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00:01Magnificent temples carved from a single massive rock.
00:06A megalithic fortress encoded with a mysterious hidden language
00:12and mystifying stone tombs that may have been created to contain a creature of monstrous proportions.
00:21Some of the greatest mysteries on our planet can be found in the ruins of ancient structures
00:28that are often described as nothing short of extraordinary.
00:32All around us we find walls made of massive interlocking stones,
00:38sacred temples constructed with complex geometry,
00:43and colossal architectural masterpieces that rival or even surpass what we can create today.
00:52How did the builders of these structures achieve such seemingly impossible feats of engineering
00:59without the use of modern technology?
01:02Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:06China.
01:23With over 4,000 years of recorded history,
01:27it is the oldest continuous civilization in the world.
01:32Its rich culture has been shaped by powerful dynasties
01:36and countless wars and unrivaled feats of engineering
01:42that are truly a wonder to behold.
01:45But of all its dazzling constructions,
01:48none is more iconic or monumental than the Great Wall.
01:55The Great Wall of China is now classified as one of the seven new great wonders of the world.
02:02We think of the Great Wall as this one thing that the tourists visit near Beijing,
02:07which is like extremely refined, sophisticated architecture.
02:11But actually, it consists of many walls stitched together over 2,000 years.
02:17The length of the wall until recently was thought to be about 2,000 to 5,000 miles.
02:23Now we know it's 13,000 miles.
02:26Okay, that's half the circumference of the Earth.
02:29This is by far the largest human-made structure on the entire planet.
02:34By far.
02:36It's amazing. It's phenomenal.
02:39At the same time, you have to wonder, what the hell were they thinking?
02:43We certainly know that the wall functions as a very, very long castle.
02:49There have been times it's been attacked,
02:51and the people on the wall have held those attackers off.
02:54Originally, in the 220s BC,
02:58the first emperor of China, the man called Ying Zheng,
03:04decided to stitch together the little walls that connected the little kingdoms
03:09to hold out barbarians in the north who are coming across his border.
03:14But different dynasties had different walls.
03:17You've got four or five different nomad groups that are various threats.
03:21As time goes on, it extends further and further out towards the west,
03:27over by this remote part of the desert.
03:29And sometimes it uses gravel and reeds and mud,
03:33which is also rammed down and closely compacted.
03:36Sometimes it even uses wood.
03:38Eventually, the Ming wall, the one that was built in the 14th century,
03:43that uses stone and sometimes brick.
03:46And sometimes it's 50 feet tall.
03:49Sometimes it's 30 feet tall.
03:51Sometimes it's 10 feet tall.
03:53He put this huge amount of manpower into creating this really impressive edifice.
03:58And if that scares your enemies away before you even have to fight them,
04:02then you've already won.
04:05The walls were certainly significant.
04:07We think of them as military operations,
04:11but the most important purpose, I think, is economic,
04:15and that they could funnel the trade that was coming in and out of China
04:19through these gates.
04:21You could monitor the goods, you could tax them,
04:24and they also controlled the human populations that sort of came through.
04:28So these gates served as a hybrid military economic project.
04:34And, of course, it worked, but it also, like, didn't work.
04:39In the 13th century, Genghis Khan and his Mongolian hordes famously broke through these legendary defenses
04:47and actually took control of China.
04:52Rebel forces overthrew the Mongols in 1368
04:56and established the Ming Dynasty.
04:59For nearly 300 years, the Mings built and reinforced over 5,000 miles
05:05of even more sophisticated walls until the dynasty collapsed in 1644.
05:12What we see today is a construction effort that spanned two millennia
05:17and largely remains one of Earth's greatest man-made mysteries.
05:24In archaeology, we have a method or a strategy
05:27for studying how much investment goes into architecture.
05:29It's called the study of man days.
05:31How long would it take me to do this?
05:33No one has yet calculated the man days required to build the Great Wall of China.
05:41The problem is that you can't get inside all the sections of the Great Wall
05:45to understand just what they encountered trying to build over mountain passes
05:51or ridges across valleys and these kinds of things.
05:54The investment in the resources are so enormous it's almost unimaginable.
