years into this ice age. Periods like the one that we are in right now (where it is warmer there's not so much ice everywhere except at the poles and on mountains) tend to last about 10-15,000 years. I guess that means we're due for some more ice pretty soon.
If you don't believe, go pick up the nearest geology book and have a good read.
What?
all the land east of the San Andreas Fault slides off into the Atlantic.
That'll be one hell of an earthquake if all the land east of the fault ends up in the Atlantic!
How about the land west of the fault ending up in the Pacific?
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
It is little wonder that both the Bible and Epic of Gilgamesh have many common themes. Much of the Bible was written by people who had lived in Summaria, then left, perhaps because they felt that civillization was wrong. There are many themes that are repeated in both Gilgamesh and the Bible.
In Gilgamesh, the walls are made of "...burnt brick and good." (Sandars, 61) In the Bible, people come together, saying "...let us make bricks, and burn them thoughly," in order to create the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:3). The Jews regarded the Ziggarat (Summerian temple/pyramid/great public work) as a bad thing made of burnt brick. This smae structure was at the core of Summerian life. The same thing is described by both Summerians and Jews with very similar language (perhaps the building blocks of an oral tradition cum written document.
The flood is another major theme in both documents. However, the Jews saw the flood as a punishment. People were wicked and corrupt, so they had to be wiped from the face of the Earth. This was not done on a whim. In Gilgamesh, Enlil (one of the gods) says "the uproar of mankind is intolerableand sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel" and the gods decide to wipe out humanity on a whim so they can sleep (Sandars 108).
The Jews migrated out of Summaria, forsaking Summarian civilization to become sheperds. While many of the stories were turned on their heads to better fit the Jewish world view, many elements were taken from the familier Summerian stories. The fact that there are similarities is more likely evidence of common cultural heritage rather than common events in some long forgotton past.
References
Coogan, Michael D.
1991. The NewOxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press:New York.
Sandars, N. K., trans. and ed.
1972. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Penguin Books:London.
Rhapsody in Numbers
There was a set of links that showed up with this post including one regarding a French study. The author concluded that there actuall are several drowned islands, just west of Gibraltar, that were submerged about 11,000 years ago. Sea level at the height of the Pleistocene was about 400 feet (120 meters) below its present level. So, in fact there is a substantial piece of real estate now underwater that once was dry land when you consider the planet as a whole. The French author plans to dive on these "islands" this summer. It is worth noting - to us archaeologists any way - that this is the second drowned city found off India. Another was found last year in 120 feet of water off southwest India - the other side of the subcontinent from the latest find. My colleagues are unconfortable with the radiocarbon dates from this site, which reportedly run about 9,000 years old. This would tack a good 5,000 years onto the archaeology of civilizations, as opposed to less complexly organized societies.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Indus valley civilization (IVC) is called Indus valley civilization because its prominent sites (Harappa and Mohenjo Daro) are in that valley.
Old school scholars view is that the inhabitants of the civilization moved to the south after the collapse of the civilization (circa 1200BCE). We don't know much about prehistoric South India around 3000BC. There are no large scale sites that are associated with the IVC.
Current view of the IVC is that it spread over up to modern day Gujarat. There are several large scale sites in that state.
Shouldn't there be other large sites like the seven temples in South India if the Indus Valley Civilization was so prevalent. FYI, Mahapariburam is just south of Madras, which is pretty south.
OTOH, there are other more interesting archaeological sites in South India. The most interesting for me is those that belong to a megalith culture. The book I read said that one person (or more than one?) was about 2m (or more) high.
The Minoan capital was Knossos, not Minoa. Knossos is located on the island of Crete. Minoa is located on the island of Amorgos, in the Cyclades island group. The Cyclades also include the island of Thera/Santorini, referred to elsewhere in this thread.
Here's a map for your convenience.
Ned Flanders, I mock your value system. You also appear foolish to the eyes of others.
It's not just the date that's off by a power of 10 in Platos story, but also the dimensions. This consistency makes it seem very likely that it's simply a result of a greek mistake while interpreting egyptian numbers.
The island is also called Santorini, btw, and it was not the capital of the Minoans, at least during the times we know of, and neither was Minoa... the capital was Knossos on Crete, Minoa is closer to Thera. However, hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't remember any reason to rule out the hypothesis that Thera was the site of the Minoan capital in prehistoric times, before the explosion?
Anyway, it's a far better fit than any other site I've seen for the Atlantis story, the details all seem to fit, as long as we change the actual numbers consistently by factors of 10.
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> The island is called Thera - "Fear" in Greek according to the TLC Documentry. One problem is that the explosion occurred 900 instead of 9000 years prior to Plato's original story. This however can be explained by difference in number systems, or clerical errors.
Or maybe Atlantis didn't exist at all?
Just because some myths have historical underpinnings doesn't mean that all myths have historical underpinnings.
And when you have to start twisting the myth around a lot to make it match the "evidence", then you should really stop and wonder why you're trying so hard to make it match.
Moreover, Plato isn't exactly a good source of mythology. He was neither a historian nor a mythographer. He was a philosopher, and not a very deep one at that. (IMO he operated on about a 10th grade mentality.) He liked to write stories about things like how the ideal state would be constituted, and he used an idealized Socrates as a sock puppet in his writings.
Plato tells the Atlantis story in his Timaeus . In particular, Plato tells a made-up story about a conversation between Socrates, Critias, and a couple of others, and in that story Critias tells a story he heard from another guy named Critias, and in that story the second Critias tells that he heard it from Solon, and in that story Solon tells that heard it from the Egyptian priests (along with a bunch of other drek). So we the recursively embedded stories Plato(Critias1(Critias2(Solon(Egyptians)))) -- and we know that the outermost story was a work of fiction (one of Plato's so-called dramatic dialogues). This is not a source that inspires a lot of confidence.
Once you get beyond that it makes a lot more sense to try to figure out what role the story played in whatever point Plato was trying to make with his polemic than it does exploring the world trying to find something that can be stretched to fit the story.
The story doesn't even appear to be real mythology, let alone real history.
<uncle>One more thing!</uncle> "Thera" doesn't mean "fear", it means "the hunt", "the chase", "pursuit", "the catch", or "hunting ground". And the name of the island may not even be the same word; Liddel and Scott list it under a separate entry.
Hopefully this gives everyone an idea why scientists and historians tend to scoff at claims that lost civilizations have been discovered, until verifiable evidence is in hand.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade