5 Ancient Legends Based on True Events

Humans, above all else, are excellent storytellers. Myths and legends have ignited the imagination and fed the souls of human beings for thousands of years. The vast majority of these legendary tales are usually just stories people have handed down through the ages. However, as it turns out, there are plenty of old myths and stories that have more than a kernel of truth to them. In fact, a few of them have roots in real geological and astronomical events of the past, providing warning of potential catastrophic dangers that threaten our existence, while also speaking volumes to the awe we hold for the wonders of our planet.

So, here are five ancient legends from around the world that are somehow based on true events.

1. The Guest Star

The Ancient Story of “The Guest Star.” In April of the year A.D. 1006, witnesses from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and possibly even in North America, spotted what they described as a “guest star” in the sky. Astronomers digging through ancient texts have found lost records mentioning and describing the cosmic phenomenon. Among them is from the multipart opus “Kitab al-Shifa” or “Book of Healing” by the Persian scientist Ibn Sina, who is also known in the west as Avicenna. In the “Book of Healing,” Avicenna took note of a transient celestial object that changed color and “threw out sparks” as it faded away. What he saw started out as a faint greenish yellow light, which twinkled wildly at its peak brightness. Then, it became a whitish color before ultimately vanishing.

For a long time, the “guest star” was suspected of being a comet, but now, it has since been determined that the celestial wonder was really a supernova – a cosmic explosion that took place 7,200 years ago but whose visible light only reached Earth at the turn of the first millennium. In 1006 A.D., the supernova was far brighter than Venus and was visible during the daytime for weeks. At present, though its visible wavelengths have since dissipated from view, the high-energy remnants of the supernova can still be seen through NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

2. The Crater Lake and the Battle of the Gods

The Legend Surrounding the Crater Lake. The most common of the legends centering around the Crater Lake in Oregon involve two powerful mythological beings: Skell, the lord of the Above-world; and Llao, the god of the Under-world. The theme of this legend is essentially “good-versus-evil.”

The Native American Klamath tribe believed that the Crater Lake in Oregon was once a tall mountain named Mazama, which back then was inhabited by Llao. The underworld deity engaged in an epic battle with Skell, the sky god, and fire and brimstone flew across the skies between Mazama and the nearby Mount Shasta. Llao was defeated in the fight, and they had to go back to the underworld. With the intention of imprisoning him forever, Skell collapsed the mountain on top of Llao, before topping off this prison with a beautiful blue lake.

The legend was not exactly far from the truth. However, the crater lake was not the product of a battle between angry gods but Mount Mazama, a volcano that erupted 7,700 years ago. So much molten rock was expelled that the summit area collapsed during the eruption to form a large volcanic depression called caldera. Subsequent smaller eruptions occurred as water started to fill the caldera which eventually formed the deepest lake in the United States.  

3. The Myth of Rama’s Bridge

The Myth of Rama’s Bridge. In the Hindu epic the “Ramayana,” the wife of the god Rama, gets kidnapped and taken to the Demon Kingdom on the island of Lanka. With the help of an army of ape-like men, Rama, along with his brother Lakshman, built a floating bridge between India and Lanka. He led the army in crossing over the bridge, and successfully vanquished Ravana, the demon king, and consequently rescued his wife.

While this elaborate tale is filled with fantastical details, the mythical Rama’s Bridge itself actually exists. Satellite images reveal a 48-kilometer line of submerged limestone shoals and sand that stretches between India and Sri Lanka. The bridge separates the Gulf of Mannar located in the southwest from the Palk Strait, which is in the northeast. Some of the sandbanks are dry and the sea in the area is quite shallow, being only 1 to 10 meters deep in some places. It was reportedly passable on foot up to the 15th century until storms deepened the channel. Temple records seem to tell that the Rama's Bridge was completely above sea level until a cyclone in 1480 brought a huge storm surge into the channel and sunk it beneath the waves.

4. Atlantis

As first described by Greek philosopher Plato in his writings, this myth tells a tale of a civilization at its peak that tragically sank beneath the waves and got lost for all eternity. This great civilization called Atlantis is supposedly founded by a race of people who were half god and half human, and lived in a utopia where they possessed great naval power. However, while at the pinnacle of their power and influence, their home - which were located on islands that were said to be shaped like a series of concentric circles – was destroyed in a great cataclysm.