05:58While some believe that a construction effort of this scale would easily take millions of people,
06:04the actual size of the Great Wall's workforce remains unknown.
06:10Although the structure has become a symbol of China's strength and ingenuity,
06:15it's likely those tasked with the construction were living in a grim reality.
06:21I would say that most of the wall was constructed through forced labor.
06:27Being sent to the wall was a punishment.
06:29It would just say on the statute books, chun, which means wall,
06:33and that's where the men were sent to carry bricks and ram earth.
06:36But there was a punishment for female criminals as well.
06:40It said, sent to pound rice.
06:42And for centuries, no one really knew what that meant.
06:46But it turns out that the bricks in the wall need cement to hold them together.
06:50And these armies of female convicts were sent to create this sticky rice soup
06:55that creates a really powerful, strong cement.
06:59And so these people are basically being exiled in the middle of nowhere.
07:03And the wall for them is a kind of prison.
07:06The workers were essentially worked to death in many cases.
07:10And there are reports of a lot of these people dying while they were building the wall.
07:17There are folk tales that have been recorded about people who expired being buried under the wall
07:26or their bodies being used to build the wall itself, which is quite a macabre thought.
07:32And we can't really look for these bodies or the remnants of the bodies.
07:37Were dead bodies really used in the construction of the Great Wall of China?
07:42Some estimate that upwards of a million workers lost their lives.
07:47So it remains a chilling possibility.
07:51And while there are countless unanswered questions about the making of this engineering marvel,
07:59Chinese researchers have begun using modern technology to try to solve the mystery of this wonder of the world.
08:09In 2018, researchers from Tianjin University decided to do a full scale drone mapped survey of the Ming Dynasty portion of the Great Wall.
08:20And what they found took a lot of people by surprise.
08:23They were able to get a comprehensive view of areas that people aren't normally able to access.
08:29And they discovered these doors that are effectively holes in the wall that were used at various portions for troops to surprise enemies by suddenly appearing through the wall.
08:42They were gates, basically, that nobody knew about.
08:46There were more than 200 of them hiding in plain sight.
08:49It turns out that the wall was not just some solid monolith.
08:54There were actually passageways, these secret doors, that were totally unexpected.
08:59China has only recently come to really start to explore itself historically, archeologically, scientifically.
09:08We haven't known a lot about why the Great Wall was built.
09:11And I can tell you from firsthand experience, it is simply impossible to access many areas of the Great Wall.
09:20And you have to remember, we can't see underneath the wall.
09:25We can't see if there were people who died in the construction and were thrown in the fill.
09:31We can't see if there were settlements that were built and then the wall covered them.
09:36What are the different features of the wall?
09:38We just don't know these things.
09:40So, I think the mysteries are going to continue to unfold over the course of the next several lifetimes.
09:50Egypt, in the shadow of the Great Pyramids, sits a monumental ancient landscape of countless architectural mysteries that continue to defy understanding.
10:07And just northwest of the Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest pyramid in Egypt, lies one of the most baffling archeological sites ever discovered.
10:18The Serapia of Saqqara.
10:21The Serapia of Saqqara.
10:22In 1850, French archeologist Auguste Merriot finds a head of a sphinx in the sand and decides to dig under it.
10:31And as they excavate, they find staircases down to some catacombs.
10:38And when they go inside, there's a burial ground with chambers, doorways, corridors.
10:46And most intriguingly, there are around 60 tombs and 24 giant sarcophagi.
10:53These sarcophagi are unusual because they are so huge and they are clearly not human tombs.
11:01This place was built around 1400 BC by the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who very much revolutionized Egypt.
11:11And it seems to have been used right up until about 30 BC.
11:15But the sheer scale and precision of the sarcophagi suggests that they did have some importance that isn't just clear to the eye.
11:27The Serapia of Saqqara is based around two large corridors, each with offshoot rooms where the sarcophagi were housed.
11:37This is what we would call the coffins.
11:39And the sarcophagi in the Serapia are absolutely huge.
11:44Ten foot wide, 13 foot long, each with its own lid and weighing around 60 to 70 tons.
11:53Moreover, what makes each sarcophagus really unusual is that they are built of one piece of solid granite.
12:01They have been brought down into the Serapia as one piece. It's simply remarkable.
12:06Sarcophagi that you might find in royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings or in pyramids are rectangular boxes.
12:13Roughly human body shaped and then a little bit larger.
12:17These sarcophagi in the Serapia were more like the size of a small building.
12:22Which prompts us into thinking, you know, how on earth did the Egyptians even go about cutting pieces of stone like this?
12:28But also maneuvering them into position.
12:30To get these huge sarcophagi into the burial vaults, they have to travel a long way in quite a confined space.
12:40And the fact is that we don't know precisely how the Egyptians did this.
12:46What could possibly be entombed in a 10 by 13 foot coffin that weighs 70 tons?
12:55Well, some believe the answer lies with a large animal the ancient Egyptians considered sacred.
13:01Known as an Apis bull.
13:04The Apis bull was a real life bull, a real animal identified by the priests according to particular markings.
13:14They had to have the right combination of black and white markings and that would be the giveaway that in fact this was the Apis bull.
13:21Which was believed to be a manifestation of the spirit of the god Tar.
13:26And Tar was a creator god and the most important god in the capital city of Memphis.
13:33And once the Apis bull was identified, it would be taken to the temple of Tar and looked after and treated as if it were a god.
13:42And at the time the bull died, they would have been given a full ceremonial burial comparable to the funeral of a pharaoh.
13:51While we do know Apis bulls were buried in ancient Egypt, were the giant sarcophagi in the Serapium of Saqqara specifically designed to inter the mummies of these holy creatures?
14:05When the catacombs were first being explored, the remains of a few bulls were found mummified in a slightly sort of unexpected way.
14:17In that the bodies appear to have been broken up and gathered together in a kind of bundle.
14:22But because most of the sarcophagi have been found to be empty, there are questions about whether or not they really were the sarcophagi for mummified bulls.
14:30The evidence is a bit thin on the ground.
14:34It's very possible that the sarcophagi were used to house the Apis bulls themselves.
14:39But as usual with things in ancient Egypt, there's both evidence for and against.
14:44But we don't have a lot of the ancient skeletal remains resulting from that.
14:49And so, of course, it's enormous fun to speculate who these tombs might have been created for, given their absolute vast size and proportion.
14:59What purpose did these enormous stone vessels truly serve? Were they actual tombs?
15:10While a lack of physical remains has certainly led to various theories, the most tantalizing hypothesis revolves around an ancient race of giants.
15:21When you look back and go into the old Arabian records and myths and legends, you find stories from the book, Ackmar El-Zaman, which was written about a thousand years ago.
15:35It detailed all these giant godlike beings coming from the land of Ad, or Adam, and arriving in Egypt and building the pyramids.
15:48We have the first pyramid in Egypt being built at Saqqara.
15:53And we have these giant sarcophagi.
15:56Some people have suggested that these could have housed human giants.
16:01And you find all these stories of these giant pharaohs.
16:05And there are lots of images that have been recording on many of the walls of the tombs and temples of Egypt.
16:11And some of them look like they're depicting giants.
16:14I mean, you kind of have to admit that.
16:16So I find this really, really compelling.
16:18Was the Serapium once a burial ground for giants?
16:23It's a fascinating idea to entertain.
16:26But the truth is, the answers to how and why these immovable containers were created remains lost to the sands of time.
16:35If there is one really great enduring mystery about the Serapium, it's really whether in fact we have found everything of the Serapium,
16:41or if one day a bit of archaeology could lead us to new chambers with everything that that might bring.
16:49Was there supposed to be something else there that we don't know about?
16:53And so it's making us ask questions about this period of ancient Egyptian history that's not very well known.
17:01It's hard to imagine just how much time and effort went into constructing the giant sarcophagi at Saqqara.
17:09Now perhaps the bigger question is, why?
17:12Like in the case of another impossible structure found in India.
17:17It's an enormous temple carved from a single piece of stone.
17:23Maharashtra, India.
17:30Just outside the city of Aurangabad lies the Allura Caves.
17:36A series of rock-cut temples, shrines, and monasteries carved out of a massive basalt cliff stretching for more than a mile.
