The Westbury White Horse

The Westbury White Horse

The Westbury White Horse is a giant representation of a horse, situated near the village of Westbury in southern England. It wascreated by cutting the outline of a horse into the white chalk of the hillside. The existing horse may be different from the original as it has slowly changed with the passage of time. Archeological evidense suggests that the White Horse dates back to prehistoric times, althought not all experts agree on this. Some historians believe that the White Horse was created at a much later date -perhaps in the 17th century. However, its located immediately below the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, seems to confirm its ancients origins.Nobody really knows why the White Horse was created. In an ancient civilisation, it may have religious importance although some experts suggest that it represents the artistic expression of the time. Local people recently took inspiration from it to create a modern version which is situated near the town of Folkestone.

The horse is 180 feet tall and 170 feet wide and is a symbol for the town of Westbury, appearing on welcome signs and in the logo for its tourist information centre. It is also considered a symbol for Wiltshire as a whole.

Tomb of Alexander the Great

Tomb of Alexander the Great

The tomb of Alexander the Great and, particularly, its exact present location has been a recurring conundrum. Shortly after Alexander's death in Babylon the possession of his body became a subject of negotiations between Perdiccas, Ptolemy I Soter, and Seleucus I Nicator.

When in India, Alexander the Great met a naked philosopher named Calanus, he was an old man who self immolated himself infront of him, rather than turning old and getting sick. His last words to Alexander were, “See you in Babylon” which sounds like the beginning of a cheesy 80’s era song, and Alexander and his soldiers didn’t get the meaning at that point because he had no plans of ever revisiting that city. Only when Alexander later died in Babylon did it make sense to his followers. The discussion of his death is for another day, today we still don’t know where his tomb is.

His coffin was hijacked on its way to Greece, by Ptolemy (his former general who was now ruler of Egypt), and buried him in Alexandria. Caesar visited his tomb, Caligula also did and he looted his breastplate, later Muslim travelers visited it as well and even wrote about it. And then suddenly in the last two hundred years we have no idea where it is. There have been more than 100 search attempts and all have failed. Legend has it he is buried under a Coptic church.

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu (in hispanicized spelling, Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmatʃu ˈpiktʃu]) or Machu Pikchu (Quechua machu old, old person, pikchu peak; mountain or prominence with a broad base which ends in sharp peaks, "old peak", pronunciation [ˈmɑtʃu ˈpixtʃu]) is a 15th-century Inca site located 2,430 metres (7,970 ft)above sea level It is located in the Cusco Region, Urubamba Province, Machupicchu District in Peru.

The Incas built the estate around 1450, but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Although known locally, it was not known to the Spanish during the colonial period and remained unknown to the outside world before being brought to international attention in 1911 by the American historian Hiram Bingham. Most of the outlying buildings have been reconstructed in order to give tourists a better idea of what the structures originally looked like. By 1976, 30% of Machu Picchu had been restored; restoration continues today.

MACHU PICCHU’S “DISCOVERY” BY HIRAM BINGHAM

In the summer of 1911 the American archaeologist Hiram Bingham arrived in Peru with a small team of explorers hoping to find Vilcabamba, the last Inca stronghold to fall to the Spanish. Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way from Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, where a local farmer told them of some ruins located at the top of a nearby mountain. The farmer called the mountain Machu Picchu, which translates to “old peak” in the native Quechua language. On July 24, after a tough climb to the mountain’s ridge in cold and drizzly weather, Bingham met a small group of peasants who showed him the rest of the way. Led by an 11-year-old boy, Bingham got his first glimpse of the intricate network of stone terraces marking the entrance to Machu Picchu.Although he is credited with making Machu Picchu known to the world—indeed, the highway tour buses use to reach it bears his name—it is not certain that Bingham was the first outsider to visit it. There is evidence that missionaries and other explorers reached the site during the 19th and early 20th centuries but were simply less vocal about what they uncovered there.

THE SITE OF MACHU PICCHU

In the midst of a tropical mountain forest on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes, Machu Picchu’s walls, terraces, stairways and ramps blend seamlessly into its natural setting. The site’s finely crafted stonework, terraced fields and sophisticated irrigation system bear witness to the Inca civilization’s architectural, agricultural and engineering prowess. Its central buildings are prime examples of a masonry technique mastered by the Incas in which stones were cut to fit together without mortar.

Archaeologists have identified several distinct sectors that together comprise the city, including a farming zone, a residential neighborhood, a royal district and a sacred area. Machu Picchu’s most distinct and famous structures include the Temple of the Sun and the Intihuatana stone, a sculpted granite rock that is believed to have functioned as a solar clock or calendar.

Atlantis: The lost island

Atlantis 

Atlantis (Ancient Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, "island of Atlas") is a fictional island mentioned within an allegory on the hubris of nations in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias, where it represents the antagonist naval power that besieges "Ancient Athens", the pseudo-historic embodiment of Plato's ideal state. In the story, Athens repels the Atlantean attack, unlike any other nation of the (western) known world, supposedly giving testament to the superiority of Plato's concept of a state. At the end of the story, Atlantis eventually falls out of favor with the gods and famously submerges into the Atlantic Ocean.

 While present-day philologists and historians accept the story's fictional character, there is still debate on what served as its inspiration. The fact that Plato borrowed some of his allegories and metaphors—most notably the story of Gyges—from older traditions has caused a number of scholars to investigate possible inspiration of Atlantis from Egyptian records of the Thera eruption, the Sea Peoples invasion, or the Trojan War.Others have rejected this chain of tradition as implausible and insist that Plato designed the story from scratch, drawing loose inspiration from contemporary events like the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415–413 BC or the destruction of Helike in 373 BC.

Origins of the Atlantis Story

Plato’s Critias says he heard the story of Atlantis from his grandfather, who had heard it from the Athenian statesman Solon (300 years before Plato’s time), who had learned it from an Egyptian priest, who said it had happened 9,000 years before that. Whether or not Plato believed his own story, his intent in telling it seems to have been to boost his ideas of an ideal society, using stories of ancient victory and calamity to call to mind more recent events such as the Trojan War or Athens’ disastrous invasion of Sicily in 413 B.C. The historicity of Plato’s tale was controversial in ancient times—his follower Crantor is said to have believed it, while Strabo (writing a few centuries later) records Aristotle’s joke about Plato’s ability to conjure nations out of thin air and then destroy them.

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. According to the US Navy, the triangle does not exist, and the name is not recognized by the US Board on Geographic Names. Popular culture has attributed various disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings. Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were spurious, inaccurately reported, or embellished by later authors.


     

Natural explanations

Compass variations

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, such anomalies have not been found. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are only exactly the same for a small number of places – for example, as of 2000, in the United States, only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.

Human error

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error. Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, the Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958.

Violent weather

Tropical cyclones are powerful storms, which form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives lost and caused billions of dollars in damage. The sinking of Francisco de Bobadilla's Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

A powerful downdraft of cold air was suspected to be a cause in the sinking of the Pride of Baltimore on May 14, 1986. The crew of the sunken vessel noted the wind suddenly shifted and increased velocity from 32 km/h (20 mph) to 97–145 km/h (60–90 mph). A National Hurricane Center satellite specialist, James Lushine, stated "during very unstable weather conditions the downburst of cold air from aloft can hit the surface like a bomb, exploding outward like a giant squall line of wind and water." A similar event occurred to the Concordia in 2010 off the coast of Brazil.

Bibliography:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle