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00:01Magnificent temples carved from a single massive rock.
00:05A megalithic fortress encoded with a mysterious hidden language
00:11and 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,
00:37sacred temples constructed with complex geometry,
00:42and colossal architectural masterpieces that rival or even surpass what we can create today.
00:51How did the builders of these structures achieve such seemingly impossible feats of engineering
00:58without the use of modern technology?
01:02Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:20China.
01:22With over 4,000 years of recorded history,
01:26it is the oldest continuous civilization in the world.
01:31Its rich culture has been shaped by powerful dynasties
01:36and countless wars
01:38and unrivaled feats of engineering that 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.
02:30This 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?
02:44We 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.
02:55Originally, in the 220s BC,
02:59the first emperor of China, the man called Ying Zheng,
03:03decided 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.
03:47And sometimes it's 50 feet tall, sometimes it's 30 feet tall,
03:51sometimes it's 10 feet tall.
03:53You 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,
04:15in 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
04:44famously broke through these legendary defenses
04:48and actually took control of China.
04:51Rebel forces overthrew the Mongols in 1368
04:55and established the Ming Dynasty.
04:59For nearly 300 years,
05:01the Mings built and reinforced over 5,000 miles
05:05of even more sophisticated walls
05:07until 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
05:48trying to build over mountain passes or ridges across valleys
05:53and these kinds of things.
05:54The investment and the resources are so enormous,
05:57it's almost unimaginable.
05:59While some believe that a construction effort of this scale
06:02would 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,
06:16it's likely those tasked with the construction were living in a grim reality.
06:22I would say that most of the wall was constructed through forced labour.
06:27Being sent to the wall was a punishment.
06:29It would just say on the statute books,
06:31chung, which means wall,
06:33and that's where the men were sent to carry bricks and ram earth.
06:37But there was a punishment for female criminals as well.
06:40It said, sent to pound rice.
06:43And 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
06:56that 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,
07:29which is quite a macabre thought.
07:31And 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.
07:46So 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.
08:08In 2018, researchers from Tianjin University decided to do a full-scale drone mapped survey of the Ming Dynasty portion
08:19of the Great Wall.
08:20And what they found took a lot of people by surprise.
08:22They 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
08:37to surprise enemies by suddenly appearing through the wall.
08:42They were gates, basically, that nobody knew about.
08:45There were more than 200 of them hiding in plain sight.
08:50It turns out that the wall was not just some solid monolith.
08:55There were actually passageways, these secret doors, that were totally unexpected.
09:01China 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 first-hand experience, it is simply impossible to access many areas of the Great
09:19Wall.
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? We just don't know these things.
09:39So, I think the mysteries are going to continue to unfold over the course of the next several lifetimes.
09:52Egypt, in the shadow of the Great Pyramids, sits a monumental ancient landscape of countless architectural mysteries that continue to
10:04defy understanding.
10:05And just northwest of the Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest pyramid in Egypt, lies one of the most baffling archeological
10:16sites ever discovered, the Serapium of Saqqara.
10:22In 1850, French archeologist Auguste Merriot finds a head of a Sphinx in the sand and decides to dig under
10:30it.
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.
10:54These sarcophagi are unusual because they are so huge and they are clearly not human tombs.
11:02This 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
11:24to the eye.
11:27The Serapium 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. And the sarcophagi in the Serapium 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 Serapium as one piece. It's simply remarkable.
12:07Sarcophagi 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.
12:18These sarcophagi in the Serapium were more like the size of a small building.
12:23Which prompts us into thinking, you know, how on earth did the Egyptians even go about cutting pieces of stone
12:28like this, but 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
12:39space.
12:40And the fact is that we don't know precisely how the Egyptians did this.
12:45What could possibly be entombed in a 10 by 13 foot coffin that weighs 70 tons?
12:54Well, some believe the answer lies with a large animal the ancient Egyptians considered sacred, known 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
13:18fact this was the Apis bull,
13:20which 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
13:40treated as if it were a god.
13:43And at the time the bull died, they would have been given a full ceremonial burial comparable to the funeral
13:50of a pharaoh.
13:53While we do know Apis bulls were buried in ancient Egypt,
13:57were the giant sarcophagi in the Serapium of Saqqara specifically designed to inter the mummies of these holy creatures?
14:08When the catacombs were first being explored, the remains of a few bulls were found mummified in a slightly sort
14:16of unexpected way,
14:17in that the bodies appear to have been broken up and gathered together in a kind of bundle.
14:23But because most of the sarcophagi have been found to be empty,
14:26there are questions about whether or not they really were the sarcophagi for mummified bulls.
14:31The evidence is a bit thin on the ground.
14:34It's very possible that the sarcophagi were used to house the Apis bulls themselves,
14:40but 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,
14:56given their absolute vast size and proportion.
15:01What purpose did these enormous stone vessels truly serve?
15:06Were they actual tombs?