17:46Constructed by a series of dynasties that ruled India between the 6th and 10th century AD,
17:53this extraordinary complex is an unparalleled monument to the diverse spirituality of India.
18:01The Allura Caves is a religious site that are a series of cave temples in western India.
18:10And it is one of the most breathtaking structures in all of South Asia, if not the world.
18:16It is comprised of 34 different caves.
18:2132 of the caves are proper cave temples, while two of them are rock-cut, freestanding temples.
18:3017 of them are Hindu, 12 are Buddhist, and 5 are Jain.
18:37This particular part of India had many important trade routes.
18:43And the rulers there also had a great diversity of religions.
18:47It was the duty of the king to make everyone feel welcome.
18:52While the Allura Caves symbolize an era of religious harmony in India,
18:57their beauty and precision also represent a true mystery of ancient engineering.
19:04And the site's most baffling construction is the Kailasa Temple.
19:10Built in the 8th century AD and spanning an area of about 300 feet long,
19:16175 feet wide, and 100 feet tall,
19:19it's the largest monolithic temple in the world.
19:25For Kailasa Temple to replicate it today would be nigh to impossible.
19:31Part of the mystery is trying to reverse engineer what they did and how they made this.
19:37So, normally you build a building by starting with a ground plan and building up.
19:44Here, these are rock-cut, which means you start from the top and you work your way down,
19:51chiseling the material out to make it look like it was built from the bottom up.
19:57So, basically you're building these things, in a way, upside down.
20:02And the skill of producing this and the geometry, it doesn't exist anymore today.
20:08We don't have any way to understand exactly how they were doing this.
20:13So, you have to scoop out the rocks and then build the temple.
20:19It's like a piece of sculpture and there has to be a blueprint in order to carve such a temple,
20:26but there has been no evidence of finding a blueprint or even mentioning that there was a blueprint.
20:33So, this is a mentally imagined or maybe they used small replica, like a model of a temple that they had on the side.
20:44We don't know. There are no any written documents.
20:48So, we are totally baffled. It's an enigmatic temple.
20:52Three million cubic square feet was the amount of stone that was removed.
20:59And that is another of the big mysteries here.
21:01Where did it go? How did they move it?
21:04It's still an enigma because just to be there, to walk in that space,
21:10you have a multi-story building of immaculate beauty and complexity that is a single piece of stone.
21:20The curvatures and the sculptural tableau are so intricate, so beautiful and so profound.
21:27It's hard to conceive that anyone could do it, even with modern technology.
21:32It's estimated that 200,000 tons of stone were removed to create Kailasa Temple,
21:41the equivalent of two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.
21:46And what makes this exquisite structure even more extraordinary is how quickly it was constructed.
21:54Kailasa Temple was allegedly built in less than 20 years,
21:59which has left a lot of people wondering how, by what means or methods, they accomplished such a feat.
22:06And especially if we're thinking that the site was built about 1,400 years ago, this is doubly impressive.
22:14So, there have been certain hypotheses that there were certain tools that vibrated at certain frequencies
22:20that were used to break down the rock. Magnetism might have been used.
22:25But there's no hard evidence for any of these building methods
22:30and no record of how these methods were deployed on the site.
22:36Could some kind of lost technology have been used in the temple's construction?
22:41Well, it's certainly a possibility.
22:44But legend has it that there may have been some supernatural assistance at the Elora Caves.
22:50And according to local folklore, secrets may still be hiding deep inside the mountain.
22:58There is this 13th century work known as the Lila Charitra
23:04that tells the story of the visit of Chakradhara, this great Hindu sage, into the vicinity of Elora.
23:11And he's traveling there with his disciples, and they need to find refuge for the night.
23:18So they go and spend the night at the caves of Elora.
23:23They start hearing strange voices emerging from out of the beautiful sculptures that surround them.
23:28And some of them start having odd visions, and one of the disciples turns to Chakradhara,
23:33and asks, how could these possibly be built? What is this structure?
23:37And the master says, this whole mountain is filled with hidden chambers and all kinds of hidden tunnels,
23:47and no one knows their entrances or their exits.
23:53And so this is probably the story of the start, that there are all kinds of hidden caves.
23:59And that lends to a lot of later speculation as well.
