5 More Ancient Mysteries We Still Haven't Solved

hello everybody welcome back to another episode of side projects this one five more historical mysteries whenever i do one of these ones where it's like buy more of anything two more of anything x number more of anything is because the previous video did really well so thank you [Music] a while ago we gave you a video discussing five unsolved historical mysteries ranging from thousands years ago to well not thousands of years ago today we have a continuation of that topic for you because as it turns out there's more than just five things that don't really add up in the historical record and also as i said in my pre-introduction introduction um it did really well by that i mean it got lots of views so i got more money through ad revenue thank you these are five more historical mysteries that we haven't solved in that last video we talked about zoroaster and mentioned in passing his probable patron persian emperor cyrus the great well today he's getting his own little feature cyrus was the founder of the first persian empire the achimanids and he lived from around 600 bce to 530 bc he was born to the son of a local king and like any kid born to well-off parents he leveraged his advantageous position to do even better and create what was at the time the largest empire in the world yeah he did a little bit better there so his paris was successful but he made the largest empire in the world basically every source we have of cyrus describes him as an incredible man intelligent and athletic religiously and culturally tolerant a military genius politically astute an incredible lover i made the last one up and he was easily one of the most prominent figures in ancient history he shows up everywhere anti-persian historians like the greeks herodotus and xenophon the latter of whom spent part of his life fighting the persian empire describes cyrus as a perfect king alexander the great who would go on to destroy the achaemenids was a little obsessed with cyrus from a young age he's even mentioned in the old testament as the man who freed the jews from babylon supposedly chosen by god for the task but we don't have to stop at ancient history the american founding father thomas jefferson supposedly took some influence from cyrus's history when he was drafting the american declaration of independence and the first israeli prime minister david ben-gurion considered cyrus a personal hero something all the more interesting considering present-day international politics in iran cyrus is something of a cult figure and even today his supposed tomb is a place of reverence for millions of people so in summary cyrus the great bit of a legend he transcended worldly politics to become a sort of ideal in the mind of people everywhere so well what's the mystery i hear you saying simon this is a video about mysteries where is it well aside from the fact that ancient history is prone to embellishment and so anything concrete about cyrus is difficult to say by far the most disputed part of cyrus's life is how it ended if you go off of herodotus and civilization vi cyrus died in battle with the scythian specifically the massagertay in present-day uzbekistan yet even herodotus admits that this was just one of many versions of cyrus's death that it heard about and xenophon says that cyrus didn't die in battle and he returned to the capital afterwards there are other stories but from here the details get a bit hazy it's not even sure where his body is buried the aforementioned tomb of cyrus is the best candidate but like we said concrete details in ancient history are difficult to come by and even the historian who first suggested that the tomb belonged to cyrus was a little bit hesitant to say so whatever the case we'll move on for now and leave you with one last cool piece of history about cyrus his epitaph oh man whoever you are and wherever you come from for i know you will come i am cyrus who won the persians their empire do not therefore begrudge me this bit of earth that covers my bones swinging around the timeline for a moment brings us to west africa in the 14th century some of you watching this have probably heard of a king named mansa moussa described by sam as the richest man to have ever lived maybe you've heard of him because i made a biographics video about the dude which is another channel i do you could subscribe if you want to i might put a link below he got that way by being the ruler of the mali empire a state in west africa which was famous for being one of the primary suppliers of gold to europe and the middle east for hundreds of years during the late middle ages gold back then was pretty much the most valuable thing you could have and as such this gold brought the kingdom a great deal of wealth turning mali into a cultural and religious center of the islamic world it was visited by moroccan traveler ibn batuta who traveled over the saharan trade routes that first brought islam to the region and he described the kingdom as incredibly safe and harmonious with adherents of islam and traditional west african faiths living together peacefully ultimately the empire would last for more than 400 years for reference cyrus's achaemenid empire lasted just over 300 so i guess history is not fair with that context out of the way let's swing back to manson moosa or rather his predecessor before mansa musa became the ruler of mali