How did the ancients build these?

I’ll have to break out the panorama equip, let me see what I can do.

Not the same as glass blowing?

Similar but glass and crystals have different properties so molding and blowing them and temperatures needed are different.

I had no idea.

First dude to put a public, humiliating beatdown on me (he then rode off into the sunset on my bike; I was 12) went on to become a world-famous glassblower. And a nice guy, too, I must admit.

It’s a good life lesson. Kids these days cry because someone said something bad about them on Facebook.

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Perfectly normal for a national library. The question is, can you freely browse the catalogue?

Or Forumosa. :sob:

All it takes is a mean solar flare and we will be back in the stone age. Again, I recommend you to watch Survival Family.

The Spanish found cities in Mexico that had technology beyond their knowledge. It took 50 years of plague and disease and war and all that was lost.

I have never accepted that there was no writing in Latin America and that the knot system was lost. The knot records were deliberately burned, and if there is any key, the Vatican may have it.

In Central America we have the round stones. They are found in islands, which means not only someone made them perfectly round but transported their several tons weight across the ocean. Some tools have been recently found, some interesting findings at attempts to repair their roundness by the ancient. But the most fascinating data cannot be completed, as their location is supposed to be connected to astronomical charts, but too many have been moved…Or ended up decorating banana landlord’s homes in the US.

Knowledge is power and clinging to power means shutting others from knowledge. It is not surprising then that in this era of rather free flowing knowledge, the ones in power poison the well by making it so hard to tell between truth and false news.

What, people think Ellora was built by aliens now? So are the aliens Hindus, except for that one Jain period?

People think all sorts of stuff was done by aliens. You don’t have to believe that bit. The point is that it’s an incredible engineering achievement that we probably couldn’t do today - or at the very least we’ve have to invent a bunch of clever new technology to do it. So the question remains: how the hell DID they do it? “Time and manpower” doesn’t really cut it, for two reasons:

  • manpower doesn’t scale well. The more people you throw at a project, the more difficult it gets to manage. 100 people working on one thing is already a major headache. Co-ordinating 5000 people would be a superhuman achievement, especially on something of that complexity. Also, there’s only a certain number of people you can cram into a square meter.

  • even if you have manpower, the question of skill remains (as @Andrew0409 pointed out). Finding 5000 people who aren’t blithering idiots is hard enough today, nevermind people with the ability to follow complex plans and execute them with a high level of manual skill. Remember, there were far fewer people back then to choose from - and as noted in the video, the invading king couldn’t even muster the manpower to destroy it.

The only logical conclusion is that, back when Ellora was built:

a) every Indian was highly competent, had an IQ of 250, and needed no sleep, or:
b) they figured out a way to get idiots to perform a list of simple instructions to achieve a complex result, like a human computer running a program; and they managed to pack said idiots at a very high density without them bumping elbows or producing an unmanageable tonnage of sewage, or:
c) it was aliens.

And how exactly are you suppose to organize thousands of people without modern technology or even printing. They must have worked on multiple different places if they are to build anything within a timeframe that fits. They have no way to communicate on different areas of the site. No way to print simple instructions or let alone have the time to also teach everyone to read pictographs.

All of these factors that would make even modern projects hard. I also just have a hard time believing the current theories of how these things were built.

I think it is generally accepted that writing arose independently in three places: Ancient Sumer, China and Mexico.

Egypt?

Some think the Sumerians influenced the concept of written language as some evidence of them trading all the way to Egypt and China were found.

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Yea there is some talk of Sumerian writing leading to the development of writing in China, but, there are also written symbols found in Henan that predate the Sumerian written language

In any case its amazing to think that all our written langauge has descended from just three (or maybe just two) roots.

Egyptians got their writing from Sumer, or at least were most likely not fully independent of the idea of writing as already developed in Sumer.

That was Victor Mair. It’s hard to find people capable of meaningfully evaluating this theory, given that they’d have to have studied both Chinese and Sumerian.

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I like the limestone concrete theory.

Yea I don’t buy it either, especially since there were written symbols in China that predate Sumer anyway.

This is a nice video that touches on how the emergence of agriculture lead to buildings and writing. The buildings in this are up to 10,000 years old.

My silly theory

They carved the stones the same way than the original movie

I just think the stones were softer then, more liquid and gaseous

I have nothing to prove my words

Please discuss (Forumosa style of course)

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I thought it was generally accepted by historians that they did have writing.

Yup. Even if someone managed to design that in their head, how would you convey it to the workforce?