24:03There are legends that the Kailesha Temple was constructed by the gods himself,
24:08or certainly that they had a hand in its construction.
24:11And this therefore suggests the possibility that a lost technology was actually involved.
24:18So whatever way you look at this, this is an extraordinary achievement for humanity,
24:25and one that we still cannot explain to this day.
24:30Could a secret chamber inside the mountain hold the answers to how and why the Elora caves were created?
24:37If so, its discovery could potentially rewrite much of what we know about ancient engineering.
24:44Not unlike another baffling stone structure in Indonesia,
24:49the largest Buddhist temple in the world,
24:52that was mysteriously built and abandoned more than 500 years ago.
24:58Central Java, Indonesia.
25:05Dominating the skyline is Mount Merapi, Indonesia's most active volcano,
25:11standing like an ancient guardian above miles of dense misty jungle.
25:17And in 1814, when this island nation was part of the Dutch East Indies,
25:21Javanese locals spoke of a strange location hidden in the jungle they called the Mountain of a Thousand Statues.
25:32The British had control of the Dutch East Indies and their governor,
25:36Thomas Stamford Raffles, was on this inspection tour in what is now Java.
25:41And the locals said to him, there's a few statues up that hill.
25:44So he sent some engineers to check.
25:47The engineers came back and they said, they're not just a few statues up that hill.
25:52They're all linked together. There's some kind of complex.
25:55And it's not a hill. The hill is the complex.
25:59So they had to clear away 200 trees and a load of ash and soil
26:03before it started to reveal itself as this nine-stepped place of worship.
26:09And they slowly revealed Borobudur, this massive Buddhist temple in the middle of nowhere.
26:18The temple covers an area of 25,000 square feet,
26:23and it would technically be the largest Buddhist temple in the world.
26:27Borobudur is designed as a mandala.
26:30A mandala is a diagram of squares and circles
26:35that Buddhist monks would use for meditation practices.
26:39There are these square terraces and they represent the transition
26:43from the troubled daily life to Nirvana,
26:47which is a life freed and blessed from any types of problems.
26:52This building is a philosophy expressed in architecture.
26:55Towering at about 115 feet is the site of Borobudur.
26:58It's composed of nine stacked tiers or nine stories.
27:04It has over 500 Buddha statues and 2,000 relief panels
27:10that tell the story of the Buddha and his progress towards enlightenment.
27:15When visitors are going through the site,
27:18they are effectively going through a path to enlightenment that's laid out in stone.
27:22Actual records of Borobudur's construction have never been found.
27:29But most historians believe this remarkable structure was built around the 9th century AD
27:35by the Chalindra dynasty, a powerful family that once ruled Indonesia
27:40and established Buddhism in the region.
27:44And while much of the site's origin is unknown,
27:48many believe Borobudur's greatest mystery is that after centuries of use,
27:53this awe-inspiring site was left completely abandoned.
27:57Sometime in the 15th century, everything is abandoned.
28:02No one knows exactly why.
28:04It could have been changes of military power.
28:08It could have been changes of economic power.
28:11It could have been the mountains started rumbling and people got nervous.
28:15It could have been a number of possible reasons, but it is quite astonishing.
28:19They moved out and they moved to other places on the Java island
28:24and Borobudur was just left to the jungle.
28:28That's very mysterious.
28:30Why was such an impressive Buddhist temple abandoned?
28:35Well, some historians believe it was due to a massive shift
28:39in the region from Buddhism to Islam.
28:42The most prevailing theory revolves around deadly volcanic eruptions.
28:46Borobudur is located in between two very active volcanoes.
28:54Mount Merapi is one of them and it's fairly famous.
28:58It's about 15 miles from Borobudur.
29:01And there were historically documented eruptions that affected the area.
29:07So, for the Javanese, this area is inherently sacred
29:12and inhabited by deities and gods.
29:14And the fact that you would have repeated volcanic eruptions would have perhaps signaled
29:20at some point that the gods were displeased with something
29:25or that they wanted something to change.
29:28But the story of Borobudur becomes even more mysterious
29:32when considering the geological record.
29:35While it sounds obvious that volcanic eruptions would be a good cause for evacuation,
29:39it appears that no major activity occurred at the time the site was deserted
29:45and left to be consumed by Mother Nature.
