The Divine Towers: Solving the Mystery of Elden Ring's Builder Civilization

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In the early 12th century, an English deacon  known as Henry of Huntington was commissioned to write a history of England, spanning all the  way from pre-historic times to the then current. When he arrived in his grand narrative to  the curious case of the monument of gigantic stones in Salisbury Plain, known to us today as  Stonehenge, he, frankly, didn't have much to say, as there was essentially nothing known about these  stones at the time. In fact he was quite honest about this, writing, stones of wonderful size  have been erected after the manner of doorways, so that doorway appears to have been raised upon  doorway; and no one can conceive how such great stones have been so raised aloft, or why they  were built there. Only a decade later, however, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who we ve actually  already encountered in this series before, as he's the one who essentially created the  modern Arthurian Legend, was more than happy to fabricate a whole mythology of Stonehenge in  his typical creative style, including that it the stones were brought from Africa by Giants,  then turned into a monument to the defeat of invading Saxons, with a little magical help  from Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian Legend. For many centuries historians didn t do much  better in the 17th century the architect Inigo Jones described Stonehenge as a Roman Temple,  for the simple reason that the Romans were the only ancient civilization he knew of with the  technological sophistication to build such massive structures. After all the smaller blue stones  still weighing several tons each were apparently transported hundreds of miles from Wales, and the  larger Sarcen stones, though traveling a smaller distance, were quarried and sculpted many miles  away and then carried to the site. No small feat for stones weighing 20-30 tons each. Today we  know that, in actuality, building at Stonehenge began sometime in the 3rd millennium BC. So, far  from being built by the Romans, it actually was as ancient to the Romans as the Romans are to us.  The reason so many have struggled to understand this site is that it is both massively  impressive and completely mysterious. There is not a single piece of contemporary  or even near-contemporary written evidence relating to it, and so we are left only with  scattered bits of archaeological evidence, all of which point to it being an incredibly  important site for these Neolithic peoples over many centuries, but nothing which can answer the  fundamental question: why did they build it? There are theories, sure: the stones appear to  be aligned to the trajectory of the sun on the summer solstice, prompting some to consider it  a form of calendar or star map. There's plenty of human remains around, though less than you d  expect given two long it was apparently in use, and usually cremated elsewhere and then buried  in containers, prompting the idea that it was nothing more than a sacred burial ground. A bit  of kicking the can down the road if you ask us. And there are the whacky, Graham Hancock style  theories, that they were build by aliens, or the lost Atlantis civilization, or  whatever. But the reason there is space for such kooky theories about Stonehenge and  other ancient megalithic sites like Gobekli Tepe, which is actually twice as old as Stonehenge,  if you can believe that, is that fundamentally, despite all our progress, we do not know  why they were built. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not being honest. There are some  things we can say with relative certainty, but a unified theory remains elusive, and possibly  forever will. Which brings us to Elden Ring s Divine Towers. These are, in all likelihood, the  most ancient structures in all the lands between. There is essentially no textual or documentary  evidence about them, no item description refers to their original use, no character describes them,  or even refers to them. They truly are the massive ancient elephants in the room. On top of that,  they are baffling aniconic which is to say, even though the structures themselves are adorned with  impressive stonework, these symbols mean next to nothing to us, with very few exceptions no words,  no interpretable symbols, no pictures. But, we can t just let that slide, no self-respecting,  pretend video game archaeologist could. The opportunity to investigate these impressive  and mysterious structures is too good to pass up, even if we admittedly have our work cut out for  us. We may not be able to decipher Stonehenge any time soon, but by God, we will figure out  the Divine Towers. Along the way we must be careful not to repeat Inigo Jones's mistake and  too eagerly attribute them to the most convenient ancient culture just because they re both old.  Instead we must let them tell their own story and, wow, what a story it is. So, here we go, with  some good old fashioned Tarnished Archaeology. Let us start with the basics. The first thing  to clarify is that they are clearly distinct from the bridges which connect them to mainland.  