the empire was ruled by a man named abu bakr ii not much is really said about his actual reign but the great mystery surrounding him is this sometime into his rule as mansa abu bakr ii developed a desire to explore the seas according to a supposed conversation between manchester musera and the ruler of egypt abu bakr became convinced that he could find the edge of the atlantic ocean although it's basically impossible to prove to that end abu bakr outfitted two naval expeditions consisting of dozens of ships and set out into the atlantic the first of these apparently went okay but after he left for the second one abu bakr was never seen again so what happened to him well we could probably guess i mean the most likely scenario is that he and his fleet perished in the violent atlantic waters since columbus barely made it to the caribbean using giant sailing ships and abu bakr was using well canoes there's a very shaky idea that abu bakr actually made it to the new world but due diligence requires us to mention that there is absolutely zero material evidence of that happening there's no artifacts there's no sources it's all just basically hearsay even so of the what-if scenarios in history this is probably one of the most interesting can you imagine how different the modern world might be if the wealthy west african empire first found the americas [Music] our next section takes us to central europe in the year 1912. a library known as collegia romano originally founded by the society of jesus was short on cash and decided to sell some of his contents to the vatican library but for some complex reasons not all of the materials sold to the vatican actually ended up there one of these pieces was a book that ended up in the hands of wilfrid voyneck a polish book dealer voynich discovered that this book which did not have a title or an author was around 240 pages of well gibberish at least that's what it looked like at first glance across the pages were odd scripts drawings of plants and animals and other just general nonsense nevertheless voynich was intrigued by this book and decided to devote more time to it he spent the next two decades trying to get scholars interested in studying it to see if they could possibly decipher the meaning of the text he perhaps thought it was encoded or maybe there was some secret hidden in the text voynich died in 1930 and would never get an answer to those questions but after his death the fame of the mysterious codex continued to grow particularly in the years following world war ii allied code breakers took a crack at deciphering it but didn't get very far and soon afterwards a series of scholars would each take turns at trying to crack the script if it was even ciphered at all in the time since all this research has been done a dozen or so theories have been put forward and subsequently torn apart by academia on what this book actually says one theory says it's abbreviated latin and other thinks that it's a vowelless version of ukrainian and still others think that the whole thing is just a hoax that void himself made up to get attention that theory however was proven wrong when carbon dating of the book put it somewhere in the ballpark of being written between 1404 and 1438 right around the time of the italian renaissance so someone had to sit down and write this book for some reason but why at least for now the best guess that we have is that part of the book is intended to be some sort of medicinal herb guide but beyond that we really have no idea it could really just be that the book is a bunch of gibberish and as you probably know there's no way to decipher gibberish whatever the case the pointing manuscript has excited the popular imagination to the point where it's been included in several fictional novels and in probably a more relatable manner an assassin's creed game so well yeah it's probably just gibberish moving on we next find ourselves in central mexico in a place called tres sapotes in 1862 a mexican archaeologist discovered a large stone sculpture depicting the face of an unknown person partially buried in the ground his discovery didn't really catch on outside of mexico but in 1938 an american archaeologist discovered the exact same head and caused a wave of attention because well of course cultural issues aside the discovery of this head led to the excavations of the surrounding area to see if there was anything else of note there soon the excavation found another hit then another and then 14 more for a total of 17 giant boulders carved into the rough shape of human heads these discoveries were the first archaeological findings of the olmecs the earliest known miso american culture the heads themselves range anywhere from being 1.17 to 3.4 meters tall and weigh anything from 6 tons to almost 50 tons but that's not all these boulders were all made of basalt which is mostly only found near volcanoes and the nearest volcanoes are in the nearby mountain range of sierra de los tucsles 150 kilometers away from where most of these heads were actually found these boulders in all their massive weight were moved an absolutely huge distance to be carved into the shape of some long dead long forgotten likeness so what were these heads carved for we can put two and two together and say that the most likely explanation is that they were carved as monuments to olmec rulers who would have been the only people able to