Most ancient structures are exactly how you’d expect them to be, with the level of technology at the time matching the architecture and the way they were built. Sites like burial mounds and castles have their construction methods well known, and carved stones are no mystery as to how they got there, but every once in a while someone tries, and fails to explain how some of the worlds most famous sites came to be.
Here are five of the most impressive ancient sites around the world that no one can come up with a definite answer as to how ancient civilisations managed to build them.
1) Saksaywaman – The Inca’s fortress
Sitting on the outskirts of the city of Cusco in Peru lays the remains of a fortress the Inca’s built during the peak of their empire. The fort itself is impressive but doesn’t match the size or detail of many of Europe’s castles, but the interesting thing is that no one can explain how the Inca’s had the technology to cut the stones the way they did.
The structure was built during the first half of the 13th century and during this time most large buildings were made using mortar created from limestone. Saksaywaman doesn’t use any kind of binding material to hold the stone together but instead the shear weight of the stone stops them from moving. The strange thing is that the stones are cut so perfectly that you cant even slide a piece of paper in between them. The edges of the stones are perfectly flat, as if they had been cut using a laser, with not a single bit of a connecting surface being even a millimetre out of line.
People in the 13th century had the ability to cut stone but usually did so by just chipping it away, and no other ancient building in the world even comes close to how perfectly flat and well aligned the stones of Saksaywaman are. To this day it remains a mystery of the tools they used to achieve this and how they reached a level of accuracy so perfect that it hasn’t been since since.
2) The Pyramids
The pyramids of Giza have to be the most famous ancient site in the world, and even though many theories exist as to how they were made no one knows for sure. The blocks could be cut using tools of the day and indeed transported and lifted into place with enough people, but the levels of symmetry on a structure so large is something people of the time shouldn’t have been able to achieve.
The base of each pyramid is an exact square and when covered in its flat outer layer would have been accurate to less than an inch from corner to corner, raising the question of how did people with no spirit levels or laser equipment maintain such symmetry on something so big. The method used to get the blocks up to the top is also unknown, but three main theories persist. First of which is a long straight ramp that would have had the blocks dragged up with shear force, but in order to have a ramp with a gentle enough slope to get such large blocks up would mean it would have to be over a mile long and would contain more blocks to make than the actual pyramid itself.
The second method is a spiral ramp which would take blocks to the top and then build their way downwards, but the biggest problem with this is having a spiral ramp round the edges wouldn’t have allowed them to have such perfectly straight lines on the finished product, and even if they did have some kind of technology to make these alignments it hasn’t been seen anywhere in the world before or after on anything other than pyramids.
The third method involves an interior ramp that drags blocks to an upper area were they are then lowered down to complete the lower sections. There are indeed steep slopes within some of the pyramids but this cant explain how the ones without interior ramps were built.
3) Göbekli Tepe
Buried under a man-made hill in Turkey sits a temple like structure made of carved and stacked stone. The monument in itself isn’t really that impressive since it doesn’t contain any intricate carvings or anything out of place for were it is, but it has been dated as being built around 10,000 BC.
During this time period people were still in the ice age and even though territories around the equator would have been the first the thaw, people of this time simply didn’t know how to build such things. For some perspective humans at the time were in the Neolithic period, an age when they hadn’t even discovered pottery yet, never mind any kind of metal. This structure pre-dates the great pyramid of Giza by about 10,000 years, making it the oldest known building on earth.
Apart from how such early people managed to build it in the first place the mystery of it being abandoned remains. For some reason the monument was buried under thousands of tons of earth to hide it for some reason, but considering the population of the planet at the time was thought to be about 4 million, its unlikely that such advanced people would have had to hide it from an opposing force. Whoever built it left the site after burying it and just vanished without building anything similar else were.
4) Stonehenge
The odd thing about this stone age monument that sits in modern day Wiltshire in England isn’t the way it was built, but rather why the building materials came from so far away. Its generally believed that people of the stone and bronze age built such monuments by dragging the stones over wet logs before tipping them up into pre-dug holes. The top stones would be dragged up an earth ramp and when in place the soil would have been dug away to rest the stone on the ones below.
The problem with Stonehenge is that the stones used to build it came from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales 150 miles away. At the time people didn’t have boats large enough to transport such large and heavy stones, and dragging them in one piece that distance would be near impossible without them cracking. It also raises the question as to why use stones from so far away and why that particular location.
5) The Sajama Lines
In western Bolivia are a series of lines between 3 and 10 feet wide and running up to 11 miles long. The lines are known as the Sajama Lines since they run close to the Sajama volcano, but no one knows what they were for or how the people who built them managed to keep them so straight over such long distances.
Some of the lines have turns and change direction, but the straight ones maintain a level of accuracy that matches modern day road building techniques, something thats even more impressive since they didn’t have any of the alignment technology we use today.
Apart from how they managed to keep them so straight the other big question is why they were made in the first place. They don’t seem to actually go any were and even if there were a few villages in the area at the time, the lines often loop back and provide paths that don’t make any sense. The vast majority of the lines seem like they never actually went any were and don’t form any kind of pattern or make up any type of symbol. It seems odd that early people spent a tremendous amount of effort to carved hundreds of miles of lines in the ground for seemingly no reason at all.