We ve gone to great lengths describing these in prior episodes, but suffice it to say that these  bridges belong to the Saint and Tree stratum, the same one as stormveil and the fortified manor,  as you can see from the clearly distinct masonry and iconography, so we can for now restrict  our analysis for now to just the actual towers. The most important point to make here is that  the Divine Towers are clearly the older of the two types structures both stylistically, as we  ll get to in a bit, but also because it wouldn t make any sense to build the Divine Bridges  if there were no Divine Towers already there. So the Divine Towers are older  ever than the Divine Bridges, which date to the Saint and Tree Empire. There  is also the matter of the amorphous unworked rock which covers a single face of each of  the towers, something we ll return to later, but here we ll just say its presence clearly  indicates that the DTs are older than the bridges, because whatever process caused this feature on  the DTs happened before the bridges were built. This is basic stratigraphy, like for example  the layer of volcanic ash from the cataclysmic eruption of Thera, modern day Santorini, that is  attested to in records from far flung places like Egypt and even China, and helps us date multiple  digs around the entirety of the mediterranean. Or perhaps an even more relevant example would  be the KT boundary, the geologic evidence of the meteor impact that ended the reign of the  dinosaurs, but we ll come to that in a bit. Point is, it's a boundary, a dividing line: There  s the pre-Thera layers, and the post Thera layers; and in Elden Ring the DTs are among the only  pre-cataclysm structures in the entire Lands Between. Essentially nothing else bears this  mark, indicating how inconceivably old they really are. The masonry of the DTs is impressive,  intricately carved from giant slabs of rock and fitted together perfectly without mortar, in large  single pieces indicating a megalithic technology. It's an immense mount of work to cut and dress  giant stones like this such that they fit together without mortar. With the Ancient Greeks, for  example, came across structures with such finely dressed large stones they called it Cylopean  masonry, because they believed only a giant or a Cyclops would have the strength to build such  things. As we ll see later on, this parallel is quite on point. This is monumental building  for sure. Beyond that, the DTs are covered in intricate carvings. It's a bit like like Angor  Wat in our world, the entire thing is carved, every face, every vertex, and each intrictately  carved in situ, which definitely indicates both an advanced but also a peculiar society. Later  structures like the divine bridges use stone bricks and mortar, a much more typical approach,  and then adorned them with free standing statues. Not so in the DTs, all their carvings are in  situ, speaking to the skill and man-hours of craftsmanship involved. And speaking of the  carvings, they are, as we alluded to before, bizarrely an-iconic. That is to say, while there  is no shortage of beautiful designs, for the most part these designs are not immediately meaningful  to our eyes. There are no pictures, or scenes, or figures except some vaguely serpentine shapes,  and much less anything resembling a proper script. What this conveys, from the point of view  of the developer, is an impossibly old and, more importantly, foreign society, such  that their symbols mean next to nothing to us. Once again it's more than a bit like StoneHenge.  Impossibly old and tantalizingly mysterious. As we proceed from the exterior  to the interior of the tower, we can see the embedded star effect similar  to what we see in the eternal cities, and likewise the elevator uses a similar  gravity magic for its function, much like, for example, the siofra river well, so there  s some celestial connotation to these towers. But it's not until we get atop the tower  that things start to come together a bit. In simplest terms, the space atop  the towers appears to be the hieron, the sacred space for the God. But, which God?  Well, in 5 out of the 6 towers we see dendrofied 2-fingers sitting atop a small mound of Earth,  enclosed in a circular ring construction of unknown function. And it is here that we have our  sole piece of textual evidence about the towers, a single shred which comes from description  of the Great Runes before they are activated, which states they are devoid of any benediction .  