Atlantis was probably not a real place that have existed in ancient times, but a real island civilization may have been the source of inspiration for the tale. It remains heavily debated, but several archaeologists are of the opinion that the myth of Atlantis could have been based on the collapse of the Minoan empire.

Santorini in Greece is now an archipelago, but thousands of years ago, it was a single island – a volcano named Thera. Around 3,650 years ago, a volcanic eruption, which is considered to be one of the biggest in human history, rocked the island and led to its destruction. The vast magma chamber of the volcanic island was emptied so catastrophically and so quickly that the core of the island collapsed, setting off tsunamis that flooded much of Thera with the inflowing Aegean Sea. The eruption blew tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere where it lasted for years and potentially caused many cold, wet summers. Such conditions would have ruined harvests in the region, which is believed to be a main contributor to the quick decline of the Minoan civilization and why they were never heard from again.

5. Noah’s Ark

In the famous story told among Christians, Jews and Muslims, God, a long time ago, chose to destroy the Earth with a great flood but spared a man named Noah and his family. On God’s command, Noah built an ark and filled it with a pair of every animal. When God covered the Earth with water, it drowned everyone and everything that once roamed the land. Noah, his family and the other animals managed to survive while on the ark, and they were the ones that repopulated the planet after the disaster.

While a boat full of animals of every kind is hardly believable to some, experts say that the epic biblical flood - as often is the case with apocryphal texts - could have been based on a much earlier tale. One such story that comes to mind is the Epic of Gilgamesh. This ancient epic unfolds similarly to its biblical equivalent. In this Mesopotamian saga that dates back to the 7th century BCE, many gods conspired to create a great flood that will destroy the world. One of the gods, Ea, told a man to make a boat to save himself and the rest of his family, along with a group of animals.

So, with similar flood tales told in many cultures, is there any evidence that the great floods referenced in these stories actually happened? Scholars and scientific experts generally agree that there never was a global deluge as there is not enough water in the Earth system to cover all the land. However, some geologists think that the legend of a great flood may have been influenced by a catastrophic flooding event in the Black Sea around 5,000 B.C.

Geological records show that the Mediterranean Sea overflowed into the Black Sea, which is located north of Turkey. It forced the sediment barrier between the two to open in a very dramatic manner, and anyone nearby who witnessed what happened at the time would have seen the creation of waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. In a single day, enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan, and the roar of the cascading water would have been loud enough to be heard at least 100 miles away. And so, anyone who were living in the fertile farmlands on the northern rim of the sea at the time would have had the harrowing experience of seeing the boundary of the ocean move inland at the rate of a mile a day.

Myths are beautiful, breathtaking narratives and literary treasures of our past. But more than that, these ancient tales we have listed - and many other which were not mentioned - were able to provide important clues to our distant past. And these clues were helpful and crucial in filling in the gaps in our scientific and historical knowledge about geological and astronomical phenomena that took place on Earth in bygone eras. So, with the help of science, we can safely say that some tales are not just made-up stories passed from one generation to another; they could be true as well.

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Sources:

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/six-ancient-legends-that-are-based-on-real-events/all/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-ancient-stories-and-geological-events-may-have-inspired-them-180950347/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160427-lost-supernova-sighting-sn1006-arab-astronomy/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/tapestry.html
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs092-02/
https://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/09/bridge-built-by-monkeys.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%27s_Bridge
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-flood-102813115/?no-ist
 

Was There an Ancient Nuclear War?

Is mankind currently at the peak of a modern age of advancement in technology and weaponry, or are we merely trapped in a never-ending cyclical process of innovation, prosperity and eventual self-destruction? There are those among us who believe that humanity’s complicated fascination with nuclear warfare is only a recent repeat in a series of achievements and blunders that have come, gone and returned with the passing of time and the rise and fall of different civilizations. This means that there are currently a variety of theories and hypotheses entertaining the idea and the strong likelihood of an atomic war taking place thousands of years ago, during a time when the most ancient human civilizations on the planet had flourished and had subsequently been erased from existence.

