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.