So presumably that's what the Fingers were doing up here, they were offering benediction with or to  the power of Great Runes. Anyone with knowledge of religious history will find this very familiar;  the notion of ascending to a sacred, elevated space to receive a ritual blessing goes all the  way back to the Ancient Mesopotamians, whose Kings and Priests would ascend their stupendously  tall ziggurats to commune with their Gods. One such ziggurat in Babylon, by the way, is  likely the inspiration for he Biblical story of the Tower of Babel just to give you a sense of  how impressed contemporaries were with its scale. And speaking of the Bible think of Moses  receiving the commandments atop Mt Sinai, or the prophet Mohammed receiving his first  revelation in a mountain cave there is something quite fundamental about ascending to a physically  higher space to receive the divine blessing. But there's a problem with this simple story,  because this description on the Great Runes clearly refers to the most recent stratum  of DT usage, in the era of the Erdtree and the Two-Fingers, long after the divine towers  were initially built. As we ve established, the DTs are likely the oldest structure in all the  Lands Between, certainly older than the Erdtree. So they must have been repurposed for Great  Rune Benediction, and this description is unfortunately not useful in determining their  original purpose. Presumably it wasn t always the 2 fingers here atop the towers, so, what was?  If we take a closer look at the circular structure surrounding the small mound of earth upon which  the fingers sit, we can recognize this design. It is replicated elsewhere, specifically in the  sealed tunnel on the way to the to the West Altus DT. And there, instead of surrounding  mere earth, it is encasing a meteorite. We know it's a meteorite because we see the  falling star beasts and other impact craters throughout the world have this exact same visual  depiction. This seems as good as place as any to shout out a Redditor, NamelessSinger we ve  actually mentioned them before in our Eternal City of Leyndell episode who had a fantastic  analysis many months ago on these topics, including covering several of the points we  will discuss today. Whoever this person is, they have the eye of an archaeologist, and you all  should read their posts. Returning to the DTs, perhaps this similarity of design between the  tower hieron and the sealed tunnel indicates that, originally, instead of the two fingers,  there was a meteorite atop the divine towers. Well, sure enough, elsewhere atop the towers,  indeed we see a repeating pattern of circular designs encasing meteorite fragments,  arranged in a deliberate and totemic manner. And in the interior of the tower we  can see much of the same. So here, without too much of a leap, we can make  our first conclusion about the towers. They were built to worship, and likely  harness the power of, meteorites. This simple re-framing helps to explain  their hexagonal positioning on the map, something that has been noted by various internet  sleuths since early after the game's release they seem to be built around a central structure  or at least some central reference point. Their center of gravity is mysterious,  however. Many have hypothesized it as the site of a future DLC, or perhaps  something even more mysterious. But now that we know they were build  to harness the power of meteorites, the simplest interpretation is, well, they were built  around the site of an ancient meteorite impact crater. If we take a look at the map, well, that  notion begins to come together. The central sea is an impact crater, something  which is evident in the map design, but even more clearly seen in the concept art  of the map, which shows the sheers cliffs and circular basin characteristic of an impact crater,  allowing for subsequent asymmetric erosion. This concept art is actually uncannily similar to  the Gulf of Mexico, not coincidentally the site of the impact event just off the coast of the Yucatan  peninsula that produced the KT boundary and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million  years ago. That impact crater was discovered, in large part, due to a gravity anomaly caused  by fragmented rocks under the crater. As we know, the link between meteors, impact events, and  gravity anomalies is nothing new in Elden Ring. So presumably, the DTs were built to commemorate  and worship the arrival of one particular meteor, as we ll see shortly, but that does not mean the  impacts stopped happening. Indeed all throughout the lands between today we can see evidence of  quite recent, though smaller, impact events, from the FallingStar beast impact craters to  the strewn fields of meteorite in the Weeping Peninsula and the Altus Plateau, not to mention  however the Astels arrived and Radahn's meteor. The Lands Between is basically a meteor magnet,  and many of these strewn fields and impactites are likely responsible for the odd geologic features  of the LB like the ghinstone deposits of Liurnia, but those are stories for another day. For  now let's just say that this notion helps to explain the amorphous rock on the sides of the  divine towers that we've previously mentioned. This is such an important feature to the  developers that it's on every divine tower, it's in the concept art of the divine towers, and  its even on their map icons the developers clearly want to show us something with this rock sludge.  