15:09While a lack of physical remains has certainly led to various theories,
15:14the 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,
15:28you find stories from the book, Akmah 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
15:45building the pyramids.
15:47We have the first pyramid in Egypt being built at Saqqara.
15:52And we have these giant sarcophagi.
15:55Some 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
16:10of Egypt.
16:11And some of them look like they're depicting giants.
16:15I mean, you kind of have to admit that.
16:17So I find this really, really compelling.
16:19Was 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
16:34of time.
16:35If there is one really great enduring mystery about the Serapium,
16:39it's really whether in fact we have found everything of the Serapium,
16:42or 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?
16:52And 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.
17:08Now 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.
17:28Maharashtra India, just outside the city of Aurangabad, lies the Allura Caves,
17:35a series of rock-cut temples, shrines and monasteries,
17:40carved 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.
18:00The Allura Caves is a religious site that are a series of cave temples than 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.
18:51While the Allura Caves symbolize an era of religious harmony in India,
18:57their beauty and precision also represent a true mystery of ancient engineering.
19:03And the site's most baffling construction is the Kailasa Temple.
19:09Built 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, is it mentally imagined? Or maybe they used small replica, like a model of a temple that they had
20:43on the side.
20:44We don't know. There are no any written documents.
20:48So, we are totally baffled. It's an enigmatic temple.
20:53Three million cubic square feet was the amount of stone that was removed.
20:59And that is another of the big mysteries here. Where 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.
21:19The 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.
21:33It's estimated that 200,000 tons of stone were removed to create Kailasa Temple,
21:41the equivalent of two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.
21:45And what makes this exquisite structure even more extraordinary is how quickly it was constructed.
21:53Kailasa 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.
22:22Magnetism 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.
22:35Could some kind of lost technology have been used in the temple's construction?
22:41Well, it's certainly a possibility.
22:43But legend has it that there may have been some supernatural assistance at the Allura 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, that tells the story of the visit of Chakradhara,
23:07this great Hindu sage, into the vicinity of Allura.
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 Allura.
23:22They 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 and asks,
23:34how could these possibly be built? What is this structure?
23:38And 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.
23:52And so this is probably the story of the start, that there are all kinds of hidden caves.
23:58And that lends to a lot of later speculation as well.
24:02There 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,
24:24and one that we still cannot explain to this day.
24:29Could a secret chamber inside the mountain hold the answers to how and why the Allura Caves were created?
24:37If so, its discovery could potentially rewrite much of what we know about ancient engineering.
24:43Not unlike another baffling stone structure in Indonesia, the largest Buddhist temple in the world,
24:51that was mysteriously built and abandoned more than 500 years ago.
25:02Central 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.
25:16And in 1814, when this island nation was part of the Dutch East Indies,
25:22Javanese locals spoke of a strange location hidden in the jungle they called the Mountain of a Thousand Statues.
25:31The British had control of the Dutch East Indies and their governor,
25:36Thomas Stanford Raffles, was on this inspection tour in what is now Java.
25:40And 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.
26:08And they slowly revealed Borobudur, this massive Buddhist temple in the middle of nowhere.
26:18The temple covers an area of 25,000 square feet,
26:22and 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
26:34that Buddhist monks would use for meditation practices.
26:38There are these square terraces and they represent the transition from the troubled daily life
26:45to Nirvana, which is a life freed and blessed from any types of problems.
26:51This building is a philosophy expressed in architecture.
26:54Towering at about 115 feet is the site of Borobudur.
26:59It's composed of nine stacked tiers or nine stories.
27:03It has over 500 Buddha statues and 2,000 relief panels that tell the story of the Buddha
27:11and his progress towards enlightenment.
27:14When visitors are going through the site, they are effectively going through a path to enlightenment that's laid out in
27:22stone.
27:25Actual records of Borobudur's construction have never been found.
27:29But most historians believe this remarkable structure was built around the 9th century AD
27:34by 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, many believe Borobudur's greatest mystery
27:50is that after centuries of use, this awe-inspiring site was left completely abandoned.
27:58Sometime in the 15th century, everything is abandoned.
28:02No one knows exactly why.
28:04It could have been changes of military power.
28:07It could have been changes of economic power.
28:10It 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
28:23and Borobudur was just left to the jungle.
28:27That's very mysterious.
28:30Why was such an impressive Buddhist temple abandoned?
28:35While some historians believe it was due to a massive shift in the region from Buddhism to Islam,
28:41the most prevailing theory revolves around deadly volcanic eruptions.
28:48Borobudur is located in between two very active volcanoes.
28:54Mount Merapi is one of them and it's fairly famous.
28:57It's about 15 miles from Borobudur.
29:00And there were historically documented eruptions that affected the area.
29:07So for the Javanese, this area is inherently sacred and inhabited by deities and gods.
29:14And the fact that you would have repeated volcanic eruptions would have perhaps signaled at some point
29:20that the gods were displeased with something or that they wanted something to change.
29:28But the story of Borobudur becomes even more mysterious when considering the geological record.