29:48By the time you get to the 1700s, the local Indonesians forgot it was even a structure.
29:54All they knew was that there was a mountain out in the jungle covered with a thousand statues.
29:58People were afraid of it a little bit. They didn't really understand or really know what it was.
30:02The prince of Yogyakarta in the 1700s had heard rumors about this place.
30:10And he went there, and immediately after, he died.
30:14And by then clearly it's seen as a cursed site, an ominous site.
30:20So the rumors of it being a place of danger and mystery did continue to circulate up into the modern period.
30:29Whether Borobudur was considered cursed or merely left abandoned as a precaution,
30:34Today, millions of people visit this sacred site to revel in its architectural grandeur.
30:42And imagine what was once at this mountain of a thousand statues.
30:51Was the Borobudur Temple abandoned because it was cursed by the gods?
30:56Well, the only thing we know for certain is that its construction was far ahead of its time,
31:01which was also the case with a mysterious Incan fortress,
31:07whose massive walls were built using stone so perfectly placed
31:12that even a piece of paper won't fit between them.
31:20High in the Peruvian Andes, overlooking the ancient city of Cusco,
31:26lies one of the most baffling structures ever discovered.
31:29It is called Sacsayhuaman.
31:34And while time and warfare have transformed this site into a shadow of its former glory,
31:40it remains one of the most spectacular examples of megalithic stonework in the world.
31:48Sacsayhuaman is in the very heart of the ancient Inca capital at Cusco.
31:54And it's a gigantic fortified structure.
31:58It's got three layers of walls that are really remarkable for their zigzaggy shape.
32:06And it's the most patchwork kind of stonework that you've ever seen.
32:11And yet it's so precise.
32:14It's something that archaeologists call polygonal masonry.
32:17And it's just a fancy word for saying that all the rocks are of a different size and shape.
32:23And these stones aren't just huge.
32:27They're gargantuan. Some of them weigh a hundred tons.
32:29The Inca managed to fit them together with these curves and lines so perfectly without any mortar that you could not even slide a blade of grass between them.
32:42Our best guess as to when Sacsayhuaman was constructed was under the Inca ruler, Pachacuti, who ruled beginning in 1438 till around 1471.
32:54But we can't be sure because we don't have any written records about it.
32:59The Inca empire is a system of recording that it was colored knots and strings.
33:05And this is how they did their accounting.
33:07And they even recorded history through this system.
33:11But we don't actually have any records from the Inca telling us what Sacsayhuaman was used for or why it was built or who built it.
33:19But probably most importantly, how did they build this thing?
33:22While the techniques used to build Sacsayhuaman remain one of history's great riddles, we do know that in 1536, the site became an Inca stronghold during the Spanish conquest of Peru.
33:38And in a great and bloody battle, the Spanish slayed thousands and overtook the fortress, which proved a key event in the fall of the Inca empire.
33:48The conquerors dismantled all but the largest stones down to their foundation and used them to rebuild Cusco in Spain's image.
34:01Fortunately, famed chroniclers such as Garcilaso de la Vega collected indigenous myths, legends and oral histories related to this mighty stone masterpiece.
34:13Including the story of the site's original builders, said to be here long before the Inca themselves.
34:23Viracocha is the Inca creator god, described in legend as being a pale skinned figure who rose out of the Pacific Ocean at some time and gave rise to the first men as they're called.
34:37Some mythic race that some have said are attributed with the building of Sacsayhuaman.
34:45But other versions of the legend say that Viracocha himself built Sacsayhuaman and that the stones literally walked into place on their own.
34:56The story that I like most is that it's said that a great serpent or dragons created the stones by petrifying the local Inca with its gaze.
35:09With its gaze and that they then became the blocks that were then stacked in this great puzzle of rocks all interlocking.
35:17Now, obviously these are just legends, they're just stories, but do they contain some kernel of truth within them?
35:26Well, legendary tales may be metaphors for lost civilizations or forgotten technology.
35:33The more recent intriguing theory suggests that the true secret of Sacsayhuaman may be written on its walls in an ancient form of writing encoded in the very stones themselves.