While talk of an ancient nuclear war may sound like something that can only be read on science fiction novels, there are theorists and believers who claim to have found indirect references in ancient literature about a large-scale war in the past that used complex tools of destruction. There are also allegedly best available evidences which can be found in ancient ruins supporting the possibility that our ancient ancestors possessed highly advanced technology which may have included powerful weapons intended for atomic warfare.

Ancient Nuclear War as Detailed in the Mahabharata

source: loving2you

Modern mankind had never heard or experienced horrific descriptions about the aftermath of a nuclear explosion until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during the Second World War. However, an accurate description of such a catastrophic event had allegedly already been written in ancient texts thousands of years ago – more particularly, in the great Sanskrit epic of ancient India titled the “Mahabharata.”

The Mahabharata, which spoke of doom and destruction and allegedly contained verses that seemingly spoke of a nuclear warfare, is believed by some to be an indirect proof that an ancient nuclear war took place on Earth way before the nuclear bomb attacks in World War II. The ancient Hindu epic are claimed by some to have originated thousands of years earlier, and they say it described massive “fireball” weapons falling from the sky during a war between the Rama Empire and an enemy race considered as the archetype of the mythical empire of Atlantis.

One reference in the Mahabharata purportedly speaks of explosions which were described to be brighter than “a thousand suns.” And when these blasts occurred, the suns were supposedly twirling in the air; the trees went up in flames; and the overall destruction was so massive that corpses were burned to the point that they were completely unrecognizable. Those who managed to survive the blasts, however, started to lose their hair and nails, while their food supplies got contaminated. All these are allegedly a concise reference to radiation poisoning and nuclear fallout, which were written on texts that are thousands of years old.  

The Ancient City in Mohenjo Daro

source: scoopwhoop

These gritty details referencing an atomic war is said to have occurred in a bygone era, when knowledge and technology required to make such weapons should not have existed yet. And so, in light of this, some believe that the Hindu epic of Mahabharata may not be as mythological as most scholars and experts think. And among the best evidences usually raised to support the theory of an ancient nuclear war is the ancient city discovered at Mohenjo Daro. Now an archeological site located in Sindh, Pakistan, Mohenjo Daro was built around 2500 BCE, and was one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley civilization until its abandonment in the 19th century BCE.

This archeological site was not rediscovered until the 1920s, and since then, significant excavation has been conducted at the site of the city. When excavations of Mohenjo Daro reached the street level, they discovered 44 skeletons which were scattered all over the city. Many of them were holding hands and were lying face down in the street, while their faces and body positioning suggested that they suffered a sudden, violent death. In certain areas of the site, they have found increased levels of radiation, and it was also a wonder how the bodies, which are thousands of years old by archeological standards, did not decay or get eaten by wild animals along the way.   

British Indian researcher David Davenport, in particular, claimed to have found a 50-yard-wide epicenter at Mohenjo Daro where everything appeared to have been fused and glassified by a heat as high as 1500°C through a transformative process known as vitrification. Vitrification is a process in which regular-type stone gets molten into magma state before hardening once again. However, once the stone is hardened, it feels like glass. At the site, there is evidence of vitrification, a phenomenon which could have only been achieved if the site was exposed to extreme heat by some type of blast.

Moreover, A. Gorbovsky in his book titled “Riddles of Ancient History” reported the discovery of at least one human skeleton in the area with a level of radioactivity approximately 50 times greater than it should have been because of natural radiation. Davenport, on the other hand, claimed that what was found at Mohenjo Daro corresponded exactly to what was seen after the nuclear bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Debunking of the Ancient City in Mohenjo Daro as Evidence of an Ancient Atomic War

Source: National Geographic

But did an ancient nuclear war actually take place in the ancient city discovered at Mohenjo Daro? Skeptics and many experts in the field of archeology and the sciences would respond in the negative. One of the first problems with this theory is that the excavations in Mohenjo Daro - through which the bodies were discovered - have been criticized by scholars for the poor approach used during the dig period. The poor methodology applied by the excavators has consequently made interpretation of the ancient site difficult.

Even though some of the original excavators of the site have initially interpreted the evidence in a way that suggested that the skeletons found there were linked by a single catastrophic event, they took the view that the catastrophe was brought about by war and not a nuclear explosion. Moreover, it was also determined by some scholars that although some of the bodies were found in the same parts of the city, their distribution suggested that many of them actually came for different time periods. Some of the bodies were clearly from the Early period of Indus Valley civilization while some are believed to be from the Late period. It is worth nothing that the two periods are more than a thousand years apart.