29:34While 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 and left to be consumed by
29:46Mother 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.
30:00They didn't really understand or really know what it was.
30:04The Prince of Yogyakarta in the 1700s had heard rumors about this place.
30:10And he went there and immediately after, he died.
30:15And 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
30:27period.
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.
30:41And imagine what was once at this mountain of a thousand statues.
30:51Was the Borobudur temple abandoned because it was cursed by the gods?
30:55Well, the only thing we know for certain is that its construction was far ahead of its time.
31:02Which was also the case with a mysterious Incan fortress whose 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,
31:26Lai is one of the most baffling structures ever discovered.
31:30It is called Sacsayhuaman.
31:33And 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.
31:53And it's a gigantic fortified structure.
31:58It's got three layers of walls that are really remarkable for their zigzaggy shape.
32:05And it's the most patchwork kind of stonework that you've ever seen.
32:12And yet it's so precise.
32:14It's something that archaeologists call polygonal masonry.
32:17It'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.
32:26They're gargantuan.
32:28Some of them weigh a hundred tons.
32:30The Inca managed to fit them together with these curves and lines so perfectly without any mortar that you could
32:39not even slide a blade of grass between them.
32:41Our best guess as to when Sacsayhuaman was constructed was under the Inca ruler, Pachacuti, who ruled beginning in 1438
32:51till around 1471.
32:53But we can't be sure because we don't have any written records about it.
33:00The Inca empire is a system of recording that was colored knots and strings.
33:05And this is how they did their accounting and they even recorded history through this system.
33:10But we don't actually have any records from the Inca telling us what Sacsayhuaman was used for or why it
33:17was built or who built it.
33:18But 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
33:32site became an Inca stronghold during the Spanish conquest of Peru.
33:37And in a great and bloody battle, the Spanish slayed thousands and overtook the fortress, which proved a key event
33:46in 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
33:59image.
34:01Fortunately famed chroniclers such as Garcilaso de la Vega collected indigenous myths, legends and oral histories related to this mighty
34:12stone masterpiece.
34:14Including 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
34:32Pacific Ocean at some time and gave rise to the first men as they're called.
34:38Some 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
34:55on their own.
34:56The story that I like most is that it's said that a great serpent or dragons created the stones by
35:05petrifying the local Inca with its gaze and that they then became the blocks that were then stacked in this
35:14great puzzle of rocks all interlocking.
35:17Now obviously these are just legends are just stories but do they contain some kernel of truth within them.
35:26While legendary tales may be metaphors for lost civilizations or forgotten technology.
35:32The more recent intriguing theory suggests that the true secret of Sacsayhuaman may be written on its walls in an
35:42ancient form of writing encoded in the very stones themselves.
35:48We have the remarkable construction of Sacsayhuaman.
35:53We have to question why they created it like this.
35:57Some 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.
36:28We have Cuenco.
36:30We have Tambo Mache.
36:32We have all these different sites stretched all across the sacred valley.
36:37And so who knows, when you start looking into things like this, you realize that there's a whole other level
36:43of sophistication that unless you study it, you can't even see.
36:48Could the written record of Sacsayhuaman be encrypted within the walls themselves?
36:53And if we can decode some hidden language, might it be part of a larger message that continues across other
37:02megalithic 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.
37:23Szechuan, China.
37:25In the southwestern heart of the country, where fertile plains give way to rising mountain foothills, there's an enormous stone
37:33figure that has towered over the landscape for more than a millennium.
37:37It 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
37:51rivers 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
38:02the common era, so over 1,200 years ago.
38:06It'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
38:24techniques.
38:24The Leshan Buddha emerges out of this cliff right at the junction of three turbulent rivers.
38:33These 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.
38:51As impressive as this massive sculpture is, what is truly confounding is that after the Leshan Buddha was completed, it
38:59is said that the dangerous and turbulent waters beneath its feet were almost miraculously tamed.
39:08Remarkably, 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.
39:20If 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
39:35and this turbulent confluence and pacified them.
39:40So some people have interpreted this as an action of the Buddha.
39:43Others, historians believe that by strategically placing rock, reworking the river banks and relining sediment and rock at the bottom
39:54of the river beds, 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?
40:07Or are engineering efforts responsible for successfully altering the river's currents?
40:14Perhaps both are true.
40:17But as with so many structures of the ancient world, their majesty and mystery continue to amaze and confound us
40:25as 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
40:44comparison.
40:45And great structures show us that not only could they do it, we would actually struggle to do something like
40:51that today.
40:52Whenever we see something we don't understand, we become curious.
40:56But in the absence of written records, you have to rely on myth and oral tradition to understand who built
41:03these things, how and why.
41:05And I think that 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
41:21one that defies the test of time.
41:25Whether it's a 230 foot statue set to calm violent waters, massive walls that stretch for 13,000 miles, or
41:35a temple complex carved from one solid rock.
41:39There 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
41:54their construction and purpose may forever remain unexplained.
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