I had the great pleasure of visiting the pyramid of Kukulkan at Chitzen Itza in Mexico.
Nearby is another structure called the Temple of a Thousand Columns.
If you stand in a certain location and clap toward the pyramid you get an echo that sounds like a bird. If you clap toward the temple you get an echo that sounds like a rattlesnake.
Kukulkan is represented as a winged serpent.
Tell me that wasn’t a major engineering feat.
The emotional effect is irrelevant. Do you people read my posts at all? I said that the labor involved is impressive, but the point was that no advanced engineering was required. Its a thoroughly unimpressive structure except as a monument to one man’s power, wealth, and ego.
Can we be certain that it was intentional? If its true, it probably means they studied acoustics. But it involves no extrordinary engineering skill.
I suspect there is a certain amount of luck involved, if not outright self-deception. However, since I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting mexico, I won’t comment further.
So were a lot of other gods. This means little. The Quetzlecoatl was a common religious symbol associated with, well Quetzlecoatl and other dieties.
I will add this, although people seem to not be discussing Stonehenge much.
I’ve been to Stonehenge three times, and each time I’ve come away with the same feeling - that all attempts to align the positions of the rocks with the stars at a certain time of day on a certain day of the year really is all just be total speculation.
There are an enormous number of small stones and medium-sized stones at certain positions in the ground, many of which are either missing or (I believe) partly or entirely under the turf. And there are at least 60 bluestones in the Bluestone Circle. It’s easy to “find” alignments from that many stones. In fact, I will quote from the National Trust book on Stonehenge (sorry, no link, most things still aren’t conveniently on the web):
I mean - there’s also all those unfilled (as of today) Y and Z holes - what was in there? There could have been a wooden structure which gave entirely new meaning to the purpose of the stones. It could have been the best damn neolithic whorehouse in all of Europe! Which brings to mind a Simpsons quote, when Moe finds a time machine:
Since when is an emotional or a personal response irrelevant to architecture?
What would your definition of advanced engineering be for ancient Egyptian civilization? Keep in mind their level of technology before demanding a suspension bridge or a skyscraper. If the larger pyramids don’t cut it – and they were easily the major architectural endeavours of their age – it seems to me you are setting an impossibly high standard.
This comment is meaningless. The Suez canal was a thoroughly unimpressive feat except as a monument to commerce. The Empire State building was a thoroughly unimpressive structure except as a monument to New York City. The London Tower Bridge was a thoroughly unimpressive structure except as a monument to a dead era. The Colosseum was a thoroughly unimpressive structure except as a monument to popular entertainment. The Great Wall of China was a thoroughly unimpressive structure except as a monument to xenophobia.
Of course, this is nonsense; like the pyramids, the feats I just mentioned were remarkable achievements that demanded the most out of the technologies and resources of their builders – it just so happens that the pyramids came before the other examples and were built with more primitive technology. If you don’t appreciate that then it’s impossible to understand their architectural relevance in context.
As for being a monument of one man, well that is not accurate. Slightly more appropriate to say the pyramids were monuments for the death and eternal life of kings and gods. Churches, mosques, and temples of all kinds are built in a similar vein – they inspire specific emotional responses to suggest awe and humility before god, and we have no problem accepting them as architectural marvels.
This suggests you’re forcing the argument. Acoustics is a facet of architecture and requires some level of engineering skill to get right. Otherwise we must assume the fellows who built amphitheatres were getting miraculously lucky every time.
I would suggest that you read some books by Anthony Aveni. Ancient Astronomers is a good place to start. And in case somebody is going to question his credentials, Aveni is no Graham Hancock.
Okay, Aveni is a skilled archaeologist.
The astronomical hy[pothesis to explain alignments is still only a hypothesis;
as an alternative, how about this;
the stones were spaced as evenly as they could manage in a circle at Stonehenge and elsewhere, with the stones aligned along certain axes for convenience during construction.
These things took decades to build; it must have been convenient to be able to check their alignments against the rising of the Sun and be sure that those measurements were reliable.
Megalithic stone circles were not built in order to observe the Sun and the stars;
they were built using observations of the sun and stars as guidelines. Once the things were built, the observations may well have been irrelevant.
Early christian churches and burials were aligned east-west; this does not imply they were constantly used to observe the heavens, just that somebody used the heavens to line them up during construction.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Eburacum, you may have a point but we do know that the solstices were very much holy events. A means to be able to tell when those days were approaching, would come very handy, IMHO. Assuming the absence of a wall-calender on which they jot off the days, this would make the monuments a very practical instrument.
Also, don’t forget that they didn’t start out as monuments but were embelishments on earlier pole structures.
Actually, we don’t know that the solstices were holy events to the people who built Stonehenge. The theory that they were has only ever been inferred (plausibly IMHO) from the apparent alignments.
Plus feasts that have ‘survived’ into history.
But, yes, know is maybe too big a word.
Crud. A huge, huge reply. Lost. Totally.
The hell with it. It took me ten minutes to write. I hate the internet sometimes.