What it really looks like, if you compare it across all the DTs, is liquified rock, aka lava,  that cooled in place on the sides of the towers. You might think these are simply ejecta  from an impact event, which once cooled is known as tektite, but they do not mark  a geometrically consistent face of the DTs, meaning it did not come from a single source. In  simplest terms, what all this means is that there was a time after the DTs were built that something  liquified vast amounts of rock, which then cooled and hardened on the towers. And as it happens,  large impact events can do exactly that. There is a time period in Earth's history, known as the  Late Heavy Bombardment, during which the rate of impact events on Earth and the rest of the inner  solar system is thought to have vastly increased. It is believed that this event occurred  after the Hadean eon during which the Earth's crust was molten liquid, so  by that time there was a proper crust, but this barrage of heavy impacts actually  re-liquified most of the Earth's crust. Now, in real geology this occurred  before the advent of life on earth, so we have to allow for some magical creativity  here, but it is just this type of event that could cause the amorphous rock on the DTs, and  as we will see later in the video, this notion is quite helpful for explaining several other  mysterious features of the lands between. Now that we have some sense of what these towers  are, we can address the remaining core mysteries, echos of the questions that have perplexed experts  on Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe in our world for generations. Who were these people? Why did they  worship this specific site, this specific impact event? And finally, if they weren t worshipping  the GW and the Two-Fingers, what were they worshipping? Well, let's return to the sanctum  atop the towers for answers. As we can see, around the embedded meteorite fragments there is  a characteristic design which is our best clue, a fingerprint of sorts, of the civilization that  built the towers. Just as we ve done with gothic trefoils and tree reliefs in the past, we can use  this to map out this civilization. As has been pointed out before, and once again, let's shout  out NamelessSinger for being among the first to do so, this design, with 8 circles arranged around  a central sphere is the signature of the fell god, as best seen his massive eye embedded in the torso  of the Fire Giant. It also happens to be based on an image of polar cyclones on Jupiter's surface,  but in game, it is seen in a variety of places: atop the divine towers, on the Fell God's eye,  also on the Giant's Fire Pan, on the Troll s Hammer, and it's even a tattoo you  can select when making your character. So it is clearly a symbol of great importance  to the developers and to the in game story. And it would indicate that it was the fell god  of the giants that was initially worshipped in the divine towers, before the Age  of the Erdtree. To be more specific, they seem to be commemorating the arrival of the  fell god, which is somehow related to meteorites. An odd connection at first, but if we take a  step back this begins to make a bit more sense. The Giants, or more likely their predecessors,  the Titans as some have called them, but we ll just call them the Ancient Giants, built the  divine towers to commemorate the arrival of their God no doubt they would have called this  God something other than the Fell God. And it was these Ancient Giants that built the  Forge, and discovered the art of smithing, once considered divine according to the  troll's hammer. This is basically Elden Ring's Prometheus story the story of how fire was  gifted to the inhabitants of the lands between, and with it all of the attendant gifts of  civilization. There is a reason Miyazaki s Dark Souls cosmogony, which is essentially  an allegory for the birth of civilization, begins with fire. Fire equals civilization. The  use of fire, initially to cook meat, then later to burn down Forrests for hunting, and much later  to forge tools and weapons, is one of the main distinguishing features between humans, including  Homo sapiens and homo Erectus, and other apes. It's no coincidence that pretty much every known  culture has a God of Fire and a God of smithing, often they re the same God. In Hesiod's Theogony  and subsequent treatments, Prometheus was the Greek Titan who stole the power of fire from the  Gods and gifted it to humanity, incurring the wrath of Zeus in the process. Fundamentally, this  is a story about how humanity acquired the gifts of civilization, starting with fire, but also  the arts, and craftsmanship, and most of all, smithing. Its fundamental nature helps explain  its enduring allure as a story. Elden Ring s Prometheus figure is the Fell God, who gifted  the power of fire the the Ancient Giants. The Ancient Giants then invented smithing, built  their massive forge, and built a civilization using these new arts. No surprise then that they  referred the power of meteorites atop the divine towers as all of you by now know, most iron and  many other early metals was originally sourced from meteorites, before the advent of smelting  which allowed the extraction of iron from ore and heralded the Iron Age. It's not