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.

Comments

Cities before the Ice Age? Whats the big deal?

[boltar]

I've never understood why academia seem so intent
on believing that civilization has only been
around
for the last 4 or 5 thousand years or so. After
all, if the genetic record is correct homo sapiens
have been around for a few hundred thousand years
at least and I find it far harder to believe that
in all that time all humans did was hunt and gather as opposed to them building cities and
towns. Carving blocks of stone , building roads
etc isn't rocket science and if some race had built
a city 100,000 years ago VERY little of it would
still be around today (Ice Ages notwithstanding).
Look at how little is left of most Roman ruins and
they're only 2000 years old!
Though Graham Hancock may come out with a lot of
BS at times , I think in this case he's spot on.

Re:Cities before the Ice Age? Whats the big deal?

[Cally]

I've never understood why academia seem so intent
on believing that civilization has only been
around
for the last 4 or 5 thousand years or so.

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.

Re:Cities before the Ice Age? Whats the big deal?

[Tenebrious1]

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.

Re:Cities before the Ice Age? Whats the big deal?

[swillden]

Carving blocks of stone , building roads etc isn't rocket science

Isn't it? Have you ever tried it? No fair using carbon-steel tools, either. For that matter, have you ever tried chipping flint to make stone tools? Or tried tanning and cutting a hide to make clothing? Again, no scissors, please.

In fact many of the "simple" technologies that we consider trivial because we can now do so much more are really anything but trivial. They were far from obvious and took a long time to develop and perfect.

And the idea of a road had to have been a blindingly brilliant insight at first. I mean, everyone knew how nice it was when a nice, broad, smooth path went where you wanted to go, but the idea of cutting and scraping the land to *make* it that way so that you could move people and goods easily... that can't have been obvious. Many of the peoples conquered by the Romans were both puzzled and awed by the Roman army's focus on and ability to construct roads. The whole road-building idea was *not* obvious, much less the techniques used to do it. But it was an extremely powerful idea, and a major part of why Rome was able to dominate so much of the world.

Heck, if I was the Cro-Magnon patent examiner, I'd have granted "Method for using rock and compacted soil for constructing broad and smooth artificial pathways to improve travel and transportation of people, goods, livestock and armies", wouldn't you?

Sunken pyramids off Japan

[sstidman]

A similar, fairly recent find is the controversial "pyramids" found off the coast of Japan. There are many web sites about this site, but a pretty decent one can be found at http://www.lauralee.com/japan.htm. There is a lot of debate about whether these structures are man-made or natural. Either way, there are some pretty cool pictures:

http://www.lauralee.com/japan/japan1.htm

http://www.lauralee.com/japan/japan2.htm

Re:sea level rise

[Peyna]

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.

Re:Noah's Ark

[the phantom]

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.

The one off Gibraltar

[j_w_d]

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.