Also, the idea that the bodies were laying around in the streets has been disproven. The bulk of the bones found at the ancient city were actually found in contexts suggesting burials of the sloppiest and most irreverent nature. The most infamous group of bodies that were found laying in the middle of the street was actually caused by the fact that these bodies were buried during the later period of the Indus Valley civilization, at a time when the existing buildings had been built over the establishments erected in earlier periods. Hence, the bodies found, as it turns out, were buried above a road which was built from a period hundreds of years earlier.

As for the remarkably well-preserved bones, this can be chalked up to Mohenjo Daro being literally one of the hottest places on Earth, with temperatures reaching up to 128 degrees. And because the location is also really dry, it is a perfect climate for preservation. This is also probably the reason why the mud-brick buildings are still standing until now.

As for the claims about there being radiation at Mohenjo Daro, the problem with these allegations is that no one is completely certain where this claim originated from. Since the source of the claim was not any of the scientists directly involved with the Mohenjo Daro digs, and since theorists that believe in the occurrence of a nuclear explosion in the area do not cite a specific and accurate reference with which to verify this claim, there is no reason to address it sp urgently as it is a non-factor in assessing the validity of the theory regarding ancient nuclear warfare.

What about the claim that the ancient settlement in Mohenjo Daro is the epicenter of vitrification? Well, according to archeologists, the site is actually not the epicenter of anything. What was found during the excavation was just a small amount of broken pottery. And because pottery is put in a fire to harden it, the broken pottery found in the area contains a specific type of vitrification called Frit. Aside from that there is no epicenter of anything at the site. If there was, traces of Trinitite - which is vitrified sand caused by a nuclear explosion – should have been found.

Another major problem with the theory that the Mohenjo Daro settlement was destroyed because of a nuclear explosion is the city itself. For an ancient city that was supposed to have been obliterated by an atomic bomb, it is unusual and inconsistent that the buildings in the area are still intact, and some of them are still standing erect at 15 feet high. Since they are made out of mud, some of them should have been toppled if a nuclear weapon did hit the ancient city as the force of its blast wave had more than sufficient destructive power to do so.

And so, to summarize, from the standpoint of skeptics and scientific experts, the bodies at Mohenjo Daro were not killed in a sudden disaster. In fact, they died a thousand years apart in some cases, and were also clearly buried. The cases of radiation are also a non-factor, while the overexaggerated vitrification at the site was actually caused by pottery.  Lastly, if a nuclear explosion obliterated the citizens of that settlement, it should have knocked down the mud-brick houses which are still standing at the site. But, it didn’t.

With speculations and evidences which allegedly prove that an ancient nuclear war took place on Earth, and with skeptics, scholars and other experts working diligently to disprove them, the theory of a highly-advanced ancient civilization capable of atomic warfare remains essentially a controversial case rather than a clean-cut one.

Was there really an ancient nuclear war thousands of years ago? And if so, did an advanced human civilization exist on planet Earth around that time, or were their supposed high technology alien in nature? For now, the truth remains uncertain. While all the evidences presented referring to an ancient atomic warfare have somehow been debunked one way or another, it is also difficult to definitively dismiss that a highly-advanced ancient civilization didn’t exist on this planet at all without presenting tangible proof as well.

Nevertheless, mankind in general must keep in mind that the important thing is for us to not pass judgment on this subject matter so rashly, and to keep an open and objective mind as new evidence gets discovered in the years to come. Maybe by then, the validity of the facts and evidence presented will be compelling and sufficient enough to either affirm the theory that an ancient nuclear war did happen, or definitively conclude that such an event had never happened at all.

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Sources:

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_07.htm
http://ancientaliensdebunked.com/references-and-transcripts/ancient-nuclear-warefare/
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http://philipcoppens.com/bestevidence.html
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https://www.google.com.ph/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Mohenjo+Daro
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http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro#cite_note-book2-2
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http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/mohenjo-daro-massacre-00819?nopaging=1
http://www.ancient-code.com/mohenjo-daro-an-ancient-city-destroyed-by-a-nuclear-attack-thousands-of-years-ago/