like there weren  t iron tools before the Iron Age; actually there were, including spear tips from Egypt from over  two-thousands years before the Iron Age proper, but they were rare, because they were sourced  from meteorites. So a Fell God of flame, and of smithing, would no doubt be associated  with this precious meteoric source of metals. But one of the implications of this story  is that it would suggest that the Ancient Giants were not only so sophisticated as to  build these towers to worship the Fell God, but they also had basically control over the  entire lands between, not just the mountaintops, as we see Divine Towers in the center of the  map, not just localized to the North. This is surprising, to say the least. Currently there is  only one Fire Giant, a relic of a lost era, and he sure doesn t seem capable of such civilizational  heights. Not to mention we are told that the giants were localized to the Mountaintops, at  least in more recent times. So do we have any evidence that this is the case, of some grand  and totally lost civilization of ancient giants that spanned the entire lands between? As it  turns out, yes. Tons.. and tons and tons You know, for a channel dedicated to excavating  the Lands Between, we really have gotten away with ignoring one giant, pervasive feature of the Lands  Between. Everywhere, all throughout the Lands, if you know where to look, hidden in subterranean  caverns, and occasionally exposed by the erosive forces of time, lie the ruins of a vast  and forgotten civilization. And when we say everywhere, we mean everywhere, from the southern  reaches of LimGrave and the Weeping Peninsula, to the Northern Mountaintops of the Giants; from the Ruin Strewn Precipice in Liurnia to the  Caelid wastes. And while they are less monumental, and more practical in nature than the DTs, they  are clearly built by the same civilization, as they have the same hexagonal geometry, the same  style of masonry, even many of the same carvings on the columns. So here we have our evidence of a  lost civilization of giants. In the mountaintops, where the density of ruins is likely the highest,  surely no coincidence by the way, there is a site of Grace, surrounded by these ruins, simply called  the Ancient Snow Valley Ruins, so maybe we re supposed to call them Ancient Ruins. But we here  at Tarnished Archaeology prefer to call this the Builder Stratum. Because wherever you find them,  they are literally underpinning the Earth itself. Take, for example, the highroad cave, where  an unassuming cave entrance gives way to a vast subterranean cavern that is, oddly enough,  not naturally formed. It's a man-made cavern, and the pillars and arches that support the  cavern are unambiguously from the Builder Stratum. Or take instead the Ruin Strewn Precipice; what  is at first glance a natural cliff face is again a massive structure underpinned by Builder Stratum  arches and pillars. In the places where we do find these features more exposed, it is clearly the  result of the erosion of the overlying earth. Take for example the exposed ruins in Radahn s  arena, clearly arches that were once contiguous and part of a much larger structure, but now only  the scattered and broken pillars remain. Much like seeing a Roman Forum today, one has to imagine  what it looked like when it still had walls and a roof. Point is, at each of the locations where  you will find these structures, they seem to have been supporting the Earth itself. This likely  explains one little mystery that had puzzled out for some time; why is the Weeping Peninsula  called a peninsula, when it is clearly an island. Well, if you look at the ruins in the straits  between peninsula and Limgrave, the same structures span both sides, and have the distinct  orientation of a shared structure, indicating that, at some point, there was a connection  between Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula, which subsequently collapsed to expose these  ruined structures. And if there was a connection, well, then that's a real peninsula, so it seems  to have been correctly named after all. The immense reach and technological  sophistication of these structures indicate a powerful and expansive civilization  that covered the entire Lands Between at its height. They were so advanced they even  crafted massive automatons as guardians, the so called Golems, powered by fire just  like Hephestasus automatons from Greek myth. There's a heap of them outside the Limgrave Divine  Tower, there's one as a boss in the Highroad cave, a builder stratum structure as we ve discussed,  you can find a cluster of them on the bridge to Limgrave's tower, and there's both animate and  in-animate versions in high concentration in the mountaintops point is, you tend find them around  the Divine Towers or Builder Stratum structures, so we know they are associated with  this Ancient Giant civilization. This is no doubt the civilization referenced in  their halberd, which reads A great halberd of black stone crafted by a civilization now gone  to ruin. So not only were they great builders and smiths, but they also