mobilize the resources to transport and carve such massive boulders into the heads we see today but aside from that we haven't found any rock-solid details about them even dating the heads is a challenge because many of them were moved from where they were originally prior to being excavated in the 20th century the best we could do is say that most were carved between 1 500 and 1000 bce and others were carved between 1 000 and 400 bce and hey they're still around so clearly it worked out for them maybe there's a lesson here that trying to make fancy monuments like your colossus of rhodes and your lighthouse of alexandria is doomed to failure and you should just stick to what nature already does best you know what they say when life gives you boulders make giant heads the final entry on our list takes us to the atlantic ocean in the 19th century on december 4th 1872 a canadian brigantine named the des gracia was sailing for the british port of gibraltar when the helmsman reported a vessel some distance away heading straight for them the captain david morehouse noted that the ship was moving erratically and its sails were in an odd position so he suspected something was wrong captain morehouse saw nobody on the deck of the ship and so sent two of his crew to board and investigate they found an eerie scene the ship named the mary celeste was abandoned even more ominously the ship's lifeboat was missing the crew conducted a quick investigation to see if they could find any clues as to what happened and they discovered the ship's log with its last entry dated nine days earlier and 400 nautical miles from where the ship currently was but other than that there weren't really any clues as to what had happened the navigational instruments and shots were missing the equipment was more or less neatly stowed away and there was no food being cooked or prepared at the time everything seemed to point to a relatively orderly evacuation via the lifeboat the ship itself was a little waterlogged and battered from the sea but otherwise it was in decent condition for being a deredict captain morehouse decided to bring the ship into gibraltar for salvage and arrived with the merry celeste in tow just under two weeks later the salvage hearing was conducted by a man named frederick solly flood who we mentioned only because a historian once described him as a man whose arrogance and pomposity were inversely proportional to his iq after flood spent some time ranting in court about how it must have been a murder or piracy or insurance fraud the rest of the admiralty course would have rolled their eyes and awarded morehouse and his crew 1 700 pounds for their trouble but the question still remained what happened to the crew the mary celeste had been captained by the american benjamin briggs along with seven others the only logical explanation was that they'd taken the lifeboat but why do that when there's plenty of provisions and nothing wrong with the ship a number of theories have been put forward there's the foul play theory as put forward by mr flood earlier but there was basically no signs of a struggle or any violence at all he said the crew must have gotten drunk off the mary celeste's cargo of denatured alcohol and murdered each other until someone pointed out to him that denatured alcohol is industrial in nature and not in any way drinkable other theories suggest that the crew ran into a bad storm and they went to the lifeboat for temporary safety but as the titanic showed lifeboats at this time weren't really all that safe so that wouldn't make sense either the only explanation that really satisfies the logic test is that the crew must have believed that the mary celeste was in imminent danger of sinking and the decision was made to quickly abandon ship one theory puts forth the idea that a water spout essentially a tornado over water passed over the ship which would explain the ship being so waterlogged when it was found in addition some natural science wizardry having to do with biometric pressure might have caused water from the pumps to blow out into the ship which might have caused the crew to think in the chaos of the moment that the ship was sinking another explanation has to do with the aforementioned alcohol cargo the mary celeste was originally delivering around 1 700 barrels of denatured alcohol to the port of genoa in italy you can probably guess how cargo of that kind can be rather hazardous it is possible that captain briggs believed that after some chaotic event that the cargo of the ship was damaged and all the alcohol was about to explode this would explain the seeming speed with which the ship was abandoned although the cargo itself was in generally good condition when it was found in shore we'll probably never know for sure what happened to captain briggs and his crew but it probably wasn't a drunken killing frenzy like mr flood said a claim only believable if you yourself were drinking denatured alcohol so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe also if you've got a suggestion for a future side projects video please let me know about it in the comments below i often look there for inspiration so please do that and thank you for [Music] watching

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 1,102,789

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects

Id: LgmFXVxpy0s

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021