Ancient Relics So Advanced, They Shouldn’t Exist!
Sometimes Ancient relics are hard to explain. The technologies seem so advanced that they shouldn’t exist at that point in history. For some people, these out-of-place objects are proof that past advanced civilizations existed and for others, it’s proof of alien intervention or time travel. Because history Is left up to interpretation or important pieces of information are missing, it’s hard to say who’s right. Let's take a trip back in time and explore some mysterious and advanced ancient artifacts that seemingly shouldn’t exist.
8 Antikythera Mechanism
Knowing the position of the stars, where the sun would be in the sky, and when the seasons would change was very important information in ancient times for planting crops, navigation, and many other aspects of life. Unfortunately, to predict the movement of the heavens, it took a lot of time, a lot of paper, and a lot of math. Or at least that's what we thought.
In 1902 divers found an old Greek shipwreck. Among the treasures, they found a little metal object with over two dozen brass gears. The gears were so well crafted that it functions as a fine Swiss watch, but nobody knew what it was for. There was a thorough analysis of the mechanism in 1959, more than 50 years after it was unearthed, that finally figured out its function, , it was one of the world's first analog computers, invented about 2,000 years sooner than we thought. With the Antikythera mechanism you could set the main dial to a specific month in the calendar and the rest of the gears would calculate the position of the moon, stars, and planets in the sky at that point and time, no pencil and paper necessary.
7 Schist Disc
During the excavation of a tomb in Egypt, archaeologists found a very interesting object, it was a circular shape with a hole in the middle and blades that looked like a turbine or what you would see in the bottom of your blender, carved from a very brittle stone. What makes the object strange is that it shouldn't exist. It was created 5000 years ago at a time when the Egyptians hadn't even started using the wheel yet. This wheel-shaped object was about 500 years too early, which is the equivalent of Leonardo DaVinci having a smartphone.
In Egypt not only was the wheel not being used yet but they also didn’t have the technology or craftsmanship to carve such an intricate object as far as we know. Because it looks like the inside of a water pump or the flywheel on a car ancient, alien theorists have gone crazy. Their prevailing theory is that the Schist Disc it is a replica seen by the craftsman, of a metal piece used to power an alien spacecraft.
6 The Ring Watch
Watches today are worn more for fashion then out of necessity thanks to our cell phones. The first wristwatch was made in 1868, before that, people used pocket watches. Among the fashion trends of the 1700s was something called a ring watch. Decorative finger jewelry that also told time. But how did a ring watch from Switzerland, which didn’t exist until 1848, get into a Chinese tomb that had been sealed for over 400 years?
In 2005 archeologists were clearing the dirt away from a ming dynasty tomb when they came across a small gold ring with a watch face that had frozen at 10:06. The ring was trapped in the dirt on the outside of the tomb. Considering the first watch was made by a German inventor in 1505, it is possible the technology existed in China when the tomb was sealed, but very unlikely since there is no proof the Chinese had developed the technology yet. In the 1600s Jesuit missionaries were known to give watches as gifts to Chinese Emperors, but the tomb was older than that. It would have been very rare and very valuable in Ming Dynasty China, so why wasn’t it found protected inside the tomb?
Even trying this hard to come up with a rational explanation, one thing cannot be accounted for, the ring was only dated to 100 years ago and was engraved with the word “Swiss”. Is time travel possible? Did a traveler from the future lose their ring while visiting the tomb in the past? The idea seems crazy but until a better theory arises that is the one a lot of people chose to believe or at least enjoy debating on the internet.
5 Viking GPS
Navigating the open ocean is hard to accomplish even today. The Chinese invented the first magnetic compass for navigation which changed the world in the 10th century, but that was still after the age of the Vikings. So how were the Vikings able to so accurately sail the open oceans at a time when just crossing the Mediterranean Sea was a navigational challenge for the rest of the world? The answer is a crystal, actually a magic crystal.
Ancient sailors used the stars or sundials to navigate on the water. The problem was when it was cloudy their instruments didn’t work. But the Vikings found a way around this problem. Greenland, in 1948 archaeologists found an artifact named the Uunartoq disk. Records from medieval Europe hundreds of years later refer to a “magic” crystal that allowed it to work even when the sun wasn’t out. It is thought that the special crystal was able to amplify even the slightest bit of light allowing navigation in almost any weather conditions. To this day nobody has found one of these magic crystals.
4 Salt: The Mother of Invention
Roman roads, ancient pyramids, and most other technological innovations in history are brought about by necessity. One day somebody got tired of walking miles to the nearest fresh water source so the well got invented, but a pipeline that carried natural gas throughout the entire city, that didn’t come about until modern times, or so we thought.
Salt has been extremely valuable around the world for thousands of years. It’s the ability to flavor and preserve food alone made it invaluable. In the 3rd century, the Chinese invented drills and underground pipelines to bring seawater into the city in order to extract the salt. As they drilled further into the Earth than anyone before they ran into “fire wells” that exploded as they drilled. The explosions were caused by methane pockets in the Earth and the Chinese quickly realized they could use it to run their ancient appliances and inventions. They soon created vast bamboo pipelines that transported saltwater & natural gas throughout the city.
3 Rust Proof Metal
Even with all our technology, there are still things done in the ancient world that we can’t replicate today. Sometimes “progress” also means that we lose something along the way. In India, there is a 1,600-year-old pillar that even to this day with all our current technology cannot be replicated.
Iron was so important to human civilization there is an entire era named after it, the iron age. During this time craftsmen became extremely skilled working with the metal. So much so that they knew that the kind of materials they used for the fire that melted it down had an impact on the finished product. The Iron Pillar Of Delhi has an unusually high level of phosphorus which created a thin coating on the iron that has made it impervious to rusting because the metal is not exposed to the elements. How the ancient Indian craftsman made iron with this ability is still a mystery to this day
2 Ancient Robots
Robots are programmable machines that run on electricity or gas, so there is no way they could have existed in ancient times because they had neither, right?
In ancient Greece, there was a man known as Heron of Alexandria who has a list of groundbreaking inventions to his credit. Among them were the wind wheel, the earliest machine to harness wind on land, the steam-powered motor, and the first vending machine, for holy water. But the invention that seemed impossibly ahead of its time was the first programable robot.
He programmed his robots by tying knots in ropes at different points and wrapping them around an axle with. The knots in the rope and pegs coming off the axle meant you could program a specific path of a vehicle or timing of certain actions. He even created a 10-minute play with puppets including thunder sound effects using this method. Take that Bill Gates!
1 Art Is in The Eye of the Beholder
Today art and invention often intermix with the rise of modern art. When it comes to ancient inventions and relics that shouldn’t exist sometimes art is the only documentation we have left.
Hathor Temple in Dandarah, Egypt is one of the most well-preserved temples from ancient Egypt built 2000 years ago. Inside there are wall carvings as with most Egyptian temples but a few of them seem to depict what could be the world’s first electric lamp, 1900 years before Edison filed his first patent.
To some this relief shows a lotus flower spawning a snake consistent with aspects of Egyptian mythology. To others, it is undoubtedly a lightbulb. There have also been polls discovered with copper tops that these people see as evidence of an electrical system being used in ancient Egypt. Ancient mythology, or the world's first electrical grid in ancient Egypt, you decide.
Incredible to think that there are inventions so advanced that with all the technology we have at our fingertips, at this moment we cannot even replicate them. Could it be that travelers from the future left evidence of their stay in times past? May we have already been visited by aliens who gave us ideas for the most advanced technology that was lost in time? We may never know the reasons for these findings ... But what else is there to discover?