crafted guardian  golems with their impressive technologies. Which brings us to the matter of why all of the  structures of the builder stratum are subterranean or exposed subterranean. One possibility is  that these impressive builders literally built the Earth alongside these structures, like a  riff on the Norse Ymir, whose body was used to make the world, which itself is just one of many  mythological narratives that follow that template. In the Enuma Elish, written thousands of years  before the Norse Eddas, the body of Tiamat is broken up to form the various features of  the world. So there's a mythological trope across many cultures of ancient titans forming  the world itself. Another explanation is that they were simply great tunnelers, and burrowed  through the lands between during the heyday, though we don t have any independent evidence  of this. But we prefer a different explanation. Remember the amorphous sludge of solidified  rock on the divine towers? Well, as we proposed, this may reflect a period of crust re-melting  after the divine towers were built. And a similar process could be reflected in the currently buried  status of these builder structures. Whatever sea of molten rock that partially covered the divine  towers, as tall as they are, would have covered the entirety of the rest of the builder stratum,  and left it in the subterranean state it is. It s not a testable hypothesis, of course, but we d bet  that if you drilled a hole anywhere in the lands between, you d find these types of ruins. They are  simply the remains of an ancient civilization that was covered after an impact event re-liquified  the crust and killed off its society. And if we look at the forge of the giants,  a structure which shared many of the same aniconic designs as the divine towers, and  rests atop clear builder stratum columns, meaning they belong to this ancient giant  civilization, we can see that the the same amorphous solidified rock is all over the support  structures of the forge. This tells us two things: for one, again, the developers really wanted  to make this feature clear, which is why every builder stratum structure, including  the DTs, and even their map icons, has it. And Two: whatever event caused this was not a  local phenomenon; it wasn t just some eruption or local impact, this same feature is present  on the divine towers in the south and the forge in the north, it is present everywhere in the  Lands Between. Whatever cataclysm re-liquified the the crust affected this entire world. And just  like the KT boundary or the Thera eruption layer, this cataclysm helps us date the pre-history  of the lands between. So now let s summarize everything we ve learned so far, and  propose a timeline. * Long into the pre-history of the lands between, meteorites begin impacting  the Lands Between * One of those meteorites presumably heralds the arrival of the Fell God   * The impact crater of this event is so great that is causes the formation of the central sea,  in reality an elevated impact crater lake, and its strewn field provides a near limitless  source of material for metalworking * The Ancient Giants built the Divine Towers around  the site of the main impact crater, placing meteorite fragments as talismans throughout  the towers, and with their newfound skills of civilization, chief among them smithing,  they built the Builder Stratum structures throughout the lands between during this period of  dominance. * Their reign was ended, ultimately, by another great impact cataclysm,  like the The Late Heavy Bombardment, which re-liquified the world's crust, causing the  characteristic amorphous features of the divine towers and giant's forge, and likely bringing  an end to the reign of the Ancient Giants. Of course once again it's hard to definitively  prove this, but given all of the ancient giant skulls we find throughout the mountaintops and in  caelid, these ancient giants were likely embedded into stone the same way their structures were  during this great cataclysm. This would explain why we always find them embedded into the bedrock;  not quite fossilized, but simply embedded, and in a similar manner no matter where you  find them, suggesting an acute global cataclysm. Just like the impact event that caused the KT  boundary and ended the reign of the dinosaurs, after which only tiny mammals burrowing in  holes survived the ensuring catastrophe, in Elden Ring it seems that when the reign of the  Ancient Giants ended, only their puny cousins, still quite gigantic to us, survived. * Of course  those puny cousins ultimately met their own end in time by the genocidal hand of queen Marika,  summarily executed by swords made of thorns, after they had already surrendered to  the mighty new power of the Erdtree, but that, our friends, is  a story for another day.
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Channel: The Tarnished Archaeologist
Views: 84,416
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Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)
Published: Wed Jun 14 2023
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