35:47We have the remarkable construction of Sacsayhuaman.
35:53We have to question why they created it like this.
35:56Some people have suggested that all the different angles and size and measurements at Sacsayhuaman actually make up a code.
36:05And this was part of their sort of symbolic language.
36:08And it's almost like a message through time, if we know how to read the signs.
36:14And this isn't the only site in the area that has this style of stonework.
36:19We have places, very famous places, like Machu Picchu.
36:25We have Ollantay Tambo.
36:27We have Cuenco.
36:29We have Tambo Maché.
36:32We have all these different sites stretched all across the sacred valley.
36:37And so, who knows?
36:39When you start looking into things like this, you realize that there's a whole other level of sophistication that unless you study it, you can't even see.
36:48Could the written record of Sacsayhuaman be encrypted within the walls themselves?
36:54And if we can decode some hidden language, might it be part of a larger message that continues across other megalithic sites in Peru?
37:04That's certainly an exciting proposition.
37:07But until we learn how to decode these remarkable walls, the mystery will remain as enigmatic as the stones themselves.
37:17Szechuan, China.
37:25In the southwestern heart of the country, where fertile plains give way to rising mountain foothills,
37:32there's an enormous stone figure that has towered over the landscape for more than a millennium.
37:38It is known as the Leshan Buddha.
37:41The Leshan Buddha is this colossal structure that sits literally almost in a throne overseeing the confluence of three major rivers in the area.
37:53It's carved out of the rock face of Mount Lingyun, and it was built between roughly 700 and 800 of the common era.
38:02So over 1,200 years ago, it's 233 feet in height, which is actually the largest pre-modern statue ever recorded.
38:15So it's quite an impressive sight, and to cut this out of the rock face requires just unimaginable artistry and techniques.
38:24The Leshan Buddha emerges out of this cliff right at the junction of three turbulent rivers.
38:34These three rivers were an important waterway for trade.
38:38But during the flooding season, it would become so dangerous at that cliff.
38:44And because of how many people lost their lives, this is where this Buddha was chosen to be built.
38:50As impressive as this massive sculpture is, what is truly confounding is that after the Leshan Buddha was completed, it is said that the dangerous and turbulent waters beneath its feet were almost miraculously tamed.
39:07Remarkably, when the statue was completed, there are records that show the rivers became calmer.
39:14If you're a Buddhist, then that tells you that the Leshan Buddha would calm the waters of the river.
39:21If you're not a Buddhist, then there's no real evidence that Buddha came along and calmed the waters.
39:25So it seems that this construction, maybe by design, maybe by happenstance, affected at least the flow of the rivers and this turbulent confluence and pacified them.
39:39So some people have interpreted this as an action of the Buddha.
39:44Others, historians believe that by strategically placing rock, reworking the riverbanks and relining sediment and rock at the bottom of the riverbeds, that would have been intentional.
39:57So there's a mystery there that remains to be resolved.
40:02Was it the benevolent power of the Buddha that made these dangerous waters safe?
40:08Or are engineering efforts responsible for successfully altering the river's currents?
40:14Perhaps both are true.
40:15But as with so many structures of the ancient world, their majesty and mystery continue to amaze and confound us as we seek to understand what appears to be impossible.
40:31Megastructures from the ancient past teach us a lot about what people in antiquity were able to do.
40:38We think very highly of our own civilization and we tend to think that past civilizations were very primitive in comparison.
40:45And great structures show us that not only could they do it, we would actually struggle to do something like that today.
40:53Whenever we see something we don't understand, we become curious.
40:57But in the absence of written records, you have to rely on myth and oral tradition to understand who built these things, how and why.
41:05And I think that mystery is going to remain a mystery for a long period of time.
41:12It's interesting to consider what ancient cultures chose to construct out of stone, a material difficult to work with, but one that defies the test of time.
41:24Whether it's a 230 foot statue set to calm violent waters, massive walls that stretch for 13,000 miles or a temple complex carved from one solid rock.
41:40There seems to be no end to the engineering feats our ancestors could achieve.
41:45And while we're able to marvel at these amazing structures, we may simply have to accept that the secrets of their construction and purpose may forever remain unexplained.
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