Has the grand Roman Pantheon been keeping a secret for nearly 2000 years? An expert in ancient timekeeping thinks so, arguing that it acts as a colossal sundial. The imposing temple in Rome, completed in AD 128, is one of the most impressive buildings that survives from antiquity. It consists of a cylindrical chamber topped by a domed roof with an oculus in the top which lets through a dramatic shaft of sunlight. It boasts a colonnaded courtyard at the front.When Robert Hannah of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, visited the Pantheon in 2005, researching for a book, he realised that the Pantheon may have been more than just atemple.During the six months of winter, the light of the noon sun traces a path across the inside of the domed roof.
During summer, with the sun higher in the sky, the shaft shines onto the lower walls and floor. At the two equinoxes, in March and September, the sunlight coming in through the hole strikes the junction between the roof and wall, above the Pantheon's grand northern doorway.
above the door allows a sliver of light through to the front courtyard
- the only moment in the year that it sees sunlight if its main doors
Hannah reckons this is no
coincidence. A hollowed-out hemisphere with a hole in the top was a
type of sundial used in Roman times, albeit on a much smaller scale, to
show the time of year. While the Pantheon's dome is quite flat on the
outside, it forms a perfect hemisphere inside. "This is quitea
deliberate design feature," says Hannah.
Pantheon means "all of the
gods" and the building's roof represented the dome of the sky, where
Romans believed the gods resided. At equinox, the sun is on the
celestial equator - where Earth's equator would lie if projected into
space - which was seen as the most stable part of the sky, a perfect
eternal home for the gods. Hannah thinks that by marking the equinoxes,
the Pantheon was intended to elevate emperors who worshipped there into
the realm of the gods.
James Evans, a historian of
astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state, is
intrigued: "The architect of the Pantheon would certainly have been
aware of the symbolic connections between the cosmos and the empire,
and between the sun and the emperor." He doesn't believe the case is
proven, however, as no markingssurvive in......
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the A...Did an Ancient Language of Universal Symbols Exist?
A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone. But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes calledthe world’s...Ancient Nuclear Weapons!
it really possible that the Ancient Indians had the capacity to deploy
devastating nuclear weapons against their enemies? Moreover is it really
possible, as many Ufologists claim, that awesomely powerful nuclear weapons were
actually given to the ancient Indian warriors by extraterrestrials, highly
advanced spacemen from other planets? well passages from ancient Indian national
epics certainly Appear to be evidence of such astonishing claims.
It i...Ancient Egyptian Alchemy
Anthony North: In the early years of the 20th century an artifact was recovered from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Dated to about 80BC, it was considered a mere artifact. However in 1971 research on the Antikythera Mechanism showed it to have an intricate arrangement of gears, dials and graded plates. One theory is that it was a computing device to work out the movement of the Sun and planets. If this idea is true, then the ancients had a degree of technology way above previou...High-Tech Wars Described in Ancient Texts!
Sanskrit texts are filled
with references to gods who fought battles in the sky using Vimanas equipped
with weapons as deadly as any we can deploy in these more enlightened times.
Sanskrit texts are filled with references to gods who fought battles in the sky
using Vimanas equipped with weapons as deadly as any we can deploy in these more
enlightened times. For example, there is a passage in the Ramayana which reads:
"The Puspaka car that resembles the Sun ...Skeleton Shows Ancient Brain Surgery
Archaeologists have unearthed the skull of a young woman in northern Greece who is believed to have undergone head surgery in the third century, Greek news media reported Wednesday. A Greek team discovered the skeleton at an ancient cemetery in Veria, with the skull including an injury that led them to conclude the surgery had been performed. "We think that there was a complex surgical intervention that only an experienced doctor could have performed," said IoannisGraikos, the ...An Ancient Greek 'Computer'
by Derek J. de Solla Price From June 1959 Scientific American p.60-7
In 1901 divers working off the isle of Antikythera found
the remains of a clocklike mechanism 2,000 years old. The mechanism now
appears to have been a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets
among the treasures of the Greek National
Archaeological Museum in Athens are the remains of the most complex scientific
object that has been preserved from antiquity. Corroded and crumblin...