5 Quotes Tagged: Mystery

The same solution — that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass — would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them.

There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.

Well, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, & a thirteenth...

In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age — perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen — or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It's therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of 'package' is involved here.

It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of "writings on stones from before the flood," turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt.
Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]'s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the "Early Primeval Age of the Gods" — and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the "Homeland of the Primeval Ones," in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster — a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...] — overtook this island, where "the earliest mansions of the gods" had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to "wander" the world.
[...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled "channel" surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones — a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as "Poseidon," was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection.
Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timae