Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The Most Enigmatic Places in the World


Discovery Channel names these 3 places as the Most Enigmatic Places in the World, but there are much more mysterious sites around the world that capture our imagination because they seem to be so otherworld.
1.    Stonehenge:
Who has never heard about Stonehenge?
Stonehenge is a megalithic monument on the Salisbury Plain in Southern England, composed mainly of thirty upright stones (sarsens, each over ten feet tall and weighing up to 45 tons), aligned in a circle, with thirty lintels (6 tons each) perched horizontally atop the sarsens in a continuous circle.
Some have suggested that Stonehenge was built by Druids, but we don't really know much about the builders. The archaeology points to a construction date between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago, so it was built even before the first metal tools were used by humankind.

 2.   Nazca Lines:

Nazca Lines are the most outstanding group of geoglyphs in the world, they are located in the Nazca Desert, between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru. Etched in the surface of the desert pampa sand about 300 hundred figures made of straight lines, geometric shapes and pictures of animals and birds - and their patterns are only clearly visible from the air.
There are 3 mysterious aspects to Nazca Plateau:
  • First, the straight lines, many kilometers long, crisscross sectors of the pampas in all directions.
  • Second, many of the lines form geometric figures: angles, triangles, bunches, spirals, rectangles, wavy lines, etc.
  • Third, many lines form animal patterns.
It is believed that the geoglyphs were built by a people called the Nasca- but why and how they created these wonders of the world has defied explanation. If the people who lived here 2,000 years ago had only a simple technology, how did they manage to construct such precise figures? Did they have a plan? If so, who ordained it? It all seems so otherworldly.
3.    Easter Island:

Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the indigenous language), is a Chilean-governed island in the south eastern Pacific Ocean. Rapa Nui is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. It's been called the most isolated inhabited territory on Earth, but there is another aspect that sets it apart from any other place on Earth - its hundreds of megalithic human-like statues that face inland from the shore. These enigmatic statues are called moai.
Almost all moais were carved out of distinctive, compressed, easily worked volcanic ash. The largest one weights up to 165 tons, and its height is almost 22 meters. Some upright moai have become buried up to their necks by shifting soils.
Some scientists suggest that
Easter Island inhabitants, the Rapanui, came from Polynesia. But similarities to Indian stone statues around Lake Titicaca in South America are striking. Is this accidental or not? Scholars are unable to definitively explain the function and use of the moai statues. Some of them suggest that the statues were symbols of authority and power, both religious and political.

No comments:

Post a Comment